The Weight of Love

  Hilary Fannin

  * * *

  the weight of love

  Contents

  Prologue: London, October 1995

  One: Ireland, May 2018

  Two: London, October 1995

  Three: Cork, May 2018

  Four: London, September 1995

  Five: Ireland, May 2018

  Six: London, October 1995

  Seven: Ireland, May 2018

  Eight: London, December 1995

  Nine: Dublin, May 2018

  Ten: London, May 2018

  Epilogue: Dublin, July 2018

  About the Author

  Hilary Fannin is a playwright and newspaper columnist. Her plays have been performed in Ireland, London, Europe and Canada. She was writer in association at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in its centenary year, 2004. Her plays are published by Methuen.

  Having written for The Irish Times for almost two decades, she now contributes a weekly personal column to the paper. Her memoir Hopscotch was published by Doubleday in 2015. The Weight of Love is her first novel.

  Hilary lives in Dublin and has two sons, Peter and Jake.

  ALSO BY HILARY FANNIN

  Hopscotch: A Memoir

  For Giles

  PROLOGUE

  London, October 1995

  Robin looked across the yard. At first, he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing: Joseph, whom he had forgotten might turn up, standing talking to Ruth. Around them, freed by the ringing bell, children fled the school like uncaged birds. Halted, Robin stood at the staffroom window and watched Ruth’s head incline and the toecap of her boot lift and graze the ground while Joseph unravelled his persona: artist and occasional invalid, and not necessarily in that order. As drizzle scribbled on the windowpane, Robin stood and watched his hopes of spending the evening alone with Ruth evaporate.

  ‘There you are,’ Joseph said, as Robin walked towards them. ‘Apparently you two are going to see something at the Renoir. Am I interrupting?’

  ‘Yes, you are. Ruth, this is Joe. Joe,’ Robin said flatly, ‘is an old friend.’

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘Cup of tea on the way?’ Joseph asked. ‘I promise I won’t detain you.’

  At Joseph’s suggestion, the three of them left the schoolyard and walked down Judd Street to a cafe where they could get out of the rain and continue their introductions. Winding their way through the wet streets, their conversation curtailed by the traffic and the sharpening rain, allegiances were brewing and rivalries being stoked, and it would be tempting to say that by the time the three of them had turned down Woburn Walk, a narrow Dickensian passageway where the window of the Sorrento Cafe glowed pale and yellow in the dusk, what would happen had somehow already happened, the loving and mourning had already begun and already ended. Even though, in real time, as the rain fell over London on that autumn evening, Ruth had only known Joseph for an instant.

  Reaching the Sorrento (which Ruth and Joseph would later rename the Kurdistani cafe), Robin pushed open the door for Ruth, and Joseph followed her inside. The cafe was warm, sour with the smell of the weather, and they took a table by the bay window, looking out through the thick glass at wet flagstones and a neat little man with an umbrella nipping through a wrought-iron gate opposite and down to the tailor’s in the basement. And there was something raw and unsettled in the air between the three of them that was more than just the dubious freedom of a Friday afternoon.

  Two solemn, baggy-eyed old men sitting at the next table paused their conversation to look at the newcomers when they came in. Robin, deep in the cave of his new coat and wondering if he should have bowed to the inevitable and simply gone home, watched the old men watching them and saw what the old men saw: two young men, one dark, shabby and assured, one fair and reticent, and a young woman in her mid-twenties, small and watchful underneath her green scarf.

  Joseph, unaware of being observed himself, slouched down at the table opposite Ruth, looking at her in that unabashed way he had of looking at people, as if he was trying to figure out the puzzle of her construction, weighing up skin and bone, categorizing shape and shadow, measuring, proportioning. Soaked to the skin in his ratty jacket, he was looking at Ruth’s face over the previous occupants’ dirty crockery as if he was trying to memorize her, and Ruth, braving his scrutiny, was staring right back. Robin, wearily disappointed and unsurprised by the turn of events, briefly considered putting his fist through Joseph’s delicate face and blurring his painterly vision before he himself sat down. Instead, tethered to kindness (even when he felt unkind and rebellious) and knowing that Ruth was poor and Joseph poorer, he picked up the dirty cups and went to the counter to place their order. And the old men, absorbing the presence of these ordinary strangers in the damp cafe, resumed their conversation.

  While Robin waited at the counter, Ruth, defeated by Joseph’s stare, looked away and began listening to the old men’s talk. They were speaking of disasters. Small, personal disasters – the kind that would never make headlines. Cherished disasters, Ruth thought, aware of Joseph’s gaze shifting away from her. The old men’s stories were, she considered, smooth as pebbles from the number of times they’d been pulled from memory and fondled with words and sighs. One of the men was remembering how, decades before, his wife had left their infant son parked in his pram outside a hardware shop on Pentonville Road and walked all the way home with a brand-new whistling kettle before she noticed the child’s absence. And although parents and infant had shortly been reunited, the boy had grown up so entirely devoid of talent or luck that his father strongly suspected the child had been switched.

  Ruth turned to look at Joseph and saw that he had taken something from his pocket: a notebook and pencil. The second old man, commiserating with the first, agreed that his companion’s son was indeed a fool and, as Joseph picked up his pencil and began to draw, recited his own story about falling from a stepladder while unscrewing a spent light bulb and almost lobotomizing himself on the contents of his wife’s much-loved ornamental umbrella stand.

  ‘It could be worse,’ the first old man soothed. ‘We could be halfway up a Kurdistani mountain.’

  ‘We could indeed,’ agreed his companion, sipping his tea. ‘We could indeed be halfway up a Kurdistani mountain.’

  Ruth reached across the table for the notebook, and Joseph handed it to her, and she saw that he had made a line drawing of the old men, a free-flowing yet perfect miniature. Joseph smiled at her and she held his gaze, and Robin, returning with a tray of tea and three stale pastries, already felt like an outsider.

  Joseph took tea with his sugar, pouring sachet after sachet into his cup while he and Robin talked about teaching and art. Joseph, arrogant and combative, leaning back in his chair and rolling a cigarette, said that he could never work in a classroom, no matter how skint he was (and fuck it, he was skint now). He refused to waste his time, he said, perched on a radiator, talking about light and the absence of light, while forty students stuffed putty rubbers up their adolescent noses and fantasized about shagging each other blind. And Robin said that, as he had no particular objection to people thinking about shagging each other, blind or otherwise, while he attempted to engage the remainder of their imaginations, teaching suited him just fine.

  ‘You’re a good teacher,’ Ruth said, breaking her silence because she knew, from the way he spoke to the students in the school where they both worked, that Robin was a patient man.

  ‘Thank you,’ Robin replied, and for the first time that afternoon he looked directly at her. Ruth looked away and out of the window at the passageway outside, so arcane, so quaint, that she half expected to see women in crinolines wandering through the drizzle and was surprised when, instead, two emaciated young girls, grey-faced
and frantic, rushed down the wet road, cropped hair sticking to their bony faces.

  ‘So what’s on at the Renoir?’ Joseph was asking.

  ‘An Irish film,’ Robin replied.

  ‘A film about small-town Irish friendship,’ Ruth interrupted, and the words sounded so much more dismissive than she’d intended.

  ‘It’s probably too late anyway,’ Robin conceded, and Ruth felt angry with him for sounding so resigned.

  ‘I never promised you anything,’ she wanted to say, but the words stayed inside her.

  The coffee drunk, Ruth’s pastry uneaten, Robin stood and put on his gaberdine. Ruth saw that the rain that had earlier tattooed his shoulders had dried into the fabric, and briefly she wondered if the rain had been trying to leave a message they had failed to decipher. She stood, picked up her father’s old satchel, which she carried everywhere and which had nothing much inside except a paperback, bookmarked by his tattered photograph, and her purse, and put her hand on Robin’s arm.

  ‘I’m sorry about the film,’ she said, and she meant it.

  ‘Some other time maybe.’

  ‘I should probably go too,’ Joseph said, buttoning up his skimpy jacket. Ruth looked down at the table and thought she recognized her own profile etched out in the spilt sugar.

  The Kurdistani mountain men had begun talking about disasters again. Ruth slowly rewound her scarf, delaying her departure, so that she and her companions could listen. The old man who had fallen from the stepladder and almost lobotomized himself on his wife’s umbrella stand was telling his friend how, after his tumble, he had got to his feet and stormed upstairs to berate his wife, only to find her in her bath, the water cold, her body grey.

  ‘Dead as a doornail,’ he said, as if the memory still confounded him, and before he reached into the water for her, he said, before he even called out her name, he had wondered if, at the moment of her departure, she had pushed him off his pedestal.

  Leaving the cafe together, they walked towards Russell Square, unwilling, despite the silence that had settled over the three of them, to part. Reaching the square, Joseph, searching his pockets for skins to roll another cigarette, found a forgotten ten-pound note and offered them a celebratory drink in The Lamb. It would, Ruth persuaded herself, have been churlish to say no.

  Later, much later, that evening they ended up in the pub in Camden Town. It was there that Joseph asked Ruth if she thought the dead ever truly left, ever really relinquished their hold, and she said the dead were as empty as her glass. And Robin took Ruth’s empty glass and Joseph’s empty glass up to the bar to buy another round, and Joseph said that he thought death was a spectrum and that the recent dead were almost present, were swathes of colour, warm as a breeze, listening and lingering and waiting to grow cold.

  When Robin came back with the drinks, they moved outside and sat on a picnic table under hanging baskets withered by the onset of winter. Crowded together, sitting on the tabletop in a line like expectant children, their feet on the bench, they drank a toast to the dead wife of the old man in the cafe and to her malevolent spirit in the bath. Ruth, drunk and cold, shivered, and Robin took off his coat and spread it over her shoulders. And then they drank a toast to Robin’s 100 per cent wool gaberdine coat, which had been an anniversary present from his girlfriend, whom he didn’t have the courage to leave.

  ‘It’s a very fine coat,’ Joseph said, inhaling his cigarette. ‘Maybe love grows.’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t,’ Robin replied.

  And then, because they were talking about love and death, or because Ruth thought they were talking about love and death, she told them a story about a delivery boy called Len whom she had quietly fucked in her aunt’s utility room in New Jersey some months beforehand, on a night when she had been so washed out with sadness she could barely speak. Surefooted now, picking her words with ease across the running stream of her drunkenness, she told them that although she had only known the boy for an hour, maybe less, her memory of him was crystal clear. She told them how, on that first night of a sad Long Island holiday, just weeks after her father’s death and with her grief-stunned, jet-lagged mother upstairs in the bed she would later share with her, she had made love alongside the softly rumbling washer-dryer to the gentle boy, who had small hands and curly hair and a weekend job delivering delicatessen meats to the suburbs, conveying late-night cold cuts to households weighted down by friends and relations.

  The boy, she told them, had introduced himself as she stood looking at the stars in her aunt’s clipped garden. He’d told her he was an astronomy student and had pointed out Mars, pinkish over the horizon, and a blur of light below that he said was a rarely seen constellation. Ruth suspected it was just the reflection of the lights on the highway, just traffic trailing towards the toll plazas, creeping towards Manhattan, which, had she had the courage to smash through the awful torpor of the night, would have been her choice of destination too.

  ‘What is it you’re looking for?’ the boy had asked her, and she’d told him she was looking for signs of life, and she’d laughed, and he’d kissed her, and she’d been grateful for his touch, grateful that she was alive enough to notice that his tongue tasted like his cinnamon-flavoured gum. Afterwards, she told Robin and Joseph, the boy had driven away in his refrigerated truck and she had spent the weekend looming around the turkey roll and the pastrami, wondering if she’d ever see him again.

  ‘Did you want to see him again?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘No. No, I didn’t.’

  Joseph bent down and blew fallen ash from his cigarette off her thigh, and when the ash was gone she saw that there was a tiny hole in her tights, her skin just visible through the aperture, like a distant star in the night sky.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said then, although she had no idea why she was apologizing or to whom.

  ‘Sorry for what?’ Joseph asked, as Robin, who had listened to her story in silence, stood and went into the bar for a slash. And Joseph picked up her satchel and slung it across his back and turned his collar up against the rain, and Ruth slipped out from under Robin’s warm coat. And when Robin returned to the table, they were gone. There were just the withered baskets and Ruth’s glass, half full or half empty, and his coat, a carapace that still held her warmth. Robin picked up the coat and walked back into the bar while, all over the rain-washed city, people were losing and finding each other, and beginning and ending and ending and beginning, ordinary strangers spooling and unspooling into the night.

  ONE

  Ireland, May 2018

  Robin left his class as soon as he got the call, and picked up his jacket from the staffroom, which was empty bar Harry Coleman sleeping deeply on a swivel chair.

  ‘Rough night?’ Robin asked, waking him.

  ‘Outrageous.’

  ‘Go in and intimidate 3E for a bit, will you? I’ve left them unsupervised.’

  ‘Skiving?’

  ‘I need to get on the road. My mother’s taken a turn for the worse.’

  Dublin to Bantry in just over four hours. A lone bullock stood stock-still on the motorway outside Fermoy. Transfixed. Stunned. Elemental. Traffic ground to a gobsmacked crawl.

  Robin spent the night in a chair by her bed, woke to the yell of peacocks on the hospital lawn; three peacocks, strutting around in broken circles as if they’d lost their wedding party. He wondered if he might be hallucinating. The door opened. A woman introduced herself, offered him tea from the breakfast trolley in the corridor.

  ‘I’m Joy,’ she said, coming in and handing him a cup and saucer. ‘Biscuit?’ she asked. He declined. Joy stroked his mother’s hand. He watched from the window. ‘Poor lamb,’ Joy said. ‘Poor little lamb.’

  ‘Peacocks?’ Robin asked, to steady himself.

  ‘Full of themselves,’ Joy replied, returning to the urn and closing the door behind her.

  Soon after, two nurses came in to change his mother and make her comfortable and told him to go into the ward kitchen, where he could ma
ke himself another cup of tea. He complied. The consultant will be in to see you at eleven, they told him when he returned, leaving him to stand watch over his mother, wax-still on crisp sheets, her oxygen tube secured by surgical tape.

  The consultant arrived at quarter to one.

  ‘There will be no recovery,’ he said.

  ‘Her hands,’ Robin said. ‘She was a potter. I’ve never seen her hands so still.’

  ‘Would I know her work?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ Robin replied.

  ‘I suggest you go home and telephone whoever needs to be telephoned.’

  Robin got back into the car and drove south, stopping at the garage just outside town for diesel, bread and milk. He arrived at Popes Cove late afternoon.

  Two low cottages stood side by side, their gable end shoulder to the wind. His mother’s neighbour, Suzi, was standing beside the ornamental wishing well in her front garden, alongside her gnomes, waiting for Robin to turn off the engine. He could have wept. Gnomes? Dwarfs? He counted six of them as he followed her inside.

  ‘I telephoned the hospital,’ she said. ‘They told me you were here.’

  She told him to sit down, said she was going to make tea. ‘You must be desperate for a cup.’

  ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I’m fine.’

  He wanted to go next door, let himself in, shower, sleep. Sit and look out at the water.

  Suzi went into her kitchen to boil the kettle. He turned on his phone. Nothing.

  A cloth dachshund with a tartan bolero was sitting on the chair Suzi had indicated – a draught excluder. There was no draught; Robin would have killed for a draught. Waves of heat rolled off the radiators. Early May, milder than most. He sat down. From the opposite chair a rag doll with a rosebud mouth looked at him like he was a serial killer. He stood up, put the dachshund on the floor. Sat down again. China shepherdesses multiplied on the mantelpiece, net curtains iced the glass. Coasters on the occasional table – English country garden. This was an occasion, he supposed, for an occasional table.