This Is Happiness Read online

  34

  In many versions, all of life is a fall from grace. In this one, I’m hoping to go the other way. I’m working on life as a rise to grace, after a fall. After several falls, in fact.

  I have little memory of getting to Avalon after the fall. I went with Ganga by horse and car. I had been knocked out and revived by whiskey, seen the uncertain edges of the world collapsing, wan and vertiginous, floating with fish-hooks, lost consciousness again and been revived again by Doady pinching hard my two cheeks and calling down a swift intercession of saints. How I got on the car, how the journey happened, Thomas at the trot, me wrapped in the boil and itch of a tartan blanket, passing water-bearers and cattle boys and doubtless making concrete my reputation as the odd Crowe, I haven’t a clearer picture.

  My brain was shattered; or felt like it, the split parts pressing against the bone of the skull; my own diagnosis, no charge. The pain gave new definition to the word sharp, the holes of the avenue adding a jarring agony as the old wheels went in and out of each one announcing us with a knocking-music and bringing Ronnie to open the door before we’d landed in the front circle.

  ‘Knocked out,’ Ganga said, employing the plain style.

  Between them, I was brought to the surgery. Ganga hoisted me on to the divan and backed out. Ronnie said the doctor was on a call. She put a hand on my forehead and went away and came back with a cool cloth. She had the studied responsible air of an elder sister, and the melancholic maturity of the daughter nearest the mother who had died.

  ‘You fell,’ she said. ‘It’ll take a little time for things to come right. Rest now.’

  I did not say to her Please send Sophie but my eyes did.

  The hand that shook me awake later was not Sophie’s but the doctor’s. He looked at me with an equable look. As he was the father of great beauty, I had not a small portion of awe for him, and equal measure of terror. But he was one of those persons who give nothing away, as though the whole feeling part of them they keep elsewhere and only visit occasionally. He had a grown-up face, is what I thought. Doctor Troy was the finished article, a mid-sized man in perfect proportion, his silver hair forever in place, and with an air that he had come into the world that way. He stood close to the divan and said nothing. The grey eyes narrowed and took in the sorry truth that despite decades of General Practice humanity continued to have an inexhaustible imagination for harming itself. There was always a new one on him. The hedgehog moved over and back on his lip. It seemed to me the hedgehog was doing the diagnosis, but that may have been the split brain thinking. The doctor, I think, was mentally thumbing back through my case notes, pausing on the three days of my standing at the gates, adding this to failed priest and trying to catch a falling pole and coming, by circumstantial evidence, to: ‘Son, are you an idiot?’

  He pulled up my eyelid, shone a torch in my eyes, went by tap around the apple-swellings on my head. ‘This hurt? This? This?’ He wasn’t listening for replies, like most doctors he had already come to judgement and was just going through the motions so it didn’t look like he had magic discernment. He lifted each of my hands, let them back. ‘You decided to save the wrists and land on your head?’ He smiled a hedgehog-smile, prickly. ‘How many fingers? Look this way, this. Down. Up.’

  When he had finished, he stood back, put two fingers of each hand in the slit pockets of his waistcoat, and delivered a classic Troy-ism. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, but for what’s wrong with you.’

  I had an unwelcome sense of being transparent and made the two-year-old’s escape by closing my eyes.

  ‘Open,’ he said and palmed a pill into my mouth. ‘Drink.’

  He went to the long windows and tugged the curtains together, taking out the afternoon light and letting off a fine dust of yesterdays. Without another word, he left. I heard him in the hallway tell Ganga something and soon enough heard Thomas and the car wheels in clop and rattle depart, and soon enough too, by the grace of prayer and pharmaceuticals, I had assembled the split parts of my brain into a single thought: the surgery door would open and Sophie Troy would appear.

  But prayers go their own way.

  I opened my eyes from a sleep I didn’t know I was having. And in the disorient realised night had fallen, and that there was a girl’s face hovering close over mine.

  It was not Sophie’s.

  It was still as a moon, studying me. The room was in the dark of after-midnight, the house asleep. From the girl’s lips leaked a held smoke. From the perfect portrait stillness of her it escaped in wisps. Her eyes didn’t leave me, and in the moments it took for me and the dark to grow accustomed to each other, she became Charlotte Troy. She lifted back her head and brought up a lit cigarette that had been invisible. She tilted back her face as though it were an offering, brought the cigarette like an adorer to her lips and sucked a pucker smoke out of it at an angle of eleven o’clock. The sound of her lips was the only sound, it was not nothing.

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ she said, shooting the smoke across my body there on the divan. ‘You didn’t hear me come in either.’

  She had a stance learned from Lauren Bacall, it came with the cheekbones. Sneaking back into the house after an evening whose entertainments all fathers drew a curtain over, she had craved the succour of one last cigarette and come into what she supposed the empty surgery to have it. She had first thought me a corpse.

  The cigarette and her had their own thing going and for a bit I was inconsequential. My head had a bat beating it. I brought my hand up as a shield and felt the egg I had grown out of my right temple. She took notice and paused the cigarette to ask, ‘Are you a bit touched?’ She didn’t wait for reply. ‘You’re the lingerer. At the gates. You’re not simple or anything?’ Her voice was a smoky chocolate, you wanted more of it.

  I was already in some other place by then, inside the strangeness of the night and her perfume and her smoke and what I would come to think of as her stickiness, can’t say why, but that was it, and it was so sweet and strong if you were standing you’d look down at your feet because they wouldn’t be going anywhere. I managed a ‘No’ I think.

  There was still something left in the cigarette and she let it come to the eleven o’clock lips once more, and held her face at that angle after, as though letting an invisible sun or moon bathe it. There was a consummate mesmerism to her. You couldn’t stop looking, and she knew it, had the custom and entitlement both.

  ‘Take me to the Mars on Friday.’

  She said it twisting the butt into the ashtray on her father’s desk, leaving the lipsticked remnant for him to find and know it was hers and begin the business of blinding himself to that knowledge.

  ‘Seven o’clock. I’ll order the hackney.’

  There was an escaped flake of tobacco inside her upper lip and her tongue went to find it, pressing and pausing the moment with complete and unabashed confidence the way the beautiful can, before she brought it out on the tip, plucked it off. To confirm her invitation, she came close to the divan and looked at me a last time. In the sea of the dark her perfume swam, and I and the room did too, all of us lost. What she saw in the shadowed figure of a prone egg-head she didn’t say. She kept the lustrous eyes on me another second, then turned on her heel and walked away to the door.

  ‘I’m Charlie by the way,’ she said.

  When Charlotte Troy was born (It’s a girl! ) Doctor Troy told Doc Senior she was a boy. He had a son, Charlie, he shouted into the ear of the old man who was bedbound and deaf and dying, lungs stuck together by a tacky emphysema and two hundred seasons of rain. It was a small betrayal, but his father would be dead before he’d find out it was a girl, the doctor reasoned. He despised in himself the weakness of it, the embedded thorn, and when the old man didn’t die, and then didn’t some more, and when the child had to be brought upstairs in the swaddling into the roar and splutter of deafness and cough and be for the duration A fine son, that thorn went further down the doctor’s bloodstream. He stonewalled his wife, Reg
ina, had a policy of no way no how when it came to addressing why he wouldn’t tell his father it was another girl, and hoped the old man would be dead before the time of dresses.

  As it happened, he was. And Charlie, who was Charlotte to everyone else and in all other rooms of the house, died with him. Charlotte Troy was one of those luminous children that have the sunlight in them. She was fair-haired and quicker to smile than Ronnie, quicker to know the golden key of that smile, to understand all it could unlock in the world, and, first-off, that chores and homework were not for the likes of her. She defeated the undefeatable nuns by a mimicry of angels. While, under the crab-clawed tutelage of Mrs Dott, Ronnie played a diligent piano, Charlotte wanted dancing tunes, and when she didn’t take the time to master them had her sister learn them so Charlotte could do the dancing. When she was thirteen, she pierced her father’s heart at the dinner table by calling herself Charlie. He passed no comment but felt his father’s thumb on the thorn somewhere behind his rib. She was Charlie thereafter, and who Charlie was was an April sun-shower, a quick and impetuous dazzlement, an untrappable tempered loveliness combined with a liveliness of mind that in those times the gentry called winning.

  I’m aware I’m speaking across the years here. But Charlie Troy was, well, a goddess.

  Now, I know, I know.

  Fact is, I didn’t see Sophie that time. She never came into the surgery. The doctor swept in in the morning said ‘Go home’ without punctuation or moving his moustache and swept out again.

  In the lead-up to the following Friday I didn’t forget Sophie, I didn’t lose any of the shining inside me for her. A platonic love exists on a different plane, we had been told in the seminary, it’s a risen thing, somewhere above the place of dirt and sweat. It cannot be touched by the comings and goings of ordinary life. I walked home from Avalon under a tight blue sky, a throb leaping like a trapped frog inside my temples. By the time I was turning in my grandparents’ gate I had found linear the corkscrew logic that by calling at the house and taking her sister to the pictures on Friday I would be proving my love for Sophie.

  I didn’t announce the date, not in words anyway, but Christy translated my stooped revisions in the bit of mirror hanging on the rafter and rubbed his hands. ‘You’re seeing her?’ He didn’t wait for confirmation and I didn’t put him right, but he got off the bed and came around me the way you might a beast due to the mart. ‘You’re not going like that?’

  ‘Why not?’

  He crinkled all the skin of his face, condensed his criticism and served it in the cold water of a single phrase, ‘You look like a priest.’

  On the Friday evening I set out in my black cleric trousers and one of Christy’s oversized buttonless shirts. The shirt was more like a tunic, was tucked in on all sides, but on my journey to the village kept rising and inflating like a cotton balloon so I was soon a walking parachute. Staying true to form and the Fahean way, my grandparents had made no comment, but I knew that, inside, Ganga was all bubbles of glee – he slipped me a ten-shilling note, Whist now! – and Doady pips of dismay, for they sat either side of the argument for my return to the seminary. Before I left the bedroom, Christy had commanded, ‘Wait!’, splashed a spiced lotion into his palms and smacked it on both sides of my neck. Gently I had drawn the quiff across to re-cover the egg on my forehead.

  Walking up the avenue at Avalon might have been one of the longest walks of my life. There were old trees left to themselves on either side, a fringe of ferns new-leafed and neon where they caught the sunlight, dark and fairy-taled where they didn’t. I was halfway up when Heaney the hackney came past. The big powder of white hair on him, he wore an imperishable black suit as a nod to the venerable office of coachman. He didn’t stop for me, but gave me a look in passing, and from it I understood he had been there before at the bequest of Charlie Troy, and that I was only the latest recruit in this particular game of soldiers.

  Heaney kept the car idling in the front circle. He knew promptness was not in Miss Troy’s nature, but he knew too that the Ford hated nothing more than being at the beck and call of a key, so they had negotiated this treaty. I came in past him. He had the window down against the swelter and the arm out resting. He preserved the chauffeur’s code of keeping his eyes on the windscreen. I went up the steps I’m not sure how, pressed the door-pull, turned to the august and paradisal prospect from that front porch and was a pantomime of the young gentleman but for the frog leaping and the egg pulsing and the parachute that needed tucking.

  The Shannon turned blue was like the sea lying on its back with its tongue out. The door-pull brought no response. All of Faha, but me, knew it was ten years since it worked. The doctor didn’t care to repair it. ‘The sick will get in anyway’ was a Troy-ism.

  After a time, I raised and lowered the knocker, the loudness of it startling the birdsong into another key and sounding more peremptory than I was.

  Ronnie it was who opened the door. ‘Hello.’ She was wearing a sensible dress of taupe colour and holding in one hand the apron she had just taken off. She smiled the wise, soft smile she had and let me into the front hall. ‘You’re feeling better?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Good. I’ll tell Charlie you’re here.’ Before she turned and went up the stairs there was the slightest hesitation, a sliver-moment in which she was looking at me, and I didn’t know if it was that she was a sister outshone, if it was become a habit for her heart to fall a little at moments such as this, if there was regret or resignation, but her eyes were deep and full of telling, and then she pressed her lips in a closed smile and turned.

  The foyer seemed even more crowded than before. The largeness of my feelings had given birth to an incipient claustrophobia. I couldn’t sit down, but there was no room to pace. In response to the rainless season, a tennis net had been resurrected, and was on its way to Faha’s only court round the side of the house, but for now was a great balled tangle on the floor, with a sizeable catch of last year’s sycamore leaves. I stood in place, the sweat catching up with me and the ’chute clinging. You are here. That’s what I was thinking. Just that. Then I heard the light footsteps come down the stairs, and Sophie was there.

  She was holding a book with her finger in the page. She stopped on the last step. ‘My sister will be down in a few minutes.’

  I’d like to say I said thank you. I’d like to say I said her name, I’d like to say I knelt down, or did anything at all, but because of the transfixing anaesthesia of beauty, and the unassailable truth that Sophie Troy was incomparable to any human being I had known, I was dumbfounded.

  ‘Soph?’ In descent, Charlie’s heels were attacking the stairs. ‘Put the cloth over Percy later,’ she said. ‘I might be late. Oh hello. We need to go.’

  Charlie waited at the front door and I opened it for her, the oval mirror showing a version of me I didn’t recognise, Sophie going back up the stairs, and I heading out to get the car door, already tied up in scarves of scent, already lost to the game of soldiers in Heaney’s look in the mirror, but aware that I was in the realm of the fabulous, in thrall to a family of swans, who had a grass tennis court, and a caged songbird whose name was Percy French.

  35

  Plato never made it as far as the Mars. If he had, his philosophy might have foundered. From the outside, the building was unimpressive. It had a plain face that hid the pandemonium of its interior and stood with pretend unremarkableness just off the market at the top of one of the broadest streets in Europe. The vista down the street was stately, had, if not a top-hatted air, a banker’s waistcoat-with-pocketwatch one left over from earlier times. It said Town. In perfect Victorian, it said Civility resides here, and was found true too, not least during the regales of the annual opera season when the Mars put away the cowboys and hoodlums, forgot it was in a frontier town on the furthermost edge and transformed itself into the place of Rigoletto and Tosca. Because they kept company with beauty the opera singers were accorded special reverence, and for years lat
er someone would summon the glories of the town’s past with the phrase, ‘When the operas used be on.’ There was gravity and serenity in a street that ran down to the blue sky and the invitations of the estuary.

  It had been a fraught car journey. From it my abiding memory is Charlie Troy having a deep but short-lived relationship with a smoking cigarette, rummaging after in the depthless depth of a shiny black handbag for a forbidden lipstick, finding it, applying it in Heaney’s mirror with a magician’s dexterity that defied the inconsistencies of the road, pressing, unpressing, and repressing her lips until the look came to her satisfaction and the bow was drawn.

  When Heaney let us off outside the picture house he asked what time we’d want the pick-up and Charlie added a bandit note by telling him to be waiting by the bank after the showing. There was a loose interpretation of a queue by shuffle and press slow-motioning inside. Employing privileges of class and beauty, Charlie ignored it and we were quickly before a ticket desk whose glass was tinted by decades of human anticipation. Behind it sat the large ham-faced figure of Liam Looby, a lecher, on his lap three rolls of tickets he hadn’t bothered to fit into the machine.

  ‘Two one-and-threes,’ Charlie said.

  One-and-three was the price for children, two-and-six the adults, three shillings for the balcony. Admission at his discretion, Looby tore off two of the cheapest ones and slid the pink tongue of them out under the gap in the glass. ‘There you are, Miss Troy.’ Charlie paid him with a smile and stood waiting while I gave him Ganga’s money.