Time of the Child: A Novel

by Niall Williams

The doctor attended Mass, but without devotion. After his wife Regina was taken by a cancer he hadn’t seen coming, he had lost the relic of faith he once had. To mask despair against God, he chose an old tactic: retain a semblance of order, and in this way meet the greatest challenge of life, which is always nothing more nor less than how to get through another day. For the sake of his three daughters, the doctor had adhered to the chronic custom of Sundays. He always came in the church door as the priest appeared from the sacristy, left mid-blessing in the last Sign of the Cross, before Could I ask you just one question, Doctor?

For a decade, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Posts and Telegraphs, a plan had been established to consider the value of a national television station. Like all aspirational, unbudgeted policies, progress was indeterminate, but, following anecdotal evidence of Christmas dinners in Dublin paused for the BBC broadcast of the young Queen’s speech, and fearing the country they had won back getting away from them out through the television, the government bit the bullet, and the national station was born. Teilifis Éireann had begun broadcasting the previous New Year’s Eve. The first months’ programmes were unseen in Faha but reviewed by a general hearsay: it was no radio. But when, in July, The Late Late Show went behind the curtains of the country, by accident of budget discovering that what Irish people most wanted to watch was Irish people talking, and westerns, Mrs Prendergast had sent word to town that she wanted a set.

It was not only himself that was exhausted, Doctor Troy thought, and not for the first or last time wished that Annie Mooney was alive. The wish was its own doorway and lent proof to the adage that the loved are never dead. No sooner did her name pass across his mind than she was the same as there.

The whole of the interior was without a straight line, each wall only meeting by the obligation for a ceiling. Under the sisters’ jurisdiction, it was decorous and compact, with a tangible air of fierce endeavour. In here Philo and Gertie sold stuck-together sweets, shards of toffee, dusty chocolates, cream, pink and yellow bars, and geometric shards of bright-coloured stickiness without name or wrapper, dips from a jar of fizz, single cigarettes, half-cigarettes and damp matches that would strike if you kept them a day beside the fire. They took in sewing, darning and what have you, offering a compendium of services that expanded by necessity, and by stratagems wily and many devolving a way for single women to support themselves.

The curate’s eyes went to the headstone, and he nodded slowly. All grief is private, you can only come to the door, and so he said nothing, only ‘Patrick’.

He raised his head and looked up beyond the horizon of his hat. 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. For some years, Jack Troy had not been able to say aloud the first Latin line of the Apostles’ Creed, could not bring himself to pray what he did not know to be fact. He could not say he believed in God, but neither could he say that he did not. In his reasoning, he was of a mind too peculiar to adhere to any doctrine, and he could not allow himself the comfort of a divine mercy, for he was too suspicious of anything that pardoned humanity. But still. 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.

There were surprise engagements of short duration and others of many years that both ended with hasty trips to Irwin’s jewellers in Roches Street or McDowell’s the Happy Ring House in Dublin, the date for the wedding set. Babies come early in that family was a saying that needed no translation, for men were men and women women, and, in Sonny Cooney’s summation, the dish always runs away with the spoon. (It would be another ten years before Sonny would have to concede a dish sometimes ran away with a dish, a spoon with a spoon, not to speak of forks.)

And yet here he was, paused in the avenue with the engine running, six house calls to make, feeling sorrow for a wounded holly tree. It disturbed him. But that it portended something was a thought he would not pursue. He rolled up the window, went down the avenue and attempted, in that fatuous phrase, to put it out of his mind. That there is no such place for putting things was proven by the number of times the image of the tree returned to Doctor Troy that morning and afternoon.