The China Factory

by Mary Costello

  Mona would be in the restaurant by now, settling herself in her seat, lifting out her reading glasses to study the menu. She was not without her mystery. She had a bridge partner, a school colleague named Tim. He thought of them at the card table at night, and the looks that must pass between them. He remembered once watching a TV programme about rock climbing, and how climbing partners grow to read each other’s minds, to comprehend each other in some deep silent way. Their lives depend on one another.

  In the nursing home his mother’s mouth was open, like the little beak of a fledgling. Sometimes on his visits a terrified look would cross her face when he entered her room. He said her name, Mother. Her frame was shrunken and the veins and arteries were visible on the undersides of her arms. Her slippers sat neatly on the floor by the radiator. A nurse came and stood beside him and spoke softly. ‘The doctor saw her earlier. Her lungs are not good… he doesn’t think there’s much time left.’ He felt his mother’s hand. When his father lay dying, his hands and feet and nose, the extremities, had grown gradually colder. His mother had kept touching them, as if temperature, and not hours or minutes, was the measure of time. Soon after his death she herself began to fade. She filled the electric kettle with milk and was frightened by rain. She began to sing the songs of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. She remembered what he had just said, but not the thing before. He thought of her brain as being littered with a hail of tiny holes, like the spread of buckshot.

  That spring, years ago, he found excuses to revisit the girl in the classroom. He was touched by her youth and her sympathy. He hoarded up thoughts of her and as he drove home, he let them suffuse him. He would remember her little cough, or the way she forgot he was there and absent-mindedly put her head in her hands at her desk. On the final observation day he sat at the back of her class again, drafting his official report. When he looked up, her eyes were on him, unsmiling, looking deeply into him.

  At the end of the day, with the pupils dismissed, he invited her to sit.

  ‘You have a bright future ahead of you,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘This job is temporary. Jobs are scarce. Do you have something else lined up?’

  She gave a slight shrug. ‘No, not really. I’m going to Dublin for the summer. A few us are taking a house there, we’re going to try some street theatre.’

  He smiled and indicated that she should continue.

  ‘I don’t know if we’ll even survive. We have high hopes! We’ll probably be forced back into the classroom in September.’ Her eyes were green. Her neck was smooth and white. ‘Long term, though, we’ll probably go to America.’

  He cleared his throat, and moved his papers about. ‘Really? To teach?’

  She tilted her head a little. ‘Mmm, I don’t know… maybe… I want to go to New York for a while, hang out there, you know, live through four seasons in the city.’ Her eyes were lit up. ‘Anyway if I do go it’ll be with the gang. There’s a community drama programme we’re hoping to get onto. America’s great for that kind of thing. I had a job there last summer. The people are different, they’re very… trusting. I met a poet at a bus stop one day… he talked to me like he knew me my whole life.’

  Under the cuffs of her shirt her wrists were white and narrow. He had a glimpse of her future. She would hear the cries of men and children.

  ‘So you’re off to the Big Apple for a wild time then!’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, I wouldn’t say “wild”. I don’t even drink.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Don’t get me wrong. I used to. I just don’t like what it can do.’

  Suddenly he felt reckless. ‘What can it do?’

  She blew out slowly and her fringe lifted in the stream of air. ‘Well… I’d be afraid of losing control. I might end up falling down on the street… getting run over by a bus… sleeping with a stranger.’

  Down the corridor a door slammed. Then there was silence. He thought she might hear the terrible commotion inside him. He picked up the report and handed it to her. ‘I don’t usually do this,’ he said.

  She read the page silently and then left it down in front of him. ‘Thank you,’ she said in a whisper.

  He began to tidy his papers. His hands were trembling. He was aware of time slipping violently by.

  ‘There’s a job coming up in a school not far from here…’ He could not look at her so he leaned down for his bag. ‘I know the principal, he’s a friend… if you were interested…’ He searched for the right words. ‘You’d be a great asset to the school.’

  They looked at each other. He saw her absorb the implications of the offer, and then her eyes softened with too much understanding and it was unbearable.

  ‘Of course, you may not want to stay around,’ he said. ‘From what you’ve said…’

  He had almost lost the run of himself. He had become a small raw thing.

  ‘Well… thank you. But if I do stick with teaching it’ll probably be in Dublin.’

  Driving back to the city that evening he grew distraught. Mona would never know the depths of him. He would die a faithful husband. They were bound together by the flesh of three sons and the dread of loneliness. That night he stood before a mirror. He thought he could hear the sound of his pulse fading. Every morning after that, at every daybreak, something slipped away. He drove along city streets in the evenings and stared at the backs of girls and women. Her name, her face, hovered behind his eyes. He went down to the strand on summer nights with the city lights at his back and stripped off and rolled out with the waves. He worked long hours and drove his sons hard at their studies and sports and exhausted everyone around him, and some days Mona turned on him with bitter, baffled eyes and he knew then they had passed some milestone and there was no turning back.

  His mother did not open her eyes. He drew the window blind down halfway, and waited. She lay supine before him, the torso, the bones that had borne the freight of her life, sunken in the bed. A girl with a plain wide face carried in a lunch tray and he smiled weakly and shook his head. She returned a few minutes later and, without a word, placed a cup of tea and two biscuits in front of him. This simple act moved him greatly.

  In the late afternoon he walked outside and sat on a wooden bench and texted Mona. He dialled his sister’s number and then instantly cancelled it. He wanted the day, and the death if it occurred, to himself. He walked around the back and stood on the edge of the lawn looking down at the Shannon. Pleasure cruisers were tied up at a small marina on the far side. Further along the bank there was a new hotel, like a large white cube. The water was calm; the reeds made the river patient. He leaned against a tree and looked up at the steel railway bridge high above the river. Just then the Dublin train nosed into view and crossed the bridge, and, out of the blue, he remembered Grace again.

  He had come upon her, unexpectedly, just three years before, when he had been addressing a teachers’ conference in Maynooth. The crowd was large and during the morning coffee break, he turned to leave his empty cup on the long table and there she stood, no more than four feet away, calmly considering him. They were instantly recognisable to each other. Her hair was longer, darker, with a stripe of grey at the front, like a badger’s. The stripe marked her out as different, changed, afflicted. We are the same now, he thought, you have caught up.

  ‘I am forty,’ she said, ‘and married.’ She crossed her hands on her lap. A great happiness had entered him the moment she sat into his car. He could not explain the closeness he felt to her. He was driving towards the city, blind, resolute. He thought of all the car journeys, all the years of remembrance. They floated along the quays in the late afternoon sun. He drove into an underground car park and they climbed concrete stairs and when they emerged out onto the street she let him take her hand. They entered a hotel, and up in the room he stood at the window and looked down at the street. Then he turned and crossed the floor and laid his head on her lap. They did not speak. He felt like a man in a novel—
silent, obsessed, extreme in his love. He thought of this moment as his last chance, his only chance, and he felt everything—the past, the future—become almost obliterated by it.

  ‘Tell me your life,’ he whispered. The room was still warm from the day’s heat. Soon, outside, the light would fade.

  She smiled. ‘A man broke my heart, once,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Your husband?’

  ‘No. Another man. In America… an actor. I met my husband when I came back.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘He insists on loving me… I will never have children.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She stroked his hair.

  ‘Did you get over him? The American guy?’

  She looked past him. ‘When I came back I stayed at my mother’s. I used to walk the lanes. It was summer then. One evening I took her car and drove for miles. When I returned I parked in the local churchyard, at the back, under the yew trees. I thought, This is where people come on summer evenings to do away with themselves. But I just sat there. I was so pierced… I thought we were predestined.’

  She took his hand and led him to the bed. She removed his shoes. The charge was immense. The light in the room had changed and he was reminded of midsummer evenings in childhood when daylight vanished and a certain kind of sadness fell on him. She raised her face to him, her throat, the tender place on her temple that he wanted to touch. He saw her eyes, saw that something in her had been extinguished. Who did this to you? he wanted to say. He took her in his arms and covered her with his whole body, with the soles of his feet. ‘Go deep,’ she whispered.

  They lay side by side looking up at the ceiling. He heard the rumble of the city in the distance. She had made him feel vast. He had to hold back words, thoughts, search for other words that might bear their weight. He remembered something from the radio that day, about how the skies are full of old junk, thousands of space shuttles and old Russian satellites that are breaking up and falling to earth as debris. Pieces the size of a family car could come crashing down on one’s house. He turned to tell her this. Her eyes were on him, full and moist and desolate.

  ‘He only liked the beginnings of things,’ she whispered. ‘He used to hit me… He was so broken. It made me love him more.’

  Twilight came. He had an urge to carry her to the car and drive off with her. Gradually, beside him, he felt her grow remote. She stepped from beneath the sheet and crossed the room. The light came on in the bathroom and the door closed softly. Then the shower was running. He looked at the shapes in the room, the TV screen, the lamps, the armchairs. He waited a long time. He knew then that she wanted him gone. He rose and dressed and went down in the lift, his legs barely able to ferry him. Out in the evening he felt sick in his stomach. The orange streetlights made everything eerie. He drove along empty streets where the trees hung low. He did not know his way out of the city. He stopped and sat in a café under harsh lights and stared at his reflection in the plate-glass window. He thought of her back in the hotel room, sitting in front of the mirror, brushing her hair in long, even strokes.

  The horizon turned black as he drove west. He imagined forks of lightning striking the road, lighting up the way ahead. He opened the window and cold air streamed in and he accelerated hard and closed his eyes for a few seconds. It did not matter if he never reached home. He knew what awaited him, what had to be got through. He knew the water in the bay and every city street and every tree on his road. He knew his own driveway and the front door where his key fitted and the sound of his step on the stairs and the smell of the warm sheets rising to meet him. He pictured himself sitting on the edge of the bed, his weight sagging as he bent down and took off his shoes. He thought how such small things—untying shoelaces, undressing—or the thought of such things, could unhinge a man.

  Lights were coming up across the river, on the marina, in the hotel, and soon they would rise from the town and reflect on the water. He felt a little chill. He crossed the damp grass and went inside. They had put a small table in his mother’s room, with a white cloth and a crucifix and two lighted candles. He listened to his mother’s breath, shortening. He laid his fingers on her pulse and rested them there and felt himself weaken in a moment of terrible tenderness, of mercy. He felt it in his arms, caritas, a love for her greater now than at any moment in his whole life. Suddenly, she opened her eyes wide and stared, frightened, at something at the foot of the bed. He whispered Momma, and moved to that spot and for one long beautiful moment he thought she was back, that it was all a mistake and in the next moment she would sit up and be whole again, and elated. But her eyes looked through him, seeing something beyond him.

  The building was quiet. He thought he should whisper something in her ear. Her lungs were rattling, filling up with liquid. Soon they would be full. When it happened, when the moment arrived, her little breaths petered out in one long exhalation, and he held his own until it ceased.

  He sat there for a long time feeling it was neither day nor night. Something remained, drifting in the room. She had been long gone before tonight, long exiled. He had lived in an exile of his own too, in recent years. He closed his eyes now. Mona had made his home. She had made his children, inside her. He turned his head to where his mother’s slippers sat on the floor. The sight of them, their patient waiting, moved him. He bent down and took them on his lap and put a hand inside each one. His heart began to pound. He had given Mona the whole of his life, the days, the hours, the quotidian. Every single day, but one. She would have him beyond this life too. Their bones would lie in the same grave and lean against each other and calcify in the earth together. What more could she want? What more could he give?

  He was still for a long time. He did not know if this moment counted for everything or almost nothing. He drove west into the night. On the radio a piano was playing, single high notes, marvellous and pure, like the ringing of delicate bells. Their tinkle, their ambulation, tapped on his soul and made it soar.

  AND WHO WILL PAY CHARON?

  Last summer I heard she was out. She was seen down by the lake late in the evenings, her grey hair down to her backside. Or coming out of the local shop with her groceries in a cloth bag, her eyes cast down as she pushed her bicycle out of the village. She spoke to no one. Though I pictured her standing at the shop counter pointing a finger and saying loaf, tea in an abrupt voice, then thrusting a twenty-euro note at the shopkeeper in an outstretched hand.

  One evening I drove over by the lake and parked in the pub car park. I thought I might glimpse her head bobbing above the hedge on the lane leading down to the water. The place is popular with anglers, and as I waited a couple of Englishmen strolled up the lane, opened their jeeps, lifted in their catch. When the light began to fade I drove away.

  After forty years hidden from view she had become a curiosity to the locals, to me too. I imagined her leaning in over the lake, gazing at her green watery reflection, her long hair breaking the surface. I drove by her house that evening. There was no sign of life. I turned the car around and just past the bend I saw the figure up ahead on foot, crossing the road from the lane, bearing down on a bicycle. I slowed down and we looked at each other. Her face was white, her cheeks hollow. I let down the window and she came close up to the car and wiped her mouth roughly with the back of her hand. Her eyes narrowed. Then, with a bewildered look, she jerked her head away fiercely and scurried off. I stared in the rear-view mirror after her. I knew she had not forgotten me.

  ‘Claude… That’s a strange name for around here,’ she said. It was late and we were sitting on a low wall outside the dancehall in the local town. Her hair was dark and silken. She had just qualified as a nurse.

  ‘I’m not from around here,’ I said. ‘I’m from Dublin. But my mother was from Kilcash. I’m staying over there with my aunt.’

  I watched her take this in. I had noticed how country people—even the staff in the boys’ boarding school where I had come to teach—treated me with a little reserve, reverence even, when I s
aid I was from Dublin.

  ‘And who called you Claude, if your mother was from Kilcash?’ she asked.

  ‘My father’s name was Claude. He’s dead now. He was a Protestant. He had to convert to marry my mother.’

  She was quiet then. Perhaps she was thinking what I had thought as a child—that my father must have loved my mother greatly to have crossed over.

  ‘It’s not as drastic as it sounds,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t religious. Protestants aren’t glued to their religion like us Catholics.’

  I saw relief in her eyes. So it wasn’t the idea of my father’s sacrifice for love that had silenced her before, but worry that I too might be a Protestant. ‘And you, Suzanne? Why aren’t you a Mary or a Margaret or an Ann?’

  She smiled. ‘My mother had an aunt, a nun. She spent a few years in a convent in France—near Limoges, where the famous china comes from. There was a young novice there called Suzanne. She’d arrived at the convent gates one evening after walking for miles, and the nuns took her in. She was an orphan. She saw terrible things in her young life—I don’t know what, maybe the war. Anyway my mother said if she ever had a daughter she’d call her Suzanne. And she did. But then Suzanne died when she was a year old, and a few years later she had me. I suppose she didn’t want to waste the name.’

  Our names, in this place, had bound us. We were a little apart, she hauling the dead sister around, me with the Protestant blood in my veins. We spent evenings together. She told me her mother could be severe on people, even on her. One day we took the train to Dublin. She was very shy at the start. We went out to Howth and walked along the pier and then up the hill. I told her about Yeats and Maud Gonne and the day in 1892 when they cycled out there from the city.