Many were out that blustery Sunday, and for a variety of reasons. Some to pass time or allow their children recreation in one of the parks, to swing them on swings, plonk them on rocking horses and slides, and say, “Yes, Mummy is watching,” in answer to their voracious claims: “Watch me, I’m brilliant … I’m brilliant.” Others came to canter on horseback, at considerable expense, up and down a stretch of upturned gravelly topsoil, within earshot of buses and motorcars, thereby annulling the sweet illusion of countryside. Still others came to visit friends in their homes, to eat pork and crackling and three kinds of veg, and then to sink into the swamps of their sofas; relatives went to visit the sick in hospitals and nursing homes scattered all over the city, dying people or merely sick people propped up sullenly on wrought-iron beds, their eyes towards the door, eyes waiting for the familiar face, the bunch of carnations, the box of sweets; an inferno of coughs, growls, and stares, the stares silently deducing who would go first.
Yes, many were out and about, defying the March wind, which, true to its record, was cutting. It tore at things. It ripped the petals of the primroses, made mince of these little hairy creatures with their butter-yellow-ringed centres; sent pages of newspaper skeetering along the towpath because people from passing motors threw sections about, sections that were too dull or too commodious for the lazy grip of one citified hand, and so from the ground criminals or royalty or strippers stared up at one for an instant before the flimsy leaf of newspaper dashed off in search of some more secure lodging. But it was late now and most were heading home, the last scurry to savour the end of the Sunday, to bask in it before the beginning of the working week, the grind.
Nell did not hurry just yet, drew back with a shudder, as the motorists, also mindful of the passing day, began a lively vendetta with one another, tearing up the centre avenue that runs through the park, careless as to whether a child or a rider might be crossing in the dusk.
She would go home soon, or quite soon. She had come out to allow Paddy the house to himself. Yes, it was like that. Not open war but estrangement. It was his year before university and he was attending a crammer before retaking two subjects, English and maths. He would have liked his own flat, as he often said, but was stuck with her, as he did not say but which they both knew. When does a mother become an incubus? It was not the first time she had asked, nor would it be the last. She had asked it, mulled over it in the years as they grew away from her, sometimes in a burst, sometimes then an intermittent relapse of tenderness, a freshly found compliment, saying, “You look nice,” but more and more this aloofness, spending time with friends, roughing it with backpacks in foreign parts and coming home nut-brown, a tan which they were proud of but which she believed coarsened their features. Sometimes a little gift for her, a plaque or a poster, and sometimes not. There had been girlfriends, of course, those who stayed overnight, often secretly, a great hush-hush going up the stairs and not coming down, but she knew because there would be an earring on the kitchen table or a hairbrush or a perfume spray in the bathroom.
A few who stayed quite openly and did not want to leave dallied, sat on the sofa in the morning, and begged by the acceptance of endless cups of coffee to be let stay. Oh, she knew why and she understood why and she pitied them for their clinging, but saw the mistake.
Meg was one of these. Meg short for Megan. Meg with long black satiny hair, which she drew over her face, web-like, to hide from people, because hide she did, her principal communication being with a cigarette, always one between her lips and several on her person, loose cigarettes, and her spare hand cupped permanently to take the ashes in case she should be scolded. Meg had replaced Emma in Paddy’s affections, although she was not nearly so vivid, not nearly so striking, more a waif. Emma had got her comeuppance, made herself too available and had to be discarded, the very same as the pompom scarf she had knitted for him was discarded, high up in the cupboard where old suitcases and broken tennis rackets were dumped. Nell consoled her as best she could, the morning it happened. It was a Sunday, summery, and Emma in a chiffon dress, a slightly absurd attire, standing in the street, by the lamppost, next to Paddy’s chained bicycle, waiting, yet deliberately refusing to look up, not acknowledging the series of welcome tappings, staring with a false security, a close-to-breaking smile, waiting for him to appear. His bicycle was his trademark, secondhand, something thin and blemished about it, the mudguards painted white, the handlebars a scratched metal, and a jaunty saddle which he had recently acquired. When his saddle got stolen he put a printed sign on his bicycle which said, HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF YOUR—— WAS STOLEN, and had drawn an oblong for a saddle. She didn’t like that, said it was an infringement. “An infringement of what?” he had said. “Privacy,” she had said, and he turned away.
Emma knew his moves, knew that on weekdays he went to his crammer and on Sundays he went for a swim. She was still beautiful, but something had gone, her preen had gone. Nell heard that, once, in her boarding school, Emma had gone down to the lake with the intention of drowning herself or half-drowning herself, having taken a bottle of wine and sleeping tablets, which she had pinched from the infirmary. She had had to be pumped. Paddy had told Nell so, but without a flicker of emotion, refusing to see that it might have anything to do with him. Several times, Nell tapped on the window and still Emma did not look up, remained in her see-through dress as if posing for a camera.
They were in another house by then, a cottage, not so spacious as their house on the river but their own; their own, as she often said.
How she had hated being in lodgings, hated the poodle that smelt of pee and the landlord with his thrift and his paraffin heaters who was always spying on them, hated her neighbor Rachel, who talked all the time about “Mother,” how she and Mother had met the Queen’s equerry, or how they had dreamed of having a cruise, or how Mother had deceived her about her illness, kept it from her, to make the pain of parting that bit less. The three lodgers, Rachel, Genevieve, and herself, never ate together, and met on the stairs, carrying their trays, embodiments of grumpiness and shame. All had known better days and believed they deserved a better fate. The lustre and daring of her dizzy gatherings used to possess her with a kind of gall, as she saw the rooms, her former rooms, festive, little night-lights in red pots up the length of the stairs, her brain and body in a transport waiting for Duncan. Time magnified the thrill, the gaiety of these events, time opened up the rooms as if double doors or shutters swung apart; rooms as for sacrament, at once holy and profane: sheaves of flowers, the night-lights in deep red little pots, not only to show the way, but as a come-hither to some orgiastic rite. What dreams she had fostered then. Even for the mad spate of a week envisaging Dr. Rat leaving his nut-brown wife and following her up those red-hued stairs. A memory, too, of velvet cushions, goblets threaded with gold, cranberry glasses that seemed to have the essence of the fruits secreted somewhere within them, the berries on the surface recalling a kitchen garden in summer with the soft clusters of limp berries dawdling on thin cane. She had wanted heartbreak, yes; by choosing him she had wanted the love that lives on half-sentences, half-promises, the aftermath of broken chords. What saddened her was not just the pain, not just the excruciation but the malady deep within which wanted it and would possibly always want it, as if love were a dispensation denied her. Her paradise was to be outside, imagining, looking in.
He had died suddenly, of a stroke, in Canada. Died in a theatre, his chosen milieu, or, rather, keeled over in a theatre and died soon after in a big hospital. Spoke Irish as he ebbed away. There was a girl with him. There would be. The girl, Nancy, wrote to her and said she intended making a film of her lover’s life. Her lover’s life! She had enclosed a list of names to whom she had also written, famous names, and to each made this brouhaha about her lover, suggesting that all would agree, would they not, that he was an exceptional man, a Renaissance man. Yes, Duncan had wanted death, had walked to it as purposefully as people walk to work. In a friend’s house the previous New Year’s Eve, he had written in a guest book: “Life is a habit of walking and talking, I have a habit of walking towards death.” He had written to her from that house that revelled night, written to say he missed her; he was at present on cloud number 999 while a woman of uncertain age with a gloriously mournful voice was outside the window singing “Red Roses for Me.” He was buried far away. For a while Nell was convinced that he would appear to her, that it would not be in her bed at night when ghost and ghost thud are imminent, but in daylight, in a café perhaps, or on the street, sidling up to her, and that he would tell her something significant, something amazing about life, or about death, and that in some strange way all the barriers between them would have passed, by virtue of his death, because over there he had discovered their affinity.
“Put that in your pipe,” she said to Nancy as she held the letter to a candle flame and saw the crepe blobs of ash as birds fluttering around his soul.