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.’