Poised to
celebrate Christmas Eve on a beautifully scenic island off the coast of
Ireland, the Moone family’s holiday is instead marred by tragedy. So begins
Helen Cullen’s stirring family saga, THE
DAZZLING TRUTH (Graydon House; August
18, 2020; $17.99 USD). Maeve and Murtagh Moone’s love story began in 1978, at
Trinity College. As an aspiring actress and potter respectively, the two
creative spirits were drawn to each other in an intense and lasting way, able
to withstand almost anything, even Maeve’s bouts of crippling depression and
anxiety. For a short time, anyway.
Marriage and
children are the next chapters in the Moone family story, but Maeve struggles
to reconcile her old life with that of the wife and mother she is supposed to
be. Until one heartbreaking Christmas Eve in 2005 changes everything. Now each
member of the Moone family must learn to confront the past on their own, until
one dazzling truth brings them back together towards a future that none of them
could have predicted. Except perhaps Maeve herself.
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Inis Óg: 2005
Murtagh had woken that morning, once again,
to an empty bed; the sheets were cool and unruffled on Maeve’s side. He had
expected to find her sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in her hound’s-tooth
shawl, pale and thin in the darkness before dawn, a tangle of blue-black hair
swept across her high forehead like a crow’s wet wing, her long, matted curls
secured in a knot at the nape of her neck with one of her red pencils. He had
anticipated how she would start when he appeared in the doorway. How he would ignore,
as he always did, the few moments it would take for her dove-grey eyes to turn
their focus outward. For the ghosts to leave her in his presence. The kettle
would hiss and spit on the stove as he stood behind her wicker chair and rubbed
warmth back into her arms, his voice jolly as he gently scolded her for lack of
sleep and feigned nonchalance as to its cause.
But Maeve wasn’t sitting at the kitchen
table.
Nor was she meditating on the stone step of
the backdoor drinking milk straight from the glass bottle it was delivered in.
She wasn’t dozing on the living-room sofa,
the television on but silent, an empty crystal tumbler tucked inside the pocket
of her peacock-blue silk dressing gown, the one on which she had painstakingly
embroidered a murmuration of starlings in the finest silver thread.
Instead, there was an empty space on the
bannister where her coat should have been hanging.
Murtagh opened the front door and flinched
at a swarm of spitting raindrops. The blistering wind mocked the threadbare cotton
of his pyjamas. He bent his head into the onslaught and pushed forward,
dragging the heavy scarlet door behind him. The brass knocker clanged against
the wood; he flinched, hoping it had not woken the children. Shivering, he
picked a route in his slippers around the muddy puddles spreading across the
cobblestoned pathway. Leaning over the wrought-iron gate that separated their
own familial island from the winding lane of the island proper, he scanned the
dark horizon for a glimpse of Maeve in the faraway glow of a streetlamp.
In the distance, the sea and sky had melted
into one anthracite mist, each indiscernible from the other. Sheep huddled
together for comfort in Peadar Óg’s field, the waterlogged green that bordered
the Moones’ land to the right; the plaintive baying of the animals sounded
mournful. Murtagh nodded at them.
There was no sight of Maeve.
As he turned back towards the house, he
noticed Nollaig watching him from her bedroom window. The eldest daughter, she
always seemed to witness the moments her parents had believed—hoped—were
cloaked in invisibility, and then remained haunted by what she had seen. Ever
since she was a toddler, Murtagh had monitored how her understanding grew,
filling her up, and knew it would soon flood her eyes, always so questioning,
permanently.
He waved at her as he blew back up the
pathway. Later, he would feel the acute pain of finally recognising the
prescience his daughter seemed to have absorbed from the womb.
‘How long is she gone?’
Nollaig was now standing before the hallway
mirror, her face contorted as she vigorously tried to brush her frizzy
mouse-brown hair into shape. She scraped it together into a tight ponytail that
thrust from the back of her head as if it were a fox’s brush.
‘Ach, you should leave your gorgeous curls
be, Noll,’ her father cajoled, ‘instead of fighting them.’
She smiled at him but slammed the
mother-of-pearl hairbrush down on the sideboard.
‘I don’t have curls, I have Brillo pads,’
she sighed. ‘Did she say where she was going?’
Murtagh squeezed his daughter’s arm as he
continued into the kitchen. ‘I’m sure your mother is just out for a walk. Happy
birthday, love. Lá breithla shona duit.’
He placed a small copper saucepan of water
on the range to boil and waved the invitation of an egg at his daughter. She
nodded begrudgingly and curled into the green-and-gold striped armchair that
sat in front of the stove.
‘With your white nightdress, you could
almost pass for the Irish flag,’ he joked, and was gratified with her snort of
glee.
He watched the clock hand count three
minutes in silence. Expected any moment to hear his soaked wife splash through
the door. He was poised, ready to run towards her with a towel and hushed
reprimands for her careless wandering, but the boiling, cooling, cupping, cracking
and spooning of each egg passed uninterrupted. Nollaig yawned, stretching her
arms and legs before her in a stiff salute.
‘Why don’t you go back to bed for an hour?’
Murtagh asked. ‘We’ll all have proper breakfast together later.’
She eyed him with suspicion but acquiesced.
‘If Mam’s not back soon,’ she said, sidling away, ‘come and wake me. Promise?
We’ll go out and find her. Remind her what day it is, for God’s sake.’
Murtagh nodded, ushered his daughter out of
the kitchen and watched her climb the stairs.
Born on Christmas Eve, twenty years before,
she was the only one of their children who came into the world via Galway
maternity hospital and not into the impatient arms of Máire O’Dulaigh, the
midwife of the island. She resented it; how it made her feel less of a true
islander. What was more, the specialness of her own day for individual
attention, her birth day, was irrevocably lost in the shared excitement of
Christmas. In retrospect, it had been a mistake, perhaps, naming her Nollaig,
the Irish for Christmas, and further compounding the association. No nickname
had ever stuck, however. She wasn’t the sort of child who inspired others to
claim her for their own with the intimacy of a given name.
‘Born ancient,’ her little sister, Sive,
always said of her, with bored disdain.
And Murtagh sympathised. Nollaig carried
the weight of being the eldest with pained perseverance, heavy responsibilities
that were self-imposed. Her mother harboured a not always silent resentment of
it, and it seemed only natural, if unfair, that Maeve and Sive gravitated more
towards each other; the baby of the family shared her mother’s wit and wildness
and often expressed the irritation her mother tried to hide at Nollaig’s sense
of duty.
Excerpted from The Dazzling Truth by Helen
Cullen, Copyright ©
2020 by Helen Cullen. Published by Graydon House Books
About the Author
HELEN
CULLEN wrote her debut novel, The Lost Letters of William Woolf, while completing the
Guardian/UEA novel writing program. She holds an MA in Theatre Studies from
University College Dublin and is currently studying further at Brunel. Prior to
writing full-time, Helen worked in journalism, broadcasting and most recently
as a creative event and engagement specialist. Helen is Irish and currently
lives in London.
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