HERE IS ADA, sitting on the sofa in the good room in Broadstone. She has a piece of work in her hands, simple work, it must have been some hemming or darning. There is an eight-year-old girl in the room, who is me.
I remember the curve of her back; her hands, dropped in her lap; the pick and lift of her fingers as she teases the thread through. The sofa behind her is a dark red, overlaid with a tangle of cushions, though Ada does not lean back into them. The two Turkish rolls with tassels at the end, from the set of some seraglio at the Gate Theatre; a red velvet round cushion with loose smocking around the rim, like the tread on a fabulous, fabric car; a series of little logs, their covers made out of metallic thread in purple and brown striations, like bark in a theatrical wood.
She sits in front of them all, and bends a little over her work, her head occasionally pulling back the extra distance required of old age. But she does not look old to me. She looks content, of a piece; she looks completely like herself. I go to sit beside her and she nods slightly my way-and when she is finished that particular stitch or twist, she reaches without looking up, and rubs her knuckles against my cheek.
‘Hello.’
That is what I remember.
Nobody left and nobody came. Charlie was elsewhere, Mr Nugent did not matter, Liam and Kitty were doing homework, perhaps, on the dining-room table, and I was with Ada in the shrine of her good room, the red velvet theatre curtains giving on to the street, and the signed photos on the wall, Jimmy O’Dee, the Adare sisters, a drawing marked ‘Othello’ of a man with a brown face and an elegant, pointed foot. They were all figures in a play that was happening elsewhere. And here, offstage, was the place to be, with Ada who could not be anyone else, even if she tried, who walked through her life with a perfect civility; quiet, a little harsh sometimes-though she never let on just how harsh she might be. Sitting there, entire in herself, Ada sews. Her past is behind her, her future is of little concern. She moves towards the grave, at her own speed.
And I, caught for a moment by the sight of the cloth in her lap, watch one stitch more, maybe two, before standing up and running out of the room.