This Is How It Ends (20 page)

She got stuck at the traffic lights on the canal. It was rush hour and there was a steady stream of people pushing their way home along the towpaths. People in dark coats carrying briefcases and laptop bags, people on bikes with reflector bands slung across their chests to light them up in the darkness. She watched their faces as they went by, and she felt a pang in her heart for each and every one of them. She felt their weariness after the long day. She felt their desire to be home. And it occurred to her, they were all of them only doing their best.

Suddenly it seemed to Addie that Hugh was just one person among all the other people in this busy city. He was just another face in the crowd, a stubborn old man in an endlessly moving world.

A dizzying experience, she felt lightheaded just thinking about it. But for the first time in a long time her heart was light too. It took her a moment to identify the emotion. And when she did she was taken by surprise.

She felt sorry for him.

N
OW THAT THE CASTS
were off, there was no need for Addie to stay in the house with him anymore. He was well able to manage on his own.

“What about Hopewell?” asked Addie. “Will we keep him on for a while?”

“God no,” said Hugh. “Hopewell is a thing of the past, I’m happy to say.”

“Do you mean he’s gone already?”

“Terminated,” said Hugh. “I rang the agency on Friday.”

Addie stopped in her tracks and stared at him. He was sitting there in the window, peering over his glasses at some papers that were lying on his desk. He had a sleeveless jumper on, a newly ironed striped shirt underneath it. He was doing his hand exercises as he read the document, opening and closing his fists in sharp spasms.

In the past Hugh had sometimes irritated Addie. He had provoked resentment in her, and he had made her sad. He had tired her out with his rantings and his ravings and his endless rage against the world. But this was the first time Addie had ever found herself actually disliking him.

Was this how it was going to be now? she wondered. Now that her eyes had been opened to him, was she going to start noticing more and more things to dislike?

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. She found herself using a tone she’d never used with him before. He must have noticed it because he looked up from what he was doing. He stared over at her, waiting to hear what she was going to say.

“I’d like to have said good-bye to him. He did a good job for us, I’d like to have had a chance to thank him.”

“For putting up with me? Oh, you needn’t worry. He did quite nicely out of the whole thing, old Hopewell. He was nicely rewarded for his efforts.”

It infuriated her, the way he said it. It made her so angry that she had to turn her back on him.

That man had cared for him for six weeks. He’d been paid for his work, of course he’d been paid. But there was more to it than that. He’d been kind to Hugh. He’d put up with a lot of abuse. Surely he deserved better.

“Well, you won’t be needing me now either,” she announced. She turned to face him. “I’ll be moving back into the apartment now.”

“Naturally,” he said, and he didn’t even look up. “You mustn’t worry about me, Adeline. I’ll be well able to manage by myself.”

And that was it.

If Addie was expecting any thanks from him, she wasn’t getting it. It would have been impossible for him to thank her.

BRUNO GAVE UP HIS
room in the B&B. There was no point in him paying for it anymore, he was never there.

“You might as well stay with me,” said Addie, careful in the words she was employing. There was no talk of them moving in together. They weren’t living with each other or anything. He was just staying with her, that was all.

“Is this really where you live?”

He was standing in the living room, looking around him with wide eyes.

She’d been nervous about bringing him here. She’d felt self-conscious about it. As if she were taking her clothes off in front of him again for the first time. As long as they were camping in Hugh’s basement, they were in a neutral space. But this was her place. It said things about her in a way that Hugh’s basement didn’t. This apartment was like a scrapbook of her life. Now she was inviting him to look through it.

She looked over at him anxiously.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “It’s amazing.”

You weren’t expecting it, when you came in off the street.

You came in through the front door into a dark, windowless hall, a long corridor with four doors off it. The most ordinary apartment corridor you could imagine, wall-to-wall carpeting and light switches and recessed ceiling lights. A half-open door to the right revealed a galley kitchen. Down the corridor to the left you would expect to find a bathroom and a bedroom. So the living room must be straight ahead.

But when you stepped through the living room door it was like walking out onto a ledge over a great canyon. You found yourself standing in a huge white room, floor-to-ceiling glass windows running the whole length of the apartment. Outside the windows, a dizzying quantity of water and air.

Bruno walked over and stood at the glass, looking out.

“You can go outside. Over there to the right. Look, there’s a door.”

She went over and opened it for him, and together they stepped out onto the narrow balcony.

Opposite them, an old mill rose out of the water, the painted name of the bakery still legible on the gray stone. There were other buildings too, smaller ones. Stone warehouses, old grain stores.

“What is this place?” asked Bruno.

Addie laughed. “It’s the Grand Canal Basin.” She pointed to a low bridge on the right-hand side. “That’s the canal down there.”

Turning to the left, she pointed to a bigger bridge. “And that’s where it flows out into the sea.”

A bright yellow boat appeared from under the bridge, packed with people. Most of them seemed to be wearing Viking hats. You could just about make out the commentary, a tour guide in a brown monk’s habit talking to them over a PA system. His voice was being thrown about by the wind.

The boat passed in front of Addie’s balcony and all the heads turned. The tour guide said something and the next thing they all gave a big Viking roar. Some of them shook their fists at Addie and Bruno.

Addie and Bruno roared back, waving their fists furiously.

Bruno was still laughing as the boat made a slow turn in the water and plowed on across the far side of the basin.

“I love it! When do they come by again?”

“Oh, every hour,” she said. “Sometimes twice an hour. The novelty of it wears off.”

He bent down. She thought he was going to kiss her but instead he leaned in and whispered in her ear.

“I’m not so sure it does.”

“IS THERE ENOUGH
room, do you think?”

When she came into the room he was standing in front of the open wardrobe, staring inside. He looked puzzled.

There was a lot of empty space. He’d never met a woman before who had empty space in her wardrobe.

Addie came and stood beside him, both of them peering in.

He had a whole half a wall to work with, five empty shelves and a twelve-inch hanging rail. He looked down at the rucksack at his feet, then he looked back up at Addie.

“OK,” she said. “There’s enough room.”

She was as nervous as a cat. She couldn’t stay still.

“I think I might go for a swim if you don’t mind, let you settle in by yourself.”

Already she was grabbing her swimming bag. She was out of the room before he could answer. He threw his rucksack into the bottom of the wardrobe and closed the door. As he sat down on the bed, he heard the latch of the front door clicking shut.

A static silence in her wake.

THE SWIMMING POOL
is Addie’s refuge. It’s the place where she’s always been happiest.

She loves the artificial blue of the water and the wobble of the mosaic floor. She loves the way the sunlight falls in sloping oblong blocks through the windows, the way it lights up the particles of dust under the water. She loves the booming silence under there.

When she arrives she allows herself to sit for a moment on the edge, her toes clenching the bar, her knees drawn up to her chest. She pulls her swimming hat down over her ears. She wears one of those old-fashioned hats with the plastic flowers on them. She has a whole collection of them. You have to buy them in the chemist, the sports shops don’t stock them anymore. They’re more comfortable than the modern cloth hats, they don’t slip and slide all over the place as you’re swimming, they stay firmly in place. The only problem is that the rubber seal leaves an imprint across your forehead that lasts for hours. Addie ends up walking around looking like a freak, but she doesn’t care.

She lowers herself into the water, shuddering as she dips her shoulders below the surface. This end of the pool is in shadow and it feels chilly. She adjusts her goggles and bobs her head under to test if they’re keeping the water out. Then she launches herself off the wall. Gliding under the surface in a deep breaststroke, she keeps her eyes open the whole time, making the stroke as long and strong as she can, prolonging the moment until she’s forced to come up for air.

Then she dips down again, coursing through the water, kicking out with her legs like a frog. Charlie Chaplin feet, that’s what her swimming teacher told them. Addie has never forgotten it. Funny the way those things stay with you forever.

By the third stroke she’s in the light, swimming through liquid sunshine, the shafts of golden sun illuminating the particles of dust suspended in the water. She pushes her hands through the light-drenched water, turning her head to the side as she swims so she can watch her arms moving through the illumination and back into the shadows. She passes one more window, swimming through one more magical block of sunshine before she reaches the far wall. Then she turns and swims back. She does this over and over again.

It used to be that she could swim forty lengths no bother, some days she would find herself doing fifty without a thought. These days she’s struggling after twenty. It’s because I haven’t been coming often enough, she tells herself. It’s because I’ve been swimming so much in the sea. Old age, she thinks, I’m going to be thirty-nine in a few weeks. Maybe my stamina isn’t what it used to be.

She stops to rest after twenty laps, drapes her arms over the bar and pushes her chest forward, savoring the stretch in her spine.

Slowly, she labors her way through another ten lengths.

THE OLD LADIES
in the changing room were all talking about books. From what Addie could tell, they were all in the same book club.

“Did you not find the sexual violence a bit distressing?” one old lady was saying, her head bent over to towel-dry her hair.

“Funny, that didn’t bother me,” said another one. She was standing in front of the hand dryer, holding her towel wide open and letting the warm air blow-dry her body. “I liked the girl in it,” she was saying, her thin voice rising over the noise of the dryer. “She had a bit of spunk.”

Addie loves these old ladies, she loves their ways.

She loves their lumpy old-lady swimsuits and their chicken-flesh legs. Their leathery chests and their freckled arms. She loves to watch the way they rub body lotion all over their skin. The way they painstakingly style their flyaway hair. They’re brave women, and Addie admires them. She aims to be like them when she’s old.

“I don’t know why I bother,” one old lady was saying. She was sitting at the mirror, carefully applying a coral shade of lipstick to her vanished lips. “I’m going straight home. I don’t know who I think is going to see me.”

“Oh, you always feel better with the lipstick on,” said another one as she pulled up her tights. “It never fails.”

Addie was still smiling as she made her way out to the car.

POOL OR SEA,
he asked, when she came back in the door, her hair wet and scraggly. She had two deep ridges across her forehead from the cap, an imprint around her eyes from the goggles. She looked like an owl who’d been caught out in the rain.

She held her arm out for him to sniff. Instead, he licked her, wincing at the sharp taste of the chlorine.

He was standing at the cooker, stirring a little pot with a metal spoon. A sweet smell of tomatoes, something salty in there too.

“Pasta puttanesca,” he said, “one of my specialties.”

She settled herself onto the high stool in the kitchen. She liked to keep him company while he cooked.

It was getting dark so early now. The water of the basin was black outside the window, the buildings huge dark slabs against the dark sky. The kitchen was like a TV in a darkened room. The yellow light over the cooker, the radio turned on low, a man with a beautiful voice talking about Chinese art. Addie’s wet towel was steaming on the hot radiator. The dog was curled up on her mat at the window, her belly rising and falling in her sleep.

Bruno turned to say something to her. He was holding the wooden spoon in midair, drops of hot red sauce falling onto the tiled floor. Addie had her eyes wide open as she listened to him, then she threw her head back and laughed.

Anyone looking in at them from the outside would think, what a happy home.

D
URING THE DAYTIME
, Addie was working on her swimming pools.

Using huge sheets of graph paper she would map out the pool from every angle. She would make 3-D drawings and cross sections showing depth and width. Bird’s-eye views to show the outline. Photographs of tiles and ink drawings of the color of the water.

More than anything, it was the color of the water that fascinated her. You could play around with it. You could make the water any color you wanted, just by changing the color of the tiles. Why are pools always blue? she wondered. And she couldn’t think of an answer. So she designed pools that were red and pink and deep purple, their tiles the color of tropical flowers. She imagined what it would feel like to swim in one of those pools. It would be like swimming in a sunset.

She made green pools too. Cool pools like caves, their outlines rough and irregular, their edges overhung with ferns and drooping fronds. Those were pools to swim naked in.

Pools like ice bowls, with leaves trapped inside them. Pools with steaming water like those lagoons in Iceland. Nighttime pools and deep, dark industrial pools like the basin outside her window.

“They’re beautiful,” said Bruno when she finally let him look at them. A note of wonder in his voice. “They’re so beautiful!”

He had taken them out of her portfolio one by one, laying them out side by side on the floor. Then he had climbed up onto the couch to look down on them from above. He had looked at them for a long time without saying another word. Then he had turned round to look at Addie. That unsettling look again, he was studying her as if she were a stranger.

“You should be doing something with these,” he said. “You have to do something with them.”

She blushed.

She turned away and started tidying up the loose sheets of paper on her desk. Her heart was swelling in her chest. Behind her she could hear flapping noises as Bruno gathered up her drawings. She took them from him without a word. She tucked them all carefully back into her portfolio, trying to hide her face from him. She was embarrassed by his attention. She didn’t know what to do with it.

It was only afterwards that she came back to it. When they were sitting down with their dinner, she looked across at him with her big round eyes, her voice thin and brittle.

“Do you really think they’re any good?”

THE RETURN TICKET
was never mentioned again, not directly at least.

“It’s still George Bush’s America,” said Bruno. “Until January it’s still in the hands of the enemy. It wouldn’t be safe for me to go back there yet.”

The truth was that he was in no rush to go back. He was enjoying his exile status. The distance he’d put between himself and his country, there was a clarity that came with it. It was as if a wind had blown right through him, a dry wind that had cleared out all the dust and the doubt in his head.

“I like it here,” he said to his sister when he talked to her on the phone. “I’m starting to feel at home.”

He had a little routine going. Every morning after breakfast, he would set off for the library. Strolling down the canal, he would hang a right at Mount Street Bridge, walking down the side of Merrion Square. Through the bustle of Nassau Street, Bruno would step off the sidewalk to avoid the clumps of Americans trundling into the gift shops. Up Kildare Street and through the doors of the National Library. The guy at the front desk knew him by now, when Bruno arrived he would always linger to talk. He made friends easily, always had done.

Upstairs in the reading room he would settle himself down at an empty desk. As he untangled his laptop cables and assembled his workspace, he would glance around, nodding at some of the regulars, the same faces day after day. Bruno began to be familiar with their habits. He found himself wondering about the nature of their work.

There was a straight-backed woman with a twist of dark red hair that tumbled down her spine into a smooth pool on the seat of her chair. A very old gentleman in tweeds who tapped furiously with one finger on a laptop all day. There was an acne-scarred teenager with fair spiked hair who was always hunched over his desk, making careful notes in a large hard-backed notebook. Bruno noticed with interest that he wrote in landscape orientation rather than portrait. Another guy had a scraggly goatee and a ring in his nose. He did nothing but read all day. Bruno never saw him write anything down.

These were Bruno’s colleagues now, they were all part of the same silent community.

Before he turned his attention to his work, Bruno would sit for a moment and savor the smell of leather and old wood. He would allow his eyes to wander over the naked cherubs that adorned the base of the domed ceiling, his gaze resting on the golden roman numerals that marked out the bookcases. The pale blue of the paintwork, the hue of a bygone era.

It always took him a while to get used to the hum of the generator. The creaking chairs, the occasional coughs and yawning stretches from his companions. The scratching sound of pencil nibs on paper. The library was a silent haven of lead and wood and leather and paper. To be here was a miracle to Bruno. He was happy just to be here.

HE WOULD UNFOLD
the family tree, spreading it out flat on the desk and allowing his eyes to wander over the page.

There was an alchemy involved in this work, there was the potential for some magic. If you collected enough facts, there was the possibility of conjuring some life out of them. All of a sudden a story would rise, like a vaporous cloud that has been produced by mixing two chemicals together in a laboratory. And Bruno was the magician, he was the one bringing his ancestors back to life.

He had tripped across his great-grandmother’s story by accident. He had discovered her name on his grandfather’s birth certificate, he had hunted down the date of her marriage. Nora Boylan, that was her name. She had been born a Maguire. Her birth date was given as 1850. But try as he would, he wasn’t able to locate it in the church records. There was no trace of her.

The birth dates are unreliable, he was told. “Women regularly lied about their age. When she was getting married, she might have told a little white lie. If she said she was thirty the chances are she was probably a bit older.”

It was pleasing to Bruno, the thought of that lie. It brought a smile to his face. He had an image of Nora, closer to forty than she was to thirty. She was standing before the altar, her intended husband next to her. She was holding her breath as the priest read out the vows. Another moment and her spinsterhood would be safely behind her. That little white lie was the only price she would have to pay. She wouldn’t even bother to mention it in confession.

Over a century later, her chivalrous great-grandson made a decision to protect her secret. He wrote her name down carefully in black ink on his tree, inscribing her dates faithfully below. Born 1850. Died 1898. He drew a frame around her name, connecting it up with double lines to John Boylan’s name. Dropping down out of their union, three sons.

James, John, and Patrick. She died the year Patrick was born, maybe she died in childbirth. Maybe she was too old to be having another baby.

He stared down at what he had achieved so far, trying to imagine the lives concealed behind all those names and dates. There were more stories there, he knew there had to be countless more stories.

He just didn’t know where to find them.

“HUGH WOULD DIE
if he thought you had him on your family tree.”

He hadn’t even noticed that she was standing behind him, he’d been so lost in his work. He was holding a tiny oval picture of Hugh between his fingers, pasting it carefully onto the page.

“He’d have a fit if he could see it!”

Bruno didn’t even look up.

“That may be,” he said calmly. “But it doesn’t change anything. He belongs here whether he likes it or not.”

Using his middle finger he pressed the photograph down onto the paper.

He had assembled a lot of the names by now. He had most of the dates. He’d spent hours trawling the register of births, working painstakingly back through the years generation by generation. Chasing down birth certificates and marriage records. Plucking facts from the air like late-season fruit.

He had borrowed some photographs from Addie and brought them down to the newsagent’s in the village to have them color-copied. Then he’d trimmed them until they were just a little cameo of the face, like those photographs Italians put on their headstones. It gave the tree life, to see the faces on it. There they were, looking back out at you.

“Oh, I can’t look at it,” said Addie, walking back over to her own desk and plonking herself down heavily. She gave an exaggerated shiver. “It gives me the creeps. All those dead people.”

A cloud passed over Bruno’s face. He was staring down at his work, his expression troubled.

There were still gaps in the tree, and they were niggling at him. The more information he hunted down, the more glaring the omissions. He kept coming back to them, the way you can’t help worrying away at a cracked tooth with your tongue.

“I don’t know why he’s so reluctant to help,” he said. “All I’m looking for is his father’s name. When he was born. Surely he would know that?”

“Bruno, would you just drop it?”

He shook his head in frustration.

“I don’t understand you people.”

There was a note of irritation in his voice that had not been there before.

Addie picked up a thin paintbrush, carefully dipping it into a pot of turquoise ink. She ran the brush across the page, her head bent low in concentration.

Bruno was looking at her, waiting for her to answer.

She could feel an anger rising in her. Slowly, she brought her head up.

“What are you looking at me like that for?”

Silence from him, he was studying her face.

She could feel her jaw tightening.

“Would you stop looking at me like that! You’re looking at me as if I’m an animal in the bloody zoo.”

“Well,” he said gently. “Sometimes it seems to me you might as well be. For all the interest you take in where you came from.”

So there it was, it had reared its head. What she had feared all along. He was going to challenge her. She was not prepared to be challenged. She would turn him away if she had to.

She swiveled round in her chair, the hand with the brush held up in the air. She was pale with rage.

“Are you actually trying to be offensive?”

He seemed genuinely surprised that she would think that.

“Of course not!”

“Well, do me a favor and try to bear one thing in mind. You’re not from here, and you don’t understand what it’s like. You’re a tourist, Bruno. I’m sorry, but all you are is a fucking tourist.”

He was listening to her very intently. That slow listen of his, he kept looking at you long after you’d finished talking, as if he was still taking in what you’d said. It was quite disconcerting. Even after all this time, Addie still couldn’t decide. Was he very stupid or was he actually very, very clever?

“I bet you had this really happy childhood,” she said. “That’s why you’re so keen on talking about the past. People who had happy childhoods always love to talk about the past.”

She couldn’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. She was shocked by it herself.

Bruno paused to think. He was spooling his memories in his mind. And he couldn’t deny it, they were all happy ones.

“Wait a minute,” he said, a confused look on his face. “Did you not have a happy childhood?”

He sounded so innocent, it was ridiculous.

“No!” she said. “I didn’t have a happy childhood. My mum died, it was shit! Maybe that’s why we don’t like talking about the past. Has that never occurred to you? We don’t like talking about the past because it was sad.”

He waited a long time before he answered her.

“Addie,” he said. “You’re the people who survived the famine! Where I come from, that would be something to be proud of.”

She couldn’t bring herself to speak.

She stared at him for a moment in stunned silence. Then she turned back to her work, bending right down over the page with her eyes narrowed and her teeth clenched shut. She sat there and listened, frozen to the spot, as he got up and walked into the kitchen.

At that moment, really and truly, she hated him.

THAT WAS THEIR
first fight.

Once they got safely beyond it, they seemed to be in a different place. Like when you’re playing a computer game and you move on to the next level. There was more bickering between them now than there had been before, but the tension was gone. Addie felt more like herself. She felt more like herself than ever before.

Every weekend, they drove out into the country. No graveyards, she said, no long-lost relations. And he agreed to that. It was all out in the open between them now.

It was quiet, once you got outside the city. Everything was slowing down for the winter. The pale wheat fields with their back-to-school haircuts, the color of them a cool gold. The hedgerows were monochrome now, all the color of the summer gone out of them. The trees were shedding their leaves late this year, it seemed to Addie. As if they were loitering to take full advantage of the thin winter sun.

Bruno insisted on using the GPS on his iPhone for directions. He saw himself as the navigator. He would sit there in the passenger seat hunched over his phone. Every two minutes he would call out directions that seemed to fly in the face of all reason.

“Left,” he would shout, just after they’d passed a crossroads. He wouldn’t have even seen the turn, he was so busy looking down at the phone.

“I’m an architect,” she would say. “I actually have a pretty good sense of direction.”

“It’s definitely left,” he would say, in direct contravention of all the road signs.

And Addie would humor him. She would reverse and take the turn, plowing down another narrow lane that she knew full well would lead nowhere but to another winding lane and another one after that.