Ghost Light by Joseph O'Connor

Author:Joseph O'Connor [O'Connor, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Historical
ISBN: 9780436205712
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 7845977
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

A tour in northern England. Then Wales. Then Scotland. His telegrams and letters you ignored. But speaking his lines every night brought him to you anyway. A ferociousness to his words, full of deliberate discords in their arrangement, that would make you draw in your breath and mutter and turn to your neighbour and feel strange things were being named in the room.

What had happened between you became a thing that would have to be let go. You sensed the messages from him were either a duty he felt he had to keep faith with or a sort of weaning-off he needed too. You were unmooring one another. Perhaps nobody would be hurt. One evening after a performance in Manchester, you went walking with your sister and told her a little of your feelings, of the promises not kept. She pointed out that you were speaking of him in the past tense now, advised you to allow him a last chance. What was holding you back? You owed it to yourself to try. The worst that could happen was a final rejection, but could you continue in the lie that you did not care for him any more, a fiction you must surely be able to recognise?

You dreamed of Wicklow: hidden lakes, the ruins of old mines, bog meadows, Ravens’ Glen, the waterfall at Powerscourt. You had been a reason to visit again the places of his childhood summers – that was all you had been: a diversion. A reason to speak the place names he found soothing to say, the words sounding beautiful in his Kingstown accent: Djouce Mountain, Tonduff, Carrickgollogan. Knocksink. Aughavanna, Glenmalure, Annamoe, Lough Nahanagan. The graves in the Protestant churchyard at Enniskerry, not far from Lover’s Leap rock. You had asked him to show you his favourite view of all; he’d brought you hiking up a switchback path above the forest at Kilmolin. On the eastern horizon you could make out the peaks of Snowdonia, the bald drumlin of Holy Island at the entrance to Holyhead. You dreamed of that vista and awoke in a boarding house in Liverpool. There was a letter from him waiting. You burned it.

Manchester, Oxford. The Medway towns. York. Carlisle. Great Yarmouth. You dreamed of being with him at Brittas Bay, grim sandwiches in the dunes, and of the ruins of a fairy ring near a maltings at Arklow, still transmitting its menace a thousand years after it was made, according to the children hunting wrens nearby. A farmer had tried to fell it; his hammer had burst into flames the moment he entered the rath – he was dead before it hit the ground. ‘That’s as true as Jesus, Mister, I seen it myself.’

‘Way to God, you gowl,’ scoffed another lad, whispering lowly to his girl. But the first boy insisted on the veracity of the story. ‘I’d no more cross that circle than pish on a grave. They’d come after you, so they would. They’re evil, so they are. An oul tinker used to live up the way told me ma the fairies took his wife.

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