This Is Happiness by Niall Williams

Author:Niall Williams [Williams, Niall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526609342
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-06-29T10:21:47+00:00

25

Before Avalon House was Avalon House it was Penniworth’s Hotel. This was back in the time when carriages coming west looked for halfway houses off the main thoroughfare. After a few hours bone-rattling along the skeleton roads, passengers needed facilities, drivers drink, and horses watering. Hotel was aspirational. Penniworth’s didn’t look like a hotel or act like a hotel except in the provision of rooms, neither too spacious nor salubrious according to legend. Mr and Mrs William and Wallis Penniworth had arrived from England and bought the building from a fleeing family of Henshawes, the father a Horace whose Christian act was to point out a sash window on the upstairs landing that might, might mind, need replacing, and whose pale water-coloured children had been warned not to mention the rain. The Henshawes escaped out the avenue under the twisted blackbirds of broken umbrellas, Keep going, children, keep going, and Penniworth put up his painted sign of the only ever, previous and since, hotel in Faha. It was the same sign he had put up in Southwold, and, when that went bankrupt, in Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire, and, when that burned down, in Porthmadog in Wales, as he succumbed to the immemorial dream of migrating westward, towards ever cheaper properties, looking for the magic formula by which hospitality is turned into money.

In Fahaean history, written for the most part by the forgiving, Penniworth is remembered as a very intelligent man, he had a forehead, and spectacles. His wife is not remembered, but for a sniffle. At first, Penniworth had the classic infatuation of the Englishman in Ireland, finding in the ease of the people and an absence of regulation the heart-opening freedom which is one of the hallmarks of paradise. He was not alone in this, in Dutton’s survey of Clare in 1808: The low grounds of the Shannon are equal to the fattening of the largest-sized oxen. In Samuel Lewis’s Topographical Dictionary of 1838: The best soil in the county is that of the rich low grounds … which extend from a place called Paradise to Limerick. In fact, the estate and twin-turreted towers of Paradise House itself, last seat of Thomas Arthur Esq., were not far down the road from Faha. Sometime look up the photographs of Brigadier Henn there and don’t think too deeply about the descriptions that mention the aqueous expanse. Despite the aqueous expanse, and his wife’s sniffling Quite a few puddles in the front fields, dear, Penniworth was fairly sure he had arrived at last in paradise. At the moment it was raining, but that was a small matter. The Irish exaggerated everything, William told Wallis on their first evening in the umber gloom of the drawing room whose chimney was just now struggling to draw. Wallis had a handkerchief to her nose, and between nasal drip and rattling wind-rain couldn’t quite hear him.

‘The Irish, I’m saying, they exaggerate everything,’ he called across to her. ‘It is really quite charming.’

Charm, however, was soon enough discovered soluble, and slowly William’s expression turned to that of a man sucking sloes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.