In the Dark Room

by Brian Dillon

  ¶ Sea view

  The village, which has left me with so many clear and cherished memories of childhood holidays, seems to vanish entirely when I think of the summer of 1985. Our last family holiday, I remember, was already uncertain, and organized by my father at the last minute in the midst of the chaos that surrounded my mother’s failing health. Only weeks earlier, she had had the nail of one index finger removed, as the circulation to her hands was now so restricted, and the skin so badly damaged, that she was threatened with gangrene. The pain that racked her whole body now focussed itself to this excruciating point: her hand bandaged and held awkwardly as she sank into her seat on the train and closed her eyes. The day before we left, she and my father had been to see the specialist who, years before, had admitted that the symptoms of her disease were the worst he had seen, and I knew from my parents’ silence on the subject that something had been revealed at that meeting, something other than the visible maiming of her body had been discussed, a secret that lurked unacknowledged in the silence of that long journey. I remember my distinct feeling that the world had further closed around us, that as I looked out at a landscape which seemed distant and laminated, I was looking for the last time at a world falling away as swiftly as the train sped through the countryside.

  For the second consecutive summer, my father had rented a house on a hill above the village, some distance from the modest chalets, closer to the seafront, where we usually stayed. We were cut off from the bustle of other holidaymakers, and I don’t think that adolescence alone can explain the sense I had, that previous summer, that our annual routine was at an end. I recall only two moments from that holiday: the sound of a carnival in the village below, its music drifting across the fields from a distance my glum teenage imagination had already sentimentally consigned to the past; and hours spent sitting, reading, before a large picture window which gave out on to a dismally wet summer I was content to accord with my new attitude of universal boredom. But my separation of myself from the scene of the family holiday may not have been entirely selfish: there was already something deathly about that house, perched windily, adjacent to the village’s ancient, long disused graveyard.

  I don’t know how long we had been in the house before I realized that my mother was dying, but I recall the instant distinctly. She had left the house only once. I remember her dismay on discovering that it was the only accommodation available; she could no longer walk back up the hill from the village, and so was trapped. She spent most of our first days there in bed, until her sister arrived (I know now why she was there: her husband and children had returned to Dublin the previous week) and drove her the few hundred yards to the seafront. She had not been able to get out of the car. That evening, as we sat down to dinner, my aunt tried to console her; she had at least got out of the house, had seen something of her home village despite everything. But my mother, as I recall, remained silent on that subject. All I remember of the meal – during which she ate nothing – is that she tried to describe the pain she was in, and that (I am least certain of this detail, perhaps because I had heard her say it so often) she said she was dying. In any case, I was sure of it: I knew that the brief time she had spent looking out at a rainswept shore was the last opportunity she would have to look at that view.

  It was not yet dawn when I woke the following morning; my father came into the room where my eldest brother and I were sleeping to tell us that an ambulance was on its way. My mother had not slept, and in the early morning had told my father that she felt as though she could not wait till daybreak. There was no need yet, he said, for us to get up. I lay there picturing the ambulance leaving the town, 12 miles away, and wondered if it would arrive in time. I wondered too if my brothers knew what I had already guessed (we said nothing as we waited), and I hoped for an instant that whatever was to come would be over quickly. In the following days, as my mother drifted in and out of consciousness, and the house filled with relatives while my father spent most of the day at her bedside, I became convinced that if she died, that split second in which I wished for a swift end would have sealed her fate. My mother, we were told a couple of days later, was improving, and although she had asked for us, we were not taken to see her. In fact, we hardly moved from the house at all, so that the week we spent waiting for her to be declared stable enough to be moved to a Dublin hospital now seems to have unfolded entirely within the walls of that house, as if it were connected to the (for me, almost imaginary) hospital and had drifted away from the surrounding landscape, the seashore, the waves which continued to beat against the concrete promontory that had been the scene of my mother’s last glimpse of the outside world. I wonder if that image might have joined the picture of her three sons in her mind as it battled with a certainty that, in her waking moments, I have no doubt my father tried to dispel.

  Is it too beguiling a thought, too obviously a product of the mourner’s retrospective construction of consoling symmetries, to imagine that she had kept the worst at bay until she had seen this view? I remember that my father and I had taken a walk along the beach during that week. In my memory, we walk silently for miles, all the way to a point just inland of a small island known as the Black Rock, to which, at low tide, we had often made our way and looked back at the beach, the village, the cliffs curving away, retreating behind huge expanses of rock where my mother had played as a child. A few days later, after my father had returned from a visit to the hospital, he asked me to accompany him on another walk, around the outskirts of the village. It was pouring rain, and as we came back along the main street he suggested we stop for a while at the village’s only hotel. As we sat in the darkness of the deserted bar, my father told me as much as he could about my mother’s condition. When we got home, he said, we would have to watch her; she would still be very ill. He did not quite say (how could he have said this?) that she was going to die, but simply that she would not get any better. I understood, and immediately imagined that I would be the one to find her dead. I was sure she would not die until we were all back in Dublin. I pictured the house in Dublin empty but for my mother and myself (imagining, despite everything, an ordinary afternoon: my father at work, my brothers out for the day). I would come in to the kitchen to find her lying at my feet. I pictured, in other words, a return to a minimal sort of normality, for a matter of weeks at least. I thought I would have time to let the certainty of my mother’s death separate me further from the outside world. And once again, I felt ashamed.

  ¶ Semi-private ward

  On 16 July 1985, my brothers and I travelled home from Kerry by train, my father having left earlier that morning in the ambulance that took my mother to a hospital in Dublin. Her condition was sufficiently stable for her to be moved, but also grave enough for the staff of the hospital in Kerry to know that they could do nothing further for her. I recall that as I sat on that train pretending to read, I imagined the ambulance tracing its different route across the country, passing through the same towns and perhaps even reaching them on occasion at the same time. I wondered whether the ambulance would stop somewhere along the way, and if so whether there were arrangements for such a break in its journey. I imagined, as we sped airlocked in our own rapidly thickening atmosphere of dread, my parents as a sort of satellite to our orbit round whatever it was that was about to occur, whatever awaited us in a place, our home, that I could now hardly remember. It was not a journey I wanted to complete, because at the end of it we would emerge into a newly and fearfully dilated air, and somehow the chamber in which my family had been secluded for several days had come to seem weirdly comfortable, as if we might have carried on in that way for months.

  We reached the station in the early evening; an aunt and uncle were waiting to take us home. As the car moved slowly through the city, I remembered the past childhood summers when we had taken this journey by taxi, and my father’s predictable question (carried on, with cheerful sarcasm, till we were far too old), as we passed along the river and into the centre of
town: ‘Do you know where you are yet?’ It was a route that always took us past the psychiatric hospital to which, over the years, I had accompanied my mother so many times. On this last journey, I realized that I had never, as a child, understood the distinctions between the various hospitals my mother had attended. It was only in the last year of her life that I fully acknowledged that the walk up from the brooding stone-pillared gates to this hospital, and back down again, stopping at a dispensary just inside the gates for my mother to collect her medication, was connected to the depression she had suffered for a decade or more. I have completely eradicated its interior from my memory: only these two short journeys, separated each time by a waiting room of which I recall nothing, remain to convince me that I did actually go with her on her visits to her psychiatrist. To me, it was just another hospital; the bus trips (this one, I recall, involved two) punctuated the mid-afternoons when I returned from primary school and regularly interrupted my summer holidays without causing me much unease. It was later, when my brothers and I were old enough to stay at home, that I came to understand these excursions and, though still dimly, to fear my mother’s return and the next diagnosis or development of her treatment.

  There were, over the years, many hospital visits, but I have only one very clear memory of the hospital where my mother’s scleroderma was treated and where she spent, as the disease progressed, more and more time. I remember only vaguely the waiting room where my brothers and I were left as my father was taken to her ward, and how eventually he would reappear to lead us in to see her. On this particular occasion, my mother came downstairs with him, and I have never forgotten my panic as she came slowly down the huge staircase and round into the lobby. As I stood up in the waiting room, surrounded by families warmly greeting their sick relatives, or embracing as they said goodbye, I discovered that I had strictly no notion of how to behave. I could not imagine that my mother was about to kiss me or put her arms round me: would this intimacy, unknown since infancy, suddenly connect me to a suffering body I had come to think of as quite distant, secluded in the bed of the ward from which she had just emerged? The thought was unbearable, and I wonder now if she felt it too; the way her illness had cut her off from a natural contact with the children standing in front of her, shuffling, uncomfortable, shamed. It may have been after that particular visit that I came to fear the building itself. I no longer dared look at the patients around my mother, nor risk a glance through the open doors of the wards I passed on the way to hers. I ceased to think of a hospital as a place where you went to be cured; now it was a place dedicated to humiliation and degradation, a place where nameless forces sucked one in and thrust one out again looking weaker, less like oneself. The place became, as I got stuck in this childish perception, my most extreme metaphor of the inexplicable history that was unfolding around me.

  ¶ Interment

  My mother and father were both buried in the large cemetery not far from our house. Originally the site of the residence of the Shaw family, owners of Bushy Park, a few miles away to the south, Mount Jerome cemetery was constituted by an Act of Parliament in 1837, and entrusted to the General Cemetery Company of Dublin, which ran it till the company was liquidated late in 1984. I remember that when my grandfather died in December of that year, there was some doubt about the future of Mount Jerome, but it seems that by the following summer it had been purchased by a large firm of undertakers and there was no question but that my mother would be buried there. I knew the cemetery well. My father’s mother had been buried there in the autumn of 1974, and visits to her grave were a regular feature of the Sunday afternoons of my childhood. I had always been fascinated by the older, original parts of the site. I knew that the earliest grave dated from 1837, and my brothers and I would sometimes wander off, as my parents went to fetch water for the flowers they had bought at a small shop just outside the massive green iron gates, to search for this ancient tomb. We never found it, but were often thrilled to discover, each time, an even older grave than we had last time. The original 25-acre cemetery had expanded westwards to take up 45 acres, surrounded by suburban houses. The point where the old cemetery ended and the new began, I imagined, was marked by the sudden cessation of the avenues of yews which grew there. We had to walk along the longest of these to reach my grandmother’s grave, and I never ceased to be thrilled by the decaying stonework of the huge nineteenth-century tombs I found on either side. As you neared the turn-off to an open, unlandscaped expanse, the monuments became suddenly less exciting. They lacked the ravaged or headless angels, battered urns or – as in at least one case – faithful stone dogs which marked the plots of defunct Victorians whose bones, I imagined, I might one day catch sight of, if only their graves would subside another few inches. As my parents coaxed me along towards my grandmother’s grave, I often longed to turn back and explore the sunken pathways that radiated from a towering mock-Gothic chapel passed by on the way in. There, I knew, if one happened on the right rusted doorway, a thick white lattice at the top would allow just enough light to see inside. There, piled up on both sides in the gloom, would be the huge lead coffins which were the grim sight I was after.

  My parents’ grave is off to one side of the path along which I was dragged as a child. Unlike my grandparents’ plot further off into the open and wind-whipped area where marble headstones and golden letters predominate (surrounded by the crunch of variously coloured chippings), this spot still feels as if it is part of the old cemetery. But the graves on the side of this narrow, muddy path have been jammed against a dismal grey wall. On the other side is a stonemason’s yard, where blank headstones stand in serried ranks awaiting their names and legends. My parents’ grave, from a distance, is hardly visible. I recall that my father had wanted the plainest of headstones; I remember him refusing all suggestions of gilt lettering and solid ornament. A simple flat stone comes to a bare point above two inscriptions that could hardly be more modest: apart from the names and dates, the headstone records only ‘a dear wife and mother’ and ‘dear husband and father’. There is nothing of the elaborate versification that crowds the black marble of the grave on the left, nor any hint of an individuality I used always to find disturbing on my trips here as a child: those graves with photographs of the deceased attached were considerably more eerie than any of the Victorian extravagances.

  I have in front of me a photograph of the grave. It reminds me that in the years since my father’s death I have visited it just once, and then only after several years of putting the moment off time and again. But I have never stopped imagining it. In my memory it stayed freshly dug for years; then, as guilt over my abandoning it set in, I imagined it becoming overgrown until its inscription was scarcely legible. In fact, of course, it had stayed much as it appears in the photograph: pallid and unexceptional, a muted reminder, nothing to be afraid of. I cannot say that when, at last, I stood in front of it again, the grave lived up to the fears I had built up in the intervening years. I had thought there would be something unspeakable to face here: a reckoning with the past I had done my best to bury. The sight of the grave, I fancied, would return me to the state of inexpressible distress I felt every time my father took me there during the five years he survived my mother. Then, I would stand staring at the dull grey mass, wondering precisely what it was I was supposed to feel. It was this thought, rather than any access of grief, that so frightened me, and kept me from returning. The grave, I thought, would be an accusation written in stone; its lack of embellishment or iconography would remind me of the silence that enclosed the two bodies that lay there. I had been unable to express my fear of this place, or of the memories that were dispersed about this particular damp and colourless corner of the cemetery. But when I stood before the grave for the first time in a decade, it seemed as if it had sunk into itself to such a degree, become so much a part of the lifelessness of its surroundings, that it no longer said anything to me.

  CODA

  ‘What we need is silence; but what silenc
e requires is that I go on talking.’

  — John Cage, Silence

  The silence that wrapped itself around my memories of my parents is soundtracked, in my mind, by the music that emanated, for a decade or so, from a corner of our sitting room. My brothers and I seem to have used music to address, obscurely or otherwise, the absences at the heart of our household. Music stood in, endlessly, for all that we would not or could not say.

  The record player in the corner of the room was a Pye Playboy that dated, I suppose, from sometime in the 1960s. Perhaps my parents had bought or been given it when they married towards the end of the decade. It was a rather archaic-looking object, built solidly of wood and, if at all datable in its quite graceless lines, more plausibly a relic of the 1940s. When I was very young, my mother would regularly, mid-afternoon, take out one of the handful of records she owned – a fairly predictable selection of Irish folk standards and their more recent imitations – and either play along on her newly acquired guitar, or set two of the three of us dancing in front of her. (In my memory, Kevin is still a tiny bundle at the other side of the room.) Music must have leached away from my mother’s life over the years – as her hands had curled too tightly to shape a chord on the guitar, or as depression sapped her energy for dancing. In any case, there was a gap of several years, as I recall, between these joyful, childish sessions and the time when the record player came back to life: first as I started to play my own records, then as my brothers began to compete for the turntable. The thing itself was remarkably sturdy; its single speaker was capable of startling loudness and its two controls (volume and tone) never failed for at least twenty years. With some careful adjustment and a little optimism, it could still be made to play in the late 1990s.