I tried to explain it to my therapist. She said, ‘Perhaps you’re just clinging to other people,’ which didn’t sound so good, so I changed the subject
I THINK I’M falling in love again, although not quite as I imagined it. But life is full of surprises. I lived a cosmopolitan life in Mullingar for five years, and presumed it was only a matter of time before I fell in love with some ice-blue Polish girl in a silver anorak and furry boots, packing shelves in a Gala shop; and then we would go to Kraków and live in complete bliss forever afterwards.
But now that I’ve had a complete nervous breakdown and the neglect of my health almost landed me in an early grave, I realise that Poland is no longer on the cards. Instead, I sit in Leitrim, staring across the kitchen table at a woman I first beheld in August of 1984, and I realise that I am falling in love with her all over again.
I tried to explain this to my therapist last week. She said, “Perhaps you’re just clinging to other people.”
Well that didn’t sound so good so I changed the subject.
“I’m thinking of doing some house- painting,” I declared.
“That’s good,” she replied. “It’s important to keep active.”
The following day I began working on my old study room. I moved the sofa outside on to the grass, put the bookcases and computers into the middle of the room and worked my way around the walls with a tray of white emulsion and a roller.
Underneath the carpet I discovered a St Valentine’s Day card I sent to my daughter when she was in primary school, and beneath the sofa I found a letter from a friend I haven’t seen for years.
His father was a business man who lacked any affection for children and his mother died eating a chicken when he was aged just nine. He himself was so wounded by his mother’s sudden death that he became a priest and spent his first Christmas in the ministry comforting a grief-stricken man whose wife, coincidentally, had keeled over and died while eating turkey.
She was laid out on a long oak table in the parlour when my friend the priest arrived. He described it all to me in the letter. I first read it 20 years ago at another oak table which the beloved and I had just bought; it was the year we were married. Our table was enormous, but we were optimistic about finding friends to crowd around it singing songs. And so we did. There were many summers of salad and pasta, when other people’s children slept on the floor and their parents remained at the table singing until the sun rose over Sliabh an Iarainn. And it amazes me how those days slipped away so swiftly, like sand through my fingers. Although the sun was still shining in Leitrim’s ice-blue sky last week, as I re-read the priest’s old letter.
The beloved came looking for me at 11am with a coffee. I was back up the ladder in the study, but she didn’t stay to hold it, like she used to years ago.
I just kept slapping on the emulsion and wondering if the priest was still out there somewhere, praying away, or if he had abandoned his post because of all the scandals or because he too might have fallen in love.
So I stopped painting and went outside again, and phoned his old number. A recording directed me to call a mobile, which I did, and suddenly we were connected again, though conversation was difficult after so many years.
“What are you doing?” I asked. He said, “I’m walking a dog.” “Oh,” I said, “you have a dog?” “Yes,” he said, “he’s my only friend nowadays.” And he asked me what I was doing.
I said, “I’m back in Leitrim, sitting on a sofa in the open air and it’s freezing cold.” In fact it was so cold that in the afternoon I was moved to visit a German woman who rents an old farmhouse up in the hills, and has no car.
“What brought you up here?” she wondered, smiling in her dressing gown, when I arrived with a bag of Cosy Glow in the jeep. “I thought you might need some coal,” I said.
Perhaps I am still clinging to other people, but I like to think that it was love allowed me to phone my old friend, and love that brought me to the woman’s door; love that has no object, but stands alone and rejoices in all the world’s wonders.