The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

A quote from some Japanese writer set against a pretty sunset (for some reason). It says: – The masochist is always in control.

There he was, eight long years after the whipped-off sheet and the broken chair. Daddo. Phil spoke about bluebells, the difference of the American woods to the spongy bogs of Offaly, and how he missed the wren here, he missed the smallness of Irish birds, and the wren especially who was the king of them all. He mentioned courting his wife, who had walked with him though bluebell woods when he was a young man. She was from Dublin and unfamiliar with the countryside, and that, in a way, was what his early poetry was for. It was his gift to her. A posy. No, What was the word? A nosegay. They lived together in Dublin for some time he said, but she got sick, unfortunately, and the marriage did not survive.

‘Unfortunately,’ she said. Speaking the word aloud into the room helped break some difficulty she had, sitting at her own dining table watching her dead father online.

Phil had a drinker’s stomach, a smoker’s cough. He was killed by an early and catastrophic bleed to the lung. And when he went, Carmel thought, a room in her head filled with earth.

It was so easy to hate this man – the facts spoke for themselves – but it was still hard to dislike him. And it was devastatingly easy to love him. To flock around and keen when he died, because all the words died with him.

Listening to him now, at a distance of more than forty years, his daughter felt again – as though she held them in either hand – the two, weighed syllables he gave to her for a name: Car-Mel. He said it as though she was the centre of the sweet, she was the salt honey dripped across your ice cream.

I am spread wide, St Kevin crucified in one outstretched hand a robin’s empty clutch of blue and in the other, a single feather a tuft of down. My hatchlings gone my heart a bare tree, the birds hop through for company. In the pool of my eye, the mayfly splits to show a mayfly more beautiful clambering out of its own husk and the heads of birds bob, fix, bob, fix, in the gathering dusk.

Carmel stomped back into the house, suddenly convinced of something. And there it was. The lost watch was on Phil’s wrist. Unbelievable. It had been there all along. She spread her fingers on the trackpad to enlarge the image. The same tan-coloured leather strap, the same creamy iridescence fanned out from the centre of the dial.

The way to see the bird you want to see, is to stop looking for it, we all know this. You have to undo your gaze, let the bird happen without you.

We flew up to Cairns and did the reef, then went on to Denpasar for some hotel life on the way to Nusa Penida. I chose this island because of the jalak Bali, a white mynah with an easy-going, loose white crest, and vivid blue skin around the eye, very chatty and imitative, and so endangered there are only a hundred or so mating couples left.

Many years ago, I met a writer who talked of his custody arrangements with his young son: “My wife got sick,” he explained, almost incidentally. “And we split up.” It seemed such a natural thing to say, it was some time before I considered the idea that he had deserted a woman with a small child because of her medical issues. Conversations about husbands going weirdly absent when their wives are ill are commonplace among my female friends. The problem is not one of male self-absorption but something more like denial, fear, or even anguish.

The book is concerned with inheritance, of both trauma and of wonder. It seems to me that women switch from Marthas to Marys from generation to generation: some get to tend and others to believe.