Anne Enright - The Green Road

‘You’re all right. You’re all right.’

They stayed like that for a long time. Hanna used everything she had. She used her breath, hawing it out on Rosaleen’s neck, sighing on to her closed eyes. She did not notice Ferdy run his coat up under her mother’s legs and wrap them in it, she did not notice the others, stumbling in the litter and overgrown rubbish of the house floor, or the foil blanket that was put over them both by John Fairleigh. She noticed nothing until he cradled her mother’s head from the other side, ran a mat under her shoulders, and brought a flask of tea to her lips.

‘Good woman,’ he said. ‘Good woman.’

It was the kind of phrase their mother hated.

Hanna had the comical idea that Rosaleen would be cross, she was far from cross. She looked at John Fairleigh with unblinking eyes. The tea slopped out of her mouth, and she just kept looking, as though nothing but John Farleigh existed in the wide world.

Outside, people stood around for a while, waiting for the ambulance, wondering if it would not be better to lift her down the mountain and drive her out of there. They felt the cold. Everything took a long time. A few went back to open the gate and give directions. Another man with a head torch arrived. ‘Anyone with a car down there, can you move the car?’ And it was like a fleadh or a gymkhana for a while, with a guy in a hi-vis jacket directing cars into a field. No one went home, though they knew she was found. People sat into their cars and waited, they switched the radios on and listened to Christmas carols, broadcast from deserted studios, until — a long time later, it seemed — they saw the far distant blue light turn up the road from Ballinalackin.

‘She only went for a walk,’ Constance said to Dessie, as though objecting to all the fuss.

Dan, who had stayed by the little famine house, lingered in the doorway of the inner room and did what Rosaleen loved him doing best. He talked to her.

He said, ‘You know you left the light on inside the car?’

He said, ‘I think it’s time to hang your Ecco boots up, darling, don’t you?’

He said, ‘Honestly Rosaleen, you have no idea. Half the O’Briens are down there in the kitchen with buckets of coleslaw and left-over potato salad, and Imelda McGrath came over with real coffee, because real coffee is where the McGraths are at these days. You know what Dessie had in the boot? He had Bollinger in the boot. I kid you not. Where will it end , that’s what I say.’

He said, ‘Oh. The moon.’

Because the moon was rising in the north-east over Knockauns mountain. A sliver of a thing, the pale light lifted the landscape to his eyes, and there it was, the most beautiful road in the world, bar none. Where else would you go?

‘You know?’ he said. ‘You could be anywhere.’

He watched the slow progress of the paramedics as they wrestled the gurney over the rocks and grass: the chrome glinting and the business of it clanking as it dipped and rose.

She had never gone very far, he thought. A week in Rome. A fortnight in the Algarve. Another time, Sorrento, and The road! she said. It was taking your life in your hands. But oh! the coast was very beautiful coming down into Amalfi, she would never forget it, and the little restaurant right out over the ocean, where she had a glass of limoncello, free at the end of the meal.

SHE SOLD THE house anyway. This was a surprise, but it was not the biggest surprise. Rosaleen woke up in Limerick hospital on St Stephen’s Day and she looked around her, at the buff coloured walls and the handmade decorations, and she smiled.

There was no problem getting a bed, she said. She wondered at that; the things you hear on the news about people on trolleys for days.

‘They’re all home for the Christmas,’ said the nurse, who was Tamil at a guess, with a name so long she had an extra inch on her plastic tag. Rosaleen looked closely at her face and eyes.

‘So pretty,’ she said.

The nurse took no offence.

‘I feel, I don’t know how to describe it, I feel much better.’

‘That’s good.’

‘I didn’t feel well at all,’ she said. ‘But now I feel much better.’

‘Yes.’

Emmet, who was sitting in his conscientious way at her bedside, saw all this and did not quite believe it.

‘You were up a mountain,’ he said.

Rosaleen turned her head and rested her gaze on him. She looked a little puzzled and then she smiled.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember?’

‘Oh, I remember the mountain, all right,’ as though this was not what she was talking about at all. ‘Oh yes, the mountain.’

She was looking at him very intently.

‘You rest now, Rosaleen,’ said the nurse.

‘I mean before the mountain.’

She nestled her cheek into the hospital pillow and looked at her son.

‘Oh darling,’ she said.

Emmet did not know how to reply to her, but she did not seem to want a reply.

‘Oh darling. I am sorry.’

‘No need,’ he said.

‘I put you through it.’

‘You’re all right.’

‘I put you through the wringer.’

She closed her eyes, slowly, gazing at him all the while, and when she was asleep Emmet went down to the metal clipboard at the end of the bed.

‘What’s she on?’ he said.

‘Drip,’ said the nurse. And then, after a moment’s thought, ‘She is happy.’

And indeed, Rosaleen was happy. She continued happy for some time. Not just happy at the fuss that was made of her — the visits, the journalist spurned at the door, the priest sounding his thanks for her deliverance at morning Mass, Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death — she was happy with other small things, the light as it thickened on the hospital floor, the clever controls for lifting the bed, the flowers Pat Doran the garageman brought in to her, though they were — to coin a phrase, she said — petrol station flowers .

‘What lovely colours, Pat. You shouldn’t have.’

Rosaleen was delighted to be alive. This is such an obvious thing to be, Hanna wondered why everyone was not delighted, all the time. She brought the baby in to see her, and they sat, her mother and Hugh and the puddin , as Rosaleen called him, ‘Oh the puddin!’ insisting they hoist the baby on the bed for her to hold. Rosaleen loved babies, she said, and it was, for a while, easy to believe her. She wanted to eat him , she said. Hugh took pictures on his phone and they admired them as they happened: Rosaleen thin and the baby fat in front of her, the baby putting his hand into Rosaleen’s mouth and pulling her jaw down.

‘Ya ya ya yah,’ said Rosaleen, and the baby laughed.

She was delighted. And the baby was delightful. Hanna tried to hold all that, so she could remember it the next time the baby screamed, the picture of her mother, handing the baby back to her saying, ‘Oh, how I envy you now.’

As if life was always worth having, worth reproducing, and everything always turned out well in the end.

Emmet saw what he had not seen in many years: his mother being wonderful. She regaled them all with descriptions of the ambulance, the doctor’s cold hands, the cow on the other side of the wall when she fell asleep on the mountain.

‘It was like a plane taking off in your ear,’ she said.

When Dan came in, the pair of them laughed at everything and Emmet was not jealous. He watched Rosaleen for deterioration of some kind but her brain was fine — or what the world called her brain: short term, long term, the current Pope, the days of the week. It was just her mood that changed. It was just her life that had changed.

She looked on her children as though we were a wonder to her, and indeed we were a bit of a wonder to ourselves. We had been, for those hours on the dark mountainside, a force. A family.