A History of Loneliness Read online

  About the Book

  ‘I did not become ashamed of being Irish until I was well into the middle years of my life.’

  Father Odran Yates is a good man. Dedicated to his vocation since entering Clonliffe College seminary at seventeen, he has lived through betrayal, controversy and public condemnation of some of his dearest friends. Through all of this, he has remained firm in his belief.

  But something plagues his mind as the years pass. A feeling that there were things he didn’t see, chances he missed. People he has let down. Is Father Yates as blameless as he’s always thought himself to be? And what of the church he has given his life to?

  It has taken John Boyne fifteen years and thirteen novels to write about his home country of Ireland, but he has done so now in his most powerful book yet. A History of Loneliness is a courageous, deeply moving account of a nation and a man living through a period of cataclysmic, irreversible change.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by John Boyne

  Copyright

  A HISTORY OF LONELINESS

  JOHN BOYNE

  Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practise.

  E. M. Forster

  CHAPTER ONE

  2001

  I DID NOT become ashamed of being Irish until I was well into the middle years of my life.

  I might start with the evening that I showed up at my sister’s home for dinner and she had no recollection of issuing the invitation; I believe that was the night that she first showed signs of losing her mind.

  Earlier that day, George W. Bush had been inaugurated as President of the United States for the first time, and when I arrived at Hannah’s house on the Grange Road in Rathfarnham she was glued to the television, watching highlights of the ceremony which had taken place in Washington around lunchtime.

  It had been almost a year since I had last been there and it shamed me to think that after an initial flurry of visits in the wake of Kristian’s death, I had settled into my old ways of making only an occasional phone call or organizing an even more occasional lunch in Bewley’s Café on Grafton Street, a place that reminded us both of childhood, for it was here that Mam would take us for a treat when we came into town to see the Christmas window at Switzer’s all those years ago. And it was here that we ate lunches of sausages, beans and chips when we were brought in to Clerys to be fitted for our First Communion clothes: exhilarating afternoons when she would let us order the biggest cream cake we could find and a Fanta orange to wash it down. We would take the 48A bus from outside Dundrum church into the city centre and Hannah and I would run upstairs to the front seats, holding on to the bar in front of us as the bus made its way through Milltown and Ranelagh, over the hump of the Charlemont Bridge in the direction of the old Metropole cinema behind Tara Street station, where once we had been brought to see Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard and been dragged out again when the barebreasted women of Otaheite made their way in kayaks towards the lusty sailors, garlands of flowers around their necks the only protection for their modesty. Mam had written a letter to The Evening Press later that night, demanding that the film be banned. Is this a Catholic country, she asked, or is it not?

  Bewley’s has not changed very much in the thirty-five years since then and I have always felt a great affection for it. I am a man for nostalgia; it is a curse on me sometimes. The comfort of my childhood returns to me when I see the high-backed booths that still cater for all types of Dubliner. The retired gentlemen, white haired and clean shaven, Old Spiced, shrouded in their unnecessary suits and ties as they read the business section of The Irish Times even though it no longer has any relevance to their lives. The married women enjoying the indulgence of a mid-morning cup of coffee with no one but wonderful Maeve for company. The students from Trinity College, lounging around over big mugs of coffee and sausage rolls, noisy and tactile, blooming with the excitement of being young and in each other’s company. A few unfortunates down on their luck, willing to trade the price of a cup of tea for an hour or two of warmth. The city has always drawn the benefit of Bewley’s indiscriminate hospitality and occasionally Hannah and I would partake of it, a middle-aged man and his widowed sister, neatly attired, careful of conversation, still with a taste for a cream cake but no stomach for the Fanta any more.

  Hannah had phoned to invite me over a few days earlier and I had immediately said yes. Was she lonely, I wondered. Her eldest son, my nephew Aidan, was away on the sites in London and almost never came home. His phone calls, I knew, were even less regular than my own. But then he was a difficult man. One day, without warning, he had turned from being a cheerful and extrovert boy, something of a precocious entertainer, to a distant and angry presence in Hannah and Kristian’s house, and that fury, which seemed to arrive without warning to poison the blood of his veins, never diminished through his teenage years, only building and swelling and destroying everything it came in contact with. Tall and well-built, his Nordic ancestry providing him with clear skin and blond hair, he could charm the ladies with barely a flicker of an eyebrow and he had a taste for them that seemed impossible to satisfy. It is true that he got one poor girl into trouble when the pair of them were not even old enough to drive and there was war over it for a time; in the end the child was given up for adoption after a terrible row between Kristian and the girl’s father which led to the police being called out. I never heard from Aidan now. He had a tendency to look at me with contempt in his eyes. Once, when he had drink on him, he stood beside me at a family gathering, placing one hand against the wall while he leaned too close, the stink of cigarettes and alcohol forcing me to turn my head away, and bulged his tongue into his cheek as he said in a perfectly friendly tone, ‘Listen to me, you. Do you never think you wasted your life, no? Do you never wish you could go back and live it all over again? Do everything differently? Be a normal man instead of what you are?’ And I shook my head and told him that at the centre of my life was a feeling of great contentment, that although I had made my choices at a young age, I stood by them still. I stood by them, I insisted, and while he might not have been able to see the sense of my decisions, they had given my days clarity and meaning, qualities that his own life sadly appeared to lack. ‘You’re not wrong there, Odran,’ he said, stepping away, freeing me from the prison of his torso and arms. ‘But still, I couldn’t be what you are. I’d rather shoot myself.’

  No, Aidan could never have made the choices that I made and I feel grateful for that now. The truth is that he did not share my innocence or my inability to confront. Even as a boy, he was more of a man than I would ever be. The talk now was that he was living in London with a girl a few years older than himself, a girl with two children of her own, which struck me as a curious thing since he’d wanted no part of the child that might have been his.

  The only other person in Hannah’s house now was the young lad, Jonas, who had always been introverted and seemed incapable of holding a proper conversation without staring at his shoes or drumming his fingers in the air, like some restless pianist. He blushed when you looked at him and preferred to be a
way in his room reading books, but whenever I asked him who his favourite authors were he appeared reluctant to tell me or would name someone I had never heard of – a foreign name generally, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, in an almost deliberate act of defiance. At his father’s wake the previous March, I had tried to lighten the mood by asking is it reading that you’re doing behind that closed door, Jonas, or something else? I didn’t mean anything by it, of course – it was intended as a joke – but the moment the words were out of my mouth I heard how vulgar they sounded and the poor lad – I think there were three or four other people present to witness the scene, including his mother – went scarlet and choked on his 7-Up. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was for embarrassing him, I wanted it badly, but that would only have made matters worse and so I left it, and I left him, and I sometimes felt that we might never recover from that moment, for surely he thought that I had set out to humiliate him, a thing I would never have done nor dreamed of doing.

  At this time, the time of which I speak, Jonas was sixteen years old and studying for his Intermediate Certificate, an exam which was not expected to present him with any great difficulties. He had been bright from the start, learning to speak and to read well before other children of his age. Kristian, when Kristian was alive, liked to say that with brains like his Jonas could become a surgeon or a barrister, Prime Minister of Norway or President of Ireland, but whenever I heard those words uttered, I would think no, that’s not this boy’s destiny. I didn’t know what his destiny might be, but no, that wasn’t it.

  I thought at times that Jonas was a lost boy. He never spoke of friends. He had no girlfriend, had taken no one, not even himself, to his school’s Christmas dance. He didn’t join clubs or play sports. He went into school, he came home from school. He went to films alone on Sunday afternoons, foreign films usually. He helped out around the house. Was he a lonely boy, I wondered. I knew something of what it was to be a lonely boy.

  So there was only Hannah and Jonas in the house, a husband and father dead, a son and brother away on the sites, and from what little I knew of family life I knew this much: that a woman in her mid-forties and an anxious teenage boy would have precious little to talk to each other about, and so perhaps this was a house of silence, which had led her to pick up the phone and call her older brother and say will you not come over for dinner some night, Odran? Sure we never see you at all.

  I had the new car with me that night. Or the new used car, I should say, a 1992 Ford Fiesta. I’d only picked it up a week or so before and I was pleased as Punch for it was a smart little thing that fairly whizzed around the city. I parked on the road outside Hannah’s house, stepped out and opened the gate, which was hanging slightly off its hinges, and ran my finger along the chipped black paint which scarred the surface. Would Jonas not do something about that, I wondered. With Kristian gone and Aidan away, wasn’t he the man of the house now even if he was little more than a boy? The garden looked well though. The cold months hadn’t destroyed the plants and a well-tended bed looked as if it had a hundred secrets buried beneath the soil that would spring to life and spill their consequences once the winter had given way to the spring, which couldn’t come soon enough for my liking, for I have always been a lover of the sun, even if, through spending a lifetime in Ireland, I have had little personal connection with it.

  When did Hannah become a gardener, I wondered as I stood there. This is a new thing, is it?

  I rang the doorbell and stepped back, glancing up towards the second-floor window where a light was on, and as I did so a shadow made its way quickly across. Jonas must have heard the car pulling up and looked outside as I made my way up the short path to their door. I hoped that he’d noticed the Fiesta. What harm if I wanted him to think that his uncle had a bit of something to him? I thought for a moment that I should make more of an effort with the boy, for, after all, with his father gone and his older brother away he might need a man in his life.

  The door opened and as Hannah peered out she reminded me of our late grandmother, the way she stood and stared, bent over slightly, trying to understand why a person might be standing in her porch at this time of night. In her face, I could see the woman she might be in another fifteen years.

  ‘Well,’ she said, nodding her head, satisfied now that she recognized me. ‘The dead arose.’

  ‘Ah now,’ I replied, smiling at her and leaning forward to give her a peck on the cheek. She smelled of those lotions and creams that women of her age wear. I recognize them whenever the women come close to shake my hand and ask me how my week has been and would I like to come for my dinner some evening and how are their sons doing, they’re no trouble to me now, are they? I don’t know what those lotions are called. Lotions probably isn’t even the right word. The television advertisements would say something else. There’ll be a modern word for them. But look, what I don’t know about women and their ways would fill enough books to stock the Ancient Library of Alexandria.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Hannah,’ I said as I stepped inside and removed my overcoat, hanging it up on one of the empty hooks in the hallway, next to her well-worn navy Penneys coat and a brown suede jacket, which could only belong to Jonas. I glanced up the stairs, suddenly eager to see him.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said Hannah, leading the way into the living room, which was welcoming and warm. She had a fire lit in the grate and the place itself had an air about it that made me think it would be very comfortable to sit here of an evening, watching the television programmes, listening to Anne Doyle describe what Bertie was doing, and whether Bruton would make a comeback, and what poor Al Gore would do now that he was on the scrapheap.

  There was a framed photograph on top of the telly of little Cathal, laughing his head off as if he had his whole life in front of him, poor lad. One I’d never seen before. I stared at it: he was standing on a beach in a pair of short trousers, his hair unkempt, a smile on his face that would break your heart. I felt a moment’s dizziness overwhelm me. There was only one beach that Cathal had ever stood on in his life and why would Hannah display a memory from that terrible week? Where had she even found it?

  ‘How was the traffic anyway?’ she asked me from across the room and I turned and stared at her for a moment before replying.

  ‘Not a bother,’ I said. ‘I’ve a new car outside. It goes like the wind.’

  ‘A new car? That’s very posh of you. Is that allowed?’

  ‘I don’t mean brand-new,’ I said, telling myself that I should stop thinking of it in those terms. ‘I mean new to me. It’s secondhand.’

  ‘And that’s allowed, is it?’ she asked.

  ‘It is,’ I said, laughing a little, uncertain exactly what she meant. ‘Sure I have to get around, don’t I?’

  ‘I suppose so. What time is it anyway?’ She glanced at her watch, then back at me. ‘Will you sit down? You’re making me nervous standing there.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, taking a seat, and as I did so she clapped a hand to her mouth and stared at me as if she’d just had a great shock.

  ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ she said. ‘I invited you to dinner, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did,’ I admitted, aware now of how the smell of food in the air seemed to be more the memory of dinner than the promise of a new meal being prepared. ‘Had you forgotten?’

  She turned away and looked confused for a moment, scrunching up her eyes so her face took on a most unusual aspect, before shaking her head. ‘Of course I didn’t forget,’ she said. ‘Only, well, yes, I suppose I did. I thought it was – did we not say Thursday?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, certain that we had said Saturday. ‘Ah look, maybe I got it wrong,’ I added, not wanting to blame her for the mistake.

  ‘You didn’t get it wrong,’ she said, shaking her head and looking more upset than I thought necessary. ‘I don’t know where I am these days, Odran. I’m all over the place. I can’t begin to tell you all the mistakes I’ve made recently. Mrs Byrne already gave me
a warning and told me I had to buck up my ideas. But sure she’s always giving out, that one. I can’t do right for doing wrong as far as she’s concerned. Look, I don’t know what to tell you. The dinner’s over. Jonas and I ate a half-hour ago and I was settled down to the telly. Can I make you a sausage sandwich? Would that be all right?’

  I thought about it and nodded. ‘That would be smashing,’ I said, and then, remembering how my stomach had been rumbling in the car, I said I’d take two if it wasn’t any trouble and she said sure how would it be any trouble, didn’t she spend half her life making sausage sandwiches for those two lads upstairs anyway?

  ‘Two lads?’ I asked, wondering whether I had mistaken the shadow in the window for Jonas when it might have been his older brother. ‘Aidan’s not home, is he?’

  ‘Aidan?’ she asked, turning around in surprise, the frying pan already in her hand. ‘Ah no, sure he’s away in London on the sites. You know that.’

  ‘But you said two lads.’

  ‘I meant Jonas,’ she replied and I left her in peace and focused my attention on the television set.

  ‘Were you watching this earlier?’ I called out. ‘Don’t they make a terrible fuss all the same, the Yanks?’

  ‘They’d give you a pain in the head,’ she said over the sound of the oil spitting in the pan as she laid three or four sausages out to fry. ‘But yes, I sat before it half the day. Do you think he’ll be any good at all?’

  ‘He hasn’t even started yet and everyone hates him,’ I said, for I had watched a little of the coverage myself earlier in the afternoon and been surprised by the crowds protesting on the streets of the capital. Everyone said that he hadn’t won at all, and maybe he hadn’t, but it was all so tight that I found it hard to believe that a Gore inauguration would have been any more legitimate.

  ‘Do you know who I loved?’ asked Hannah in a faraway voice, as if she was a girl again.