The Dazzling Truth Read online

  One Irish family. Three decades. One dazzling story.

  In the courtyards of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1978, aspiring actress Maeve meets pottery student Murtagh Moone. As their relationship progresses, marriage and motherhood come in quick succession, but for Maeve, with the joy of children also comes the struggle to hold on to the truest parts of herself.

  Decades later, on a small Irish island, the Moone family are poised for celebration but instead are struck by tragedy. Each family member must find solace in their own separate way, until one dazzling truth brings them back together. But as the Moone family confront the past, they also journey toward a future that none of them could have predicted. Except perhaps Maeve herself.

  Acclaim for

  Helen Cullen’s first novel,

  The Lost Letters of William Woolf

  “This moving treatise on love and the art of letter writing will leave readers eager for more from this very talented writer.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “A love-letter to letters and a brilliantly written, moving homage to the power of words, The Lost Letters of William Woolf celebrates the magic of pen and paper.”

  —Nina George, New York Times bestselling author of The Little Paris Bookshop

  “The novel is exceedingly well-written and flows incredibly well... Quite moving.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A heartwarming novel about love, life, and the lost art of letter writing.”

  —PopSugar, Best Book of Summer

  “Helen Cullen’s first novel is sure to appeal to anyone who’s ever been curious about a letter gone astray, and readers who have found themselves surprised by the direction their life has taken. [An] intriguing debut.”

  —Shelf Awareness

  “If you liked Harold Fry and Me Before You, you will love Helen Cullen’s nostalgic debut... With its themes of love, romance and frustrated hopes, this life-affirming book will draw you in and keep you there.”

  —Independent (Ireland)

  “Enchanting, intriguing, deeply moving. The Lost Letters of William Woolf concerns itself as much with lost love as it does with lost letters.”

  —Irish Times

  “A beautiful story celebrating life, love and letters. This is a luminous debut.”

  —Phaedra Patrick, author of The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper

  “A poignant and beguiling world of lost opportunities and love.”

  —AJ Pearce, Sunday Times bestselling author of Dear Mrs. Bird

  “A charming romantic caper. William Woolf, a thirty-something Englishman working in the dead letters depot of London, is the latest in a tribe of unlikely heroes. Delightful.”

  —Sunday Times (UK)

  “Wonderfully warmhearted and quirky.”

  —Good Housekeeping (UK)

  “If you want a beautifully written story of love, loss, heartache, thwarted dreams and how to negotiate relationships as they change over time, this one’s for you.”

  —Emma Flint, author of Little Deaths

  “Gorgeous. Packed full of romance and longing, the writing pulls you in and doesn’t let you go until the very last page. I was sad to finish it!”

  —Ali Land, bestselling author of Good Me Bad Me

  The Dazzling Truth

  A Novel

  Helen Cullen

  Helen Cullen is the author of The Lost Letters of William Woolf. Prior to writing full-time, Helen worked in journalism, broadcasting, and most recently as a creative events and engagement specialist. Helen is Irish and currently lives in London. Find her on Twitter, @wordsofhelen.

  Dedicated to those who always leave a light on,

  and Demian Wieland in particular.

  Contents

  Quote

  Introduction

  One: Queen Maeve

  Inis Óg: 2005

  Two: Days of Crow

  Dublin: May 1, 1978, Noon

  Dublin: August 18, 1978

  Dublin: September 18, 1978

  Thirteen weeks and two days later

  Dublin: March 1981

  Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean: April 1982

  Inis Óg: July 1984

  Inis Óg: December 1984

  Inis Óg: 1985

  Inis Óg: 1986

  Inis Óg: January 1990

  Inis Óg: May 1990

  Inis Óg: July 1, 1990

  Inis Óg: August 1990

  Inis Óg: August 1994

  Inis Óg: February 1996

  Inis Óg: October 2001

  Inis Óg: December 2004

  Inis Óg: September 2005

  Inis Óg: Christmas Eve 2005

  Three: As the Crow Flies

  Inis: Óg: January 2006

  Brooklyn: December 2006

  Inis: Óg: July 2008

  London: 2009

  Dublin: 2011

  Galway: March 2012

  Dublin: February 2013

  Inis Óg: September 20, 2014

  Inis Óg: December 20, 2014

  Inis Óg: December 21, 2014

  Letter - To Daddy

  Dublin: May 24, 2015

  Letter - To Children

  Inis: Óg: Morning, December 19, 2015

  Inis: Óg Midnight, December 19, 2015

  Inis: Óg December 20, 2015

  Four: Kintsugi

  Inis: Óg December 24, 2015

  Letter - To Murtagh

  Acknowledgments

  “The truth must dazzle gradually.”

  —Emily Dickinson

  And from the record player, through the crackling, Henry Mancini’s orchestra began to play. The opening notes of “Moon River,” at once so familiar and yet newly revelatory, broke through the cracks, and with them came the light.

  One:

  Queen Maeve

  Inis Óg: 2005

  IT WAS CHRISTMAS EVE.

  Murtagh wore tan sheepskin slippers, broken down at the heel.

  He shuffled to and fro along the well-worn floorboards in the shadowy hallway of the Moone family home.

  Smoothing unwieldy fair hair back from his forehead, he gently touched where his temples throbbed. Still damp from the rain, he hugged his Aran cardigan tighter and the wooden robin brooch on his lapel turned upside down.

  The ticking of his wristwatch was amplified in the silence, its pearlescent moon face catching the streetlight through the window and winking back.

  The door to the living room remained firmly closed.

  Christmas waited inside.

  * * *

  The branches of a lopsided fir tree—the one he had dragged home across the Gallaghers’ field seven days before—were weighed down by decades of tinfoil garlands the children had clumsily stitched together with red wool. None would ever be thrown away, however tattered they became. Every year, as the Moones assembled to transform their island cottage into something akin to Santa’s grotto, each child claimed their own creations with jealous possession. With ceremonial grace, their mother carefully unrolled their handiwork from the fraying white tissue paper that protected it for the other forty-eight weeks of the year. One by one, the decorations were placed on the tree.

  * * *

  Over these festivities, as with all others, Murtagh’s wife reigned supreme.

  His Queen Maeve.

  * * *

  None of the children challenged the traditions; their mother had sewn them so meticulously into the fabric of their being.

  Stitches that could not be outgrown.

/>   How he loved her for this gift she bestowed upon the family: permission to remain childlike in their enthusiasms; never to become embarrassed by what they had once loved. “You never have to lose anything, or anyone,” she often said, “if you just change the way you look at them.”

  And yet, he had lost her.

  Even while he held her close.

  Even with his eyes wide open.

  * * *

  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 houndstooth 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-gray 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 back door 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 banister 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 pajamas. 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 toward 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 path. Later, he would feel the acute pain of finally recognizing 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 wrangle 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 steel wool.” 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 stove 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 toward 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 a 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, 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 birthday, 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.

  Nollaig carried the weight of being the eldest with pained perseverance, heavy responsibilities that were self-imposed. Her mother harbored a not always silent resentment of it, and it seemed only natural, if unfair, that Maeve and Sive gravitated more toward 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.

  * * *

  As soon as he heard Nollaig’s room grow still, Murtagh pulled on waterproof fishing trousers over his pajama bottoms, and Wellington boots. He struggled into a heavy jumper of itchy gray wool, impatiently yanking the sleeves of his nightshirt down from where they were caught at the elbows, and shrugged on the duffel coat that remained his favorite, though it was long past its prime. It was eight in the morning now; the sun would not rise until closer to nine. As he reached into the cupboard under the stairs for a torch, he was relieved to find only one waiting on the shelf.

  At least she’s taken a light.

  The beam from his flashlight showed him little but the safest path for his own feet, but he was glad of it as he waded through the inky blackness.

  Come meet me, Maeve.

  Show yourself.

  Come meet me, Maeve.

  Show yourself.

  As he marched a beat down the long, narrow lane toward the pier, trailing his left hand along the stony walls covered in moss, he repeated his mantra.

  Not another soul stirred.

  What would call them from the warmth of their homes to be drenched in this storm?

  When the weather enveloped the island in an angry embrace such as this, the isolation became almost unbearable. The elements made prisoners of the islanders, who could be convinced they had been swept out to sea, lost and untethered, never to reach the mainland again.

  As Murtagh leaned against the weather-bleached clapboard sign that shouted ferry times in bright orange paint, the sky became diluted with the first strata of light.
r />   The rain eased.

  The darkness slunk away, but only by as little as it had to for dawn to be officially considered broken.

  Perhaps Maeve was already at home, she in turn now worried for him.

  In the weak winter light, he trudged through the sand to retrace his steps, willing with each breath for his home to have sprung to life while he’d been gone.

  The sound of the twins arguing in the kitchen heartened him as he wiped his boots on the back-door mat. Eighteen now, they occasionally loomed before him as fully grown men. At other times, they were still the small boys who hadn’t liked sharing the same supermarket-trolley seat and let their objections be known.

  “How hard is it to make toast, Mossy?” Dillon said, scraping the charred surface of a cremated slice of soda bread into the sink. “Every. Single. Time.” He enunciated each syllable with a violent scratch of the butter knife.

  Mossy, indifferent, stood drinking orange juice straight from the carton, ignoring the rivulets that dribbled down his chin. His face lit up as his father peered around the door.

  “Da! Where were ye? What’s the story with breakfast?” He shoved the carton back in the fridge, its lid discarded on the countertop.

  “Yeah!” Dillon chimed in. “Where’s the feast Mam promised? We’re half-starved waiting!”

  Murtagh swiveled his head around the kitchen. “She’s not back, then? Your mother?”

  The twins caught each other’s eyes, before their gaze fell back on their father as he wrestled off his boots.

  “Was she not with you?” Mossy asked, dragging his floppy fringe across his forehead and plastering it behind his ear.

  Son Day, his mother called him. Tomás Moone, the pale, blond, waifish bookworm who inherited not only his paternal grandfather’s name but his coloring and temperament, too. Son Night, his brother Dillon, with ebony-black curls and high cheekbones, was unmistakably his mother’s son. Named in honor of two of her heroes, Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas, the artistic mantle lay heavily on his shoulders. He had the dream to be an artist, but not the driven determination. Dillon was never interested in struggling, only in enjoying what came easily. Mossy was the one who worked hard, persevered conscientiously with any task until it was complete. Sometimes Murtagh wondered how each would have developed if their names had been swapped at birth, or if, with the naming, their fates had been sealed.