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They take up letter writing. True they have Skype and FaceTime and Messenger and a whole host of ways of keeping in touch, but none of it is the same. None of it feels remotely right, when they are so far apart.
Their third summer together, and she is away with her research and he is…here. Like he always is. Left to long for her.
True it hasn’t all been abject misery. He passed his viva and can now officially call himself Doctor Erik Delafontaine, though it feels decidedly pretentious to call himself Doctor when he is a Doctor of music and not of medicine. John Henry has taken to it much easier than he has but then again John Henry would, and has had cards printed up: Doctor E. Delafontaine and Doctor JH Harrison, consulting academics. He took the liberty of sending one to Christine, which resulted in a series of Snapchats of her putting the card in a variety of different books relating to their different interests (one of them, Erik is fairly sure, was a Portuguese sex book though he has no grasp on the language to verify that, and he will not be asking her when they are so far apart). Nadir has one of the cards nonchalantly displayed on his desk, and Erik knows, he knows, his mother has one pinned to the fridge.
Uncle Al even phoned him, breathless with laughter, to say he might give one to the vet the next time he sees him, “just in case he has any pressing queries.”
With Kate in America and Morgan in London, Johnry (as Erik has started calling him, only occasionally, just to annoy him) clearly has far too much time on his hands.
So much time, in fact, that he has dyed his hair black from its natural sandy brown, and started slicking it back, and taken to wearing black ties with white dots on them.
When Erik presses him on the matter, he simply threw back his head and declared it his “academic right to be eccentric.”
There’s eccentric, and then there’s John Henry.
If he were a psychiatrist, Erik might wonder if it is some sort of quarter-life crisis. Then again, that could just as easily be said about him, and his listlessness now in Christine’s absence.
And the waiting. The waiting will do his head in. Waiting to hear about his postdoc applications. Waiting to hear back from the publishers about his thesis. Waiting to graduate. Waiting for Christine to come.
So much waiting.
It is the waiting, the nonsense agony of it, that drives him to agree to John Henry’s proposal of a week in Connemara.
It is early July. The third. Christine is due to arrive in precisely eighteen days and fifteen hours. Eighteen days and fifteen hours until he can take her into his arms, until he can kiss her and comb his fingers through her hair and hold her close and feel her soft breath against his neck as she laughs at his foolishness but her kisses will be just as soft as his for her and she’ll curl her hand around the nape of his neck and her touch will be so gentle, so cautious, as if she is afraid of hurting him, as if she is afraid of something having gone wrong within him that he has refused to tell her for fear of worrying her.
Eighteen days and fifteen hours and there is no power in the world that can make them go by quick enough.
John Henry’s car is a battered little thing but along with the necessary clothes they load it with Erik’s second-best violin and his guitar, with two bottles of green chartreuse and two of a blended red wine and two of whiskey, with a battered hand-cranked record player that John Henry liberated from somewhere disreputable after the night of the Perseids last year and it’s far from the most reliable music player but it will do even as it distorts sound, with a box of the records John Henry has gathered, a good deal of Queen and Thin Lizzy but also the staples of Hozier and Mumford and Florence and, inexplicably, Ed Sheeran.
Erik has wondered many times if his dear friend is quite normal, and on this day the wondering only grows.
A spur of the moment trip to Connemara seems, in fact, to be a thing John Henry has considered in some detail.
Almost as much detail as his “spur of the moment” trip to Glenwood last November.
Some people and their obsessions…
Erik trusts he has never been so bad as this.
(Taking off with Nadir during their undergrad to visit French battlefields and graveyards of WWI as the result of uncontainable yearning pertaining to one Konstin Daaé does not count, thank you very much.)
So they set off for Connemara. July, and the weather is a far cry from the drought of his first summer loving Christine, and the spells of dryness interspersed with thunder of their second year. There is a chill for early July, misty rain rolled in. The science says the Gulf Stream has shifted south again — according to the BBC weather and meteorology has never been his area so he’s willing to listen to the authorities — swirling the low pressure in their way. This isn’t even really low pressure, not the way he thinks of it. It’s more a drizzly dampness, bleak and miserable. Summer in Ireland.
There is, of course, no improvement as they hit the West. There so rarely is. The Atlantic is the Atlantic and the Atlantic dictates its own whims.
Mostly he dozes as John Henry drives, though he comes back to himself long enough to notice the moment that Sunshine fizzles out on the radio, too far from Dublin for the radio signal to carry music to them. Some fiddling with the dial finds Ocean FM, but he settles for just going to RTÉ 1. Ten past twelve. Both the Angelus and the nuacht are over and they’ll have music until one. Time enough then to seek out some other station. Or to contemplate the cds.
Ronan Collins is, as ever, out to attack his feelings with his choice of songs. No sooner has he found RTÉ than he hears the familiar opening strains of Néidín. Tears prickle his eyes to think of Christine, to remember her on the night of the Perseids, the blue of her eyes, the golden shine of her hair in the firelight as she sang. How she kissed the chartreuse off his lips and the aching inside of him is deep, deeper than anything he has ever known, the desire to reach out and find her and take her in his arms but she’s not here, of course she’s not here, and his throat is tight as he steadfastly looks out the window, blinking hard to keep his tears at bay.
A light hand on his thigh brings him back to himself, and through the blur of his vision he looks and sees John Henry looking back at him, understanding written large in his face, the silent offer of changing the station if he wants to but he doesn’t want to, he wants to sit here and drown in his feelings because it’s the only way he can be close to her, the only way until she comes back.
John Henry’s nod is slight, and he puts his hand back on the wheel.
It’s not better but it is a little easier after that, even as Ronan Collins plays ‘Carrighfergus’ and ‘Gulf Coast Highway’ and ‘Sweet Sixteen’ and every one of them reminds him of Christine and how much he loves her and how every little fiber of him just wants to be close to her, always, is never completely happy unless he’s beside her with her fingers twined between his. He’s been in love before, with different women, with different men. He had a crush on Nadir when he was seventeen even though he always knew Nadir would never feel the same for him and he has never spoken of it. He fancied himself in love with John Henry when he was twenty-one and he knows John Henry fancied himself in love with him too but it’s so long ago that their friendship is easy and maybe better for how they understand each other. But Christine—
How he feels for Christine—
It’s almost a year since he first knew he would ask her to marry him. At Christmas he gave her a ring promising to propose. When she comes home he is going to ask her, he has it all worked out. They’ll go into the small college garden, and there beneath the arch between the trees he will get down on one knee and present her with the ring he has bought, that even now is nestled deep in the drawer in his room at home. He will present her with the ring and ask her and he has no doubt that she will accept (even though she will likely insist on putting the wedding off until her thesis is finished and she, too, has graduated as a Doctor of History in four years’ time) but God how he’s nervous about it and for all that he is desperate to ask her there is that part of him that doesn’t want to, not yet.
He has never been particularly religious — no matter how he’s tried, he’s never been able to reconcile the notion of a benevolent god with the god who took his father from him when he was only four years old, though, he hopes, there’s something more than this — but there is something sacred and special in contemplating a mere proposal, and part of him wants to savour that for as long as he can.
Dan Fogelberg comes on, ‘Leader of the Band.’ And he closes his eyes, and sighs, and leans his head back.
The place they come to in Connemara is Baile na hAbhann, right on the Atlantic. It is a village really more than a town, a Gaeltacht and his command of Irish has never been strong — the problem of taking it up at thirteen when everyone else has studied it since they were five, and what his mother and Al taught him of it before then was limited to basics. He’ll never make a Gaelgóir, but he does his best to take in what’s being said as John Henry asks directions to the house they’re renting.
Connemara Irish is not as impossible as Donegal Irish, but still he gets lost with what they’ve been told.
John Henry is more confident, but a drive that should only take five minutes takes fifteen when they do, in fact, get slightly lost.
They find the cottage in the end, white-washed walls and thatched roof. Quaintly picturesque.
He wonders what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into.
The first port of call is unloading the car. Guitar and clothes and records and books and record player and alcohol into the house, and the food they bought in the town, and the fire-lighters and a bag of wood. He refuses on principle to burn coal.
And then onto the graveyard. John Henry was uncharacteristically oblique on the matter of why he wants to go to the graveyard, and some part of Erik feels as if he should know, so he doesn’t press him. Maybe Romantic notions, more likely pertaining to one obsession or another.
It could easily be the former.
The craggy sandstone marker reveals the latter.
The top name written on it reads Dr Noel Browne. He doesn’t need his glasses to see the set of John Henry’s jaw, to see that this trip is, in fact, something of a pilgrimage.
He retreats to the car for his violin.
When he returns to the graveside, and carefully draws bow over strings, a single tear slips down John Henry’s cheek.
The music drifts, caught by the breeze, and floats out over the wide Atlantic.
When, at last, they make it back to the cottage, it is by silent agreement that they do not speak of the graveyard. While John Henry coaxes the fire to life, he makes tea, and toast. Neither of them have much appetite, and afterwards, by the crackling fire, they put on the At Swim record. Lisa Hannigan’s soft voice, faintly fae, faintly ethereal, drifts around them.
John Henry lies back in his armchair, a heavy book propped in his lap with the title of Passionate Outsider, and Erik sighs, and closes his eyes, and dreams of Christine, of her soft kisses, of her swaying in his arms.
Later, on the edge of sleep, he gets up, and writes it all in a letter.
The post office in Baile na hAbhann is barely a post office, he discovers the next morning, after summoning the words oifig an phoist from his memory. He doesn’t trust it to get a letter to Portugal, and it leaves him with the option of either going in pursuit of another, bigger, town with his halting Irish, or of saving his letters for Christine and posting them after they depart.
John Henry is mawkish, and there is something romantic about the idea of waiting until he has a few letters to post, so that is what Erik resolves to do. To write her daily, and post them all at once, so when she gets them she can read them in order and be amused at him.
There remain seventeen days until she arrives.
He declares his love to her in different ways in his letter, and afterwards he and John Henry drink the chartreuse, and listen to record after record as the rain pelts the straw roof above them.
They lie by the fire and say very little, and sleep curled around each other on the floor.
Erik wakes in the morning to a pounding head and aching bones and cold ashes in the grate. The storm has passed, and when he struggles to his feet, he brews tea and throws a blanket over John Henry still asleep on the floor.
Then he goes outside and heaves up most of the chartreuse.
He’s not able for hard drinking anymore.
Sixteen days until she arrives and the sweat is pouring through his skin from the mild alcohol poisoning. He leaves that out of his letter, leaves out even the euphemism of being under the weather, and instead tells her that John Henry insists that brisk walks are invigorating and good for one’s health — which is not totally a lie, because they did go for a walk though it was faltering more than brisk, and the seagulls screaming above them were mildly terrifying more than invigorating. He tells her, too, of John Henry tearfully reading extracts from Thanks for the tea, including the last paragraph, “He lies in the clean sandy soil by the Atlantic shore…” and then lying down to weep, and how — for the want of their respective loves — they slow-danced to ‘Wasteland, Baby’ by the fire.
He leaves out that he has started composing. Christine has very nearly as much of an appreciation for Noel Browne as John Henry does — though she’s more caught up in the whole church and state end of things, and a little of the socialist politics, whereas John Henry’s feelings appear to be bound up in the man himself — and it would be a nice surprise for her to discover that their respective feelings inspired him to music.
Their respective feelings, and that last paragraph of Thanks for the tea and the visit to the graveyard and the view of the Atlantic and that section in Passionate Outsider that John Henry insisted he read, “My dear, This is my last letter from Parliament. Thank you for having been such a wonderful wife…”
On his last day in academia, whenever that may be, he resolves to write Christine a letter like that, for the soft sweet sentiment of it.
(He refers to her as his dearest, in the acknowledgements of his thesis, and though she has not seen that part yet, it is almost the same.)
Fiction and music and sometimes poetry have always been more his worlds than history. History is Christine’s realm, and John Henry’s, and even, to a certain extent, Al’s. It is his only to occasionally idly wonder over, but it is not his to live in.
But with John Henry the way he is, idly choosing records to put on because of feelings engendered by the story of a couple, who ceased to truly be a couple twenty-three years ago when one of them died, he is beginning to wonder.
What is it like to love someone for more than sixty years? What is it like to lose them?
His mother was widowed when she was twenty-six. She loved his father for seven years and lost him and he is already older than she was when that happened, and sometimes the fact of that is enough to make his head spin. In a little more than a month he will turn twenty-eight. His father died at twenty-nine.
He has wondered and hoped many things but he hopes desperately he will live longer than twenty-nine. By the time he turns twenty-nine he will only have loved Christine for four summers, and loving her for sixty summers seems like a lot to ask for for someone with his health, for whom so many internal things can go wrong but if he got even half of it, even a third of it, it would be better than seven.
Even if he had a hundred summers to love her it would never be enough.
He goes for long walks while John Henry writes. He brings his violin and when the mist rolls in from the Atlantic he settles for bringing his little notepad of staff paper instead, and he keeps quotes in his pocket, hand-written and chosen from both Thanks for the tea and Against the Tide, each containing their soft intimacy and gentle professions of love in between the broad strokes. Christine’s photograph is folded and pressed close to his heart, and as he walks he composes his letters for her, and when he finds somewhere to sit he works out notes for his violin.
Afterwards, back at the cottage, he pieces it all together, while John Henry is reading or else has gone to the graveyard. And when they are ready they share the whiskey, or the wine, or the other bottle of chartreuse, and he might play his guitar (and his voice is not as gravelled as properly suits ‘Carrighfergus’ but he does his best) or his violin, or they play some of the records and dance with each other, and they are each full of the agony of missing those they love, but it would be worse if they were apart, worse if they did not have someone else to lean on, someone who understands, and doesn’t mind.
At the end of the week, the piece is complete. John Henry has stopped gelling back his hair, and he weeps as Erik plays his composition, and hugs him afterwards. They load the car and point it north for Sligo. One last stop at the graveyard, and he plays it at the graveside of the two Brownes who inspired it by loving each other, one of them a little broken, never truly well, like him, the other the steadfast shoulder to lean on, the heart big enough to absolve all pain, all worry, like Christine.
He posts his letters to her in Galway City, but there is nothing left here now to hold them.
His mother in Sligo welcomes them with open arms, insists they’re underfed and need rest. Bill grins at them, “best to listen to her”, and Al, when he stops in for tea, hugs them both and, upon hearing of Baile na hAbhann, says, “I was there once for a funeral.”
What are the odds it would be that grave they visited? But Al nods and says, “Noel Browne treated my father in Newcastle Sanatorium in the late fifties.” This is news to Erik, of the grandfather he never knew but who by all accounts was a stern man, but then Al makes possibly John Henry’s whole entire year by saying, “it’s all in Pop’s diaries in the attic. You can read them if you want.”
The diaries are carefully added to everything already in the car, handled as gently as if they were babies, and Al sits down with them and Erik’s mother and Bill and a bottle of whiskey, and tells them all about the funeral, about the flute music played at the graveside, and the recitation of Auden, that “Andrew would have come too, in tribute to the man, but he had a gig that night and there was nothing that could make him miss it”, and this is something Erik never knew of his father, but he soaks in every detail of it to live deep in his heart, and then his mother adds, in a soft voice, a little sad even at the remove of so many years, “he said he’d visit the grave sometime, but he never got the chance.” And it is only now that the realization dawns on Erik that his father died barely a week after that funeral, and something painful clenches his heart, and makes him swallow.
His father couldn’t visit the grave, but he did, following, unknown, in the path of a ghost.
They make it back to Maynooth, to the news that they have each been accepted for postdocs, he in Trinity, John Henry in London. There is paperwork and contracts, the missing Christine dulled to an ache with such work though he reads Against the Tide at last in its own right in tribute to her and his father and grandfather and Browne.
It is a sobering, unsettling thought, the thought that if it had not been for Browne, and the Newcastle Sanatorium, then his grandfather might have died then, might never have married and had Al and his father, and he would not be here, know, to know of it.
On the twenty-first he is in the barber’s on Main Street, getting his hair trimmed, and thinking of his music and all he has learned in the last three weeks and less, of history and his own history, when he sees it.
A flash of blonde hair across the street.
His heart leaps because he would know that hair anywhere, has kissed it and twined it with his fingers and buried his face in it and it’s Christine’s hair, Christine.
He’s out of the barber’s chair and out of the shop before he knows it, running across the road cars beeping his heart beating Christine Christine Christine and then she is before him, blue eyes turning up to meet his wide with surprise because he must look demented and he’s pulling her into his arms, pulling her into his arms and hugging her hugging her, Christine his Christine.
“Erik…” her voice is muffled with his chest but she’s here she’s here he’s crying she’s here.
“You’re back you’re back.” Tomorrow she was due tomorrow but she’s here.
“I wanted to surprise you.”
He kisses her. “Marry me.” Her lips are just brushing his and she smiles.
“Yes. Yes, Erik.”
It’s not how he planned to do it not at all but the words have just tumbled out and he’s not going to waste time, not with her, not when his parents only had seven years. He wants fifty with her, fifty at least.
And she’s laughing into his mouth and he’s laughing too but he loves her he loves her he loves her and she said yes and her hand is touching his hair, and she’s pulling back still laughing.
“Erik, your hair…”
He’d forgotten about the barber, forgotten about being half-clipped and still wearing the cape and he feels his ears burn even as he grins.
“I should probably go back.
“I think we should,” and his heart lifts to hear her, her fingers twining with his. We. We.