Academy Street
Authors: Mary Costello
PRAISE FOR MARY COSTELLO
Academy Street
‘With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise
have faded into oblivion amid the legions of the meek and the unobtrusive.’
J. M. COETZEE
‘I read
Academy Street
cover to cover in one night, unable to stop. It is a short novel about a long life, stretching from rural Ireland to post-9/11
New York, and brings to mind the elegance of Colm Tóibín and the insight of Alice
Munro. Its stealthy, quiet power will exert a hold over any reader.’
MAGGIE O
’
FARRELL
‘To recount a life story in a novel is a difficult task. To do so with brevity and
unsentimental honesty takes greatness. A powerful and emotional novel from one of
literature’s finest new voices.’
JOHN BOYNE
‘Intensely moving but never sentimental,
Academy Street
is a profound meditation
on what Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself”. In Tess Lohan,
Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realised characters in contemporary
fiction. What a marvel of a book.’
RON RASH
‘
Academy Street
is understated, graceful and, ultimately, devastating. Even as my
heart was breaking I couldn’t put the book down.’
DONAL RYAN
The China Factory
‘It is the accumulation of tiny pleasures…that makes
The China Factory
such a satisfying
and accomplished debut…Her writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems
demand—call them themes; they are the kind of problem that make a writer. With a
bit of luck, they could keep her at the desk for the rest of her life.’
ANNE ENRIGHT
,
Guardian
‘A collection of exquisite stories so intricately wrought, so unique and enthralling
as to be utterly bewitching.’
Sunday Independent
‘These stories resonate profoundly together, whether through powerful parallels or
upsetting contrasts.’
Australian
‘Accomplished and often very moving, plunging straight into those moments in life
that can seal a person’s fate.
The Sewing Room
in particular is a brilliant and terrifying
tale of loss.’
Sydney Morning Herald
‘The twelve short stories of
The China Factory
are each little gems…Creating the
perfectly told and balanced short story is a true art, and Costello has mastered
it.’
Weekly Times
‘The subtle underpinnings, the intuitive capacities—the eye for detail, the feel
for language, the care of it—are much in evidence…One hopes to read more of Mary
Costello.’
MOLLY McCLOSKEY
,
Irish Times
‘A powerful collection from a very fine unshowy writer.’
Irish Independent
‘Fears of the future, haunting memories of the past and day-to-day internal struggles
take her characters to unexpected places, often surprising the reader. Each has a
compelling story and Costello tells them with such an intensity of human emotions
that it’s impossible to feel unmoved by their plight.’
Weekend Press
, Christchurch
‘Costello’s…style is honed down to deceptively simple profundity, capturing emotional
essence with breathless economy.’
West Australian
CONTENTS
Mary Costello lives in Dublin. Her collection of short stories,
The China Factory
,
was nominated for the
Guardian
First Book Award.
Academy Street
is her first novel.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000 Australia
Copyright © Mary Costello 2014
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of
this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner
and the publisher of this book.
Published in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd
Published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company 2014
Cover design by Pete Adlington
Cover image by Anthony Butera (Contemporary Artist), Sunday Afternoon, East 7th Street, Lower East Side, NYC, 2006 (oil on linen) / Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library
Page design by Imogen Stubbs
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author:
Costello, Mary, 1963-, author
Title: Academy Street / by Mary Costello.
ISBN:
9781922182449 (paperback)
9781925095395 (ebook)
Dewey Number: 823.9208
For my mother, Ann and her sisters, Carmel and Clare
In the depths of the winter I finally learned that there lay in me an unconquerable summer.
ALBERT CAMUS
IT IS EVENING and the window is open a little. There are voices in the hall, footsteps
running up and down the stairs, then along the back corridor towards the kitchen.
Now and then Tess hears the crunch of gravel outside, the sound of a bell as a bicycle
is laid against the wall. Earlier a car drove up the avenue, into the yard, and horses
and traps too, the horses whinnying as they were pulled up. She is sitting on the
dining-room floor in her good dress and shoes. The sun is streaming in through the
tall windows, the light falling on the floor, the sofa, the marble hearth. She holds
her face up to feel its warmth.
For two days people have been coming and going and now there is something near. She
wishes everyone would go home and let the house be quiet again. The summer is gone.
Every day the leaves fall off the trees and blow down the avenue.
She thinks of them
blowing into the courtyard, past the coach house, under the stone arch. In the morning
she had gone out to the orchard and stood inside the high wall. It was cold then.
The pear tree stood alone. She walked under the apple trees. She picked up a rotten
yellow apple and, when she smelled it, it reminded her of the apple room and the
apples laid out on newspapers on the floor, turning yellow.
She lies back on the rug and looks up at the pictures on the wallpaper. Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden. Her mother told her the story. She picks out the colours—dark
green, blue, red—and follows the ivy trailing all over the wallpaper, all around
Adam and Eve. They are both naked except for a few leaves. Eve has a frightened look
on her face. She has just spotted the serpent. A serpent is a snake, her mother said.
The apple tree behind Eve is old and bent, like the ones in the orchard.
She feels something in the room. A whishing sound, and a little breeze rushes past
her. She sits up, blinks. A blackbird has flown into the room. It flies around and
around and she smiles, amazed, and opens her arms for it to come to her. It perches
on the top of the china cabinet and watches her with one eye. Then it takes off again
and comes to rest on the wooden pelmet above the curtains. It starts to peck at a
spot on the wall. She holds her breath. She listens to the tap-tap of its beak, then
a faint tearing sound and a little strip of wallpaper comes away and the bird with
the little strip like a twig in its beak rises and circles and flies out the window.
She looks after it, astonished.
The door opens and the head of her sister Claire appears. ‘Is this where you are?
Tess!
Come on, hurry on!’
Something is about to happen. Her older sisters Evelyn and Claire are home from boarding
school. She loves Claire almost as much as her mother, or Captain the dog. More than
she loves Evelyn, or Maeve her other sister, or even the baby. Equal to how she loves
Mike Connolly, the workman.
The door opens again, and Claire holds out her hand urgently for Tess to come. There
are people standing around the hall, waiting. The front door is wide open and outside
there are more people. She can hear their feet crunching the gravel and the hum of
low talk. She looks around at the faces of her aunts and cousins, her neighbours.
Her teacher Mrs Snee is smiling at her. Claire pulls her close—they are standing
next to Aunt Maud now—and squeezes her hand and bows her head. Suddenly she is frightened.
A shuffle on the upstairs landing and everyone goes quiet. Men’s voices, half whispering
but urgent, drift down from above. She thinks there must be a lot of people up there
but when she looks up there are only shadows and shoulders beyond the banisters.
She sighs. She will soon need to go to the bathroom. She looks down at her new shoes.
She got them in Briggs’ shop in the town during the school holidays, along with the
green dress she is wearing. Her mother got new shoes that day too. And a new blue
dress. Her mother bent down to tie her laces and Tess left her hand on her mother’s
head, on the soft hair.
The stairs sweep up and turn to the right and it is here on
the turn, by the stained-glass
window, that her uncle’s back comes into view. Light is streaming in. Her heart starts
to beat fast. She sees the back of a neighbour, Tommy Burns, and her other uncle,
struggling. And then she understands. At the exact moment she sees the coffin, she
understands. It turns the corner and the sun hits it. The sun flows all over the
coffin, turning the wood yellow and red and orange like the window, lighting it up,
making it beautiful. The gold handles are shining. It is so beautiful, her heart
swells and floods with the light. She closes her eyes. She can feel her mother near.
Her mother is reaching out a hand, smiling at her. She can feel the touch of her
mother’s fingers on her face. Her mother is all hers—her face, her long hair, her
mouth, they are all hers. Then someone coughs and she opens her eyes.
The men are almost at the bottom of the stairs and the coffin is tilted, heavy. She
is afraid it will fall. Her father and her older brother Denis get behind it now,
lifting, helping. She looks down, presses her toes against the soles of her shoes
to keep her feet still. She wants to run up the last few steps and open the coffin
and bring her mother out. She looks at the handles again, and at the little crosses
on the top. She tries to count them. There is a big gold cross on the lid. Last night,
when her cousin Kathleen took her up to bed, they passed her mother’s room. The shutters
were closed and candles were lit. There were people standing and sitting and leaning
against the walls, neighbours, relations, all saying the Rosary. She dipped her head
to see past the crowd. She could not see her mother. Just the dark wood of the wardrobe
and
the wash stand. And the mirror covered with a black cloth. And leaning up against
the wall, against the pink roses of the wallpaper, the wooden lid with the gold cross,
and the light of the candles dancing on it. They put the lid on over her mother.
She looks up at Claire, about to speak, but Claire says ‘Shh’, and tightens her grip
on Tess’s hand. A silence falls on the hall. She turns and sees the big brass gong
that she and Maeve play with sometimes by the wall. She wants to reach for the beater
and hit the gong hard.