The Truth About Love

by Josephine Hart

  And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? “Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.” But that’s all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough. Was it the roll-call of the heroic dead that gave the impression we’d granted absolution to those fighting for the great old cause, though not quite in the manner we’d imagined? Did the dead stop us from bringing the South to a total standstill? To say, as they say nowadays, “not in my name.” Maybe it’s hard to reject such a determined suitor, hard to reject someone who wants to be united with you so much in holy conjunction that they’ll kill their way to get to you. And as Bogus said to my mother, and it made her laugh, “Shotgun marriages have their own romance.” Yes, sometimes we laughed at the black bitterness that lay beneath his vanity, which remained strong. Because even in those dark days Bogus would boast of the success of his collection of witticisms, poetry and stories, How to Be Irish, subtitle: “The Lessons Are Easy—It’s the Homework That’s Hard.”

  It was. It took thirty years for us to learn our lessons. No one thought it would last that long. Why not? We’d been preparing our minds for it, but above all our hearts. And if it doesn’t start there, in the heart, it doesn’t start anywhere.

  SEVENTEEN

  As I remember in those early years of atrocities, when I talked to my mother I was careful with language. Was she all right? And each time, though sad, very sad, she was also calm. Completely calm. Is it an act? Yes? No? and I’d concentrate on every movement of her voice up and down the scale, listening, alert and fearful of hearing a note that was too low or one that might soar too swiftly and too quickly and fall again, and me not there to catch it. She was, however, utterly calm. She was utterly cold. And she was utterly contemptuous. Which was not her style. “Who are these people?” she’d ask. “Did we make them? How?” And once, when she handed the phone to him, and I remember this, “There’ll be more. There always has been, to make up to the dead,” he said. He was right about that.

  Sometimes, however, we didn’t strike the right note with each other. But we did well enough. We developed a technique and taught ourselves to briefly acknowledge the fact of the latest “brutality, terrible, terrible” and then to talk about the universe. Our universe, a backwash to the life I lived. We’d talk through the years of Mrs. Brannigan’s boys, who’d joined the bank as she’d hoped, and of her certainty that Adrian would someday be made an assistant bank manager and of how May Garvey’s longed-for son, now a teenager, had told his mother he might have a vocation, might go to Maynooth to study for the priesthood, “back to where he came from, my miracle boy.” And we had many more than the three or four families to whom Miss Austen bore witness but our background noise was more, much more fierce. Miss Austen kept the sound of battle off-stage. We couldn’t quite do that. But we did OK. And of course we talked of the life I lived, of the life I do not talk of here and of how grateful I was, of how I was more than grateful. And she’d sometimes remind me that she always knew that the years she felt I’d sacrificed, which was not how I ever saw it, would come back to me. And we agreed that they had. “You are,” she’d say to me, “living now that great blessing, a private life of love.” And I liked the phrase then and I still do.

  So maybe I’d relaxed about them and began to feel confident that their souls and hearts were mended. That they had been darned up by the invisible thread of love, by minute-by-minute stitching through the hours of days. But perhaps the mending process had been too exhausting because though they had many years together he died younger than we’d all expected and long before her. His dying took a few weeks. I came home, of course. Sat by his side. With her. And once, when he knew there was no chance, I thought that he seemed to be trying to speed things up a bit to save her the anguish. But maybe I’m wrong. Still, there was a note in his voice one day when he whispered to me, after I said she looked tired, “I’m doing my best,” and later I wondered, doing your best at what? And I’m still not certain. That man would have hurried up his dying if he thought it might have helped her.

  And though I sat there in the first week or so they didn’t need me, perhaps didn’t really want me. So I’d go for long walks knowing they had private work to do. Especially him. He was setting her up for life without him. No one thought she could live it but he set her up for the journey. And, this will be no surprise, they talked non-stop in those last weeks. I’d leave them in the hospital to give them some more time together, which amazingly was all they wanted, more time together. After a lifetime together they wanted more time. And that’s love, I suppose. The nurse told me that one night he’d called out in panic, “My God, I’m dying. I’m dying!” She shouldn’t have told me. I still can’t bear to think about it. But he rallied past the fear because the next day he greeted us with smiles and little jokes, they set about their whispering again and because it was raining I sat in the corridor reading Eliot and Henry James. The constriction of language and its expansion, a rhythm, like that of the heart. But his was weak and getting weaker. Then, about a week after that night-time outburst, at four in the afternoon, one Thursday afternoon, when he’d insisted we pop out for a walk, he left us. He left us with the silence of his heart and his heart had been a most beautiful thing. He left us, as you would expect, before we got back from that last walk of ours with the still-living dream of him. Perhaps he was trying to save her. Not to make her witness to his last moments. And that’s love, I suppose. But up until that day the conversation, that long love-poem, two people talking through life, that continued. And that’s love, I suppose.

  Everyone came to the funeral. Everyone. Including Thomas Middlehoff, which was nice of him though some people were uneasy to see him there. He was more than the German now. He was a German with an Irish history. He was writing about us still and at a delicate time. Theft. The German, Wittgenstein, might indeed have visited us and written about us but that was different. “Didn’t Dev invite him to Ireland? Dev was mad about sums and didn’t we offer him nationality when he was in trouble, being a Jew? But we’re not a nation of mathematicians. Saints and scholars, yes, but no good at sums. Though we will get better in time.” Bogus, another letter. And though Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal had been noted decades before, we’re a well-read nation and words obsess us, whether on the page or on the wind. We also knew Böll was a Catholic and The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum had had quite a bit of success in a country where such a title would resonate. Böll told us things we had wanted to hear, though there is an under-note. But Thomas Middlehoff! No prizes for him. Still, he’d “done no real harm” so they “let it go,” that day at the funeral.

  I was really touched that he came. Afterwards he shook hands with my mother, bowed, talked about how he’d felt there’d been a deep bond with my father and that he would “greatly miss him.” She made no response to that. Then he turned to me, “Olivia,” a handshake and bow and suddenly he bent down and gave me a little kiss. My mother looked away. It probably seemed inappropriate but it wasn’t. Not at all. I nearly put my arms out to hold him or maybe hold on to him because I felt he understood things better than most. But I didn’t. Still, the moment lodged with me and I felt I had to see him again before I left. So a few days later, when my mother sat with her sisters talking over old times, times I didn’t know, when they were young, I drove out to see him. Patricia, Bridget’s daughter, who for three days a week worked as his secretary, said he’d be alone. It was a Sunday. He wasn’t. I should have rung. A tall, thin woman opened the door.

  “Who is it, Harriet?”

  “I’ve no idea,” she called back to him and before I had a chance to introduce myself to her he was standing before me. He looked shocked, not embarrassed exactly but perhaps a little angry. I stumbled over myself, apologies falling from my lips, a veritable confetti of “I’m sorry.”

  “Please stop apologising. Come in. We’re not in flagrante, you know.”

  And
he almost hooted his laughter and I never saw a man who looked at a woman with such adoration, except one, or two.

  “Olivia … O’Hara. I’m sorry, Olivia, I do not know your married name. May I introduce Mrs. Calder, Harriet Calder.”

  He seemed preoccupied and clearly unhappy I was there. I apologised again and again. She stopped me.

  “Come in,” she said.

  He looked angrily at her. But she was insistent. As though she needed my presence for some reason. She had what they call natural authority. I followed this woman, Mrs. Calder, as she strode down the hall so fast I cursed the stupid shoes I was wearing and felt inelegant and irritated and all out-of-kilter in that house.

  “Drink?” asked Harriet Calder and then she yawned slightly. And a shadow of deep exhaustion passed over her face. And then I noticed that her face was very thin and bony. Maybe more than just thin and bony. And then I saw that she was pale. And maybe more than pale. And I looked away and I told myself, don’t react. Compose yourself. Compose your face.

  “Harriet! It’s not yet midday! What will Olivia think of us?” As if she gave a damn.

  “Yes please,” I said. “Whiskey.”

  And Harriet Calder smiled. A strange, crooked smile. But I knew enough about a slight distortion of features to know they have the power to trap a man. The things you learn!

  “That settles it Thomas. Scotch all right? Thomas prefers Irish whiskey. Are you patriotic?”

  “Scotch is fine,” I said.

  “Not patriotic then? Thank God.”

  I looked around the dark wood-panelled room, smoky velvet curtains and in the corner a deep winged chair in which you could almost hide. He motioned me to a low sofa with colours of old gold and dark green stitched into a pat tern I couldn’t decipher and awkwardly I sat down and tried to balance my drink, too tense to stretch out to the small side table. All in all, I did not feel at home, and neither of them would ever have issued that old invitation, “come in and make yourself at home.” But after a while I realised I wanted to be there. Very much. Yes, I wanted to be in the darkened room that smelled of old velvets and of old books—no paperbacks, I noted—and of old wood. Because in all the heaviness in the darkened room I could feel the energy, the restless, thrilling energy. Sexual. Impossible to miss. Then they started speaking again. And though they spoke perfect English I felt I was listening to foreigners, that the rhythms were different. I knew I was almost out of my depth but I believe in hanging on, and I hung on to the words that day.

  “Olivia came home for her father’s funeral—Tom O’Hara.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” she asked. He looked away. She was not the kind of woman you could apologise for. And he didn’t.

  “Mr. O’Hara? Wasn’t he the man who returned the gate?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the father, therefore, of the boy? You gave them the gate.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at me and said, “Thomas liked your father. Never liked his own. You live in London?”

  “Yes.”

  “With your husband?”

  “Harriet!”

  She laughed. “It’s a perfectly natural question.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Children?”

  I nodded. She was not interested in pursuing the question further.

  “Thomas’s son died. Frederick. And another child. Did he tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “Indeed! Thomas is a very careful man and I am a careless woman.”

  “Not true, Harriet. Not true.”

  And she silenced him with a look. Power. She had power. Then she smiled again.

  “However I have some caring instincts and I must now leave Thomas at a moment when I have given him bad news. I am pleased you are here with him. An unexpected but welcome visitor. Stay a little, while he bids me goodbye in private.”

  I nodded. And she motioned to him to follow her. And he did. I would guess he always obeyed and anyway, I thought it was clearly too late for rebellion. Perhaps she’s right and he needs me. I owe him from long ago. I picked up a book, a copy of which was open on the desk, lines about goodness. How rare it is. Hardly an insight. Had he been reading it to her? When he came back he poured himself another drink. He looked at me as though he trusted me and I felt peculiarly proud.

  “She’s dying!” he said. “Harriet Calder is dying!” and he laughed, that strange violent laugh I’d heard earlier. “Incredible! Incredible! She is the love of my life and she’s dying. She’s dying.” He was almost shouting as he paced the room. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.” But he couldn’t stop. It was unstoppable this drumming out of rage at this outrage by the gods. Carry on, I thought. We both know it will make no difference. And he did continue, the fast, staccato drumming, drumming it all out of himself with useless words.

  “Do you know what that means? Do you really know what it means? What I am facing? She is finally leaving me, the love of my life.”

  “I do,” I whispered.

  He leaned for a moment on the back of that winged chair as if to draw breath, and then more words, faster, which did not suit the rhythm of his voice, which was designed for slower, more controlled speech. I wished he’d stop. I realised I had held him in such high regard that I wanted him to be someone who suffered silently. Who could imply the things he knew, not spell them out for me. I had allocated a part to him. He wasn’t playing it. I didn’t want passionate incoherence from this man. That was something I could do for myself. No, I wanted dignified silence with a hint of some thing underneath, something that implied there was an answer. That was the kind of silence I wanted. Then I wondered, what have I come for? What am I looking for here? Away from my own life and back in the one I left? Back for a funeral. And I looked hard at him, willing him to think of me and what I’d just been through. But he seemed lost in his own recollections. We all have our favourite scene. No, not favourite, essential. He was lost in something, gazing at something or somewhere he’d been once and, as “that man, Yeats” told us, if you get to know that scene, that one life-scene, you will know the man. Where was he? What was he looking at? Who was he looking at? Then he took a deep breath, as though that whispered affirmation of a few moments ago convinced him he was not mad.

  “Good. Good. Yes. You know, of course you know what I’m going through. Harriet Calder is dying. Incredible. I know that woman. I know her. Can you say that about anyone and be certain?”

  “Yes.”

  “The first time I made love to Harriet Calder was the first time I made love.”

  I gasped. I was being attacked. I was being invaded by this uninvited intimacy. How dare he! I looked around as though looking for escape. How dare he do this to me. But there was no possibility of stopping him … of stopping this … this what? This savagery. Not now. And though he said, “Forgive me,” it was contemptible special pleading.

  “Forgive me. Forgive me, Olivia. Unpardonable. Obsession. The universe reduced to one—the universe lit by one. Madness. Is that the perversion of love? Hearts with one purpose alone … seem enchanted to a stone … Is that not the line?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but Yeats was speaking of love of country.”

  And I wondered as I said it, does all love spring from the same source? Can all loves be diverted or twisted? What is it that makes a love flow kindly on? Who or what decides?

  “Harriet and I had a son.”

  Please don’t tell me this! We are not close friends. That’s what I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I suppose the secret soul of a man is eternally seductive.

  “We had a son, though I did not know of this until it was too late. How could I? War swallows up all the normal rhythms. I must have another drink.”

  I saw my opportunity: “I don’t know why I came and I’m incredibly sorry and … and I must go. I’m sorry.”

  And I made an inelegant effort to rise from that uncomfortably low sofa.

  “Please do not, Olivia. Please do
not go. I do not normally make requests and only with Harriet do I beg.”

  I looked away. And then I remembered that my father had told me of the long-ago conversation that he’d had with this man. “A man of some particular understanding, Olivia.” And I remembered the gate. Would Dada want me to stay? Oh Dada, should I stay? Oh Dada, where are you? This man seems in agony. I sat down again. As my father would have done. Thomas Middlehoff continued to pace around. I know that necessity.

  “… I received a letter from Munich, dated the fourth of July 1944. It read like a love letter. A love letter from Harriet is a most unusual matter. If I’d died that day, and so many did, I felt I would have died happy. That was but a momentary feeling. It was followed by an urgent, overwhelming desire to see her, which of course was not possible. I had been wounded and was in hospital. On the eighteenth of July, for three solid hours, Munich was bombed. Hamburg, we’d hoped, would be the end of summer bombings. Hamburg, August 1943. Two hundred thousand dead in Hamburg they said. In Munich? How many? Was she dead was all I wanted to know. Was she dead? Millions die and we are so designed that we are broken only by the death of those we love. The others are lost in history. We are not good. It’s the self, always the self. Was she dead? I left the hospital where I was being quickly made whole again in order to be sent back to fight. I cannot even remember how I managed to get out of this. I was heed less of the risk I was taking in ‘so undermining the morale of the armed forces.’ Absent. I searched for her. I searched for her knowing that if I saw her I would live. I would be triumphant. A victor in the land of the defeated. I knew I would have pulled what made life bearable, my life bearable, from that place. I would rejoice in a city in which others had perished. Where others had died, sucked down in melted asphalt, no way to drown. Others had been incinerated, made into ashes in a second. Gone. Some had been shrunken into compact completeness. Men no bigger than children. I will stop. The rushing roar of the thing was over when I got there. It was quiet. Shock, at its most profound, is silent. It is the silence that seems to stop time. Many, I saw, were smiling. Real smiles. Real radiance. Until you saw their eyes and you knew they were now mad. And some were truly elegant. Yes, elegantly picking their way as ball-gowned ladies and the formally dressed men who guide them do as they cross a courtyard to the sound of music, carefully judging the position of each foot in case they slip and fall. And one figure seemed to me to be of particular elegance. That’s how she appeared to me. A woman of particular elegance. Elongated. A Modigliani figure. Behold the woman!