Hanging with the Elephant by Michael Harding Page B

eats away at everyone eventually. Of course, it’s glaringly obvious in the old bachelors from up the hills buying their bread and rashers in village supermarkets, and you can’t miss it in widowers who take up carpentry just to belong to a club, or widows who go to yoga classes. And there’s often someone in the local book club or drama group who has had a sudden bereavement and is trying to get out of the house. And they walk with such a heavy weight that their loneliness iseasy to feel. But there are lonely people in marriages, too. Unnoticed. Those whose smiles are a prison because they just can’t admit even to themselves that their partner is a waste of space, in case it brings the world tumbling down on their children’s heads or in case their mothers would say, ‘I told you so.’
    Sometimes when I see a couple sitting together in the corner of a bar, I can’t avoid noticing how she glows in his presence, smiling like the sun, holding her face close to his, but when she slips away to the bathroom, the smile evaporates and her expression is drained and uneasy – and then does the make-up seem just a touch overdone. And all her gloss and powder seem like a prison door behind which she too might be wondering why she always feels alone. Maybe everyone is lonely and maybe it’s incurable. And no matter how many relations hold hands around a deathbed, there is no escaping the solitude of that final letting go. And maybe that’s the secret of this universe. Certainly when I look at the happy young woman my mother was in pictures from the past, she didn’t know what the universe had in store for her.
    Her face blazed with happiness as she walked the streets of Cork, arm in arm with her friends. And even when we were growing up, she loved having people come to stay, and preparing dinners, and wheeling trollies of freshly made buns into the drawing room when the room was full, and making chicken soup dinners when her children camehome from university for a weekend, and bringing buns to the old women in the annex of the county home on Sunday afternoons, and playing golf, and going to visit her sisters in Westmeath and Dublin, and staying up all night in our house at parties when there were other people there who would listen to her stories – and all that time she loved other people. She needed other people. But like all young people, she never thought she’d get old. Like many old people, she didn’t know why her heart had grown melancholic. I suppose the heart is the core of the problem. She reached out all her life to be held by others, because we all need to be held by something or someone. And as she got older, that holding was less firm, and the friends dwindled until they were few and far between, and she realised that loneliness is what kills us all in the end.
    She was in her seventies when the beloved and I first moved to Leitrim. That was in 1993. She drove herself to our front door on the first Christmas we were in the house, and again at the end of January, for our daughter’s first birthday party. But two years later, she was going downhill. She was seventy-nine and we thought she wouldn’t last much longer. She stopped driving. She was short of breath. And she had dwindled into a small bird of a woman in a tweed suit. She sat in the kitchen of our little cottage in the hills above Lough Allen on Christmas morning. Myself and my beloved went for a walk around noon, as the turkeyroasted slowly in the oven. Outside it was snowing and the world was silent and white.
    ‘I’d prefer to watch mass on the television,’ Mother had said.
    So off we went, me and the beloved, arm in arm, while the old woman held herself in rigid attention for the pope, and the child slept in the cot in the front room.
    I thought it might have cheered my mother to be alone with her grandchild, but it didn’t. She was still watching the pope when we returned.
    ‘How was the child?’ I’d asked.
    ‘No trouble,’ she’d