Does she actually love him? She says as much to her confessor. But when pressed to confirm it, ‘she sighed and said nothing’.
When, after Rose’s sudden death, Eilis receives a letter that makes it clear she must make a return trip to Ireland, she wants to be able to tell Tony that she will stay. But then it occurs to her that he might feel that it is her duty to go.
Is she rationalising a secret desire to return? Or is this another instance of Eilis’s admirable fellow-feeling, her ability to perceive and somehow mirror the goodness in other people? Decency and pity, at any rate, are swirling and thickening around Eilis and Tony, and threatening to get the better of their romance.
There is, of course, a moral dimension to any homecoming. Home has claims on us that overpower most others. And yet by lavishing so much attention on Eilis’s time in Brooklyn, Tóibín quietly upends this moral expectation. So we are inevitably saddened to read that, back in Ireland, ‘everything about [Tony] seemed remote’ to Eilis. ‘And not only that, but everything else that had happened in Brooklyn seemed as though it had almost dissolved and was no longer richly present for her.’
When it has been so richly present for us, this can’t help but hurt.
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