The South by Colm Tóibín Read Free Book Online Page A

door, dressed as though for some great event.
    “Do tell me all about yourself,” she said.
    “You’re going to have to let me stay here.”
    “Have you left him? Oh good, I’m glad you’ve left him.”
    Katherine washed herself and changed her clothes. They sat in a small room overlooking the garden which gathered in what light came from the sun. Her mother returned again and again to the story of the woman coming up the driveway to implore Katherine not to proceed with the court case.
    “What a pity she didn’t come with you!” her mother laughed. “A big Irish cow laying siege to you. I’m so glad you’ve come.”
    In the days that followed Katherine began to laugh too.
    “What exactly did she sound like?” her mother asked, but Katherine’s effort to imitate the woman’s accent was so unreal that her mother laughed even more and wanted her to go on doing it.
    “You escaped from Ireland just in time,” her mother said, going over once more all the details of the journey.
    Katherine made no plans. Each night her mother made a cocktail with vodka and vermouth and told stories about the Blitz, or went out to poker parties, or to the cinema. One night she invited some friends for drinks and poker. They were English women, all of them, in their sixties and seventies, and they drank several cocktails before they settled down to cards.
    “It was the game of poker that got us through the war, my dear,” Katherine’s mother said to her, as they played the first hand. Later, when her mother left the room the ladies talked among themselves until one of them turned to Katherine and smiled. “So you’re the friend from Ireland then,” she said.
    “I suppose I am,” she said. “I haven’t seen my mother for some years.”
    “Your mother? Is your mother here as well?”
    “This is my mother’s house. I’m her daughter.” It suddenly struck her that she had not been introduced to these people as her mother’s daughter, nor had she used the word “mother” in their presence.
    “You’re her daughter? I didn’t know she had any children.”
    “Here she is now. Ask her.”
    As they stood in the kitchen when the guests had gone, Katherine asked her mother why she had told her friends that she had no children.
    “I put all that behind me.”
    “It feels funny being written off like that.”
    “Yes, like walking out of the cinema, leaving it all behind, the big picture.”
    “Don’t make jokes.”
    “Katherine, don’t tell me what to do.”
    “Did I ever exist for you?”
    “I got out of that place, and I put it behind me. It’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it. Your father wouldn’t come. I don’t think you’ve consulted your spouse. Incidentally, he telephoned twice today.”
    “Tom?”
    “He’ll telephone again tomorrow. I told him I had been in touch with you and I would tell you.”
    “Tell him I’ve left,” she said, and turned away.

BARCELONA:
A PORTRAIT OF FRANCO
    “We should call this exile’s corner,” Michael Graves said, as the waiter poured more sherry into his glass. “We should put a sign up. Do you know the Irish word for exile?”
    “Please tell me,” she said.
    “Deoraí.”
    “How very interesting.”
    “Maybe so, but do you know what it means?”
    “No.”
    “ Deor means a tear and deoraí means one who has known tears.”
    “I see no deep furrows on your cheeks,” she said.
    “That’s because, like you, I’m not really an exile, but an émigré. Delighted to get out. A great country to emigrate from is ours. ‘And after this our exile . . .’” he began to intone.
    “What’s that?”
    “It’s a prayer. ‘Hail Holy Queen Mother of Mercy, Hail Our Life Our Sweetness and Our Hope, to Thee do we send up our sighs mourning and weeping in this valley of tears . . .’ You say it at the end of the Rosary. Do you know what the Rosary is?”
    “A prayer.”
    “Too true. It’s a prayer.”
    He spoke to her with a mocking ease she had not