“Sorry,” she was saying again, stony-faced. She was wearing a white apron, the white apron she always wore in the kitchen.
“The chickens?” said Israel. “Pigs?” George looked down at the floor. Israel looked to old Mr. Devine, tucked up in his blanket on his seat by the Rayburn. “OK,” he said, not getting a reply, and he stroked his beard. He’d taken to stroking his beard; it gave him something to do with his hands. “What’s up? You’re not kicking me out of the chicken coop again?”
George looked him in the eye and held his gaze for a moment.
“I’m afraid it’s Pearce.”
“What?”
George paused, just for a moment, and Israel realized: it was the pause. The pause that everyone dreads, and that everyone knows ultimately is coming, and whose meaning is as clear as any outpouring of however many words; the total eloquence of a moment’s silence.
“No?” said Israel.
“I’m so sorry,” said George.
“No!” said Israel.
George averted her gaze.
“Oh, no.”
“I know you were fond of him.”
“But…I was…just. I just saw him, yesterday.”
“I know.”
George reached out and patted Israel’s arm, and it was the touch that was like the pause, a touch entirely expressive and direct in meaning: the black spot, the bad news, the curse. And it suddenly brought everything back, the way she touched him: the day his father died. He was thirteen. His mother. They were in the front room. They had this new sofa-they hadn’t had it long. You could still smell its newness-almost as if it’d been born into the room. And he was there, sitting on the sofa. He’d been watching TV. His father had been in hospital for some time. But Israel still somehow had no idea his father was going to die; it just hadn’t occurred to him. He’d thought that it was like in a television drama-that it was a difficult story, but that everything sorted itself out in the end. As if life were like a drama. Like Dawson’s Creek. And his mum was sitting on the sofa next to him, and she was saying his name, and there was a pause, and she ruffled his hair, and he somehow knew in that moment that everything didn’t sort itself out. That things went wrong and couldn’t be put right, that beyond crisis there was…nothing. Darkness. And everything after that moment, after his father’s death, seemed to lose its color, as if someone had literally put on a filter that had blocked out the light. As though a cloud had passed over. And the colors had never quite returned. As though the world was on mute. Which is why he read books. That’s when he’d become a serious reader. To try to regain the color. But he never could regain the color. The books always promised they would help him regain the color-as though the stories could somehow redeem things. But they never could. So he always had to read more and more books, just in case the next book was going to be the one that made the colors return. Thirteen. Which was when he’d started suffering from migraines. And he’d started putting on weight. And retreating. Into a sort of long insomnia. Which was why, ultimately, he was here. Nowhere. With the touch and the pause, awakening him again to grief.
“But how did he…” He was speaking, without even knowing he was speaking.
“It’s…” began George. “They’re not sure at the moment.”
“Thou shalt not kill,” said old Mr. Devine, shuffling under the rug.
“What?”
“Granda! Sshh!” said George.
“The Lord does not abrogate his care over his elect,” mumbled Mr. Devine.
“What?” said Israel, suddenly angry. “What’s he talking about?”
“It was an accident…Israel…I’m sorry.”
“Accident?”
“Killed hisself,” said old Mr. Devine.
“What?” said Israel. What was this wretched man suggesting? “What happened?”
“He seems to have been…I don’t know. Some bookshelves, they…”
“What?”
“The bookshelves, they came down and…”
“Leonard Bast,” said Israel. He was clutching his head, as though in pain. “Oh, god.”
“Leonard Bast?”
“Howards End. Leonard Bast, he’s…crushed.”
“Howards End by E. M. Forster?”
“Pearce mentioned it to me.” Israel’s voice had become uneven, as though lacking air. “I didn’t think anything of it.” He felt as though he were choking. He felt like prostrating himself. “He couldn’t have…”
“It was an accident,” said George, reassuringly. “It was definitely an accident.”
“He’ll not get a burial if he killed hisself,” said Mr. Devine.
“Granda!” George was becoming exasperated.
“Speaking the truth,” said Mr. Devine, apparently oblivious. “‘Ye that fear the Lord, trust in the Lord. He is their help and their shield.’”
“Anyway, he’s at peace now,” said George.
“‘And they that know thy name will put their trust in thee: for thou, Lord-’”
“Will you shut up!” yelled George at old Mr. Devine, unable to contain herself anymore. “You stupid, selfish man!” And as George screamed, Israel recognized the emotion, which wasn’t grief but rage, and the rage not just of today, but of years, and everywhere, and everything, the same rage he’d felt when his father died-the rage of being wounded, of being disgusted with himself, of being sacrificed by the dead to mourning. And he could suddenly see it in George too-having been sacrificed by her parents’ death all those years ago. Hence her rage at Mr. Devine. And “Shut up!” she was yelling again at Mr. Devine. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” and then she was banging her way out of the kitchen, with Israel hurrying out after her into the yard.
“George!” he called.
“Go away!” she screamed back, not turning, striding away from him, as if she was to blame.
“You want to be left alone?” called Israel.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to be left alone!”
She didn’t want to be left alone.
He left her alone.
He didn’t want to be left alone. He found himself in the van, driving. Out of Tumdrum and down the coast road, remembering what Pearce had said: the best road in Europe. And then he was parking down in Glenarm and taking the keys from the ignition and sitting there looking out to sea. And could see nothing. Because there was nothing to see. And sitting and crying and shivering by himself. With nowhere to go. And nowhere to be. And nothing to think.
And then hours later, having disappeared into himself, in deep, pitiful mournful self-involvement, he was driving back, half-dazed and despairing, to the Devines’. He needed to talk to someone.
He couldn’t talk to George.
He couldn’t talk to Gloria.
So there was no one to talk to.
Except perhaps the Reverend Roberts.
Lights were on in the manse, which was a two-bed semi-inconveniently situated on a new-build estate just off the coast road. Tumdrum Presbyterian Church had sold the original-the real-manse many years before. The original-the real-manse was a five-bedroom redbrick Victorian villa bang in the center of town, with its own orchard and a walled garden, and a small housemaid’s room, and a library, which had been home to generations of upright ministers and their uptight offspring, and which was now home to local pinstripe-jacket-and tight-jeans-wearing businessman Martin Mortimer and his life partner, Kevin, the hairdresser. Martin and Kevin were accepted, on the whole, in Tumdrum because, it was generally agreed, they were not “flamboyant” and “didn’t rub your noses in it,” and they had lavished time and money on the old manse and transformed it into a home of top-of-the-range chrome and mahogany fittings, with a wet room and a lot of signature wallpaper, while the orchard had been sold and was now a development of-only three-executive-style town houses called “The Orchard.” While in the new manse the Reverend Roberts was living simply and quietly, lacking entirely in Martin and Kevin’s financial common sense and interior design flair. The reverend’s possessions consisted almost exclusively of the clothes he wore and a few Bible commentaries, and the furniture in the house consisted of the congregation’s castoffs: an outdoor plastic picnic table in the living room, which served as his desk, a straight-backed mock-velvet armchair, and no pictures on the wall, and no mess. The Reverend Roberts was someone who had somehow cleansed himself of the everyday mess of things, the detritus. He was not distracted. Which is probably what made him a great minister, and which is certainly why, when Israel could think of no one to turn to, he now answered the door wearing a faded blue terry cloth dressing gown that had once belonged to a member of the congregation. It was too short for him. He was wearing his glasses.