The Green Road: A Novel Read online

  ‘Oh the baby, what a pity. I suppose we don’t have the beds, really. So it’ll just be yourself? Lovely. And?’

  ‘Saar.’

  His mother always paused after a name she considered unusual.

  ‘Yes. Saar is back in?’

  ‘Holland.’

  ‘Lovely. See you at three.’

  ‘Maybe closer to four,’ said Emmet.

  ‘Right. Well tell Constance what time, she’s the one with views on all that. Bye! Oh listen, are you bringing wine? I’m just saying don’t leave it Hanna’s end, unless you’re happy to see it go down the plughole. Of course you’re not the wine buff that . . .’

  She paused.

  ‘Oh Emmet, it would be lovely, now that Dan is home, wouldn’t it be lovely to have something nice for once? I’d love – I don’t know – are you bringing wine?’

  ‘No.’ He looked out the window. There was no sign of Hanna.

  ‘It’s just when Dan is back for once. I don’t know. I just have this. You know. Champagne.’

  ‘He’s landed, then?’ Emmet’s picture of the kitchen reorganised around Dan; the sainted face, the slow-blinking eyes.

  ‘He’s asleep,’ Rosaleen said, sotto voce. ‘I must tell Constance to get champagne.’

  ‘What about Hanna?’

  ‘Oh stop it. We’ll use the little glasses. The ones we got in Rome.’

  Rome was 1962, an audience with the Pope, a man on a little Vespa, so handsome he would cut you, with a fat brown baby on his knee. Oh and Roma, Roma! The unexpected piazzas, the sprays of orange blossom, an old codger on the tram who stank of garlic so badly – Rosaleen should have realised that morning sickness was setting in. Dan was conceived in Rome. And Dan loved garlic! There was no end to the mysteries of Dan.

  ‘Listen, Ma, I’ll go.’

  There was another small silence. Ma.

  ‘Off you go.’

  ‘See you soon.’

  ‘Goodbye now!’

  Emmet put down the phone, exhausted. Saar had baked biscuits for him before she left and the kitchen still smelt of cinnamon. Saar was terrific. Dutch, pragmatic, team-spirited. He put her on a plane back up to Schiphol, knowing that, next Christmas, he would be going to Schiphol too.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  And she said, ‘I love you.’

  Then he faced back into the horrors of the Madigans – their small hearts (his own was not entirely huge) and the small lives they put themselves through. Emmet closed his eyes and tilted his face up, and there she was: his mother, closing her eyes and lifting her head, in just the same way, down in the kitchen in Ardeevin. Her shadow moving through him. He had to shake her out of himself like a wet dog.

  Mother.

  His stupid sister late, as ever. Over-packing, at a guess, busy forgetting things, locating her phone, losing her phone, shouting about her phone, messing, messing, messing.

  Emmet climbed the stairs and tapped, as he passed it, on his housemate’s door.

  ‘All right?’

  Denholm came out and followed him to his own bedroom, as Emmet pulled a bag out and set it on top of the bed.

  ‘Shipshape,’ said Denholm.

  ‘Just checking you were still there.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Denholm, who did not have the money to be anywhere else and was, besides, always at the little desk in his room. ‘How are you, Emmet?’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, turning to shake the man’s hand – African style – there in lovely, suburban Verschoyle Gardens, Dublin 24.

  ‘How are you?’ he said.

  Denholm was commuting to Kimmage Manor every day for a course in International Development. His mother had died a month after his arrival from Kenya and his sister, also in rural Kenya, was HIV positive, a fact she only discovered in the maternity unit of the local clinic that was run by the same nuns who got Denholm all the way to a housing estate off the N7 and to Emmet’s spare room.

  ‘I am very well,’ said Denholm.

  ‘The Wi-Fi working?’ said Emmet.

  ‘A little slow,’ said Denholm. ‘But yes.’

  He had been talking to his brother on Skype, he said, before his office shut down. It was a big holiday in Kenya. They were all heading out of Nairobi, the same way Emmet was heading out of Dublin. They would get back to the villages in time for Midnight Mass, then a big party – all night – more parties the next day, and then on St Stephen’s Day, which they called Boxing Day, a soup made out of the blood of the Christmas goat. Good soup, Denholm told him. Hangover soup.

  Emmet went about the place, pulling open drawers, throwing some bits into a bag, which was a woven polyester conference bag with World Food Programme written on the flap. A couple of polo shirts, underwear and socks, a paperback from his bedside locker, his phone. He ducked into the en-suite bathroom to get his his toothbrush and deodorant.

  ‘Sounds like the business,’ Emmet said. He was slipping a hand under the mattress for his passport when he realised that he was just going down the road, in Ireland.

  ‘Yes,’ said Denholm, who could not keep the Christmas loneliness out of his voice.

  And, ‘Wow,’ Emmet said, as he cast about him for nothing, trying to hide his sudden mortification at the fact that he was leaving Denholm alone. After all the hospitality he himself had been offered, in so many towns. Why did he not invite him home for his dinner? He just couldn’t.

  It was not a question of colour (though it was also a question of colour), even Saar was out of the question – Saar with her Dutch domestic virtues, who would clear the dishes and wash the dishes, and sing as she swept the fallen tinsel off the floor. Christmas dinner, for Emmet’s family, was thicker than Kenyan blood soup, so none of the people that Emmet liked best could be there, nor even the people he might enjoy. The only route to the Madigans’ Christmas table was through some previously accredited womb. Married. Blessed.

  I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.

  Hanna wasn’t even bringing the father of her child.

  High standards at the Madigans’ dining room table. Keep ’em high.

  ‘Is the tram running tomorrow?’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Denholm, who would be trapped for Christmas Day on a housing estate off the N7, and he went downstairs, offering tea.

  Emmet blamed his mother. You could tell Rosaleen about disease, war and mudslides and she would look faintly puzzled, because there were, clearly, much more interesting things happening in the County Clare. Even though nothing happened – she saw to that too. Nothing was discussed. The news was boring or it was alarming, facts were always irrelevant, politics rude. Local gossip, that is what his mother allowed, and only of a particular kind. Marriages, deaths, accidents: she lived for a head-on collision, a bad bend in the road. Her own ailments of course, other people’s diseases. Mrs Finnerty’s cousin’s tumour that turned out to be just a cyst. Her back, her hip, her headaches, and the occasional flashing light when she closed her eyes – ailments that were ever more vague, until, one day, they would not be vague at all. They would be, at the last, entirely clear.

  ‘I was going to bring my housemate,’ said Emmet in the kitchen, a couple of hours later. ‘He’s having a rough time.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Rosaleen.

  ‘His mother just died.’

  ‘Oh no!’ Rosaleen loved a good tragedy. Tears – actual tears – came to her eyes.

  ‘And his sister and her baby are HIV positive.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Though perhaps this was not the right kind of tragedy, after all.

  ‘I see.’

  His mother seemed smaller than he remembered. Her skin was so thin, Emmet was afraid to touch in case she bruised. Not that anyone ever touched her – except Constance perhaps. Rosaleen did not like to be touched. She liked the thing Dan did, which was to conjure the air around her, somehow, making it special. When Hanna went to greet her, there was a big mistimed clash of c
heekbones.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Ow.’

  This was before they were over the threshold. Rosaleen opened the front door looking terrific. She had a crisp white shirt on, with a neat collar and her mid-length string of pearls. A slightly rakish pair of argyle socks showed between black trousers and tasselled loafers, her hair was a shining platinum from her special shampoo. And when Hanna reached up to kiss all this, their faces clashed at the bone.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I think so. Yes.’

  Rosaleen’s precision turning, as ever, into a kind of general difficulty for them all.

  ‘Yes I am fine,’ and then, ‘Where’s the baby?’

  Even though Emmet had told her there would be no baby.

  ‘He’s with Hugh,’ said Hanna, after a pause.

  ‘What a pity,’ said their mother. ‘Oh well.’

  And she looked at her daughter as though she, alone, would have to do.

  Hanna had slept the whole way down in the car. The baby had kept her awake all night, she said – a little petulantly – and though his little sister annoyed him, Emmet felt sorry for her, freshly woken and bedraggled as she was, on their mother’s doorstep.

  ‘I told you,’ he said to Rosaleen.

  ‘Did you? Maybe you did.’ And then, a little sharply, ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’

  She was an impossible woman. Emmet did not know why it was his job to keep his mother in line – he just couldn’t help it. He could not bear the unreality she fomented about her. Emmet could not understand why the truth was such a problem to Rosaleen, why facts were an irrelevance, or an accusation. He did not know what she was skittering away from, all the time.

  ‘A baby can’t have AIDS,’ she said, with some finality.

  ‘They did the test at the maternity clinic – an Irish nun, actually.’

  ‘A nun?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, in Kenya,’ said Emmet.

  ‘Oh.’

  Rosaleen considered all this for a moment.

  ‘And is he from Kenya?’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your housemate?’

  ‘He is. Yes, he is Kenyan.’

  ‘I see,’ she said and shifted her hips to one side on the chair.

  ‘Are you making that cup of tea?’ she said, suddenly, looking over her shoulder at Hanna. And Hanna, who was, in fact, spooning the leaves into the pot, paused for a micro rage with the caddy in her hand.

  ‘There is a child,’ Rosaleen said, turning carefully back to the table. ‘On the autistic spectrum. He was born to one of the people who run the Spar.’ And then, as a concession. ‘She is an Estonian, would you believe. And the husband is very nice. From Kiev.’

  But Emmet was already bored by the game. He was a grown man. He was trying to expose the foolishness of a woman who was seventy-six years old. A woman who was, besides, his mother.

  ‘It’s a long way,’ he said. ‘From Kiev to County Clare.’

  He could see the next couple of days stretch out in front of them. There would be much talk about house prices, how well Dessie McGrath was doing, what everything was worth these days – more expensive than Toronto, Dan, yes, that cowshed down the road. Emmet would start an argument with Constance about the Catholic Church – because Constance, who believed nothing, would not admit as much in front of her children who were expected to believe everything or at least pretend they believed it, just like their mother. Hanna would have a rant about some newspaper critic, their mother would opine that these people sometimes knew what they were talking about, and on they all would go. It was, Emmet thought, like living in a hole in the ground.

  Hanna put a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, and the smell of it rising through the house woke Dan and brought him downstairs. She heard his step outside the kitchen door and knew it immediately – she had kept the rhythm of his footfall inside her, all these years.

  He came in; a handsome man who resolved himself into her brother as soon as he opened his mouth to say, ‘I thought it was you!’ His voice had an American inflection that Hanna remembered from the last time they met, some time before the baby, when she and Hugh took a week in Manhattan and Dan brought them to the Met and to an exhibition by Bill Viola, and they had a fantastic time: Hugh talking stage sets with Dan – a field of sunflowers, that is what Dan wanted, a lake, an expanse, and Hugh said, ‘Put it on the vertical, turn it into the back wall.’

  ‘Hiya,’ she said.

  They did not kiss, not in the kitchen, though they would have kissed were they up in Dublin or in any other town. Instead Dan pulled out a chair, and Hanna got up to fill the kettle again. She knew, as the water hit the crusted element, that this was the only place in the world where Dan would sit, requiring tea. In any other kitchen he would serve and smooth and tend.

  ‘Tea?’ she said.

  ‘Perfect,’ he said.

  ‘You right?’ said Emmet. And Dan nodded to his little brother as though they had seen each other quite recently, when the truth was, neither of them could remember the date, nor did they try.

  Rosaleen, meanwhile, was smiling. Her face seemed almost translucent. She was happy to see them all. She was happy because Dan was home.

  Or she was happy for no reason, Emmet thought. Her face was a kind of cartoon. It had always been like this. There was something out of kilter with his mother’s happiness, as though a light had been switched on by a passing stranger, and left to illuminate an empty room.

  He wondered about her brain. Rosaleen found it hard to keep still, in her old age. She was always out in the garden, out on the road, she was always walking; rendered ecstatic by some view. She was hopped up, now, and out of the chair.

  ‘I could give you salad and some chicken,’ she said to Dan. ‘I have a bag of salad.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Dan.

  ‘They’re so easy.’

  ‘They are easy,’ he said. ‘But, you know, you load up with healthy groceries, I find, and they go off as soon as you reach for the ice cream. Not that this is off.’

  He was beside her at the fridge door, they leaned into the interior light together and he had the bag of salad in his hand. Hanna knew it was the first bag of pre-washed salad Rosaleen had bought in her life.

  ‘It’s very light,’ said Rosaleen.

  And Dan said, ‘You know that looks sort of perfect, I just might.’

  After which there was a kerfuffle about dressing; what vinegar Rosaleen had, or did not have, and would he settle for lemon juice. Emmet, during all of this, read the paper in a stolid sort of way, but Hanna did not mind. She sat at the table with an unlit cigarette between her fingers and she could not get enough of Dan, the way he had grown into himself, and grown also into some version of a gay man that she might recognise. Her knowledge of him came from two directions and met in the human being sitting at the table, who was saying, ‘You know what I miss? Bread and jam.’ Grown up, Dan was so inevitable, and yet so unforeseen.

  He sat in their father’s chair, the prodigal returned. He looked around him as though tranced by every small thing.

  ‘This!’ he said. He went to touch the little jug for milk and paused, his finger a millimetre away from the china. ‘I haven’t seen it in.’

  ‘Oh you’ll find us very,’ said Rosaleen.

  ‘No!’ he said.

  ‘Rustic,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said Dan. ‘That’s what I mean. It’s perfect. It’s fine.’

  ‘I like to use things,’ said Rosaleen. ‘Even if nothing matches. Not any more.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Dan, thinking how much Ludo would like his mother’s table – how much Ludo would like his mother, perhaps, wondering if everything was going to be all right, after all.

  Hanna saw Dan’s small smile. They all saw it. The shadow of someone else was in the room. Rosaleen looked to the window, where her reflection was forming on the pane.

  ‘Remember that Christmas,’ she said to Hanna, ‘you broke th
e Belleek?’

  ‘I didn’t break the Belleek,’ said Hanna.

  ‘The little Belleek jug,’ said Rosaleen, ‘Like a shell.’

  ‘It was Constance,’ said Hanna.

  ‘Oh,’ said Rosaleen, unconvinced. ‘Remember that little jug?’ she said to Dan. ‘It was like a shell, what do you call that glaze, what it does to the light?’

  ‘Lustre,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was Constance,’ said Hanna.

  ‘I thought it was you,’ said Rosaleen, mildly.

  ‘Well you were wrong.’

  ‘Oh it doesn’t matter,’ said Rosaleen, as though it was Hanna who had brought the subject up.

  ‘I Did. Not. Break. ThefuckingBelleek!’

  ‘You can get it all on eBay now,’ said Dan. ‘And, you know, it doesn’t price well.’

  ‘God, the way you went on about it,’ said Emmet. ‘Mind the Belleek!’

  ‘The Belleek!! The Belleek!!’ said Hanna.

  ‘How much is it, anyway?’ said Emmet to Dan.

  ‘Not much,’ said Dan.

  ‘We’ll get you a new one, all right, Ma?’

  And Rosaleen, stilled by the word Ma, decided to say nothing, except perhaps for one last, small thing.

  ‘It was my father’s,’ she said.

  Hanna went out to smoke her cigarette then, checking the rooms on the way through to the front door. But there wasn’t a drink to be had in the house, she knew that already, apart from the bottles of wine lined up on the sideboard in the dining room for the Christmas dinner, and those could not be breached.

  Back in the kitchen Dan was still romancing their mother, feeding her anecdotes about some woman who was too wonderful to be famous.

  ‘She lives with just a housekeeper now, and someone to look after the dogs.’

  ‘And he never came back?’

  ‘He never came back.’

  Hanna cleared some cups into the sink and signalled to Emmet, who was still stuck in the newspaper.

  ‘Will you walk out the road,’ she said. ‘It’s Christmas Eve.’

  ‘Oh right.’

  ‘They’ll all be below in Mackey’s.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  And in three minutes flat they were out the door, over the humpy bridge, and passing the bright forecourt of the Statoil garage, where there was, Hanna realised, cheap wine on sale in the shop, if she needed to get some on the way home.