'A clock?'
'A clock.'
'But there's no new clock in the house,' I said. 'Is there,
Dadda?'
'I don't know. Mr Fine says so. Not that he sold her the clock. He only sells carrots and cabbages. But she showed him the clock here one day, when you and me were out. A very nice clock, he said. Made in New York. With a Toronto chime.'
'What is that?' I said.
And as I spoke my mother appeared in the door behind my father. She was holding in her hands a square porcelain object, with its elegant dial, and around it someone, no doubt in New York, had painted little flowers.
'I don't have it ticking,' she said, in a small voice, like a fearless child, 'for fear.'
My father stood up.
'Where did you buy it, Cissy? Where did you buy such a thing?'
'In Grace's of the Weir.'
'Grace's of the Weir?' he said, incredulously. 'I have never even been into that shop. I would be afraid to go into it, in case they charged me for entering.'
She stood there, shrinking in her unhappiness.
'It is made by Ansonia,' she said, 'in New York.'
'Can we take it back, Cissy?' he said. 'Let's take it back to Grace's and see where we are then. We cannot go on making payments to Fine. They will never give you what you gave them for it, but they might give you something on it, and maybe we can close the debt with Mr Fine. I am sure he will oblige me if he can.'
'I never even heard it tick or chime,' she said.
'Well, turn the key in it and have it tick. And when it strikes the hour it will chime.'
'I can't,' she said, 'for they will find it then. They will follow the sound and find it.'
'Who, Cissy? Us, is it? I think we have done all the finding now.'
'No, no,' said my mother, 'the rats. The rats will find it.'
My mother looked up at him with an eerie glow in her face, like a conspirator.
'We will be better to smash it,' she said.
'No,' said my father as desperate as you like.
'No, it would be better. To smash it. To smash Southampton and all. And Sligo. And you. I'll raise it up now, Joe, and bring it down upon the earth like this,' and indeed she did raise it up, and indeed she did throw it down on the thin damp cake of concrete on the floor, 'there, all promises retrieved, all hurts healed, all losses restored!'
The clock lay in its porcelain pieces there, some little ratchet loosened, and for the first and last time in our house, the Ansonia clock chimed with its Toronto chime.
It was soon after this, so soon, that I have to report, my father was found dead.
To this day I don't know what killed him exactly, but I have puzzled it over these eighty years and more. I have given you the run of the thread, and where has it led me? I have lain all the facts before you.
Surely the matter of the clock was too small a thing to kill a man?
Surely the dead boys was a dark thing, but dark enough to darken my father forever?
The girls also, yes, that was a dark matter, bright though they were as they fell.
It was my father's fate to have those things befall him.
He was just as anyone else, and anything, clock or heart, he had a breaking point.
It was in the next street in a derelict cottage, where he was working to rid it of rats, at the behest of the neighbours to right and left of the empty house, that he hanged himself.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Do you know the grief of it? I hope not. The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father.
I cry out for him.
chapter nine
I suppose I must add the few unpleasant things that befell my father after death, when he was no more than a big pudding of blood and past events. It is possible to love a person more than oneself, and yet as a child, or nearly woman, to have such a thought, when your father is carried into the house for the inevitable wake…Notthat we hoped to have many to wake him.
His motorbike was put out into the little yard by Mr Pine our neighbour, a cold-eyed carpenter who yet put himself immediately to assist us. I need not tell you it was never brought in again but was left to fetch for itself as best it could in the outdoors.
In its place was set the long penny-halfpenny coffin with my father's large nose poking up. Because he had hanged himself, his face was covered in a white paint as thick as a clockface, work done by Silvester's funeral directors. The street then crowded in and if we had few pipes and pots of tea and not a drop of whiskey to offer, nevertheless I was astonished by the ease and merriment of the people there, and the obvious regret they showed for the passing of my father. The Presbyterian minister Mr Ellis came in and also Fr Gaunt, and in the way of supposed enemies or rivals in Ireland, they shared a witticism in the corner for a few moments. Then in the early morning we were left alone, and my mother and myself slept – or I slept. I wept and wept and I slept at length. But grief like that is a good grief.
When I came down in the morning from the loft where my narrow bed was kept, there was a different class of grief. I went over to my father and for a moment could not work out what
I was seeing. There was something wrong with his eyes at any rate. When I peered close I saw what it was. Someone had pierced each eyeball with a tiny black arrow. The arrows pointed upwards. I knew immediately what they were. They were the black metal hands from my mother's Ansonia clock.
I plucked them out again like thorns, like bee-stings. A thorn to find a witch, a sting to find a love is an old country saying. They were not tokens of love. I do not know what they were tokens of. This was the last sorrow of my father. He was buried in the small Presbyterian yard with a goodly show of his 'friends' – friends I hardly knew he had. People who he had rid of rats, or in the old high days, buried people for. Or people who cherished him for the human soul he had exhibited to the world. Who liked his ways. There were many I could not put names to. Fr Gaunt, while the Presbyterian minister of course did the ceremony, stood beside me almost as a friend and spoke a few names, as if that was what I wanted. This name and that name, that I forgot as soon as he spoke them. But there was also a man there called Joe Brady, that had taken my father's job at the cemetery at the invitation of Fr Gaunt, a queer fattish man with burning eyes. I don't know why he was there, and wasn't sure even in my grief if I wanted him there, but you can't keep anyone back from a funeral. Mourners are like Canute's sea. I was content to think he was paying his respects.
My head was aflame with the deep, dark pulse of grief, that beats like a physical pain, like a rat got into your brains, a rat on fire.
Dr Grene's Commonplace Book
Tremendously busy attending to all the arrangements at the hospital and not much time to write here. I have missed the odd intimacy of it. As I characteristically have probably a poor sense of myself, that is to say, a rather miserable sense of my own slightness as a person, as a soul, keeping this book has somehow helped me, but how I can't say. It is hardly a therapy. But it is at least a sign of ongoing inner life. Or so I hope and pray.
Perhaps with some justification. Last night coming home as weary as I have ever been, cursing everything, the dreadful potholes in these Roscommon roads, the lousy suspension in my car, the broken light in the porch that meant I banged my arm against the concrete pillar, I entered the hallway, really in a rather foul mood, prepared to curse everything there also, if given half a chance.