Connell Waldron

Connell Waldron is a gifted student whose confidence depends less on what he can do than on whether he feels he belongs. At school, he and Marianne Sheridan conceal their closeness behind the visible divide between their households; at university, the social ease he once took for granted disappears. His scholarship changes what he can afford, but not how uncertain he is of his own value. Grief and depression make that uncertainty acute, while intimate connection and writing offer limited, hard-won ways forward.

Identity and Background

Connell is academically able and particularly suited to English, though he initially struggles to imagine a future for himself. In January 2011, he tells Marianne that the English examination results have come back; she has also done very well, and jokes that he is on track to get six hundred points. Her teasing sits alongside an accurate recognition of his ability. He is modest about being top of the class and tells her that she is smarter than he is; she replies that she is smarter than everyone.

The social difference between them is obvious to their schoolmates. Marianne lives in the white mansion with the driveway, while Connell’s mother, Lorraine, works as a cleaner. Yet nobody at school knows the private relationship connecting those two facts. Their secrecy lets Connell preserve his standing in a social world where his mother’s job and Marianne’s isolation might otherwise define how others see them. At the same time, it divides his public identity from a closeness that matters deeply to him.

Connell’s discomfort with self-display appears in small, revealing gestures. When Lorraine pauses before leaving the kitchen, he puts his hands in his pockets and suppresses an impatient sigh so audibly that it still sounds like a sigh. Later, faced with Marianne’s offer of chocolate spread, he presses his hands further into his pockets as though he could store his whole body there. The gestures suggest a young man who often wants to retreat from the demands of being observed, even before university makes that unease overwhelming.

School, Secrecy, and Intimacy

Marianne encourages Connell to study English rather than Law, which he had chosen because he could think of nothing else. He cannot picture himself as a lawyer and has little interest in the subject; English is the school subject he enjoys, and reading already occupies much of his free time. Her advice helps him recognise a preference he has not been able to turn into a plan. He hesitates over job prospects, but Marianne dismisses the economy as hopeless and urges him not to let that anxiety decide his course.

Their private relationship also gives Connell an experience unlike his earlier sexual encounters. Other girls had repeated details of their intimacy to the school, turning his tenderness and mistakes into locker-room stories. With Marianne, awkward or difficult moments remain between them. The secrecy is not simply protection from embarrassment: it gives Connell the freedom to be intimate without anticipating an audience’s judgment. After their first time together, she stays overnight at his house. The next morning he kisses her goodbye, washes the sheets and replaces them with fresh linen, still trying to understand what she meant by thanking him.

That privacy has a cost. Connell and Marianne affect not to know each other at school, even though their closeness is one of the most significant parts of their lives. The public performance of indifference protects Connell’s position among classmates, but it also requires him to deny a relationship that feels unusually safe to him. Their intimacy gives him freedom from the school’s scrutiny only because it remains hidden from the school.

University and Social Alienation

At university, Connell’s old social footing fails him. In November 2011, Lorraine encourages him to go to a party even though he expects not to know anyone. He arrives alone, unsure whether to take off his jacket, and feels as though his presence disturbs everyone in the crowded room. When Gareth finally appears, Connell’s relief is immediate, but it turns into self-loathing because he is so dependent on the attention of someone he barely knows and does not particularly like.

Gareth belongs to the confident university world Connell cannot read. He is known around campus, has been involved in college societies and attended a prominent private school in Dublin. Connell, by contrast, remembers being liked and playing on his school football team, but knows that this history would not earn a laugh or recognition here. Even Gareth’s offer of a drink makes him uncertain: he cannot tell whether the other man’s manner is genuinely courteous or an ironic performance. The scene exposes Connell’s disorientation as a classed and social displacement, not a lack of intelligence.

The scholarship announced in April becomes a major practical reversal. Connell is named among the English scholars at Trinity College Dublin, and Marianne is named among the History and Politics scholars. He hears her friends cheering and realises that both of them have won. Lorraine is quiet with shock when he calls her; Niall and Elaine cheer him and call him an absolute nerd. Yet the achievement does not instantly make Connell feel at home. At the formal dinner for the new scholars, he wears a borrowed tuxedo that does not fit well, struggles to make conversation with an English professor and would rather be with Helen and his friends.

The scholarship nevertheless changes his material circumstances decisively. It pays his rent and tuition and provides a free college meal each day, making it possible for him to travel around Europe during the summer. For Marianne, the award confirms a belief in her own specialness; for Connell, it is an immense practical fact, not a settled answer to whether he deserves success. The difference captures his persistent uncertainty: opportunity arrives, but self-belief does not automatically follow.

Grief, Depression, and Seeking Help

Connell’s isolation deepens after the death of Rob Hegarty, a school friend he has scarcely seen in recent years. A few days into the new year, Connell receives a late-night group message from Rachel Moran asking whether anyone has seen or heard from Rob. He is returning from a night out with Helen and tells her the message is nothing. The following day, Rob’s body is recovered from the River Corrib. Connell later learns that Rob had been drinking heavily and seemed unlike himself, but he had not known; he had not been home much the previous term and had not kept up with people.

Looking through Facebook, Connell finds that Rob’s last message to him dates from early 2012. It accompanied a photograph of Connell with his arm around Teresa, a friend of Marianne’s, and made a crude joke about her. Connell had never replied. He cannot remember whether he saw Rob the previous summer and struggles to hold a clear mental picture of his face: the image starts out recognisable, then its features blur. Bereavement is tangled with the ordinary evidence of distance and missed contact, making his guilt inseparable from the knowledge that he had gradually lost touch.

By March, Connell is filling out a questionnaire at the university counselling service after Niall tells him it is free. On the pessimism question, the most hopeless statement seems to him to describe his future exactly, but he circles a less severe option because he does not want to alarm the person who will receive the form. The tiny tear his pen makes in the page, and his effort to arrange his face into a neutral expression, show how even asking for help involves managing what other people might see.

In his first session, Connell tells Yvonne that he has felt bad for a couple of months, perhaps since January. She asks whether something happened then, and the narration returns to the message about Rob. Connell has become so withdrawn that he can spend an hour and a half on the floor of his room, too exhausted to move from the en suite to his bed. Eating alone in the scholars’ Dining Hall, he hears other students talking without being able to join in and feels alienated from his own body. The scholarship has secured a room and meals, but it cannot by itself restore connection or relieve depression.

Writing and Uncertain Change

Writing begins as a private way for Connell to hold on to experience. During his travels, he writes to Marianne about the cities he visits, sometimes describing a particular scene. He tells her about emerging from the U-Bahn at Schönleinstraße into darkness, with tree fronds moving above the street and the sounds and smells of bars, pizza and exhaust fumes around him. Putting an experience into words feels to him like trapping it in a jar so that it cannot entirely leave. Marianne praises his emails and asks to read his stories; he tells her honestly that the stories are not as good.

In April, he sends his only really completed short story to Sadie Darcy-O’Shea, editor of the college literary journal. Her immediate enthusiasm unsettles him. He has never let anyone read his work before, and his pulse pounds hard enough that he has to lie down and stare at the ceiling. Although Sadie wants to publish the story, Connell initially says it is not ready. He agrees only on the condition that it appear under a pseudonym and that she keep his authorship secret, even from the other editors.

The story appears unedited in the May issue under the name Conor McCready. Reading it in the Arts Block, among students heading to lectures with coffee in hand, Connell notices two errors on the first page and has to put the magazine down to breathe. He finds another error when he resumes reading. Because his name is concealed, he cannot ask anyone what they think, and he never learns whether the story was considered good or bad. He comes to suspect it was published because Sadie needed material for a deadline. The experience brings him more distress than pleasure, yet he keeps two copies, one in Dublin and one under his mattress at home. That combination of concealment and preservation mirrors his relationship to intimacy: the work remains his own, but he has allowed it to enter the world.

Connell’s trajectory is not a simple ascent from gifted boy to confident adult. He earns recognition and financial independence, but still encounters loneliness, grief and doubts about his future. His closeness with Marianne offers a form of understanding unavailable in his more public social life, while his letters and stories give shape to feelings he has difficulty making visible. The kept magazines mark a modest change rather than a resolution: he has risked showing someone his work, even if he cannot yet bear to claim it openly.