She looked down at the white paper on the table in front of her, and the writing on it — her own writing. ‘My darling Dan’.
Dan would love a glass wall at the back of the house. Dan would strip back the old paper, he would paint the place ‘winter lichen’ or ‘mushroom’. When he worked in a gallery they painted the place every six weeks he said. He would get professionals in to do it, so the lines would be true.
Rosaleen picked the paper up and turned it over again. It was his Christmas card and he would like it. Dan liked simple things. He would be over forty now. He would be forty-four in August. Her son was forty-three years old.
Rosaleen tried to think what he might look like, this very minute, or how he looked the last time he made the trip home, but all she could remember was his smooth eight-year-old cheek against her cheek. Her blessed boy. He was so happy up against her, never pulled away. And he smelt of nothing, not even himself. Leaves, maybe. Rust. Boys were easy, she always thought. Boys gave you no trouble.
‘I think of you often,’ she wrote. ‘And just as often I smile.’
They were another planet. Surrounded by their own sense of themselves; their faces englobed, she thought, in their boyhood beauty. They wore their maleness as a gift.
What did you do today? Nothing. Where did you go? Nowhere. Though that was more Emmet’s style. Dan told you everything except the thing you needed to know. The schoolmaster’s shoes with the secretly stacked heels, the local woman gone up to Dublin to be in the audience for The Late Late Show. Dan was a master of irrelevance.
‘I miss your old chat,’ she wrote.
Dan’s eyes, Emmet’s eyes, as they looked at their mother, playful and impenetrable. Two sets of green, flecked with black. Stones under bright water.
She could still see them asleep, each in their beds as she passed their bedroom doors. Emmet under a hundred blankets. Dan sprawled, agape, a kind of push in him, even then, as though dreaming impossibilities. He slept like a shout. And as soon as he got the chance, he was gone.
The whole night long we dream of you, and waking think we’re there, —
She indulged herself a moment, pictured him sitting across the room from her, with a newspaper, perhaps, a cup of tea. It gave her a pang, just to catch the edge of it. An imagined life. Dan and herself somehow together in this house with their books and their music. The old style.
Vain dream and foolish waking, we never shall see Clare.
The world she grew up in was so different it was hard to believe she was ever in it. But she was in it, once. And she was here now.
Rosaleen Considine, six years old, seventy-six years old.
Some days, it wasn’t easy to join the dots.
She had not redecorated the bedrooms, upstairs. They were still the same. The same quilt on Dan’s bed. It was there now, if she cared to go up and look at it. The side lamp he found all by himself down in the local hardware, coming home excited, at what age? Eleven. Excited by a lamp. A print by Modigliani of a naked girl leaning on to her hand. And, in Emmet’s room, a big map of the world, the countries pink, green, orange and lilac. Yugoslavia. USSR. Rhodesia. Burma. When they grew up, Dan went everywhere, and Emmet, she liked to say, went everywhere else. But Dan always sent a message home.
‘All my love,’ she wrote. And then looked at what she had written. She underlined the word ‘All’ with a strong stroke of the pen: once, twice, a little wiggling tail on this second line, trailing down the page.
‘Your fond and foolish Mother, Rosaleen.’
The card went into its envelope. She tucked the flap in, turned it, pristine, and smoothed it down before writing ‘Mr Dan Madigan’ on the other side. Then she propped the envelope up against the little stainless steel teapot. His address was on a piece of paper in the drawer. Toronto. That was where he was. Or Tucson. One or the other. She did not know how he lived, but there were always rich people around him. At least that was the impression he liked to give. That he was thriving in some way that was beyond her understanding.
Which, indeed, it was.
‘Oh rough the rude Atlantic.’
Rosaleen spoke the poem a little out loud as she fumbled about in the drawer full of old papers, and what did she come across, only the postcard of the woman in the red room. The woman was dressed in black, and her face was carefully inclined over a stand of fruit that she set on the red table, and you could tell by the tilt of her head that she thought the fruit was beautiful. A widow, perhaps, or a housekeeper. The pattern on the tablecloth moved up on to the wall behind her and it was both antique and wild. Rosaleen turned the card over and there was Dan’s grown-up writing: ‘Hi from The Hermitage, where the security guards all look like Boris Karloff and are ruder than you can imagine. Love! Danny.’
Did he come home that time? There were trips when he flew right over the house, or might have done, and did not set foot on Irish soil.
A silver dot in the summer sky, her own flesh and blood inside it. Dan opening a magazine, or glancing out the window perhaps, while she caught at the gatepost to steady herself and squint skyward, 20,000 feet below.
Rosaleen had to close her eyes, briefly, at the thought of it. She put the postcard back in the drawer and tried to swallow, but her throat seemed to resist it and she was sitting back at the table when she realised she had not found Dan’s address, after all — Constance would have to sort it out for her. The next card was open in her hand. Rosaleen looked at the whiteness of it, that gave her no clue as to what to say.
‘My dear Emmet.’
Something was wrong. Perhaps it was the card. She turned the thing over to check the back and it was as she had suspected — the charity was one that Emmet did not like, or probably did not like — not because they fed the starving of Africa, but because they fed the starving in the wrong way. Or because feeding the starving was the wrong thing to do with them, these days. Rosaleen could not remember the particular argument — she did not care to remember it. All Emmet’s arguments were one long argument. Those babies, that you saw on the TV, the women with long and empty breasts, their eyes empty to match, and Emmet’s own eyes full of fury. Not passion — Rosaleen would not call it passion. A kind of coldness there, like it was all her fault.
Which, of all the wrongs in the world, were her fault, Rosaleen would not venture to say, but she thought that famine in Africa was not one of them, not especially. Not hers more than anyone else’s. Rosaleen had not said boo to a goose in twenty years. She didn’t get the chance. Her life was one of great harmlessness. She looked to the window, where her face was sharper now on the dark pane. She lived like an enclosed nun.
Her books, the poetry of her youth, Lyric FM. These were the scraps that sustained her. Mass every morning — and Rosaleen had no interest in Mass — for the chance of company; each parishioner more decrepit than the next and Mrs Prunty, this last twelve months, smelling of wee. If she’d had the choice, Rosaleen would have been a Protestant, but she didn’t have the choice. So this is what she was reduced to. Resisting bingo on a Saturday night. Waiting for the tiny bursts of pink on her winter flowering cherry. Deciding against yew and spruce, one more time, for the last time. And yet it seemed every child she reared was ready with one grievance or another. Emmet first in the queue, for telling her she was wrong. No matter what good she tried to do with her widow’s mite. Wrong to give it to this charity or to that charity and wrong to give it to fly-blown babies and big-bellied Africans: she’d be better off throwing it in a hedge.
‘Happy Christmas. Keep up the good work! Your loving Mother, Rosaleen’.