The Night Stages Read online

  So Niall too would have spent some time in this airport. She thinks about this as she descends the lowered steps that lead to the ground. He would have heard the hollow sound of his footsteps on these aluminum stairs, the slap of his shoes on this damp tarmac.

  Now she is entering a cool room filled with yellow-and-orange leatherette benches, the tiles beneath them polished, light from the large windows mirrored on the floor like long silver pools. Certain details surface in the room, this waiting room: the four clocks announcing the time in distant cities, the acidic green of the plastic plants placed among the banquettes, hallways leading to washrooms and restaurants, and at one of these entrances, a sign with the black silhouettes of a man and a woman, lit from behind.

  She walks down the corridor and pushes open the door of the women’s washroom. Inside she finds herself in a pink-tiled antechamber. There is a series of mirrors above a counter in front of which a number of stools are bolted to the floor. She sits on one of the stools and becomes slowly aware of her face in the mirror. By habit she takes lipstick out of her handbag and paints her mouth. She had sometimes felt that beauty was the one, perhaps the only, gift she could give him. She looks for a moment at her wan skin, her own exhausted eyes. Then she reaches for a tissue and angrily removes the colour from her lips.

  Minutes later she stands at the end of the hall outside the washroom and gazes across the passenger lounge toward a colourful wall, only a part of which is visible from this vantage point. She wonders if what she sees is a large map, but as she walks into the room itself it becomes clear to her that she is looking at an enormous painting: oranges and greens and blues. It holds her attention for several seconds before she turns toward the window where the dark shape of the airliner can be seen, along with the fuel truck that is connected to it by a thick hose. A soft rain is falling now, but there is no hint of wind, no storm. The low light and the rain obscure the fir trees that had been so clearly visible at the end of the runway. The plane is lit from within. The line of yellow oval windows looks faintly yet ominously militaristic in the weak light, much more so, oddly, than any of the warplanes she had flown in the past. She turns away from the window, back to the mural.

  There are children of various sizes, placed here and there across the painted surface. Some of them are toylike – not dolls exactly, more wooden and brightly coloured than dolls. They resemble nutcrackers, she decides, remembering the ballet she had been taken to as a child. In spite of their fixed expressions, they seem to be filled with an anxious, almost terrible, anticipation, as if they sense they are about to fall into a sudden departure from childhood. All around them velocity dominates the cluttered air. Missile-shaped birds tear the sky apart, and everything is moving away from the centre. How strangely sad, she thinks, that children should be affected by such abrupt arrivals, such swift departures. And their stance, the way they stare out and away from the frantic activity surrounding them, is resisting this. It is a kind of defiance. She turns back to the room, walks to an orange banquette, and sits down, facing the mural. But she is no longer looking at it because she is once again thinking of Niall.

  Her Kerry kitchen had been closer to the earth than the rest of the house: two steps leading down into it from the parlour. She is seeing Niall now, sitting on the first of these steps early in the morning after one of their few full nights together. Behind him the morning sunlight was a path into the parlour. But he was turned toward where she stood, in the darker morning kitchen. How strange they were then, still tentative in their reunion after months apart. She recalls how she had walked over to him and pulled his head toward her hip, her hands in his hair, and how his arms were warm around the backs of her thighs. He was still stunned by sleep and it seemed to her that they had remained in this embrace for a long time. She couldn’t remember disengaging, or when exactly they had broken out of that moment. She couldn’t remember how they had moved through the remainder of the morning.

  She glances at the clock, under which the phrase GANDER, CROSSROADS OF THE WORLD is printed in large red letters, then out the window toward the airliner. It is almost eleven a.m. The rain, intermittent upon landing, has settled in, and a dull shadow has darkened the fuselage and dimmed the lights of the plane. “A common greyness silvers everything”: that one line comes into her mind, Niall saying it in relation to literature and weather. Shelley, or was it Browning? He had told her that silver was the colour most often, and inaccurately, associated with weather, something about climate theory that, even when he explained it in detail, she had not quite grasped.

  The plane is blurred, the runway has vanished.

  There is no argument with fog. In its own vague stubbornness, it wields more power than wind, rain, snow, even ice. During the war, just a hint of it cancelled all plans, all manoeuvres. Having no access to radar, she and the other ferry pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary had flown beneath the clouds, following roads and rivers, sometimes even a seam of limestone, from airfield to airfield. Once she had flown along Hadrian’s great wall in a wounded Hurricane that had coughed as it plowed through the air, a dangerous situation, but one not impossible to manage. Fog was impossible. There was no avoiding it, no manoeuvring around it. The flight here in Gander would be delayed.

  All the children in the mural accept this. They do not intercede on behalf of themselves or anyone else. Neither their defiance nor their anxiety has anything to do with the world outside the painted landscape where they live. They, themselves, would never change, and are uninterested, therefore, in a world undergoing constant revision.

  Whenever anyone asked her about her childhood, she would always reply with one word: temporary. No one had ever taken the conversation further, until Niall. “Isn’t everyone’s,” he had said, the words meant as a regretful statement of fact rather than a challenge. He did not ask for an explanation, which may be why she had provided one. “I felt trapped in it,” she said to him, “trapped in my body, which wasn’t aging fast enough to please me. I wanted out.”

  “Of your body?” He laughed.

  “No, I just wanted that to grow. I wanted out of my childhood.”

  “I ran with a brilliant pack of boys all over the hill behind the town,” he said. “We’d only go home if the midges came out, and even then reluctantly, and only after the tenth bite.” He told her he still saw some of these boys – men now – in the Fisherman’s Bar in the evenings. They were labourers, he said. A few had gone to London, or New York, work in the parish being so scarce. A distance had developed between him and those who had either returned or remained, something to do with the stability of his own employment, he thought. His brother, Kieran, however, had neither returned nor remained.

  There were things, she told him, that had made her childhood more livable. A dog, belonging to a boy she played with and whose house was connected to the walls that surrounded her father’s property, the little village her father essentially owned. She didn’t mention the boy himself, though he had made her happier than she knew. Later it had been the nearby airfield. She had hated it at first, this airfield. The whole village had been destroyed to build it. Compulsory purchase. Expropriation. Miles of Cornish dry-stone walls were bulldozed, she’d told Niall, ancient fields, and, yes, the whole village. It had felt to her as if some of her childhood had been destroyed at the same time because she had always believed that the good part of it had taken place outside, not inside, her father’s walls. “Since I was a toddler,” she said, “I’m certain I preferred to believe this.”

  Niall had particularly liked her descriptions of her early life among a gang of village boys – the men’s club, her mother had called them. As she had grown older and other girls her age began to go to dances and house parties in the company of just one boy, the tomboy in her had remained stubbornly emplaced. She and the boys had on occasion tracked down couples parked in cars, interrupting their intimacies by jumping up and down on the rear bumper, chanting insults, then running away.

  “Fo
otball with ‘The Boys of Barr na Sráide,’ the Upper Street,” Niall, the athlete, had said. He mentioned that there was a poem, one that had quickly become a song. “Back in the hills where my brother lived,” he added, “almost every story, even a simple anecdote, turned into a song.”

  She remembers now that she had never heard the song about the Upper Street, “Barr na Sráide.”

  A room full of leaf shadows and the two of them talking, explaining themselves: what had they looked like during their hesitant, first conversations? Very early in the morning, because it was often Saturday, when he had the afternoon free, a diagram of the day’s forecast would have been chalked up by him in the weather station near the town where he lived. He had spoken about this, as if he were embarrassed about the way he spent his days. “I am a meteorologist,” he said, almost shyly, “and in these parts that means I spend most of my time measuring rain.”

  She told him about her war. Day after day she would have departed to fly somewhere with only a map and the predictions of the meteorologists to guide her. Likely she would have had an instruction manual in her hand as well, for the Mosquito or Spitfire or any of the other half-dozen aircraft she and the others might have been required to ferry on that particular day. “Forty-seven aircraft, I flew four dozen different kinds of planes during the war.” She added that there had been a number of women pilots, all quite young. On the final run of the day, one or the other of these girls would fly from airfield to airfield picking up the others who had delivered planes to different military locations or to factories. Once, returning to the base, seven or eight of them were seated in the back on the floor of an Avro Anson, knitting.

  He had been entranced by this. “Was he any good, then, your weatherman? Had he predicted fine weather for the knitting?” She could feel his body shaking with laughter.

  “No,” she said, smiling.

  “But you trusted him, I expect, took his advice.”

  “No, I did not.”

  There was a good chance that the day’s weather had already been telegraphed from the Kerry Station by Niall’s boss, McWilliams, or by his own father, as bad weather arrived in the west of Ireland first. “It bursts in from the Atlantic,” Niall said to her, “like the front line of an army aching for a battle.” He opened his arms expansively. And then there was his laugh.

  Aching for a battle, she thinks now.

  There had been sun moving on the wall as they spoke, and now and then, when the wind shook the fronds of the sallies on the lane, it travelled across the pillow and into his hair, gold and red, so that when she thrust her hands into it, it was warm.

  “Why was it you didn’t trust him?”

  It had taken a moment to remember that they had been talking about her war-time meteorologist. “Because our weather person was a woman,” she told him. “And, yes, I trusted her completely.” He laughed again, his face opening with delight, when she told him that the woman’s nickname was Wendy Weather.

  She walked outside with him that day into the dampness of the late afternoon. Two fields away toward the mountain, they had seen a heron rise from the marshlands, then fly purposefully in the direction of the lake. “He will have a nest there, Tamara,” Niall said, “or she will.”

  She preferred the single syllable of Tam. But the sound of her full name carried by his voice, the formality of that, drew her to him in a way that surprised her.

  Sitting now in the airport, looking at the Constellation cloaked in mist, then back toward the sun yellows and night colours of the mural, she thought about his and her own resistance. She had always run away. But after the fact of him, what they were to each other, she had come to an uneasy sort of rest. “I’ve nothing to make you want to stay,” he had said to her, more than once. “Nothing but trouble. You could step into desperate trouble from something like this.” When early on she had asked about his children, he explained that it hadn’t been possible or, at least, that it had never happened. “Sometimes,” he said, “it is as if he was my child and I somehow lost him.” When she asked, he was astonished that she hadn’t known he had been speaking about his younger brother.

  The house where Niall’s brother had been raised still stood near the heathery slopes of Garrane, looking as if it had grown out of the rough pasture. Beside it, one of the Iveragh’s disordered burial grounds tumbled down the hill toward the bog below. The brother had lived there in his later childhood, and into young manhood under the care of the country woman that Niall would refer to as Kieran’s Other Mother, and was happy there, Niall had said, in a way he had never been in his own home. Niall had shown her a newspaper clipping concerning his brother, and two black-and-white photos, one with the brother astride a bicycle, grinning. Kieran was a chancer, Niall said. You never knew what he was going to do.

  “Dead?” She asked gently, having noted his use of the past tense.

  “I hope not,” he said, not looking at her. “I don’t think so. In England or maybe America, for a long time now. He just vanished in the night. Working, or so they say, on building sites or perhaps the motorways.”

  Later he would begin to look for his brother in the most desperate of ways. It was my fault, he said. My fault.

  It is even darker outside the window now, as if the fog is trying to cancel the struggling light.

  NIALL’S BROTHER, KIERAN, HAD BEEN SO FIERCE IN his entry into the world that their mother’s pelvis was broken by the birth. “Who could ever completely forget, or be able to bear the memory of such a night?” Niall had said. The whole house, the street outside the door, the empty butcher shop, the rain pounding down on the estuary, even the stars above the church had seemed to be in agony. Pain was everywhere.

  But Niall’s mother had resisted even a loss of consciousness. As if pain were a relationship she was refusing to leave. As if she had married it. During the lengthy ordeal, Niall had looked through the partly open door for as long as he could manage. The tendons of his mother’s neck were visible, he told Tam, as taut as strings on a musical instrument. For some reason this had horrified him even more than the unearthly noises she was making. She had been almost singing the anguish, verse after verse after verse of it.

  In the farthest corner of the room, Niall’s father, a man who as county meteorologist would have foreseen and explained all manner of extreme systems, was swaying back and forth, his hands over his ears. His lips were moving, but he was not able to endure the full sound of his wife’s pain even long enough to pull the rosary from his pocket, as the feverishly praying midwife had done. It was the first time, Niall said, that he had witnessed a grown man’s weakness. He would never forget it.

  In his boy’s mind he felt that he had disappeared, could not even be recalled. There would have been nothing he could say, no amount of sound that he could have made that would cause him to be noticed, so he remained quiet. He was walking back and forth in the hall, his bare feet moving soundlessly from one red triangle on the carpet to another, draughts made by winds outside the walls moving up his pyjama legs. He was nine years old.

  The doctor had finally swung around. He crossed the room and grabbed the father by his upraised wrists, shaking him into attention. “For God’s sake, man,” he said, “go wake the chemist. Tell him to bring morphine. Now!” Niall remembered him saying this. “Now,” he repeated to Tam, his fist slamming into the palm of the opposite hand.

  “Have you none in your bag?” Outside the door, Niall heard his father ask this question, his voice querulous and childlike, filled with tears.

  “Would I be asking you if I did?”

  A scream had torn the air in half. Niall could feel the muscles in his back and down his arms clench. He stepped from one red triangle to another, moving back and forth between the walls of the hall. Then, he admitted to Tam, he had begun at last to cry.

  The doctor pushed his father out the bedroom door. “Throw a rock through the man’s bedroom window if you have to.”

  His father had thundered down the stairs
, moving straight past his quiet son, who stood entirely still now in the hall. There was an electric lamp on the hall table and behind it a glass bell that covered an arrangement of stuffed, dead birds. Niall had thought that he had become completely invisible until he saw that his own limbs were elongated in the reflection on the curved glass, his face smeared, and then he believed that the horrors of the night had left him distorted and askew. He was unrecognizable, and his father was running frantically into the night, as if caught in the midst of burglary.

  He could hear his mother moaning in response, he half believed, to the sound of the closing door. The dim light in the hall looked to the boy like smoke, the colour of pain. Even the carpets on the floors and the faded birds behind the glass were drawn into this dusk, this sound. He discovered he could no longer remain upright so he crouched on the floor, listening to the doctor’s voice but not to what he was saying. Abruptly his mother began to shout as if calling out to someone in anger. The silence that followed the shouting filled the boy with dread. But then the smoke cleared, became absence.

  “Jesus,” the doctor finally said, “you little bugger.”

  And Niall heard the baby’s cry. He was furious with the baby. It was an intruder, an outrage. How dare it cry? It was damage and torment. It had been trying to kill his mother.

  Some minutes later the tall man who was the town chemist walked in the front door with Niall’s father. His night clothes were drenched with rain and he held two bottles, one in each hand. Though he looked up at the landing as he climbed the stairs, Niall knew he did not see him. He believed now it was the baby that had cancelled him out. His father was sitting on the bottom step, deflated, as if he were one of his own weather balloons damaged by storm.