An extract from Letters to Jude

I am looking at my mother through a window in the act of dying. She is lifting a cup of tea to her lips. The flash of lightning strikes and kills her. As the lightning strikes her it registers her picture instantaneously on the pane of glass. The lightning passes through a tree outside—the passing of her soul—and burns the tree down.

My Dear Leo,
I hope you don’t mind my writing to you after such a long, long time, but my thoughts of you never faded. I just had to write when I heard of the sudden death of your mother. It must have been a dreadful blow. I knew how close you were to her. Freddie Crichton conveyed the news. He had my phone number from when I au paired for him, of my parents’ home in Sevilla. When he called I was polite to him but I didn’t tell him much of my business. He hinted at the terrible ordeal we suffered that night in his house. He was trying to get me to describe it as if he wanted me to relive the trauma inflicted on us by those creatures. He called them dogs. ‘You know the way the dogs do it,’ he said, making me feel most uncomfortable. I asked him did they ever catch the assailants. He said what would be the point of that? ‘You know the cops here never catch anyone; they just spend their time asking the public to solve their crimes.’ It was he who suggested I write to you. He seemed so concerned—friends that go back the furthest, he said, but I never knew you two were close. In fact I would have thought the opposite. Anyway age can mellow people and maybe that’s what happened to him. He told me how you were shattered by the unexpectedness of her death—my poor, poor Leo—and that I would be like a tonic, he said. O, how he goes on. He tried it on with me you know more than once, but what chance did he have when my heart was smitten by you? However, he did mention your wife in very favourable terms. O Leo, I should not be talking like this, not now that you are a married man . . .
He remembers a pleasantly cool evening in midsummer in his prenuptial days with Lil. They had come from the theatre and were seated at the bar of the Royal Dublin Hotel. A man with a leering face—what disguise did he wear? A mask of risus sardonicus—unsteadily wriggled into a high barstool beside them. He gulped down a double whiskey and touched Lil on the back of her exposed neck. Was it accidental? Her shoulder, he remembers expecting it to recoil but no, it remained motionless and she said nothing but dangled the beads on her necklace and he could have sworn a fleeting smile crossed her lips. Had she known him? Was he from the play, he wondered, one of the cast from the commedia dell’arte of Lolita which they had just seen at the Peacock and which he enjoyed but which Lil found an awful bore? A little later he got off his high stool and falteringly . . .

The Rhymer
There’s many a slip
Between cup and lip

. . . touched the back of Lil’s neck again near the clasp of her pendant—this time trying to make it look like an accidental brushing as he struggled with the arms of his white linen jacket—where did he think he was? In some hot colonial outpost and the cool evening outside? He embarrassedly caught my eye, that bald head lurking under its fedora where had I seen it. ‘Sorry,’ he said and his accent seemed familiar, coming half muffled from behind the mask and yet disguised enough to prevent me from pinpointing it exactly. I was about to take umbrage when Lil’s hand went out to restrain me. ‘Did you know him?’ I asked Lil afterwards. ‘Who was he?’ ‘Just a man,’ she said.
. . . O Leo, I hope you are happy. There are so many things I want to tell you, and one thing in particular, which I don’t know if I should ever tell you. Please write to me. It all depends on whether you answer this letter. Just look at it. I didn’t even write in paragraphs, I was so nervous.
With sincere sympathy,
Bernarda.

Dear Bernarda,
Was it really you? Has Crichton done some good at last? (Although, why didn’t he appear at my mother’s funeral?) Is it possible? After all the years. Or is he trying to stir up trouble? He fancied my wife—he chased anything it seems in a skirt. He actually knew Lil before me when both of them worked in the Department of Trade before he moved to the libraries where he found his true metier, and he writes now in the media as a sternfaced critic. He was jealous when we got married and held a lifelong resentment towards me, so maybe his exhorting you to contact me again is an attempt on his part to break up or at least undermine the marriage. Who can tell? He was quite surprised, you see; he thought that I purloined Lil from him because you had left. He knew we had dated, and after all wasn’t it in his house the horror happened. Of course he was never to know the sordid details. How could either of us have confided such a thing to him? And then you went away. He never questioned about your disappearance; he just presumed your time of learning English in Ireland was at an end with your fluency achieved (and what fluency: you grasped the nuances of Hiberno-English like a native to the envy of your fellow students). Did you get the teaching job when you went back to Spain? O but Bernarda, it is so welcome you are to me. You come like a shaft of sunlight through the gloomy mists. Thank you so much for your kind letter. My mother, yes it was so sudden. I was so unprepared. I dream by day and mare by night, my thoughts flapping like Painted Ladies . . .
JF: If a caterpillar can become a butterfly, why can a child not become a . . . ?
. . . Or how come when we immerse ourselves in water we can swim, but when we embrace the air we cannot fly? I seem to have lost my direction. Trying to reach out a spiritual hand towards burgeoning feelings as they agitate inside me, and coax an unarticulated idea from an embryonic egg. Sometimes I dream her back and I feel close to her. Like when she died, I felt this overwhelming pressure on my chest but then I found her Lourdes holy water bottle shaped like the Virgin, and despite my lapsed belief I held it to my chest and all pain eased for a while at least; all was calm. I feel we are all like little spiders seeking a matrix. I think if I really try I could commune with her. I sometimes sense a presence, a flutter of breeze or a leaf, a whisper. I see her image in the windowpane so beautiful, still young—she was only nineteen when she had me. I will to hear her through a melting cloud, an evanescent sound. I imagine I hear her voice faintly coming in from the labyrinths of the dead. Loneliness dissolves for a wonderful moment but then she is gone. Was it a lack of concentration on my part or not? I don’t know. I walk a lot. I went down to the river this evening to see if I could find some energy. My eczema (the barometer of the state of my health) is bad. The weight on my chest returns. And time passes like the season’s leaves. Such vague trepidation.
I stood on a grassy patch overlooking the river, neon light reflecting off the water, and I looked across at all the houses, all the little tungsten bulbs, and I thought of all the lives inside, all the disputes and copulations, and my own Wounded House—my own life—drowning amongst them, lost in the sameness . . .