There would be no problem with his address this year. Emmet was home now — not that this made much difference to her routine. A phone call every week, a visit one Sunday in every month. Emmet was saving the world from a rickety little office in the middle of nowhere, and he had a girlfriend, no less. A drab looking Dutch thing, with good manners and clumpy shoes. She would do well to hang on to him, Rosaleen thought. He was a hard man to pin down.
And, not for the first time, Rosaleen wished her son some ease. The boy with so many facts at his disposaclass="underline" that politeness edged with contempt, even at four, even at two. Yes Mama, whatever you say. The moment he came out of her, he opened his eyes and met her eyes and she felt herself to be, in some way, assessed.
Absurd, she knew. The power of the moment. The first baby she had seen right after birth, his eyes opening, whoosh, in the middle of the purple mess of his face, and those eyes saying, Oh. It’s you.
What did you do today? Nothing. How was school? Good.
He had a job in the civil service — a proper job — and he left it in 1993 for the elections in Cambodia, came back with stories of bodies in the paddy fields. And he was thrilled by these stories. Delighted. These dead people were much more interesting, he was at pains to point out, than his mother was, or ever could hope to be. And after Cambodia, Africa, places she had barely heard of. And then, unexpectedly, home.
He sat, for the year his father was dying, in the front room, like his own ghost. Rosaleen would come across him and get a fright at this unkempt man who had arrived one day to live in her house; a chemical tang that lingered after he used the toilet as bad or worse than the smell of chemotherapy from his father. Rosaleen thought he was taking pills of some sort. And one day, after he had cleaned up and made a new start of himself, she saw him at the desk of the old study, and it was her father all over again: the same size — Emmet had wasted to an old-fashioned weight — the same focus, and fury, and clammy sense of sanctity. It was John Considine.
A man she had always adored.
Oh Dada.
Oh, little Corca Baiscinn, Rosaleen in a green silk dress that shushed as she walked, hairband of Christmas red, black patent shoes. Rosaleen in her ringlets on the hearthrug in the good front room, saying her piece for Dada.
Oh, little Corca Baiscinn, the wild,
the bleak, the fair!
Oh, little stony pastures, whose flowers
are sweet, if rare!
Oh, rough the rude Atlantic, the thunderous,
the wide,
Whose kiss is like a soldier’s kiss which will
not be denied!
The whole night long we dream of you, and
waking think we’re there, —
Vain dream, and foolish waking, we never
shall see Clare.
Where did the time go? It was ten o’clock, and she had not eaten yet. She wasn’t even hungry, though it was now fully dark — the only thing between herself and the night was her image on the windowpane. Rosaleen straightened up. The same weight as ever. She walked. Every day she drove out in her little Citroën and she walked. She was the old woman of the roads. But she had legs like Arkle, her husband used to say, by which he meant that she was a thoroughbred. Rosaleen recognised, in her reflection, the good bones of her youth. She never lost it. From a distance, if you keep the hump out of your back, you might be any age at all.
She was doing a Christmas card for Emmet. A man who blamed her for everything, including the death of his own father. Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault. The fact that people die. It is all your fault.
Rosaleen put the card in an envelope, then took it out again to see if she had signed the thing. There it was, in handwriting that was unwavering. ‘Your loving Mother, Rosaleen’. Four words that could mean anything at all. She read them over but could not put them together, somehow. She could not put them in a proper line.
She had lost her son to the hunger of others.
She had lost her son to death itself. Because that is where your sons go — they follow their fathers into the valley of the dead, like they are going off to war.
Rosaleen sealed the envelope with a careful, triple lick, lapping the edge of the envelope so as not to get a paper cut on her tongue. She had to pause then to remember who it was for — Emmet always managed to upset her, somehow. She wrote his first name in strong letters on the envelope, and maybe that was enough for now, Constance could finish the rest.
‘To Hanna,’ the third card was started, before she even had time to consider it. ‘Happy Christmas. We will be seeing you, I hope, this year.’ She turned the last full stop into a question mark, ‘We will be seeing you, I hope, this year?’ but that looked too querulous, she thought, and she scribbled the question mark out. Then — of course — the thing was not fit to send.
And it was not ten o’clock, because that clock had been stopped for years, maybe five years. It stopped some time after Dan went. And by Dan she meant Pat, of course, her husband. The clock stopped some time after her own true love Pat Madigan died. It was nice to think he would have fixed it for her, if he had not died but, to be honest, death made very little difference to all that. His mother’s house was always tended and tarred, there were boxes of nails and guns full of mastic out at Boolavaun. But nothing of that nature ever got done in Ardeevin unless she begged him. Rosaleen had to nag like a housewife, she had to get down on her knees and wring her hands and even then, it might not happen — a new washer in the toilet cistern, a couple of slates on the roof — she might weep for them to no avail. The trick, of course, was not to want it. If she managed this for a year or more, if she actually, herself, forgot the tile or the slates or the stalled clock then it might get done. Or it might not. By this man she loved more than sunlight or rain. Pat Madigan. A man whose face she watched as he himself watched the weather.
And when the weather was right, off he went, to the land in Boolavaun. The few scrubby fields he had there, the little stony pastures, Rosaleen had planted them with pine trees, since, for the few thousand they brought in a year. Dessie McGrath organised it for her, the man who married Constance. Ugly dark trees in their serried ranks and rows.
Dessie wanted to build out in Boolavaun. He had an idea for a half-acre at the end of the long meadow, on the rise that looked out to sea. The sea view was everything these days, he said. The home place didn’t have one, of course, it was in a dip with its back to the cold Atlantic. Surrounded, these days, by the dark timber, it looked like a shed in comparison with the other places out that way. Popcorn houses, Rosaleen called them, because they went — pop, pop, pop — to twice the size they had been the week before. Pop! a second storey and Pop! some dormer windows and Piff! the outhouse turned into a conservatory: rooms painted Dulux peach, and, under the glass roof, a couple of dead pot plants from the supermarket, together with some cheap wicker chairs. Rosaleen knew well what Dessie McGrath had in mind with a half an acre of the long meadow, and he could whistle for it. Or he could wait for it. He could have it when she was gone. Because that is what they were waiting for. They were all waiting for Rosaleen to be dead.