by Anne Enright
‘Right,’ said Hanna. They were all turned towards their mother now. They were looking for something from her and Rosaleen did not know what it was.
‘She always did things the right way,’ she said.
Dan said, ‘And was she – I don’t know. Was she a happy type?’
‘Well I think she was happy,’ said Rosaleen. ‘What kind of a question is that?’
To which there was no answer, really.
‘It’s a very hard thing,’ said Rosaleen, finally. ‘To describe your mother.’
‘Yes,’ said Hanna.
‘Except that she is your mother,’ Constance said, her voice full of disapproval, her face tucked down as she worked her plate. But the others did not know what she meant by that. And they sat for a moment, in silence.
‘It’s like there’s some secret,’ said Hanna. ‘But there just isn’t.’
And there they were. It was a Christmas like the ones they remembered from the old days – and how could they forget how the dinner always ended? It was traditional, you might say. Rosaleen got upset.
‘I don’t know why everyone is getting at me,’ she said. ‘The ungrateful children I reared.’
Tears coated her eyeballs; she blinked them back.
‘Oh, darling,’ said Dan in a voice that was almost bored. ‘Rise above.’
‘I gave you everything.’
Constance reached a useless hand across the tablecloth.
‘And there is no end to it. I am still handing it over. I can see no end to it all.’
She was on her dignity, face averted.
‘Whatever I did – whatever it was – it was not enough. Clearly. That’s all. I just don’t know.’ The tears spilled over now. Rosaleen was a little girl. Rosaleen was a sad old woman. Their own mother. In a moment she would leave and go up to bed and Oh, they all loved her now, they were hopeless in it. They yearned to make her happy.
‘Stop, Mammy,’ said Constance. ‘You’ll make yourself sick, now.’
‘No I am not talking to you, not any of you,’ she said. ‘Shauna, say your poem.’
‘What poem, Granny?’
‘Oh little Corca Baiscinn.’
But Shauna did not have that poem, or any poem. She had a song, said Constance. But she didn’t have a song either, apparently.
‘Did you bring your tin whistle?’ said Dessie.
‘No,’ said Shauna. Then she changed her mind. ‘I mean yes, I have it here.’
‘Good girl.’
Shauna stood where she was, slender in a dress of black jersey that just about covered the beautiful S of her backside. She flung back her red hair and lifted the tin whistle, then she tossed her hair back again and stuck her hip to one side. After a quick, nervous smirk, she applied her lips and fingers to a tune that they all recognised, on the first four notes, as the beautiful ‘Róisín Dubh’.
‘Ah,’ said Rosaleen, because it was her song, translated.
O my Dark Rosaleen!
Do not sigh, do not weep!
The sound of it sweet beyond reckoning and sadly heroic.
‘Incomparable,’ said Dessie, adoring his daughter openly, there in the middle of all the mad Madigans. ‘Ye girl ye!’
And it was Shauna’s job to light the pudding, because she was the youngest, so they turned off the lights and Dessie poured the whiskey from the cap of the bottle; two tin measures. The liquid fire spilled down the dark sides of the pudding, then the flames licked back up themselves, and they matched Shauna’s eyes for blue, and her hair for orange. She shrieked at what she had done and, delighted, stepped back.
After which, Rosaleen rallied, as only Rosaleen could. She took up a spoon and struck it against her glass and, as if there had been no argument, no tears, she lifted her chin and made her Christmas speech:
‘I look around me on a day like today and I can’t believe how well you look, or that you are anything to me, or anything indeed, to the creatures running around my feet in this very room all those years ago. I can see them yet. The children you used to be. And how sad that your father is not here to enjoy you the way I still can. And maybe Dan could do the honours. Dan?’
Dan stood up.
‘What is it again?’
‘Go mbeirimíd beo,’ said Constance.
‘Guh merrimeed bee-oh,’ said Dan
‘Ag an am seo arís.’
‘Egg on ahm shee-yuh a-reesh.’
‘That we will all be alive this time again. Or this time next year,’ Dessie translated, for the benefit of his daughter, and Shauna said, ‘Ew,’ making them all laugh. He pulled her into his lap, saying, ‘Is that the way of it?’ And Constance stood to clear the dishes, one more time.
‘This time next year. Indeed,’ said Rosaleen, in a wan voice. ‘Wherever we may find ourselves.’
Constance, stacking the dishes, cracked a plate off the one below it.
‘Mind the Belleek!’ said Emmet.
‘Any chance of a coffee?’ said Dan.
‘There’s no coffee,’ said Constance. ‘Sorry. I forgot.’
‘You forgot,’ Hanna said, reaching for her cigarettes; the sloppy sarcasm perfectly pitched to undo her sister, who was heading for the door. Constance turned.
‘Yes, I forgot. There is no coffee, except instant maybe. I forgot.’
‘Just asking,’ said Hanna.
‘You can bring your own fucking coffee, do you hear me?’
‘Oh, dearie-me,’ said Rosaleen.
‘Mind the Belleek!’ said Emmet. ‘Mind the Belleeek!’
Constance was holding the pile of plates, but instead of dropping them or flinging them against the wall, she clutched them tight and screwed her face up.
‘Oh God,’ said Dan.
She looked altogether pathetic. She turned to leave then ducked back towards them again.
‘You can’t come,’ she said.
It was a moment before they realised what she was saying. She was talking to Rosaleen.
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s not fair. You can’t come. You can’t live in my house.’
‘I can do what I like,’ said Rosaleen.
‘No, you can’t. You just can’t. There’s about seventy little houses getting built around here, you can have one of them. You would love it. Everything new and clean. You can have your own little house.’
‘You’re not going to put me out on the roads,’ said Rosaleen and Constance lowered her head.
‘I just mean,’ she said.
‘Your own mother!’
‘You can have your own little house.’
They thought they knew what would happen next. Constance would throw something (Mind the Belleek!) and Rosaleen would win. And when she had won, when she had everyone at the limits of themselves – Constance weeping as she brushed up the broken china, Constance begging to be forgiven – then she might decide not to sell the house, after all. She might not bother. And life would continue as before.
But in fact, Constance did not drop anything. She said, ‘Dessie?’ and she turned and walked out of the room. After a moment, Dessie lumbered after her.
‘Tea will be fine,’ said Dan. ‘I’ll make the tea.’
Hanna, who was drunk, lit up a cigarette.
‘Fuck this,’ she said. She took a couple of drags, then pushed back her chair and walked out too. After which, the men pretended to clear the table and scattered quietly about the house and no tea was made.
Dan went up to his old room to check his phone, and to text Ludo OMG SOS. He sat on the edge of the bed and even the sag of the mattress was familiar to him: taking his shape, as it had always done. There was no signal. He checked through old messages, that in their carelessness would remind him of his actual life – the one that happened far away from here.
If you can pick up some nice white fish, hake or turbot even I will give you a big kiss and a lick. xxl For like, four people?
Someone needs to tell Dale where to get off.
Hello from Atlanta
airport. 2435 steps to gate C24 on the pedometer. Walking my way back to you babe.
Code for alarm is my birthday, figure it out! Don’t forget to pick the raspberries. Enjoy!
The immersion cylinder next door made its usual hum: the high note of water thrilling through the pipes, a rolling chord of underboil, then the knock-back of an air hammer. Silence. Dan looked about the room where his young life was stored, his life before New York, not innocent so much as stupid.
Not innocent, at all.
The row of books: Man Ray, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Tennyson, even – how could he not have known? Listener’s Guide to Opera. The anglepoise lamp he bought from his own pocket money in the local hardware store. The Modigliani poster on the wall a failed attempt to love some idea of a woman in the raw. Wrong painter. Wrong picture. Dan could not forgive himself all the misdirection of those years, as he told Scott, his portable therapist who was back now in his head. He could not sentimentalise. All that withering and wasted time. He had failed to name the real events of his youth, or possess them as his own.
Even now, he wondered at the home movie of his memory. His father shrugging him away on Fanore beach – the slow motion feel to it. Who had pressed the mute button on his childhood? His father’s hands were wet and cold. His mother was foolish. His grandmother had three hats. And, yet, everywhere he looked, the house held memory and meaning that his heart could not. The house was full of detail, interest, love.
It was a question of texture, Dan thought, a whiff of your former self in a twist of fabric, a loose board. It was the reassuring madness of patterned wallpaper under the daily shift of light. The sun rose at the front and set at the back of Ardeevin, wherever he was in the world, and when he came back, the house made sense in a way that nothing else did.
Downstairs, the sound of Constance hectoring her children about the washing-up. In the front bedroom, his brother Emmet, thinking his own thoughts. Dan could tell it was Emmet by the sound of his breathing almost. His little brother. He was fond of Emmet as a boy but, grown up, the man bored and frightened him. Balder now, Emmet always managed to look somehow undernourished, unfit. Unprepossessing. Dan did not know when their paths last crossed, then he remembered, with a jolt, the bones, under his hand, of his brother’s shoulder as they carried their father’s coffin down the aisle of the small church in Boolavaun.
That happened.
They carried the coffin. Six men. Sons at the front. In the middle, Dessie and their uncle Bart (queer as Christmas, Dan thought, how did he not guess?) A neighbour at the back, paired with a surprising American cousin, who was doing a course up in Dublin and had been dispatched west by a transatlantic phone call. It was a strange way to meet up. But the coffin – the coffin containing his father’s body – was not so heavy. And it was such a practical thing to do. It was a task more than a burden. Once you have actually carried a dead man you are happy enough to leave him down, let them put the box into the damn ground.
Emmet had gone into his parents’ room to find something, and he forgot, as soon as he entered it, what it was he was looking for.
It was a year or more since anyone had been in here. The wardrobe swinging open and half empty, his mother’s pile of paperbacks on a little table beside the bed. Emmet glanced at the things on her dressing table, and it was as though she had already died. A couple of emery boards sliced with the residue of her nails. A tube of hand cream. Her little compact with a picture of a rose on the lid and – he knew the surprise of it so well – a mirror on the inside. There were bits of cheap jewellery in a crystal dish that might have been an ashtray once and rosary beads hung over the edge of the mirror. The rosary was his father’s, last seen twisted about the dead man’s fingers – she must have prised them off it again – when he was laid out in that same bed whose reflection was behind his own. Emmet almost expected his father’s corpse to appear in the blank of the mirror, or to find him lying in the bed when he turned around.
His father was a Catholic. He was the real thing. Sinner and supplicant, one of the fretfully unredeemed.
Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy,
Hail our life our sweetness and our hope.
To thee do we send forth our sighs
To thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve
Mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.
The beads were made of some translucent material gone grey inside, like poor man’s pearls. Emmet reached to touch the thing and then couldn’t, it made him feel slightly sick.
He looked, instead, at the postcards Rosaleen had stuck into the frame, between the wood and the glass: a minotaur by Picasso, the Annunciation by some Renaissance Italian, a version of the Nativity by Gauguin. All of them, he presumed, from Dan.
That mirror had seen enough action over the years.
It didn’t bear thinking about, the things that happened in that bed. But also from Rosaleen, sitting in the little chair applying lipstick, tweezing, dabbing, checking and improving. She had such a demanding relationship with her own reflection. Rosaleen challenged her looks, and they rose to meet her.
He wondered where she had hidden herself, the passionate woman he had avoided and adored when he was a child. The woman who quoted poetry at them and the Bible. I would you were cold, or hot. But because you are lukewarm, neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth. The woman who knelt down on the floor in front of him, and took him by the shoulders on the morning of his First Holy Communion, and said, ‘Remember who you are. When you take the host, say it in your heart: Hello Jesus, my name is Emmet Madigan.’
This is what pushed him, from one country to the next. This energy. A woman who did nothing and expected everything. She sat in this house, year after year, and she expected.
Emmet caught sight of himself in the empty glass, and he took his disappointing face out of there. He had to get away from his mother, somehow. He had to step to one side, let the rush of her wanting pass him by.
He would marry Saar, that was one way to do it. He could follow her to Aceh in a few months’ time, and after that he would follow her wherever she wanted to go. But when he tried to locate Saar in his mind, he found only Alice. Foolish Alice, with her helpless goodness, her idiotic lack of guile. He wondered who she was sleeping with now, if she would be at the big FAO bash in Rome, what would happen if he fell at her feet and wept, would that make any difference? He had an image of himself as Gabriel, offering a lily to a white-skinned Madonna who had Alice’s downward glance and her slight, sad smile.
Outside, a jackdaw was bashing a snail on the roof, its feet scrabbling against the metal guttering. And Sell sell sell, he thought. Give the money to the poor. Burn the fucking place down.
Because Emmet was still trapped, always would be trapped, in some endlessly unavailable, restless ideal.
O clement, O loving,
O sweet Virgin Mary.
And he laughed a little, at the ironies of all that.
Downstairs, Constance did not know where to put herself. She was shaking after the confrontation in the dining room. She was so worried about Rosaleen, she was desperately worried about her mother, also cross with her, and cross with herself for buying the stupid scarf. And she was in a rage with Dessie, for taking the woman at her word. Rosaleen would never sell the house. It was just the kind of thing she liked to say. Because Rosaleen never did anything. This maddening woman, she spent her entire life requiring things of other people and blaming other people, she lived in a state of hope or regret, and she would not, could not, deal with the thing that was in front of her, whatever it was. Oh I forgot to go to the bank, Constance, I forgot to go to the post office. She could not deal with stuff. Money. Details. Here. Now.
Rory came up behind her at the sink and he put his arms round her, the way Dessie sometimes did, though Rory was taller than Dessie and he also lacked – it went without saying – Dessie’s sexual intent. He bent to lay his cheek against her shoulder and he swayed from side to
side, humming a little.
‘Happy Christmas,’ he said.
‘That’s one way of putting it,’ she said.
He lingered there another moment.
‘Can I have some money?’ he said.
‘What do you want it for?’
‘I just need, like, thirty.’
‘Ask your father.’
He did not leave. He said, ‘I love you anyway,’ and he planted a kiss on the nape of her neck.
‘I’m sure you do,’ she said. ‘Now go ask your father.’
He let go, but turned to prop his handsomeness against the counter and look at her for a minute.
‘Next time, you could throw in a couple of beers.’
‘I might,’ said Constance.
‘If you remember.’
‘Hah.’
‘God, Mum, she’s really stiffed.’
‘Don’t talk about your auntie like that.’
‘I mean really, though.’
‘Shift.’
It was a secret thing for her – it wasn’t a big deal – but just the fact of her son made Constance entirely happy. He could do what he liked, she would not mind. He was a good guy, and he loved his mother, and not even his laundry offended her. Or not much.
‘Out of my way now. Move your big spágs.’
Hanna came into the kitchen, and looked at the pair of them as though she knew they had been talking about her. She stubbed out the cigarette on the top of the range, and poured herself a glass of white wine. She lifted the glass to her mouth, and felt the baby at her lips, warm and baby-smelling, an unexpected yearning, as she drank, for his frank gaze, the damp interior of his hand.
The house was disappearing around her.
Hanna pushed away from the range and wandered away, before there was a fight with Constance, who was, clearly, in a snit. She went back into the hall and wondered where she could set it down, this hurt that sloshed around inside her. She glanced into the dining room and saw her mother gone from the Christmas table. She turned in to the good front room, with the cracked hearth, and walked all the way to the front window, where she set her hands on either side of the frame, facing north. The glass was as old as the house. It was her favourite thing, a fragile survivor, slubbed and thickened to gather and distort the light. Hanna tipped her forehead briefly against it as she looked out into the gloaming.
