After several years of unrewarded endeavour, at the end of which Esme Nussbaum thought she had finally worn out what remained of her energies, an exciting piece of information came her way. The agent responsible for it was precisely one of those who knew nothing of what they were about and were therefore always more likely, in Esme’s view, to yield a result. She felt tentatively vindicated. It all came from one or two fairly innocuous questions being asked about boxes of letters found stored in a convent.
A convent! Esme Nussbaum threw her head back and laughed, as she often did at things that weren’t funny, like a crazy woman. She found the idea of a convent so ludicrously incongruous she was certain it was going to yield something. Something big or something small she didn’t know, but something. .
She suddenly felt years younger.
Barely two months later, she was to be seen extending her hand and flashing her brightest and most motherly smile. ‘Hello, I’m Ez,’ she said.
‘Hello, Ez,’ said Ailinn Solomons.
TEN. Lost and Found and Lost Again
i
THERE ARE TIMES in your life, he thought, when you need to see an animal. Not a dog or a cat — they carried too many associations of the humans whose feet they clung to. Something unconnected. Something wild. Seals, he decided were the thing. From his bench he could sometimes see them, their bald heads bobbing about in the ocean. Were there hunchback seals whose totemic disfigurement at one and the same time shamed their progeny and guaranteed them immunity. Immunity from what? From whatever vengeance seals meted out to one another for offences buried deep in seal history. Your colleagues detest you, the librarian had told him. In fact the word she’d used was ‘mistrust’, but to him that was just splitting hairs. Did seals detest?
They weren’t out there, anyway. After an hour or more of looking, he gave up on them and returned reluctantly to his cottage. There was no explaining why he did that. He could have gone on watching. Or gone for a stiff, dizzying walk. Shaken stuff out of his head. Let the wind blow him about. If there were times in your life when you needed to see an animal, there were also times in your life when you needed to be an animal.
There were no visitors. He had the cliffs to himself. He could have scampered, sniffed the ground, rubbed his nose in droppings, howled, screamed. Beyond a general impression of height and risk and isolation, he didn’t know the cliffs on which he’d so often walked. He sedulously avoided looking, as though ignorance of his surroundings, particularly an ignorance of what grew beneath his feet, was a metaphysical necessity to him. Now was his chance. But he didn’t take it. Instead, he let monotonous mortal habit claim him. And back down to his cottage he went.
It wasn’t even as though he was in the mood for work. On some days his lathe answered every anxiety. The whirl of the spindle shut out his thoughts, all the concentrated frustration in his body vanished at the point where he held the handle of the chisel as gently as he might have held the fingers of a child. The wood curled beneath its blade, like the hair of that same child becoming unloosed from a bonnet. He favoured a light touch, not always knowing exactly what he wanted to make. Let it turn itself, he thought on good days, let it turn out as it chooses. If the bowl was waiting in the wood, then God was waiting in the bowl as surely as love had been waiting — a long, long time waiting — in the spoons he’d carved for Ailinn. But not today. No curls, no God, no Ailinn. It was like waiting for a storm to break.
He was relieved to find his utility phone flashing. If it was trouble, bring it on, he thought. If it was Ailinn, please let her say she was coming over. It had been weeks since he’d seen her. He had not rung her because he was frightened to encounter a hostile voice. ‘You threw me out. Drop dead!’ She’d have been within her rights to say that and more, then slam the phone down. He’d offered her his bed, his home, his loyalty. You can’t do that and then ask someone to leave, no matter how distraught you feel or how temporary you want their absence to be. A life companion is a life companion. It wasn’t her fault his cottage had been broken into and his Chinese runner straightened. And if he’d meant it when he’d told her that the little he had was hers, then it was her house that had been broken into, her Chinese runner that had been straightened, too. He had to stop thinking of himself as a man alone, unless that was now what, thanks to his own stupidity, he had once again become. Only this time it would not be the same as before. There was no same as before, not after Ailinn. After Ailinn, nothing.
He wondered whether he should leave the utility phone to flash. All day and all night if necessary. Not rush to find out. Delay the disappointment. Though it was still morning he knew that if he went to bed he would immediately drop into sleep. Anticipation keeps some men awake. It poleaxed Kevern. He thought of it as a gift. When the terrible time came — it didn’t matter which — he would deal with it by passing out. He had warned Ailinn what he would do.
‘Good to know I can count on you,’ she said.
‘Under no circumstances think you can count on me,’ he said, just in case she intended her comment as a joke. ‘I’m not man enough.’
‘I won’t make that mistake,’ she said.
‘I am not your rock.’
‘I understand.’
‘Should anything happen to you I will fall immediately into the deepest sleep known to man. I might never wake up from it. I’d hope never to wake up from it. That’s how impossible I would find life without you. See it as the proof of my devotion. But understand I’d be no use when it comes to getting help or, if you’re beyond help, gathering your friends, organising your funeral, arranging the flowers.’
‘You’d let me just lie there on your floor.’
‘Our floor — yes.’
‘And what if anything happens to you?’
‘I’m not asking you to do any better.’
‘I can leave you on our floor?’
‘You can leave me anywhere. Dead or dying I won’t know anything about it.’
‘So ours is a fair-weather love?’
‘That makes it sound selfish, but yes if you mean that when we prosper we prosper and when we don’t—’
She got the picture. ‘—we don’t.’
It must have been with this conversation in mind that she framed her message — the message to which, when the moment came to run from it, he knew he had to listen.
‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been going mad here. Why haven’t you rung me? We need to speak urgently. Don’t go comatose on me. It’s not the something terrible you’ve told me you won’t be man enough to cope with. Or at least I don’t think it is.’
ii
A brief nod to the work done in past times by St Brigid’s Roman Catholic Convent and Orphanage, Mernoc, is in order here, if only to correct the misconception that every Roman Catholic orphanage was just a workhouse under another name. ‘I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a workhouse is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance that can possibly befall a human being,’ wrote that once popular English humanitarian, Charles Dickens, and under his influence a sentimental predisposition against such charitable institutions was, for a century or more, and not just in his own country, the norm. Whatever the justice of this negative view of the workhouse, St Brigid’s conformed to another pattern entirely. Children placed in its care were viewed as gifts from God himself, little angels with damaged wings, no less, whose physical and spiritual well-being was the first and last concern of all members of the community, from the lowliest novitiate to the Mother Superior herself.