Anne Enright - The Gathering

And I, caught for a moment by the sight of the cloth in her lap, watch one stitch more, maybe two, before standing up and running out of the room.

THE RENT BOOKSonly start in 1939-which makes me imagine, briefly, that Charlie owned the house once, but lost it to Nugent on a horse. I doubt this could be true, but the after-image still lingers: Charlie out at Leopardstown with Nugent like a crow over him at the rails, with his coat tail lifting in the breeze.

‘There you go,’ says Charlie, desperately insouciant, handing over a last slip of paper to the man who loves his wife better, or at least sharper, than he.

‘On the nose.’

But Nugent did not look like a crow, he looked like an ordinary man, I do remember that, though all I can recall of him absolutely is the peculiar growth in his ear, a perfect little bulb of shiny pink, and the leaning-backness of him in the wing-chair, on a Friday in the good front room.

I bring the girls over to my mother’s one Saturday, as I have taken to doing since Liam died, and I ask her, in an ordinary way, where she lived first, before Broadstone; what house they were in, before they moved to the house I knew.

‘What?’ she says, looking at me like I might be a stranger, after all.

‘When you were little, Mammy. Where did you live when you were little?’

‘Around the corner,’ she says, and is distressed by the fact. ‘I think we lived around the corner.’

The past is not a happy place. And the pain of it belongs to her more than it does to me, I think. Who am I to claim it for my own? My poor mother had twelve children. She could not stop giving birth to the future. Over and over. Twelve futures. More. Maybe she liked having all those babies. Maybe she had more past than most people, to wipe clear.

The letters I found are on blue writing paper, watermarked with the crest of Basildon Bond. There are maybe fifteen of them in all, each signed L. Nugent, or Lambert Nugent, and each more banal than the last. There are gaps and lapses, into which I read anger or desire. I would do that, that is what I do, but they are, at the very least, intriguingly mute.

Dear Mrs Spillane,

I am afraid I can not offer any rebate on the six shillings owing since Easter last. The work you have had done on the hall skirting board was undertaken without any prior, and can not be considered as ‘in lieu’. I will be seeking the full amount when your rental next falls.

Yours sincerely

Lambert Nugent

Dear Mrs Spillane,

Believe me when I say that I have your best interests at heart in the matter of the back garage, which feeds anyway into the back laneway.

Yours sincerely

Lambert Nugent

Dear Mrs Spillane,

You know yourself what I mean. I mean that Christmas meant nothing in the scheme of things, which stand as they have always stood in this matter.

The cistern man will be there on Tuesday and I will pay for him myself.

My best regards to your husband, Mr Spillane.

Yrs

Lambert Nugent

Dear Mrs Spillane,

In the question of seven shillings and sixpence, it may well be your husband will have it after the 5th. I will want it on the day, however.

Yrs L. Nugent

Dear Mrs Spillane,

I can not afford you what you seek in the matter of the tenancy. By sub-letting to Mrs McEvoy, you are in contravention of all agreements in this matter and I am quite entitled, as you will find, to seek an increase or find another tenant, which I am, as you know, very slow to do. I am very much in my rights.

Hoping to continue an arrangement that is suitable to all concerned,

Yrs

Lambert Nugent

Dear Mrs Spillane,

Here is the receipt for the ceiling on the boxroom.

Yrs

LN

Dear Mrs Spillane,

My son tells me that you have had a bit of a scare and I wanted to send you my very best and good wishes for a speedy recovery. I will not send Nat down on Friday, but come myself, if I may.

Yrs sincerely

Lambert Nugent

Although it was Nugent who died first, in the end.

It seems to me that it was a relationship of sudden pique and petty cruelty. I may be wrong-this may just be the way that landlords speak to their tenants. But there is a sense of thrall to it, too; of Nugent working in the garage, that he owned, at the back of the house and then walking round to the door, that he owned, at the front, and knocking. It makes the ritual of the tea and biscuits a savage enough little one, on his part, and Ada at her most charming-her most, you might say, sexy-because that is what women on their back foot are like. Thirty-eight years of so many shillings per week; her whole life dribbled away into his hand. Thirty-eight years of bamboozling him with her female charms, while he sat there and took it, and liked it, because he thought it was his due.

And he loved her! I say, poor fool that I am. He must have loved her!

But when it came to love, Nugent was just a small-timer; he didn’t have much of it to throw around. He had the house, and he had the woman, more or less, and he did what he liked with the children passing through. Even his gratifications were small. Because children in those days were of little account. We three Hegartys were manifestly of little account.

When Nugent saw a child he saw revenge-I have no doubt about that-and a way out of it all; the whole tedious business of human exchange that a man has to go through in order to get what he might want.

Think of it. The bitterness of the man and the beauty of the boy.

ONE NIGHT Igive up steering the car one way or the other and let it go where it wants, which is north, as always, this time past the hump of Howth Head and on to the Swords road, all the way to Portrane.

I make my way past the asylum and turn down to the sea, then I stop at the gate of the small field, in the middle of whose rubbish is my uncle’s mathematical head. More than five thousand people are buried here, according to Ernest, who knows the local priest. I am not surprised. A cube of panic rises out of these walls. The air at the gates has the same hum as you find under high-voltage wires.

I stand for a while, and feel my hair stand to.

The moon is up. In the distance a line of white wave unfurls itself along the strand, and makes no sound. The sea slaps at the rocks below me, upset by cross-currents and by some distant storm. There is no wind.

I stand there and think that there is no worse place for me to go. This is the worst place there is.

In which case, it is not too bad. If this is as mad as I get then it is not too mad. My children will not be harmed by it; though I may have to change my life a little; get out more, trade in the Saab.

This week’s property supplement-Tom’s little offering on the kitchen table-had a house for sale on Ada’s street. It is not Ada’s house, or not yet; but everyone is selling and moving, it might come up any time. I could stalk it, Ada’s house. I could buy this house up the road, and make it over, and sell on, until the day comes-not too far away, I feel sure-when I am standing in Ada’s front room, pulling up a corner of the wallpaper, talking to some nice architect about gutting the place. I will wear a sober trouser suit and incredibly silly heels and click-clack my way across the bare boards, while telling him to rip out the yellow ceiling and the clammy walls; to knock down the doorway to the front room, but save the Belfast sink in the little kitchen, over which, looking out the back window, I learned how to imagine things. We will exclaim together, my architect and I, over the little ceiling rose, and the pretty fireplace where things were burnt: letters, bookies’ dockets, pork fat, the hair from Ada’s hairbrush going in with a sizzle. I will ask him to get the place cleaned out with something really strong, I don’t want a woman with a mop, I will say, I want a team of men in boiler suits with tanks on their backs and those high-pressure steel rods.