I’VE BEEN doing a lot of walking recently and since it rains a lot in Leitrim, I decided to buy a rainproof trousers and a jacket. As I entered the shop, another customer was examining a pair of large Wellingtons.
“If they’re too big,” the lady behind the counter said, “you can wear extra socks. In fact,” she said, “you should always ‘slip effortlessly’ into a wellie; you should never have to struggle to get it on.”
I was telling this story to the General last week in Dominik’s Restaurant in Mullingar, which was buzzing with ladies who looked like they all had 2011 Jeeps outside, and a large family celebrating someone’s birthday, and the food was so good that I was regretting my move to Leitrim.
The General was in rude health, although he hasn’t trimmed his eyebrows since we last met, and I saw a hair fall from above his left eye into his pea soup but I decided to make no remark.
For some reason he found the story about the big Wellington very funny, but I didn’t ask him to elucidate. “The point is,” I said, “that since I’m depressed I need a lot of exercise.” “And you’ve lost weight,” the General said. “You’re looking splendid.”
But looks can be deceptive. I know a woman with a slim waist and wonderfully white teeth, I told him, who is always cheerful, always in peak condition, and yet she suffers from migraines every month. She went to a Chinese doctor recently and he did wonderful things for her with suction pumps, and acupuncture needles.
“He massaged me for an hour,” she said.
But it didn’t work, because while she’s minding everyone else, no one is minding her.
She said, “When I came home that day I had an extraordinary desire to eat plums. I’ve loved fruit all my life, but in recent years I buy it, wash it, and put it on the table for the children, but I don’t eat it myself.”
The General asked me did I watch Downton Abbeyon Sunday night, I said "I've given up watching television. There's a wonderful video store in Carrick-on-Shannon, with a large collection of European movies that would keep anyone going for the winter, but I prefer to sit at the stove and watch the flames flickering and listen to the rain."
“Yes,” the General agreed, “I imagine that’s infinitely more comforting than Serbian movies.”
It rains less in Cavan but there is no stove in my mother's house. It's cold and empty, now that she has gone to a nursing home. For a year after she moved, I touched nothing in the house. Her tablets remained beside her bed, her bank statements beside the armchair in the front room. And a copy of the Saturday Independentshe was reading on the day she left went yellow in the sunlight on a coffee table. But eventually I put her things into boxes and got a friend to strip the old wallpaper, and paint the walls white, and take up some of the old carpets. I even put in a new bed upstairs, and lay on it one day wondering should I move in.
I felt a strange silence in the room where she may once have stood beside the mirror trying on a black evening dress that still hangs in the wardrobe, mothballed, and dusty, half a century later.
Packing her things away was not an easy task. The mantelpiece was lined with photographs; relatives at birthday parties, and committees in the golf club standing around holding pieces of Cavan Crystal.
I suppose it just feels empty because she is elsewhere in a nursing home, splendidly content and lovingly cared for. She inhabits the now, the immediate present, and is heedless of anything further back than the biscuits she ate five minutes ago, or the box of Roses that I pour into her handbag before I leave.
Sometimes when I am walking in the Leitrim rain, I grow melancholic, and recall how slim my mother was, how apparently cheerful and in peak condition, and how she put fruit out for her children, instead of eating it herself, and how radiant she looked in a black evening dress, one night long ago.
But I didn’t mention any of that to the General. He has no sentimentality for mothers, though he looked at me like a helpless child when yet another large hair dislodged from his eyebrow and landed in the middle of his ice-cream.
