Epilogue

I say epilogue because that's what it felt like, the bit that comes after the neverending story finally ends, a talismanic touching, rather than a tying, of loose ends.

We took a trip that was both a pleasure and a necessity, to Newcastle, County Down, to visit my uncle Niall's wife, Terry, recently widowed when he died some months ago. As I've written elsewhere, the past couple of years have seen off my mother and four of her siblings, a little extinction event that rippled through our family. They were all old, in their eighties and nineties, though (in my mother's case) that hardly mitigated the sense of loss, for me anyway.

Terry was very warm and welcoming, always a pleasure to meet her. She had sorted Niall's papers and family photos into various bags labelled with the different dates/periods of his life and kindly let me take a few of the photos which featured my mother. Others, for which she didn't have copies, I photographed.

Two examples:

my mother (on the far left) at some function with her parents and three siblings, Dermot Nuala and Niall (grinning on the right). My mother's beauty, her bare-armed elegance, goes straight through me. I know that locket on her neck, those pronounced shoulders and collarbones, what it felt like to massage them with oils to try to alleviate the relentless osteoarthritis "singing" in her bones. I can feel her warmth and vibrancy, hear the blood tick in her veins, catch a whiff of grandfather's cigar (he always smelt of cigars). And in another way entirely, the poses in this photo, those bright ghostly grins, that otherworldly glamour, remind me of the final shot in Kubrick/Stephen King's film The Shining, Jack blending in with the phantoms, lost among the other suits and grins.

I already had seen a copy of the above, but this one was new to me: my mother, 11 years old, pinching a twig, or possibly a bud (on an apple tree?), with my grandfather holding baby Niall. Grandfather's eyes are shut so, despite the smile, his face has something of a death mask about it. On the back of the photo, grandfather has written in his strong flowing hand:

Spring, 1929. Corner of our garden, "Malvernherst", Burnham. Niall about 2 and self! Gosh Almighty! [grandfather never took the Lord's name] 46 years ago! Niall -- as usual (even then) smiling -- not a care in the world!

Niall, I think, is clearly frowning. He was the youngest, doted on by probably everyone (my mother used to take him for walks and read to him, as she later did to me). Perhaps grandfather always saw him as smiling, even when he wasn't.

Later we took Terry to scatter Niall's ashes near the farmhouse grandfather spent his 19th century boyhood in, tucked in a valley in the Mourne Mountains. The place was nearer than I'd thought, just a 15 minute drive from Newcastle. As we drove above the valley, parallel to the snow-dusted Mournes, Terry tried to point out the house. We stopped and I walked back to try to photograph it but couldn't spot it (I photographed this bull instead). We got back in the car and drove a little farther and then I saw it clearly a white house on the far side of the valley. We drove down then up extremely narrow, snow-crusted, deeply potholed roads. The original building is still very much there, looking recently whitewashed and in good shape, with what is presumably a more modern extension, a barking alsatian and two large hissing geese in the (thankfully locked) garden. The wean made iceballs out of what was left of the muddy snow and managed to throw one at me before desisting. He was generally very well behaved (and Terry and he hit it off). Terry wanted to scatter Niall's ashes on the 'fairy ring' in the lower field, as he had requested, but all she found in the snow was ankle-deep mud. So she made do with a scattering at the garden gate, witnessed by barking dog (apparently the owners were away). In any case, Niall was finally home for good.

I remember only two stories grandfather told me about living in that valley as a boy. One was a typically macho anecdote about noticing a nice turnip growing in a field as he was walking home. He thought it would be good to bring back to his mother, so he took out his pocket knife (to dig it up? trim the roots?). He ended up badly cutting his hand, dripping blood all over the place. When he showed the wound to his mother she apparently remarked in a casual manner that he'd need to walk to the doctor (who lived 12 miles away, or something like that). The other story made more of an impression on me. One day he spotted something passing slowly along the high road, a funeral, then heard (or perhaps had been drawn to the door by the sound of) the eerie, alien noise of keening carried down the valley to where he stood watching, listening.

The wean fell asleep as we headed home later through the darkening mountains. I felt the rush of it then, the clear sky's electric blueness shading to black, its full hollowness in the chest cavity, that now familiar pain ramifying into wonder. How I wish I could believe that my mother wasn't so thoroughly gone! In less than a blink. But then the universe/cosmos is little more than a blink. What's 14 billion years really, measured against an infinity of non-existence? Yet here I am, and we are, streaming continuously into our vanishing points. Such is the usual soundtrack in my head on longish drives, though more accentuated; the looking through old photographs, followed by the visit to that farmhouse, the scattering and the supremely clear bell-jar of the evening sky lifting its lid. A phrase was echoing in my head, something I read in a review of Julian Barnes' latest book, which quoted his remark about death: "It's just the universe doing its stuff."

Somewhere among the mountains the fields fell away on our right and we found ourselves gazing on a still little lake, polished to chrome flawless mirror for the always flawless sky, the universe etc.