Holding Her Breath by Eimear Ryan

Author:Eimear Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

At first she just looks at the pictures. She finds a thick photo album at the top of one of the boxes, an old-fashioned one with acetate pages, containing photographs of Ben from his childhood right up until just before his death. Someone—Lydia, she assumes—has taken great care to arrange the photos chronologically. She flicks through them, watching Ben age rapidly.

Some of the photos she has seen before, but many are new to her: Ben aged six, outside the forge, in short pants and suspenders, with his father. (There are no photographs of his mother.) Ben after winning a scholarship to St. Flannan’s in Ennis. Reddish hair, knobbly knees. Ben at the university in a cap and gown. He and Lydia on honeymoon in the Lake District, gorgeous and young. Their wedding a simple registry office affair. He gets noticeably heavier as the years progress; it becomes him. Photos of him crouching next to Alice as a little girl, quite serious, in a school pinafore. Hobnobbing photos, with Heaney and Motion and even Ashbery—there was a stint in New York in the late seventies that she’s never heard about.

The contents of the boxes are markered neatly on the lids: LITERARY JOURNALS, CORRESPONDENCE POETS/EDITORS, CORRESPONDENCE FAMILY. There is a box for each poetry collection. Not sure where to begin, she opens the one labeled THE LUNAR FIELDS DRAFTS/PROOFS. It’s filled with lined copybooks of the sort that a kid would use in primary school, with an illustration of a round tower on the cover—clearly Ben’s notebook of choice. His handwriting is heavy and cramped, difficult to make out. He revised his poems ruthlessly, if the annotated proofs are anything to go by. She opens the Roslyn box and recognizes, with a pang, Lydia’s handwriting on the proofs. Ben was not alive to mark them up.

A box at the bottom is labeled MISC. Following some instinct, she digs it out. She sifts unsystematically through postcard reproductions of paintings, flyers for lectures and readings, old fountain pens, yellowing receipts, and even some paperwork for a dental procedure that Ben underwent three years before his death.

At the bottom of the box is a thick typewritten manuscript, titled Sweet Obscurity: The Life and Death of Benjamin Crowe, by Julie Conlon-Hayes.

This, she removes to her own room.

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