The Green Road: A Novel by Anne Enright

Author:Anne Enright [Enright, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-05-11T04:00:00+00:00

Where did the time go? It was ten o’clock, and she had not eaten yet. She wasn’t even hungry, though it was now fully dark – the only thing between herself and the night was her image on the windowpane. Rosaleen straightened up. The same weight as ever. She walked. Every day she drove out in her little Citroën and she walked. She was the old woman of the roads. But she had legs like Arkle, her husband used to say, by which he meant that she was a thoroughbred. Rosaleen recognised, in her reflection, the good bones of her youth. She never lost it. From a distance, if you keep the hump out of your back, you might be any age at all.

She was doing a Christmas card for Emmet. A man who blamed her for everything, including the death of his own father. Because that is what your babies do, when they grow. They turn around and say it is all your fault. The fact that people die. It is all your fault.

Rosaleen put the card in an envelope, then took it out again to see if she had signed the thing. There it was, in handwriting that was unwavering. ‘Your loving Mother, Rosaleen’. Four words that could mean anything at all. She read them over but could not put them together, somehow. She could not put them in a proper line.

She had lost her son to the hunger of others.

She had lost her son to death itself. Because that is where your sons go – they follow their fathers into the valley of the dead, like they are going off to war.

Rosaleen sealed the envelope with a careful, triple lick, lapping the edge of the envelope so as not to get a paper cut on her tongue. She had to pause then to remember who it was for – Emmet always managed to upset her, somehow. She wrote his first name in strong letters on the envelope, and maybe that was enough for now, Constance could finish the rest.

‘To Hanna,’ the third card was started, before she even had time to consider it. ‘Happy Christmas. We will be seeing you, I hope, this year.’ She turned the last full stop into a question mark, ‘We will be seeing you, I hope, this year?’ but that looked too querulous, she thought, and she scribbled the question mark out. Then – of course – the thing was not fit to send.

And it was not ten o’clock, because that clock had been stopped for years, maybe five years. It stopped some time after Dan went. And by Dan she meant Pat, of course, her husband. The clock stopped some time after her own true love Pat Madigan died. It was nice to think he would have fixed it for her, if he had not died but, to be honest, death made very little difference to all that. His mother’s house was always tended and tarred, there were boxes of nails and guns full of mastic out at Boolavaun.

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