Mary Costello - Academy Street

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She entered the orchard, entered a great silence, a farm girl again, scarcely disturbed by time. The old fruit trees bent low, ivy-covered, stunted. She walked to the far end and leaned against the wall. The stones were warm, mellow from hundreds of years’ sun, acquiescent. She laid her head back and she was caught by something — the flicker of sky, intimations of eternity — and for one pure moment she was free and everything was revealed and everything resolved, the final question — the only question — resolved, and she was being delivered, given her first fleeting glimpse of landfall. A fall of memories loosened and images of happiness returned. Afternoons with Captain and Mike Connolly, her father in a straw hat in a yellow hayfield, her mother at an upstairs window, Oliver at her breast. The lull of Eden, of ancient perfection. Had this been her destination all along, this return to the source, the starting point, the only place she had ever belonged?

She crossed the courtyard and turned the corner, half expecting to come upon new miracles. But there was nothing there, no stamp, no stones. The ground where the house had stood was an L-shaped patch of grass, indistinguishable from the lawn but for its deeper shade of green. Old slates lay stacked against the fowl-house. To the right, the laurel tree, patient, majestic. In the distance the avenue of beech trees and the lone ash, blue-green and brooding in the evening light, and, further off, the copse by the quarry, the loamy fields. She stood on the edge of the grass. She hovered between worlds, deciphering the ground, tracing in mid-air the hall, the dining room, the stairs. She was despairingly close to home now, to the rooms and the voices that contained the first names for home. Memories abounded and her heart pounded and history broke in. A famine hospital with a stained-glass window. Bodies in a quarry, smoking in lime. The deeper she went the further she was drawn, into a lower world with the sound of a gong and a mother coughing up blood. A marble fireplace. Adam-and-Eve wallpaper. A red lamp under the back stairs as death rattled upstairs, and the die was cast. The die was cast. A mirror sheathed in black then. And the Garden of Eden plucked and plundered by a blackbird, toppled by a wrecking ball — and Adam, Eve, the apple and the angel, all fallen, vanquished, all buried beneath the rubble.

The cortege followed the hearse up the avenue and turned right onto the main road. For half a mile they drove along Easterfield’s perimeter wall. This was it. This was her life, the summation of her life, her dreams run out. She would not encounter love again. She would not lie down with a man or hold a child in her arms. She was at the end of her destiny. She turned her head, looked down over the open sloping fields, with the avenue on the right and groves of old trees, oak and beech, in the distance, and then she leaned forward, her eyes drawn to the slate roofs and stone walls of the outbuildings, the courtyard, the orchard. And then she saw it, the gap where the house had been, the absence at the centre of things. An absence that was an injury, a scar on the land. She put her hand to her heart. The house was gone, turned to dust. The earth was mortally wounded. She felt the distress, the long unrest, the silent suffering of the fields and the beasts, the barns, the grieving ground, and the walls and the trees with the little birds in the boughs all gathered around, bowing down in sorrow.

That night she dreamt. She heard the land weeping. At dawn she heard the clarion call of the city. Streets waiting for her footsteps. Doors to be opened, books to be read, her life as it had been. And all the days to be got through, the endless days, the nights, the silent rooms. There was no Eden, there would be no Eden, no radiant streaming, no transformation. Just time, and tasks made lighter by the memory of love, and days like all others when she would put one foot in front of the other and walk on, obedient to fate.

As they drove away, Michael slowed on the avenue, beeped the horn, waved. His children were playing in a corner of the field, on rope swings hung from trees. They were swinging high, back and forth, leaning, reaching out over the quarry, over broken rock and weeds and old water. When they saw their father they swayed in mid-air, raised their little hands and waved back.