The Woman’s Daughter
A classic Bolger novel, following the lives of three women.Set in the grimy backstreets and suburbs of Dublin. Bolger has often used a woman’s voice to tell his story, and this novel is no exception; we follow the lives of three women – a Victorian maid, a young woman brought up in the 1960s (the product of a violent family) and that young woman’s daughter, the child of an incestuous relationship, hidden away from sight.
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DERMOT BOLGER
The Woman’s Daughter
In Memoriam
‘Although finn strictly means a colour, it is used to designate water that is clear or transparent. In this way is formed the name Finglas from glais, a little stream: Finn-glais (so written in many old authorities), Crystal Rivulet.’
– Joyce, P. W. (The Origin and History of Irish Place Names, Vol. II, 1883)
‘But you’ll have to ask that same four that named them is always snugging in your barsalooner, saying they’re the best relicts of Conal O’Daniel and writing Finglas Since the Flood. That’ll be some kingly work in progress.’
– Joyce, James (Finnegans Wake)
Contents
PART ONE: The Woman’s Daughter
PART THREE: The Crystal Rivulet
There is a city of the dead standing sentinel across from her window. Through the gully between them a swollen rivulet is frothing over smooth rocks brimming with the effervescent waste of factories. Within its boundaries grey slabs of granite are flecked with shards of mud as sheets of rain churn up the black pools that nestle in the webbed tyre tracks. Above its crumbling lanes and avenues stooped ivy-covered trees shiver over the homes where no soul moves.
There is a city of the dead that edges down the grass bank towards her window. To the brink of the rivulet that sprays out from an underground pipe. The gnarled fingers of its railing slot shadows over tombstones from the illuminated carriageway. The holes on the pitch-and-putt course breathe easy without their spears. The alarm on the pub wall waits, broken glass in the car-park dreams of tyres. The last lorry lurches down the steep hill and onward towards the countryside. The bored attendant in the all-night garage cradles his head beside the ranks of switches and dials. The cables and monitors hum in his glass vault, the night’s takings snug in the floor safe. He seems to be the only living thing as he lifts his head to gaze across the gleaming forecourt to the railings outlined in the yellow light. Yet even there life stirs invisibly downward. Below the plain stones and pillared crypts that end united in the soil, there comes the inaudible creak of life bursting through. The sigh that is clay capsizing, the bustle of blind creatures being eternally renewed.
There is a city of the dead whose gates all fear to enter. Every morning the woman observes it when she leaves her home. Each evening it stands there, patiently awaiting her return. In the hours between she sits beside the conveyor belt picking the indented cans from the incessant silver stream. At night, when the curtain moves in the room, the moon sketches out the grey stones and rushing water like a sole universe. In daylight the curtain never moves, the room staying in darkness which we have never known.
Would we find a figure there stretched in the blackness? Could it live or breathe? Since the sword of light retreated beneath the door it has lain stationary. What could it dream of, knowing no world beyond these walls, the nightlit river and stones? Food? Light? A Saviour? A trickle of blood? The woman’s stories constantly retold?
If our eyes grew accustomed to such darkness we might discern the shape of a nightdress, the outline of a girl and long folds of lank hair. Our ears, still unattuned, hear nothing, yet her head twists towards the door and one elbow lifts her from the bed. Just when we’re certain she’s been mistaken the key burrows into the stiff lock, the glass panels shiver as the front door slams and the footsteps commence on the stairs. One step, two step, the bogeyman is coming. Three step, four step, your mother is home. The girl’s head swings upwards and one bare foot reaches slowly out for the cold lino. The beam of light swarming through the keyhole would catch the white bend of her knee and then be blocked by the key blinking in the lock and the flood of electric light saturating her eyes with a searing whiteness through which the woman came home exhausted from her work.
But it is night now, they should be sleeping according to the ritual played out in that house day after day. The woman returned to her parents’ bed, the child silent in her own. Soon it will be time for the woman to rise, a second before the clock would shatter the stillness if not smothered by her hand. She should stand cooking breakfast in the winter dark, two cracked bowls of thick steaming porridge carried up the stairs. Her mind returning to the worry of leaving the house for work, the exhortations for silence, the fable of the man who guards the stairs, the double checking of each lock.
Except that one of them is squatting in a heap beneath the window with the curtain torn down. The single bed is empty, the blankets forming mountain ridges across the floor. She hugs herself as her eyes, terrified, never leave the woman sitting on the chair beside the door that should not be open, above the hallway where the shards of hammered glass glint in the streetlight coming through the broken frame. The night air like an intruder sneaks in, carrying off the stale smell of sweat and urine and polish. The woman lifts her head.
