Saints and Sinners (18 page)

I cannot remember when exactly the first moment of the breach came. There were tiffs over food that I refused to eat and disapproval about gaudy slides that I put in my hair. I began to write—jottings that had to be covert because she would see in them a sort of wanderlust. She insisted that literature was a precursor to sin and damnation, whereas I believed it was the only alchemy that there was. I would read and I would write and she, the adjudicator of what I was writing, had to be banished, just as in a fairy tale. One day she lost her temper completely when I read aloud to her a quotation of Voltaire's that I had copied—"Illusion is the queen of the human heart." She looked at me as if I had escaped from the lunatic asylum twenty miles away.

"Illusion, queen of the human heart," she said, and went on with her task. She was pounding very yellow oatmeal with boiling water, and the vehemence with which she did it was so great she might have been pounding me. Those passions, those sentiments that were in Voltaire or in Tolstoy, the recklessness of a Natasha willing to elope with a cad through a window, those were the heights I now aspired to. She sensed the impulse in me the way a truffle hound sniffs the spoils buried beneath, and a current of mistrust sprang up between us.

She searched my eyes, she searched my clothing, she searched my suitcase when as a student I returned home from Dublin — the few books I had brought with me she deemed foul and degenerate. The battle was on, but we skirted around it. I wrote and she silently seethed. She would tell me what others — neighbors — thought of what I wrote, tears in her voice at my criminality. Flings, youthful love affairs, were out of the question, yet I threw my lot in with a man I had only known for six weeks. Though hating him by merely seeing a photograph of him, she nevertheless insisted on my marrying to give the seal of respectability to things and there followed a bleak ceremony, which she did not attend. With uncanny clairvoyance she predicted the year, the day, even the hour of the union's demise. Ten years and two children later, when it happened, she wrote her ultimatum. It was sent poste restante and I read it in a street in London. She enjoined me to kneel down on the very spot as I was reading and make the vow to have nothing to do with any man in body or soul as long as I lived, adding that I owed it to God, to her, and to my children. She lamented the fact of my being young and therefore still in the way of temptation. She had reclaimed me.

Then came years and years of correspondence from her. She who professed disgust at the written word wrote daily, bulletins that ranged from the pleading to the poetic, the philosophic, and the commonplace. I never fully read them, being afraid of some greater accusation, and my replies were little niceties, squeezed in with bribes and money to stave off confrontation. Yet there was something that I wanted to ask her about. I sensed the secret inside her. An infant before me had been born prematurely and had died, and I believed it was caused by some drastic transaction between the two of them. Why else was its name never uttered, prayers for it never said, and never did we visit the grave where even the four letters of its name were not inscribed on the tombstone underneath that of distant forebears? She had not wanted another child, three children and waning finances were hardship enough, and by being born two years later I had in some way usurped her will.

For twenty-odd years I had postponed opening the bundle of letters that lay in my house, in a leather trunk, enjoinders that I had not read and had not the heart to destroy. Then one day, deluding myself into the belief that I needed for my work to revisit rooms and haunts that had passed into other hands, I lifted the little brass latch and took them out. It was like being plunged into the moiling seas of memory. Her letters were deeper, sadder than I had remembered, but what struck me most was their hunger and their thirst. Here was a woman desperately trying to explain herself and to be understood. There were hundreds of them, or maybe a thousand. They came two, three a week, always with apology for not having written in the intervening days. I read them and stowed them away. She would wonder whether I was at home or away, wonder how soon we would meet again, wonder what new clothes I had got, or any other extravagant item of furniture. She would swear to cross the sea to England, even if she had to walk it, and slyly I postponed those visits. She would send things from her linen press, and the letter which preceded the parcel read,
“I sent you yesterday eighteen large doyleys, 
eighteen small ones and four central ones
I didn't 
get to wash and starch them as it takes so long to iron them properly, when starched."
The next letter or the one following would be about toil. She had drawn one hundred buckets of water and sprayed the entire avenue with weed killer to kill off the nettles. One Sunday she had gone for a walk, farther than she had ever gone before. It was a scorching day, as she said, and she felt a strange kind of energy, an exhilaration as when she was young. Up there on the slopes of the mountain there were ripe blackberries, masses of them on the briars, and not wishing to have them rot she began to pick them to make blackberry jelly. Without basket or can, she had to remove her slip and put the blackberries inside it, where they shed some of their purple juices. Her letter kept wishing that she could hand me a pot of clear jelly over a hedge and see me taste and swallow it.

I had no intention of going back to buy a house or a plot of land, but nevertheless she had her eye out for holdings that might suit me. One was called Gore House, named after an English landlord, long since dead. She said it was a pity I had not bought it instead of the German clothier, who not only never set foot in it but had bought it when he saw it from the air, traveling in his private jet. Continentals loved the place and therefore why not I?

The letters about her dogs were the most wrenching. She always had two dogs, sheepdogs, who sparred and growled at one another throughout the day, apart from when they were off hunting rabbits, but who at night slept more or less in each other's embrace, like big honey-colored bears. They were named Laddie and Rover and always met with the same fate. They had a habit of following cars in the avenue and one, either one, got killed while the other grieved and mourned, refused food—even refused meat, as she said—kept listening to the sounds of dogs barking in the distance, and in a short time died and was buried with its comrade. She would swear never to get another pair of dogs, but yet in a matter of months she was writing off to a breeder several counties away and two little puppies in a cardboard box, couched in a nest of dank straw, would arrive by bus and presently be given the identical names of Laddie and Rover. She gloried in describing how mischievous they were, the things they ate, pranks they were up to. She looked out one May morning and thought it was snowing, but when she went outdoors she found that they had bitten the sheets off the clothesline, chewed small pieces, and spat them out.

Her life got increasingly harder—there were floods and more floods, and heating oil got costlier each year while the price of cattle went rock bottom. People were killing their own beef, but as she said, for that, one needed a deep freezer, which she did not have. A mare that my father loved and had dispatched to a trainer was expected to come first in a big race but merely came third, and the difference in the booty was that of a few pounds as opposed to several hundred pounds, thereby crushing all hopes of riches. The mare could have come first but that she was temperamental — could be last in a race, then out of the blue pass them all or purposely lag behind. Not having the means, she nevertheless lived for the day when she could afford to get me a chandelier and to have it so carefully wrapped that not a single crystal would get broken. I did not have that much of a wish for a chandelier.

As she got older she admitted to being tired, and sometimes the letters were in different inks where she had stopped writing or maybe had fallen asleep. Death was now the big factor, the six-mark question that could not be answered. She was bewildered. She began to have doubts about her faith. One morning for several moments she went blind, and from that day onwards she hated night and hated dark and said she lay awake fearing that dawn would never come. Life, she maintained, was one big battle, because no matter who wins, nobody does. I began to see her in a new light and resolved to clear up the differences between us, get rid of the grudges and regain the tenderness we once had. I always pictured her at work removing the clinkers from the ash pan in the morning and separating them from the half-burnt knobs of anthracite, which she mixed in with the good stuff as an economy. She loved that Aga cooker that was kept on all night, because formerly it was a hearth fire that would have quenched and had to be coaxed into being with balls of newspaper, sugar, and paraffin oil. I realized that what I admired in her most was her unceasing toil, allowing for no hour of rest, no day of rest. She had set me an example by her resilience and a strange childish gratitude for things.

She began, as things grew darker, to implicitly forgive my transgressions, whatever they might have been. I was going to America and she asked me to track down a gentleman at an address in Brooklyn. He must have been a sweetheart. She believed that it had been opened and therefore read. It was like finding a hidden room in a house I thought I knew. I remembered something that as a child I had blushed at overhearing. We were in a hire car—my mother, a newly married woman called Lydia, and myself—waiting outside a hospital for a coffin to be brought out to the hearse. My father and the driver had gone inside. Lydia chainsmoked, laughed a lot, and was vibrantly happy. My mother was delighted that we had given her a lift and began to get talkative. Normally guarded with neighbors, my mother began to tell this stranger of her glorious time in Brooklyn, the style she had, the dances she went to, the men she met. Pressed on that point, she said that yes there was one in particular, dark, handsome, and with a beautiful reserve. He had been such a gentleman, had given her little gifts, and on their Sunday outings had seen her back home to her digs and shook her hand on the doorstep. Yet one night, passing a house of ill repute with its red lights and its sumptuous velvet curtains, he had nudged her and said that maybe they should go in there and see what went on. She did not say if the friendship had been broken off abruptly, but it was clear from a little shiver in her body in which desire and disgust overlapped, that she had probably loved him and wished that she could have gone through that forbidden door with him.

Even as I was resolving to go to that address in Brooklyn she was taken ill at home and driven to a hospital in the city, hundreds of miles away. Like many another in a time of reckoning, she decided that she wished to change her will with regard to her house, which had for her the magic of a doll's house. She wished to give it to me. Her son, hearing that he was about to be disinherited, came in high dudgeon and they quarreled in the gaunt hospital hall. She got into some sort of fit there and was brought back to bed, her mind rambling. Late in the evening she began her last letter—
"My hand is shaking now as well as myself with what I have to tell you."

It remains unfinished, which is why I wait for the dream that leads us beyond the ghastly white spittoon and the metal razor, to fields and meadows, up onto the mountain, that bluish realm, half earth, half sky, towards her dark man, to begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting, and free of shame.

IN OUR FRONT GARDEN, there were a few clumps of devil's pokers — spears of smoldering crimson when in bloom, and milky yellow when not. But my mother's sister and her family, who lived closer to the mountain, had a ravishing garden: tall festoons of pinkish-white roses, a long low border of glorious golden tulips, and red dahlias that, even in hot sun, exuded the coolness of velvet. When the wind blew in a certain direction, the perfume of the roses vanquished the smell of dung from the yard, where the sow and her young pigs spent their days foraging and snortling. My aunt was so fond of the piglets that she gave each litter pet names, sometimes the same pet names, which she appropriated from the romance novels she borrowed from the library and read by the light of a paraffin lamp, well into the night.

Our families had a falling out. For several years there was no communication between us at all, and when the elders met at funerals, they did not acknowledge one another and studiously looked the other way. Yet we were still intimately bound up with each other and any news of one family was of interest to the other, even if that news was disconcerting.

When the older and possibly more begrudging people had died off, and my cousin, Edward, and I were both past middle age—as he kept reminding me, he was twelve years older than I was and had been fitted with a pacemaker—we met again and set aside the lingering hostilities. About a year later, we paid a visit to the family graveyard, which was on an island in the broad stretch of the Shannon River. It was a balmy day in autumn, the graveyard spacious, uncluttered, the weathered tombs far more imposing than those in the graveyard close to the town. They were limestone tombs, blotched with white lichen, great splashes of it, which lent an improvised gaiety to the scene. Swallows were swooping and scudding in and out of the several sacred churches, once the abode of monks but long since uninhabited, the roofs gone but the walls and ornamental doorways still standing, gray and sturdy, with their own mosaics of lichen. The swallows did not so much sing as caw and gabble, their circuits a marvel of speed and ingenuity.