The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  When Niall arrived the following morning, they removed each other’s clothes and made love on the high, lumpy bed. Sun came in through the white cotton curtains and she could hear children playing in the lane below, laughing and calling to one another. They were ravenous and ordered lunch in the room then walked outside, climbing the steep slopes of the ravine and looking across the expanse of water. Trains passed by on the narrow-gauge railway. He was glad there were trains, he had insisted, when she said there might be noise. It made it all seem more real to him. That she could take his arm, could lean toward him out of doors, was to her an unimaginable luxury. She knew she loved him.

  On the afternoon of the second day, he began to withdraw. What was it, what was wrong? she had asked. He said it was nothing and told her to stop worrying and imagining things. This hurt her. She watched him, watched his face, waited for him to turn toward her, to at least tell her what was on his mind. For weeks afterwards she would recall his profile, the sternness of his expression, and the dimming down of his mood.

  He had fallen silent. There was no talk of Francis Drake or even of the weather, which remained calm and bright. She chattered on, her voice filling the room in a way that made her despise herself. Drake, she said, could only have loved the weather in this spot. What would he tell McWilliams? Perhaps, she ventured, Drake would have written about weather in all the other places he had been. Tropical storms, for instance. Maybe McWilliams would like to think about Drake’s memories of storms. Niall had told her Drake spelled storms with an “e” at the end. “There blew up a mighty storme,” she said to him, emphasizing the “e” so it sounded like an “a.” Past tense, she added, when he didn’t look at her or smile.

  He turned toward the window then, as if looking out at the sky, but she knew he was not looking out, would retain no memory of the arrangement of clouds. “I can’t tell McWilliams about being here,” he said. “He is very fond of Susan.” He turned back to look at her. “My wife,” he added.

  Tam said nothing. She didn’t need to be reminded that Susan was his wife.

  “I have to go,” he said. “I have to look for Kieran. He’s here. Somewhere in the mid-north. He’s found work in the construction of a motorway.” Someone, some Irishman on a building site, had told him this in London. She imagined Niall, picking through the rubble, the noise of the machinery all around him, looking for his brother, then speaking to this other labourer. It was as if his brother might have been smashed by the rubble or run over by the machinery. She thought of her own father’s firm, and the building of motorways.

  “I can’t be in this country and not look for my brother,” Niall had said. Defensively, she thought, as if she had always been trying to talk him out of it. “I just can’t do that. They say he’s drinking, living rough.”

  “He’s not a child,” she told him. “It’s possible he wants that life.”

  “Don’t tell me what my brother wants,” he said, sudden anger in his voice. “Absolutely no one could want that life.”

  He opened his case, began to collect his things.

  “It’s my doing,” he said flatly, “all of it.”

  “How could it be, Niall?” She recalled him using words such as fault and loss in relation to his brother. Lost him completely, he had said.

  “No,” he said now, “you can’t understand. It is my fault.”

  “You don’t want to be with me,” she said. “I can understand that.”

  “Oh, I want to be with you,” he said. The anger had not left his voice, but his expression was open, torn. “It’s my brother I am talking about. But I want to be with you. And that is my fault as well.”

  After he left, she sat paralyzed in the room. She could not go outside, could not walk again on the paths where they had been together, a sky over them rather than a roof. All the other relationships she had had in her life, her current acquaintanceships, the people in the village near where she lived, and her warmly remembered friendships from her flying days dimmed then receded. Even the pure memory of Teddy, sealed in place and preserved by death, felt neither reliable nor retrievable. Hers was a half-life, thin, almost empty, not large enough to claim ownership of this terrible sense of loss. She tried to conjure this rogue brother, wanted to position him on the map she was constantly revising in her mind, the map of Niall’s character. But she hadn’t enough information to make sense of this preoccupation.

  She could not look at the unmade bed. Exclusion was everywhere. Outside, small trains on the narrow-gauge railway approached, whistled, and moved into the distance. Even these small, cheerful machines, one of which she would ride to leave this place, seemed remote.

  A faint greyness is entering the air outside the window of the terminal, a moist dawn attempting to make its way through the fog. She must have slept, though she has no real belief in this, and is almost certain she had been in a state of dazed vigilance all night. The number of passengers in the lounge has thinned. There is a woman stretched on a bench opposite to hers, another feeding a baby on the other side of the room, and a large, silent family of what appear to be Irish immigrants on the two banquettes to her left. The children, who had been noisily active for most of the previous day, have now collapsed into various attitudes of sleep, lying against one another like a heap of puppies.

  She rises and walks to the counter, where one tired-looking employee is seated on a stool with his back leaning against the wall. When she asks, he tells her that it is unlikely the atmosphere will clear anytime soon. She could get a hotel room, he says, just on the other side of the parking lot. They would call her there when the aircraft is ready to leave. Most of the other passengers have done this already, and there would still be enough hours, he conjectures, for sleep. He intends to go home himself, he says, and catch some shut-eye.

  She is surprised by what sounds like an Irish inflection in his speech, but she hasn’t the heart or strength to remark on it. “Maybe I’ll do that,” she says. She asks about a place to eat.

  The restaurant should be open for breakfast now, the employee tells her. It’s over there, just to the right of Flight and Its Allergies. When she registers confusion, he says that the mural, which was really called Flight and Its Allegories, had been dubbed Flight and Its Allergies by the staff at the airport. “We can’t make head nor tail of it,” he says. “If I were you, I would visit the Constellation for breakfast before bedding down.”

  “The Constellation,” she repeats. She looks out the window where the airliner sits, motionless, unlit, obscured by the mist. Orion slips into her mind.

  The man points to the far side of the terminal where filigreed screens of carved wood form a long dividing wall, then smiles. “Not the aircraft, the restaurant,” he says.

  She has a faint memory of someone telling her that Newfoundlanders were mostly Irish. And sure enough, the light, sharp consonant at the end of the word restaurant recalled the sound of Niall’s own voice when he said words such as constant or trust.

  KIERAN’S BODY HAD CHANGED INTO THAT OF A young man, and his mind had acquired more knowledge and, therefore, a more complicated way of thinking. The bicycle, however, was a source of comfort in that it could be relied upon to stay more or less the same. Kieran knew every sound it made under any condition, how the tires purred on a good road, hissed in grass on a hillside too wet and steep, really, to be negotiated, rattled when descending a stony mountain track. Some days, when he had been riding for a good length of time, the turning of the speed-blurred wheels beneath him seemed to be an extension of his own body, as if the bicycle had become an essential fifth limb. He went out riding in any kind of weather: a day without speed was for him a day when his self felt heavy and encumbered, as if he were trying to walk through slowly churning, waist-high water. And he feared that, unless he moved forward, his mother would begin to speak to him from that water.

  Swiftness of passage was a species of intimacy to him. He could bring to mind what he had observed of the hawthorn, sally, and holl
y bushes of the hedgerows more easily than the bark of the one apple tree outside Gerry-Annie’s house. He knew the incline and descent of the most obscure roads and tracks of his parish. Later, in the quiet of Annie’s cottage, he could call to mind everything he had seen in the small theatres of roadside windows: a torn curtain, a plaster saint, a china figurine, a face. A change of flowers in a vase or the absence of a toy car from the ledge of a stranger’s window thirty miles away were more vivid to him than a shining, new oilcloth placed by Annie on the familiar table where he took his meals each day.

  When Niall finished his seemingly endless university education, Annie would say, he would become a weather man like his father. Reports of his successes were sent back frequently from Dublin, and Kieran would hear about these, mostly from Annie, who still cleaned and occasionally cooked for his father, and now and then from his father himself. Niall had joined every athletic team, apparently, often becoming captain. And he had scored hundreds of winning goals, according to Annie. His father called him a natural athlete and said he had known this right from the beginning. The minute the lad stepped out and onto the field, he said. Kieran, who had understood since infancy that physical prowess was Niall’s territory, would therefore have never dared to approach the game. Still, he knew the football jargon, more or less. The fencing was more confusing, and he was surprised when he learned that this involved a sword and a mask, believing until then that the activity could only have applied to the penning of sheep. Once he was made aware, he often pictured his brother with his face disguised and a weapon in his hand.

  Kieran saw less and less of his father, though he still made one or two obligatory Sunday visits, and now and then his father came up into the hills on a sunny Saturday. Gerry-Annie was always delighted by these events. She brought out the good teapot, cups, and saucers she and Gerry had been given as a wedding present and made a quantity of sandwiches. She’d cut a few roses from the bush near the door and place them on the table. And, when all was ready, she took off her apron, the only time apart from preparing to go to Mass that she was seen to do this in her own kitchen.

  Kieran’s father would accept a glass of whiskey from the bottle kept in the dresser, and after the ceremonial raising of the glass and the first sip, Annie loved to be told about the weather balloons that his father had launched twice daily at the observatory when he was still working and how it was that they were able to send information back.

  “Is it the same balloon, over and over, then?” she once asked. She didn’t really believe that a floating object could telegraph the news of distant winds and assumed, therefore, that it must report back to headquarters.

  “No, Annie, we use a different one each time.”

  “But isn’t that a terrible waste, and times so bad?”

  “You may be right about the waste, but we need a new one each time, as not a single one ever returns.”

  “Perhaps if you held on to a string, you could pull them back.”

  “There isn’t a string long enough, Annie. And the measurements are taken with the theodolite.” She loved this word and afterwards often repeated her suggestion so that she could hear it again.

  “Theodolite,” she would say with awe, as if hearing the name of the instrument for the first time.

  Kieran often thought about how smoothly Niall had entered the adult world, almost as if he had never been a child, or even a youngster like himself. True, there was that gap of almost a decade between them and those early years before Kieran was born when his brother would have been small and living alone with their parents. But now he’d been gone long enough that the city had established itself in his attitudes and in his clothing. He didn’t look at all like the young men Kieran worked with. His stance was different than theirs, and his attitudes and speech. Polite and well spoken, even his brother’s apparent kindness was foreign and sometimes unreadable to Kieran, though he sensed, now and then, that Niall was trying to reach him in some way or another.

  Once, Kieran took Niall out to see the bicycles that were still, all these years later, being kept in the cow byre. Many of the tires were flat and rust now coated the spokes and rims of the wheels.

  “It’s odd, her in there always talking to our father about waste,” Niall said about Annie, “and these out here unused in the byre.”

  “She honestly believes that those who left them will come back to claim them.” The sound of spring lambs calling for their mothers could be heard coming from the valley as they turned from the bicycles and stepped outside. “But I know the truth,” Kieran said, pulling the rough door shut behind him and fastening it with a dark iron bolt. “I’ve met fellows about to emigrate. They swear they will come back. But they hardly ever do. Mostly they go to London or Liverpool and get stuck there.” He walked to the side of the byre and pointed to one then another of the cottages visible in the fields below them. “Or they go to New York. One went from there,” he said, “and all three from there.”

  “But they’d be making money on the building sites,” Niall said, “and they could use that to come home.”

  Kieran regarded his brother with amazement. It was obvious that he had no knowledge of what the country people were up against. “They send the money home,” he told Niall. “There’s hundreds in the hills that wouldn’t make it through the winter if they hadn’t a son or nephew abroad working on the sites.”

  Niall shook his head. “A pity, that,” he said, “and a bloody shame. They ought to be given a chance, those boys. A fighting chance for a life of their own.”

  “It’s not possible,” Kieran insisted, “not with the way things are.”

  Niall dismissed this. “I don’t accept that,” he told his brother. “Anything is possible if you want it badly enough.”

  Much later Niall would tell Tam about these times at Annie’s cottage. Listening to his brother talk about people so far from his own experience was both surprising and comforting to him, in that it made his brother – this stranger who had come to know other strangers – more vital to him. “As if I might come to know him,” he said.

  “But I closed the conversations down somehow,” he admitted. “I thought I was more knowledgeable than him. And, of course, he sensed that.” He paused. “And he withdrew.”

  In the midst of tight, mannered, and increasingly infrequent Sunday afternoons in the house in town, Niall told her, while the parlour slowly darkened between them, or later, at the evening table with their father, he had come to feel the distance between himself and his brother. All talk was halting and formal and never initiated by Kieran, who seemed both wild and restrained and as palpably suspicious as a fox. Sometimes the quietness in the room was so filled with tension Niall almost wished for the return of his brother’s tantrums, anything to break through the forced calm of the board games they played with their father, and then the awkward, silent meal, a shepherd’s pie most often, prepared by Gerry-Annie on Friday to be heated up later.

  Years before, when Kieran had begun to attend the Derriana School, the conversation had sometimes centred on this, his father asking what he was studying and whether or not he liked his teacher. But these questions had brought only monosyllabic answers from Kieran, and it wasn’t until Niall mentioned the bicycle that any expression at all had come into the boy’s face. Once, Kieran had become almost animated as he talked about the replacement of a bicycle chain: what it had cost and how much easier the cycling had become once this was accomplished, that and the purchase of the light that was affixed to the handlebars and that guided his evening return to the dark hills behind the town. In subsequent years Niall would try to convince himself that he had not mentioned his own bicycling to his younger brother because he had wanted Kieran to have something that was his alone. And his own bike in Dublin, he told Tam, would have been so much better outfitted; how could he have spoken of it? “Kieran was so bloody proud of that one tin light,” he said.

  Lying in bed later in the night, Niall had sometimes thought about
this light moving steadily upwards like a star rising through the trees of Carhan Wood and appearing at the top of the small mountain they called Garrane. He had held in his mind until he slept this one small, travelling candle, the most lonely and tentative flicker of light that he could imagine, in spite of knowing that Kieran would have entered Gerry-Annie’s lane less than twenty minutes after leaving the house and a full hour before he himself had gone to bed. It was in this way, he would say to Tam later, he had come to understand that he missed his brother and that some part of him wished the younger boy could stay home, even though he himself was almost always in Dublin. He had not discussed the boy’s absence or even his brief Sunday presence with his father, and knew he would never do so, in the same way that, once his mother was gone, her name was rarely mentioned. Oddly, it was Kieran who had once slipped the word Mother into a silence at the table. “Mother says,” he had begun. Then he had stopped, as if he hadn’t been aware that he was speaking in company. Niall had felt a shadow of discomfort move through him. He resented the younger boy suddenly using the word Mother. And he was shaken by the spectrum of possibilities in that unfinished sentence.

  Up in the hills at Gerry-Annie’s, this young man, this stranger-brother whose voice had taken on the soft accent of the country people with whom he lived, had tried to describe the plight of a workmate who had, indeed, returned from America. “The only one I ever heard about, came back,” he said, “was Brian from Garreiny, far back in near Lough Iskanamacteery. They say he came home because his mother was dying of a broken heart.” He had kicked a pebble with his boot. “It’s a dark place back in there with the mountains so close to one another,” he said, explaining the mother who had needed her son to return. “The roads are never dry, even with three full days of sun in summer.”

  Both brothers had fallen silent again, at the reference to the mother. But within that silence Niall came to understand that, unlike the angry, sad younger brother he had lost, this quiet labourer was someone with a discrete set of experiences that he could seldom share. He was aware as well that the landscape they were looking at – a landscape that he, Niall, had never taken the trouble to learn – was now, and would likely permanently be, his brother’s geography.