The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin

Author:Colm Toibin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER FOUR

He drove home from the hospital and waited in the empty house in case the phone would ring. He made himself a sandwich and drank a few glasses of brandy. He hoped that he would be able to sleep. He was drawn back all the time to the scene in the Cathedral when he was young, his father standing up as though something had shot slowly through him. As the night drew on he did not turn on the light, but waited in the dark.

He could not remember how long he had stayed with his Aunt Kitty during his father’s first illness. He remembered waiting for news and listening in case something was said, but he knew that if he asked he would be fobbed off. The wind, he remembered, for the first weeks was bitterly cold and the evenings were dark, and the house always seemed strange and alien. He could not wait to go home.

“I’m going to fail my Intercert if I don’t study,” he said to his Aunt Kitty.

There was no secondary school nearby, only a technical school. She assured him that they studied English and Irish there as well, and he could do woodwork and mechanical drawing.

“I couldn’t go to the technical school. They don’t do Latin in the technical school.”

“And what good will Latin be to you?”

“You have to have Latin to get into university.”

He pictured the technical school in Enniscorthy and the boys who went there, many from cottages on the outskirts of the town, others from rows of houses on the town’s edges, boys he knew to see but had never spoken to. When they left school most of them would go to England. He did not want to go to the technical school, no matter how different his aunt assured him it was from the technical school in Enniscorthy.

She put a paraffin oil heater into the parlour for him and let him pile his books up on the table.

“You’re a great scholar,” she said to him. “Your mother, God have mercy on her, was a great reader. She used to send to Dublin for books. We have a lot of books upstairs, your uncle’s father bought them years ago at an auction. You can take any of them you want.”

For a few hours in the day the house was quiet. He went through the books upstairs and carried a few down to the parlour. He recognized the names of some of the authors. There was mildew on a few of the books and a damp smell, but no one had opened them for years and the print was still legible. One day when the fumes from the paraffin had made him drowsy and he could study no longer he picked one of them up and began to read the opening page. He was puzzled by it, the unfamiliar was being described in too much detail. But he carried on, until he found a story to follow and learned how to skip the descriptive passages.

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