This Is Happiness Page 29

  I like to think I was about to say Can I speak with you?

  But I didn’t, because as I came to the drawing room, she said, ‘This is Eugene,’ and stood a little to the side, a look in her eyes that wasn’t exactly mischief, but play, and perhaps the entire history of her dynamic with an unlicensed sister.

  There was no time to consider it, I was face-to-face with an America of teeth, coast-to-coast and sea-to-shining-sea, whose immediate effect was to make you keep your mouth closed on your own peninsular coastline.

  ‘Sorry. Who are you?’

  He was broad and fleshy and friendly with an open look. Not overly burdened by intelligence is a Fahaean phrase. He had a head of black curls and pursed pink lips. His eyes were the polished buttons of someone for whom the world has gone to plan. His suit was navy, his tie claret, his shoes tan, and the whole combined in an ensemble of adulthood that not only seemed much older, but in fact beyond me.

  ‘Noe.’

  ‘I’m being stupid. No, you don’t have a name?’

  ‘I’m called Noe, for Noel.’

  ‘How do you do.’ He shook my hand as though we were business partners.

  Sophie was still standing inside the door, affixed to coming-on calamity. She had a scientist’s cool regard for the free-for-all of her sister’s love life and kept her finger paused in the book a moment longer.

  ‘Who are you here for?’

  There may have been quick or clever and witty answers. I knew none of them.

  ‘He’s here for me,’ Ronnie said.

  She had the knack of rescue and had been called on often I realised at that moment. She had materialised in the room the way good fortune might. I couldn’t manage any words. The lie of course was unquestioned, because of the gravity of her person and her grown-up air of responsibility. She kept not only this household together, but the world, was what I was thinking. She managed everything, her father, the patients, the house, one wild sister, and one saintly one. She was not in any obvious way as beautiful as either, but there was a kind of steady and certain grace in her and the melancholy that people call wisdom.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Eugene said. Things always went swimmingly. He shone some America.

  ‘You’re all healed?’ Ronnie asked.

  ‘Nearly,’ I replied, but the question was for him.

  ‘Couldn’t wait any longer,’ Eugene said and raised his eyebrows in a pantomime oh-oh, as though he’d said a rude thing, and maybe he had, but it was all right among us chaps.

  ‘Huge?’ Charlie’s heels clacked down the stairs.

  Eugene chuckled at the calling of his nickname.

  Sophie’s eyes flashed a look at me not to betray either of her sisters. Then Charlie marched in and I was in a room with the three Troy sisters and as far out of my life as I had known.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ Charlie said. For one second, we exchanged looks, the rate not in my favour, I was left mostly with ashes. ‘We can’t dawdle, we’ll be late, don’t wait up, come on, Huge.’

  He clicked the fingers of both hands, and came to her. ‘Nice to meet you, Niall,’ he said in passing, and none of us corrected him, and they sailed out the door like fabulous creatures from another world.

  (In three years they would be married, a June day that would disappoint Faha, because the anticipation Faha felt on first reading of the engagement, Doctor Jack Troy, Esq. of Avalon House is pleased to announce, was swiftly knocked down by the news the wedding would not be in the parish. Already, there had been a flurry of planning. The paper with the announcement not yet a day old and, all of a shot, Mrs Queally had taken her big button to the florist’s in town. She managed four ways to slip the phrase society wedding into the conversation on the bus. At the florist’s she let distinguished Limerick family out, and sent a single nod after it, letting that speak to how beautiful the arrangements would need to be. There was talk of concelebration, there was talk of the Bishop, and of Handel, the choir was mustered and put on a regimen of double nights, all before Dilly Walsh who was all the time trying to escape the blessing of her fecundity came from the surgery two weeks later and delivered a three-word coup de grâce, ‘’Tisn’t on here.’ In the event, not to lose face, Mrs Queally didn’t cancel the flowers. A Fahaean solution was found whereby a floral archway, in name anyway, was built at the foot of the avenue to Avalon and the choir assembled and sang Handel in the rain when, in a hired dark green Riley car with biscuit leather, Heaney, in full wedding regalia, boutonnière and what-have-you, comedy of chauffeur’s cap atop the cloud, drove the doctor and the bride out the gates on their way to Limerick, and Charlie delivered a slow Queen’s wave that was part acknowledgement of retinue and part farewell and inspired John P’s immemorial assessment, ‘She’s pure thoroughbred,’ and the doctor was said to have just the trace of a smile lurking in the moustache, maybe because after a long-fought battle with a lawless daughter he could see the end in sight, and two hours later at the Redemptorist Church of Mount Saint Alphonsus he would hear it too, when Mr Eugene Hart would step forward, take his bride’s hand and say I take thee, Charlotte, and Charlie Troy would be no more.)

  ‘She’s just terrible,’ Sophie said. ‘Terrible, terrible, terrible.’ Verdict delivered, she turned and walked out of the drawing room with her book.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘No. It’s fine. It was my mistake. I misunderstood.’

  She smiled at that, how Charlie was always forgiven. Her smile did to her face what May does to a garden. ‘Can you help me hang up the tennis net?’

  An hour later, after much tugging, winching, more tugging, one winder snapping at the moment of tension, a falling down, laughter, an agreement between Ronnie and me to declare regulation standard a net with an irredeemable bow in the centre, I walked down the avenue in a suffused evening sunlight, knowing that two things were now certain. I would never again set foot inside the Mars. And my doom was complete, I was in love with the three Troy sisters.

  38

  Maybe I didn’t know it then, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Didn’t know that there are times in a life that pass but retain a gleaming, which means they never die, and the light of them is in you still. There are many consolations in having a convulsed heart. Among them is being attuned to the music of everyday and awake to all that is shining, stirring, pulsing. I was not sad walking down the avenue from Avalon past the great trees in full leaf, their green heads full of birdsong. I felt not captured but freed. A door had opened, and the world was larger, fuller, more varied, complex and rich than it was when I walked up there. I also had a first understanding that, contrary to science, the heart expands more than it contracts.

  Some of it too was that a shift had taken place inside me. I understood that I would not be marrying Sophie, Charlie or Ronnie Troy, but could love them all the same, and be happy in the misery of that.

  All of which to say I came past the ditches noticing the knuckles of the blackthorns ruptured with blossom, and up into the village with the light step of the open-hearted.

  The evenings that fell then were like embroidered cloths, warm and blue before the stars came out, a living embodiment of the soft permissive comfort in the sound May. Say it and you sound the evening coming down over Faha and the fields about, the cattle standing in them and the river behind the street wearing the navy sky like a favoured scarf. May. A sound that comes around you. A sound that has your mother in it.

  Church Street was still as a picture. Ryan’s dog lying outside Ryan’s, Bourke’s car outside Bourke’s, and Clohessy’s outside Clohessy’s, two tractors outside Dolan’s, too early yet for the main clientele who would squeeze the last from the extension of the daylight, not travelling out until the gloaming. Down the cracked slope of the churchyard, St Cecelia’s had its doors closed but a lamp burning. The doors were closed but never locked then. The church had an inviolable status, and Tom Joyce the sacristan had finally conceded to Father Coffey’s misguided or enlighte
ned policy of never turning the key (and not telling Father Tom). Sin has no opening or closing hours, was Father Coffey’s chilling dictum. To have any chance of a fair fight, neither should the mother church.

  Because of a switched-on feeling and a May-time rapture, because of that same helpless longing to make the plot come out right that would accompany me through all my days, see me into and out of all the unscripted tumult, joys and mistakes that constitute a lived life, I stopped at the chemist’s door.

  When you’re three inches off the ground, you don’t see the potholes. I rapped on the door with the confident knuckles of a nuncio. Ryan’s dog lifted his head to see if there was going to be singing.

  I had no speech prepared. I had a shining. That would do for a starter, the rest would follow.

  Inside the darkened shop a lamp came. The Yale lock turned and the door opened.

  Doctor Troy looked at me. He was a man of few expressions. He had maybe five, all of which were cousins, and all of which involved moustache and eyebrows. His eyes had more weariness in them than any I had seen. They were deep and small and still, as though they were less for looking out than looking in, what he saw outside being swiftly accommodated into the general and ever-expanding category called humanity. Holding the door open, his eyes were saying You? and his moustache was saying it too, or something worse. Doctor Troy didn’t move. Like Sophie earlier, he kept the door ajar and I had the second sensation of a Rubicon.

  ‘Miss Mooney told me to call.’

  ‘Miss Mooney?’

  ‘Mrs Gaffney. She told me to.’

  The moustache said something back to that. It wasn’t repeatable. The doctor was likely revisiting his last sighting of me, slinking away after the evening with his daughter, adding this to the idiot who dived head-first off the Captain’s Ladder, the three-day tramper at the gates, and the poor dimwit who tried to catch an electric pole, and he was caught between a sponge of pity and punching me in the face.

  ‘She asked you to call?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last time I called.’

  ‘You’re…?’

  ‘A friend.’

  He didn’t move. His eyes didn’t leave mine. He used one of the other expressions, in which his tongue pressed one side of his cheek. Then he held open the door.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He locked the door behind us and we went through the shop and at the doorway into the sitting room he said, ‘She’s up here.’

  Doctor Troy was standing at the bottom of the stairs in the grey suit and waistcoat, revealing no more than he did any other time, but changing the air all the same. I looked at him. He gave nothing back but a dolorous gravity, and I went past him up the stairs, with each step aware of the weight of dread.

  The door into the bedroom he’d left open. Annie was sitting in the bed, lying back against the pillows, her hands flat on the bedspread and her hair combed out long. From pain, her eyes were glistening. The same parentheses of the wince-smile came around her mouth when she saw me and I knew what I hadn’t realised I’d known all along.

  ‘You’re not to tell him,’ she said.

  39

  I went into the church that night. I don’t mind admitting it. Desperation makes up its own rules, and I had been in a like place before.

  After my mother fell the last time, she lived between chair and bed. She didn’t complain. The fact that she didn’t made it worse, because her suffering was clear and cruel, and I couldn’t reconcile it. She lost her spirit-level, the world became unbalanced. If she stood up she felt she was falling down. She described the alarm of it, but without upset, it was just what was happening to her, and she thought if she didn’t stand for a time the world would straighten up. Bernadette and Saint Teresa of Ávila were the prayer cards Mother Acquin sent and they were by the bed.

  The tremors that came in my mother’s hands she hid by a tactic of rosary beads. She picked them off the bedspread and twisted them in her fingers while I told her about my school day. Her teacup she didn’t pick up until I’d left the bedroom. One day I came in and she was sleeping, and half under her pillow I found the pages. They were a white pad from my father’s office, and on page after page was my mother’s signature. Only it wasn’t hers. Her handwriting was drunk, the letters toppling on to and into each other. Each time she wrote it her signature was less recognisable to herself. She had tried with different pens, tried with two hands, one holding the other, she had tried each letter separately, with infinite slowness in the dead of the winter afternoon, tried with all she had to keep her identity upright, but her signature kept falling over and by the last attempts it was the writing of a bird. She was too embarrassed by it to say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and my father didn’t say anything.

  But soon enough the shake of her hands was betrayed by buttons. She couldn’t dress herself. There was a day when my father and I brought her down the stairs between us to take her to a specialist in town. Her body felt disassembled. It felt as though only the worsted stuff of her dress kept her parts together. Her head went back. There was a day too when her words started buckling, and when she heard them she looked puzzled, as though to say Who was speaking like that? And when it happened again, she looked down at the space where the words had come out as though to see the mangled shape of them and figure out what it was she was doing wrong.

  And so, gradually then, I understood that the systems of my mother were shutting down one after the other. She was going into a still and silent place, and only her eyes were the same. They had a wet look and watered from the corners and sometimes I dabbed them, and sometimes I didn’t want to draw attention and pretended my mother’s face was not softly weeping while I sat beside her.

  In the same way the illness had come, I believed it could go. Mystery is in everything. What I did then I think any boy with a dying mother would have done, I negotiated with God. I started praying all the prayers I knew. When they made no difference, I looked up other ones, as though there was a combination I needed to crack. I’d pray them at night and in the morning look in on my mother before going to school to see if there was a change. In case the distance between heaven and earth was great and it took the prayers time to get there and time for the blessing to arrive, I’d check when I came home too.

  One day, sitting beside my mother, her eyes softly weeping, I realised it was going to take more than prayers.

  ‘I know you can hear me, Mam.’

  Her eyes were a pale blue-green and they bore a look of acceptance I never saw again in this world. She was in there, was the thing that struck you. She was inside the prison of her body, and she was thinking and feeling and had no way left to get any of it out but for the steady watering of her eyes. And there was no way for me to help her.

  There may be sons who would have been better able to bear it than me. My life has had many sufferings, but none equal to that.

  ‘I’m going to become a priest,’ I said.

  She closed her eyes. Just closed them for a second or two, then opened them again. But it was enough. I felt the distance between heaven and earth was maybe not so far, my promise was heard, and my mother’s suffering would come to an end.

  I wasn’t finished the first year in the seminary when she died.

  I went into St Cecelia’s that night not to pray that Annie Mooney would recover. I knew she would not, and Doctor Troy knew it and she knew it too. I went because grief has to find a home, has to find a place to settle, or the dark wings will overwhelm you and you will fall down in the road. I went into St Cecelia’s because when you come face-to-face with suffering you have to negotiate.

  I lit all the candles there were on the tabular metalwork before the statue of Saint Francis. I hadn’t the coins for them, but I had another ten-shilling note from Ganga for the Mars and I posted that there, then I knelt into the pew furthest from the altar and looked up.

  ‘It’s me,’ I said.

  40


  In time, Sophie Troy left Faha to go into medicine, and by a roundabout route, first becoming a nurse, after thirteen years she eventually qualified as a doctor in England, and soon after went to Africa and married a French medic she met there, and that’s where I lost track of her.

  Ronnie, I had a good few conversations with, she was the easiest person I ever met to talk to, and we went to the sea a few times and once took the train together, and I loved what I would call the soul of her, which was gentle and wise and kind and forgiving, and I’m not sure I ever met anyone as honest or good. But she had no love for me and couldn’t pretend she had. She took care of the doctor when his mind started straying, and she cared for him in the falling-down house until he died and all of seven parishes came to the funeral, and to have something to live on she sold the house after that, and went to the city, but I was gone from Faha by then, and didn’t see her again.

  In the days following, still bright and blue and with no sign yet of the clouds returning, I called to the chemist’s to see Annie Mooney. Because the people of Faha were used to having to invent a way to live, they got around the fact that their chemist was indisposed by a three-part solution. Mrs Queally did stand-in to keep the general customers served, and when she was unavailable an honesty tab operated for self-service, and once a day when he came to check on the patient, Doctor Troy filled the prescriptions himself and left them ready for pick-up. Annie was not bedbound the whole time. Whether from medicaments or defiance, she’d rally and dress herself and appear stiffly in the sitting room or in the shop and when her health was enquired about she’d smile the gentle half-wince and say she was just getting over it. Faha was not told the extent of it. The only people who knew were the doctor and Father Coffey and, by unaccountable good or bad fortune, me. Annie was one of those people who believe in signs, she told Father Coffey when he asked why I was there. He had the grace not to argue against something older than Christ, recalled the sacristan telling him all the candles in the church had been lit, and turned the blazoned cheeks towards me to see evidence of signpost. I didn’t understand it, but neither did I argue against it. An unsaid understanding, born out of being in the company of suffering, meant the three of us, doctor, priest and me, were in a conspiracy of silence. Cancer was not a word in such common usage as now. People had a complaint, and then a worrying complaint, and then a bad one and then a very bad one, going around the naming as if to take from it some of its power, but there was still a seemingly inevitable declension in it. Annie had been to the hospital and had the tests that told her what she already knew. She had chosen not to stay in one of the places of care but to return to her own house in Faha to die.