The Gathering

by Anne Enright

  ‘Leave your mother alone,’ says Tom.

  Indeed. I have been so much touched these last few days. I cross my legs over the memory of the sex we had the night of the wake. Or he had. And wait for the Mass to begin. Everyone wants a bit of me. And it has nothing to do with what I might want, or what my body might want, whatever that might be – God knows it is a long time since I knew. There I am, sitting on a church bench in my own meat: pawed, used, loved, and very lonely.

  Actually, I do know what I want. I want whoever touched the small of my back in Mammy’s kitchen to declare himself. To say, again, that everything will be all right. Because I felt someone’s loving touch, and I was – but completely – reassured by it, before I turned to see that there was no one there.

  Also, I want Rowan. I yearn for him, not with lips or hands, but with my entire face. My skin wants him. I want to nuzzle him, and feel his light hair tickle my chin. I want to flutter my eyelashes against his cheek.

  This spooling fantasy runs through my head through all that follows: the Mass and the stupid old priest and Ernest’s few words from the altar.

  Liam was never interested in material things, says Ernest. He had a great sense of humour.

  ‘My brother had a rage for justice,’ he says, not mentioning how this might turn to bus-kicking, in drink. But it is done well enough. The words are well enough spoken, while behind me, my great, and soon-to-be-broken, secret shouts, ‘Hallo! Hallo!’ in broad South London at the back of the church.

  We do the whole thing. We follow the box out down the aisle again and as soon as we hit open air, I say it to Tom.

  ‘Do you remember the girl? That girl who came with him the last time, or the second-last time.’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘Remember the girl who wouldn’t eat, with a face on her, when we had the builders in?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says.

  ‘He was horrible to her.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Her.’

  ‘She was pregnant,’ I say. ‘She was pregnant at the time.’

  ‘By him?’

  ‘Oh, there’s no doubting the child,’ I said. ‘It’s Liam. To the life.’

  The Hegartys are stuck in the porch, shaking five hundred people’s hands. I don’t know half of them, and I don’t care. I am waiting for Sarah to come through so I can take her aside and figure how to do this thing.

  ‘I’m very sorry for your trouble.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’m very sorry.’

  ‘It’s a great loss.’

  All of them apologising for the fact that someone you love is dead, when the world is full of people you don’t.

  ‘I knew him at school,’ says one man to me, transforming, even as the words happen, from a middle-aged stranger to Willow of the vodka naggin and the beautiful older brother. He is absolutely himself, and this confuses me. I can’t get the picture of a middle-aged man back, now that I know who he is.

  ‘Oh, Willow,’ I say, like a schoolgirl fool. Love is one thing, but there are so many people in the world to like, that we never see.

  It’s a heady business, burying the dead.

  I wait until we are at the hotel, and even then I am reluctant to break the news. I can not hand it to Bea, the owner of all the Hegartys. I can’t expose it to Ivor’s irony, or Ita’s intelligence, or Mossie’s wonderful management skills. I need a child to do this, or a grown-up child.

  ‘Come here, Jem,’ I say to my little brother; the youngest and best loved. And I watch him go round the others; Mammy last. Bea tries to make her sit down, but she will not sit down. Mammy stands up and undoes the top button of her blouse, and, wild-eyed, pulls off her coat, casting around her as she does so, stuck in the second sleeve. She finds Sarah and the child, as Bea yanks the last of the coat off her arm, and she hurries over, runs even, to set her hands on the child’s shoulders, then up on either side to graze his lovely face. She looks at Sarah, with a terrible contract in her eye, and Sarah steps forward, very politely, to shake her hand. After which, as though none of this had happened, Mammy turns away.

  It is hard to describe the effect of the boy on the assembled Hegartys.

  ‘Rowan?’ they say. ‘Rowan.’

  It is like we had never seen a child before. He has the Hegarty eyes, we say – delighted, like they weren’t a curse – and we look to see what human being looks out through them, this time. It is too uncanny. Everyone wants to touch him. They just have to – they reach out and he shies away; flinches, even. The one he chooses for safe haven is, of all people, Mossie, who sits him on one long leg and jounces him, hard, Ride a cock horse, threatening to spill him on to the floor. Mossie, who was for Liam a dark mirror, loves the boy and the boy loves him. Mossie’s own children gather round, and for the first time I see how happy they are – that is why they are so well-behaved, with their gentle mother and their father who is firm but fair: they are content.

  This seems like an amazing thing to notice about your own brother, after so many years – it is almost more amazing than the fact of Liam’s son. Maybe that is because the accident of Liam’s son is too fantastic to contemplate, in the middle of a hotel reception room, in the suburbs of Dublin, where two hundred people I sort of know are sitting down to soup or melon, followed by salmon or beef.

  We eat it all up. Down to the apple tart and ice cream. We do not stint. We put slabs of butter on bad white rolls, and we ask for second cups of tea. I am inordinately interested in the food. I look up from my plate to Rowan and then I look down again to stab a potato croquette.

  There are other things to notice, whenever I have the strength to pull my eyes away from the boy. Ivor talking to Liam’s friend Willow for several moments too long. A look that passes between them and the priest, no less, who gets his coat and looks again, before he goes out the door. Ernest sees this last glance too and takes note. And there is Ita sitting at a right angle to Ernest, holding on to his forearm with both hands and talking into the side of his face, which has that drawn, mortified look I remember from confession. Someone has given Kitty a microphone, and she stands there while Mossie taps a glass with his knife. Then she lays the microphone down on the table, and lifts her face to sing, with utter sweetness, Liam’s favourite song:

  Let us pause in life’s pleasures

  And count its many tears,

  While we all sup sorrow with the poor;

  There’s a song that will linger

  For ever in our ears;

  Oh, hard times come again no more.

  But of course. This stupid thing. I have to push hard against my eyelids, the tears are so sudden and sharp.

  ’Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,

  Hard times, hard times,

  Come again no more;

  Many days you have lingered

  Around my cabin door,

  Oh, hard times come again no more.

  A ragged consensus gathers under the chorus, but, by some miracle, they let her sing the verse alone: my annoying little sister, looking at the ceiling with innocent eyes, as she takes each note and tenderly lays it down.

  While we seek mirth and beauty

  And music light and gay,

  There are frail forms fainting at the door;

  Though their voices are silent,

  Their pleading looks will say

  Oh, hard times come again no more.

  There isn’t a dry eye in the house. On Mossie’s knee Rowan grows indignant, as he watches his mother wipe away the tears.

  ‘Shut up,’ he says suddenly. Then louder, ‘Shut uhhhhp!’ in his sweet English accent, and everyone laughs. I have never been to a happier funeral.

  I push back my chair and go out to find a cigarette.

  It is many years since I smoked. We all gave up, one way or another, after Daddy died, so I have to accost one of the neighbours with this oddly intimate request.

  ‘I couldn’t take one of these off you? Would you mind?’

  ‘Wor
k away. Work away.’

  I go and sit in the foyer, and I smoke. The cigarette tastes like the first cigarette I ever had, sitting on Liam’s mattress in the garden passage, in 1974.

  38

  THE DAY SHE hears that Lambert Nugent has died, Ada orders a cup of coffee in Bewley’s – nothing fancy, just a white coffee and a custard slice, waitress service, and when they arrive, she picks off her gloves, with the same twitching precision that caught Nugent’s eye, many years before. So, he is dead. She sips the coffee and cuts the custard slice into small pieces, which she eats, one after the other, until she is done.

  Ada is worried about the rent – even though she has no need to worry about the rent; she took advice about the rent, years ago. Some other man will come and take it – some man she does not care about, one way or the other, and it will be the same money and the same little house, and the same life she leads inside it. Even so she felt it had broken loose, that the bricks and the slates and the granite lintels had been set sailing on a calm, grey sea.

  It was over. Whatever the story between them had been.

  Old Nolly May.

  Or even, as they sometimes said, Nolly May Tangerine – from the ‘Do not touch me’ of the Bible.

  And why not? Why should he not be touched?

  ‘Isn’t he a card?’ as she used to say of Lamb Nugent, after this or that comment, some implication: her profligacy at the butchers, or the necessity of Christmas. ‘He’s all heart,’ she used to say, by which she meant that, on the day he died, she would order a quiet custard slice in Bewley’s, and really quite enjoy it.

  Ada is seventy years old, which for a certain kind of woman, is not really old at all. She is always on the go and she might have twenty years in front of her (although she does not have twenty years in front of her), Ada does not count. At seventy, she lies in bed, like the rest of us, thinking of the warmth and texture of the last doctor’s hands. Her own hands, as she unsheathes them from her black leather gloves, are skinny and restless: a tangle of strings and knobs and bones, like ship’s rigging. Who needs a doctor, when your body is busy coming out through you, to display its working parts? Ada is fond of her hands, even a little proud – they have been so clever, over the years. As for the rest of her body, she is not bothered to check, having long ago fallen out with the mirror, that seems to supply her with no useful information any more – none whatsoever.

  But her hands, as they slowly dip the spoon, so the coffee chases itself up through the crust of sugar, her hands have done good service. They have stitched and unpicked. They have done their insect work, and changed, as an ant might change, the surface of the earth.

  And as she sucks the sticky tip of the spoon Charlie is there in front of her, bowing over a paper bag and saying, ‘Oh, comfort me with apples,’ at the Fairyhouse Races, a lifetime ago.

  A very Protestant thing to say, she thinks suddenly – quoting the Old Testament like that. And she wonders for the thousandth time, whether her husband was the man he said he was, at all.

  If Ada had reached any sort of conclusion in this life, it was a little one. People, she used to think, do not change, they are merely revealed. This maxim she has applied, with the flattest satisfaction, to turncoat politicians, and unfaithful spouses, and wild boys who turned out right in the end. She applies it now to the memory of Charlie Spillane and to his true heart, that only became more intensely, and importantly true to her over the years. If people were only revealed by time, then the man who was revealed to her in Charlie Spillane was endlessly good – just that – with all his evasions and his regrets, his eye for a filly and for the main chance, the thing that her husband was had burned more clear for her, since he had died.

  It was a great mystery: goodness.

  Ada presses the pad of her finger into the last flakes of pastry, then fails to put it to her mouth. She rubs the stuff off, to fall on the floor, and she misses her husband, and all the men she once knew who are now dead. They each left a quality behind; something distinctive and hard to catch. If Ada believed in anything she believed in this persistence, that other people might call the soul.

  In which case Lambert Nugent had none, or none that she could find. Nugent was the kind of man who flared up on you; the rest of the time he was hardly there at all. The ardent youth, the trembling man, the white flame of his old age; she had seen each of these in glimpses, the rest was a murk of small remarks and glances elsewhere, of things withdrawn before they were shown.

  What did the silly man have to hide?

  As Nugent aged, his mouth got more greedy around her biscuits, and his tongue and throat, his whole tasting apparatus was the most tender and vivid thing about him. Sometimes Ada felt he wanted the biscuits more than he wanted the rent, he had such a sweet tooth. He was such a child. Maybe that was the secret – the fact that he was only and ever five years old. Or two.

  Oh, Nolly May.

  Some mother had a lot to answer for there, she thinks. The Lord have mercy on his soul (if He could find it).

  She takes a sip of coffee before her custard slice is chewed and gone, and this annoys her, suddenly. Ada hates mixing things up in her mouth. She hates mixing things up at home. More and more her life is like this, sniffing at the clothes in the old chest of drawers and washing them one more time, for the last time. More and more, she puts the tea towels in a different wash from the bath towels, or does not put them in a wash at all, but boils them on the stove.

  She stands up and organises her stuff, thinking, as she does so, about the aneurysm that got Nugent in the end, wondering if it hurt – surely there were no nerves in there to feel the pain. Except of course your brain was where pain was in a way, so maybe it was the worst way of all to go.

  And so she steps out into the roar and light of Grafton Street, with the buses rushing past, and is, as she does so, a child again.

  Ada with her suitcase, the day her mother died.

  How she turned and carried the suitcase out of the house. And everything that seemed impossible was possible after all. She had the gift of feet, that placed themselves one after the other so that she could walk out of there, and she had the gift of her hands, to make her way through life, and she did not look back.

  39

  THERE IS A hotel in Gatwick airport where you could live for the rest of your life. You could stay there until they found you, and they would never find you – why should they? You could eat the stale croissants from trays set out in the hallways, wash out your smalls in the sink, nip from room to room when the cleaning trolley went round.

  It has a spa. I saw this when I checked in. I went back to the shops in the South Terminal and bought myself some togs. And I bought socks and pants there, too, and a bag to put them all in – quite a nice bag, very unfussy, in that bumpy, hammered leather. And when I was coming back, walking past reception with the flat key in my wallet, I realised that I did not know how to leave.

  There are three restaurants, or so the ad in the lift tells me, but I don’t have to go to any one of them. I can order a Caesar salad upstairs – there is always a Caesar salad. I can walk the room – because you can always walk the room, if there is enough space. And in this room there is just enough space to go from the bed over to the window, to the television set on its corner bracket, then over to the desk, which is under a mirror that also reflects the bed. Here, you can pause to look at the information in the leatherette binder, after which, you might move to the trouser press and the box with runners on the top where you are supposed to leave your case, if you have a case – most of the guests in the Gatwick hotels do not; their luggage circulates without them, somewhere up there in the sky. Being in a Gatwick hotel does not mean that you have arrived. On the contrary, it means that you have plenty left to go.

  The foyer contains the human contents of a 747 whose engine failed over Kazakhstan. This is their second night on the ground in the wrong country; their clothes are ripe – crying out for a heated trouser press – and their
skin is grey. They will think about a bath and settle for a shower, but not yet, because they have nothing clean to wear. They will check the wardrobe and the bedside light, after which, they will sit on the bed, then lie on it, or tug out the tight quilt and climb under it: though after a while we will all roll or crawl or slump across to the forgotten mini-bar, and wonder is it worth the price. Any of it.

  This is not England. This is the flying city. This is extra time.

  San Miguel, Gordon’s, Coca-Cola, Schweppes. I need something more precise – there is nothing precise enough for me to drink here. I take the overpriced water and swallow until the plastic bottle collapses with a crack. I should go out and get a litre of this stuff. I should go and get a half-wax in the spa. I have the rest of my life to organise. I can’t organise the rest of my life with hairy legs. I wonder is there any way to get into the Clarins shop in the departure lounge where a woman in a white coat does a serious facial in a little back room, though facials always make me look plucked. Still, I have a terrible yearning for a woman in a rasping white coat whose pressing and patting fingers will stick my face back on, where it is in danger of falling away.

  I felt very level when I drove to Dublin airport. I felt very sane and full of purpose. I had some idea of seeing Rowan, perhaps, or of walking along the Brighton front one last time. But the minute the plane’s wheels touched down I knew what I had come here to do. Sleep. I needed to sleep. So I just followed a sign that said ‘Hotel’ and it led, as it often does, to a firm bed, a full mini-bar, and a clapped-out television remote control.

  And I sleep.

  I wake fully dressed, take off my clothes and get in between the cool, tight sheets.

  ‘I tried to catch you,’ says the man in my dream. ‘But you were in the wrong year.’ It is Michael Weiss. He has swum through decades to get to me, he has fought his way up through layers of time. And when we stand face to face I say, ‘How are you Michael?’ and he says, ‘I’m fine. I’m just fine.’