Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

They had lived through revolution, seen the poet-revolutionaries replaced by bank managers, and discovered the thorned truth that independence had left them as poor as before.

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

In the four years since she died, Doctor Troy had had to find a way to live with the acidic knowledge that with Annie Mooney he had missed the last chance of a lifetime. In his practice he had found time a greater medicine than pharmaceuticals, only slower, and so bound himself to a course of carrying on, hearing his own phlegmatic advice, this time to himself: It will go away. To which he added one of the most useless commands of mankind: Stop thinking about her.

By the end he might have been describing a future prime minister, but Taoiseach was a noun only known in the masculine and he drew his conclusion by leaning forward across his stomachs to say Do you know what? She’d make me just the perfect secretary.

In Faha, the hands of men and women had their world in them. They were hands swollen, sored, scarred, hands formed by weather and work, hands crooked, curved, with the one finger that couldn’t be straightened or the one that couldn’t be bent, the finger that was part-tobacco, the one with the thorn embedded or nail turned amber, purple or black, from a puck or a blow unrecalled but memorialised, hands with fingers clubbed, contracted, with joints that cracked loud like sundered timber, yellow knobs for knuckles, hands that wore assorted lumps and ganglia, ones with skin roughened, toughened, from contact with earth and animals, from the rubbing scrubbing and scouring that all the world needed, hands that wore history and geography, which was nothing more or less than the signature of place and your time in it.

‘It’s Doctor Troy,’ Jack prompted again. ‘Yes. That’s right,’ the Canon said, with the same gratified tone he used when he got the correct answer to the questions in the catechism as he went through the Master’s room, the quarter pound of Satin Cushions in his cassock lightening as he left the sweets on the desks after him. He nodded once more, ‘That’s right.’ But he did not move, and in a moment the doctor saw some puzzlement cross his face. It was light, a small thing really, it came out as: ‘And I’m…?’ ‘You’re Father Tom.’ ‘Father Tom?’ It seemed unlikely and then hilarious, and he put his hand across the traffic of laughs coming. ‘Yes, Father Tom.’ The older man’s eyes came to the doctor and held him in a look not so much lost as baffled, and in it a kind of fierce beseeching. Doctor Troy would remember it for the rest of his life.

With no resolution but the one of getting the priest into a bed, Doctor Troy passed through the village, around the back of the Parochial House and killed the headlamps. Father Tom said a soft ‘ah’ at the sight of home, as if he may have been brought elsewhere. With no grounds in science, the familiarity of the place acted as an analgesic for whatever was awry in his mind, and he blinked the three blinks of recovery, showing some realisation of the situation by turning to the doctor and with a supplicatory look asking, ‘You won’t tell?’

‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ her father said, and raised a palm a few inches in a compendium gesture of Goodnight farewell thank you I’m sorry and I love you. He lifted his eyes to look at Ronnie in the hope that in their grey depths she would see he could not say another word to any human being.

What was also certain was that if her father said to her Here is that boy’s address, Ronnie’s look would say What?, her face a frown, a hand pushing away a straying hair as she turned to some urgent chore, shutting down discussion by an intractable industry, need to be elsewhere, or any one of those checking behaviours we use to shield ourselves from the life we haven’t lived.

Changing your mind is one of the most difficult feats of the living. Easier to change your nose.

Once, it had come to him that the whole history of mankind had failed the Sermon on the Mount, the bitterness of that only resolved by the understanding he came to that maybe the aspiration was more important than the realisation, and maybe Christ knew that. As he stood by the window, what filled Jack Troy then was the fantastical idea of grace as an actual thing. That it was something real, and at that moment the thing he suddenly longed for the most: for one last time, to make an act of grace, even if he was not sure he believed in it, or in the daylight could have explained why.

God wants us to love, was a saying of his father’s, despite the way he made us.

Could a human heart be filled to capacity, like any other vessel? Could you reach the point of being unable to take on more care?

With tousled curls and a white shirt that wouldn’t stay tucked, he had the look of an unmade bed, which Sonny Cooney said accounted for his conquests.

Jude Quinlan had an accommodating nature but an inveterate shyness. He wanted to help but not step forward, and in this crux was often caught.

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. ‘You need to rest,’ he said.

The hardest person to live with is yourself, was a saying of his father’s. Regret is the salt in the wounds of life, it keeps them stinging. And stops us making the same mistakes.

The doctor drove home with no sense that the plot was moving. He was burdened with the twin convictions that time was short and he should be doing more.