Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain

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СКАЧАТЬ that. She could have chosen to walk around the edge of the room, after all.

      ‘I always know where to find you, Rosie,’ Andy Sutton said, and being Andy he said it every time he came to the house. Andy was in his early sixties, but he seemed even older because he looked after us all, including my friend Peg, and my friend Tessa, whose cousin in fact he was. Andy worked for a charity called No-Need and in summer he collected goats and hens and rabbits and pigs around Ireland and drove truck-loads of them across to Gatwick Airport in England, to be flown out to places that were so poor that the people could cope with only the smallest livestock. The rest of the year there were regular meetings at No-Need headquarters and he came up from the country for them and stayed with his mother Pearl, a few streets away in Kilbride.

      He’d open the front door and stick his head into the kitchen.

      ‘Is Min asleep?’ he’d whisper.

      And I’d whisper back, ‘She either is or she’s pretending to be.’

      ‘Do you never move from that table?’ he’d say, and go out the back to check the thermostat on the boiler or to fetch the ladder to change a high light-bulb. Or he’d stagger back into the room under a sack of logs from the trees on his farm.

      My aunt, upstairs, would detect a presence and soon the madly animated voices on her transistor radio, or the sweet swoops of singers – she turned up the volume for singing – would filter down through the ceiling. Then whoever was in the kitchen could talk normally.

      Other times, the quiet would be broken by dance music from next door and I’d know that Reeny was back from Spain and that she’d be in any minute to see us, tanned and jovial and carrying ham, or peaches, or chocolates – some gift that wasn’t alcoholic. And once in a while the fellow who did old-age pensioners’ hair in the home brought his gear in and I’d hand the kitchen table over to him. And every two weeks I’d tactfully go to the library when a psychologist and some sort of nurse assistant came to see Min as part of a service for elderly people with depression that Reeny – a virtuoso manipulator of the welfare system – had discovered. Reeny filled in the questionnaire too, but when the team came to assess her she had to admit that she’d only signed up because she liked getting something for nothing.

      ‘Your aunt is very low in herself,’ the psychologist would say reverently, when I was seeing her out.

      ‘She goes to the pub too often,’ I’d say.

      But the lady didn’t want to hear that. She stuck strictly to her own turf.

      I’d turn back in to the kitchen and pick up my book, and the sound would come from upstairs of Min scrolling from station to station on the little transistor she kept on the pillow, so near to her face that it was half-covered by the frizz of wild, colourless hair.

      And I could tell too from the rhythm of her heels on the stairs – I’d had the old carpet taken off and the wood stripped and varnished – whether she’d finally got out of bed for some plan that included me, or whether she was going to the pub.

      ‘Rosie!’ she’d exclaim in a friendly way as she came down the last two steps. ‘What has you sitting so quietly?’

      This was a rhetorical question, of course, and it made no difference whether I answered or not. During the autumn I had the back door open to the yard. I loved that, the lozenge of light on the kitchen floor, the little yellow curtains swishing softly in the warm breeze; and she’d smile too at the genial scene. But as it grew colder her eyes would go immediately to the hearth.

      ‘That’s a great fire you have there!’ she’d say absent-mindedly, and she’d have already moved in to perch on the little blue armchair and pick up the tongs to add a few lumps of coal, or, if the fire was sullen, to carefully poke a few sticks into it at points where, when they lit, they would transform the whole thing. She was a genius at fires. ‘Thank God for coal!’ she’d say, shuttling fine slack onto her creation with the lightest of touches.

      Sometimes, carried on by enthusiasm, she’d even refer to the fire in the range of the house she grew up in, in Stoneytown, out on Milbay Point.

      I came to attention whenever she said that name. It was a quarry-workers’ settlement on the edge of the sea that she dismissed, but that to me was as exotic as Shangri-la.

      ‘Freezing we’d be in that oul’ place,’ she’d snort. ‘If the boats couldn’t make it over from Milbay to take the stone, we used to have no coal,’ she’d say, and she’d draw her chair right up to our fire with a dramatic shudder. ‘We could be weeks waiting on a bit of coal!’

      I used to wonder why the fire mattered so much to her. Then one day I realised that in remote parts of Ireland in the dark, poverty-stricken 1930s, the fire was life itself. The range in a kitchen must have been the god of the house. People were completely dependent on it for cooking, for baking bread, for heating, for drying. There were woods near Stoneytown, Min conceded, but surely to God I knew that beechwood was no good for burning in a range?

      She’d have her coat on ready to go out. But she got such satisfaction out of coaxing the fire to a blaze that she’d prop her big handbag on her lap and sit there peacefully looking into the flames, her face made young again by their pink reflections.

      Not every day, but two or three times a week, she’d strain up then to the little mirror in the scullery to swipe on lipstick and drag a brush through her hair. A lot of people smiled quite unconsciously when they saw her because she was only four feet, eleven inches high and her eyes were as dark as a marmoset’s. I knew that she was nothing like as cute as she looked, but I often smiled at her little ways, too. Helplessly.

      Then she’d carefully detach the page with the crossword from the rest of yesterday’s newspaper and go off to the Kilbride Inn. She did yesterday’s crossword because the answers were in today’s so she could look them up if she was stuck. It was accepted that I wasn’t welcome to accompany her.

      I’d say to myself, why does she bother going up there? She only sits by herself anyway. I don’t understand her. And I don’t know that much about her, either, beyond the fact that her mother died when she was ten, and her father disappeared a year or so after I was born. Then I’d think – what does it matter whether you understand her or not? You’re stuck with her, anyway. She’d been a mother to me since the week I was born, but there’s no law that says you have to understand even a mother, much less an aunt who took over when her sister died. And I’d think, without resentment, it doesn’t bother her that she doesn’t understand me. What’s more, most of the people in the world don’t try to understand each other. Analysis is a disease of the Western, educated classes.

      And yet – I remember examining this thought slowly, sitting in the quiet kitchen with Bell for once content to be on my lap – people can accept that the partners they choose are separate, other people. They can make love – I had, often – without having a clue to what was going through their lover’s head. They can look down on the dead body of a wife or husband and think, ‘I never really knew that person.’ But the woman who brought you up? I never in my whole life met anybody who didn’t feel entitled to know that woman.

      I doubted if I would recognise any of the places in Min’s inner landscape. And what did she know of the miasma of images that kept me sitting dreamily at the kitchen table, as I wandered lazily among them. The seashore at dusk near Dakar, with the big crabs ambling down the sand into the even line of white foam. Clack-clack they went, and the waves went shush-shush. Or the oilcloth on the table on the grass outside a farmhouse on the Rigi and the taste of sharp cheese grated over fried eggs. Or schoolchildren, in Flanders, coming СКАЧАТЬ