Trespassers

by Julia O'Faolain

  Responsibility had moved uncomfortably close.

  The reaction in Kilkenny was to ostracise Butler’s family, force him out of the local archaeological society which he had himself resurrected when it was moribund, and devise other malicious, gnat-sized assaults. The County Council expelled him from one of its subcommittees, and local businesses such as creameries refused to deal with him. There is a cartoonish pettiness to this boycott, but it cannot have been pleasant to have been on the receiving end of it. The American writer Paul Blanshard, a virulent anti-Catholic whose aim was to alert the US to the dangers of letting RCs take over, seized on the story and told it later in his book The Irish and Catholic Power. Was his book really ‘virulent’? Malicious? I thought so then but was unlikely to be open-minded. I remember his visiting Knockaderry and that, from my shy station behind the tea trolley, I took against him.

  *

  In the Forties and Fifties, religion in Ireland was prone to generate malice. The faithful used to be warned by priests never to put foot in a Protestant church. If invited to a ‘mixed’ wedding or christening, you should wait outside. As rules are for breaking, Marie and I used sometimes to slip inside the Killiney Protestant church, a pretty building with a slim verdigris-covered spire, to breathe forbidden air. It did not take much more than that to make us feel we were turning into apostates. The church was just a stone’s throw from our house, so on idle days we would sidle in and have a look at the austere, alien, but unexpectedly appealing, décor. It was not until I had been to France that I began to notice how weepy, bloody, triumphalist and florid our own churches’ arrangements were. The lovely ruined ones, destroyed in half-forgotten wars, would almost certainly have been just as overstuffed with gimcrack gewgaws if they had survived, so we didn’t regret their undoing. As it was, the sight of a wind-eroded, free-standing stone groin framing stretches of sky had a sorrowful appeal. The mix of fragility and tenacity was heart-breaking. Clonmacnoise especially – a roofless, sixth-century monastery in County Offaly – was surrounded by close-cropped grassland littered with white bones. Eileen and I drove there one winter’s day, after dropping Seán in Cobh, where he would catch the liner for New York, then wandered for hours around the ruined buildings, without seeing another human being whom we could ask whether those bones were human. In my fading memory – this trip was a long time ago – there are skulls or half-skulls in the scatter and I remember thinking of the ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ scene in Olivier’s Hamlet before realising that the skulls must have belonged to goats.

  Years later, when visiting Palmyra and Apameia, I felt some of the same excitement, although those much vaster sites were neither as empty, lonely or numinous. And no doubt neither, now, is Clonmacnoise.

  *

  A memory of an earlier visit to Maidenhall: I am walking to Sunday Mass with the Butlers’ maids, one of whom is called Sally. She is teasing me, but not, I sense, in a friendly way. I am younger in this memory, but alert, as children can be in ways they do not try to freeze in words. My awareness flickers as Sally’s mood shifts. Am I wondering, she asks, why I’m with the maids this morning and not with the Butlers? She launches this as though it were a trick question. Is it? I am used to maids doing this. There is provocation here. The maids are competitive. Some are quite young. Sally nags, asking where I think my hosts are.

  Without thinking, I say, ‘It’s early. I suppose they’ll go to a later Mass.’

  She laughs with delight, and I guess that I have fallen into a trap. ‘Mass!’ she derides, ‘Mass? Dontcha even know they’re Protestants?’

  Clearly she hopes her information will deflate and shock me. I shrug. ‘We know heaps of Protestants,’ I tell her, ‘in Dublin. Some come to Mass.’ My claim, though mostly untrue, takes the wind out of her sails.

  In this memory I am too young to know the words ‘social class’, but, contrary to a widely held belief, you can think without words, and I know what Sally is on about. If I have to go to Mass with the maids, that, she wants me to know, is because I am of the same stock as they, so I’d better not be stuck up. Like, she implies, should stick with like and not be too friendly with Prods. The Standard would no doubt agree with her. Not that I have ever laid eyes on it. Seán, who has had run-ins with Peadar Curry, its editor, doesn’t subscribe nor, as far as I know, do the nuns. All they have in their parlour are stacks of a dry-looking magazine called Studies. It is run by Jesuits of whom they think highly.

  The idea of Protestants going to Mass came to me from a poem of Betjeman’s who, while slyly working in Ireland for the British Ministry of Information, had professed some – teasing or perhaps tactical? – interest in becoming a Catholic. When his wife actually became one, he was horrified and wrote a poem listing and lamenting the familiar, cosy, Protestant ways and habits she would now miss.

  *

  In early June 1947 Eileen and I haul a suitcase down from the attic and prepare for my trip to France. We are excited, though nervous about the family with whom I am to stay. They will surely, we tell each other, be kind. The Sacred Heart nuns, whose school the younger girls attend, have promised that they will. The family is large because Monsieur Morandy married twice, though both wives died. Between them they produced two boys and six girls. Guessing that the war must have left France in worse shape than the Emergency left us, Eileen and I agree that I must bring useful presents. After some thought, we opt for shoes and butter: two by-products of the cattle trade for which Ireland is noted. I can’t carry six pairs, but reckon that if I bring two, there is a good chance of one or two of the girls finding their size. The butter is ‘country butter’ and available off the ration. Salty and orange-coloured, it is coarser than that sold by the creameries, and I am ashamed to be bringing such a primitive product all the way to Savoy. Eileen, however, claims she can’t spare any of the ration and argues that, if the French won’t eat what I bring, our own needs should come first. What I won’t realise, until confronted by the Morandys’ imperfectly concealed disdain, is that the shoes are worse than the butter. Wartime efforts to make Ireland self-sufficient have lowered standards so badly that we forget how clothes used to be. For years our school cardigans rubbed our necks raw, and the shoes I am to offer are as stiff as boards.

  In school, when we complained, the nuns’ advice was to offer up our discomfort to help the souls in purgatory to work off theirs. But that isn’t the sort of recommendation you can write on a gift card.

  *

  Having packed my Moran’s French Grammar, I consider buying a phrase book, but decide not to. Seán has one in Italian, and I can see that the phrases it features are unlikely to be of use to someone staying with a large family in the mountains. For instance, ‘Waiter, two more Marsala milkshakes, please’ could sound silly if what I need to deal with is a request to help dig, wash and peel enough potatoes for eight or, if I include Monsieur Morandy and myself, ten. I am hoping things won’t be like that, but you never know. Reports have reached me of Irish au pairs being enslaved by ruthless foreigners. Technically, I am not in fact to be an au pair. The plan is that my visit is to be the first half of an exchange and that one of the Morandys will come to Dublin. This, however, won’t happen and, although I will visit them four times, I don’t think they pick up much English from me. Numbers are against them. I have to communicate. They don’t.

  So the ruthless foreigner will turn out to be myself.

  Come to think of it, why won’t one of them come? Don’t they like me? Is it the cost of the journey or could they have been put off by the shoes? On each of my later visits, Seán will slip a modest amount of money into a letter to pay for my keep.

  *

  On this first occasion, he is to come with me as far as Chambéry railway station, hand me over to Monsieur Morandy then leave for Italy about which he has contracted to write a book. He suspects Graham Greene, his editor at Eyre & Spottiswood, of hoping for hilarious accounts of how an Irish Catholic copes with temptations devised by predatory Italian ones, me
aning, I suppose, pimps. I must have learned that word from Honor Tracy, who used to shock us by translating enjoyable excerpts from Curzio Malaparte’s lurid best-seller, Kaputt. Though maybe not? Due to Seán’s efforts to forestall the censors, our house is full of banned books. Nobody minds my reading these. Even Eileen thinks I’d as well learn about the dangers lying outside the country. Pimps, she warns me, can be women. Beware of motherly ones who wear a prominently placed miraculous medal. She read that in some novel, and isn’t above using literature the way she uses her Home Doctor.

  Why not, I ask myself – especially when you hear how some writers use life.

  When Seán called at Eyre & Spottiswood’s London office, Greene, slipping out on some pretext, managed to leave him alone with a girl who, he said, would keep him company but who instead made a lively attempt to seduce him. Seán now thinks that the two had had a bet as to whether she would succeed and wonders if Greene does this with all his authors, or only with Catholic ones. It was he who first had the idea of Seán’s going to Italy and writing about it. So, why the girl? Is GG a voyeur? And Seán a guinea pig?

  Pondering these questions I guess that animosity between Irish and English Catholics might be to blame. They think of us as lowering their image. And I think of GG as using religion as copy. He does this brilliantly, which makes it more annoying.

  Seán didn’t tell me about the incident with the girl. I heard him talk about it to Dick Ellmann, the American writer and literary critic, who was often around in those years. Shortly after being demobbed from the US navy, he had arrived in Dublin and almost instantly became a family friend.

  His impressive career as the biographer of Yeats, Joyce and Wilde was just taking off. But, not knowing at first with whom I was dealing – he had, I would discover, translated the poems of Henri Michaux – I agreed recklessly to write and exchange sonnets – happily soon lost. He had probably been asked to help with my homework so as to give Seán another half hour to finish an article. This, now that I no longer needed to be taught to ride a bike, was how I guest-sat people who arrived early – as many did, due to anxiety over a lack of buses. Sometimes I took energetic ones for a walk and swim, but don’t remember Dick as one of those.

  Two years later he and Mary were married. She had been teaching at Wellesley College, but gave this up to be with Dick in Ireland. Their three children were born in the early Fifties and at some stage they settled near enough to my parents to share a maid who, since telling tales is a maid’s perk and privilege, told Eileen that Mary disliked Killiney and was homesick for Wellesley. Well, Killiney was a sleepy place.

  In those years I was mostly away, so I missed getting to know Mary, which I regret. Her book, Thinking About Women, came out in 1968, has a cool wit and is, to my mind, the most elegant of the Second Wave feminist manifestoes. Sadly, an aneurysm of the brain prevented her writing another. She kept on bravely though, writing pieces for the New Statesman, and outlived Dick, who was struck down with motor neurone disease in 1987. This second blow was terrible luck, but at least he managed to finish his life of Oscar Wilde. I didn’t see him once he fell ill, but before that Lauro and I spent a number of happy evenings with him whenever we coincided in Oxford, London or California. My last memory of Mary is at Dick’s memorial service in New College, which she attended in a speedy wheelchair. Like characters in a Greek tragedy, they were both endowed with rare brilliance and stricken by rare adversity.

  *

  The Morandys lived up the mountains from the town of Chambéry in an airy, grey house called Le Sarvant, which in patois meant ‘the genie’. It had a wide, curving stone stairway, a great, bright kitchen with a high ceiling, and several cellars where they stored wine casks and other equipment, including a contraption for shaking honey from its combs. They kept bees, grew vegetables and fruit, had vineyards, made their own white wine and were self-sufficient on a scale grander than de Valera’s wartime campaign could ever have hoped to achieve. Only in one way were we in Ireland better off. We had meat almost every day, whereas they only had it once a week, and even then its origin was probably a black – or grey? – market. Monsieur Morandy made occasional forays further up the mountains to collect provisions from his ‘butter man’ – mon bonhomme à beurre – and similar providers. Back in Dublin, no such contacts were needed. Our shoe-leather might be tenth rate, and we might be short of fuel, paper, oranges, sugar and tea, but we did have meat. Which was to be expected. After all, the old Irish had always kept cattle, our great epic is about a battle over a bull and, during the Emergency, the availability of steak south of the border attracted visits from allied soldiers stationed up north. Back in the misty past, our lush grasslands must have made the breeding of cows and horses an inevitable trade. Later, the poor kept pigs and, until myxomatosis struck, rabbits. And in the Forties, when fishermen had no way of getting their lobsters to market, they sold them cheaply to whoever happened to be swimming off Killiney Beach. Watching the Morandy girls provide tasty meals without such raw materials, I wondered whether having such a plethora of them was why we had failed to elaborate an imaginative cuisine. All you needed to do with a steak, after all, was throw it on a hot pan, wait, then turn it. My parents wrote, gardened, read, took trips and entertained, but had no time for fancy cooking. Even unusual meat could puzzle us.

  Once, during the Emergency, some benefactor sent us a freshly killed stag. Seán claimed it had arrived anonymously, a lordly gesture which makes me wonder if it came from Lord Moyne, a poet who had the wherewithal to donate such largesse. Other friendly lords – Wicklow, Longford, Dunsany – had either less reason to do so or fewer resources. Or the stag might have come from a charitable soul in some government department – forestry perhaps? – which had a right to cull deer. Meanwhile, how were we to dismember and cook it? Nobody knew.

  In those days people ate game ‘high’, i.e. on the point of going off. This point, in the case of snipe and plover, was determined by hanging it by its beak and waiting until it fell. The stag, though, was too much for us. Captain Disney, when consulted, was equally at a loss.

  ‘Hang it in the turf shed for a bit anyway,’ he suggested, putting off the moment of truth.

  So we did, and like the witch testing Hansel’s finger to see if it and he were fat enough to eat, we poked and sniffed it regularly. Shamingly, we must have forgotten to do this at some point, for one day when we opened the turf-shed door, a maggotty glint told us all we needed to know. It had to be buried. We should, we now saw, have called a butcher the minute the gift arrived. We felt like the undeserving poor who are alleged to keep turf in their bathtubs.

  *

  Monsieur Morandy in the Forties looked like everyone’s idea of a Frenchman. Lean and dark, with a trim moustache, he had served in the Chasseurs alpins and enjoyed reminiscing about meals he and his comrades had improvised under unpromising conditions. Even the least of them would surely have known how to butcher a stag.

  ‘We used wine bottles to pound boiled potatoes into purée,’ he told us. Recalling that cheerful male readiness to adopt impromptu shifts clearly made him wistful, but he liked domestic conviviality too.

  During that first summer and later ones I would see him on innumerable, festive occasions – name days and birthdays – presiding genially at his dinner or luncheon table, filling glasses with his ‘little’ white wine and cracking jokes whose subversiveness expanded as the meal proceeded – subversive, that is, regarding politics and politicians. Never about morals. He needed those. After all, he had had to keep six daughters in order for years, which may have been why he tucked them away so far up the mountains, although his own work was in Chambéry. The eldest ones were now over twenty.

  ‘Papa,’ they warned me, ‘is very strict. Très, très sévère.’

  I guessed that this, if true, would not be in an Irish way, and saw I was right when he filled my glass with his ‘little’ white wine, then laughed uproariously when I said I had taken an oath not to drink until I was
twenty-one. Why ever, he asked, had I? Everyone in the Dublin diocese, I told him, had to take it on their confirmation day. It was because we in Ireland drank too much.

  ‘Pff!’ he laughed with disapproval. His wine would do me no harm.

  ‘Taste it. Good, isn’t it? Have some more.’

  But what, I worried, about the oath?

  ‘Pff!’

  Subversion delighted him. And by the end of that summer, he had so resolutely – and often slyly – topped up my glass, and introduced kirsch or cognac into my coffee cup, that I had become addicted to every sort of alcohol.

  *

  When I first met him, though, at Chambéry station, he seemed a little lost and glum, but neither of us knew how to ask if the other was all right, and Seán, who had a train to catch, had to rush off.

  We, too, Monsieur Morandy managed to let me know, should hurry. His car was outside. Over there. See? Better start out. People were waiting at home.

  The drive into the mountains swerved sharply up winding roads, while spectacular views, some of them snow-capped, flashed abruptly in and out of sight. The car was décapotable. That was the first brand-new French word I learned that summer and, as if to celebrate it, the top was down. The sun’s glare bounced off metal and mirrors, and it was a surprise, on reaching the great, thick-walled house, to find its interior as cool as a cellar. Shutters had been closed, and in the dimmed salon about thirty people turned to face me. Most were women. All wore black, and some wore ill-fitting clothes which made me think they might be nuns in mufti. An affable old lady who was one of the girls’ aunts and spoke perfect English took charge of me. She introduced me to the others and, simultaneously, to the expeditious French mode of shaking hands with everyone within reach, working the throng like a politician. Already, on my way here, I had been astounded to see grown men kiss on railway platforms, and now wondered whether, since French manners were so showy, I should curtsy to the nunnish ladies. After all, in school we curtsied to the Reverend Mother, so I knew how to do it. Better not, though, since France was a republic.