Before the Fall: Centenary Edition

1995-1

1995

Midsummer is past. The days are getting shorter again. Sometimes, it feels like I've never lived anywhere but this tiny shed, in this tiny village, on the edge of the ocean. My busy days in San Francisco — so full of to-dos and appointments — used to seep past without me, but here, my life is stripped down to six basic activities: sleeping and eating, writing and reading, running and relaxing. Time is mine again.

Life likes to take it easy, it seems, and the only way to be properly alive is to slow your pace to match.

So I find myself less bored than when I was busy, and less lonely than I've been for years, though I've never spent so much time alone. Solitude soothes me, along with the fresh air, the sound of the sea, and the past that I'm excavating with my pen. All are helping me to heal. I didn't know that was what I was doing when I came here, but I know it now, and I tell myself that's why I've stayed on, why I haven't yet left as planned.

I'm reading an election leaflet of Gran's from 1923 when a voice from the door interrupts. "Jo Devereux, sometimes I think you're mad."

I jump. Then I see who it is. Irritation, instant and involuntary, coils in me.

I don't want to stop writing, certainly not to listen to my sister's views on my lack of reason. Yes, it is Maeve, come all the way down to Mucknamore from Dublin to visit me. She stands at the door of my shed, neat and slim in linen shorts and Ralph Lauren polo shirt, her car keyring looped over one finger.

Living here as I have been since May, centred on the secrets I've been finding in my mother's family papers, I've long ceased to notice the dilapidation. Now, following my sister's eyes, I see what she sees. Flaking walls. A concrete floor. An unmade bed on one side of the room. Debris piled into the opposite corner.

"What brings you here?" I ask.

"Lovely welcome, I must say. Can I come in?"

I hesitate, conscious of my shape and that I never did get round to telling her.

It wasn't intentional. What I had planned was to go to Dublin, to see her there, and explain. I never thought I'd still be here in this shed so many weeks on.

There's nothing for it now except to get up from my chair and step out from behind the table.

Her eyes fall on my body, swoop in on my abdomen, then swing back upwards to my face. "What —?"

She is stunned, her face so very shocked that I find myself laughing, that nervous laughter she always brings up in me when I've done the wrong thing.

"Oh my God!" she gasps. "I don't believe it. Oh my God!"

"Let's go round the back," I say, voice airy, as if I am a society hostess suggesting tea on the lawn. "That's the nicest place to sit."

I take my rug from the end of the rumpled bed and, while she's swallowing her surprise, I lead her to the grassy patch where Rory and I have been sitting most long evenings of this long, strange summer. It's private out here, between the shed and the edge of the little cliff, and the sea is singing a soothing song today, as if it's on a go-slow, not really wanting to turn the waves over.

"You should have rung Hilde to tell me you were coming," I say, flicking the rug out over the grass. "I'd have arranged to meet you somewhere a bit more comfortable."

"I've been expecting to hear from you every day, Jo. You've been down here for weeks and not so much as a phone call. But," she breathes, "never mind all that...What about this?" She leans across as if to touch me, then changes her mind. "Look at you. My God."

I gesture her to sit on the rug. "Would you like something?" I remember to ask when I'm down. "A drink? I only have orange juice."

"Orange juice would be nice." She puts a hand on my arm to stop me trying to push back up. "I'll get it."

"It's just inside the door, in the corner. The coolest spot."

She comes back with two plastic glasses and hands me one. "That's quite a mountain of manuscript you've got in there."

"I know. It keeps growing on me."

"Am I allowed read it?"

I shake my head. 'Not yet."

"When?"

"Soon. I have to type it up, and it needs a lot of tidying."

She opens her mouth to say something, but closes it again.

"Sorry the juice is warm," I say, when the silence stretches too long. "No fridge, obviously."

"I really thought I was beyond being shocked by you, Jo, but you've done it again. Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't tell anybody." Well, nobody except Rory.

"Not even the father?"

"No. Especially not the father."

She dips her head down to her plastic cup, trying to stop the disparagement that's rearing up inside her. She is thin, I notice, too thin; her hipbones jut against her shorts.

"What about you?" I ask her. "How have you been?"

"Fine. Fine. Nothing compared to this."

"Are you sure?"

Her face creases. "Oh, up and down, I suppose." Then she tilts her head towards the house. "Two shocks in a row. What they've done to Mammy's house, to the shop...It's so different, isn't it?"

"Unrecognisable."

Our mother had died just as she closed the sale of her house to Hilde and Stefan Zimmerman, an efficient German couple who'd pre-organised planning permissions. They'd arrived to live here within a week of her funeral. Work had begun immediately and was well advanced already.

"I wish it could have been kept as it was for a while," Maeve says. "It would have been nice to get used to Mammy being gone first, before we had to deal with this too."

"It's been easier for me, I suppose, being here. Seeing it change day by day."

"I still can't believe I'll never see her again. Can you? I think of things I want to tell her before I remember she's not here. And it hits me all over again."

"Time helps," I say.

"Is it helping you?"

"It's not the same for me, you know that. I hadn't seen her for almost twenty years."

"Still, she was your mother."

I try again. "I do know the feeling you're talking about and how awful it is. Time really does help."

"Your friend Richard?"

I nod, gratified that she remembers.

"Well, then, I wish time would just hurry up and do its thing."

We both fall into a silence, looking out over the sea.

How have I let this shed become my home-away-from-all-homes? That's the question my sister's arrival has thrown into relief.

I was supposed to depart for Dublin a week ago. Yet still I sit, day after day, at my makeshift desk, sifting through sentence after sentence bequeathed to me by my mother and grandmother, telling myself I need to be here to do it when I know I'm really here for Rory.

Though I told him I was leaving. Though I wrote it down to show him, to show myself, that I really meant it and though every word I wrote was right and true. If Rory's marriage was indeed so wrong for him, if our love — the first love — was what he wanted, then that had to be formally acknowledged. Properly done. Slip-sliding into an affair was not an option.

So, I wrote him. I was leaving. I was going to Dublin where my sister would help me organise an obstetrician. I would have my baby there and, as soon as possible afterwards, I was going to fly back to San Francisco to make a new home as a single mom.

My letter set him free. "We missed our time, my love," it said and I can still feel how good it felt to write that, to break the will-we-won't-we game we'd been playing since I came back here at the beginning of summer.

If his wife and family were not what he wanted — if what he wanted was me — then he was going to have to find a way to tell them and do what he should have done the first time, twenty years ago, when it was all less complicated. Come after me.

I didn't quite say all that in my letter, but it was implied. "When we were young, I so wanted you to follow me," I said. "I wanted that long, long, long after there ceased to be any possibility that you might."

Hint hint, Rory. Over to you.

When Maeve arrived fifteen minutes ago, I'd been typing out documents. A letter to Peg from her friend Molly, a letter to Norah from Peg that was never sent, and an election leaflet that seems poignant to me, that seems to carry in it all the yearning that my grandmother passed down the years.

Dear Voter,

We were told the Treaty with the British Empire would bring peace. If so, what is WAR?

We were told it would bring freedom. What, then, is s*****y?

We were told it would bring order. Then what is CHAOS?

They said this Treaty would fill Irish pockets. It has filled only Irish PRISONS and GRAVES. If the British Government is going to keep fighting and destroying us, we prefer that she should use her own English troops — as she does in the North of Ireland — and not our own misguided pretend-politicians.

People of Ireland, come back to us. Our country's future is now in your hands.

A REPUBLIC is the only basis on which we can build a proud and prosperous national life. Use this coming election to vote NO to this terrible Treaty. Then we can ALL share TOGETHER in the final victory over the British Empire.

Come back to us.

Vote for those who will yet SAVE THE NATION.

Vote Anti-Treaty.

It gets me every time, this leaflet put together by my grandmother and great-grandmother. It's those words: "Come back to us." Come Back.

People don't, do they?

We can't.

That's what I was trying to say to Rory, in my letter. Trying to reclaim what we had, to start over, to get it right this time, wasn't possible. No matter how much we wished it was.

So why am I still here?

"So tell me," Maeve asks, echoing my thoughts. "Why are you still down here? What have you been doing with yourself?"

"You saw that heap of papers in there. Reading and writing, mostly. Lying low."

"Is there anything of interest in those papers of Mammy's? Are they all rubbish?"

"Oh, no, they're not rubbish."

"Really? Tell me."

"I think you better wait until I've put it together."

She sits up, intrigued by something in my voice. "What on earth have you found?"

"All sorts of things."

"Deep dark secrets?" she grins.

"Yes, as a matter of fact."

"Things Mammy didn't tell us?"

"You're forgetting, Maeve, Mrs D. never told me anything."

That stops her smile. "Oh no, Jo, you're not going to write something Mammy wouldn't want known? Please tell me you're not."

I spread my hands and examine my fingernails.

"Jo!"

Above us a gull screams, slides across the air towards the sea. How much did Mrs D. know? That is the question. In her letter, she said she didn't read Norah's "scribblings" or all of Gran's diaries. I have read everything now, some of them many times, and still I'm not certain. Sometimes I find one thing in their words, especially Norah's. Sometimes another.

But what I hear in almost every sentence is the sound of their words shrinking from what they're saying, even as they say it. That's what speaks loudest to me across the years.

Maeve is annoyed with me again. "It's not your story, Jo, to do what you like with."

"Hey, calm down. I'll tell you in a while."

She looks sceptical.

"I will, Maeve, I promise. I just want to get it straight myself first."

"So you're not going against Mammy's wishes?"

I shrug. "Nothing I write can hurt her now. And if she really didn't want me to know — or write — about something, all she had to do was take it out of the suitcase."

"Maybe she wanted you — us — to know, but not the whole goddamn world."

I shake my head, though she's right, of course. That's possible.

Maeve takes off her sunglasses, blinks at me in the sunshine. "Jo, if you publish something she wouldn't like just to settle some score of your own, you'll be sorry later."