I’ve always loved Edna O’Brien’s work, but this atmospheric, beautifully written story about an estrangement between two parts of a family and the attempt of the narrator and her cousin, Edward, to mend it years later has stayed with me in an especially insistent way since I first read it. The original dispute centred on the way Edward treated his mother years before; the description of her leaving his house on foot with her belongings and taking refuge in the narrator’s family home after his new wife objected to her, is very moving. “But, with so many dead,” the narrator explains, after she bumps into him on a visit home, ‘there was no need for estrangement anymore.”
The story moves freely through time, but its focal point is a family graveyard, which is on an island and only accessible by boat, and O’Brien’s descriptions of it at different times in the story are memorable:
“There were limestone tombs, blotched with white lichen … Swallows were swooping and scudding in and out of the several sacred churches, once the abode of monks, but long since uninhabited, the roofs gone, but the walls and ornamental doorways still standing, grey and sturdy, with their own mosaics of lichen”.
The narrator visits it “clandestinely” before her reconciliation with Edward and then several times with him and these visits bring them closer together. The descriptions of the cousins’ growing friendship are tender and moving. He begins to know almost telepathically when she will ring and to come in early from the fields to answer the phone; she visits him at home and in hospital, and sits quietly with him as he cries about the past, but the relationship is not straightforward and a new rift eventually opens between them.
I love the lyricism and detail in this story, and the atmospheric sense of an island graveyard heavy with history, just as the cousins’ relationship is weighed down and strained by their own family history, but what I admire most is the complication that’s so astutely depicted in both the cousins’ characters – the ways in which they come closer, then hold each other off and the vulnerability and refusal to compromise that’s in both of them is powerful and vividly realistic.
First published in the New Yorker, 2009, and available for subscribers to read here. Collected in Saints and Sinners, Faber and Faber, 2011
