The Green Road (19 page)

‘Oh dear.’

‘If it’s not on the laptop it’s the phone. So I take away the phone and you would not believe it. The temper.’

‘Rory?’ said Rosaleen.

‘He’s nineteen. I can’t be taking away his phone.’

‘And could you not.’ Rosaleen couldn’t think what Constance might do. There was discussion once about his ‘credit’.

‘Could you not take away his credit?’

Constance looked at her.

‘You know, I might,’ she said.

‘Go and give your granny a hug,’ that’s what she used to say. And Rory would walk over, very simply, and put his arms around Rosaleen, and lay the side of his head against her heart.

‘Listen,’ said Constance. ‘I won’t stay. Are you all right?’

‘Of course I am all right.’

‘Put the telly on,’ said Constance, and she had the remote already in her hand. And on the telly came. ‘All right?’

Rosaleen hated the telly. People talked such rubbish.

‘For the news,’ said Constance.

The sound came on to Angelus bells, and now Rosaleen heard them outside too, coming from the church. It was six o’clock.

‘It’s very dark,’ she said.

‘Oh, November,’ said Constance. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow. You’ll come up to Aughavanna tomorrow, for your tea. All right?’

She had opened the door of the kitchen and was already moving through it, and there was the hall beyond her, painted a Georgian turquoise that Rosaleen always considered a mistake. Too acidic. Rosaleen was pulled after her daughter as she turned on the lights, and opened the door to the wine-coloured study, where Rosaleen slept now, because the room was small and easy to heat – an electric radiator, an electric blanket on a timer that only Rory knew how to control, a smoke alarm. And, tucked in under the stairs, a shining, white room with sink and toilet, all tiled and watertight, like the inside of an egg.

The stairs rose up into darkness. Rosaleen did not sleep up there. Not any more.

‘See you tomorrow, Mammy,’ said Constance, and Rosaleen said, ‘You’ll have a cup of tea?’ hating, immediately, the sound of her voice.

‘I won’t,’ said Constance. ‘We’ll have tea enough tomorrow.’

She was speaking loudly, as though Rosaleen were deaf.

‘Why can’t you, sure?’ said Rosaleen.

‘Mammy,’ said Constance with a slight lift of her arms. There it was again, that stupid word.

‘
Mammy
,’ Rosaleen said. ‘Grow up, would you?’

‘I’ll do my best,’ said Constance.

And lose some weight!
Rosaleen wanted to say. The woman would be dead before her. But Constance was already on her way down the hall.

It was very ageing – fat. It made her daughter look like an old woman, which was a kind of insult, after all the care that was put into the rearing of her. The coat didn’t help. It was like an anorak, almost.

‘Have a good night,’ said Constance.

‘I will,’ said Rosaleen.

Mind you, the child always liked to sneak things. Down the side of her bed, a little nest of papers. Crinkle crinkle crinkle in the middle of the night.

‘And lose some of that weight!’ she said, after the door closed in her face.

Rosaleen waited a moment, listening to the silence, then gave a little two-fisted victory dance. She heard Constance crossing the gravel outside, the bleat of the unlocking car. Even her footsteps were clear.

She might have heard.

No matter. The woman was her daughter, she could say what she liked.

Rosaleen stood in the hall of acid blue, and listened to the car engine – a purring, expensive sound. She waited for the swirl of gravel, and for the silence after it, then she turned to face back into the house. It was November. The wind was from the south-west, slicing around the landing window, and into the house. Blue Verditer, that was the colour of the hall. Through the far door was the rose-coloured light of the kitchen, and in it, the blare and nonsense of the news.

Wah Wah Wah. The telly was a series of blanks and shouts. The light thrown out by the stupid box, thin and bright. Dim. Bright. Brighter. Gone.

It was all wrong. The wrong-coloured walls. The stairs she never climbed any more, and unimaginable things up there. Unimaginable.

Rosaleen reached for the curling end of the bannisters. The wood was dark, the smell of the polish she used as a child so real she might catch it on a sharp inhale. A volute. That is the name of the curl. It unspooled and swept upwards to the landing and beyond that to the boys’ rooms.

O my Dark Rosaleen
,

Do not sigh, do not weep!

The priests are on the ocean green
,

They march along the deep.

The abandoned bathroom, with its porcelain like ice. The girls’ room. And the big bedroom. Untenably cold.

And Spanish ale shall give you hope
,

My own Rosaleen!

And in those rooms: A print by Modigliani of a naked girl leaning on to her hand. A map on the wall of the whole world, as it used to be. And for the girls; a wall papered with posies tied with ribbons of blue. She pulled herself up the stairs, one two.

Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope
,

Shall give you health, and help, and hope
,

My Dark Rosaleen!

And then she came down again, to stand in the middle of the hall.

The big bedroom was directly above her now, its two windows facing the morning. And in the centre of it – just over her head – the double bed where her father lay dying, and then died. It was the bed where she herself had been conceived, and it was also her marriage bed. Not deflowered. That happened somewhere else. New mattresses of course. The same mahogany headboard, inset with a medallion of rose and cherrywood, the same dark iron frame with strong planks for cross-boards, and in it, all the pomp of her family life: kisses, fevers, broken waters, the damp of their lives, the sap.

The pair of them lying still and awake all night long and Pat Madigan saying to her, some summer morning when dawn came, ‘I don’t know what I am doing here.’ By which he meant lying alongside her, John Considine’s daughter, a woman he had loved with quietness and attention for many years. Also patience, of course. And tenacity. He did not know what he was doing in this place – what he had been doing – if he had not wasted his life on her. He might have been with a different woman. A better woman. He might have been more himself.

Pat Madigan always knew who he
was
, of course, or who he
should be
.

Well good for him.

She only brought it up now to forget it. Rosaleen had married beneath her. There was no point fooling herself about that now. It was considered a mistake at the time. But she had flown in the face of public opinion, she had defied them all.

A love match. That was the phrase people used, but Rosaleen thought love had little enough to do with it, that it was an animal thing. Three weeks after her father’s death. Not that she was ashamed of it. There were things country men knew that men from the town had no clue about. These young people with their little events below the waist, thinking they were just marvellous. Whatever it was Bill Clinton said about sexual relations, she couldn’t agree more, because when they were young and in their beauty, which was considerable, Rosaleen Considine and Pat Madigan went to bed for days. That was what she called sex. Days they spent. It was a lot more than pulling down your zip while you were talking on the phone.

So what do you think of that?

‘Hah!’

In defiance of the night, she said it out loud.

‘What do you think of that?’

The bed was above her, ready to fall through the plaster, the place where her father died and her mother died, the place that later became her bed with Pat Madigan, when they moved into that room, and a kind of curse in it for the next while: no child conceived there except a few miscarried things, until Emmet was finally started and then Hanna. The bed where Pat Madigan himself finally died, his body wasted by the cancer until all that was left of him was the scaffolding. But, my goodness, he made a great ruin, for having been so well built, those big hinging bones, the joints getting larger and the cheekbones more proud, as the meat melted back and spirit of the man broke through.

He went on a Tuesday night, and they had the lid down by Wednesday afternoon: Rosaleen made sure of it. Planted on the Thursday in a terrible downpour and not one of the mourners allowed to care that they were soaked through. The days and weeks these people spent talking about the weather. Discussing it. Predicting it. The months and years.

It rained. They got wet.

How terrible.

Her father was buried in August, one hot summer, and of course John Considine was too big a man to be shoved into the earth, like a blown calf. They had to wait for priests and monsignors, not to mention his good friend, the Bishop of Clonfert. But something had gone off in her father, it spread through him in the days before he died, and it kept going off for the three or four days after, as men were summonsed from Dublin and from Liverpool; one couple, whoever they were, arriving, almost festive in their own motor car. Various nuns sat vigil by the coffin in the front room and one of them stroking her father’s forehead as she talked to Rosaleen. Vigorously. Gazing at his dead face. Stroking it. Pushing it.

‘Ah God love him,’ she said. ‘Ah, the crathur. Ah the poor man.’

Brushing his hair back, over and over. The smell of incense, of roses and lavender brought in from the garden, honeysuckle soap on Rosaleen’s hands, and her father’s nose, as the days passed, rising higher away from his own face, as though in disdain. Rosaleen thought the stroking nun was mad in the head. And she thought her own virginity was going off inside her, that her womb would rot, she had left it so long, turning one or other suitor down for reasons that were always clear at the time. A brace of young men, or wealthy men, standing in the room where her father lay now, adjusting their ties. She was much courted, John Considine’s daughter. And in the end, she gave it away to Pat Madigan in a hayrick in Boolavaun; her body, later that night, alive and tormented by tiny prickles and welts because, Pat said, the hay was new to her skin.

Forty acres of rock and bog. That is what she got. And Pat Madigan.

The door to the front room was closed now. Her father’s ghost was a cold twist of air turning on the broken hearth. Her father was a moment’s anxiety, as she passed the study,
Hush hush! your father’s working
. Fellow of the Pharmaceutical Society, Knight of Columbanus, Irishman, scholar, John Considine of Considine’s Medical Hall. Rosaleen looked in at her own narrow bed and wondered, not for the first time, whether her father was actually important, or if these men, with their big thoughts about the world, were all equally small.

There was a dishcloth going off in the sink – she could catch the smell of it from the doorway – and the thing they put under the stairs, the new bathroom that looked so shining and so sanitary, was only another drain, really, opening into the house. The kitchen table was laden with grocery bags, the television blattering away. The evening was ahead of her, with maybe a book to pull her through it. Any book would do. She used to read while the place fell apart around her. And she still read. She liked it.

But first she went to the drawer full of papers. The guarantee form, never posted, for the washing machine before last. Old cheque-books, one end thick with accusing stubs, the rest slapping empty. Things to do with tax. Forestry stuff for the land at Boolavaun. She found the woman in the red room and then another postcard from Dan, a thing by Kandinsky with two horsemen against a background that was also red, and something about the stretch of the animals’ necks that showed the wildness and difficulty of the journey they were embarked upon.

Rosaleen held it up to the light.

Beauty, in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required. That was the drop of water on the tongue.

The evening was just beginning. If she made a cup of tea now, she could have a little sandwich with it; something small to stop her waking in the middle of the night and wandering out into the hall, wondering where she was, though she was never anywhere else but here.

Where else would she be?

But there was something wrong with the house and Rosaleen did not know what it was. It was as though she was wearing someone else’s coat, one that was the same as hers – the exact same, down to the make and size – but it wasn’t her coat, she could tell it wasn’t. It just looked the same.

Rosaleen was living in the wrong house, with the wrong colours on the walls, and no telling any more what the right colour might be, even though she had chosen them herself and liked them and lived with them for years. And where could you put yourself: if you could not feel at home in your own home? If the world turned into a series of lines and shapes, with nothing in the pattern to remind you what it was for.

It was time. She would doze in the chair by the range, tonight, she would not lie down. And in the morning she would walk down the town, over the bridge to the auctioneer’s. She could get a price for it, apparently; the days when people were put off by the heating bills were gone. The auctioneer was a McGrath – of course – a brother of Dessie, who married her daughter. He had to wet his lips each time she passed; his mouth went so dry at the sight of her. Well he could have it. Let the McGraths pick over the carcass of the Considines, they could have Ardeevin and the site at Boolavaun, she would move in with Constance, and die in her own time.

They had all left her. They deserved no better.

The gutters falling into the flowerbeds, the dripping taps, the shut-up rooms that she had abandoned, over the years. The pity of it—an old woman.

Rosaleen took up the little stack of Christmas cards. She opened the first one: