This Happy

by Niamh Campbell

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

'A beautiful, wry love story' David Nicholls, author of ONE DAY

'I love this woman's writing. Golden sentences' Diana Evans, author of ORDINARY PEOPLE

'One of the year's most beautifully written books, THIS HAPPY traces the path to womanhood of Alannah from disastrous affair to no-less-comfortable marriage and beyond' The i, Best Books of 2020 So Far

'If you loved Sally Rooney's NORMAL PEOPLE, read this novel ... Darkly romantic ... Reminiscent of Eimear McBride's lyrical Joycean sentences' Vogue

'The best novel I have read all year' Sunday Business Post

I have taken apart every panel of this, like an ornamental fan. But we stayed in the cottage for three weeks only, just three weeks, because it was cut short you see - cut short after just three weeks, when I'd left my entire life behind.

When Alannah was twenty-three, she met a man who was older than her - a married man - and fell in love. Things happened suddenly. They met in April, in the first bit of mild weather; and in August, they went to stay in rural Ireland, overseen by the cottage's landlady.

Six years later, when Alannah is newly married to another man, she sees the landlady from afar. Memories of those days spent in bliss, then torture, return to her. And the realisation that she has been waiting - all this time - to be rediscovered.

Release date: June 11, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

When I awoke to find him gone I was not immediately surprised. After all we had argued the previous night and I had broken a plate with a chaffinch on it, one part of a set decorated with thrushes and various tits. I had broken it emphatically but, surprised at myself, snapped back at the sandy crack: I felt remorse, as if I had let slip something I didn’t mean.

As I lay in the bed it occurred to me that he could not have gone for a walk in the lane, or to visit the landlady, or to buy supplies, because the sun still hadn’t come up. The kitbag that he travelled with was gone from the top of the inlaid chest. And then, Oh hell, I thought: he’s gone back to his wife.

It was early. The window was a coffer in the wall and the room was filled with moonlight, and in the faded wallpaper were putti, Virgins, wolfhounds, hags, calligraphy. The moon lit the wardrobe and the horse-bits on the windowsill. It was an austere room. There was only the chest, the wardrobe, the bed with its cakey eiderdown, and a stack of mildewed books. Mice lisped in panels and the boards groaned underfoot. I lay in the hollow he’d left, beginning to feel afraid.

I listened for the ring of his weight on the ladder, for the creak of his tread in the lower room, for a boot or a cough or the rustle of clothes. I heard nothing but the wind rinsing the trees as shadows tossed along the wall.

After a time I rose from the bed and pulled on his expensive peacoat, which hung on a nail. The motorbike was gone from the yard below. Across the stubble field I saw the brick factory piped like a candle shrine, its tusks and stacks macabre against the sky.

What to do? It was cold in the room. It was five o’clock – this I knew because the cat was crying outside the window now: meowing in outrage, meow! The cat was like clockwork at five a.m. When I rushed to the pane we looked at one another before he leapt out of sight, and where his yellow eyes had been an oak tree rolled in the wind. I went downstairs and let the animal in; it wrapped itself around my legs. It climbed up onto the pulverised loveseat to look at me. I knew the soles of both my feet were black.

What to do? I walked a thoughtful circuit through the house. The main room was cavernous with deep windows, and, in one of these, books had been crushed together on the sill. In this room there was also a fireplace of wood-chocks and a crisp corona-shaped grate. A corridor of Perspex ran adjacent, lapped with leaves and seedpods. A lamp like a smoky bowl, upturned, ridged and twisted at the neck by the glass-blower, was always left on. I’d never seen it being switched on or off. It gave a waxy colour to the room.

Outside, I knew, the painful business of daybreak was beginning. The sky was gashed with grey and yellow to the east. Cold beaches without colour lay in low-tide, just a few miles away, and this was relevant to me, as was the bicycle beneath tarpaulin in the yard.

Every light out but the yellow of the lamp.

Every light out but the eyes of the cat.

Every light out but the truly indifferent moon.

One day in autumn when I had been married for less than four months I saw the landlady. I saw her in Cow Lane – such a strange place to be, cobbled self-consciously – and when I caught sight of her I turned and pretended to be distracted by the surplus of a shop door, a banal glass-panelled door, swinging and releasing people with shopping bags.

The landlady was standing on the pavement. It had been raining, all was shining, it was mild: she was pausing and reading something on her phone. In the years since I had seen her last, when she oversaw my disgrace, she hadn’t changed. Even without preparation – nothing that had taken place during the day to indicate this encounter would occur – I felt generosity rise within me, a desire to tell her so – to tell her, you look great, you always do, you have such style. She must, I thought, be fifty now at least.

I weighed my options and eventually pivoted, prevaricated, walked away. I swept off before she could see me. My footsteps clacked on the cobblestones.

Dame Street was like coming ashore, and here I halted. I began to click the fingers of my hands. This is something I do when I want to summon a decision from within or without me. Behind, the chute leading back into Temple Bar was desultory. Buses broke from the Cathedral and brayed towards College Green.

Even now, I thought. Even now this minute I feel exhilarated to think about it, all of it, although I must confess it had been crushed into a kind of pinhead, a pinprick, a punctum, something severe, a tattoo: but when released, it was a rich green wave of memories, flaming seams and flaming seals. And at that point I hadn’t seen her, nor Harry, for something like six years. I was thirty now – over six years – although nonetheless of course I remembered it all forensically.

I was going just then to meet my husband of four months – less than four months – but found my footsteps slowed, which was strange, since typically I hurried everywhere. And there was a general slowness then, after I had seen the landlady – a distension, it was almost like horror – like everything in the environment was a sign.

I wasn’t married long. Things had happened suddenly.

I was going at that moment to meet my husband.

I continued, pressed, on my way, against the crowd, as the cathedral bells erupted and the birds scattered and gulls opened, as supple as crossbows, looking for scraps from tourists on the grass. I wondered how much I had told my husband about the episode with Harry when I was twenty-three. Little, I reckoned; hardly anything. But it had happened, certainly, to me.

It seems funny to say I have never listed the facts. This is because they make me sound foolish.

When I was twenty-three, and studying in London, I met a man who was older than me – a married man, a writer – and fell in love. Things happened suddenly then as well. We left London, this man and I, and travelled to Ireland, where I am from. We had met in April, in the first bit of mild weather; we went to Ireland in August. We came to stay in a cottage at the bottom of a tubular lane, the type in Ireland called a boreen. The cottage was his; he rented it, he knew it well.

I have taken apart every panel of this, like an ornamental fan. But we stayed in the cottage for three weeks only, just three weeks, because it was cut short you see – cut short after just three weeks, when I’d left my entire life behind.

Afterwards, for years, things brought it back to me, the cottage, suddenly: dusty aubergines; a copse against a cold bloodletting sunset in Phoenix Park; the smell of burning timber, or of damp. Once in the film institute I was folding my coat under my chair and when I sat up I could smell it – the cottage – smell smoke, wood smoke, on someone’s clothes, and I was seized with strange autonomous ecstatic grief.

I think of it in certain atmospheres. A species of spacious evening, in the countryside especially; the sky stretched and pillared, wet scents of land-water, wet dog, wet dock, steeped leaves, and earth rippled up by hooves or bicycles or boots. I remember standing in the lane barefoot, bath-time, the lustful chill and coming discomfort of nightfall – the slow rich reclamation of the fields and hills by darkness, threaded starlight, night coming on like someone filling a bucket with dark sand.

I could stay here forever! I thought. I could live on here, forever! I was young back then. I was always so wound up.

But when I saw her, the landlady, in Cow Lane, when I had been married for four months and six years had passed since it all, it was not that things came flowing back to me. In fact it had been with me, close to me, sewn into decisions like signatures, for years: redrafted, redesigned, streamlined, all confusion corrected, all forgotten details simulated, supplemented, quantified.

And so the sight of the landlady in a marvellous moss-green coat – the kind woven in Donegal and treasured for a lifetime – looking no older, looking more beautiful really, the sight of this was a source of grace or abrupt unasked-for glee. Like I had been waiting all this time to be rediscovered.

Really they are always with me, always near to hand, these memories. Image and gist maybe. Distilled.

A morning in the cottage, say. Outside the cottage: there, in the steeping lane. On this morning – I cannot capture it intact – the landlady came upon me peeing in a copse with a woollen rug on my shoulders. When I saw her I cried out to excuse myself and stood up straight. Harry was back in the bedroom, asleep.

She said, Oh dear, oh dear, the dog has run off, and I answered, I’m sure he’ll come back, and she paused at a slant as if hanging from something, her face a half-rictus of pain, so that I imagined her to be judging me, although now on reflection I think she was only distraught.

Very early. And here she was running about after the dog. As I gathered myself up I felt the sensational field of my body, and especially my fingers, expand, spreading like filaments to the broken grin of the tree trunks and growing things, the liquor-smelling richness of decay, the path churned to peaks and troughs. I felt she had brought other people with her and they were watching me. But there was nobody around.

I went back to the bedroom of the cottage then. I don’t understand how a man can sleep like that. Don’t they worry what you will do, unsupervised?

I have watched my husband, asleep, similarly: so vulnerable, so trusting, or unthinking. You could be a Judith sawing the head from Holofernes; this could be Molly’s Chamber, a girl filling a pistol up with water and inviting the magistrate in. All of these being idle thoughts of course. Free-flowing from below.

Later that same day, when Harry was once again elsewhere – working, of course – I sat on the steps as the evening fell and anxiously tried to absorb it, the lane of trees, the sounds of the breeze sifting dryly through the trees, the spokes of rowan with red berries, or to find meaning in it, to compose a deathless sentence that would explain it all to me.

I remember now that I’d felt helpless in the face of this task because I did not, for the most part, know the names of the trees.

I remember the giddiness that was a kind of declawed trauma when Harry told me, You are a complicated girl.

This is how I picture myself: as a girl, awaiting instructions, her knees drawn to her chest. A sense of aggravated static or of glittering anticipation, blackly glittering anticipation, and in such imaginings I was painfully alone. Much, much harder was the task of conjuring the man – Harry – from a distance, on mature recollection, and trying to wonder what he was thinking, if he thought about it at all, if he whipped my interest and discarded me accidentally, or without malice, without sufficient empathy – or if, really, I’d wounded him with what I’d said on that final day.

What I had said: I will not join your – chaste harem! You won’t put me back in a box like a toy.

Snottily, it must be said. Insubordinately.

On Dame Street, after I had come ashore, I turned, I walked; I watched for the landlady from the corner of my eye. My gaze alighted on the faces of people coming towards me in case I saw someone else or something else significant, in case the day was about to become a theatre of synchronicity, as days can become at times I think when fate is accelerated. I even paused and gave the street time to unfold or loosen something – I walked slowly, I thought slowly – but there were no more disclosures.

I thought, then, that I had been waiting, I had been waiting to be rediscovered – I had been waiting for him to return – for a long time, that this had been an unspoken hope and a wishful vigilance but that, since I’d met my husband, it had receded. So much so that I saw the impulse abstracted before me and felt sorry for the person who had waited, and I thought with some pleasant condescension, how does a person waste her twenties like that? The answer of course being easily indeed. As easy as can be.

Passing Essex Street I also thought of how boring life could be and of how boring people were, how inhibited, and that it was natural to conceive of wild aspirations to cope with this.

For the rest of the way I slipped into the notion that my husband might have gotten to the bus stop before me, might be waiting for me, but judged myself at the top of Parliament Street to be idiotic because he was never waiting for me. As I walked the sheer rain began to fall again, lightly, so I pulled up the hood of my coat, the coat with the tartan pattern like a picnic blanket that I became sick of suddenly and which made me feel plain. My husband was always late. He proposed to me, really, to get out of being held accountable, one evening, for being late – to get out of being held accountable for this and other things.

On the quays rain ruffled the river as the evening came on. When a bus pulled in I let it come and go, watching it lurch off and join the stalled traffic, and wondered if, one day, I would jump on a bus anyway, without my husband: if, one day, I would lose patience entirely. I saw him coming in the dark blue coat, the satchel swinging by his side, and smiling ruefully. His complexion was weathered from working, for many years, in hot weather – from living in Spain. The effect of his heavy lids was a languid expression I found restful to observe. When I saw him my irritation lifted.

Little kit, he greeted. This was the nickname he had given me. Because I am slight and I bite. Seven minutes, he said, looking at the LED screen, that’s not bad, is it?

There is power in a past, I thought, and liability too.

How was work? I asked.

My kid, he grinned, is going to win the chess tournament. He referred to the boy he had been coaching at the school where he taught history.

Oh my, I teased, you will be so fulfilled.

He can even beat me now, he said.

The grin was real; the excitement was real. He was like a child about teaching, about guiding and being seen as a guide. I always slightly disdained this since I taught third level and didn’t give a rat’s ass about it. I see now this was obvious and unhelpful.

You should come to the tournament, my husband said.

I don’t understand the rules, I retorted, because I went to state school. But then I laughed: Yes, I’ll go, I said, I’ll watch. It would be nice to see the place.

You might need to get Garda vetted.

They’d want to vet me all right, state school and all of that.

I knew that he wouldn’t ask me again. I’d have to ask, and by then it would be too late to arrange anything. Because we hardly knew each other, our interdependence sometimes took the form of wary bluff and games of chicken; challenges, withholdings. But we didn’t talk much about our marriage, about the decision we’d made. We behaved as though it had always existed.

Are you all right? was something he asked me a lot. He would say this and watch me from the side of his eye. And I would pretend I did not know I was being watched.

Harry watched me, similarly, from the side of his eye.

Harry was in my mind now and weaving between my thoughts disruptively.

I remembered, standing at the bus stop I recalled, our first meal together – our first meal, Harry and I – and that it was famine food, it was cockles and mussels in broth; there were candles burning on pale pine tables, and he watched everything that I ate – tracked it, it seemed, from bowl to lips – and looked stiffly at the wineglass every time I lifted it. We were in Borough Market on a summer night. I was reading Little Dorrit at the time and I talked about how boring I was finding it. I was aware that my petulance made me look childish and guileless and attractive.

These tactics, I thought: you are tactical. The thought made me ashamed.

Standing at the bus stop, my husband placed an idle hand on the small of my back. Always this hardly calculated gesture of proprietorship has felt authentically, absorbingly, erotic to me.

I remembered Harry, spontaneously, grabbing my calf. Before me on the motorbike. Geyser of gratitude and passion at the grabbing of my calf. I knew absolutely nothing about men then, at twenty-three, but I’d learned a little since.

These two men, as I placed them alongside each other now, were not the same. My husband you see was wild with love for me, or not love for me, but a dependence that predated me and had no doubt attached itself to other women, earlier women, with a tenacity so burning it eventually burned out. Harry on the other hand had never needed me, but for in fits-and-stops of anger orchestrated by my body and the way I used my body, leaving bits of it lying about, such as a leg cast out under a table outside a restaurant in Borough Market, heedless and scantily furred at the thigh where the razor had stopped. A leg thrown wide denoting hipbones open as a jaw in shock.

Harry had been a figure of awe to me. My husband, increasingly, was not: his love was a gauche and floundering type – or seemed so – full of hunger and puppyish need. To this end, the end of preserving things, my husband was also dishonest, or could be. Harry was never dishonest with me. He was smooth and contained – an image of him: the door to his office locked against me – and a canvas for huge projections, at the time, on my behalf. But I can’t, I thought then, at the bus stop, blame him for that, really.

How was the library? My husband asked me now.

Oh, fine, I said. Still on the lesser Gombrichs. I was reading, then, about illusion. I have always been interested in that.

The bus drew up. As we travelled through the city the rain began to weaken and a surprising final show of sunlight swept across the evening, leaving a red residue, so I said, We need to walk this evening – straight away, when we get home. We need to just drop all our stuff and go straight out. Before it starts raining again.

There were no free seats on the bus, only standing room swinging from poles as it dawdled north.

The old trees of the suburbs were copper and abundant. The trees at the Bishop’s palace spilled over the walls and littered the pavement with gem-coloured mulch. The landlady and her sudden exact apparition was everywhere, though nowhere substantial, and I started to wonder with application what, in fact, she might be doing now, and did she still live in the old Georgian farmhouse, and did she still rent to Harry, and did she remember me. And where he might be. I’d assumed he had gone, was in London, or somewhere else. I’d never before thought of Dublin as somewhere that Harry would manifest. I’d considered it a planet apart.

My husband sent messages from his phone, one-handed, fluently a. . .