Dublin for hours and hours, just talking and talking. I think he’s probably a bit of a mess underneath. I quite like that really!
Soon the world of the family and friends Hannah and Susan shared had almost disappeared from the letters; so too had the references to what Hannah’s letters must have contained about her life in Palestine. Stefan was very aware of that. He found himself scanning the later letters, not for the pieces of the jigsaw he was actually meant to be putting together, but for the pieces of the other one, the one that was about Hannah Rosen. Sometimes there was still a glimpse of that, buried among her friend’s preoccupations.
When I met John tonight we didn’t talk very much. We finally did what we’d both wanted to do at the end of that first night, when we walked through Dublin. You always tell me I use the word love too easily. You don’t even like using it when you’re talking about Benny, and you’re marrying him! Tell me which of us is the more confused? Anyway, I’ll pretend I’m not talking about love even if I am. You’re the only person I can say all this to. I quite like how secretive and exciting it all is. Sounds a bit daft of course. I know you’ll think so! But then you’ve got a nation to build. You’ve got to be serious. I don’t suppose it’ll last long – after all he is a priest! It’ll get a lot less exciting once guilt catches up with him. But just now he hasn’t got time!
As the letters went on they were less and less about excitement and more about unhappiness and isolation – from her family and her community, even from the friends she had at UCD. It seemed to Stefan as if some of the things Susan said suggested that Hannah reciprocated those feelings at times – not of unhappiness perhaps, but at least of uncertainty. Soon, however, there was scarcely any room in Susan Field’s letters for anybody else, even her best friend. And then, in middle of it all, she found out she was pregnant.
Well, I told him. He started on about leaving the priesthood and meeting his obligations. God, the only thing worse than the mess I’m in is the thought of a lifetime with a man who’s ‘meeting his obligations’. I just shut him up, but then he surprised me. He asked me if I wanted to keep the baby, and when I told him I didn’t, he said he’d help. There’s a man in Merrion Square, a proper doctor I think, German, all very private and swanky. He knows somebody John knows. I don’t know how. I can’t say I care. I’ve seen him and it’s all very easy. It’ll be sorted out next week. John and I won’t see each other again. He’s leaving UCD. It seems a long time since we felt happy with each other. I’m not sure we ever did, whatever we told ourselves.
The last two letters were much shorter. The animation that had filled the others, even when she was writing about unhappiness, had been drained out of her. There was only emptiness. Now she just wanted it over with.
Merrion Square tomorrow. I don’t know what then. It was all about nothing in the end. In between I seem to have lost touch with all the things I cared about. I can’t even remember what they were. I’m a long way from everyone. I wish you were closer, Hannah. I suppose the blues are inevitable. But they’ll go, I guess. By the way, if I use the word love too much, you don’t use it enough. If you don’t love Benny, then making the desert bloom and filling it with babies won’t be enough. I don’t know so much about myself any more, but I know that about you. Anyway, here I go!
That was the final letter. It was dated the twenty-fifth of July. The end was bleaker than Hannah had made it sound. He knew what darkness was, and he could feel it in Susan Field’s final letter. There was a time when he had thought about walking away from it all. In Ireland the boat to somewhere was always an option; for some it offered new hope, for others it was the final expression of despair. He had even thought about another journey once, the darkest journey. For the Greeks you took a boat for that one too. It had been no more than a thought that he left behind. He had his son Tom to pull him out. What did Susan Field have? In that last letter it didn’t feel like very much.
6. Kilranelagh Hill
As the train pulled into the station at Baltinglass it followed the road and the River Slaney, black now under still thickening cloud. Beyond the river, Baltinglass Hill rose up above the town, a great pyramid of green. Three thousand years ago the people who lived there had buried their dead on its slopes and had looked down from the stone fort at the summit, as a new people arrived. The newcomers had probably followed the river too. And then the people who watched from the fort were gone, even the words of their language had disappeared, unremembered for thousands of years. They left only the ring of stones on the hilltop and the megaliths that once covered their dead.
Stefan put Susan Field’s letters into the inside pocket of his overcoat. He looked across the river at the hill he had climbed so many times as a boy, and at the ruins of the abbey that had stood below it for a thousand years, sitting next to the small Church of Ireland church that had replaced it. The abbey was not quite forgotten, but it was another place of tumbled stones and unremembered words; it was where the dead were buried now, his grandparents and his great-grandparents among them. The train juddered to a halt with the grinding of steel on steel and a long, weary hiss of steam.
In front of the wooden station buildings, a tall, bearded man in his sixties stood on the platform. Next to him, tense with anticipation, his eyes fixed on the train, was a boy of four. The old man had Stefan Gillespie’s dark eyes and so had the boy. David Gillespie and his grandson Tom waited, and then Tom ran forward as a carriage door opened and his father got out. Stefan folded his son into his arms and lifted him up, laughing, for no reason other than that Tom was laughing, with the simple happiness of seeing him.
‘Jesus, you’re a weight, Tom Gillespie! What’s Oma feeding you?’
‘Will you carry me then?’
‘I will not!’ But he carried him a little way along the platform anyway, till they reached David. Inevitably Stefan’s father was looking quizzically at his face and the evidence of the beating. ‘And I’d a run in with a feller before you say anything else about it. It’s nothing but bruises so.’
‘Did you lock him up, Daddy?’ asked Tom, impressed.
‘Well, not exactly. It was sorted out.’ He laughed. His father just nodded, suspecting there was more to it than nothing but bruises, but he asked no questions. It was clear Stefan wouldn’t be saying any more.
‘Tom was at Mass with the Lawlors. He wanted to stay and walk back with you. And I fancied a bit of a walk myself. We had nothing better to do, did we, Tom?’ It was a two-mile walk from the farm on the saddle of land behind Baltinglass Hill and another two back up again.
Tom took his father’s hand as they walked to the road.
‘Is the trike in the window at Clery’s still, the way you told me?’
‘When did I tell you that?’
‘You told me last week, and the week before.’
‘And the week before, ever since you saw the picture in the paper.’
‘Is it there though?’
‘I’d say it is.’
‘Do you look every day?’
‘I maybe miss the odd one.’
The town began just beyond the station. The buildings closed in on either side of the road and shut out the fields along the River Slaney; the blank, stone walls of the mill on one side and low two-storey houses and shops on the other. As they crossed over the bridge the water from the mill race made the river noisier and more urgent, though as it spilled out on the other side it resumed its leisurely course. Again the hill rose up, this time over the wide main street. Here some of the buildings were higher; the bank, the solicitor’s. There were occasional splashes of colour on the rendered fronts of the small-windowed shops and houses, but mostly they were grey, and mostly the grey plaster was crumbling. In the square, next to the statue of Sam MacAllister, who had died in the hills beyond the town in the last days of the rebellion of 1798, was a Christmas tree, yet to be decorated. Beyond the square was the Catholic church.