Free The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín Page B

tried the doorbell there was no response. He did not want to tap the window in case it frightened her. He banged the knocker for a while and then he heard her coming. She opened the door, peered at him for a moment and then took off her glasses and looked again.
    â€œCome in, come in, come in,” she said.
    She led him into the bright front room and fussed for a moment over the cushions on a chair. He noticed a bandage around her leg.
    â€œIt’s lovely to see you now,” she said. “Carmel has been in a few times. She said that you would be in one of these days, but I thought you might wait until the weather got bad again.”
    â€œIt’s lovely, isn’t it, the weather, and the house and the garden look lovely as well,” he said.
    â€œIt’s nice in the summer,” she said.
    She smiled at him as though he was a small boy, arriving with his father to see her, proud of some new piece of knowledge he had acquired or some new achievement. She was always gentle, eager to please and prepared to disguise her own keen intelligence and sharp memory if these were to interfere with the general harmony. She had never married, never known the control a wife and mother exercises, the unsimple compromises a man and a woman make with each other. She had worked in an office all of her life, grateful for a secure job, having lived through times when there were few secure jobs to be had.
    She went down to the kitchen now and came back with a bottle of whiskey on a tray with a glass and a jug of water. He noticed that she was unsteady on her feet. She left the tray down on the coffee table in front of him.
    For him there had always been something childlike and sweet about her. She had come through, unseathed, into old age. She was free of them all now. She had told Carmel that she was happy not to have anyone to look after, even though she missed them, especially her brother Tom, with whom she had shared this house after their parents’ death.
    â€œYou know yourself how much whiskey you want,” she said. “There’s no point in me pouring it for you.”
    â€œWill you not have one yourself?” he asked.
    â€œMaybe I will,” she said and laughed. “You know I normally don’t.” She went down to the kitchen again and returned with an empty glass and a bottle of lemonade.
    â€œYou’ll go home and tell Carmel now that I’ve taken to the drink,” she laughed again.
    â€œCarmel would be delighted to hear that you’re taking a drink,” he said. She poured the whiskey and added some lemonade.
    â€œLet me see if I’ve any news for you now,” she said. “You couldn’t come all this way without some news.”
    Slowly, as he sipped his whiskey, she went through all his relatives one by one, distant cousins in North Wexford who were always asking for him, other cousins in America, old family friends in Cork. She talked about the Bridge Club, remembering if he had ever met any of the people she was telling him about, or if she had told him of them before.
    â€œI’ve a lot to tell you now,” she said. “It’s so long since I’ve seen you. I hear everything about you from Carmel.”
    There was a great deal he wanted to know, of which he only possessed snatches now, things which would disappear with her death. At times he felt that he had been there, close by, when his grandfather was evicted, and that he had known his father’s Uncle Michael, the old Fenian, who was too sick to be interned after 1916. Or that he had been in the bedroom, the room above where they were now, when his grandfather had come back to the house on Easter Monday 1916 and sat watching him as he pulled up the floorboards under which he had hidden a number of rifles. Or that he had witnessed his grandfather being taken from the house at the end of the Easter Rising. These were things which lived with him, but he could only imagine