Professionally, sexually. In those days, when a woman hit thirty she went home and shut the door. So it is to her great credit that my mother refused to lie down and die.
Just the way all mothers are crazy to their daughters, all mothers are wrong.
There was an amount of politics involved in an evening like this. It was a kind of rule of thumb that the later the arrival, the more sympathetic to the Republican Cause, and these particular musicians came last of all.
Dublin was a small town in those days, even the bullies were small, but the gossip was stupendous, and I know it wasn’t healthy but I do miss it. We have all got very disconnected since, which is to say, sane.
After three more years, she was released from the asylum, rattling with pills – a much reduced, soon to be terminally ill woman who was invisible, on the street, to those who passed her by.
A funny thing happens when the world turns, as it turned for us on the night we burned the British embassy down. You wake up the next morning and carry on.
Dubliners talk to each other very easily. We talk as though getting back to it, after some interruption.
And, by the way, we all consider sleeping with the bad man – we want to fix his hurt, or we want him to hurt us – one way or another, we are all attracted to the shadow.
This is what remains. Magical objects with the magic gone out of them. A few cassettes and no tape machine on which they can be played.
Boyd loved an inaccuracy, for example, because an inaccuracy could render everything else you said void. It.
Prithee Sirrah and Begorrah.
And this would be fine if he lived in any other town, but in Dublin every fool had a novel on the go, so he was, as Hughie Snell liked to endlessly repeat, ‘a eunuch in the great harem of Irish literature’.
If you think about it, the youngest part of the tree is in the very middle. It is the little dot that will widen into a ring, next year. The youngest part of any tree is the heart.
A pair of swans above the lock, the waters pouring down into the pool below: the rightness of things restored me to my own proper desiring. I got up and walked back home very slowly, putting the right motives back in the right bodies. This is what Duggan did, this is what I did. This is what he wanted and knew, this is what I wanted. This is what I did not want. This is what I did not know. Also, the difference between what happens in your head and what happens in the room. The big difference.
I don’t blame him for anything now. Or not much. All of this will, in some form, happen to you. You will wake some morning and pat yourself down. You will realise that you think too much and live too little and that most people, men and women both, are mostly fine. You will love more easily and relinquish blame. At least I hope you will.
Oh yes, thank you, Kitty,’ she said and then sat and looked at her food. At one point she keeled forward and laid her cheek along her cigarette arm, which was stuck out straight across the tabletop. She was weeping. If such a thing can be said of someone who was making no sound and shedding no tears. Then she straightened up, pushed the palm of her hand up across her cheek and resumed her cigarette, ate through exhaled smoke, and poured herself some red wine.
Katherine read constantly. She loved biographies of male dictators and enjoyed a long Stalin phase when she became obsessed, not by the Gulags or by the Yalta Conference, but by his wife’s suicide, his taste for sweet Georgian wines, the way he made his ministers bark ‘The Blue Danube’ after dinner, like dogs. She quoted his daughter Svetlana, who said, ‘He was a Sagittarius, you know, on the cusp with Capricorn.
During the summers, she worked with the fit-ups.
If I am a fool, he said, Then let me be a great fool and not a small one.
Beauty, in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required. That was the drop of water on the tongue.
We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.