When All Is Said(23)

One of the pictures in my jacket pocket is of you on your christening day. You’re in your mother’s arms, wrapped in your white cocoon of a christening robe. She’s stood in front of our house right before we headed to the church. ’Course I’d pulled the old house down by then and built a brand spanking new one a bit further up from the road. I think I’d a Ford Cortina back then, a red one. Sadie in her pink tweed suit with matching pill-box hat. She loved that suit, hardly ever wore it. It was still in the wardrobe until recently. All packed away now with the rest of her stuff. She’s looking down on you like you’re the centre of her world, like no one else matters. I only remember her looking like that one other time, three years earlier, before you came along.

Forty-nine years ago, I met Molly, only once and only for fifteen minutes. But she has lived in this dilapidated heart of mine ever since. It seems your mother and me were never meant to have more than one child. Life was not on our side with that one. We had you relatively late. I was thirty-nine and Sadie, well, she must have been thirty-four. We’d been trying of course, from the get-go. Watched all around us have one baby after another while we were blessed with none. It was hard. I took my disappointment to the fields, to the dairy, anywhere but the house. Our silent burden. Month after month, year after year, we fell deeper and deeper into the quiet sadness of it. Sadie wouldn’t talk. Despite my fumbling attempts to engage her. If I’m being honest, I was relieved at her silence. What, after all, would I have said when I didn’t even want to hear my own pain, let alone face up to hers. But still, the guilt of that silence dogged me as I walked my lanes and turned the key in the tractor and blessed myself at the end of Mass. It sat on my shoulder, never letting me forget that I’d failed.

They say women are good talkers. If that is true, then your mother was the exception. I didn’t know her to have many friends around; acquaintances sure, but no one really close. Early on I suppose, when we were just married, she may have spoken to her mother. But I’m not convinced of that either. Their relationship didn’t strike me as being that type. There was a love but of the Irish kind, reserved and embarrassed by its own humanity. These days people are all for talking. Getting things off their chest. Like it’s easy. Men, in particular, get a lot of stick for not pulling their weight in that quarter. And as for Irish men. I’ve news for you, it’s worse as you get older. It’s like we tunnel ourselves deeper into our aloneness. Solving our problems on our own. Men, sitting alone at bars going over and over the same old territory in their heads. Sure, if you were sitting right beside me, son, you’d know none of this. I wouldn’t know where to start. It’s all grand up here in my head but to say it out loud to the world, to a living being? It’s not like we were reared to it. Or taught it in school. Or that it was preached from the pulpit. It’s no wonder at the age of thirty or forty or eighty no less, we can’t just turn our hand to it. Engineers are not born with the knowledge of how to construct a bridge. It has to be learned. But despite all of that for some reason, back then, with all that hurt and absence in our lives, I felt the urge to give it a go.

‘So, how are you now?’ I managed to say to Sadie one day, nodding in the direction of the bathroom from where I’d just come and seen the evidence of another failure, a blood-soaked napkin.

‘Just leave it, Maurice.’

‘Sadie…’

‘No, Maurice. I can’t do this now. Please.’

She raised her hand to stop any further efforts I might attempt and simply left the kitchen. Leaving me to land in my chair and run my finger around and around the wood-knot on the table. Listening to the incessant tick of the clock over the Aga that had never gotten on my nerves before. I looked at it and considered throwing the Meath Chronicle in its direction. It was killing me that I couldn’t fix this thing, this barren nothingness of us. For a man accustomed to being able to solve anything once he threw enough money at it, this was bloody torture.

I didn’t try talking to your mam after that. We skirted around each other’s lives from then on. Coming together in the bed when we tried to rid ourselves of our burden, giving it another hopeless go. Until one night she turned away from me for weeks on end. Not wanting to try any more, exhausted by our collective failure. And so, the silence grew stronger and wider and took us over until there was nothing to say over the teacups of an evening.

That was until Doctor Arthur McRory arrived in Duncashel. His practice wasn’t open a wet week and there we were, in line to see him. Where she’d heard this man could help us any more than Doctor Matthews in Rainsford, I had no idea. But I came home one evening to find her standing waiting for me at the door. I was barely through it and she had the coat and boots off me. I was escorted to the table where she sat me down and took a seat beside me.

‘Maurice. We’re going to a doctor.’

‘We are, are we?’

‘He’s new. In Duncashel.’

‘And why might we be doing that?’ I asked, having a good look around to the stove to see if there was any sign of a rasher for the tea.

‘For to see. You know,’ she said, nodding her head below.

‘Oh, right.’

‘You’ll go so?’

‘Suppose.’

‘Grand. Tuesday. Four o’clock. You’ll have to have your bath Monday night so.’