Anne Enright - Yesterday's Weather

‘All washed up.’ The voice came from directly above her, and she gave a start. When she looked up he was there, perfectly dry. He was wearing a pair of navy high-waisted swimming trunks. His body was white as wax and his front was sticky with hair. She was ashamed to look at this body and so looked at his face.

‘Oh all right,’ she said, and wanted to turn off the sun like a lamp, so they could make love on the beach.

Felix, my secret, my angel boy, my dark felicity. Felix: the sibilant hiss of the final x a teasing breath on the tip of the tongue. He was the elixir of my middle years, he was the sharp helix spiralling through my body, the fixer, the healer, the one who feels. But when he was in my arms he was simply breath, an exhalation.

Did he have a precursor? He did, to be sure. There might have been no Felix at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain boy-child in my Tir na nÓg by the sea. Felix was as young as I was that year, the year I first fell asleep, and when he whispered me awake, my life became fierce and terrible. (Look at that tangle of thorns.)

Believe me, I write for no one but myself. Mine is not the kind of crime to be spoken out loud. This, then, is the last, or the penultimate, motion of these fingers that burned alive on the cool desert of his skin. You can always count on a suicide for a clichéd prose style.

I was born in 1935 in Killogue, a small town in the west of Ireland. My father was a small, introverted man of uncertain stock, who ran the pub that faced out on to the town square. My mother died of creeping paralysis in my seventh year, and nothing remains of her in my mind save the image of a woman sitting in the parlour in a perpetual Sunday dress, her throat caught in a stained circle of ancient diamanté and a charm bracelet at her wrist. When they laid her out, again in the same room, with the glass-fronted china cabinet pushed precariously against the back wall, I noticed that her ‘jewels’ had been removed. This sensible, pious figure seemed to have nothing to do with the woman I remembered, and I was suddenly aware that she must have undressed like that every night, unless she wore the diamanté to bed.

My father grew more nervous after my mother’s death, his silences grew longer and were punctuated by sudden rushes of speech, always about the harvest or the Inland Revenue, the goings on ‘beyant’. He began to sleep over the bar at night, bringing a small iron bed into what had once been a storeroom, and leaving the bedroom that they had shared intact. He became a crusader for the gombeen class, claiming that there was no such thing as good staff to be found. The days were spent in a silent frenzy of suspicion, watching every boy who was brought in to serve behind the bar, until the explosion burst loose and the boy was sacked — for not charging his friends, or shortchanging the regulars, or simply for sloppy work, licking the knife that was used to cut the sandwiches. Meanwhile, I sat outside, squatting on the kerb that faced the square, where I could see over the brow of the hill to the sea beyond. The strand was hidden by a dip in the road, and it looked as though the water came right up to the crest of the hill and joined it in one clean blue line. I ran towards it like a plane taking off, hoping to dive straight in, always disappointed to discover the street below, the untidy line of houses, the sea wall, and then the beach with its load of mothers wrapped up against the cold, children playing in the sand, and the breakers rolling in beyond.

I was nominally attached to a good woman who lived in a rundown house between the hill and the strand; who washed my clothes, fed me and let me go — perhaps because of some old debt she owed my father, perhaps for a small fee. As far as I can remember, I was a brave child. (It is not the loss of innocence that I regret, but the loss of that courage.) I swam in the deep, underwater world of childhood, my limbs playing in the shattered light of the sea. I loved the cold shock, diving off the cliffs, my body growing numb as I prised free the starfish that hid in the crevices, or teased the nervous mouths of translucent sea anemones. I chatted easily and dangerously with the visitors to the town, with a friendliness that came as second nature to the daughter of a publican. Old men with whiskey breath would lift me on to the bar counter, tip the wink to my father for a bag of crisps and call me ‘princess.’

It was the summer of my eleventh year. I was grown wild — more reckless in the sea, more brash with the locals and coy with the tourists, who filled the town with their white, bared flesh. My father picked on a young boy called Diarmuid to help behind the bar, some distant relative from Galway with (I can’t continue this for much longer) … with the black hair and fine, blunt cheekbones of a Connemara man. Daddy gave over the storeroom to house the boy and slept again in his old room, treading carefully and with a sense of unfamiliarity over the wooden boards. His presence there was light, but unsettling. He brought back the ghost of my mother with him.

I must stop. ‘Ghost,’ ‘flesh,’ ‘fine, blunt cheekbones,’ these words are all strangers to me. I am trying to construct a childhood, so I can pick my way through it for dues. ‘Felix came because ’ … because in the summer of my eleventh year, my father hired a boy called Diarmuid. Any other boy would have done, any other childhood. The secret must be in the style. If I must choose some way of lying to myself, I thought, this might be the most appropriate. Take on the cadences of an old roué in a velvet smoking jacket, cashmere socks, and a degree of barefaced and thoughtful dignity that is not permitted to the rest of mankind. But look at me. I am a woman of fifty-one years of age, in a suburb of Dublin; not exactly sitting with rollers in my hair, but certainly subject to the daily humiliation of coffee-morning conversation and the grocer’s indifference. I buy winter coats in Clery’s sale. I have a husband. Every year we drive to the same guesthouse in Miltown Malbay. There has been no tragedy in my life, you might say, apart from the ordinary tragedies of life and death that Ireland absorbs, respects and buries, without altering its stride. In my clean, semi-detached house there are only a few sordid clues; my daughter’s empty bedroom, a doll without a head, one broken arrow from a boy’s bow, that sits like so much junk at the back of the coal house. Where is the poetry in that?

I have always been struck by the incongruous picture of an old woman with a pen in her hand. Is it not slightly obscene, Ms Lessing, to show your life around like that? Of course your neighbours are rich, they respect you, they are proud to have you living nearby. They don’t watch you in the street and say, ‘Why write about orgasms, when you look like that?’

Middle-aged women write notes to the milkman, not suicide notes. When they die, they do so quietly, out of consideration for their relatives and friends. And then there is the subject of perversion. Old women are never perverts. They may be ‘dotty’ or ‘strange’, poor things, they may, and often do, ‘suffer from depression’, but they emphatically do not feel up boys in public parks. Their lust is a form of maimed vanity, if it exists at all. It is not the great sweeping torment of the poet. It is not love. The only thing we suffer from is the menopause (‘Let me tell you something, Iris dear, the change of life is a blessing … when he stops … you know, wanting things in the middle of the night.’ I want I want I want). I want I want I want. I am not an hysteric. I am a woman of ten and a half stone with a very superior brain. I do not know what the word ‘maternal’ was ever supposed to mean.