The Gathering

by Anne Enright

  She sits in front of them all, and bends a little over her work, her head occasionally pulling back the extra distance required of old age. But she does not look old to me. She looks content, of a piece; she looks completely like herself. I go to sit beside her and she nods slightly my way – and when she is finished that particular stitch or twist, she reaches without looking up, and rubs her knuckles against my cheek.

  ‘Hello.’

  That is what I remember.

  Nobody left and nobody came. Charlie was elsewhere, Mr Nugent did not matter, Liam and Kitty were doing homework, perhaps, on the dining-room table, and I was with Ada in the shrine of her good room, the red velvet theatre curtains giving on to the street, and the signed photos on the wall, Jimmy O’Dee, the Adare sisters, a drawing marked ‘Othello’ of a man with a brown face and an elegant, pointed foot. They were all figures in a play that was happening elsewhere. And here, offstage, was the place to be, with Ada who could not be anyone else, even if she tried, who walked through her life with a perfect civility; quiet, a little harsh sometimes – though she never let on just how harsh she might be. Sitting there, entire in herself, Ada sews. Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.

  And I, caught for a moment by the sight of the cloth in her lap, watch one stitch more, maybe two, before standing up and running out of the room.

  35

  THE RENT BOOKS only start in 1939 – which makes me imagine, briefly, that Charlie owned the house once, but lost it to Nugent on a horse. I doubt this could be true, but the after-image still lingers: Charlie out at Leopardstown with Nugent like a crow over him at the rails, with his coat tail lifting in the breeze.

  ‘There you go,’ says Charlie, desperately insouciant, handing over a last slip of paper to the man who loves his wife better, or at least sharper, than he.

  ‘On the nose.’

  But Nugent did not look like a crow, he looked like an ordinary man, I do remember that, though all I can recall of him absolutely is the peculiar growth in his ear, a perfect little bulb of shiny pink, and the leaning-backness of him in the wing-chair, on a Friday in the good front room.

  I bring the girls over to my mother’s one Saturday, as I have taken to doing since Liam died, and I ask her, in an ordinary way, where she lived first, before Broadstone; what house they were in, before they moved to the house I knew.

  ‘What?’ she says, looking at me like I might be a stranger, after all.

  ‘When you were little, Mammy. Where did you live when you were little?’

  ‘Around the corner,’ she says, and is distressed by the fact. ‘I think we lived around the corner.’

  The past is not a happy place. And the pain of it belongs to her more than it does to me, I think. Who am I to claim it for my own? My poor mother had twelve children. She could not stop giving birth to the future. Over and over. Twelve futures. More. Maybe she liked having all those babies. Maybe she had more past than most people, to wipe clear.

  The letters I found are on blue writing paper, watermarked with the crest of Basildon Bond. There are maybe fifteen of them in all, each signed L. Nugent, or Lambert Nugent, and each more banal than the last. There are gaps and lapses, into which I read anger or desire. I would do that, that is what I do, but they are, at the very least, intriguingly mute.

  Dear Mrs Spillane,

  I am afraid I can not offer any rebate on the six shillings owing since Easter last. The work you have had done on the hall skirting board was undertaken without any prior, and can not be considered as ‘in lieu’. I will be seeking the full amount when your rental next falls.

  Yours sincerely

  Lambert Nugent

  Dear Mrs Spillane,

  Believe me when I say that I have your best interests at heart in the matter of the back garage, which feeds anyway into the back laneway.

  Yours sincerely

  Lambert Nugent

  Dear Mrs Spillane,

  You know yourself what I mean. I mean that Christmas meant nothing in the scheme of things, which stand as they have always stood in this matter.

  The cistern man will be there on Tuesday and I will pay for him myself.

  My best regards to your husband, Mr Spillane.

  Yrs

  Lambert Nugent

  Dear Mrs Spillane,

  In the question of seven shillings and sixpence, it may well be your husband will have it after the 5th. I will want it on the day, however.

  Yrs

  L. Nugent

  Dear Mrs Spillane,

  I can not afford you what you seek in the matter of the tenancy. By sub-letting to Mrs McEvoy, you are in contravention of all agreements in this matter and I am quite entitled, as you will find, to seek an increase or find another tenant, which I am, as you know, very slow to do. I am very much in my rights.

  Hoping to continue an arrangement that is suitable to all concerned,

  Yrs

  Lambert Nugent

  Dear Mrs Spillane,

  Here is the receipt for the ceiling on the boxroom.

  Yrs

  LN

  Dear Mrs Spillane,

  My son tells me that you have had a bit of a scare and I wanted to send you my very best and good wishes for a speedy recovery. I will not send Nat down on Friday, but come myself, if I may.

  Yrs sincerely

  Lambert Nugent

  Although it was Nugent who died first, in the end.

  It seems to me that it was a relationship of sudden pique and petty cruelty. I may be wrong – this may just be the way that landlords speak to their tenants. But there is a sense of thrall to it, too; of Nugent working in the garage, that he owned, at the back of the house and then walking round to the door, that he owned, at the front, and knocking. It makes the ritual of the tea and biscuits a savage enough little one, on his part, and Ada at her most charming – her most, you might say, sexy – because that is what women on their back foot are like. Thirty-eight years of so many shillings per week; her whole life dribbled away into his hand. Thirty-eight years of bamboozling him with her female charms, while he sat there and took it, and liked it, because he thought it was his due.

  And he loved her! I say, poor fool that I am. He must have loved her!

  But when it came to love, Nugent was just a small-timer; he didn’t have much of it to throw around. He had the house, and he had the woman, more or less, and he did what he liked with the children passing through. Even his gratifications were small. Because children in those days were of little account. We three Hegartys were manifestly of little account.

  When Nugent saw a child he saw revenge – I have no doubt about that – and a way out of it all; the whole tedious business of human exchange that a man has to go through in order to get what he might want.

  Think of it. The bitterness of the man and the beauty of the boy.

  36

  ONE NIGHT I give up steering the car one way or the other and let it go where it wants, which is north, as always, this time past the hump of Howth Head and on to the Swords road, all the way to Portrane.

  I make my way past the asylum and turn down to the sea, then I stop at the gate of the small field, in the middle of whose rubbish is my uncle’s mathematical head. More than five thousand people are buried here, according to Ernest, who knows the local priest. I am not surprised. A cube of panic rises out of these walls. The air at the gates has the same hum as you find under high-voltage wires.

  I stand for a while, and feel my hair stand to.

  The moon is up. In the distance a line of white wave unfurls itself along the strand, and makes no sound. The sea slaps at the rocks below me, upset by cross-currents and by some distant storm. There is no wind.

  I stand there and think that there is no worse place for me to go. This is the worst place there is.

  In which case, it is not too bad. If this is as mad as I get then it is not too mad. My children will not be harmed by it; though I
may have to change my life a little; get out more, trade in the Saab.

  This week’s property supplement – Tom’s little offering on the kitchen table – had a house for sale on Ada’s street. It is not Ada’s house, or not yet; but everyone is selling and moving, it might come up any time. I could stalk it, Ada’s house. I could buy this house up the road, and make it over, and sell on, until the day comes – not too far away, I feel sure – when I am standing in Ada’s front room, pulling up a corner of the wallpaper, talking to some nice architect about gutting the place. I will wear a sober trouser suit and incredibly silly heels and click-clack my way across the bare boards, while telling him to rip out the yellow ceiling and the clammy walls; to knock down the doorway to the front room, but save the Belfast sink in the little kitchen, over which, looking out the back window, I learned how to imagine things. We will exclaim together, my architect and I, over the little ceiling rose, and the pretty fireplace where things were burnt: letters, bookies’ dockets, pork fat, the hair from Ada’s hairbrush going in with a sizzle. I will ask him to get the place cleaned out with something really strong, I don’t want a woman with a mop, I will say, I want a team of men in boiler suits with tanks on their backs and those high-pressure steel rods.

  And the garage – we will turn the garage into a studio space, with skylights and white walls, and I will put wide plank flooring over the old cement. Oak.

  ‘What do you think about oak?’ I will say.

  I will rent the house out for a while. And I will be nice to the tenants. And when I am finished. When I am good and finished. When I have beaten the shit out of the place and made it smell, in a wonderfully clean but old-fashioned way, of wood soap and peonies, I will sell it on for twice the price.

  Is that all right, Liam?

  There he is. Standing at the water’s edge, looking out over the waves.

  Is that all right?

  He looks like an extra in a film. He is wearing a baggy brown suit, that he would never wear in real life, and a Paddy cap over his young curly black hair. His eyes of Irish blue crinkle at the corners as he looks out into the night. He is not alone. There is another man further up, there is a boy standing on a headland; at each peak and promontory these watchers stand, looking out to sea.

  It is like a Guinness ad, but no one moves.

  Overhead, a huge plane comes in to land. The first of the day, trailing Arctic frost. New York, Newfoundland, Greenland, Portrane. It is six a.m. Time for me to turn home.

  I get in the car, and reach for the key, gone cold in the ignition. It is March. It is nearly five months since Liam died. Ciara’s baby, who met him coming in the door, is now one month old. My own last child, the one I might have with Tom, is getting tired waiting. I turn the key and start the car.

  Liam turns to watch me as I go. He does not know who I am, or what the sea is, or what sort of a place Broadstone might be. He is full of his own death. His death fills him as a plum fills its own skin. Even his eyes are full. It is a serious business, being dead. He would like to do it well. He turns from the confusing lights of the car, and sets his face towards the sea.

  I drive back up to the main road, but the car does not turn for home. I go to the airport instead and, after a little while, I get on a plane.

  37

  SUICIDES ALWAYS PULL a good crowd. People push in: they clog the doors and sidle along the back benches, gathering on the rim of the church: they turn up on principle, because a suicide has left everyone behind.

  I wish they had stayed at home.

  I stand in the church porch waiting for the mourners’ car to arrive from Griffith Way. Tom is chasing Emily along a bench. Rebecca stands beside me and will not let go of my hand. I am glad I have got the distraction of children among these people, strangers and friends, who check my face and will not say hello, or not yet. I fuss around the kids, and scold Emily and send them off with their father: he will need a head start to get them past the box at the top of the aisle.

  A woman makes her way towards me through the crowd. I know her from somewhere – if I could just remember from where, then her name might come to me, and what she might want. She has been crying, that is the disconcerting thing. Anyone can slobber over you, I think, once you are dead.

  She is tall and pale and black-haired and this should be enough, I should recognise her by this, and by the slightly harried look she has of a woman both wounded and mild. She looks around until she finds me – I knew it was me she was looking for – and she comes over, pushing her way through the other people with awkward grace. She is all hip and shoulder, in a mushroom-coloured trench coat and a beige jersey dress.

  And then I remember her from that awful visit Liam made, the one when I had the builders in, and there was no floor in the girls’ bedrooms, in the middle of which mayhem, Liam arrives with this woman who seems to have no opinions about anything at all. Not even about what she wants to eat.

  I don’t know how long Liam lived with her or slept in her single bed, or did whatever he did with these disastrous girls. And I can not, for the life of me, remember her name. But I do remember loving her a little, by the time they left for Mayo; with her long nervous hands, and her blue-veined skin, and her hair in a drippy chignon. I do remember hoping that she would give him some rest.

  She is older now, though the same sense of flickering hurt is there, as the stained-glass colours fly up her chest and pull at the corner of her eye. But this is gone by the time she reaches me. She levels her face at me, and is full of the story she has to tell. It is pushing its way out through her, this thing. It is not, in any way, her fault.

  And I still can not remember her name.

  ‘Did Kitty get you?’ I say. ‘It’s a long way to come.’

  And suddenly I feel very Irish as I reach out to take her hand in both my hands, to thank her for making the journey, to welcome her in and allow her to grieve.

  ‘You’ll come back to the hotel? Do you know where it is? Will you want a lift?’

  ‘I just came,’ she says. ‘I just arrived.’

  ‘You heard?’ I say, meaning his suicide, and she nods, as if this was slightly beside the point.

  ‘This is Rowan,’ she says, reaching round to extract a child from behind her elegant legs, and I look down, for the first time, at my brother’s son.

  He has a curious large head and forward-leaning little body and I realise, after a second, that this is because he is only three years old. Because he is only three – going on four – years old, his head pivots beautifully on the stem of his neck as his face tilts up to examine me, with my brother’s blue eyes, though when his mother tells him to, ‘Say hello,’ he squirms round the back of her trench coat again. He peers out and dives back, and I realise that I am supposed to play hide-and-seek with this child. I am supposed to duck and weave around either side of his mother’s narrow thighs. And I do. I say, ‘Hello Rowan,’ and ‘Were you on an aeroplane?’ Then I say, ‘Hello Rowan,’ again, ‘Hello sweetie-pie,’ wondering how I can trick or induce this child into my arms and, after a while, kiss him, or inhale him. How I will steal or filch permission to rub my cheek along the skin of his back, and play the bones of his spine, and blow thick kisses into the softness of his arms? Perhaps over time. Perhaps I will be able to do it over time.

  ‘Oh, he’s terribly like,’ I say to his mother, whose name, I realise, is Sarah. I knew all along that this is what she was called.

  ‘Yes,’ she says.

  And the look that passes between us is one of absolute regard.

  ‘Will you come and sit with us?’ I say, indicating the top of the church, though I know this might not be the best moment to break the news.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Oh, no. I’m sorry, I just got in.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I say. ‘You’ll come back after?’

  ‘Oh, I think so,’ she says. ‘I think I should.’

  ‘Yes, you should. You should.’

  The mourners’ car has arrived o
utside, but I can not, I find, leave the boy. I get down on my hunkers and I smile. He hides again. I reach out my arms and he edges further back. He knows my need for him is too great. And then, evil person that I am, I say, ‘Afterwards, you know, if you come back with all of us, there will be buckets and buckets of ice cream.’

  He likes that one all right.

  Here they come: my mother, tiny and round and bobbing on Bea’s elegant arm. Mossie on the other side, also tall, and handsome in the way that professional men can be; his gentle wife; his three too-perfect children; Ita in a slow march; the twins, Ivor and Jem, who bump together and separate, all the way up the aisle. Kitty, my little sister, stops to take my hand, in a quietly theatrical way. As I turn to leave, Sarah nods to say that she will not disappear, that she knows who she is, and what she has come here for.

  I make my way up to the top of the church and am drowned in the emotion, whether love or sadness, that floods my chest. My face sets into the mask of a woman weeping, one half pulled into a wail that the other half will not allow. There are no tears. My head twists away from whichever side of the church is more interested in my grief, only to show it to the other side. Here it is. The slow march of the remaining Hegartys. I don’t know what wound we are showing to them all, apart from the wound of family. Because, just at this moment, I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive.

  Tom turns, and when he sees my face, he stops. He hands me in to the seat in front of him, and the girls follow me on the other side.

  ‘All right?’ he says, slipping his hand over mine, while Emily turns in to cling to me – or, if the truth be told, to stroke my breasts while pretending to admire (or console, perhaps) the covered buttons of my good, funeral coat.