After She Left

by Penelope Hanley

  ‘Sherry?’ repeated Keira. ‘Mum, no one drinks sherry any more, sherry is what the priest’s housekeeper would have offered visiting parishioners in the sixties. Have a nice glass of bubbly.’

  *

  That night Maureen slept in Keira’s bed, Keira slept on a single mattress on the bedroom floor, and Jimmy kipped on the living room sofa. For Maureen, staying at their house was probably slumming it. Most of the Beach Lane rooms had carpet; all they had here was sea-grass matting. Maureen had matching furniture, which Keira privately categorised, along with wall-to-wall carpets, as ‘stuffy bourgeois’. Maureen’s shelves held china ornaments – little ballerinas or birds, and items like Jim’s present to her of a Lalique Madonna – which Keira thought of as dust collectors. But to Maureen, Keira’s ‘less is more’ style would be roughing it.

  Keira had given Maureen one of her big T-shirts to wear as a nightie. The blind was up and a sharp twig from the hawthorn tree scratched against the window like a horrid twiggy hand wanting to be let in. Keira shuddered and pulled down the matchstick blind.

  As she stuffed pillows into clean white pillowslips, her brain felt crammed with tumbling images of Clarrie Shaw, the Mongol Hordes, and Maureen on the back of Jimmy’s Triumph 650. For five or even ten minutes at a time she didn’t think about Alan or feel the sharp-nailed fingers of deception and betrayal scratching her heart. The sparkling wine and rosé she had drunk at dinner probably helped the hurt recede as well.

  Maureen came back from the shower looking refreshed and pink-cheeked, her shoulder-length black hair damp and her face relaxed. She didn’t look forty-five and a half. She looked about thirty.

  ‘Brilliant water pressure,’ she said. ‘You ought to get a plumber to stop that noise, though.’

  ‘A plumber could stop it?’

  ‘It’s a simple thing, apparently.’

  They were both silent, then, each thinking about the only plumber they knew: Jim.

  When they were settled in, the door closed against Butch, and both in bed ready to sleep, Keira said, ‘I’m going sailing tomorrow. I interviewed this old guy called Seamus Mike and he invited me.’

  ‘Good Heavens, Seamus, I met him once,’ said Maureen. ‘He visited us in the Easter holidays when I was about seven.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you’d met him! He’s house-minding in Birchgrove. His wife died. Would you like to meet him again?’

  A pause. ‘I’d have no objections.’

  ‘He painted a fascinating picture of life on the Blaskets. I got so involved in what he was saying because of the rhythmical way he talked. It’s a world that’s all gone now. He told me he and Deirdre came from the Island of Stories.’

  ‘Island of Stories!’ Maureen scoffed. ‘Entertaining yarns is all the stories are.’

  ‘They’re the truth. He told me stuff that really happened. Stories means well told, it doesn’t mean they’re lies!’

  Her mother sceptically clucked her tongue and said, ‘Yes, well … At least we can assume he’s a good sailor and he won’t take you out if the weather’s iffy. The radio forecast a possible storm tomorrow.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Keira yawned. It was weird thinking of the Beach Lane house without Maureen, just her dad and Sean. How would her dad cook Sean’s dinner? An image of Sean in his Christian Brothers school uniform making toasted peanut butter sandwiches for them both popped into Keira’s head. ‘So, what are you going to do, Mum?’

  ‘I’m seeing Stephen Field on Monday.’

  ‘Wow. This is serious.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Hey, Mum?’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘Of course you can stay here as long as you like, but how long do you think Jimmy will stay? It’d be different if it was just me, but I live with two other people …’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘He’ll probably be in jail again soon.’

  A split second pause and then Maureen gave a bleak little chuckle. Keira laughed and then Maureen started really laughing. On and on they went, Maureen with a hysterical edge and Keira guffawing at her mum’s rapidly developing gallows humour. After that they settled down to sleep until Keira thought of something.

  ‘Hey, Mum, will you … do you want to go to Mass tomorrow?’

  After a pause so long that Keira thought she must have nodded off Maureen said, ‘I should have said something sooner. I’ve been having doubts since Rowan started protesting against the Vietnam War. It’s been building up … I started questioning … politics, the government, the position of the Church. Your father sees things more simply than I do. I tried talking to him but he just restates his position.’

  ‘He’s dogmatic,’ said Keira.

  ‘Our talks were like intersecting monologues. Not communicating.’

  Maureen rolled over. ‘You know, I’ve often thought marriage is a conversation. About the time when Rowan left, your father stopped listening to me. It’s lonely, being in a marriage where the conversation has stopped. He’s still a believer but my faith has just about foundered.’

  ‘So tomorrow morning you won’t be needing to know where the local Catholic church is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, that’s good.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t know where it is.’

  *

  Keira thought she’d be crying all night because of Alan’s perfidy but she slept like a dead person until the noisy miner birds woke her at seven o’clock. She began getting dressed.

  ‘You young people don’t have curtains, just these woody blinds.’

  ‘Mum!’ Keira turned round from hooking up her bra. ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you. They’re matchstick blinds.’

  ‘I always wake up early. But people could see through these blinds, what about privacy?’

  Keira heard the note of maternal alarm in her voice but gave an elaborate shrug, standing there in her Bonds Hip-Nippers and white lace bra. ‘I’ve got nothing to hide. Don’t be so aghast, no one’s going to see.’ She gestured to the window. ‘Bamboo blinds are opaque but they’re too dark. I like the light coming through.’

  Maureen shook her head. ‘Privacy is important.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ A pause and then she asked, ‘Were there curtains here when you rented the house?’

  Keira pulled on her Levis and a rust-coloured corduroy shirt. ‘Yeah, but they were horrible, with fat beige roses all over them. In every room! Nessie and I took them down and bought matchstick blinds – they’re cheap, too.’ She tugged at her blue jeans and pulled up the zipper.

  ‘I see.’ Maureen peered at the alarm clock on the bedside table. ‘Are you going sailing so early?’

  ‘Nope, going to art school first to develop a couple of rolls of film.’

  ‘Make sure you have a good breakfast first.’

  ‘Sure.’

  In the kitchen, Butch tried to wind his way around Keira’s ankles in an aggressively ingratiating way, alternately whining and purring until she shook some Meaty-Bites into his bowl. A few minutes later – passing Jimmy, who had slept through the cat’s noise and the kettle boiling – she walked up the hall with a cup of tea, the aroma of it soothing, as if all was right with the world.

  ‘Darling girl, thank you – tea in bed, what a luxury,’ said Maureen.

  *

  Keira loved the quiet serenity of the darkroom. She even loved its chemical smell. It was a place of concentration on the present moment, where problems and pressures were left outside the rubber-sealed door. It was essential to focus only on the task at hand. One lapse and you could ruin a whole roll of thirty-six images. Keira unwound the week’s work from the film canister. In the blackness she coiled the exposed film onto the metal spools that fitted inside the round developing tank, then swished it slowly back and forth, back and forth. But her mind refused to focus just on the process.

  ‘There can never be equali
ty in a relationship,’ Nessie said once, ‘always one person loves more than the other.’ Sometimes the man loves the woman more – Keira wondered if this was the case with her parents – but for Nessie it was always she who loved more. Before Alan, Keira’s boyfriends had always loved her more. She thought she’d met her match with Alan. But she’d been swimming along in a warm sea of assumptions. She had assumed she could spend as much time on her studies as she liked without it affecting her relationship. She had assumed he was as happy as she was to be in a relationship where they had sex and friendship and a future but no one had to make compromises, at least not yet.

  Why hadn’t he talked about it if he was unhappy? Their talks were mostly about ideas: the life of the mind, vital to them both. Well, the sex was really good, the sex wasn’t in the mind. A deep throb of pain twanged through her veins at the thought of no more sex like that with him. But she couldn’t think about that. She couldn’t cave in to debilitating feelings but must think her way through this methodically or she would end up crying on the cold floor, drowning in forlorn feelings, with no film developed or with all her prints wrecked.

  Should she be ringing him, begging him to come back? Or was it better to do nothing? Let him stew. If he was stewing. He might be having gleeful fun with what’s-her-name. She should have stuck around to find out more about his motives and not have let the sudden poisonous force of blind jealousy dictate her actions. Knowledge is power and she did not know many of the facts.

  She put the film in the stop bath. Transferring the film to the fixer, she thought she should have paid more attention to those theoretical discussions they had about possessiveness being passé and marriage being a malaise of bourgeois capitalism.

  She thought life would just keep on getting better if she did all the right things. Didn’t life continue to get more interesting as one ticked off accomplishments? Wasn’t it a process of trying hard and working harder, of passing exams and saving money and having a balanced life of study and friends and love and sex and everything gradually improving? What had she done wrong? Why did she feel so ghastly?

  She rinsed the film and hung it up in the drying room. That night she would make a proofsheet and enlarge the ones with the best exposure and composition. They were simple shots of Ros, her house and Deirdre’s painting, plus a few of Seamus Mike she’d taken before hopping on the bus.

  Something Heide said slipped into her brain: ‘The simplest photographs can precipitate a train of stimulating ideas. A camera is so much more than a visual record – it can be the means for contradicting notions of what we think we know.’

  Keira had thought she knew Alan. She thought he would be faithful. She thought she was in control.

  Haywire, chaotic and contradictory images and sensations of Alan crammed her mind one after the other. His purposeful walk, his laid-back laugh; his stinging words of betrayal on Saturday, his loving grip around her naked shoulders just moments before; the smell of his lime aftershave, the acrid smell of burnt croissants and bitter coffee.

  She tried to return to her photography but her mind would not focus.

  After leaving the darkroom, Keira caught a bus to Central to connect with a 433 for Balmain. In order to escape her thoughts she buried herself in Iris Murdoch’s novel The Black Prince, not looking up as the bus rolled past Broadway, much quieter on a Sunday, her peripheral vision indicating when the bus was going past the Glebe terrace houses, past Glebe Island Bridge, past industrial White Bay and finally Rozelle. She didn’t look up properly until well past the Darling Street fire station.

  At the stop before Peacock Park she got off and walked down the quiet road. Louring clouds tumbled in the dark grey sky like a Deirdre Wild landscape.

  Seamus was right, the house was easy to find. He was digging some sort of seedlings into the dark earth with a red trowel. When he caught sight of Keira he stood, brushed his hands on his thighs, and walked towards her. His teeth flashed white against his tanned face when he smiled.

  ‘’Tis a winter’s day and has the cut of it,’ he said, looking up at the low grey clouds over the dark sea. ‘Don’t know about sailing – we’ll see what happens after we’ve had a cup of tea. Would you like to see the boats?’

  ‘Yes. Can I take some photographs?’

  ‘You can, of course.’

  She followed him down the yard to the harbour’s edge. The water was grey with masses of white caps. The dark water slapped against the boats. Seamus pointed to a one-masted wooden sloop. ‘That’s Mick and Naomi’s twenty footer.’ Naomi was painted in looping white letters on the bow. ‘In the boatshed you can see what I’m working on.’

  As they were walking over to it there was a sudden thunderclap. A few moments later they felt rain spitting. Then it fell in large, heavy drops, splashing their faces and hands with surprising force. They ran down the grassy slope towards the whitewashed shed with its rustic wooden door, the two square windows at either side seeming to eye them as they hastened for shelter.

  Seamus unlocked the door and stood aside to let Keira in. Inside, it was dark and smelled like wet earth and kerosene. The white walls were dotted with hooks. Tools and coils of rope hung from them.

  Seamus went to a pale wood tea chest on the floor and took out two blue towels. He gave Keira one and they stood in silence, wiping off the cold raindrops. After Keira had dried her hair and her eyes had adjusted to the dimness she noticed a construction that resembled the beginnings of a vast basket except that it was very long rather than high.

  ‘We’d better wait the rain out,’ said Seamus. ‘It has come quickly; perhaps it will leave quickly.’ The boatshed had a tin roof and he had to raise his voice above the noise of the rain ‘Ah, ’tis all mod cons round ’ere, we ’ave electric light and ’ot and cold running water.’

  Seamus reached over to pull the light cord by the door. He switched on a little bar heater. Then he filled the kettle at the sink and plugged it into the electric socket. He prised the lid off a cake tin and took out a half loaf. ‘Soda bread. I make it m’self. Sit down, sit down,’ he said, gesturing to the simple wooden chairs with woven straw bottoms Keira thought of as Van Gogh chairs. She looked out at the falling rain. When the tea was made he brought their mugs over and set a sugar packet on the wooden crate. ‘Milk?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  He got a bottle and a block of butter from the tiny fridge near the sink. Other than the milk bottle and the butter, it was full of VB beer. He sat down and dipped the teaspoon three times into the sugar before finally stirring the contents into his tea.

  ‘I have some tea with m’ sugar,’ he said, winking.

  He sliced and buttered the soda bread. Keira stared at the red-hot electric bars of the heater and stretched her hands towards it, the sudden warmth feeling as welcome and relaxing as hot sunshine. She gestured to the basket-like construction taking up much of the floor space.

  ‘So, Seamus, what is this?’

  ‘Well now,’ he said, handing her a piece of buttered soda bread, ‘this is the makings of a naomhóg. They were known in Ireland for centuries, but after the destruction of the woods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they came into their own.’

  ‘How exactly do you make it?’

  Seamus grasped his mug in his right hand. ‘I mark out an oval on the ground, about six or seven feet long and four and a half feet wide.’ He gestured with his free hand, brown and calloused. ‘Originally we used to put thirty-two hazel rods about ten feet high firmly in the ground following the oval – but hazel bushes being not so easy to come by in Balmain, I’ve done the same thing using wooden laths. I bend them over so they meet, and bind them side by side …’ On and on he went while she sipped the hot tea, her hands wrapped around the warm cup.

  ‘The next step is to pull it up and cover it with a tanned cowhide. That’s it,’ he pointed, ‘from the tannery at Five Dock. Now I need to stretch it tightly over here.’ He gestured with both hands over the wooden framework. ‘Then I�
��ll trim it and put the seats in place, and she’s ready for launching.’

  ‘Would it be possible for you to take me for a ride in it?’

  ‘It would.’

  ‘How many people can go on it?’

  ‘Four comfortably. The Dingle Peninsula naomhóga are the most seaworthy. The naomhóg was the only boat that could ever land on that wild coast. It’s a design with no ugly angles. As in nature, it’s all curves, the same as in the curlicues and arabesques in the Irish illuminated manuscripts, inspired by the bend of a branch or the curve of a swan’s neck. Now, here I go gabbing on and on and you’re probably bored sick, you are. ’Tis very white you’re looking, Keira. Are you going to faint? You don’t need a doctor or anything?’

  She gave a brief laugh. ‘God, no. It’s not a doctor I need. It’s … it’s … my boyfriend – we’ve broken up and it was a bit of a shock.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. He must have poor judgment.’

  She smiled ruefully. ‘Thanks. Please carry on – what I need is distractions. Could you tell me something more about Deirdre?’

  ‘If a dolphin gets sick her companions will get beside her and nudge her along through the sea because dolphins have to keep moving to keep breathing.’ He leant forward and patted her shoulder. ‘We all need our dolphins nudging us from time to time, and I think that today will bring you yours.’

  She sniffed and looked into his eyes, puzzled. He looked evasive.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Never mind that for now. Céit’s mother was called Brigit an’ she used to say: “A good story deepens the heart.” Brigit’s mother had three daughters, Brigit, Ettie and Maeve, and she told them the Celtic myths and read to them from Shakespeare and the Bible. So Brigit, although she was young and the daughter of a stonemason, knew a thing or two about the world and about her own heritage.

  ‘When she fell in love with Dermot O’Mara from the Great Blasket, then got married and had her first child, she called her Céit Deirdre but she was always known as Deirdre.’

  The hot soothing tea that Keira sipped warmed her inside and his lilting voice lulled her into a lazy unthinking absorption of the story.