Anne Enright - The Gathering

Hard times, hard times,

Come again no more;

Many days you have lingered

Around my cabin door,

Oh, hard times come again no more.

A ragged consensus gathers under the chorus, but, by some miracle, they let her sing the verse alone: my annoying little sister, looking at the ceiling with innocent eyes, as she takes each note and tenderly lays it down.

While we seek mirth and beauty

And music light and gay,

There are frail forms fainting at the door;

Though their voices are silent,

Their pleading looks will say

Oh, hard times come again no more.

There isn’t a dry eye in the house. On Mossie’s knee Rowan grows indignant, as he watches his mother wipe away the tears.

‘Shut up,’ he says suddenly. Then louder, ‘Shut uhhhhp!’ in his sweet English accent, and everyone laughs. I have never been to a happier funeral.

I push back my chair and go out to find a cigarette.

It is many years since I smoked. We all gave up, one way or another, after Daddy died, so I have to accost one of the neighbours with this oddly intimate request.

‘I couldn’t take one of these off you? Would you mind?’

‘Work away. Work away.’

I go and sit in the foyer, and I smoke. The cigarette tastes like the first cigarette I ever had, sitting on Liam’s mattress in the garden passage, in 1974.

THE DAY SHEhears that Lambert Nugent has died, Ada orders a cup of coffee in Bewley’s-nothing fancy, just a white coffee and a custard slice, waitress service, and when they arrive, she picks off her gloves, with the same twitching precision that caught Nugent’s eye, many years before. So, he is dead. She sips the coffee and cuts the custard slice into small pieces, which she eats, one after the other, until she is done.

Ada is worried about the rent-even though she has no need to worry about the rent; she took advice about the rent, years ago. Some other man will come and take it-some man she does not care about, one way or the other, and it will be the same money and the same little house, and the same life she leads inside it. Even so she felt it had broken loose, that the bricks and the slates and the granite lintels had been set sailing on a calm, grey sea.

It was over. Whatever the story between them had been.

Old Nolly May.

Or even, as they sometimes said, Nolly May Tangerine-from the ‘Do not touch me’ of the Bible.

And why not? Why should he not be touched?

‘Isn’t he a card?’ as she used to say of Lamb Nugent, after this or that comment, some implication: her profligacy at the butchers, or the necessity of Christmas. ‘He’s all heart,’ she used to say, by which she meant that, on the day he died, she would order a quiet custard slice in Bewley’s, and really quite enjoy it.

Ada is seventy years old, which for a certain kind of woman, is not really old at all. She is always on the go and she might have twenty years in front of her (although she does not have twenty years in front of her), Ada does not count. At seventy, she lies in bed, like the rest of us, thinking of the warmth and texture of the last doctor’s hands. Her own hands, as she unsheathes them from her black leather gloves, are skinny and restless: a tangle of strings and knobs and bones, like ship’s rigging. Who needs a doctor, when your body is busy coming out through you, to display its working parts? Ada is fond of her hands, even a little proud-they have been so clever, over the years. As for the rest of her body, she is not bothered to check, having long ago fallen out with the mirror, that seems to supply her with no useful information any more-none whatsoever.

But her hands, as they slowly dip the spoon, so the coffee chases itself up through the crust of sugar, her hands have done good service. They have stitched and unpicked. They have done their insect work, and changed, as an ant might change, the surface of the earth.

And as she sucks the sticky tip of the spoon Charlie is there in front of her, bowing over a paper bag and saying, ‘Oh, comfort me with apples,’ at the Fairyhouse Races, a lifetime ago.

A very Protestant thing to say, she thinks suddenly-quoting the Old Testament like that. And she wonders for the thousandth time, whether her husband was the man he said he was, at all.

If Ada had reached any sort of conclusion in this life, it was a little one. People , she used to think, do not change, they are merely revealed. This maxim she has applied, with the flattest satisfaction, to turncoat politicians, and unfaithful spouses, and wild boys who turned out right in the end. She applies it now to the memory of Charlie Spillane and to his true heart, that only became more intensely, and importantly true to her over the years. If people were only revealed by time, then the man who was revealed to her in Charlie Spillane was endlessly good-just that-with all his evasions and his regrets, his eye for a filly and for the main chance, the thing that her husband was had burned more clear for her, since he had died.

It was a great mystery: goodness.

Ada presses the pad of her finger into the last flakes of pastry, then fails to put it to her mouth. She rubs the stuff off, to fall on the floor, and she misses her husband, and all the men she once knew who are now dead. They each left a quality behind; something distinctive and hard to catch. If Ada believed in anything she believed in this persistence, that other people might call the soul.

In which case Lambert Nugent had none, or none that she could find. Nugent was the kind of man who flared up on you; the rest of the time he was hardly there at all. The ardent youth, the trembling man, the white flame of his old age; she had seen each of these in glimpses, the rest was a murk of small remarks and glances elsewhere, of things withdrawn before they were shown.

What did the silly man have to hide?

As Nugent aged, his mouth got more greedy around her biscuits, and his tongue and throat, his whole tasting apparatus was the most tender and vivid thing about him. Sometimes Ada felt he wanted the biscuits more than he wanted the rent, he had such a sweet tooth. He was such a child. Maybe that was the secret-the fact that he was only and ever five years old. Or two.

Oh, Nolly May.

Some mother had a lot to answer for there, she thinks. The Lord have mercy on his soul (if He could find it).

She takes a sip of coffee before her custard slice is chewed and gone, and this annoys her, suddenly. Ada hates mixing things up in her mouth. She hates mixing things up at home. More and more her life is like this, sniffing at the clothes in the old chest of drawers and washing them one more time, for the last time. More and more, she puts the tea towels in a different wash from the bath towels, or does not put them in a wash at all, but boils them on the stove.

She stands up and organises her stuff, thinking, as she does so, about the aneurysm that got Nugent in the end, wondering if it hurt-surely there were no nerves in there to feel the pain. Except of course your brain was where pain was in a way, so maybe it was the worst way of all to go.

And so she steps out into the roar and light of Grafton Street, with the buses rushing past, and is, as she does so, a child again.

Ada with her suitcase, the day her mother died.

How she turned and carried the suitcase out of the house. And everything that seemed impossible was possible after all. She had the gift of feet, that placed themselves one after the other so that she could walk out of there, and she had the gift of her hands, to make her way through life, and she did not look back.

THERE IS Ahotel in Gatwick airport where you could live for the rest of your life. You could stay there until they found you, and they would never find you-why should they? You could eat the stale croissants from trays set out in the hallways, wash out your smalls in the sink, nip from room to room when the cleaning trolley went round.