I drove to Killarney on Tuesday morning and left the Yaris in the long-stay car park beside the station. Getting the car into the space took three attempts. The noise under the dashboard – the one I’ve been ignoring since spring – was worse on the cold start, so I sat there for a moment with the engine running, listening to it, before deciding once again that it probably wasn’t urgent.
The train to Cork leaves Killarney at half nine and gets into Kent Station just after midday. Two hours and twenty-something minutes, depending. I know this drive by road – it’s a good two and a half hours at least, longer if you’re unlucky in the tunnel – and I’ve done it maybe four times in the past year to see Donal. But he rang two Sundays ago and said, ‘Would you not take the train? You’d be better on it,’ and I thought about it for the rest of the day and decided he was right, which I didn’t tell him.
The platform at Killarney was cold. A young woman in a good coat was talking loudly into her phone about something being completely unacceptable. A man with two large bags of messages was trying to get onto the train before it had stopped moving. December already. The short days had arrived suddenly, or that’s how it felt – like I’d blinked and lost most of the light.
The window
I had a table seat, two-person, facing forward. Nobody sat opposite me until Mallow, which was good. I had my book – I’d finished ‘Ordinary Water’ a few weeks ago and had started a McGahern I’d read before, ‘That They May Face the Rising Sun’, which I return to roughly every four or five years and find different things in each time. But I didn’t read much. The window kept getting in the way.
South Kerry in early December, from the train, is a series of small arguments with colour. The fields are still green – that particular grey-green that arrives in November and doesn’t leave – but the light on them is thin, almost tired. There were stretches of bog between Killarney and Rathmore that looked entirely empty, which they largely are, and the mountains to the north were low in cloud so you could only see their bases, which made them look unfinished. A horse stood alone in a field near Rathmore, its back to the wind. I watched it for as long as the window allowed.
Somewhere after Millstreet the land flattened and the cloud shifted and for ten minutes there was actual sunshine, horizontal and pale. It came through the window at an angle and lay across the table and I held my hand in it. You’d take it, in December. You’d take what you get.
The other passengers
A woman got on at Millstreet with a child of about six who spent the rest of the journey asking questions with the sustained intensity only small children can manage. What are those poles for. Why does the train make that sound. Are we nearly there. What does that sign say. The mother answered every single one, patiently, without looking up from her phone, which was either impressive or slightly sad – I’m not sure which, and probably both at once.
A retired couple across the aisle ate sandwiches out of a Tupperware box and talked in the low, unhurried voices of people who have no particular need to perform a conversation. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I wasn’t trying to. They had the ease of a long marriage about them, or so I thought, though you can be wrong about these things.
The young woman from the platform – the one with the good coat – was three rows ahead and had apparently resolved the completely unacceptable situation, because she slept from Rathmore to Mallow with her head against the glass, her mouth slightly open. I felt for her, briefly, in the way you do for strangers who let their guard down in public without knowing it.
At Mallow a man got on and sat opposite me and immediately opened a laptop and started typing with great purpose. I went back to McGahern.
Cork Kent
Kent Station comes at you from the river side, which always strikes me as the right way to arrive in Cork. The Lee was grey-brown and the bridges were lit already, though it was barely noon, and the city climbed the hills above in terraces of red brick and pale plaster. I always forget how hilly Cork is. It doesn’t look it on a map.
Donal was waiting at the exit in his good jacket, hands in his pockets. He looked well. He looked, I thought, more settled than he did when he first moved – which took time, because he’d been twenty years on the peninsula and leaving it cost him something, though he wouldn’t say so. His daughter lives ten minutes away, and I think that helps in ways that don’t need to be said out loud.
‘How was the train?’ he asked.
‘Grand,’ I said. ‘I should have been doing it all along.’
He didn’t say I told you so. He never does, which is one of the better things about him. We went and got lunch at a place near the market – warm inside, the kind of menu that doesn’t overpromise – and I had soup and brown bread and the feeling of having arrived somewhere properly, without the particular low-grade irritation of two hours on the motorway.
The afternoon was tea and talking and walking along the quays in the thin December light. We didn’t discuss anything important. We discussed the soda bread – he has opinions, as he demonstrated on the phone last week – and the stew from that call, and whether the garlic I’d planted in October would come to anything. He thinks it will. I’m cautiously less certain, but I’ve been checking the vegetable patch every few days anyway, just in case.
I took the return train at six, which meant the whole way back was dark glass and my own reflection. But the coffee from the trolley was hot, which I hadn’t expected, and the boy doing the trolley service had the specific cheerfulness of someone who means it rather than someone performing it. I found my page in the McGahern.
The Yaris was still in the car park when I got back to Killarney. Cold, obviously. The noise started again almost immediately, a soft irregular knock from somewhere behind the glove compartment, faint enough to explain away.
I drove home in the dark. The lane was very quiet when I got in and the fire had gone down to almost nothing.