A Mind of Winter E-Book

Eoghan Smith

• Herausgeber: Dedalus Ireland
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Dedalus Ireland
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 124

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A bitter January day on the outskirts of a small Irish university town, and Fox, a reclusive researcher, has just received a phone call. His former girlfriend Clara has brought word that his mentor and love rival Stoyte is gravely ill and, what's more, the dying man has some final things he needs to say. Now Fox must set out through the snow and ice to reckon with the ghosts of the past. Poignant, haunting, and absurdly comic, A Mind of Winter is a tale of lost lives, guilt, punishment, and the cruelties we inflict upon ourselves and others.

Leseprobe

Dedalus Ireland

Eoghan Smith is the author of the novels The Failing Heart (Dedalus, 2018), A Provincial Death (Dedalus, 2022) and A Mind of Winter (Dedalus, 2023).

He has contributed essays, articles and reviews to a wide variety of publications, including The Irish Times, Books Ireland, The Literary Review, The Dublin Review of Books, the Irish University Review, and the Irish Studies Review. He has also written a monograph on John Banville and was the co-editor of a collection of essays on Irish suburban literary and visual cultures.

Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited

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ISBN printed book 978 1 915568 47 2

ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 48 9

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First published by Dedalus in 2023

A Mind of Winter © Eoghan Smith 2023

The right of Eoghan Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A.

Typeset by Marie Lane

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.

to Aoife Webbfor all the reading

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

—Wallace Stevens, ‘The Snow Man’

Contents

About the Author

Dedication

A Mind of Winter

Acknowledgment

Dedalus Ireland

Northern Ireland

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Now, almost night. The snow will not stop falling, not for some time. Perhaps it will never stop, or at least, better say, not for as long as you can endure it. It is falling everywhere you look. It is falling on all creation. It is falling on the roof of the Lawlor cottage, and on the narrow track that leads through the garden. Past the iron gate, it is falling on the crossroads, and it is falling on the bare overhang of the ash and horse chestnut trees. Behind the rough lattice of boughs and branches, it is falling on Traynor’s yard, on his jumble of tractor tyres and pieces of metal and old forsaken things, on his crooked barns and outhouse roofs and chimney cowls. It is falling on the hard, conical faces of his Belclares, huddled in a corner of one of his fields. And on Traynor’s black cap and thick, rolling shoulders, it is falling too. It is falling on the stretches of the long road and of the short road, and it is falling on all the shivering animals trapped beneath the ice-shrouded bushes. It is falling on the hedgerows that line the ditches, and it is falling all over the winter-quieted housing estates on the outskirts of the town, a mile or two or three away, where it is falling on the slates and sills of the public library and locked-up cafes and convenience stores. It is falling on the last of the silent smokers who are loitering outside of the public house and it is falling on the empty playground in the field beside the fire station. Across the town square, opposite the unmanned police station, it is falling on the fragile crenellations atop the remains of the Norman castle, and, further beyond, it is falling through the thin, black railings of the college entrance and on the ancient yews in the front lawns. It is falling on the scattered buildings within, on the purplegreen ivied walls of Rhetoric House and Logic House, and it is falling against the newer glass and steel frames of the arts and science blocks. And somewhere—where?—there—in the old infirmary, it is falling against the windows, where this lean, russet-headed woman is hearing her husband breathe out his last. This is where he has come to die. The snow is falling in his mind, where it has been falling all winter. The woman’s hazel eyes are turned to those shifting sky-shades, where she knows it is falling on the graveyard below, a mile or two or three out the road. It is falling on the strip of ground where soon her husband will be buried, it is falling on the surrounding land, and on the narrow arteries of roads and hedges and canal ways, and on the faint, treeless hills that overlook it all. The woman, whose name is Clara, imagines it falling on you, where you have fallen, somewhere—where?—there—in a field, this field a mile or two or three from the edge of the town, perhaps, this field into which you have arrived as you made your way through the swirling brumes of snow dust. You must have lost your balance, to fall as you did. You don’t know precisely where you are. From somewhere, you can hear fretful bleating, as much as you know what fretful beating sounds like. Perhaps, you think, you are in one of Traynor’s fields, for Traynor owns all these fields, and perhaps it is he who will discover you in the end. You don’t know exactly how long you have lain here, in the snow, how long the interval has been. You only know that you have been cold a long time, that the horizon is cast with lead and shadow, that time passes insensibly, but in so passing it passes absolutely and equably for all things, and so it is passing for you. But although this frozen world around you appears motionless, and that you think you have not moved since you fell, you know that you have not yet truly come to rest, for even in you, where you are now, as with everywhere in all things that suffer love and death, there is—

Up, Fox, up

Up

—a blizzard in the heart. There is some time to make a start. Come on now. Get up from the bitter ground. Recollect yourself. Remember how you were, what you were doing. There is some time. Recover who you are, where you were going. Make a start. Here it comes. Here I am. This is it. This is my start. Tonight—no, tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll phone Clara. Or at least I’ll send a text. It’s me, Fox, is he dead? No, no, not that. It’s me, Fox, did you get any sleep? No, that won’t do, try again. It’s me, Fox, were you awake all night? Still not right. Clara, I am sorry. That’s significantly better. Expression of sadness. Conveyance of general regret. But do I mean it? And sorry for what, exactly? That I loved you Clara, could it be that for which I am sorry? And then, after the last of the bread and tea, after I have washed my face and brushed my hair, I’ll put on my black homburg, the one with the white band, and my black coat and black boots, and, closing the door firmly behind me, and checking the latch is off, set out again through the snow. Yes, that’s what I’ll do, you may be sure of that, I’m a man of my word. I should add some colour, make sure I look the part. I’ll take something vibrant, the knitted mustard scarf, not the dark brown lambswool I slung around my neck this morning, nothing so symbolically uncommitted to life as that. Or perhaps I’ll set out again on Tuesday, which must be two days, or is it three, from now, or is it four, let’s just say I’ll set out on the day Stoyte is to be buried, assuming of course that he has died by now, assuming too that I’ll get up, assuming too that I’ll find my way home. There is some time to—to what?—I was about to say, to complete the journey. But no. To come full circle, that is more accurate, to close the loop. I ask myself—what do I ask myself? I ask myself: do I regret not being there when Stoyte died—but, well, that is if he has died, of course, I am getting ahead of myself. Let’s set an early intention to at least be precise where we can. For all I know he might yet labour through the night, defiant, single-minded, spiteful to the last. That alone is an incentive to continue my own struggle through the snow, through the fields, through the hours. But to return to the question, it all depends, Fox, on what you mean by regret. Do you regret not being there, so to speak, for Clara? Or perhaps what you really mean is that you regret not being a witness to Stoyte’s passing? Perhaps that is what you mean. It would be just like you, Fox, to mean that, given your fascination with the macabre. His would not have been my first death—had I seen it. Others I have witnessed, on occasion, perish before my eyes. Some pets of course. There was Rusty, the family Afghan Hound, always completely lawless, despatched by a speeding car—I can still feel the leash slipping from my ten year old hands, hear the sudden and decisive thud, see his long, silky hair spread out across the tarmac like a golden-tasselled rug—and little Trixie, my Abyssinian guinea pig, kidnapped one dark October night and left out in the rain by a vengeful neighbour. I found her in a shoe box at the bottom of the garden, abandoned, rheumy, slumberous. I combed her marmalade and coffee rosettes as she slipped away in my lap. And then, a few moments ago, this magpie just beyond my left hand, the poor innocent. It was a race to the death between the bird and me. Or rather, it was more an examination of tenacity, a question of who can survive longest. We locked our gazes—for how long, I don’t know, minutes perhaps, hours—until spidery, thin blue membranes slid over its dusky little doll’s eyes. One cannot feel victorious in such cold weather, one does not have quite enough heat in the blood, yet the battle was not all in vain for I discovered I had a lot more fight in me than I had given myself credit for. It seems you still have willpower, Fox, after all these years. And while we’re at it, let’s not discount the insect lives I have needlessly, accidentally, mercilessly extinguished. I imagine they must number in the hundreds, perhaps even the thousands. Quite the killer I have been, quite the corpse-accumulator, now that I think about it. And you may as well say it Fox, we can all see the direction this is going in, go on, tell us about the humans too. My parents, for instance, let’s start with them since they started with me, one went slowly and the other went suddenly, relatively speaking of course, as a riposte to my lifelong devotion to them I suspect. In what order did they go? Let me think, give me a minute. My head is not yet a solid block of ice. Cogito ergo sum. One died inside and one died outside. One was in concrete, and one was in water. I remember those details because I have an instinct for all things substantial. I have it now. The rest of the details I mean. First there was my demented mother, locked up in a bleach-stunk nursing home at the edge of a boggy conifer plantation. She wailed at me and my older brother, a choreographer my parents had named Pierre—oh such continental notions Mama and Dada had—for a largish portion of time, a year or two or three perhaps, one’s sense of the passing of time is different in the lightless tunnel of death, until one day the bald, lopsided manager in a tawny suit presented us with the bill. I remember that he never blinked, and that the sclera of his eyes were an absorbing shade of butterscotch. For a time, it seemed the end would never come. The old boot nearly had us fooled with a late display of terminal lucidity, when one apricot-skied morning she cackled hoarsely and beat her breast, dredging up her favourite old Schubert melody from some dark pit in the back of her skull, and it looked like she might reverse the arrow of time and suddenly rejuvenate. She stretched out a hand, and for one horrible moment I feared she would clasp her bony fingers around my wrist, she who loved to shuffle about to the waltz in G-flat major. I could stand just about anything but her waltzing about in those tattered, red slippers and unwashed, pink nightdress. I