The Night Stages (4 page)

In his boy’s mind he felt that he had disappeared, could not even be recalled. There would have been nothing he could say, no amount of sound that he could have made that would cause him to be noticed, so he remained quiet. He was walking back and forth in the hall, his bare feet moving soundlessly from one red triangle on the carpet to another, draughts made by winds outside the walls moving up his pyjama legs. He was nine years old.

The doctor had finally swung around. He crossed the room and grabbed the father by his upraised wrists, shaking him into attention. “For God’s sake, man,” he said, “go wake the chemist. Tell him to bring morphine. Now!” Niall remembered him saying this. “Now,” he repeated to Tam, his fist slamming into the palm of the opposite hand.

“Have you none in your bag?” Outside the door, Niall heard his father ask this question, his voice querulous and childlike, filled with tears.

“Would I be asking you if I did?”

A scream had torn the air in half. Niall could feel the muscles in his back and down his arms clench. He stepped from one red triangle to another, moving back and forth between the walls of the hall. Then, he admitted to Tam, he had begun at last to cry.

The doctor pushed his father out the bedroom door. “Throw a rock through the man’s bedroom window if you have to.”

His father had thundered down the stairs, moving straight past his quiet son, who stood entirely still now in the hall. There was an electric lamp on the hall table and behind it a glass bell that covered an arrangement of stuffed, dead birds. Niall had thought that he had become completely invisible until he saw that his own limbs were elongated in the reflection on the curved glass, his face smeared, and then he believed that the horrors of the night had left him distorted and askew. He was unrecognizable, and his father was running frantically into the night, as if caught in the midst of burglary.

He could hear his mother moaning in response, he half believed, to the sound of the closing door. The dim light in the hall looked to the boy like smoke, the colour of pain. Even the carpets on the floors and the faded birds behind the glass were drawn into this dusk, this sound. He discovered he could no longer remain upright so he crouched on the floor, listening to the doctor’s voice but not to what he was saying. Abruptly his mother began to shout as if calling out to someone in anger. The silence that followed the shouting filled the boy with dread. But then the smoke cleared, became absence.

“Jesus,” the doctor finally said, “you little bugger.”

And Niall heard the baby’s cry. He was furious with the baby. It was an intruder, an outrage. How dare it cry? It was
damage and torment. It had been trying to kill his mother.

Some minutes later the tall man who was the town chemist walked in the front door with Niall’s father. His night clothes were drenched with rain and he held two bottles, one in each hand. Though he looked up at the landing as he climbed the stairs, Niall knew he did not see him. He believed now it was the baby that had cancelled him out. His father was sitting on the bottom step, deflated, as if he were one of his own weather balloons damaged by storm.

In the room, the boy followed the tall man to his mother’s bedside, not even looking at the despised, dangerous baby or the midwife who held it. The doctor thrust a syringe into one of the bottles. He turned then and plunged the needle into the mother’s arm. Her mouth was a circle of pain: there was neither breath nor voice in it, but her eyes were bright and open, alive with suffering. The noise of the newborn was everywhere, shrill, demanding. Niall was certain that the baby had stolen his mother’s voice.

The baby quieted and something in the room changed. Kneeling by the bed, the chemist picked up one of his mother’s clenched fists, which he held in both of his hands for several moments while looking down at her face on the pillow. Then he bent toward her. “Not too much longer now and the pain will be moving away,” he whispered into his mother’s ear, and as he said these words, the silent howl began slowly to melt from her mouth.

She was broken. Rags and bones tossed on a bloody bed. Her loose hair shone with sweat and her thighs and knees,
still open, were smeared with crimson. But she turned her face toward the whisperer.

Niall would always remember the way the man uncurled his mother’s fingers, one at a time, the left hand and then the right, and the way he smoothed those hands, with the palms of his own, into the wrinkled sheets of the ruined bed.

“Who are you?” she asked, and the question was one long exhalation of breath.

They had known each other two years before Niall had spoken to Tam about his mother. By the time he finished, he was pale, exhausted, and the bottle on the table between them was empty.

“Was that how she died?” Tam wanted to know.

“No,” he said, “not like that.”

The way she was pulled back to being with him, the way she submitted to the force of his personality during their times together, astonished her over and over. As the years passed there were times when she suspected that he walked unwillingly to a meeting knowing there could no longer be anything new for her to bring to him: the same room, the same caresses. Had not everything already been said, touched? Sometimes he would appear at her door like a bewildered Magi, one who had travelled too far, much too far for this
small spate of comfort, the brief awakening, if it could be called an awakening, to pleasure. Sometimes, if it was winter, he would have to remove a coat, a hat, and these he would place gently on the arm or the seat of a chair, and while he did this, he would comment on the weather in the most ordinary of ways as if he had no scientific knowledge whatsoever concerning the rain he had shaken from his sleeves.

There was always that one moment she waited for when he would place his forehead at the intersection of her neck and shoulder and she would feel his body relax against hers, a full stop, an ending to everything outside of them. The rest of her life without him vanished; then language, then geography until there was only the white rectangle of the bed and how they moved there. There was the soft zone beneath his ribs at the place where his waist met his hips, and her own waist twisting in his hands, his breath entering her throat.

Goodbye to all that, she thinks now, looking at the entranced children in the mural here in the passenger lounge.

They are not interested. There is no active drama left in them.

Niall’s boss, McWilliams – he of the much-admired encyclopedic mind – was someone he cared about and quoted. McWilliams might have told him something new about the weather in Croisset during the week that Flaubert was completing
this page
of his
Bovary
, or the effect of fog on Victor
Hugo’s thirty-second chapter of
Les Misérables
. There was a much-told story concerning the path of Halley’s Comet on the day of Mark Twain’s birth, and its reappearance the day before the same author’s death. He might have rhymed off some of the meteorological questions put by God to Job.
Hast thou entered into the storehouses of the snow
; or
hast thou beheld the treasures of the hail
are the only two she remembers. There were parhelia, and fogbows, famous gales, and bog bursts. A shower of orange snow, the village of Sneem upside down in the sky. There were Sun Dogs –even Moon Dogs. He could chart the history of a snowflake through the structure of its crystals. He was very fond of meteor showers, international date lines, undersea ridges, and the kind of low pressure systems that determined the outcome of battles.

Sometimes she ventured her own opinions about weather, even about literature, but Niall would barely register these, was more interested in the segments of her life that he considered to have been truly hers. Her memories of her English childhood fascinated him, he having limited first-hand knowledge of that country beyond a series of weather patterns. What did she remember of butlers, he, a P.G. Wodehouse fan, wanted to know, or of Hardy country, or Constable’s cloud studies, which he had heard about from McWilliams? They would see these things together, she had told him, knowing, even as she spoke, that this would never come to pass.

“And the two of you?” she had asked once, about the brother. “What happened?”

“There was the living apart,” he eventually told her. “And then a kind of betrayal.”

He told her that Kieran had moved in full-time, or at least as close to full-time as he could manage, with their housekeeper, the other mother, Gerry-Annie. “He was impossible for my father to control at home,” he said, “and knowing where he was, more or less, my father let him go to her.” Kieran soon had a bicycle – where he got it his family never knew – and had sped around the parish and finally the whole county on it.

“He had the gift or the curse of charm, though no one but Gerry-Annie knew this in the beginning. But when she made such observations, she spoke them in Irish, and in such a declarative way! So we didn’t really understand whether they were good or bad, which was what she wanted, I imagine.”

“A sort of Irish Nelly Dean,” he said then, adding that
Wuthering Heights
was one of McWilliams’ favourite books because of the weather in it. She was their maid, came in from the country daily to help look after them when Kieran was small. Her name was due to the way country people of the parish occasionally identified a woman. “There would be many Annies, many Marys,” he said. “And most of them were either O’Connells or O’Sullivans. This particular Annie had been married to Gerry O’Connell: hence Gerry-Annie.”

When Kieran went off to school, Gerry-Annie had come down to clean only two or three times a month. But after their mother died, she was, again, regularly in the house. Niall had liked her well enough, but Kieran took to her wonderfully.
So, a year or so after their mother was gone, off he went with Gerry-Annie into the mountains. “It was only five or six miles,” Niall had explained, “but a completely different world, and Kieran became a part of that.”

Descriptions of Tam’s tomboy childhood always made him laugh – the runaway in her, and her fascination with planes. Sometimes she felt she was performing for him, but she carried on, eager to make him happy. He would offer accounts of Gaelic football victories, and all the training that took place in every imaginable kind of weather. He had been a sort of local hero, he admitted. There were cups and trophies and the townspeople caught up in a number of victorious homecomings. She’d pictured him riding on the shoulders of cattle drovers and shop clerks and recalled for him the beginning of a poem concerning an athlete dying young. “Who wrote that?” she asked.

“Houseman,” he’d said. He never would have known about this, he confessed, were it not for McWilliams. “Wenlock Edge” was a particular favourite. “ ‘Tis the old wind in the old anger,’ ” he quoted. Then, after reciting these words, he had taken her open hand and had placed it over the left side of his face, as if instructing her to silence him.

He had read science at university in Dublin, and after graduate work in meteorology, he had accepted a position at the Dublin Weather Office. A few years later there was an opening at the
weather station where his father worked, and he’d come home for that. “And to get married,” he said.

He measured rain, the movements of the magnetic North Pole, and the fluctuations of solar wind. His father launched the daily weather balloons. “Every day,” Niall said, “right on time. He did this every day until he retired.” He mentioned that his father, who could have afforded to send him to school in England, did not.

Except for the artificial wind, created, she believes, by the rendered velocity, the mural she is looking at is oddly without weather. It is all oranges and yellows and reds, the colour of sun, the colour of heat and fire. Parts of it are blue. But no ocean, and no weather. There is full grey now beyond the window glass, and full silence. Calm and erasure. She is thinking about the fog in these terms. But when she whispers the words
calm and erasure
, the sound is like that of a wave pulling up a golden Kerry strand and then withdrawing.

She is remembering a winter afternoon, the fire banked high, the wind pushing rain against the glass of the west-facing windows, and Niall speaking in surprising detail about his lost brother’s life as a child. He was establishing the actuality of Kieran, what he had been, what he still might be. She was moved by this, by the fact of him giving her, through the brother, at least this one path into his past. She hadn’t seen the pain yet. That would come later.