I wonder what he thinks about all the day long. I should know, I suppose, or would, if I was any kind of a wife. Silence always suited him. That his silence now has been forced upon him by sickness hardly matters. I think a lot about the day he stole into the house through the back porch door and a present in his hand for me of a gold necklace with a heart on it and a diamond set in its centre and I sitting in the dining room at the table with James and his hand on mine and he gripping my fingers so tightly his knuckles were white. And a fool could know what was happening, what had happened, what had been about to happen. And he only punished me for that with silence. He left himself out through the front door and went down the avenue to his car that he had parked down there away from the house the way I wouldn’t hear him coming in and he could surprise me, back early from his trip to the north, and the necklace boxed and bowed and held out before him like a thing being taken altarward in an offertory procession and the thorns of the rosebush opened the skin of my hand as I retrieved it from where he’d flung it and the salt of my tears seared in the tiny wounds.
I finished it with James that day and never took up with another man again. Pierse ended his self-imposed exile from our bed after a few weeks but he got into the habit of staying up watching television at night, and drinking, never very much, but enough so that he’d sleep sedated and the smell of it would drift from his breath across to me. He was never bothered by the silence between us, only the loudness, when I’d burst out with something, to try to goad him, to wound him, to make him react in some way so that I could say There’s the long and the short of it, there’s what he feels; now I can know what I need to do to repay. But all debts are written off eventually, when it’s clear no payment will ever be made, that restitution isn’t possible and everything is then reset to nought.
Pierse took to holding my hand daily again after our son died. As though to stop the shaking in himself, he gripped me, and took both my hands in his, and squeezed his eyes closed and bared his teeth and his breaths would rush and heave from him like silent screams. He’d helped him buy his ticket to Australia; he’d even contacted some people he knew over there to arrange a few weeks or maybe months of work for him on building sites, and he’d driven him to the airport and hugged him awkwardly but tightly at the departure gate and showed no sign of letting go until Stephen pulled back gently laughing from him. He asked me did I want to stop somewhere for a bit to eat on the way home and I said yes and we stopped in Limerick and in a corner table of a darkened restaurant he’d sat in front of a plate of untouched food and said Christ, Maud, I think I’m after making an awful mistake. Letting him off like that. I should have persuaded him to stay here and work away with me. And not three weeks later our telephone rang in the early hours and he took my hand as we walked up the hall from our bedroom and a voice half a world away told us our Stephen was gone, scaffolding had collapsed under him and he had been killed.
There are days when it seems as though they are the only three things to ever have happened. I got married, I had a love affair, my son was killed. Someone now, some expert in the ways of human minds, looking from a cold distance at me and at the way I carried on, would say I was suffering then from some kind of depression or disorder or some such nonsense. But James stole into my life smiling, and the sight of him, his presence in a room, caused the air to thicken, my mind to slow, my heart to quicken. I don’t understand fully still to this day what came over me, or out of me, or what kind of a spell he cast on me, but I nearly drowned myself in foolishness and heat. The noise of those days, the burning joy, the wildness. He was a young widower; his wife had haemorrhaged in childbirth, his daughter was born to sadness and he told me these things in a soft voice, and he told me how he loved to talk to me, how he loved to look at my eyes, how he loved me. He kissed me and I lost my reason. When the church roof was mended and the fundraising committee we co-chaired was disbanded he came to our house and sat in the dining room and gripped this hand so hard it pained me and he asked me to come away with him and his teenaged daughter to England, and to bring little Stephen with me, and I nearly said yes until some gentle draught Pierse created in his effort to surprise me caused me to turn my head and see him there, at that doorway, with his gift for me on the palm of his trembling hand.
We’re going well now, with our ball. The squeezing and passing from left hand to right hand to partner, and the wait to take it back, have fallen to an easy rhythm. Our knees are almost touching, I can feel the warmth of him. A strange, fortunate symmetry, that his left side was struck and my right, his within six months of mine. Mini-strokes, the doctors said. There’ll be more, as likely as not. Tremors before the earthquakes. The ball falls from his hand; he sucks his teeth in crossness at himself. He looks at me, he stretches out his arm. He grips my hand and pulls lightly and I use the last of my fleeing strength to cross the space between us and turn myself so that I’m sitting on his lap. My necklace swings outwards, the little heart describes an arc and settles again on my chest. I’m seventy-seven and I’m twenty, my child is dead and he hasn’t yet been born, there’s a thickening of the air about me again in this day room, in this honeymoon suite, and my heart is slowing and my mind is quickening and the arms are tight around me and the breath and tears are on my face of the man I pledged to God to love and honour all my days.
Long Puck
MY FIRST WEDNESDAY here the Orthodox Christian priest strode in long-bearded and black-eyed. He embraced me and kissed me on my cheeks, he in a frock and me in a smock, and he called me Brother. Being green and unsure of the prevailing custom I only stood and smiled at him and he smiled back at me with his hands on my shoulders and said, We will be friends. And he strode back out and across and up the wide and dusty street to his own tiny stone church. It’s peaceful here, my oldest parishioner told me. There was a thing once, a terrible thing that happened, but it was a hotness of the blood, a sudden, silly thing, young men … And he trailed off and said no more about it and I thought no further about his intimations and worked each day in the cool inside of my church and welcomed all who entered here.
A local boy in his late teens or early twenties came here one day and said his name was Halim and asked did I know a place called Tipperary. It’s where I’m from, I told him. He laughed and a light in his eyes danced. His cousin lived there. What is this place like? he asked. I told him about the green fields and low hills and forests and valleys and the villages and towns and the speedy drawly talk of the people. They must like chips, he said. My cousin is a rich man. He drives a Mercedes. He sells chips at curling matches in the summer. Hurling, I corrected him. I showed my new friend my hurley and sliotar, and pucked it against the transept wall. His eyes widened. I rang home for another hurley. It came with a shipment of vestments and wine. He’d come to the church in the cooling evening and say, Few pucks, Father? And every time I heard these words I laughed and he laughed with me and we pucked our sliotar up and down the street.