Orr continued to preach, his fervour undimmed. Some later said they noticed a change, but you have to take such re-readings of history lightly; how tempting to mistake hindsight for wisdom. The year was rushing towards Christmas, as it does in Belfast. The days shorten, darkness takes over. The rain, a steady presence throughout the year, becomes colder, the angles harsher. But then those days come like an unexpected grace: green and yellow and brown leaves littering the pavement, the early dew glinting, flickering in the low sun. Orr took to walking by the Lagan, through cut glens where cows, motionless, chewed their slow way through winter. The banks of the river were sparse and dun, mute birds aware, taking flight as he passed, leaving thin twigs trembling. Sometimes he walked as far as Lambeg, past the old brewery, out into open fields. He went out to find God, he told his wife, to listen to the Spirit. Maybe he did. Or maybe he was trying to walk himself out of love.
At times he would visit Anna after these walks. His cheeks flushed pink, burrs on his trousers. His hands were freezing, and he put them between her legs to warm them up. Sometimes they just lay there, his hands against her, between her, naked and quiet. He looked at her like he was trying to find something, she said, and every time he left he seemed to have a satisfaction, like he had glimpsed what he was looking for. She felt both exhilarated and unnerved by it; the sense that it wasn’t really her he was after, but something inside her. She asked him once what he was looking at. He was standing naked at her bedroom window, framed against a grey sky, like an art installation. He was watching her, saying nothing. She lay on the bed, propped up on an elbow. This nakedness a gift, something he gave her which everything that followed could never erase: the feeling of being at home in one’s body. He looked at her for a long time before answering. And Moses said unto God, said Orr, Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt?
So much of Orr remained impenetrable to Anna. She felt like Marlow, moving deeper and deeper towards Kurtz, staring at the passing riverbanks, still understanding nothing. But the river carried her, and the sense of discovery was palpable, invigorating. She was both hunter and hunted, the thrill of capture alternating with the fear of being captured. She had both too little of him and too much; even in his absence her body felt more alive, her awareness heightened.
The months that followed were joyous. Anna was visited by Orr as often as he could without raising suspicion. His church and home were in the east of the city, far from the student bars and upmarket boutiques of the Lisburn Road, where Anna lived. Belfast had been ripped apart, ghettoised by the Troubles. Interfaces, walls, twilight zones. Orr’s area was dominated, more or less, by loyalists. The children of the 1986 generation of no-sayers, they were just as militant, though with less to lose. A decade of unimaginative leadership, of reconciliation attempts built around ‘telling your story’, served for the most part merely to trap people in the failed myths they’d grown up with rather than encouraging them to abandon them for bigger, messier ones. Belfast was left with the veneer of a cohesive city, but was deeply fractured below the surface. More ‘peace walls’ were built in the ten years following the IRA ceasefire in 1994 than in the previous twenty.
Still, Orr could travel to Anna’s part of the city easily, and whilst they avoided venturing out in public, he wasn’t in great fear of being discovered visiting her house. There was a routine to their time together. They almost always made love first, no small-talk or awkward uncertainty. After the first month, as their intimacy increasingly matched their desire, Anna would often answer the door naked. At times she would touch herself before he arrived, so that from the first second her nerves would pulse. After the sex were long hours of lying around, afternoons bleeding towards evening, spring revealing itself slowly outside her bedroom window. When Orr wasn’t looking at her he often stood by the window, watching the world taking shape again, recomposing itself after the death of winter. She watched his concentration, followed the lines of his body.
They spoke of everything but their relationship, the two of them combined. Orr talked of God fearlessly, seemingly unconcerned that he was standing naked in front of a woman not his wife. It’s hard to make sense of this. Orr loved God and his word. And he loved a woman in direct contradiction of this word, even a most liberal interpretation. Neither of these realities is necessarily surprising. Whilst Orr kept it a secret, there was a sense in which he wasn’t hiding. As he stood naked before Anna, he also stood naked before God, and you’d have to think that he was as aware of His eyes as of hers. There was a boldness in Orr’s love, or at least in the exercise of it. He was daring God to prove him wrong. To intervene. In the middle of a rare argument, Anna accused him of being a hypocrite. What would Jesus do? she asked him. Orr was halfway putting his clothes back on. He stopped, looked at her, and said: He would do this. And he removed his clothes again and moved his mouth between her legs and began to kiss her.
Blasphemy is so close to devotion. The believer knows God, knows him intimately, not through rules and laws and books but in his heart; he feels God move through his body. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. Orr tied himself to this like an anchor. He did not try to justify himself, but called on God to prove that he would have done otherwise. He was not one of those men constantly second-guessing their infidelity, moving from lust to regret within the hour. Orr committed to his desire, and whatever selfishness that entailed, it was not the selfishness of dragging Anna into his own guilt.
And so it went. Three, four times a week he called on her and they spent a morning, an afternoon together. Only once did they break the routine. An elderly uncle of Orr’s died in Scotland. Orr could have sent his condolences in a letter, but he decided to go. The funeral was in Elgin, a small town just to the east of Inverness, once a cathedral city. Orr’s ancestors had strong ties to Moray and Aberdeenshire. His father, although born in Belfast, talked with just a hint of Scottish burr, inherited from his own father, who had grown up in Aberdeen and moved to Belfast in his twenties. As a child Orr spent three or four summers in the hills and mountains of the region, and would always talk warmly of the towns he then visited: Lossiemouth, Buckie, Fraserburgh, Peterhead, Macduff. They sounded, to his young ear, close enough to be familiar but strange enough for the promise of mystery. He told Anna that it was in Peterhead that he got saved. His father took him to a tent mission in a field beside a gospel hall. Orr was ten years old. The preacher was a man named Lousse, white hair streaked with grey and black, like an animal. He was stout, his belly roundly pushing at the buttons of his shirt, his tie never settling, flapping with the movement of his arms as he preached. And his voice was like singing, Orr said, a rich, round brogue that practically sucked you into the kingdom. Orr had heard it all before: ye must be born again, suffer the little children, come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. It was not news, as such. There was a sense in which Orr, even at ten, already believed it; he just hadn’t committed to it. But something was different that day as Lousse spoke, Orr said. It was a different text, a stranger text. Lousse preached from John 12: Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. There was something in Orr that leapt when he heard those words. The attraction of hating one’s life. God knows what battles we fight with ourselves. Ten years old. He committed himself to Christ that day, Orr said, Christ in his brokenness, Christ in his death. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.
So Orr went back, and brought Anna with him. Anna travelled on her own, rented a small cottage at the edge of the Cairngorms, and Orr stayed with her. He travelled in and out to Elgin, meeting family members, sharing his grief and consolation. He told people he was staying in a hotel, and more than once had to resist an offer of a spare room. He was very nearly caught out. On one occasion, a cousin called unannounced at the hotel he had named. Orr’s name was nowhere in the register. The cousin asked him on the following day, and he had to quickly come up with an excuse, namely that he had moved somewhere closer to the mountains.
For the four days and nights of the trip, Orr and Anna were as husband and wife, shut off from the world. Anna looked back often on this time with such fondness it was almost cruel: the unfilled outline of what might have been. For four days and four nights they drank tea, talked, sat in the shape of each other’s bodies on a bench in front of the cottage watching the dusk descend and the mountains fold in on themselves, the colour fading slowly until all was darkness. They woke to the sound of their own breathing. Birds, different birds, sang outside their windows. Once Anna, standing at the window, spotted a deer move across the low slopes of the nearby mountain. It was maybe two hundred yards away, but it turned as though it realised it was being watched, and stared in her direction. Orr was lying in the bed. She opened her mouth to tell him and then stopped, decided to keep it to herself, this moment of grace, this recognition. She turned to look at him. When she looked back towards the mountain, the deer was gone.
Orr’s uncle had been well known and well loved in the town, and Orr found himself surprised by the connection he began to feel. Every day Anna watched him drive off towards Elgin, thirty miles away. When he returned he would repeat the stories he had heard, stories of faith and humour and kindness, and occasional mishap. His uncle had died well into old age, but not all in the family had been so fortunate, and the recounting of lives cut short seemed to give him a sense of himself that swelled at the edges. He shared these stories with Anna as though they were gifts.
Anna spent the hours while he was away reading, and occasionally writing. At this stage in her life (still well shy of thirty) she had published only her PhD thesis, an examination of the influence of German romantic painters on Beckett’s later plays. Already there were signs of the writer she would become, her wit tied to stark, blunt expressions. She took those German words that sound too good to be translated—Schadenfreude, Weltanschauung, Gemütlichkeit—and built a style out of their geometry: precise, full in the mouth, melancholic.
Her first collection of poetry came a few years later, but some of the poems that appeared in it date from this time. Edited and honed for many months afterwards, but born of the curvature and scent of the Cairngorms. On the night before they left, Orr arrived back to find her hunched over the small wooden desk, writing by candlelight.
Show me what you’re writing, he said. She wouldn’t. He smiled. Are you writing me?
Would you like me to? she asked.
A disturbance into words, a pillow of old words, he said.
She stared at him in surprise. You’re quoting Beckett now?
He laughed.
She knew then, she said later. Who could doubt her?
Two weeks after they returned from Scotland there was an accident in a small row of terraced houses near Orr’s church. An unattended gas fire exploded, ripping apart a living room. An elderly couple, asleep upstairs, just managed to escape. But the fire spread quickly, catching the neighbouring house and racing through the downstairs rooms at speed. The furniture was old and cheap, highly flammable. Upstairs there was a young woman and her baby, four months old. The fire trapped them at the top of the house and the woman yelled from the windows for help. Neighbours rushed into the street but the flames from the blaze kept them well back. In desperation, the woman threw her baby to a man standing as close as he dared. But her throw was poor and the child hit the ground heavy. When the woman realised what had happened she moved back from the window, and disappeared from view, into the blaze.
Orr presided over the shared funeral. The tragedy was front-page news, and hundreds came to pay respect. Somehow people identified with the woman, or perhaps the child; the overwhelming futility, the powerlessness. It did not require a revolutionary spirit to see the story as one of poverty: gas heaters, cheap furniture, houses rammed close together. Class was never a major rallying point in Belfast: too deep and well exploited were more colourful histories of belief and tradition. And yet, like everywhere else, the experiences of the poor moved quickly through history and religion towards the broader church of cheap food, reality television and unemployment. Anxiety was free currency in the city; unnamed resentments simmered, inarticulable. A blurred, passive violence combined with outrage. No one knew quite where to direct their anger, and yet anger seemed in endless supply.
It was in this setting that Orr had to put two bodies in the ground. Anna saw an intensity in him she had not witnessed before. He was quiet, focused, his sadness palpable but not indulgent. When he visited her he moved around her house as though it were a boxing ring.
At the funeral Orr spoke quietly and without sentimentality. The woman had no relatives present, and perhaps this gave him a freedom he would have found difficult to create under the expectations of family members, lovers. He praised the woman, and the child, and the neighbours. He said that platitudes had no place on a day like this. That if comfort were to be found, it should be found in each other, in the physical presence of the people you can reach out and hold, and love. He said, to an audible murmur, that God should be ashamed. And then he read Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation thereof. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
He omitted the final verse: Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.
Everything changes, but there is nothing new under the sun. As a child, without brothers or sisters, Anna had to constantly invent ways to amuse herself. She created a game in which she would hide items of her mother’s—hairbrushes, necklaces, even shoes—around the house. At first it irritated her mother and she complained. But the hiding places were obvious, a cupboard she would open regularly, where the teabags were kept, or under her coat. Her mother warmed to it, began to appreciate these deliberate surprises, these tiny gifts. Anna did not forget, though she’d been only six or seven years old at the time, seeing her mother change her mind, moving from irritation to joy. And she was struck that the only change was inside her, that her mother was choosing something; that the world existed, in some measure at least, within. She was not, obviously, able to articulate this at the time. But it triggered in her, the memory of it, she said, a mute awareness, a responsiveness, a determination to create the world as she walked through it. By appreciation, by openness. By grace.
The funeral did something to Orr. His faith up to this point was hardly naïve, but from this point it tightened, hardened. It became leaner. It did not dissipate, fall apart as one sees among liberals, disappointed by their God being less powerful, or less nice, than they think themselves, and therefore dismissible. Orr’s faith was more biblical, more brutal. If God needed fought, Orr would fight him. There was a violence in Orr. He would not lie down and let God walk all over him. An arrogance, perhaps; but isn’t all faith arrogance? A universe stretching out towards eternity in both directions, uncountable creatures scuttling over the face of the earth: yet God loves me. Why not, of course. If you’re going to have a god, you may as well have a decent-sized god, and one that pays attention. Not, for Orr, a cringing deity, full of love for mankind but utterly unable to lift a finger to help. His God may indeed stretch out the heavens like a curtain; but his hands were dirty.
Orr carried this attack into the bedroom. Always attentive, he became, said Anna, more physical. He was everywhere.
She asked him if he thought God would punish him.
For what?
For this, she said. You and me.
Of course He will, he said.
He came to visit, a Tuesday afternoon. He followed her into the kitchen. She put water on to boil. He knew something was the matter. He waited for her to speak.
I’m pregnant.
He nodded. Okay.
She shook her head. Okay?
He looked at her.
What do you want to do? she asked him.
He walked over to her, standing by the stove, and put his hands on her belly. He was silent for a while, watching her belly, watching his hands.
We’ll have a child, he said.
How can we have a child? Anna answered.
People have been doing it for decades, he said.
Anna was prepared for anger, or fear. Instead she experienced an unexpected calmness. Orr made cups of tea for them both and they sat at the small wooden table.
Will you tell your wife?
Orr nodded.
Will you leave her?
He looked at Anna.
Do you want me to leave her?
I love you, she said. If I do not love you I shall not love.
They did not say much else that day. A simple satisfaction settled in Anna, chasing away her expected anxiety. She wanted the child; it is not a complicated desire, she reckoned. The weight of the world lies behind it.
Everything changes, but there is nothing new under the sun. Orr told his wife. He made no excuses, no arguments. He told her as clearly as he could, he said, that he had met Anna and she had become pregnant. Sarah surely asked him for details and he surely provided them. Whether this was a kindness or not is hard to say. By Orr’s account, Sarah was measured in her reaction. Her anger was real but not showy, as he had expected. She asked him what he intended now to do, and he told her that he didn’t know.
Orr continued to see Anna, though after she announced that his child was growing inside her, their physical intimacy abated. They still had sex, but more gently, and less often. She did not know at the time whether this was a temporary or permanent change, but in the aftermath of such persistent physical pleasure, its absence felt like pain. With the rawness of intimacy tempered, there were small gaps opened up in their conversations, spaces of uncertainty which had once been filled by sex. Orr still looked at her with longing, with desire, and his hands still moved over her. After the initial conversation Anna did not press him on whether he would leave Sarah and his family; but his continued return to her house was an answer, or answer enough. His faith was not diminished, neither in God nor in himself. Anna recalled a particular conversation, a week after her announcement. She was lying on her sofa, Orr making tea. She mentioned an article in the newspaper she was reading, about global warming, the melting ice caps, oil running out. She wondered aloud about their child, what world she or he would grow up to inhabit. About how we need to learn to care properly for the earth. Orr appeared at the doorway, the kettle rumbling behind him.
All these people talk about how we need to do this for the earth, do that for the earth, he said. The earth doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter to it whether it’s covered in ice or sand, ants or people. The planet feels nothing. It’s all narcissism. Talking about what the planet needs when what they’re talking about is themselves. How can the selfishness that created this mess get us out of it? Deep down people know this, somewhere inside them. That’s why humanism and secularism can never save the day. We need God, someone to lift us outside our own vision, to let us see the planet as creation—as though it did feel something. Have ye not known? Have ye not heard? Hath it not been told you from the beginning? Have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.
Anna watched him, bemused. A smile appeared on his mouth, and he moved out of his rant, shaking it off like wet clothes.
He moved back and forth, between his own house and Anna’s. What was it like, returning home, putting the key in the lock of his front door? His heart speeding up, slowing down. Sarah, hearing him arrive, moving further into the house, retreating. The boys not understanding what was happening, but sensing invisible chasms open up between rooms as their parents moved around them.
Orr spoke so rarely of Sarah to me; but the few times he did it was of a woman whose kindnesses were relentless, who loved him and his boys with simple devotion. Anna was not a refuge from unhappiness, nor a reaction to a felt hurt. Orr said he did not stop loving Sarah, but rather—now I speculate—he felt his desire widen, expand. Her patience—was it patience?—as he hauled an affair before her, set it up and told her what it was but not what to do with it. What was she supposed to do with it?
Anna had few people she would have called friends. Her fellow lecturers were amiable, one or two genuinely enjoyed her company, but for the most part she treated them, and they her, with a professional courtesy and restraint. Outside of work she kept largely to herself; a yoga class a couple of times a week, a monthly film club at the university theatre, occasional nights out for drinks with colleagues. She still saw her mother often, her father having moved back to England with another woman who, on the two occasions they had met, Anna hadn’t liked. She wasn’t sure how to talk of her pregnancy, or with whom. She knew that sooner or later she would have to, were she to keep the child.
In the eight years that had passed since Anna’s father left, her mother had solidified. Throughout university Anna had half expected a second phone call to echo the first, her mother falling apart after her father’s leaving. But the call never came, and Anna watched her mother slowly steady herself, taking that extra breath before replying, swallowing whatever sadness she had to to keep going. Anna’s choice to study Beckett as an undergraduate was arbitrary, unaimed; but by the time of her PhD she experienced his writing as prophetic, as the voice her mother strangled in those breaths. It is better to adopt the simplest explanation, even if it is not simple, even if it does not explain very much.
She told her mother as little as she could, the bare facts, stripped of emotional judgement. Anna had prepared herself for an onslaught, for the full weight of her mother’s unspoken anger at her father’s betrayal to fall on her, or on Orr, whom she did not name. But Anna’s mother responded to the news with a quiet pragmatism. She arranged doctor’s appointments, made lists of baby items that she would need, even began preparing a room in her house where Anna and the baby could stay. The expected interrogation did not come, and Anna felt, in a strange way, disappointed. She had wanted conflict, something to react to and fight against, and neither Orr nor, now, her mother would provide it.
It was terrifying, Anna said later, that it was not terrifying. That it felt so natural, making and carrying a child inside her with a man she did not know she could trust, or rather, that she knew she could trust to be exactly and entirely himself, whatever that was, but who in some distinct way was not hers. Possession obsessed her in those first few weeks. Who belongs to whom, and in what way can human beings belong to one another, or, for that matter, to themselves? She had not, until a child grew in her womb, thought of relationships as a form of property, but now she could think of nothing else. She returned repeatedly in her head to Beckett’s description of love in Malone Dies as ‘a kind of lethal glue’, and lay awake at night—on her back, a new, forced position—trying to imagine what it would be like, holding her own child in her arms. In these visions, Orr hovered in the background, present but out of focus, addendum. She could see, she claimed, the child’s face before it was born.
She found herself not so much embracing the idea of motherhood as falling into it. It was not a pile of books beside the bed, or signing up for classes, but a simple quality of attention: she noticed children in a way she had, she realised for the first time, never done before. They existed. She began to see what had always been there. It came as a shock. She who thought she was so observant, so sharp and precise, had failed utterly to register the presence, the interiority, of so many people. Interiority, yes: the inner life, the racing thoughts and unfolding trauma of human existence, pounding itself into the future heartbeat by heartbeat as they clattered and thrashed their way around her. On one afternoon, as she walked through the Botanic Gardens after work—the gardens sat adjacent to the university, and on sunny summer evenings when the students had largely evacuated the city they were populated by families, old couples, the great unwashed of Belfast—she spotted a young girl chasing a butterfly. It was a clichéd delight, her tiny arms flapping and her cheers and shrieks as the butterfly dipped and hovered, moving from leaf to leaf. But Anna watched with something close to horror as she saw the child learn—in a matter of minutes—that if she was quieter, and slower, and more deliberate, the butterfly would not move so readily. That it could be, in a word, fooled. The girl’s eyes narrowed, her face tightened into a furrowed, vital concentration; Anna saw her lose her sense of everything else in the park and become a composed, taut violence, poised to pounce. And she did pounce, and caught the butterfly, and in catching it crushed it. Anna stared at her as she stared at the broken creature in her hand. Her face relaxed again into a calm flatness, and she beheld the deadness with absolute impassivity. And then she shook it off, and turned before it had even hit the ground, laughing and running back to her parents, sitting forty feet away, oblivious.
Anna was beginning to show; a hint of roundness to her belly, a faint pulsing in her body which she may, she thought, have been imagining. It was a period of silence, of a sort.
Sarah left the house, a bright June day, heat in the air from early morning. The three boys had left for school already. Orr was in his study, and heard the front door open and close. He turned to the window to see her walk down the driveway. She worked as a teaching assistant in a primary school in Holywood, just outside Belfast. Orr watched her go, as she did every morning, to walk to the station.
At two-thirty Orr’s phone rang. He was in the hospital visiting an elderly member of the congregation. He ignored it. It rang again, the same unknown number, and he excused himself and stepped out of the room. The caller identified himself as Superintendent Murphy from Bangor Police Station, and asked if he was speaking to Samuel Orr. We need you to come to the hospital, said Murphy. I’m in the hospital, said Orr. There was a brief moment of confusion, after which Murphy said, Your wife has been involved in an accident. You need to come to the Royal. Orr said, I’m in the Royal, Ward 34. Where is she? Is she alright? Come to A&E, said the policeman. Now.
Orr stepped back into the old man’s room, made a brief apology, and walked quickly to A&E. By the time he arrived he was running. There were two policemen standing with a doctor. He described what happened, on the few occasions he talked of it at all, less as a story than a list, as things observed: the senior policeman, Murphy, a good fifteen years older than himself; moustache; younger partner doesn’t introduce himself; doctor, forties, wears a name tag: Dr Susanna Bell; small amount of blood on her jacket sleeve, glistening; follow me, she says (like Jesus); Murphy nods to his colleague.
You can almost see him, walking behind her as she strides quickly through the overlit corridors of the emergency wards. She opens a door and steps inside. The light comes on by itself, a sick green hue. An office, not a ward room; Orr feels his stomach turn. Take a seat, Mr Orr, she says. Orr shaking his head, struck dumb. Your wife was hit by a train. She died there. At the station. Silence. It seems she slipped as the train approached the platform at Holywood. Silence. I’m sorry. Silence.
He asks to see her, and when they initially refuse—she was mangled, broken in a way a body should not be—he insists. When they pull the sheet back he says nothing. The policemen and the doctor recede. Orr’s heart quickens, pounding so hard he can feel it against his chest. A train hurtling at speed, the pull of air as it passes, part gravity and part desire. He feels himself pulled forward, towards the body. He feels the panic rise in his throat, imagines faces at the window watching for a reaction. Sounds compounding, adding one on top of the other, until the silence is a roar. He stares at the body until the noise abates, fights with himself until the only sound he hears is not a sound at all but a question, which he knows will never now be silenced: did she really slip? When nothing is named, confusion grows and with it comes anguish. What name could he give it? Naming is a presumption, an act of ownership. But there is nothing to own; an absence, a place where something used to be.
Sarah’s father, Jackie, ran a grocer’s on the Cregagh Road, the same shop he’d owned since Sarah was born. Orr called him, and he closed the shop early—it was only four in the afternoon—and made his way to the Royal. Jackie did not know about Orr’s affair. He hugged Orr to his chest, something he’d never done before. It was like holding a greyhound, he said: coiled energy, all blood and muscle. Jackie spoke to the doctor, and Orr sat by himself, still, staring ahead. Jackie called Orr’s parents, who arranged to pick the boys up—the two youngest, both still at primary school, had been waiting for over an hour for their mother. He brought Orr to the hospital café for food. You can’t just stay here, he eventually said to Orr, who had hardly spoken since Jackie arrived. I’ll drive you home.
Orr resisted. He drove himself home, despite Jackie’s protests, and spent the night alone. He texted Anna only to say that he wouldn’t be there to visit her the next day. Orr was not given to texting, and Anna was unsettled. She called him immediately but he did not answer.
It was three days before Orr saw Anna. She knew already. The news report had been specific, and whilst Anna had deliberately avoided learning the detail of Orr’s domestic life, she immediately recognised the name and the geography. She called him again—this was the day after the accident—and offered awkward, hesitant sympathies. Guilt had not been a stranger to either of them; Anna had cocooned it within her, hedged it off with a combination of Orr’s brazen example and her own visceral, physical pleasure. But for the first time it took on a substance, it ceased to merely hover in the background of their love but stepped into full view. Anna found herself touching her belly constantly, as though the innocence of the child might somehow be transferred to her. Or vice versa.
For the three days Orr remained cut off, sealed inside his own world. He moved between his house and the paths across Divis and Black Mountain, pacing out his grief and anger and whatever else ran nameless through him. The rain fell persistently, the sky low and full. His children stayed with his parents. He phoned on the second day, and his mother told him that he must come to them, that they needed their father now. But he did not go, not until the following afternoon. He walked through his parents’ unlocked front door, into the living room, where they sat blankly watching television. The youngest child was five years old; his face was red from crying. None of them moved when he entered the room. He kissed each of them on the head, then turned off the television and sat in an armchair facing them. For a moment they simply stared at him. You know your mother is dead, he said finally. But we are alive. The youngest had stopped crying, and like the other two, watched him, followed his eyes and words with expectation. Orr’s father had also come into the room, but Orr didn’t acknowledge him. The boys looked at him without fear. I love you, Orr said to them. The youngest stood up, still tearless, and put his arms around his father, and Orr responded, and there was a stillness, and death was temporarily defeated.
But only temporarily. As Orr himself had often preached, the dead do not stay dead. He called on Anna that evening, the third day. She opened the door to him and wordlessly touched his face. Her hands moved over the surface and he closed his eyes. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. He opened his eyes and she led him inside. They sat in the kitchen and drank tea, the rain finally stopped, the late light of summer throwing lines on the table, like the bars of a prison cell. They barely spoke. Orr remained inaccessible, present but detached. She wanted to ask him what would happen next, but the questions dissipated as they formed, each insufficient to the moment and to what it was she really wanted; not information, but Orr himself.
They slept together, though they did not have sex. The alteration: first one held, then the other; an exchange of griefs and fears. There was a hesitation, as though they were sharing the same words but in a different language that neither had quite mastered. Anna’s sleep was broken; every hour or two she stirred. But each time she found Orr sleeping, his face a stone.
In the morning, as Orr dressed, she said to him, God did not do this.
He was silent, putting on his clothes. Then he nodded. No. We did.
On the following Sunday Orr did not preach. He sat in the church like everyone else, in a seat a few rows from the front, and listened to the words of a young man barely out of school tell of the great things the Lord had done for him. Everyone knew of Sarah’s death. The boys sat by Orr, in order of height, eldest to youngest. It was a sight rarely seen, as Orr was almost always at the front, conducting affairs, and the boys sat with their mother. The effect of the four of them together was almost startling, their features so similar that it looked as though, if one said something, all their mouths would move together.
At the end of the meeting people lingered, reluctant to leave; Orr was hugged and touched and left in no doubt that the pain he was feeling was shared. The boys stood beside him, receiving the same attention, though many of the men weren’t sure how to engage them and some ruffled their hair with a sympathetic pat, which Philip quickly tired of. The youngest did not cry, had not cried since Orr’s return. He stood implacable like a soldier returned from war, soaking up sympathy, no longer able to be surprised or saddened.
The days that followed were full of activity. The inevitable involvement of a coroner meant that Sarah’s body was not released for burial until the Tuesday, and so the funeral was scheduled for Thursday, over a week after she died. Those days lay before Orr like a minefield; Anna had never seen him so uncertain, so self-conscious. She had been, up to this point, drawn to his confidence, his seeming solidity, but she found this other, vulnerable Orr just as compelling. It unnerved her, this realisation; that this man could fall apart completely and she would still love him. It was like a power, or possibly a weakness, she never knew she had, a capacity for desire that seemed increasingly unconcerned of an object.
They saw each other only once more before Sarah was buried. On the day before the funeral the boys were still staying with Orr’s parents, and Orr visited Anna. They went for a walk together along the towpath by the Lagan, where summer was in full, fecund display. It was early afternoon when they set out, the sun throwing short shadows around them, Anna slightly rounded in the middle, her clothes almost ready to be exchanged for the loose drapes—curtains, she called them in one of her later poems—that would hide and show her growing belly. They were comfortable in silence, and needed to be, and they walked without touching. Anna asked him how he prayed.
Do you mean how can I pray at a time like this, or what way do I actually do it? Orr asked.
Both.
I do it by just talking. Sometimes I close my eyes, sometimes I don’t. That’s not a metaphor, he almost smiled.
And how do you pray? she asked again.
Orr was silent for a long time and then said, simply, We’re in this together.
Anna was unsure if the we meant herself and Orr, or herself and Orr and God, or—and this possibility only came to her much later—just Orr and God.
The funeral was small and private. The story had made the news, but Orr was left, along with his congregation and friends, to mourn in peace. The service was in the mission hall, and was presided over by an older pastor from another church in the country, who had known Orr since he was a boy. He spoke with deliberation and a marked, steady rhythm which lifted and fell as he praised the young woman whose body lay in the coffin before them, but whose soul was already in the arms of her saviour. He read from Isaiah 55: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Orr stood up to speak about his wife. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, he repeated. He spoke awkwardly, hesitating, stumbling from one word to the next. The calmness, the measured precision deserted him, and he spoke as though grasping, still looking for the words as he said them.
The coffin was carried for about a quarter of a mile, up the Beersbridge Road to the junction with Bloomfield, where it was lifted into the hearse. Orr and Philip shouldered the front, with four men from the church behind. Philip was not as tall as his father, but insisted that he be allowed to be one of the bearers, and they placed two cushions on his shoulder to help keep the height uniform. At the graveside the visiting pastor read the words of the apostle: There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power: It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.
They lowered the coffin into the ground and Orr threw mud on it. Two men from the council filled up the hole as the mourners left. Philip stood alone, face marked from earlier tears, watching them.
After the funeral there was a small gathering at the mission hall, where food had been prepared by some of the older women. The atmosphere was subdued, constricted, the grief different in its contours than at other funerals they had all witnessed. Sarah was so young, there was no escaping the sense of a brokenness in the order of things which lingered among the mourners even after the consolation of the scriptures. It was coupled with the sense that Orr’s charisma, his simple ability to put others at ease, seemed to be working in reverse, and the gap between the Orr they had known and this new Orr—an Orr who did not even seem to know how to do grief properly—was too confusing. People drifted away quickly. His parents eventually left with the boys, and the handful of mourners who remained began packing away food and stacking chairs. Orr and the visiting pastor stood off to the side for a long time, Orr doing the listening, his face towards the floor. The older man eventually put his hand on Orr’s shoulder, and said goodbye.
Orr visited Anna the following night, and she asked him about the funeral. He described it for her, his tone flat but containing a calmness too, a warmth that seemed to be spreading inside him, as though the old Orr was considering returning, testing the waters. She was overwhelmed by, at first, a blunt satisfaction, which turned almost instantly to shame at her own callousness. Sarah was in the ground less than a day, and Anna already found that she could not help but feel glad, or, if not glad exactly, relieved, that the unsettled question of ownership was suddenly in her favour.
As he was leaving he put his hands on her belly, just as he had when she had announced she was pregnant. She put her hands on top of his, and looked at his face, but his eyes stayed where they were, directed at her belly, at the child within. He shook his head.
What? she asked him. What is it?
Without looking up he answered, If I do not love you I shall not love.
He kissed her and Anna watched him leave, considering for the first time that the line was perhaps as much threat as promise.