The sun shone, it was the peak of summer, and Mill House had been given over to a literary festival. White marquees on the long green lawns, the smells of lavender and mint, the dusty rooms of the big old country pile thrown open and fitted out with folding chairs, PA systems, appetising tables of lanyards and brochures and books.
Holly was doing duty as an author chaperone and general factotum. It was the sort of thing that you could put on your CV, if you were desperate. She had already handled a crisis. Mark Waley, winner of the Connell Prize, had complained about his accommodation. There was only one chair in his room.
“I need two chairs,” he said, “for my morning meditation. I did specifically request this.”
He winced, as if in pain, and looked at his phone.
The problem was that there was only one chair in each guest room, so if Mark Waley was given two chairs, one of the other writers would have none. Holly tried to find Suleika, the festival codirector, but Suleika was on her way back from Dublin Airport with the second-wave feminist icon Sara Annesley.
Mark Waley looked at his phone and sighed. Holly purloined a chair and moved it to his room. Mark did not offer to help. Holly watched as he set the two chairs carefully side by side in a corner. He looked at them from various angles.
“Okay,” he said, nodding slowly. “Okay. Thanks.”
He did not meet Holly’s eyes.
Mark Waley’s novel, They Are Us, was about Syrian refugees. It was set on a boat adrift in the English channel. A Guardian blurb on the back cover called it “a deeply urgent and empathetic book, a book for our times and for all time”.
Holly had given up on They Are Us around page 100. The novel did not seem likely to move its story off the boat, and there were only so many descriptions of the sea that she could patiently admire.
She went back downstairs to see if she was needed. The house was mysteriously empty so she walked out on to the terrace. There was the smell of freshly cut grass, the smell somehow bringing with it the distant drone of a lawnmower’s engine, although no actual lawnmower could be heard. It was the sort of glorious day on which life stretches out enticingly before you, or is supposed to.
On the terrace, writers stood around in light summer clothes drinking coffee from paper cups. It was disconcerting to see so many newspaper faces and names made actual. The tall, wide man in the brown leather jacket, with the big square head and the look of an amused old tortoise, for example: that was Rich Abrams, who had defined the American postmodern novel for a generation. And he was talking to Petra Acton-Jones, the gender-critical Telegraph columnist. Petra wore a blue hat with a huge floppy brim. Since her arrival this morning she had gripped the brim of the hat with her left hand, had not once let go, as if she were keeping it on her head against a strong breeze. But there was no breeze, the day was perfectly calm.
All of these established writers, journalists, critics. Their very physical presences burnished by fame, their actual bodies and clothes rendered somehow more real, more persuasively there, by success. They made Holly feel acutely unestablished. They made her feel even more acutely unestablished than usual.
Holly was 23 and she had recently dropped out of her MA in Creative Writing in London and moved back to her parents’ house in Terenure. Life, even on a glorious day, did not stretch out enticingly before her. It seemed instead a grey corridor, strewn with dangers. She knew she was not supposed to feel this way, her parents were rich, she had been to university, she lived in a peaceful country. But life, when she knocked on it, made a hollow sound. It had not been the teachers on her MA course, it had not even been the other students, with their convincing ideas for novels and their coyly dissimulated ambitions; it had been the way the orange street light outside her window seeped noxiously through the weak curtains of her rented room in Stoke Newington, as she lay awake in the small hours. The way this orange light made, somehow, an insidious mockery of the reality of everything, of her own place in the world especially. She could not be a writer. Her short stories died after a paragraph. She was in the wrong city. She would never find love. What could you do with such perceptions, except ignore them by going home to your parents? And by doing things like volunteering to work at a literary festival, a kind of proof that you were still interested in doing literary things, normal things?
“Holly, are you busy?” This was Jack, the other festival director. He had a way of sidling up to you confidentially, of taking you politely by surprise. “Can I send you over to the mill?”
“The mill,” Holly said stupidly.
“Suleika’s over there with Sara,” Jack said. He looked past Holly and gritted his teeth. “Be good if she had some moral support. Carry the luggage, sort of thing.”
Obediently Holly set off across the grass. The summer heat bore down on her, a great demotivating force. Heat like this you were supposed to flop down in, give up on locomotion altogether. Bumblebees wavered from weed to weed, the river sound began to rush up towards her the closer she got to the mill. Holly disliked being with Suleika. Suleika’s fearsome competence always seemed to put Holly at a disadvantage.
Suleika and Jack were either a couple or they were not; it was difficult to tell. Certainly Suleika touched Jack often, on his arm, his shoulder, his face. They had frequent earnest confabs, whispering in each other’s ears. Suleika was one of those people who sound, look, and act English, who grow up in England, go to an English boarding school and an English university, and yet describe themselves as Irish. Jack owned Mill House and knew writers. He clutched his hair often and looked confused. He assumed that everyone knew the same people that he did. “You know Margaret, of course,” he would say; and when it became clear that the Margaret he meant was Margaret Atwood, he would look surprised when you said that you did not.
The mill was the actual Mill House mill. A century ago it had manufactured cotton or wheat or something. Now it was externally ramshackle but internally mostly all-mod-cons, as Jack had put it, four-star comfort, or would be when all the work was finished. The mill slumped picturesquely above a bend in the Blackthorn river and was where the most esteemed festival performers were staying. Mark Waley had complained about not being put up in the mill.
Holly found Suleika and Sara Annesley in one of the not-quite-finished bedrooms. They were interacting with a bearded young man who wore paint-stippled overalls and a tool belt. From elsewhere in the mill came the sounds of hammering and sawing.
“I know I’m being fussy,” Sara Annesley was saying loudly. “God help me, I know and I’m sorry. But this window faces east, doesn’t it? I mean, the sun is going to come streaming in, first thing. Absolutely streaming. And the bed is, well. You see.”
She gestured towards the bed. The bangles on her wrist went click-a-clack.
Sara Annesley was now in her very late 70s. She had written one of the minor classics of the second wave, Mad Women and Empty Men, she had camped at Greenham Common, she had called Tom Paulin a chauvinistic tit on Newsnight Review.
Suleika, clutching her phone in one hand, waved at the window with the other. “Can’t we put up a blackout blind, or something.”
Sara Annesley said, “No I don’t want you going to any trouble, darling, especially when lovely Mick here has all his tools ready to go.”
There was an innuendo here that the man in the overalls clocked but ignored. He said, “I’d need to go out on the scaffolding there and you’ve no access from in here. Window’s too small.”
“And why can’t you do that,” Suleika said.
“We don’t, eh, currently have the right ladder,” Mick said.
Mick spoke with a mild ironic inflection that made Holly like him. On his left hand was a tattoo of the name Caroline.
“I would have thought one ladder’s as good as another,” Suleika said.
Mick said nothing. He raised an eyebrow.
Holly said, “What’s the issue?”
Sara Annesley looked at her, startled; then gripped Holly’s forearm warmly and shook it, as if in solidarity.
Suleika widened her eyes. “The shutters,” she said. “There’s only one. They haven’t put the other one on yet.”
And indeed, the small high window had only a single blue-painted shutter attached. The other rested against the stuccoed wall.
Mick made an open-handed gesture and said, “I’d say stick up a sheet. If you’ve one spare. It’s as good as.”
“We were supposed to have everything finished last week,” Suleika said. “I think we’ve been very tolerant of the delay. And I think, for our very special guest here, we might be able to pop the second shutter on, mightn’t we?”
Mick said, “It’s just too risky. With the equipment I have on hand? That’s a sheer drop out there and the scaffolding’s unsteady. Thirty feet or more.”
The hammering and sawing stopped and they could hear the river, powerfully shushing past the open window.
Suleika put her arm on Mick’s shoulder and guided him out on to the landing, where they murmured together inaudibly.
Holly found herself alone with Sara Annesley. She did not know what to say. Sara Annesley mouthed the word “men!” and winked.
“Right!” Suleika said brightly, returning. “Michael says he’ll pop out now and get that sorted. Sara, why don’t you join us up at the house for a glass of champers?”
Holly stayed behind to haul Sara Annesley’s two suitcases up from Suleika’s SUV – three flights of stairs. When she was finished, she looked around for Mick, feeling, vaguely, an urge to apologise to him, though she wasn’t sure for what. But he was nowhere to be found.
Back at the house more people had arrived, a big crowd now of writers and guests. Everyone stood around holding books, other people’s or their own. The festival was in full swing. For an hour, for two hours, Holly was swept along by random tasks. She was deputised to guide Liam Cochrane, the great memoirist and historian, to his event, via the bar. “Get him three glasses of chardonnay,” went Jack’s instructions. “Not one at a time. Three together.”
As they waited to be served in the drinks tent, Cochrane placed a hand on Holly’s lower back
“I like your shoes,” he said.
“Did you know I was at college with your daughter,” Holly said. “She was in one of my English classes.”
Indeed, Holly had heard all sorts of rumours about Róisín Cochrane, who had belonged, as an undergrad, to UCD’s most famous throuple, and who was now appearing in a Broadway play about the Aids epidemic.
“How is dear Ró,” Liam Cochrane said, removing his hand. “Keeping well, I trust.”
Then there was a minor emergency when Saoirse Maguire, the bestselling millennial novelist, asked for a cup of mint tea, and it turned out that the Mill House kitchen pantry contained no mint tea, and Suleika was on the point of dispatching Holly to the Spar in Rathmullen to buy some, when it was calculated than the 40-minute round trip would mean that Saoirse Maguire’s mint tea would not be ready until halfway through her event. But Saoirse went off the idea of mint tea and consented to an oat milk decaf latte from the hipster coffee truck in the courtyard instead, thank God.
Among the festival staff a certain backstage tension had found its focus on the afternoon event in which Petra Acton-Jones, who believed that trans women were not welcome under the feminist umbrella, and Sara Annesley, who had written op-eds saying that they were, would exchange views.
“They hate each other,” Suleika had said that morning, with satisfaction. Along with the Mark Waley interview, the trans-clash event, as Suleika called it, was the festival’s centrepiece. Suleika had rung all her arts-journalist friends and sent them free tickets. Controversy was expected.
But when Holly snuck out of Liam Cochrane’s event in the Great Room, she saw Sara and Petra laughing together with their glasses of Bollinger. Sara was holding Petra’s wrist fondly. Petra had finally let go of her hat.
Holly had a strange sense that she was somehow not quite present, that the textures of her immediate surroundings – the smell of the dusty old house, the bright colours of the people in their summer clothes – had a gravity, an authenticity, that she herself definitively lacked. She was drifting, somehow, without moving; she was lost though she knew where she was.
“Oh god. Oh fuck.” This was Jack. He had taken an uncharacteristically direct path to Holly’s side. “Oh god.”
“Everything okay?” Holly said.
“Where’s Suleika,” Jack said. He grabbed his hair with both hands. “We’ve had a tragedy. Oh fuck.”
Via a hand placed firmly on her shoulder he pushed Holly outside, on to the terrace. Holly consented to be pushed. She had no great sense of urgency. In Jack’s vocabulary, a tragedy meant something like missing luggage, or a signing pen that had run out of ink.
“We’ll have to call the police,” Jack said. He was frantically thumbing at his phone. “We’ll have to call an ambulance. Is it an ambulance, when they’re already dead?”
They were alone on the terrace except for Mark Waley. He sat on a wrought-iron bench and appeared to be reading a copy of his own novel, They Are Us. His event was up next.
“Who’s dead?” Holly said.
Crossing the lawn, drawing nearer, Holly could see a man in white overalls. Mick, of course. But no – this man had no beard, he was larger, older. He was walking very slowly.
Suleika had hurried over. “Are you serious,” she said.
“The fucking scaffolding collapsed,” Jack said. He held his phone to his ear. “He broke his neck on the way down, they think.”
Holly said, “Oh my god.”
Suleika put her hands on her hips. “What are you doing,” she said to Jack.
“I’m calling the police,” Jack said. “He’s lying there beside the river, for Christ’s sake.”
Mark Waley had looked up from his book and had been watching with interest. Now he stood and came over.
“How’s it going,” he said.
Jack was listening intently to his phone. Suleika was intently texting. Mark looked to Holly. It was the first time that he had made eye contact with her. His eyes were beautiful, a soulful brown.
Holly said, “There was an accident. A man died. He was working. At the mill.”
“Jesus,” Mark Waley said. He nodded slowly, as if agreeing with a point he had just made himself. “Should we ... should we go over and help?”
“Fucking answer,” Jack said to his phone.
Suleika looked at the sky. “The weather,” she said. “I was worried about the weather spoiling things.”
Mark Waley looked at his watch. “I’m supposed to go onstage in 20 minutes,” he said.
Holly stumbled over saying the thing that she could not believe no one else was saying: “Maybe we should, maybe we should ... cancel?”
Mark Waley stood with his arms folded. His copy of They Are Us was pressed to his heart. He nodded again, and looked away.
The man in white overalls had reached them. “Did you tell her,” he said to Jack. A mild round face, 50-ish. His voice was absolutely flat, his expression was empty.
Jack held up an index finger and walked away.
“Is he,” Holly said. “Was it Mick?”
The man in the overalls could not look at her.
Suleika put her phone in her pocket and took Mark Waley’s arm. “Let’s focus on you,” she said. “What would you prefer to do, under the, under the circumstances?”
Mark sucked his teeth. “Dreadful stuff,” he said. “That poor man. I wonder if we should, if we ...” His expression was pained. “But you’re looking at disappointing everyone, 15 minutes beforehand. And, you know, I’m here.”
Suleika closed her eyes and nodded. “Holly,” she said, “take Mark to the green room. We’ll go ahead with the next event and then see where we stand. Don’t say anything to anyone yet, no announcements. We’ll keep things going, for now.”
In the green room – really the study off the Great Room – Holly fetched Mark a bottle of Evian and waited with him while the crowd noise swelled.
“Can you believe it,” Mark said. “Twenty minutes before my event.”
The event was sold out. Everyone wanted to hear the Connell Prize winner talk about his work. Holly stayed in the green room and listened to the amplified voices. She did not know what else to do. She wanted to go back to the mill but she couldn’t seem to make the actual decision to stand up, to walk, to go and look at the horrible thing that was there.
The interviewer, an RTÉ arts journalist, asked Mark about the political implications of They Are Us.
“This is the novel as a profound act of empathy,” Mark said. “You put yourself on one of those boats, and in doing that, you put yourself inside the soul of another human being. It’s a radical gesture. And in this chaotic world, that radicalism, that empathy, is all we have.”
Holly took out her phone and Googled two chairs meditation. It worked like this: you summoned all your negative emotions while you sat in one chair, and then you left them behind in that chair and moved to the other one, where you summoned only positive emotions. Thus you were cleansed of destructive feeling. What should you do, Holly wondered, if you only had one chair in your room? What should you do if you had none?
Kevin Power is the author of novels Bad Day in Blackrock and White City, and The Written World: Essays and Reviews. He is an assistant professor at Trinity College Dublin
