Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

He was not yet sixty but felt like a hundred.

Melancholy was an occupational hazard of the General Practitioner

She looked at life with such a direct gaze that God Himself would be shy,

In Faha, the line between comedy and tragedy was drawn in pencil, and oftentimes rubbed out.

Although invisible to Church and State, it was women who knitted the country together, and in Faha, on Sunday morning after Mass, you could see the needles.

Like the triangle that has one leg longer than the other, Ronnie had an asymmetrical relation with Faha.

here the people were, in a phrase she had read in a Russian novel, great-souled.

She was not beautiful enough, she decided. It was a corrosive conclusion, the acid kept inside her by the cork of the unpopped question.

his melancholy deepened by the defeat of those who found it hard to believe in God when presented with evidence against Him every day,

A large man with a flat face of few expressions, Jerome had a bishop’s rigour and a deliberate step. The parting of his hair was an articulation. His brown suit had the material for two;

She had nine children. As memorials, each of them left her the original eight pounds of their birthweight, so that after the eighth she was a round of bosom, belly and buttock, which parts were only nominal.

In a parish of one-offs, each house was its own story.

but faultlessness was not the first requirement of music. Still, by a three-part alchemy of instrument, music and musician, in the notes were the constraints and sorrows of his daughter’s life.

Regret is a fruit of age. The longer you live the more you know its sour taste.

suffering in another can be borne; in your daughter not,

She was a soft and kind woman, with blue eyes of long hurt, and the anxious look of one married to an instability.

Mostly jowl, he gave living substance to the weight of the law, with polished boots that could sing and silver buttons under a pressure not measured in pascals.

Like all advice from all fathers, it was useless until it wasn’t.

How was she still awake, still standing, he wondered, and not for the first time considered that God’s first mistake was starting with a man.

As always, it was impossible to tell what the doctor was thinking. Life had given him a mask for a face, planate cheeks with rivering blood vessels, deeply recessed eyes and sheltering eyebrows that, lowered, seemed to want to join up with the moustache and show no expression at all.

The rain caught the wind and implored the windows to let it in. It made bursts of thrashing, answered in the chest of the chimney by a hollow moan.

The doctor had lived long enough to understand that, in an island country, sideways was the way all stories wanted to go, roundabouts the native way of getting anywhere, and that there was a good reason there was no straight road in the parish.

He drove on, travelling in that inner country where the body is stationary, but the mind moves faster than the wheels.

The air was clean as a knife and came for his cheekbones and the tops of his ears. His breath evanesced like something freed.

he could not allow himself the comfort of a divine mercy, for he was too suspicious of anything that pardoned humanity.

the doctor found himself succumbing to the gaiety of grandfathers who know they did so much wrong as a father the first time, and who, from an appreciation not too late of the shortness of life, let the rules fall away, coming instead under the governance of the tiny hand clutching their forefinger.

it was understood that in all chess games life was the third player.

for we are all young when no one can see us.

But when tolerance is grown thin, acid comes through.

Sorrow is the longest thing in life, and going back the preferred way of an old mind.

‘That’s easy, I’m trying to be a Christian,’ he said. ‘Only the Church and the State are in my way.’

The top sash on the window was lowered and in the room the damp weather that was neither rain nor not-rain but a cloud-lining that was Ireland in December.

He wished he could place his hat on her table and lay his head in her lap and say nothing and have nothing said, but be in the stillness and repose of profound love, by which all failures are absolved.

the darkness that shrouded those western places at the death of the year seemed to be inside him as well as out.

Absence is its own presence; it occupies the same space.

he had the look of all of his years and the peculiar vulnerability of every man in his socks.