Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

Of course, I didn’t have a clue.

He came home — when I think about it, it must have been the day he’d heard the news — and he sat in the sofa, and for the first time since his mother’s funeral, I saw him cry. The children saw him cry. I had no idea what he was crying for. I felt like calling an ambulance. Then I put two and two together and realised he must be lapsing again, he must be mid-lapse. And I panicked.

I know that. I did panic. And it’s not like me. He lifted his head to speak to me and I said,

‘I don’t want to know.’ That was all. ‘I don’t want to know.’ And I said it really fast, like I was talking off the record, here. Like what was happening was not actually happening. Or he’d better make bloody sure it wasn’t happening because I wasn’t having the mess of it all over my beautiful, hard-won house. And he pushed his face around to clear away the tears — not hot tears, not outraged, grief-stricken tears, just that leaky, worn-out water you find on your face sometimes, when you are sick or defeated — he wiped the tears away and then he just sat.

My fantastic man.

The first time it happened, at a guess, was when the children were small. I was up to my tonsils in nappies and mayhem, falling asleep before my head hit the pillow, fat as a fool. Anyway. They feel ‘excluded’, fathers; isn’t that what the articles say? They have the weight of the world on their shoulders, and after a while — I’m convinced of this — they start to resent you, maybe even to hate you. Then, one day, they love you madly again and you realise — slowly, you realise — that they have been up to something. They’ve had a fright. They’ve come running back home.

Which is nice, too. In a way.

Oh, what the hell.

The first time it happened, my father was in having some tests, actually, and I was far too busy to shout at my husband, or go through his pockets, or sniff at his clothes before I put them in the washing machine. I had more important things on my mind. In the end, everything went so well, Daddy didn’t even have to have chemo — after which, I was too relieved to double back and start shouting at my husband, or sniffing at his clothes. It was over by then, and besides, I had learned something about myself. I’d learned that I was not that sort of woman — the sniffing sort, the type to rage and scream. And that was an odd kind of feeling, I must say. Because I grew up with the same dreams as every other girl, but when the chips were down … When the chips were down, I kept my head held high.

What was I supposed to do?

One part of me thought he deserved a holiday, to be honest; that if I had the chance I might take one myself. Another part of me thought, ‘Someone must die.’ I really thought I might kill someone for this. I might kill her. Or I might kill him. Or I might leave them to it and kill myself. Well, that’s no use, is it? This stupidity, this incontinence of my husband’s was too small to bother about. And it was too large to leave us all standing; all still alive.

But maybe it was in my head, from that time. In both our heads. The idea that someone must die.

So what are we looking at? Two or three more, over the course of the years? A scattering of ‘accidents’, and then, one day, this, whatever it is. A man crying on the sofa. Grief.

It was half past five. The children were watching telly before tea. I cleared them out of there — my daughter, the apple of her father’s eye, welling up a bit herself at the tragic look of him, with his coat thrown beside him and his briefcase still in the other hand.

Kids bury that sort of stuff very deep. I thought it would be better if she talked about it, but when I asked her, a week later, about her father crying on the sofa she just looked at me, like I had landed in from outer space.

‘What sofa?’ she said. ‘Which sofa?’

That’s Shauna for you, who is nine. There’s no point talking to her brothers about it, they’ve already gone into the grunting phase.

And then I think, Why not? Why not talk to your sons about things? Why not rear men who can speak?

Because there’s my husband, collapsed against the oatmeal-coloured linen mix, staring mortality in the face. And what else? His own smallness. Looking as though he had killed her himself, although he had not killed her, he had not even loved her. Thinking (as I imagine) about some beautiful part of her, mangled by the door or bonnet, and turning already to clay.

And there is no one he can talk to about this. No one at all.

Men don’t have friends like that — guys you might ring and say, ‘Take him out for a drink. Talk it over. Sort him out.’ No. The only friend he has is me.

And he can’t tell me, because I really do not want to know.

All this in hindsight, of course. At the time, I looked at him and I thought that our marriage was finished, or that he was finished. I was looking at extended sick leave and then what? My husband crying on the sofa was forty-nine years old. And if you think forty-nine is a tough station, try fifty-five.

I was looking at a long future with a man who had forgotten what he was for.

So when he pushes the tears off his face with his hand, and when he lifts his face to tell me all about it, there is only one thing I can say to him, and that is:

‘I don’t want to know.’

How did we get through the next week? Normally, at a guess. That’s how we did it. We got through the week in a completely normal way. While I waited for some hint or clue. The back page of the paper that he stares at too hard and too long. And then, on Tuesday morning, I come in from the school run and he’s still there, in his dark suit, putting on his funeral tie.

‘Who’s dead?’

‘Some girl,’ he says.

‘What girl? Someone’s daughter?’ He doesn’t answer. He brushes his shoulders off in the mirror.

He says, ‘We only get them trained and they’re gone.’

‘Well, I’m sure she didn’t mean to.’

Round and round goes the funeral tie, down through the knot. Pull it tight, ease it a little loose again. Kiss the wife goodbye.

‘You don’t want me to show?’ I say, because I am raging now. I know what has happened, now. I want to twist the knife.

‘No,’ he says. ‘She was only in the door.’

‘You sure?’

‘No, no.’ Pick up your briefcase, pull your phone off the charger, check for your keys.

‘Home for tea?’ I say.

‘What is it?’

‘I thought I’d grill a bit of salmon.’

Forget where your good coat is kept, open one door of the wardrobe, the other door of the wardrobe, look to your wife who says, ‘It’s under the stairs.’

Look your wife in the eye as she says this, reach out to touch her neck and hair.

Say, ‘Thanks,’ then off you go.

Oh, I know what you are thanking me for .

The front door clicks shut on my husband in his funeral tie and I wander downstairs to tidy away the breakfast things and make my usual cup of coffee. I fill the kettle and plug it in. I take out my mug and put it on the counter. And then, before the water is boiled, I have the recycling bin spilt all over the floor, and I’m going through the old newspapers for death notices.

Samantha ‘Sammy’ MacHale, tragically, abroad . Easy. I get out the phone book and look that up too.

The church is in Walkinstown, so that’s her family off the Cromwellsfort Road. She might have lived at home still, at twenty-four — the price of everything these days. I could go there now, if I wanted to. I could drive there in my little car. I wonder do her parents know what she got up to? I have a shameful desire to tell them — so sharp, I have to stand still until it subsides.

I am not that kind of person.