Anne Enright - The Green Road

There followed a time of great kindness and generosity, not just from neighbours and from strangers, but among the Madigans. There was no talk of bringing Rosaleen home to Ardeevin, ‘That cold house,’ said Constance. She had the room all made up, she said, and Rosaleen’s things brought over, so she could stay as long as she needed to, out in Aughavanna.

DAN FLEW BACK to Toronto and found that Ludo had posted an alert for Rosaleen on his social media page, saying, ‘If anyone has anybody in Ireland, especially on the west coast, then please spread the word about this missing woman.’

‘That was a bit previous,’ he said, scrolling through the responses and best wishes, including one from a psychic in Leitrim offering his dowsing skills. He paused at a line from a guy called Gregory Savalas and clicked through to his homepage, which showed mountains and lemon groves. Dan thought it must be in California, but his address was listed as Deya, Mallorca, and there were pictures of a dog, another guy, a small pool, and ‘Greg’ himself in a faded denim baseball cap and cutoff jeans, a blue neckerchief, boots, his face sticking a little strangely on to his bones. He also had a little paunch and a glitter in his eye, to tell you he was not clear — how could he be clear — but he was damn well alive, he was inhaling, exhaling, swimming, drinking Rioja and looking at the lemon grove, enjoying the lemon grove. He was inhabiting a life and he was living the hell out of it, because it was his life to enjoy.

Greg.

Dan checked the photograph again. There he was: that sardonic, slow-moving, slightly fey guy who had died, Dan was sure of it, in the mid nineties. Greg who was once dead, and was now alive.

The page was quite the lifestyle statement. There was very little you might call ‘real’ — a slight intensity to his expression perhaps, in a world of aged stonework, bowls of lemons, stunned blue skies. But there, under a photograph of an under-lit palm tree, with a comet streaking across the Milky Way were the lines: ‘Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths/Enwrought with golden and silver light,’ which was Dan’s party piece, all those years ago when he played at being ‘Irish’ for them all.

Dan checked the friends list: some of them were linked to Ludo but there were none that he recognised from the old days, not even Arthur who seemed destined not to die. He searched and searched, remembering Billy, remembering Massimo and Alex, the loft on Broome Street. His heart was busy with the cohort of the dead: men he should have loved and had not loved. Men he had hated for being sexy, beautiful, out, dying, free. It was not his fault. He had forgiven himself, as he told Scott-in-his-head, or he had tried to forgive himself, years before. But now — look — Gregory Savalas.

The relief he felt was close to love. The fact that this human being, among so many human beings, should have survived.

Hi Greg ,

You won’t remember me, but I remember you from way back in the day, when you had that tiny gallery on the Lower East Side with, like, one perfect thing on the wall. I was a friend of Billy Walker before he went — you know I still turn a corner and see him and have to give myself a shake, he was such a beautiful boy, a beautiful person really. Anyway, this is Irish Dan. I am still alive. I see that you are still alive. Enjoy the lemon groves. Enjoy. Enjoy. Just sending you a little wave .

EMMET WAS EXHAUSTED when he got back to Verschoyle Gardens. Again. He was not burnt out, he just needed to talk to someone. He needed to read. He meditated for an hour each morning and, when he was done, stretched his hands out, giving thanks for the people sleeping in the rooms on either side of him, Saar on one hand and Denholm on the other. This was the way relationships went for him now. The sex with Saar was important, of course it was, the sex with Saar was an intimate thing. But he also knew it was something other than sex that moved him along his life’s course. It was a kind of tension and it was here, in this configuration.

Emmet would never fall in love. He would ‘love’, he would, that is to say ‘tend’. He would cure and guide, but he did not have the helplessness in him that love required.

Denholm slapped his shoulder and said he should have children. Every man should have children.

‘You think?’ said Emmet.

‘No question,’ said Denholm. This was a guy who had been educated in a mud room to speak convent English, write in Victorian copperplate: Denholm could, at eight, recite the Kings and Queens of England and the life cycle of the tsetse fly. Back in Kenya, he would often hold hands with his male friends, and here in Ireland he did so too, once, walking home with Emmet after a few drinks in Saggart. He had forgotten where he was and who he was with, and Emmet went to sleep that night, smiling like a fool.

One evening in February, he got an email from Alice in Sri Lanka:

You know when they are making a new statue of the Buddha, they do the eyes last. They use a mirror to paint by, and afterwards the artist is blindfolded and led outside where he washes his face in milk. They call it Opening the Eyes of the Buddha — wood into flesh, or at least, presence. I go every morning to the Temple of the Tooth and then work until dusk, living by the light, have not woken in proper darkness for months. From here back to the UK in March and then, who knows. If you hear of anything coming up, let me know.

Emmet sat and meditated, but it did not help. He shifted on his sit bones, and did not know what to do with this holy hard-on he had for a woman he had failed to love some years before. He let all the psychic rubbish of sex clatter through his mind, to enter and leave at its own chosen speed — which was pretty fast, as it happened: flashes of breast and cock, the movement of pink tongue behind (a surprise this) Denholm’s (but that’s all right, that’s fine) white teeth. He let it all barge through him and when it was gone, there he was, back with Alice.

Dear Alice

Lovely to hear from you. I was thinking of you just recently, at the malaria forum we are setting up here, and actually that’s not a bad place to consider if we ever get to the stage of looking for applications. Hopefully in the next three months. Rainy Ireland, eh? But you’d be in the field a fair amount. Malawi, mostly. I’ll let you know, if you like. Don’t want to blather on. Hope you and Sven (??) are thriving. Lots of love, xEmmet.

He sent this and regretted it. Wrote another one, that was also, in its way, a bit of an untruth.

I think about you all the time.

He sent this too, and listened to his life opening.

HUGH WAS BETWEEN jobs and he came back with Hanna in the New Year to help sort and pack and get Ardeevin on the market. He brought an old Polaroid camera and some last rolls of film and Hanna heard him about the place the first day they were there, silently looking, then the click-whirr-click as the photograph was extruded, another silence as he shook the thing dry and a little piece of her childhood rose to view. She looked through them later: the spiral at the bottom of the bannister, the squat taps in the upstairs bathroom, the vivid ghost, on the wallpaper, where a wardrobe had shielded its own shape from the sun.

‘Research,’ he said.

When the baby took a nap, they went upstairs and made love in her childhood bed, releasing all her scattered selves into the room: Hanna at twelve, at twenty, Hanna here, now.

The baby was walking, and into everything, Hanna followed him around that afternoon and it was all murderous: the broken greenhouse, the stream at the side of the garden, where he might drown. But it was simple too: the pleasure of the door knocker she hoisted him up to lift and drop, the textured granite stoop and the door that gave under his pushing hands to expose the vastness of the hall.