The South

by Colm Toibin

  Ramon was dead; and Tom; and Miguel. And this was an ordinary day among the days she had been allotted during the time she would be alive, a day when they would all live with her, old ghosts.

  * * *

  She phoned for a taxi to take her to the gallery when she had had her bath and dressed herself. Dublin was quiet; the quay was deserted.

  John Taylor who ran the gallery introduced her to the man who was to make the speech, the man from the Arts Council. He was much younger than she had imagined.

  “Did you come up from Enniscorthy this morning?” he asked her.

  “Yes, we drove up.”

  “Do you often come to Dublin?”

  “I live in Dublin,” she said and noticed that the man’s attention seemed to have focussed on someone else who had just entered. She excused herself and walked into the back room and found Michael Graves.

  “Do you know any of these people?” she asked him.

  “No,” he whispered.

  “Let’s go and have a drink, we can come back,” she said.

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I can. I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Are you all right?” He stood beside her and helped her to stand and lean against the wall.

  “I think I’m fine.” She put her hands to her face. “I feel awful,” she said.

  “You go down,” she said. “See if Richard and Deirdre are here.”

  When he had gone she stayed there, leaning against the wall. She could hear her blood thundering in her head.

  A man came towards her in the gallery and shook her hand. “Delighted to see you again,” he said. She smiled. Several people turned to look at her as she moved across the gallery which was now filling up, to where Michael stood with Richard and Deirdre. John Taylor brought her a chair and a glass of water.

  The man from the Arts Council was introduced and began to speak.

  “What’s his name?” Deirdre whispered to her.

  “I don’t know. I think it’s in Irish,” Katherine said. “An Irish name.”

  He spoke for some time about Ireland and Spain, he ended by talking about her skill and brilliance. She approached him when he had finished and thanked him.

  Michael introduced her to a critic from one of the Sunday newspapers who wanted to meet her.

  “Do you know all these people?” Her tone was sharper than she meant it to be.

  “Yes, I suppose I do,” he said.

  “Who are they all? What do they do?”

  “Didn’t you invite them?”

  “No, the gallery did. I don’t have any objection to them. I just want you to tell me who they are.”

  “Some of them are painters, some are buyers, others just go to openings all the time; they enjoy them.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” Katherine said and looked at Michael.

  * * *

  They went with Richard and Deirdre to the Royal Hibernian Hotel, had a drink there and then said goodbye on the steps. Michael said he wanted to go to Larry Tobin’s pub in Duke Street.

  “Am I going to be a millionaire?” Katherine asked John Taylor, when they were seated in the pub.

  “The watercolours were going fast,” he said.

  “And not the paintings?”

  “Not yet anyway.”

  They were joined in the pub by a number of people she had met with Michael before. They talked about her exhibition.

  By ten o’clock she wanted to leave, but the conversations kept on around her; more people joined them and others went away; more brandy appeared in front of her each time she wanted to go.

  “Michael, I’m going this time. I can’t stay on drinking.”

  “No, just hold on.”

  “I haven’t eaten.”

  “I’ll get you a sandwich,” he went up to the bar and came back with a ham sandwich and some mustard.

  “I’m going to go home soon. I really am.”

  * * *

  They stood together out on the street.

  “I’ll walk up towards the Green with you. I’ll get a taxi.”

  “Do you want to go and eat?”

  “No, I want to go home. Ring me tomorrow. I’m exhausted.”

  “I hate going home on my own,” he said.

  “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Your exhibition was very good.”

  She sighed.

  “But it’s past now, isn’t it? I’ve to do more work now.”

  She got into a taxi and pulled down the window.

  “Why don’t you come over in the morning and we’ll have breakfast.”

  He smiled and walked away.

  At the bottom of Grafton Street she told the taxi driver to stop. She handed him two pounds and told him she was sorry but she wanted to walk. It was a fine night. There were crowds in Westmoreland Street going to a disco. She walked down the river and crossed at the Halfpenny Bridge. Down the river at night when there were no cars coming the only sound was the tapping of rope against the flagpoles. A few alarm bells were ringing down the quays and the blare of an ambulance could be heard in the background. She looked down into the water, the ink-black water, and across the river at Adam and Eve’s opposite the Four Courts. By now Michael Graves would be putting the key in the door of his flat in Hatch Street, facing into another night.

  She turned into Blackhall Place and walked up past the Incorporated Law Society towards Manor Street. She walked up Aughrim Street. The clouds were passing quickly across the full moon. The full moon shining over the Phoenix Park.

  When she came to the bottom of Carnew Street she hesitated as she saw there was a figure sitting at her doorstep. She stood for a moment wondering if she should alert a neighbour until she realised who it was.

  “I thought you were a ghost,” she smiled. “What are you doing here?”

  Michael Graves stood up. “Where were you? I thought I was going to have to sit here all night. I got a taxi over here.”

  “I walked, but I didn’t expect to see you. I was thinking about you.”

  She opened the door and turned on the light in the front room.

  “Schubert,” he said.

  “What Schubert?”

  “There’s one you always play.”

  “Hold on. I’ll get a drink first. What do you want? Whiskey, brandy, gin, Harp?”

  “Let’s have a gin and tonic each, lots of ice.”

  “The fire’s set, you can put a match to it.”

  When Katherine came back into the room with a tall glass of gin for each of them, Michael had drawn the curtains and switched on a lamp. He was looking at Ramon Rogent’s painting over the mantelpiece.

  “This is perfect,” she said.

  He settled himself in an armchair and, when she had put the needle on the record, she sat on a stool beside him.

  “The gin,” he said. “The taste reminds me of things.”

  He left silence as the music soared; when she rose to turn the sound down he spoke again.

  “Things.” He almost whispered the word.

  She glanced at him as he clinked the ice around in the glass.

  “We’ve come as far as this,” she said. “I suppose we should be grateful.”

  “Maybe,” he said and smiled softly. “Maybe.”

  She stared into the fire as it began to flare, then turned and looked at him.

  “I’m glad you came back here tonight,” she said, “and I will make up a bed for you when the record ends. And then I’ll go to bed myself. I’m tired. Maybe we will light the fire again tomorrow if it’s cold. That would be something. Maybe we won’t do much tomorrow.”

  “I’ll stay up for a while,” he said. “It’s nice being here.”

  They listened to the music as it became intense. Soon the slow movement began. She wished for something else now, some time in the past or something that might have been different, but soon she stopped herself thinking. She closed her eyes and kept them closed until the movement came
to an end, and then she stood up and slowly began to get ready for the night.

  Michael did not stir. He sipped his drink and then turned and smiled at her when she came back into the room with the fireguard, which she put in front of the fire. When his bed was ready, she came and told him; and then she made her own way upstairs. She would, she knew, be fast asleep before he moved from the chair.

  AFTERWORD

  The journey due south from Dublin by train is beautiful. Beyond Dun Laoghaire, the train line cuts through rock overlooking the sea. Several times as it emerges from tunnels it seems perched right over the water. And then, beyond Bray, the scene becomes gentler. For some miles, the train runs by a short stony strand with the calm Irish Sea on one side. At Wicklow it moves inland, and then a few miles north of the town of Enniscorthy it begins to follow the line of the river Slaney, the river which Edmund Spenser called in The Faerie Queen “the sandy Slane.”

  Spenser in the 1580s passed through the town; indeed, he held a lease on Enniscorthy and the land around for a short period before selling it on. One of his closest friends, the poet Lodowick Bryskett, however, stayed in the town for many years and wrote letters to London making clear that he was living in a dangerous borderland, a place where English civility was fragile, where the barbarous natives represented a constant danger to the new English who had taken vast tracts of territory in the name of the Queen. The Slaney valley contained rich land, and over the next century most of it changed hands, the native Irish, or those who had begun to behave like natives, being forced into more boggy or hilly terrain. All along the valley, on both sides of the river, are the beautiful old houses of the planters, people with names like Deacon and Proctor, some in ruins, but many of them still intact and stately.

  On Sundays when I was growing up we used to go for drives through this landscape either in the small family car or in my aunt’s car. As children, we were as interested in where the best ice cream could be had as we were in stories about history and ancient conflicts. Sometimes, however, my uncle, who had fought in the War of Independence, would point to an old house and mention that he had, as a young insurgent, raided it for guns in 1920 or 1921. I remember one house because he remarked on his luck to find freshly cooked chickens during the raid; they were delicious, he said. By listening only half the time, I picked up a considerable amount of information about big houses around Enniscorthy which were burned or raided and the reasons why. Thus I knew that the Irish novelist Molly Keane was Captain Skrine’s daughter, and that the burning of her house when she was a child had been done by my uncle or some of his associates. I did not read her novel Two Days in Aragon about this event, however, or know it existed, until I had written my own novel, The South. But on meeting her in 1981, as I was planning my novel, I took a long and close look at her—she was born in 1905—and I found that encounter very useful as I worked on my book.

  There is another encounter which might have mattered more. It is all the more powerful and present because I am less sure about it. Between 1978, when I came back to Ireland from Spain, and the mid-1980s, I would travel to Enniscorthy some weekends, taking the train from Dublin on a Friday evening. For the first hour, the train would be full of commuters, but then, beyond Wicklow, the numbers would thin out; it would be easy from the accents to tell the difference between people from Arklow, Gorey, Enniscorthy and Wexford, even though these towns were between ten and twenty miles away from each other. Also, I would know a good number of the people from Enniscorthy by name, or by sight.

  On one of those Fridays sometime in 1979 a woman got on the train at one of the stations outside Dublin and travelled south. She sat on the side away from the sea in the last seat of a carriage. I had a very clear view of her. She was not dressed like the normal travellers on this train; she was wearing worn but expensive tweed, and good shoes; she seemed deeply preoccupied and was travelling alone. She looked grander and richer than we were, the rest of the travellers, and in the casual shorthand of the time, I might have surmised that she was a Protestant. By this I mean that there was a sense of old stability, old money about her. While she did not appear arrogant or anything like that, she did, however, seem formidable, someone not easily frightened. She stood out, since people like that did not usually travel on this train.

  I got off at Enniscorthy, and in my dreams, or maybe in reality (I am not sure about this part), there was someone to meet the woman I had seen on the train at the station, as there would be in the novel The South, whose contours began to grow in my imagination. She would become Katherine Proctor; this journey, the journey I saw her on, would be her first journey home in many years. This landscape is the landscape of the south, the south of Ireland, in a country often known in political parlance as “The South,” as opposed to “The North”; Katherine, having left this place, had journeyed to Spain, to the warm south.

  I knew exactly where she had been, even though her journey to Catalonia in Spain had been a quarter of a century before mine. I had gone to Barcelona on 24 September 1975 when I was twenty. I had stayed first in an old pension on the corner of Carrer del Pi and Carrer Portaferrissa. The city then almost belonged to the 1950s. No tourists came to Barcelona; they went to the coast rather than the city. The shops were old-fashioned. There was a great sense of custom and decorum in the streets. There were also police in the streets, and people were afraid of the police, and this gave private life a greater intensity, as it did friendships and family relations. When Franco died on 20 November 1975, things began to change, but no one was clear in the first year or two what that change was going to be.

  I worked as a teacher of English. One of my students was in her sixties. She was a Catalan woman of great charm and intelligence who lived near the church of Santa Maria del Mar. She had studied Catalan in the 1930s with the great lexicographer Pompeu Fabra. She had seen Casals play in Prades in the French Pyrenees when he came there after the Civil War, and maybe also before the war in the Palau de la Musica, the city’s splendid concert hall. I began to go to the concerts in the Palau, especially on Saturday evenings, and I began to study Catalan as well as Spanish, and I started to ask anyone I could find about the war, about what had happened in the city between 1936 and 1939 and in the years of repression afterwards.

  While the Picasso Museum and the Miró Foundation were open then, and I was aware of what these two painters had meant for the city, and how many years they had lived elsewhere, there was another museum which began to interest me almost more. It was in the building in the Parc de la Ciutadella which now houses the Catalan parliament; it showed the work of the Catalan painters who went to Paris only once or twice and who had then come home. I became fascinated by the work of two of them especially—Isidre Nonell (1872–1911) and Joaquim Mir (1873–1940), contemporaries of Picasso’s who had continued to paint in a style they had learned in their twenties. Later, as the novel was taking shape I became interested in the Catalan painter Ramon Rogent (1920–1958), and I put him as a real character into the book and allowed Katherine to study art with him and buy The Hammock from him, one of his best works.

  In the three years that I lived in Barcelona I often went to a small village in the Pyrenees called Farrera de Pallars. The journey there, by bus, was then even more spectacular than it is now; the roads have been improved and some tunnels built. The village is on the side of the hill, each stone house with slated roof poised to get maximum sunlight. There was no shop or bar, and many of the old houses were vacant or abandoned. Sometimes, in the evening, I would go and have a beer in the house where there was a public telephone and listen to talk about the village in the past, about the families who had lived in the houses, and about what had happened in the war when the village was taken twice, first by the Loyalists, or the Reds as they were often called, and then by Franco’s forces. Out of the village there were many old paths, some of them havens for smugglers, since the village was close to Andorra.

  This village, and the magnificent landscape around, the
snow that came in the winter and stayed for months, the beautiful high sky in the summer, were a revelation. Being there was pure excitement, as the city of Barcelona and the colours of the Mediterranean were pure excitement. This grew more intense as the plans for a new and democratic Spain and an autonomous Catalonia became clear.

  Once I was back in Ireland, however, Spain became something I had lost. I missed almost every aspect of it, as I had missed Ireland in my early months in Barcelona. I was aware that the Slaney valley had been colonised and fought over, much as the Catalan landscape had. But no one, as far as I knew, had made paintings of the Blackstairs Mountains in Wexford, or the light over the Slaney at certain times of the year. There was no Irish Picasso or Miró, and no Wexford version of Nonell, or Mir, or Rogent that I had paid any real attention to. Ireland, despite its literary heritage, was, in many respects, a strange dull backwater, or so it seemed to me in 1978, as I tried to find work in Dublin.

  The city lacked colour, and it was out of this lack that the novel began to take shape. I slowly became aware of a number of painters who had indeed worked with the Irish landscape. They had a real glamour and independence of mind all the more apparent because of the general drabness around them. Many of them had lived in France or in Spain. Slowly, I began to look at art made by an earlier generation of Irish woman painters such as Norah McGuinness (1901–1980), Mary Swanzy (1882–1978), Mainie Jellett (1897–1944) and Evie Hone (1894–1955). As I started to work as a journalist I could meet at openings artists such as Anne Yeats (1919–2001) and younger painters such as Camille Souter, Anne Madden and Maria Simmonds-Gooding, women painters who worked in France or in the west of Ireland, and came to Dublin merely for exhibition openings. There was glamour, mystery and singularity about them. They seemed made for a novelist in search of a protagonist who was an artist.