THE
DAZZLING TRUTH
Author:
Helen Cullen
ISBN:
9781525815829
Publication
Date: August 18, 2020
Publisher:
Graydon House Books
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Summary:
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.
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 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 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
Author
Bio:
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 events and engagement specialist. Helen is Irish and currently
lives in London.
Social
Links:
Twitter: @WordsofHelen
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Facebook: @WordsofHelen
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