Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

In Faha, the hands of men and women had their world in them.

hands that wore history and geography, which was nothing more or less than the signature of place and your time in it.

unseeing is not in the gift of mankind and for the rest of the day he would return to the fact that, constrained under the limits of time and the child’s blackboard to abbreviate the entirety of her feelings into a single word, Ronnie had chosen just this boy’s name.

Jack Troy got back in the car with a lighter step. Medicine was not nothing, from the anguish of spiritual meaninglessness there was reprieve in aiding another, though there remained the mystery why caring for the sick was easier than for the well, and for the stranger than your own blood. They were mysteries he couldn’t solve, and under the grace of Nora Haugh’s good humour and sweet loaf he could let them be, sitting behind the steering wheel and not for the first or last time recalling his father’s adage that the central challenge of life was to accept that the world is a place of pain, And yet live. Yet live, Jack.

Mimicking life, the Morris’s headlights showed just the bit of road directly in front of it, leaving it back into the dark after.

The moment undid gloom, for in it was the substance of everyday, the small and ordinary which, against catastrophe, is discovered marvellous.

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

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.

grace

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

‘Don’t people put God in His place by calling this “ordinary life”?’

the idea that if a body could exhaust itself in living, so could a heart. 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 the primacy of an emergency exhaustion, these were questions that had to be postponed,

Jude knew all, and though he had not the words to say so and would only realise it eight years and six thousand miles away, the large, twisted response inside him when he thought of his father

love without condition.

All lending substance to those who since before Christ had watched the December sky for portents.

as if modelling for figurines to attend with Magi.

the whole of him stretching out of the child he had been. It was both a blessing and a loss to her.

but because he was on the rope-bridge between man and boy, the world had a sway in it and the answer to if he believed in spirits was both no and maybe.

From a life whose blessings came in disguise, her brown eyes had a chary look, but at Jude she smiled.

It was a performance of dignity where none was felt, and, when he had the drop taken, so good it convinced himself.

Despite the weight of circumstance and uncertainty, she was aware now of a glowing not quite euphoria but near enough, a lightening that was happening inside her by the minute and to which she was more witness than maker, as though it were a thing bestowed.

blessed.

the smell of the baby. It overwhelmed all. It was a smell unmatched in the world, and she surrendered to it again now, lowering her face to the sleeping child and closing her eyes so the smell came about her and held her in it, and was, though all else might fall, the fundament of goodness.

what lay ahead. Like all roads in Faha, you could only see the next bit. Contra mundum, the doctor did not say, but Ronnie saw it in her father’s eyes and in the set of his jaw. He is ready to meet all that is asked of him, she thought. As am I. She looked down into the baby. ‘Yes,’ she said.

For, in his arms, she was alive who had been dead. In the instants of it, reason was elsewhere. At first there was only the rushing white elation in his spirit: she was breathing. It overtook all. She is breathing.

The word he came to was inspired, finding within it both in and spirit, and, remembering his Latin, the inspirare, breathing-into, that contained the exact action of the night surgery

child’s heart started beating, as though a third party was present.

the girl had breathed something into him.

From long acquaintance with calamity, the doctor’s face had mastered impassivity. He could be told of any disaster or tragedy and in the lineaments and planes of flesh and bone there would appear no register. Hold fire was his father’s precis for a profession that required you to be human and not, and a manner that did not flinch when the enemy was right in front of you.

seeing more clearly than ever that love could not be foreseen or contained,

Still, the joy in the room was as unmistakable as it was rare, and because it had come unbidden, had the feel of blessing.

was lovely.’ It was hard to look at her, she was so happy. The baby is not ours, he wanted to say. This is only for now. But he could not hurt her that way,

By instinct, he knew too that, in a thesis that could not yet be proven, the telling of symptoms was the first part of the cure.

this hiding was not a viable way forward. They could not sustain it, but when he saw how Ronnie and the baby were already one, he could not imagine an alternative.

the philosopher Sherlock Holmes, said that when all other solutions had been tried and failed, the one that remained, No matter how improbable, boys, had to be the correct answer. So,

The marvellous was what flooded him then, in the gifted belief that what had happened, what had come to their very door, and what was happening here in front of him in a daughter more extraordinary than he had granted, was not random, but had a purpose, which was, he dared to think, love.

He could not have explained why but he knew that what happened next mattered enormously; he could not have reasoned it out in front of judge and jury, but it was a fact to him, same as his own blood and the light in which it lived. What happens here, what I choose to do, matters. He was not an innocent, nor did he fool himself. He knew that grace and redemption could not be traded, and we had to live with our life’s failings the same as with our own face.

he could not escape a burdened sense of consequence and importance, for the child, for his daughter, and for himself.

About all was the stillness that seems composed, seems to speak in a language not ours.

It was the character of all life that the more you looked the more you saw, and with night skies of absolute stillness and clarity the stars behind the stars were a theatre of revelation and had the placed-ness of that supreme geometry that gave the Greeks their stories.

He could not say he believed in God, but neither could he say that he did not.

Beyond that reasoning, there was this something that had no name, that in six decades of living was both occasional and familiar, a prompted moment of clouded complexity he could not parse except to say that when he felt it, he felt less alone.

That infants were sent to be raised by aunts, that there was some whose sister was their mother, whose mother was their grandmother, and every other twist that desperation could think of, was not new, and in this Faha was no different to anywhere else.

holding her birdlike wrist. How could she still be living? was what he thought. She was beyond eating or drinking, on the ledge between this life and the next, but day after day remaining so. It was a condition he had seen before, this remaining.

What possessed you?

in the chronicle of human endeavour there was no end to unaccountable behaviour, but also, you were not entirely the captain of your own fate, something could come over you. The best answer to the question was a lift of the shoulders and two palms opened, to indicate what had dropped from the sky. This had the virtues of suggestiveness and silence, because what had possessed one could possess another, and because you couldn’t argue with a mime. That, in the heat of the moment, it was the answer hardest to find, that instead any number of the possessed had set out on carefully stepped explanations of how and why they had done what they had done, was proven by the amount of broken crockery that ended up in the ditches, and the perpetual scarlet of the clipped ears of schoolboys.

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.

What was in the kitchen, he knew, was love. But he knew too that love is dangerous, because it brings us to our best selves, and because purity is a commodity the world can only tolerate in thimbles.

To say that what seized him was the sentimentality common in old men who have spent a lifetime ignoring their heart was a diagnosis his son refused to give. Instead, because of the nakedness of it, he had adopted the view that in the doorway of death his father had become a living version of his own soul. He showed what he felt without shield, and what he felt was enormous.

But storytellers skip the everyday, mistaking the ordinary for the dull, seizing on the sensational and leaving out the habitual that is in fact the fabric of life. The condition of Father Tom was not only one characterised by domestic catastrophe and distress. This too, this calm, smiling, benignity, this recalled boy in a wrinkled flesh, was how he was. The truth was less dramatic but told a fuller story. The doctor sat awhile, saying nothing.