Brushing his hair back, over and over. The smell of incense, of roses and lavender brought in from the garden, honeysuckle soap on Rosaleen’s hands, and her father’s nose, as the days passed, rising higher away from his own face, as though in disdain. Rosaleen thought the stroking nun was mad in the head. And she thought her own virginity was going off inside her, that her womb would rot, she had left it so long, turning one or other suitor down for reasons that were always clear at the time. A brace of young men, or wealthy men, standing in the room where her father lay now, adjusting their ties. She was much courted, John Considine’s daughter. And in the end, she gave it away to Pat Madigan in a hayrick in Boolavaun; her body, later that night, alive and tormented by tiny prickles and welts because, Pat said, the hay was new to her skin.
Forty acres of rock and bog. That is what she got. And Pat Madigan.
The door to the front room was closed now. Her father’s ghost was a cold twist of air turning on the broken hearth. Her father was a moment’s anxiety, as she passed the study, Hush hush! your father’s working. Fellow of the Pharmaceutical Society, Knight of Columbanus, Irishman, scholar, John Considine of Considine’s Medical Hall. Rosaleen looked in at her own narrow bed and wondered, not for the first time, whether her father was actually important, or if these men, with their big thoughts about the world, were all equally small.
There was a dishcloth going off in the sink — she could catch the smell of it from the doorway — and the thing they put under the stairs, the new bathroom that looked so shining and so sanitary, was only another drain, really, opening into the house. The kitchen table was laden with grocery bags, the television blattering away. The evening was ahead of her, with maybe a book to pull her through it. Any book would do. She used to read while the place fell apart around her. And she still read. She liked it.
But first she went to the drawer full of papers. The guarantee form, never posted, for the washing machine before last. Old cheque-books, one end thick with accusing stubs, the rest slapping empty. Things to do with tax. Forestry stuff for the land at Boolavaun. She found the woman in the red room and then another postcard from Dan, a thing by Kandinsky with two horsemen against a background that was also red, and something about the stretch of the animals’ necks that showed the wildness and difficulty of the journey they were embarked upon.
Rosaleen held it up to the light.
Beauty, in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required. That was the drop of water on the tongue.
The evening was just beginning. If she made a cup of tea now, she could have a little sandwich with it; something small to stop her waking in the middle of the night and wandering out into the hall, wondering where she was, though she was never anywhere else but here.
Where else would she be?
But there was something wrong with the house and Rosaleen did not know what it was. It was as though she was wearing someone else’s coat, one that was the same as hers — the exact same, down to the make and size — but it wasn’t her coat, she could tell it wasn’t. It just looked the same.
Rosaleen was living in the wrong house, with the wrong colours on the walls, and no telling any more what the right colour might be, even though she had chosen them herself and liked them and lived with them for years. And where could you put yourself: if you could not feel at home in your own home? If the world turned into a series of lines and shapes, with nothing in the pattern to remind you what it was for.
It was time. She would doze in the chair by the range, tonight, she would not lie down. And in the morning she would walk down the town, over the bridge to the auctioneer’s. She could get a price for it, apparently; the days when people were put off by the heating bills were gone. The auctioneer was a McGrath — of course — a brother of Dessie, who married her daughter. He had to wet his lips each time she passed; his mouth went so dry at the sight of her. Well he could have it. Let the McGraths pick over the carcass of the Considines, they could have Ardeevin and the site at Boolavaun, she would move in with Constance, and die in her own time.
They had all left her. They deserved no better.
The gutters falling into the flowerbeds, the dripping taps, the shut-up rooms that she had abandoned, over the years. The pity of it — an old woman.
Rosaleen took up the little stack of Christmas cards. She opened the first one:
My darling Dan,
I think of you often, and just as often I smile. I miss your old chat.
All my love,
Your fond and foolish Mother,
Rosaleen.
She was an old fool, that much was true. There was no doubt about that.
‘And by the way,’ she put at the bottom. ‘P.S Do, DO come for Christmas this year, it’s been so long!!! And I have decided to sell the house.’
Part Two. COMING HOME, 2005
Toronto
LUDO SAID HE had to do it, it was the last chance he would get.
‘For what?’ said Dan.
‘To be in the house. To see your mother while she is still your mother,’ Ludo said. He paused in his chopping and dicing and looked out at the yard. The snow outside was high to the windowsill, and the flat under-light made everything in the kitchen look drab and momentous. The blue of it took the money out of everything, Dan thought — all Ludo’s cosy objects, and his middle-aged skin. The bell peppers on the chopping board, meanwhile, were a more thrilling shade of red.
‘She is always my mother,’ said Dan.
Which was Ludo’s point exactly.
‘Well make up your mind.’
‘I rejoice in my contradictions,’ said Ludo and he lifted the big knife, waving it high.
‘Yeah well,’ said Dan. ‘I am not saying I came out of some other woman, I am just saying it was a long time ago.’
‘This is not a lucky way to talk,’ said Ludo.
‘Lucky?’ said Dan, as he opened the fridge, its interior green as a hanging garden with lettuces and leeks, the default champagne in the rack and imported gin in its earthen bottle, keeping cold. Ludo was, among other things, a rich man while Dan, for reasons that were never entirely clear to him, was not rich. Not even slightly.
‘What do you mean, lucky?’
‘Life is too full of regrets,’ said Ludo.
A big-featured man with eyes of serious blue, Ludo favoured pinstriped waistcoats and leather jackets, with buttonhole and umbrella, and his house was full of stuff. This was new for Dan, who had woken up in a lot of beautiful white rooms in his day. A nice brick-colonial in Rosedale, Toronto, it had antique cotton quilts and a rocking chair in the bay window: there were three different kinds of maple in the front yard and behind the up and over garage door was a wide shovel for snow.
Ludo was interested in early American landscapes and Dan was surprised to find he was interested in them too. At least a little. They first met in New York over a sincere view of a river gorge that Dan was offloading for a friend. One thing led to another, of course. When Dan flew up with the piece they ended up in bed again, after which they discussed Ludo’s growing collection, as Dan had hoped to do.
Sexually, Ludo was frankly masochistic and this appealed to Dan’s chillier side. But you can never do these things twice. Besides, masochists were always boring in the end. Also — perhaps inescapably — in the middle. And Dan was slightly bored with being bored, though he still craved that little jolt of empathetic pain.
So perhaps it was lucky that, in Toronto, Ludo was off script; too baggy minded and curious to stay in role. Dan felt his age as he realised this was, in fact, what he had flown up for — for the chat, for Ludo’s easy, good company. It did not take them long to hang up the leathers and settle into something else: mostly in Brooklyn, when Ludo was down lawyering in New York, then some skiing near Montreal, a winter break in Harbour Island, until Dan ended up in Toronto for six months because cash was so short, and Ludo so easy. He let out his place in Brooklyn and gave it a go.