The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,92

break the news. I can not hand it to Bea, the owner of all the Hegartys. I can’t expose it to Ivor’s irony, or Ita’s intelligence, or Mossie’s wonderful management skills. I need a child to do this, or a grown-up child.

‘Come here, Jem,’ I say to my little brother; the youngest and best loved. And I watch him go round the others; Mammy last. Bea tries to make her sit down, but she will not sit down. Mammy stands up and undoes the top button of her blouse, and, wild-eyed, pulls off her coat, casting around her as she does so, stuck in the second sleeve. She finds Sarah and the child, as Bea yanks the last of the coat off her arm, and she hurries over, runs even, to set her hands on the child’s shoulders, then up on either side to graze his lovely face. She looks at Sarah, with a terrible contract in her eye, and Sarah steps forward, very politely, to shake her hand. After which, as though none of this had happened, Mammy turns away.

It is hard to describe the effect of the boy on the assembled Hegartys.

‘Rowan?’ they say. ‘Rowan.’

It is like we had never seen a child before. He has the Hegarty eyes, we say–delighted, like they weren’t a curse–and we look to see what human being looks out through them, this time. It is too uncanny. Everyone wants to touch him. They just have to–they reach out and he shies away; flinches, even. The one he chooses for safe haven is, of all people, Mossie, who sits him on one long leg and jounces him, hard, Ride a cock horse, threatening to spill him on to the floor. Mossie, who was for Liam a dark mirror, loves the boy and the boy loves him. Mossie’s own children gather round, and for the first time I see how happy they are–that is why they are so well-behaved, with their gentle mother and their father who is firm but fair: they are content.

This seems like an amazing thing to notice about your own brother, after so many years–it is almost more amazing than the fact of Liam’s son. Maybe that is because the accident of Liam’s son is too fantastic to contemplate, in the middle of a hotel reception room, in the suburbs of Dublin, where two hundred people I sort of know are sitting down to soup or melon, followed by salmon or beef.

We eat it all up. Down to the apple tart and ice cream. We do not stint. We put slabs of butter on bad white rolls, and we ask for second cups of tea. I am inordinately interested in the food. I look up from my plate to Rowan and then I look down again to stab a potato croquette.

There are other things to notice, whenever I have the strength to pull my eyes away from the boy. Ivor talking to Liam’s friend Willow for several moments too long. A look that passes between them and the priest, no less, who gets his coat and looks again, before he goes out the door. Ernest sees this last glance too and takes note. And there is Ita sitting at a right angle to Ernest, holding on to his forearm with both hands and talking into the side of his face, which has that drawn, mortified look I remember from confession. Someone has given Kitty a microphone, and she stands there while Mossie taps a glass with his knife. Then she lays the microphone down on the table, and lifts her face to sing, with utter sweetness, Liam’s favourite song:

Let us pause in life’s pleasures

And count its many tears,

While we all sup sorrow with the poor;

There’s a song that will linger

For ever in our ears;

Oh, hard times come again no more.

But of course. This stupid thing. I have to push hard against my eyelids, the tears are so sudden and sharp.

’Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,

Hard times, hard times,

Come again no more;

Many days you have lingered

Around my cabin door,

Oh, hard times come again no more.

A ragged consensus gathers under the chorus, but, by some miracle, they let her sing the verse alone: my annoying little sister, looking at the ceiling with innocent eyes, as she takes each note and tenderly lays it down.

While we seek mirth and beauty

And music light and gay,

There are frail forms fainting at the door;

Though their voices are silent,

Their pleading looks will say

Oh, hard times