in it – to show that Santa had indeed sampled our hospitality so that, the following morning, when they had got over the initial delight of their presents they would stand beside the table to examine the remains of the food and the whiskey glass lying sideways on the table because obviously, with a drop taken in so many houses along the way, Santa must have been well slewed by the time he got to our door and it was a wonder at all he managed to leave the right presents in the right houses and there was Agnes standing by the table in her pyjamas listening to me saying all this, weighing it up, while Darragh was already surging ahead, examining the carrot and cake but still not saying anything so that I began to wonder if I had slipped up somewhere in my story and given something away that would spoil the whole thing and I was about to open my mouth again but Mairead was looking at me from across the table, shaking her head, wearing that expression, both fearful and dismayed, which was telling me without words to
stop now, before you go too far
stop now
so I stopped
because every echo of that expression brings me back to that morning when we were just four months married and Mairead stood at this same breakfast table waving a small blue wand over my head and wearing that imploring look I had never seen on her face before, so compromised and uncertain of itself, startling in a woman who, till then, had conducted her life with all the confidence of one who had trusted her first instincts, her way of going about a life which had led her across Europe and through various teaching and cultural posts in Madrid, Berlin, Prague and all the way to the banks of the Danube in Budapest where, after two years working in a language school, she had suddenly turned for home – happily enough, as she admitted herself – but this time taking the scenic route through Northern Europe – Warsaw, Oslo and Copenhagen – before finally fetching up in our local secondary school covering maternity leave for the vice principal, which was when I met her, shortly after I took up work with the County Council and we started a courtship which saw us married a few years later and buying this house which we were settled in only a few months the morning she stood over me
at this same table
waving the stick that was telling us, by way of an unbroken line through its tiny window, that she was pregnant, that we were going to have a child and furthermore that this was something she was so totally unprepared for that she tried to stifle a giggle of fright in an effort to grasp the consequences of what it all might mean – this wand she was holding up between thumb and forefinger as if she were about to cast a spell in the room and draw down a cloud of glittering fairy dust over
this very table here
which at the time, stood in a house that was little more than a concrete shell, an old house going through a radical refurbishment, no doors or windows in some of the rooms, walls and ceilings stripped while the hallway was strewn with timber offcuts and copper piping, a house beginning to evolve around us, a wall-by-wall gain on structure and order, a space in the world we could call our own even if that morning it was in fact little more than a bedroom and a kitchen with the whole place smelling of sawdust and wet cement as she stood over the kitchen table
this same table
with that blue pregnancy indicator in her hand which was telling us with ninety-eight percent accuracy that she was indeed pregnant, because that’s what the clear line through its little window was saying, definite as any line drawn in the sand or any surveyor’s contour or any of those global parallels
longitude and latitude
which demark those national borders that are drawn up in the wake of long, complex negotiations – the 45th parallel which separates Alaska from Canada or, more accurately, the 38th parallel which separates North from South Korea – a definitive boundary or threshold over which you can venture only if you accept that you are leaving your old life behind with all its habits and customs, a life that has served you well enough up to this but which will not suffice in the new circumstances when
we were both faced with this threshold which most likely had its origins in one of those sudden, joyful fucks on the stack of doors in the bedroom at the end of the hall or on one of the carpenter’s trestles in the kitchen, one of those sudden coming-to-grips with each other to which we were given in those days, waylaying each other before moving on to whatever it was we had originally set out to do, an airy ignoring of each other which suited us both, smug and heedless but all demolished by the small baton which Mairead waved over my head with its news of how our lives had taken such a radical swerve away from all the old habits and rhythms we had so easily inhabited up to this but which now, surprisingly, I would relinquish without too much regret because
marriage to Mairead had brought with it a settling of my whole spirit into a kind of banal contentment I was comfortable with, a contentment which had drawn from me some nameless yearning the moment I wedded this spirited woman who stood over me as I sat
with my breakfast and newspaper in front of me
a man in the process of having his life overturned by news his young wife found so disabling but which
I seemed to be taking in my stride, having readily interpreted it as another extension of that ordinary contentment which had come to me in marrying Mairead, so much so that now I found myself marvelling, not at the dullness of my response, but at the realisation that if she had stood there telling me she was not pregnant this indeed would have been shocking news, this would have stopped me in my tracks and caused me something deeper than that mild surprise which kept me sitting there at the kitchen table with my wife repeating desperately that yes, she was pregnant and with that settled there should have been a finality to the moment which would have allowed us to acknowledge it with a tearful embrace and congratulations before setting the whole thing aside for the time being – fuller discussion later that evening – as I was anxious to return to my breakfast and squeeze the last drop of peace and quiet from those few remaining minutes before going to work – all of which was my normal way of going about the morning but
which I now saw, from the look on Mairead’s face, that the normal way of doing things would not suffice anymore as a new set of circumstances had just supervened and that I would have to dig deeper within myself to find something which would soothe the startled expression from her pale face beneath the severe centre parting which gave Mairead that ascetic look which so became her as the traveller who had crossed so many time-zones and borders but which spoke nothing of her bright spirit or the generous way her face opened so completely in laughter with such broad disclosure of all her features that it was sometimes impossible to refer back to the pale woman who now
stood there with that blue twig in her hand as
the moment lengthened to a dangerous silence in which it became obvious to both of us that even though we may have had four years of a relationship behind us, we were not yet as skilled as we might wish in coping with news like this, not yet capable of assigning it its proper place and dimension or seeing it in context, because right then we seemed to be incapable of getting past this moment or of putting it to rest for the time being so that we might get on with our day and why
sitting here
at this kitchen table
this particular incident should come to me now it’s hard to say, except to confirm that the blue line in that tiny window was
Agnes
or as Darragh would sometimes have it
Agnes Dei
Agnes the Unhinged
the Abbess of the Abyss
Agnosia
