Anne Enright - The Green Road

‘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 the 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.