This Is Happiness Read online

  And then dark.

  25

  Before Avalon House was Avalon House it was Penniworth’s Hotel. This was back in the time when carriages coming west looked for halfway houses off the main thoroughfare. After a few hours bone-rattling along the skeleton roads, passengers needed facilities, drivers drink, and horses watering. Hotel was aspirational. Penniworth’s didn’t look like a hotel or act like a hotel except in the provision of rooms, neither too spacious nor salubrious according to legend. Mr and Mrs William and Wallis Penniworth had arrived from England and bought the building from a fleeing family of Henshawes, the father a Horace whose Christian act was to point out a sash window on the upstairs landing that might, might mind, need replacing, and whose pale water-coloured children had been warned not to mention the rain. The Henshawes escaped out the avenue under the twisted blackbirds of broken umbrellas, Keep going, children, keep going, and Penniworth put up his painted sign of the only ever, previous and since, hotel in Faha. It was the same sign he had put up in Southwold, and, when that went bankrupt, in Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire, and, when that burned down, in Porthmadog in Wales, as he succumbed to the immemorial dream of migrating westward, towards ever cheaper properties, looking for the magic formula by which hospitality is turned into money.

  In Fahaean history, written for the most part by the forgiving, Penniworth is remembered as a very intelligent man, he had a forehead, and spectacles. His wife is not remembered, but for a sniffle. At first, Penniworth had the classic infatuation of the Englishman in Ireland, finding in the ease of the people and an absence of regulation the heart-opening freedom which is one of the hallmarks of paradise. He was not alone in this, in Dutton’s survey of Clare in 1808: The low grounds of the Shannon are equal to the fattening of the largest-sized oxen. In Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of 1838: The best soil in the county is that of the rich low grounds … which extend from a place called Paradise to Limerick. In fact, the estate and twin-turreted towers of Paradise House itself, last seat of Thomas Arthur Esq., were not far down the road from Faha. Sometime look up the photographs of Brigadier Henn there and don’t think too deeply about the descriptions that mention the aqueous expanse. Despite the aqueous expanse, and his wife’s sniffling Quite a few puddles in the front fields, dear, Penniworth was fairly sure he had arrived at last in paradise. At the moment it was raining, but that was a small matter. The Irish exaggerated everything, William told Wallis on their first evening in the umber gloom of the drawing room whose chimney was just now struggling to draw. Wallis had a handkerchief to her nose, and between nasal drip and rattling wind-rain couldn’t quite hear him.

  ‘The Irish, I’m saying, they exaggerate everything,’ he called across to her. ‘It is really quite charming.’

  Charm, however, was soon enough discovered soluble, and slowly William’s expression turned to that of a man sucking sloes. Whatever the actual formula for success in hostelry, by necessity Penniworth’s version required that no funds be spent on the building or facilities. The hotel responded with a diva’s tactic of theatrically falling apart. Guests did arrive, a dreary selection of the damp and the near-drowned, dripping inspectors, itinerant salesmen, and the lost, who shook off the weather but not the sense of having arrived in a place of last resort. From the traffic of wet boots in the front hall the floorboards rotted, a remedial Persian rug of Limerick origin was Penniworth’s solution, but the rain ran the dye then ate the fibres, two of the boards surrendering foot-sized portions, plop, to the pool in the basement, offering up a child’s smile of gapped teeth. Two chopping boards did emergency dentistry while Penniworth waited for Mr Doyle the carpenter who had sent the perennial message that he would be coming any day now, a day not listed in the calendar. Capriciously the roof leaked, but the drip missed the bucket, and then the buckets, and then the bathtub, moving around the room in a rain-game familiar to those who’ve experienced the sense of humour of the Almighty when He comes to Faha. The bannister of the stairs came adrift from the rails, if you held on to it for support you had the sensation of a ship in rough seas.

  Despite, or because of, the conditions, a sixpence of Penniworths were minted. Three long-nosed daughters, and three myopic sons, they had doting nannies and visiting tutors and went off to boarding schools and had no more truck with the parish until their parents departed this life and went in quick succession to be buried beside Purtills in the Church of Ireland cemetery Kilrush, after which the eldest, Philip, put the hotel up for sale and the parish came through the front doors to take a look and had the humbling experience of having to surrender its prejudice that every Englishman in Ireland was a millionaire.

  Doctor Troy, Senior, it was who bought it.

  (Pru, the eldest of the Penniworth daughters, had taken down the sign the day after the sale. She took it with her to two maiden aunts in Bath, preserved it as a token of what she remembered more and more fondly as her time in paradise, and like a sea-salvaged treasure or slow-dying dream it was in the back of the closet in her nursing home in Tetbury when she passed. Fact.)

  Doctor Troy was from one of the better families in Dublin. Brusque, moustached, and with the natural aloofness of the Royal College of Surgeons, he suffered a smaller case of idyll-icitis, took on the property like an enfeebled patient, addressed the umpteen crises of dilapidation in all rooms and, perhaps ironically, renamed the house Avalon.

  By a medical osmosis at that time, whereby the sons of doctors became doctors, young Jack Troy became Doctor Troy and, by the time his father was gently losing his mind to addictive trances of fly-fishing and gin-soaked games of bridge that were played not according to Hoyle’s, Faha enjoyed a continuity of care, and grown children could copy their grandparents by saying they were going to see Troy.

  All of which to cover the black time in which I lay unconscious.

  I awoke in the nineteenth century, on a leather divan in a room of significant disorder, stacks of books, newspapers and journals had fallen over, a tower of suitcases had not, two bureaus appeared to have been carried just in the doorway and carried no more, possibly because of the obstacle of one of Hartigan’s pianos, purchased because Doctor, a fine house like this is crying out for one, just crying. And did I see – was it three? – beautiful young women going up the stairs just now? Well now. The house’s crying out was not assuaged by the stiff un-music of the sisters’ practice and scales, and soon enough was crying louder as Mrs Troy took ill and all practice stopped. The day of her funeral the out-of-tune piano was shunted down the hall to make room for the blackbird of grief and the trays of sandwiches that kept appearing. That piano was still there in that halfway station when years later Doctor Troy himself passed, and the vast population of patients, and their relations, and their neighbours, and their acquaintances, came out of the not-quite-woodwork and arrived like the testimonial cured in Avalon. Hartigan himself appeared, thin and yellow as sheet music two years after his rumoured death, enduring it seemed by virtue of long association with imperishable art. There, in the hallway of the surgery, the demisemiquavers of his eyebrows rising, out of the black-and-cream keys he knocked a Count John McCormack tune that all of Faha recalled as just beautiful.

  I lay on the divan and looked about me, trying to recall what had happened. There were various armchairs, each occupied with dusty collections of what to Doctor Troy must have once been curiosities, the room a hodgepodge of interesting chaos and a fair replica I’d say of the contents of the doctor’s mind, but all beneath a high ceiling with plaster egg and dart cornices, brocaded curtains and a blazing fire of sycamore logs. The long window looked without interruption down a lush meadow to the river. Evening had fallen, the river silvered. I lay and stared at that river a good while and understood something of Doctor Troy Senior’s condition, because it just kept moving and I kept looking without any notion where I was or how I had got there.

  The chimney was a poor drawer unless blazing, and from its lighting, and all times before, invisible ribbons o
f woodsmoke had settled about the nooks of that room. Coming to myself, the smell lay across my nostrils, sweet and deep and foreign. In Faha, turf was burned, and perhaps because turf recalled its more glorious past as forest, and resented its fall to a fuel somewhere just above cow dung, or because in Faha dry turf was never actually dry, it burned poorly and every house smelled of turf until no one could smell it any more. Woodsmoke was the smell of money, of big houses and the gentry. Now, lying in that room, that was the first thing that struck me. From that moment, I think, woodsmoke became one of the signal scents of my life, and I never again smelled logs burning without being helplessly hopelessly returned to Avalon House, and all that came with that.

  Lying flat, I lifted my right hand to a shooting pain in my temple. But that hand was unavailable, and because I was under the lunatic jurisdiction of a cocktail of medications, my first thought was not to question that, but to say OK and try to lift the other one, which was also unavailable. I raised my head to look down and saw both wrists bound in a plaster if not of Paris then of Limerick say, that is, a bit greyer, and made immobile by two grocers’ lead weights. I looked at my hands pinned there and then the electricity pole was falling on me again and again I was trying to hold it up and I was thinking You’ll get out of the way at the same moment I was realising that I hadn’t.

  The imaginative suffer more than the grounded. That’s my excuse for moaning then, feeling the stabbing in my head and the gourd of shame. But it had the result of turning the cream porcelain of the door handle and bringing a girl in a blue dress into the room. She was about my age, or a year younger, her hair long and fair. She was holding a book, The Modern Home Physician, a finger inside the page where my cry had stopped her reading in her amateur nurse’s chair outside the door. Nothing about her entrance, nothing about the soft sound of her dress and the hard one of her shoes on the floorboards, disabused me of the notion that I was in the nineteenth century. She had a grace and ease of movement that made her seem to glide, made it seem in her case the laws of physics did not apply or had been surpassed without question, because now she was at my side and, though air-swimming through a fog of medication, I was aware of being in the presence of extraordinary beauty.

  ‘I’m Sophie.’

  Though I opened my mouth, I had lost the power of speech.

  ‘Doctor Troy’s daughter,’ she said. ‘You were knocked unconscious and brought here.’

  I heard her, I understood the words, but couldn’t respond. I was in soul-disarray, experiencing something for the first time, that is, a kind of dazzlement. I couldn’t look at her. I just couldn’t. If I hadn’t been bound on the bed I couldn’t have been in the same room as her. None of which would find its way into words then, none of which I could have explained to another soul.

  You might think that in sixty-odd years I’d forget, lose the memory in my blood and in my bones of what that felt like, that the feeling would be lost, and my only recourse to invent a second-hand version or erase it altogether from the story. But you’d be wrong. Sometimes a moment pierces so perfectly the shields of our everyday it becomes part of you and enjoys the privilege of being immemorial. I remember it as though it were today. Honestly. I remember the canal of my throat closing, I remember riots breaking out, sea in my ears, sweat on my lip, fish-hooks floating in my eyes, and the reflex that was general and immediate, crawling beneath my skin and birthing in me the archetypal response to great beauty: the overwhelming sense of my own ugliness. I remember.

  Sophie Troy was beside the divan, her hand holding the book, a forefinger still on the interrupted line. She was gentle, everything about her simplicity and kindness, but I couldn’t look at her. ‘You mustn’t move your hands,’ she said, ‘not for a little anyway.’

  Her voice I have lost now. I can’t hear it, a desolation. I’ve tried, I try here now. I can shut my eyes and see her, can remember things she said, but I can’t hear that voice or recreate it for you.

  She took a taper from a side table and placed it inside the page, put down the book and from a pewter jug poured a glass of water.

  ‘My father is out on a call.’ She came back to my side. ‘When you woke he said to give you these.’ In her palm, two white pills. ‘You’ll have a headache, he said.’ She studied me with a nurse’s curiosity and dispassion. ‘Is it awful?’

  Let’s say I shook my head.

  ‘Put these on your tongue.’

  Her hand was two inches from my mouth. It smelled of almond soap. It sent me somewhere. The pills, I tried to look only at the two white pills, not at the pink creases on the inside of her fingers or the five lines of her palm.

  ‘Open your mouth a bit more.’

  Gullivered, hands weighted down by my sides, eyes closed, I put out my tongue. Time stops on this moment. Somewhere clocks are ticking, sand is falling through the ampoules of an hourglass, and the river is flowing, but not in that room right then. And though it is absurd, though it is ridiculous, it is the absurdity and ridiculousness of real life, and I am surrendered, offered up to it, then feel the small pressure of Sophie Troy placing one of the pills on my tongue.

  ‘Good,’ she says. She is small and light and all business. I am her patient and nothing more. She is a girl lost in fascination to the workings of bone, blood and muscle, the convoluted and intricate mechanics by which a body functions. She sees nothing else. The injured body in front of her is in her duty of care now, there are procedures to follow and she adheres to them closely, concentrating on physical realities and lending truth to the threadbare axiom that women are the practical sex.

  Her hand comes behind the back of my head and she leans in to lift me towards her to drink.

  The firmness of her hand at my neck, the bareness of her arm, in the fall of her hair a smell I cannot name and some part of me goes scrambling after it, goes through meadow-scents, honey, something paler, falls into an exotic of coconut, and is still scrambling when the rest of me is trapped by the small crinkle sound like a starting fire in the stiff fabric of her blue dress and I realise with a shock the sheer nearness of her as she lifts me forward and towards her breast. For the first time in my life I am stopped in the thousand sensations, in the intoxicating strangeness of another person. Her breath is warm, and other. Her eyebrows are dark, and, combined with her fair hair, have a force of attraction that can’t be measured, but against which I became then, and remain now, defenceless. Right then, more than anything, I want to be a better version of myself. I don’t want to be this stupid injured, I don’t want to be the failed priest with hands bound and weighted who tried with an idiot’s certainty to hold up a falling pole from Finland. I want to be a knight. I want to carry the book of virtues and be honourable and wise and kind and heroic and whatever handsome is, and because I am not, and know I cannot be, the pain is sharp and true and all-consuming, because it is the pain of yourself.

  Of course, Sophie Troy knows nothing of any of this. She furrows her brow slightly holding my head, her lips purse to get the patient to drink. Only the cool of the glass against my mouth keeps me in the world.

  She watches as I swallow the pill and then repeats everything for the second one. ‘Good,’ she says. ‘They will help.’

  She puts a palm against my forehead and looks into the upper air, as if reading there an air-extension of my well-being, and for a second I think she can and will see there what I am still too confused to realise is happening, because maybe, maybe it is the medications, maybe I am in thrall to a pharmaceutical fantasy and my feelings are not mine but borrowed from chemicals and in brief time – I blink, and blink again – they will take them away and this breathtaking sense of an infinitesimal beauty will pass, and I will be back in an ordinary whose doorway right now I cannot imagine ever finding again.

  Sophie Troy takes her palm from my forehead and, with the satisfied quod erat demonstrandum of a sophomore doctor, concludes, ‘You have a fever.’ She is confirmed, not alarmed. I am a textbook case. ‘It will pass.’ Brie
fly she looks at me to see if there is anything she has missed. Her seriousness pins me to the bed. I can’t look at her or I fear I will betray myself. I look past her to the window and the dark meadow with the night in it and the river running with silver mockeries of moon.

  ‘You’re to be kept overnight for observation,’ she says, by way of conclusion, then adds: ‘Your grandfather is here.’

  ‘Ganga?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Sorry. Grandfather.’

  ‘Yes. He’s been waiting for you to wake. I’ll send him in.’ Sophie Troy turns back to the side table then, removes the taper bookmark, reinserts her finger in the pages of The Modern Home Physician, walks to the door with it, stops, turns, and, without the slightest trace of what was once called intrigue, says, ‘I’ll be outside if you need me.’

  She steps out the door. Not once has she smiled.

  I hear her say, ‘Now, Mr Crowe,’ and, because my ears have followed her, hear when in a lower voice she says, ‘I think he’ll be fine.’

  In his best suit – he has three, the worst one, the better one, and the best one, which will become the worst one in time – the white shirt and black tie he thinks mandatory for the formal occasion of a surgery visit, Ganga steps in. From big-heartedness and gratitude, his eyes are shining. His hands are holding each other in a knotting twist in front of him. He stands a moment to take in the fine dimensions of the room, helplessly flash-remembering the days of Penniworth when he himself was a boy, the rumoured grandeur of the hotel that no one in Faha ever set foot in, finding something of that in the foot-wide oak flooring-boards. Standing, he takes in the pleasing prospect down the meadow towards the moon river, and though there is presently no aqueous expanse coming towards the house, he can see how it could have, how the infamous floods of 1827, ’29, ’33, ’37 – years spin-rolling now like a wheel of misfortune up to the floods of 1953, ’54, ’55 and ’56 – could be a challenge right enough. All of which only takes an instant, then he comes to the bedside, looks at my bindings, slowly shakes his big round head, and beams.