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The Night Stages

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

LEICA

There is a black-and-white photograph of Kenneth standing in sunlight beside a prairie railway station. He is loose-limbed and smiling, happy maybe, or at least unconcerned about the journey he seems poised to take. Slim, fresh-faced, all dressed up, he appears to be just a kid really, possibly leaving home for the first time. But nothing about his posture, or the atmosphere around him, suggests anxiety. He wants to get going, this young man, but he is not at all unhappy with, or uncurious about, the place where he stands. His shadow falls behind him, but the gesture painted by it is one of eagerness. He will never lose this alertness, this aura of keenness.

The station's platform is dry and clean: there have not been any recent bouts of snow. But Kenneth's overcoat, and his gloves and scarf, suggest that it is cold. There is also a winter clarity of sunlight and crispness of shadow on the cement under his feet, a full sun in a clear sky above him. And then there is this anticipation – that eagerness.

A cable telegraph sign is just behind his left shoulder: it could be he has sent or has received some sort of message, a declaration or a summons. Perhaps he will be gone from the place where he stands, and quite soon. Everything around him in this picture – shadows, the raised arms of the railway signal, the sky and the station – speaks of a departure to places larger and more complicated, a drift toward relationships more sophisticated than those unfolding in the town or village beyond the edges of the picture. An entrance into commerce, perhaps, or maybe sudden fame. It is not at all hard to imagine Kenneth gone, the quay empty, and the photographer, whoever he or she may be, turning away, walking back into a town that has already begun to fade.

* * *

But Kenneth is older than he looks in this image: he has already taken and abandoned several points of view. He has been to Paris, Milan, Madrid. He has been educated by museums and instructed by teachers. He has met – briefly – certain celebrated artists. He has visited important monuments and gazed at significant landmarks. He has gathered all of this together and has brought it with him to this stark place, along with a wife and two children. Yes, he is married and has children.

There is a grain elevator in the distance on the other side of the tracks. Some sort of field, far away, is almost hidden by Kenneth's left elbow. He is not a prairie boy, but he has chosen this sky, this platform, and everything beyond it as a background to his daily life, and he has become familiar with returning to such a landscape after completing projects in the outer world. In spite of how things may look, this is a photo of arrival, one taken just after disembarkation, when the airport mural was still bright and alive in his mind, the paint on it hardly dry.

If he were to close his eyes now, the figures he has created would stare back at him – a questioning congregation – wondering where he has gone. His back is turned to the distances suggested by the converging lines of the railway tracks. The sky is utterly empty. Kenneth's shadow is a thin ghost on the quay. But there are thousands and thousands of miles inside him.

IVERAGH

Just after midnight she walks out the door, steps over frost- stiffened grass, and approaches the grey shape of the Vauxhall. She slings her suitcase into the back seat, slams the door, then opens the driver's side, sits behind the wheel, pulls the door toward her. She turns the key in the ignition, places her palm on the cool, vibrating knob of the gear shift, and allows herself one moment of hesitation. Her white cottage, an unlit rectangle against a sky busy with stars, is as grey as the car. The turf shed is grey as well, squatting at the back of the yard. There is a moon somewhere, but she refuses to look for it. She flicks on the lights. She shifts into reverse.

The grass of her own lane flattens under the wheels; then, when she turns the car, an ill-repaired road with a ribbon of similar grass at its centre appears in her windscreen. Three miles of hedgerows accompany her to the crossroads at Killeen Leacht, with its single tavern, dark and empty, and its wide, slow river. Salmon are gently turning in their sleep under that shining water. Salmon and the long green hands of water weeds, shaken by the current.

Soon she is deep in the Kerry Mountains, disturbing flocks of sheep drowsing near potholes, and birds probably huddled in hidden nests. The car's lights bounce on the stone bridges of Coomaclarig and Dromalonburt, then illuminate the trunks of last standing oaks of Glencar. She wants the constellation tilting in the rear-view mirror to be Orion, and when it follows her for some time along the hip of the mountain called Knocknacusha, she concludes that it is. Climbing to the Oisin Pass, she thinks about the ancient warrior Niall had spoken of, the one who had searched from that height for lost companions but not found them. He'd been gone for three hundred years, Niall said, but the woman he was with made him believe it was only three nights. He had lost everything, Niall insisted, for three nights with a woman.

She descends to the plain. Lough Acoose, still and dim under faintly lit clouds, slips into her side window. On the opposite shore the hem of a shadowy mountain touches the water. Ten minutes later there is the town of Killorglin, and then the Laune River, oiled by moonlight.

Goodbye, she thinks, to all that. Goodbye to the four flashing strands of the Iveragh Peninsula, to the bright path of surf in St. Finian's Bay, the Skellig Islands freighted by history, the shoulders of mountains called Macgillicuddy's Reeks. Goodbye to her own adopted townland, Cloomcartha, to the kitchens that had welcomed her, and to dogs whose names she had known. Goodbye to her own small drama – that and the futile, single-minded tenaciousness that had almost maintained it. The changing weather patterns, the gestures, the theatrical light.

An hour and a half later she reaches the smoother roads and quieter hills of neighbouring County Limerick. She accelerates, and as she does, she begins to visualize the abandoned peninsula unfurling like a scarf in the wind, gradually unwinding, then letting go, mountains and pastures scattering behind her on the road. "Iveragh," she says out loud, perhaps for the last time. The landscape, she knows, will forget her. Just as Niall will forget her. What she will forget remains to be seen. She imagines her phone ringing on the table and no one there to answer it. This provides a twinge of pleasure until it occurs to her that it might not ring at all.

She leaves the car in the airport parking lot, knowing it will be towed, stolen, or junked when it becomes apparent that no one is coming back to claim it. The sky, overcast now, is a solid black, echoed by greasy black macadam. It begins to rain in a half- hearted way as she walks with her suitcase toward the lights of the terminal, leaving, she hopes, such full preoccupation and terrible necessity. She is leaving the peninsula. Leaving Niall.

* * *

Ten hours later, the airliner on which she is travelling shudders, preparing to descend. The window is an oval, the shape of a mirror that once hung on a mother's bedroom wall. A mother, she thinks, and a mother's bedroom wall. What she sees through this oval is the blurred circle of the propellers, then a broken coastline, froth at the edges and rocks moving inland as if bulldozed by the force of the sea. Now and then an ebony ocean emerges between long arms of altostratus clouds trailing intermittent rain. Altostratus. One of the words Niall has slipped into her vocabulary, along with geomagnetism, cyclonic, convective, penultimate. Ultimate.

All night the hum of the engines has remained constant, but reaching this shore the sound changes, the Constellation banks, and the seascape below tilts to the left. There are caves and inlets, and the curve of a sudden beach like a new moon near dark water. The noise diminishes and the cliffs move nearer until she can see the ragged cut of the bitten periphery, then the uninterrupted northern forest, moving inland.

She searches in her handbag, finds a cigarette, and lights it while staring at the blue flame near the propeller, which for a moment echoes the reflected orange flame of her lighter. While she smokes, the roar of the aircraft intensifies, then diminishes again, like an argument. One silver wing dips toward the sea, and she sees a freighter half a mile or so beyond the rocks of the coast. She believes the ship is fully lit and of a great size, waves cascading over its long deck, pale castles of ice on the bow in the full dark of a late December afternoon. But it is autumn, not winter, and the day is opening, not closing.

She cannot visualize the cockpit of this very domestic plane, this padded and upholstered airborne parlour called a Constellation. More than fifteen years have passed since the war, the Air Transport Auxiliary, and the intense relationship with aircraft that filled her then-vivid life. The young pilot she had been then, the young woman behind the controls, would have been disdainful of what she has become: a sombre person with the bright centre of her life hidden, her days unfolding in the pause that seems to define this half-point of the twentieth century. Fuselage, she thinks, instrument panel. These terms are still known to her, but she has, beyond her facile drawings of aircraft, no real relationship with them. She has become unknowable, and very likely uninteresting. She has blamed Niall for this, and for much else, though she knows it has been her own acquiescence that has caused her to become, in every possible way, a passenger.

Her younger self would have been disdainful of the clutter of what passes for comfort in this airborne interior: the seats that become beds, the blankets, the linens and tableware. She can remember evenings when, after a day of ferrying warplanes, the moon would sit complacently over the dark airfield and the makeshift bunkhouses where she and her flight companions would sleep. She can recall whispered confidences and bursts of laughter, the sense of guardianship, inclusion. And now, more than a decade and a half later, she is being flown into nothing but personal scarcity. She leans her head against the curved frame of the window, trying to bring the communal engagement of the war years back into her heart. But when she closes her eyes, the memory of a map falls into her mind.

Because it was drawn on a narrow slice of paper, she had believed Niall had placed a drawing of a river in her hand. Then she had looked at it more closely and had seen there was only one shoreline moving down the sheet, defining thumb-sized spots of blue. Bays, he had told her, the beginnings of open water in a cold climate. Whoever made it must have been working on the deck of a ship that was following the coast, he had said. It was one of the few gifts he had ever given her, and she cannot now recall the occasion that had prompted it: only that it had moved her, and she had not told him how much. She would never, now, be able to tell him how much.

She opens her eyes, turns back to the oval.

What she sees below is not quite arctic, is a mirror image instead of the sea cliffs that were visible after the takeoff from Shannon, except there are far too many trees now to mistake this country for Ireland. The cliffs appear to be wilder, though the surf breaks around them in the same familiar way. As the plane lowers more purposefully, making its final approach into Gander, Newfoundland, the pine forest approaches. Sea, rock, then acres and acres of forest. Like all transatlantic flights, the aircraft would refuel in this bleak, obscure place. The passengers would disembark for an hour or two.

Tam recalls the bright new American aircraft she had sometimes been instructed to pick up at Prestwick in Scotland: Mosquitos often, or Lancasters. Those planes had set out for the transatlantic part of the journey from the place that is now directly below her, as Ferry Command had been situated at Gander. She had always wanted to pilot a transatlantic flight, but it was understood that no woman would ever be invited to do so, regardless of her skills or accomplishments, so the idea of Gander had remained a vague point of intersection to her, situated between one important shore and another. Soon her boots will be on Gander's transient ground, however: all these years later. You bide your time in a temporary place like this, she thinks. You make no commitment. This is the geography of Purgatory and the aircraft is about to touch down.

She had always enjoyed "touching down," noise and power and forward momentum lightly brushing the ground, then settling in, becoming calmer, silencing. She recalls the satisfaction of a completed mission, the pleasure of performance. But now she believes that when she lands it will be as if an idea, something tonal – a full weather pattern, Niall would say – will have closed up behind her, and she will be in the final stages of leaving him.

In the mountains of the Iveragh, he had told her, there would always be times of scarcity. But the old people of the Iveragh knew the difference between scarcity and famine. There is hope in scarcity, the old people had said. She had heard them say it. They had said it to her.

There was no hope in her. Not anymore. From now on she would starve.

* * *

Niall had been born in a market town on the Iveragh Peninsula of County Kerry – the Kingdome, he called it – and except for university and a handful of years working for the Meteorology Service in Dublin, he had never lived anywhere else. Sometimes he would recite the ancient names of the peninsula's townlands and mountains when she complained, as she occasionally did, of his silence, until, laughing, she would ask him to stop. Those names were tumbling around in her mind now, mixed with the sounds of the engines. Raheen, Coomavoher, Cloonaughlin, Killeen Leacht, Ballaghbeama, Gloragh. Beautiful places, as she had come to know, though diminished by the previous century's famine and then by ongoing, unstoppable emigration.

Niall's direct antecedents had survived the famine. Probably by their wits, he'd said. They had not perished in the mountains, he told her, but had made a life for themselves instead in the town. Nor had they later run up the slopes of mountains during uprisings or in the tragedy of the civil war, as those in the rural parishes had done. He had shown her the memorial plaques that were scattered here and there around the countryside at the places where rebels had been shot or beaten to death. He had had a sentimental, if not a political, sympathy for those desperate boys and the songs that were sung about them. "'We'll give them a hot reception,'" he had sung to her more than once, "'on the heathery slopes of Garrane.'"

No one in the family had taken the boats from Tralee either, he'd told her. There were none of them in London or New York. Not until his younger brother, Kieran, of course. Kieran, who had been the first of the tribe to go.

Goodbye to Niall and his impossible, lost brother. Goodbye to the heathery slopes of Garrane.

* * *

Niall had himself once made the journey to America, seeking his brother. He had bought a ticket to New York and spent his holidays tramping through the streets of that city, from flophouse to flophouse. After this, he stayed away from her for more than a month, and his phone calls – the few times he made them – were brief and tense. When she did see him, he would not describe his life to her in any kind of detail. It was during periods like that, when he went silent, that she knew he associated her with everything that was dark and wrong. She was a mistake he had made or, worse, a crime he had committed. She was misdirection, shame, something for the confessional, though he never went to confession. At times like that she would begin to suspect that he had taken a vow against her.

So Niall too would have spent some time in this airport. She thinks about this as she descends the lowered steps that lead to the ground. He would have heard the hollow sound of his footsteps on these aluminum stairs, the slap of his shoes on this damp tarmac.

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Excerpted from The Night Stages by Jane Urquhart. Copyright © 2015 Jane Urquhart. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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