Chapter 10 #24
Liam has a pair of shoes in oxblood leather.
He has a tiepin and a wristwatch. He has a suit in grey flannel.
He has two pairs of horn-rimmed spectacles: one for every day and a spare.
He sports a handkerchief, folded in three, in his breast pocket; he presses them himself, once a week, in his lodgings; he is used to attending to his own needs—his time in the Order taught him that, if nothing else.
He has a choice of two ties. He is contemplating the purchase of a straw boater with a green-and-white grosgrain band.
On his day off, he takes the tram out to the seafront and walks along the strand.
He writes a letter to the peninsula. Dear Enda, Rose and Eugene: the words move him unutterably.
He tells them he has left the priesthood.
He tells them he has missed them. He tells them he has a job and that they will laugh when they find out what it is.
He pins two banknotes to the page. I will come out to see you, he writes.
Then he amends this to: I long to see you all again, to see home.
There is no reply.
Monday to Saturday, he works at the offices.
He is a diligent employee, skilled in mathematical calculation and in cartography.
Like his father before him, he can render, freehand and flawless, a drumlin, a lake, the contours of a valley, the geometric boundaries of an estate, the wild irregularity of bogland, woodland both evergreen and deciduous.
He can glance at an outdated map and at new lists and calculations and immediately divine what amendments need to be made.
Times have changed, and with them the mapping-office rules: he is permitted to sign his own work, to spell his name however he desires, in whichever language he chooses.
He and his kind are no longer automatically given the rank of “labourer”: Liam’s job title is “surveyor,” and he is paid a living wage.
He is mostly in the city, where he lives a life of routine and regular structure, but for several months of the year, he is out in the field, making revisions to the ever-changing maps of the ever-changing country, checking measurements and calculations, noting down any alterations to the geographies, both human and physical.
He writes again to his siblings. I am doing well in the city.
I am making maps and sometimes I have to refer to ledgers and books written in our father’s hand—what do you think of that?
I will call in when I am sent out west. It can only be a matter of time.
I wish you well, I send my love and best wishes to you all.
Again, there is no reply, and this injures him. Enda can write, of course, and even if she has moved to a different house, married perhaps, his letters will find them because that is the way of places like the peninsula—no one just vanishes.
He is a willing, if quiet colleague, uncomplaining about long hours, not given to spending lunchtimes at the bar but quick enough to put his hand into his pocket when it’s his round.
He listens to the conversations around him but doesn’t often contribute.
If volunteers are needed to go out into the field, he is always the first to put forward his name.
When it is discovered that he is sending postcards to the daughter of an innkeeper with whom he stayed for several weeks up in the north, he is good-natured about all the teasing he comes in for.
The postcards, most of which are hand-drawn, increase in frequency, and when he comes back from his next assignment, it is several days before he lets slip that he and the innkeeper’s daughter are married.
She is ten years his junior; when he tells her he was once a priest, because he wants no secrets between them, she laughs, assuming it’s a joke.
He assures her that it’s the truth, that he trained for years in Rome, then lived in India, and she looks at him with wide, disbelieving eyes, then says best not tell her father.
She cries when she has to leave the inn, and her parents, but recovers quickly, sitting beside him on the journey to Dublin, her gloved hand tucked into his.
He purchases the lease on a house not far from the Lanes. It is in a woeful state of disrepair but it has a door with a glass fan above it, a row of rusting railings outside. He installs tenants on the upper floors; he and his new young wife live in the basement.
I am married now, he writes to them, and we have a child on the way. I would love to hear a word, if you have the time. Please forgive me for whatever it is I did to offend you all. You are my flesh and blood. Your loving brother, Liam.
Several weeks later, the letter is returned to him, falling to the tiles in the hallway of his house.
He picks it up on his way out to work, hat on his head, a maroon tie pinned to his collar, walking cane in his hand, and turns it over.
Scrawled on the back, in blotted and uneven ink, are two words: “GON AWAY.”
The misspelling and the brevity are devastating to him. GON AWAY. How could they go, all three of them? And where? He cannot picture them anywhere other than the cottage on the hillside, or down at the shore with the widow. That they might be living elsewhere is inconceivable.
He writes that very day to the widow herself, c/o Father Joseph at his chapel. Can you tell me where they are? Do you have an address? He signs it, Your Liam.
It, too, is returned to him only days later. A different hand this time, in looping pencil script: “BOTH DECEASED.”
The creased, returned letters are propped on a shelf in the kitchen, along with bills, a hairpin or two, one of his library books.
His wife, when she catches him looking at them, slides an arm around him.
Maybe you should go out there, she says, when you get the chance, and you can find out what happened to them all.
It would give you ease, I think. You might find someone who knows where they are, how to find them.
She’s right, of course, Liam sees. But her time is near, and then the baby comes, a son, and his days are busy at his desk, and his evenings at home, and somehow months pass.
He has two sons when it becomes known in the office that a man is needed to go out west, to the coast. The name of the place is familiar to Liam; it is perhaps fifteen miles from the peninsula.
He puts himself forward, says he would be glad to take on the task.
He kisses his wife goodbye, he ruffles the hair of his elder son, he strokes the curved and milky cheek of the younger, and he sets out.
The mapping itself is straightforward. A new stretch of road here, the draining of a bog, the felling of a wood there, a few houses reduced to rubble, a field sold to a neighbour, a small inaccuracy to a place name, a number of redrawn lines to the townland boundaries.
Many of the books and drafts he must refer to are in his father’s hand: he finds Tomás all over the landscape, written into it, wherever he goes.
That familiar, slanting script never fails to give him a jolt, and sometimes, if no one is looking, he will pass his palm over the pages, as if from the loops and crosses of the words he might glean some insight into that most enigmatic and taciturn of men.
On the final day, he takes the road leading south-west, a twisting, uneven track that skirts multiple inlets and sounds, leads him into woodland and out the other side.
It is several miles before certain things begin to seem recognisable: that bare rock pushing up from the middle of a field, the slope of that roof, the line of white surf in the distance, the humped back of an island out to sea, the trees sculpted to italics by an unrelenting wind.
He passes a line of cottages, then the chimneys of the manor house appear over the next hill; he traverses the crossroads where the lane leads to the town, and then he sees the peninsula laid out before him, the hill that is shaped like the spine of a sleeping dragon, the loughs pooled in the hollows, the dividing lines of stone walls, the sheer face of the outcrop, at the base of which is the cottage where he lived a great portion of his life.
As he walks closer and closer, things look at once familiar and strange.
The estate wall seems lower than he remembers, its stones thick with leaf-rot.
Were there always pink-gold lilies on the surface of the pond?
Have swans and moorhens always nested like that in the reeds?
Was the moss always a vivid yellow-green?
Liam is simultaneously disoriented and certain of where he is: he is adrift, he is home; this place is both in him and out of him.
And the question that keeps tolling through his mind is: who is he here, if none of his people are left?
When he reaches the village, the first shock is that the house of the fishermen is nothing more than its foundations, pulled down, Liam fears, by the eviction men.
He stands for a moment at what would have been the threshold: he sees a shard of a bowl, the rusted blade of a knife.
The next cottage he reaches, which used to house the two elderly sisters, has at its doorway a pair of leggy, sharp-nosed dogs, between which sits a small, besmirched child, who is solemnly eating an apple.
The dogs keep their eyes trained on Liam as he passes, alert to his status as a stranger.
The widow’s house looks much as before: the half-door open at the top to let in the air, feathers of smoke lifting from the chimney, a brown cow tethered to a stake, a hen roosting on the windowsill, a creel of seaweed propped up against the lime-washed wall.
Liam knocks, calls out a greeting. After a moment, a man comes around the side of the house. He is dressed in the canvas britches and smock of men in these parts, and he takes in Liam’s suit, his polished boots, with something like alarm.