Anne Enright - The Green Road

She heard Dan come in behind her, recognised him by the squeak of his shoe. This is how they knew each other, the Madigans, they knew the timbre of a voice, the rhythm of fingers tapping on a tabletop, and they didn’t know each other at all. Not really. But they liked each other well enough. Apparently.

‘I am getting married,’ he said.

‘Oh God Dan are you?’

Hanna turned.

‘Why?’

Dan could not find an answer to that. Not immediately.

‘Oh come on,’ he said.

‘Sorry. Sorry, I mean, who is the guy?’

‘Well that’s the why,’ Dan said. He tried to say Ludo’s name but couldn’t, the room wasn’t ready for it yet.

‘It’s someone in Toronto,’ he said.

‘That’s brilliant,’ she said.

‘Clearly.’

‘No I am. I am really pleased for you. Of course I am. I just thought that you got away from all that, you know? That great institution called marriage.’

‘I did get away from it,’ he said. ‘And now, I can do what I like.’

‘Absolutely.’

They heard Rosaleen’s little car coughing into life outside and the wheels chewing the gravel. The driveway was full of cars — the Lexus, Dessie’s BMW, the battered tin can that Emmet affected, these days. Hanna glanced out the window to see her mother’s Citroën up on the grass, headlights washing the trunk of the monkey puzzle tree, before she bounced across a flowerbed and sliced, at an angle, through the piers of the gate.

‘Nice one,’ she said.

Rosaleen was indicating right, away from the town and towards the sea. The inside light was on and everything was very yellow in there. It looked, Dan thought, like some kind of artwork, he could not think by whom — the dirty, electric look of the lit box jouncing out of the dim garden, Rosaleen, inside, in a purple woollen hat and a teal coloured coat.

Did the coat have a hood? Yes it did have a hood, it was one of those waterproof things for hikers that everyone wore these days. Did the hood have a fur trim? No it did not.

He remembered every detail. She left the inside light on. She was wearing a purple hat and a North Face three-quarter-length jacket in a blue-green. The light still lingered in the western sky. They all heard her leave and none of them thought anything of it. Except that it was Christmas Day and there was no place in particular for her to go. For the first long while after the sound of her engine faded, they did nothing.

‘Where’s she off to?’ said Emmet. ‘With no bell on her bike.’

He was passing the front room and the others followed him down to the kitchen, where the kids had turned on the TV. They were happy to leave the front of the house to its festive, empty business. They dipped into the wine and stood about. Constance would be moving on soon, and they did not want her to go.

‘Is there some nun?’ Dan said. There used to be a nun — a sip of sherry and MiWadi for the kids, who all came back from the convent parlour laden with miraculous medals and little prayer cards with their names on the back.

‘Sister Jerome? She’s long dead,’ said Constance, who was packing up, or trying to, because she had to drive her gang across town for the Christmas evening gathering of the McGraths.

‘Tell them,’ said Hanna.

‘No,’ said Dan.

She picked up the remote and turned the TV down.

‘Dan has some news,’ she said.

‘Tell them what?’ said Dessie.

Dan looked at his brother-in-law’s broad face, pink with Christmas wine and well-being. He lifted his hands up suddenly, to clack non-existent castanets.

‘I’m engaged!’

There was a small silence. Dessie’s pink intensified.

‘Congratulations, man,’ said Rory. ‘Legal! Hey.’

He loped over to his uncle and hugged him, right there and then. A big wraparound hug, complete with back pat. So no one had to ask the obvious question — the one to which they all knew the answer. Of course it was a man. Of course.

‘Oh I am delighted,’ said Constance.

‘Congratulations,’ Emmet said.

Hanna raised her glass. ‘Safe at last.’

And Rory said, ‘So who’s the lucky guy?’

So that took another half-hour of their day, because Dessie went to the boot of the BMW and liberated a bottle of champagne intended for his mother’s house, and they popped it and had an awkward glass. Then Constance was barking and squawking as she tried to get her brood out the door, and with Constance gone, there was no one to worry about Rosaleen.

The house was silent. They left the TV on and watched people singing and dancing for a while.

A phone call came in from their uncle in Florida. Emmet picked up and, after a few pleasantries, Bart said, ‘Will you put your mother on?’

‘She went out for her walk,’ said Emmet.

‘What time is it there anyway?’

Emmet looked at his mobile.

‘It’s nearly five,’ he said.

‘Listen I’ll catch her in a bit,’ said Bart. ‘I’ll ring at seven.’

Emmet put down the phone.

‘Should we ring Constance?’ he said.

And Dan said, ‘What for?’

ROSALEEN WAS OUT on the green road, and she was cold. She was going for her constitutional. As she did after lunch, most days. She was getting out for a bit of air. She had left it a little late. Lunch was late. Even so, she had not thought it would be dark, not yet, the way the Atlantic sky held the light for so long after the sun was down, something to do with the height of the heavens out here on the green road. The west was still open and clear but the ground under her feet was tricky enough. All the colour was going from things and nothing was easy to see. You could not tell grey from grey.

The little Citroën was parked where the tarmac stopped, back at Ballynahown, and Rosaleen was out on the dark road under a deep sky. There was no moon. There was the sound of running water, quite loud. One of her feet was wet — the front part — and the path was uneven. Rosaleen found the strip of grass in the middle of the road and stuck to that, and, Lift your eyes. There it was. She stopped to look. The stone wall that was the remains of a fort keeping watch on the Aran Islands and the far distant mountains of Connemara. The mountains were purple and navy blue, the three islands black against a silver sea. The sun was gone below the horizon, but the light from it still bounced up off the sky. So the sea was dark in the distance and light close to. It was all a question of the angle. Because the world was round but the light was straight.

There were no more people.

The houses were far behind her. The last two on the left hand side were dark and deserted, their blank windows looking out over the valley. And then a farmhouse on the right, with an arthritic collie who herded her along her way, in sprints and crouches, its belly scraping the ground. Old people in there. Who knows what kind of Christmas in that house.

The sea was on her left, while the slope, she knew, rose on the right, the boulders, grey and humpy in the darkness; the few sheep standing behind them for shelter, their heads drooped and shoulders slumped, foursquare on patient feet.

There was no wind but the air was cold. Her eyes smarted with it, and Where did it begin ? That was the question that went through her, though it was more a cadence than a question, it was another scrap in a life full of scraps, some of them beautiful.

O my Dark Rosaleen!

Do not sigh, do not weep!

She was sighing now, she was weeping now, she was feeding the wind with the little shards of her tears, that the wind blew back at her, hurting her own face. Hard to know if they were tears of sorrow or of cold. She was so frustrated. Rosaleen, Rosaleen someone was calling her name, but when she listened it was no one, not even the wind.