He sent this and regretted it. Wrote another one, that was also, in its way, a bit of an untruth.
I think about you all the time.
He sent this too, and listened to his life opening.
Property
HUGH WAS BETWEEN jobs and he came back with Hanna in the New Year to help sort and pack and get Ardeevin on the market. He brought an old Polaroid camera and some last rolls of film and Hanna heard him about the place the first day they were there, silently looking, then the click-whirr-click as the photograph was extruded, another silence as he shook the thing dry and a little piece of her childhood rose to view. She looked through them later: the spiral at the bottom of the bannister, the squat taps in the upstairs bathroom, the vivid ghost, on the wallpaper, where a wardrobe had shielded its own shape from the sun.
‘Research,’ he said.
When the baby took a nap, they went upstairs and made love in her childhood bed, releasing all her scattered selves into the room: Hanna at twelve, at twenty, Hanna here, now.
The baby was walking, and into everything, Hanna followed him around that afternoon and it was all murderous: the broken greenhouse, the stream at the side of the garden, where he might drown. But it was simple too: the pleasure of the door knocker she hoisted him up to lift and drop, the textured granite stoop and the door that gave under his pushing hands to expose the vastness of the hall.
They ordered a skip, bought paint. In the evening, she washed and went over to Aughavanna with the baby, leaving Hugh in his painter’s overalls, blanking out the bamboo grove on the dining room wall.
Hanna thought that once the house was gone her thirst might go too, but the house was not gone yet. And neither was her mother, who made such a fuss of the baby — Hello, you. Yes. Hello! — from a slight distance, of course, because of the baby’s sticky hands but loving him, nonetheless, and getting all his smiles.
It was a long day. Back in Ardeevin, Hanna succumbed to a bottle or two of white from the garage shop, and there was such a bad fight, Hugh threw her out of the house. Physically. He pushed her into the garden and closed the door. Hanna bashed the knocker and yowled. She stumbled back and around to the kitchen window where she saw Hugh pouring the last of the wine down the sink. He went from room to room, turning out the lights and he left her there for a very long time, looking up at the blank house, weeping in the cold.
The next morning, after they had kissed, made up and all the rest of it, Hanna lay and looked at the ceiling and remembered looking at the same ceiling, as a child. She wondered what it was she had wanted, before she wanted a drink.
A life. She had wanted a life. She lay in this bed as a child and she thirsted after the great unknown.
The baby slept and woke and rolled off the mattress they had set for him on the floor. Then he was off again, pulling books on top of himself from off the shelves and laughing.
‘Ben, stop it, Ben, no!’ But she did not really mind. He could break the Belleek for all she cared, in a couple of weeks it would all be gone.
Over in Aughavanna she said to Constance that maybe Dublin was the problem, the baby was in much better form.
‘Boys!’ Constance said.
Her own screamed for the first year, there was no consoling them. Then once they got on their feet, that was it, they never cried again.
‘Run them and feed them,’ she said. ‘That’s all you have to do with boys.’
‘And what do you do with girls?’ said Hanna. ‘Drown them at birth?’
‘Yeah well,’ said Constance. ‘There’s a rain barrel round the back.’
They both glanced over to Rosaleen, but she had not heard, or pretended not to hear.
With all the running around supermarkets and cold mountainsides and overheated hospital corridors, Constance actually lost weight over the Christmas. When she looked at herself in the mirror, the ghost of a former self looked back at her and Constance thought it was trying to tell her something, even as she turned to the side and smoothed her stomach with a smile. Something terrible would happen, she was sure of it, because her mother had courted chaos and found it up on the green road. She had made some deal with death, and Constance did not yet know when it would fall due.
It was a good thing Hugh painted the place because half of County Clare trooped through the house on the first Saturday, it was busier than a wake. The house sold in three weeks, closed in eight. By the first of March the Madigans had shut the door for the last time. Whoever bought it did not move in — a developer, by all accounts — so the place stayed empty while Rosaleen’s bank account filled up with money. Pucks of it. No one took her Christmas promise all that seriously: she had always been very private in these matters and never exactly open-handed, so it was a great surprise to each of her children to find themselves so much the richer. They had money, a significant amount of money, and that felt fine.
Rosaleen did not bother going over to Ardeevin. ‘Oh I don’t think so,’ she said and Constance did not pressure her. It was an emotional time. They looked at smaller houses in the newspaper and Rosaleen said, ‘Lovely,’ but it was a bit of a reach after all she had been through. When they went to view, she drifted from living room to kitchen to bathroom.
‘Oh Mammy, look at the insulation on that hot water tank.’
The new houses in their neat estates seemed only to confuse her, and indeed it was difficult to imagine her there. Constance set her heart on a little gate lodge, a sweet house with high ceilings and big Georgian windows, but the garden was far too small and it was slap bang up against the main road.
‘What about this one, Mammy? You just need to put a kitchen in.’
‘A kitchen?’
Besides, the market was turning. According to Dessie, the market was in a massive state of denial. Better to wait than to buy.
But the price came plummeting down on a place in town; an old stone house covered in Virginia creeper, tucked in behind the church, refurbished inside, everything to hand.
‘Is that limestone or granite?’ said Rosaleen. ‘It’s a very dark grey.’
Then she saw something rustling through the foliage. A rat, she said later. Or she thought it was a rat. She fumbled her car keys and dropped them in a bed of hydrangeas, she pulled at the collar of her blouse, and took a turn. Constance got her checked out, over and back to the hospital again, it took three weeks for tests and waiting for tests, and by the time she was given the all-clear, the little house was gone.
Constance drove her home one last time from Limerick Regional and their path took them up over the humpy bridge, past Ardeevin. The front windows were boarded up and the gate hanging open, but Rosaleen did not seem to notice the house, it was as though the place had never been. That evening, Constance went to pick a few roses from the wreck of the garden and she came back hugely tired and alone.
There would be no perfect house, how could there be? Because Rosaleen was impossible to please. The world was queuing up to satisfy her, and the world always failed.
It was a trick she had learned early, in the front room of Ardeevin, perhaps, when one suitor or another would be sent off with a flea in his ear for thinking he might be good enough for the daughter of John Considine. Or earlier than that — it was hard to tell. Rosaleen was difficult to psychologise, a woman who never spoke of her childhood until she was in her sixties, and then in a way that made you wonder if she had ever been a child at all.