Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain

And getting older, I perceive, is an entirely different cultural experience on one side of the ocean than on the other. For example: the years roll off a woman from an old-style country like Ireland when her plane touches down on the tarmac in New York. I call it the JFK Effect – sixty years old becomes fifty years old in an instant. For another: the American sisterhood denies the self-abnegation of the European grandmother, defies ageing with every instrument at its command, and prefers not to dwell on death. I see, and it makes me both admiring and uneasy, that American women go on believing in their own importance to the end. Whereas in Ireland, the childless, ageing woman has no tribal function, and must invent her own self-importance.

      Best Love, Rosie came out of these two preoccupations. What can the New World do to and for a woman formed in the Old World? And how does any modern woman – who has travelled, done interesting work, had lovers, been responsible for no one but herself – meet the challenge of that time late in middle age when these things begin to fail her? How does any person find new pleasures when the old ones have lost their savour?

      What surprised me, as the story of what happens to Min and her niece Rosie unfolded itself, was how much fun I had with it. And I think that was because of the vigour with which Min – the older woman – seized her chance to get out of the Dublin milieu which was too familiar and had nothing new to give her. Her adventure in the book delighted me as much as it did her.

      My head is with her. But my heart is with her niece, my dear Rosie.

      She is a woman whose needs are too passionate and complex to be answered by America. Instead, she returns to Ireland and to the past. She retires, in many ways hurt by life, to the primitive house of her grandfather, beside the stone quarry where he worked on a remote and beautiful peninsula. She learns about the terrible lives that were lived there, especially by women. But even as she discovers the harsh truth of her own parentage, she is also encountering forms of love. Friendship; a small, loyal, dog; the splendour of the natural world; conscious efforts to redress wrongs done – things she never valued in her youth – are the resources she gathers as she pauses on the brink of the next part of her life.

      Thousands of miles away, in the States, Min is also discovering new aspects of joie de vivre – the pleasure of being paid for work, for example, and the freedom of belonging to a transient, diverse and unjudging social underworld. Niece and aunt, who were silent when they were together, learn to speak to each other. Now that they have abandoned the roles thought appropriate to their ages and are separated only by an ocean, each have become pioneers.

      There are dark undertones to all this, of course, and in the book, as in my own life, many good things have been lost for ever in the passing of the years. But Best Love, Rosie – my fifth book in ten years – is the book of my years of commuting between the melancholy of Ireland and the optimism of America. It insists on celebrating what those years showed me. That the world in all its shades of black and white is wonderfully interesting. That sorrow can be managed: it can be banished to a minor place within. And that even the most seemingly moribund life is open to the possibility of change – in youth, in middle age, and always.

      Nuala O’Faolain 14 January 2008

       Best Love, Rosie

       nuala o’faolain

      Part One

      Dublin

      1

      I was in bed with Leo on Christmas morning in a chilly pensione near the docks in Ancona. It took courage to unpeel from his back and slide an arm out from under the duvet to ring my aunt in Dublin.

      There was no reply, so I tried next door.

      ‘Hello? Reeny? That you? Yes, of course it’s Rosie. Merry Christmas, sweetheart, and every good wish for the New Year! I’m in Italy. Yes, with a friend – what do you think I am – mad? It just wasn’t worth going home for the short break they give us at work. Listen – Min isn’t answering her phone. Would you mind going out the back and calling up to her window? It’s eleven in Dublin, isn’t it? And I know she’s going in to you for the turkey and sprouts. Shouldn’t she be up and about?’

      ‘Ah no, she’s fine,’ Reeny said. ‘Don’t you worry. She was in here last night watching Eastenders. But she’s becoming a bit odd, Min is. There’s days now she doesn’t get out of bed even though there’s feck all wrong with her. And – I don’t want to ruin your holiday but I was going to tell you the next time I saw you – there was a bit of trouble there recently when she had a few drinks on her. The guards brought her back from the GPO of all places – nobody knows how she got from the pub into town – because she fell and she couldn’t get up. Well, it was more that she wouldn’t get up. She kept telling everyone she had to post a parcel to America. Anyway they were very nice and they brought her home, though the guard told me they’d a hard time stopping her hopping out the door of the patrol car, and only that she was a little old lady they’d have handcuffed her. She hasn’t been out all that much since, and a few of the women talking about it in the Xpress Store were saying that maybe Rosie Barry should come home…’

      ‘But Min doesn’t want me!’ I said, laughing.

      ‘I know she doesn’t,’ Reeny said. I stopped laughing.

      Reeny didn’t notice. ‘But that’s the way they are with depression,’ she went on. ‘I saw a fella talking about it on the telly. They don’t know what they want.’

      ‘Tell her I’ll ring her tonight, Reeny, and that she’s to answer the phone no matter what. And how are you doing? Is Monty with you?’

      Monty was Reeny’s son, a big shy golf fanatic, somewhere in his forties, who my friend Peg had been going out with for decades. His father walked out on him when he was a little boy, and I always saw the golf thing as something he’d protected himself with while he struggled to make a man of himself. ‘Tell him Santy’s going to bring him a hole-in-one.’

      Beyond Leo’s shoulder I could see a corner of the Adriatic – brilliantly blue and white-capped from a stiff wind that was making the shutters rattle. There’d been an attempt at making love earlier, but neither of us had been committed enough to keep going. It was a good thing, I supposed, that we weren’t afraid to show it when we were half-hearted. Still, low sexual energy was bad for the soul. Not to mention there were two more days to go in an under-heated room and there was nothing to do in Ancona when such attractions as it had were closed for the holiday.

      Christmas Day. The very words used to shimmer.

      ‘Leo!’ I tried to wake him nicely by curling my arm around his belly and stroking him gently. ‘Leo, sweetheart – go and see if the signora will make us a cup of coffee.’ Lifting myself on my elbow, I was as shocked as if I’d touched a live wire to see that he was wide awake and staring at the window.

      The next day we went to an organ recital in an exceptionally draughty unused church, where Leo disappeared into his completely attentive mode. You could stick pins into him when he’s listening to music and he wouldn’t notice.

      Things would have to change, I saw with bleak clarity as I sat there growing colder and colder. We were once – but I didn’t want to think about the marvellous lovers we’d once been. I could barely admit to myself that it was becoming harder and harder to lure him away, now that he had lost his villa, inland from Ancona, that he had hoped to turn into a small luxury hotel.

      I thought about Min instead.

      Somebody needed to be keeping an eye on her if she’d reached the point where she disgraced herself in public, and with Reeny these days caretaking an apartment complex in Spain, for the first time since the two of them were young women she wasn’t always at hand in the house next door. There was also the fact that in a few months I’d have finished my contract as a writer with the Information Unit of the EU in Brussels and I’d have a lump sum if I left – enough to