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You have nothing to say to your mother. If you started, you would say the wrong things and you wouldn’t want it to end that way.
‘Well, at least that much is done. I have only the one left now and, God knows, I could be left with him till the end of my days.’ ‘You don’t think he’ll marry?’ ‘Who’d take him? A bloody nuisance, he is.
He turns silent and stares again at the groom. ‘When a woman makes up her mind, you can’t stand in her way. You are best out of it.’
Weddings are hard. The drink flows and the words come out and he has to be there. A man loses his daughter to a younger man. A woman sees her son throwing himself away on a lesser woman. It is something they half believe. There’s the expense, the sentiment, the no going back. Any time promises are made in public, people cry.
Some nights he gets down on his knees when the housekeeper is gone and the curtains are pulled tight across the windows and prays to God to show him how to be a priest.
It’s what she once wanted but two people hardly ever want the same thing at any given point in life. It is sometimes the hardest part of being human.
Down at the river, the sleepy brown water runs on. The peace is deeper as always simply because it’s still there.
The silence is like every silence; each man is glad of it and glad, too, that it won’t last.
‘She gave me a second chance but it was never the same. Nothing was ever the same.’ ‘Christ,’ says Leyden, pulling away. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you.’
She sometimes found herself standing in the barn watching her fowl pecking the seed, feeling happy until she realised she wasn’t.
They would leave remembering not the fine old house that always impressed them or the man with the worried look that owned it or the strange flock of teenagers but the woman with the dark brown hair which got looser as the night went on and her pale hands plucking unlikely stories like green plums that ripened with the telling at her hearth.
Secretly, he knew that the place gave him more satisfaction than his wife and children ever would.
He has a capacity for wonder, sees great significance in common things others dismiss simply because they happen every day.
She stands there in her apron on a Tuesday wishing she’d married another man, a Dubliner, perhaps, who would stroll down to a butcher’s shop and buy whatever she craved, a man who couldn’t care less what neighbours think.
Some things she will never understand. Why is the winter sun whiter than July’s? Why hadn’t the girl’s father ever written? She had waited for so long.
No longer is it a question of if or why. She must now decide when, exactly, she will leave.
Now that so much has been said there is nothing left to say.
It’s the first admission he’s ever made. If he starts down that road there might be no end to it. Even in his surest moments Deegan never really believed there would be an end to anything.
Her letters, in recent times, without ever changing course, had taken on a different tone and he had heard that another man, a schoolteacher, was grazing a pony on her father’s land.
It was the easiest thing in the world to humiliate somebody.
Women’s minds were made of glass: so clear and yet their thoughts broke easily, yielding to other glassy thoughts that were even harder. It was enough to attract a man and frighten him all at once.
Everything was made for something else in whose presence things ran smoothly.
When he closed his eyes, the same old anxiety was there shining like dark water at the back of his mind but he soon fell asleep.
If only, in her adult life, her unfounded beliefs could be so abruptly disproved. To be an adult was, for the greatest part, to be in darkness.
They went around in cars they couldn’t afford, with small children who’d never tasted their mother’s milk, committing adultery at the drop of a hat. In fact, hats didn’t drop fast enough for them.
Putting the past into words seemed idle when the past had already happened. The past was treacherous, moving slowly along. It would catch up in its own time. And in any case, what could be done? Remorse altered nothing and grief just brought it back.
Stack, like every man who has never known a woman, believed he knew a great deal about women.
The experience was like almost everything; it wasn’t a patch on what it could have been.
If only I could cut out the man, Margaret thought, I might have a child. A man was a nuisance and a necessity.
He laughed. It was a queer sort of laugh, closer to sadness than amusement. For a moment, she imagined his life and felt for him. Did anyone ever know what another was going through?
She would never forgive him for that. In any case, she wasn’t the type to forgive; forgiving might mean forgetting and she preferred to hold onto her bitterness, and her memory. But always she blamed herself.
So, being mad was the same as having your wits about you, Margaret thought. Sometimes everybody was right. For most of the time people crazy or sober were stumbling in the dark, reaching with outstretched hands for something they didn’t even know they wanted.
‘Do you know nothing?’ she said. ‘No.’ ‘Neither do I.’ ‘Aren’t we blessed?’
Now that Stack knew a woman, there grew the knowledge that he would never understand women. They could smell rain, read doctors’ handwriting, hear the grass growing.
