The Past

by Neil Jordan

  SO I SHALL see Una in a dress as white as her daughter’s, with a wide-brimmed hat and veil. He is in a less flamboyant, though immaculate, tweed suit. They eat quietly, listening to their daughter’s chatter. And when the young waiter replenishes the grapefruit and the sausages he treats them with that mixture of deference and familiarity that their public selves project. He is Republican, this waiter, he is anti-clerical and left-wing. And yet, when back inside the kitchen he hears the old cook spit the term ‘Redmondite!’ into the saucepan, he turns and raises his voice in defence of the family outside with a violence that surprises him.

  LILI WOULD HAVE her use this term. And others like it. She’d have her glorying in her activism, reacting to the split like the Republican she claimed to be. ‘The one marital demand he ever made on her—that she keep her mouth shut in public.’ Keeping her mouth shut, her presence felt. Swathing in her dark cape and pillbox hat through Republican functions, Gaelic League meetings, de Valera attending her opening nights. Having it both ways. Married to the one character on the Free State side with ‘an ounce of popular charisma’, keeping up her old politics, her taste for intrigue. ‘And it is a taste, believe me, a habit; which is probably why, of all the Treaty figures, he was the least vilified.’ Dropping dark hints everywhere about subtle, back-room influences on him, influences ‘not wholly political’. Fulfilling both her taste for intrigue and her taste for the public stage, having and eating her cake in this conflict turned increasingly vicious, from assassination to assassination, building a mystique round him that was in the end above politics. So when the end did come, she was in a unique position, having gathered about her that last element necessary for nationalist sainthood—the odour of graveyards. And by means of a graveyard gesture, uniting her public and private self. ‘Mick,’ she would proclaim to the handful of mourners, ‘was a Republican . . .’

  SITTING WITH LILI, staring at the cascades of butter, piling them on to the steaming sausages and as was only natural for a girl of your age, quite uninterested in the grapefruit. The young waiter takes them away, ventures to touch your hair, glancing at your father. The old cook spits into the saucepan. Guests catch your eye and give you sixpences, much to your mother’s disgust. The taste of the wafer is still in your mouth, the perspiration of the priest’s finger which placed it on your tongue, and you eat maybe to forget it. Una looks at the green hand on your white where the tree stroked you.

  ‘Why did you smudge your dress, dear?’

  13

  MICHAEL WAS SHOT while walking down Trimelston Road, near to a church. He was not in uniform. He died quickly for, as was explained at the inquest, enough bullets were used to stop a running bull. Rene learnt of it when driver Jack came to the door without him. The wind sang the melody, beaten out by the separate trees. It is too much to believe that he died thinking of the promenade and the bathing huts.

  ‘FOR A YEAR she was the grande dame of them all. But who could live up to the memories she invented for him? As time went on she gradually relapsed into what she always should have been—a mediocre actress. But she had a year of grace as the nation’s widow. And that was a part. Her black cape and her veil were obligatory at High Masses, state receptions, public funerals. And opening nights. Never forget them. Rene was often with her, dressed in black too. But she couldn’t just play the part, she needed a sub-plot. She made ambiguous references in public about how he died. She started hinting at plots and counter plots and counter-counter plots. She gave herself the air of knowing “certain facts” not available to “the public at large”. Facts, moreover, which implicated those “in power” at the “highest level”. She couldn’t let it rest. I mean, everyone must have known there was a war on. She made it the done thing to give the air of being in on her secret. The ladies who copied her dress began to copy her way of standing at public functions with this removed, aggrieved, defiant air. The implication was of course that those functions had no constitutional validity, that she graced them with her presence, as her late husband had graced them with his life. She began to refer to him by the letter M. As M. used to say. Handy, I suppose, a bare letter is as anonymous and distant and mysterious as you want to make it, I suppose. I’d hear it in drawing-rooms, not knowing who it meant. You sense these things and you learn more of them. But it couldn’t last, could it?’

  THE TWO OF them in black, on the sofa that whorls like a shell behind them, that seems to have been green velvet. The edges of the print are faded again by time, like a flame. Their figures stand out in what is an oval of light, or focus, the mother’s hands on her daughter’s shoulders, the sofa whorling out of the frame. There seems to be dust around.

  ‘AFTER A YEAR they stopped listening, didn’t they? The more strident her claims became for him, I mean, the more embarrassing a figure she became. And by that time even Dev was looking for a way into the second Dail. And so she wheeled round towards the worst fate of all—that of not being taken seriously. And it often happens to public widows. It began in what she would have called the “highest circles”, where the bow of deference changed to the nod of indifference, and it spread gradually, like a mild disease. In the end it hit even her audience and real parts—by which I mean theatrical ones—began to pass her by. But she never lost the indefinable air of being a figure of consequence, and as theatrical circles are more loyal than most, she kept her camp followers. Still, she found herself slowly excluded from that magic circle of rumour, clandestine meetings and Chiefs of Staff until in the end Dev himself didn’t turn up at the opening night of The Moon on the Yellow River. Needless to say, she reacted in turn, she learnt phrases like “betrayal of the cause”, “the true constitution” and when eventually Dev came to sign that book of allegiance to the King with his left hand over his eyes, she condemned him more vociferously than anyone. But by then people had almost forgotten who she was. Una who?’

  THE MONTHS AFTER the Communion breakfast are hardly memorable. The irises in the jam jars wither and before Sister Paul throws them out you filch one for your copybook, where it smudges the ink. The tree changes from green to golden and then finally empties itself and you wonder whether this is what is meant by the age of reason after all—a sense of absence. Then driver Jack comes and stands in the doorway with tears in his eyes and his cap in his hand and you see on the instant that this is one event that will distinguish this time for you. You wonder what he is going to say. Something that will have the import of your father’s words over the heather in the yellow chair. You look to Sister Paul for permission to rise from your seat but she anticipates the news from Jack’s cap and his tears. She ushers you instead from the room, past Jack into a parlour you have never seen before, where there are oak chairs with slender ankles, green walls and a brown, glinting piano. You wait for Jack there, and his eyes and cap.

  Soon after that you were taken from the school. Your education became sporadic. You would run on the Abbey stage now and then, in minor children’s parts. Your mother, at the time of Jack’s news, was appearing in a St John Devlin comedy, which broke all box-office records for a week. And it was in the Green Room of that theatre, the Abbey, that the photograph was taken of you. It was the first photograph. I can see you at last, your mother’s arms framing your hair, which doesn’t look blonde, since the print is bad. Your dress could be satin. It seems to be wet, clinging to your knees. You are staring at what must have been the cowled head and shoulders of the photographer and except for your stare, which is remarkably direct, you seem an ordinary child.

  THREE

  BRAY, 1922

  14

  AND IT IS the spirit of that photographer that impels this book. James Vance, his passion for documentation, for capturing in a frame the shades of experience. Fascinated and maybe appalled by the wealth of his senses, did he take a puritan pleasure in sliding the print out of the acid bath, in seeing all those brash colours reduced to variations of grey? Or was the delight in the image ghosted on to the clean plate? As a boy, he hears Muy
bridge lecture in the Ancient Concert Rooms about his plates of galloping horses and wrestling men. He holds his father’s sleeve, who queries loudly the airborne legs. But James just sees horses, as real as any that galloped on the Meath estate. And devotion to the magic of such images must have seemed a worthwhile thing to the man he gradually becomes. More than a pastime and yet less than a profession, since he had money, Lili tells me and his life, without the focus of necessity, needs its point. Does he grow with a conscience, Lili, a Protestant one, large and shambling, drawing him like a magnet towards all that he is not? And James Vance was unlike most of what he saw around him. So this conscience blooms, becomes like his person which is large and shambling, often ashamed of itself, ready to retreat at the slightest rebuff. His height comes to find expression in a stoop, his conscience in a constant apologetic demeanour which Lili claims was a kind of pride. History has decreed that he is more than mere Irish after all, and while his person seems bent on destroying this distinction, his speech retains it. His accent stays with him like a bad lung. He would open a door, Lili tells me, enter a room with a movement that always seemed on the point of checking itself. It gave her what she calls her ‘turgid’ feeling. But it can’t stop me loving him, loving his obsession with days, months and years, with time and all its alterations in the faces he loves, on the building he loves, on the country he loves, as high collars must have made way for double-breasted suits, Ringsend brick for Wall Street concrete, as the waistcoats and pampooties of Aran islanders made way for shiny overcoats and steel-tipped boots. I think of the perplexity of the eternal child, of the vanity of all his efforts, as he tries to suppress the windmills of time, change and chaos into an ordered progression of prints, a march of moments pencilled in days, months and years, the four corners of each stuck down with Cow Gum, six prints to a page in that bulky album, hard-covered and black, like a Bible. I love the hopeless faith of this documentation, I pity the lack of faith that makes it necessary. I see both of us trying to snatch from the chaos of this world the order of the next, which is why even now, so long from the end, I am tempted to call him ‘father’.

  HIS FATHER’S OBSESSION was for paint daubed on canvas. He could be seen around this time sitting on Bray prom, near the end of his years, trading on the fact, conscious of the enigmatic figure he cuts, furiously unmoved by anyone who stared, his black suit and boots and his white hair (‘Bohemian’) and the sea that he painted repeatedly, if it was not the promenade walk or the hotels on the road proper. Lili preferred him infinitely and takes endless pains to disprove consanguineous similarities. It is the difference, she claims, between photography and paint—

  BUT TO GET back to the photographer, what I can see is his fascination with matters technical and his huge delight in that contrivance, and in every development of it. And even given what she sees as excess of humility, I imagine him taking a hidden pride, a sly pleasure in the mechanics of that black box. He knew its powers, how it worked. He would walk down the slums on the north side and plant the legs of his tripod among the turds and rotting vegetables and give pennies to thin boys to stand in attitudes of deprivation. I suspect he gave pennies because the attitudes of deprivation look so forced: he was a bad photographer after all, the only valuable thing about his ‘social’ prints being the buildings behind the faces. I can almost see the copper gleaming in the thin boy’s eyes. So picture him, the Protestant who had exchanged his horse for a conscience, on the Gloucester Diamond surrounded by vegetable thieves and dissolute husbands and all kinds of brassers, attempting to keep his thin kids quiet for the length of an exposure. They would have heard of the way the image magically wafts on to the coated paper. They would have gathered, from those tenements without parallel anywhere in Europe, into a respectful half-circle, a good six feet between each of them and the youth with his cowl, the magic of technology fascinating them all the more because they were so unfamiliar with it. And among those on the other hand who would have disdained that magic—as they would have, I imagine, in the Abbey’s Green Room—he would have been blessed with a magic of a different kind. For as he began his theatrical prints years later, he would have then been able to claim that sure sense of solid craft, that ‘know-how’, that abstract concern with detail which is the tradesman’s defence against the leisured, the educated, the effete.

  WHICH IS NOT to say that he himself wasn’t leisured, educated or effete. On the contrary, by virtue of his background he could well have been all three. We have already seen his way of opening doors. If we open the door slightly wider we can see him in that house in Sydenham Villas, facing Bray Head, its left side towards the sea front where in his last years his father used to paint. The last in a series of houses they owned, all of them round Bray and its environs, the first of which bordered on Lord Meath’s estate and vied with it as a house of ‘quality’, I can see its precise, peeling, shabby grandeur; both its inhabitants with the accents of wealth, with the bric-à-brac of wealth thrown in odd corners round those rambling corridors, with everything to do with wealth except the momentum which keeps wealth going. Their ambition must have wandered, generations ago, from the sturdy concerns of their Huguenot forebears. They once owned property in Bray, a small ceramics factory, a shop in London and another in Dublin. Someone had scattered delftware round Europe from there, renowned once for its blue and green handpainted lozenges, for its whorls and for the brittle ‘ting’ each rim would give when plucked with the thumbnail. But as the parsimony of fathers is changed to the patrimony of sons and the painter had inherited along with an income an impatience with the details of commerce which he handed to the photographer as an inadequacy, the shops were leased to thrifty chemists and the factory, which had shut one year now long beyond memory, stayed shut, stacked with layer upon layer of forgotten, unsold delft.

  15

  THE VANCE FORTUNE proves more brittle than that delft. It lasts with the glaze of its lozenge and the scallop of its edge intact to find its home in antique collections. But their estate decays with the symmetry of poetry leading to the photographer, a thin trickle of dividends and the house in Sydenham Villas. Lili claims James was half-hypocrite, with his assumption of the causes and tenets of the revival, that he had ‘airs below his station’ which she seems to think are even worse than airs above. But one can glimpse something different—the thin sense of despair, the slow irony of history that reduces the difference between his house and that of his Papist neighbours to that of a coat of paint. He carries that difference like his conscience, like a bad lung. I see him on the slopes of Dublin Bay, somewhere around Killiney, in autumn, when the eucalyptus bark is peeling, reeking with the smell of tomcats. The sea is viscous, metal-hued. That difference has preyed on him, it becomes an effort to walk upright. He has read Hegel, Marx, Saint-Simon and has glimpsed the sublime unity through his favourite, Rousseau. The exhaustion of his background seems to lift. He sees the tide of history, and people simply washed.

  He must love that sea, he feels, he must welcome all its movements, and among them the ebb and erosion of his class. For who is more uniquely placed, he asks himself and almost shouts the question at the hillside, to give themselves freely, wholeheartedly to Nationalist Ireland? It is their very base of privilege and the decay of that base, the one shearing them of all self-interest, the other opening their eyes, that gives them uniqueness. Who? he shouts this time and the echo could shift rocks. It returns, without an answer. And so he turns and decides to accept. Typically, Lili might say. To accept the decay of his fortunes and the iniquity of them, to retain the paltry privilege he has left and to work towards the elimination of all privilege. He climbs the hill, peels off some eucalyptus bark and rubs his teeth with it. And as the flavour spreads round his mouth, draining all the moisture and as his tongue retreats from the flavour of resin, the question persists with him. He sees the neatness of his formulations, how he has followed them with his shambling rigour, only to be led back to precisely the state he was in when the formulations b
egan. And is it simply the state, he wonders, that suits him best? Is all the agony of thought, he wonders, is it just a wheel that turns and changes nothing, however wide the circumference, always returning to where it began? The cones of eucalyptus are around his feet as he heads for the Vico Road, like odd excretions from those striped erotic trees. He kicks them aside with his high-laced boots, their heavy soles that could belong to an intelligent tradesman or a gentleman who aspires to be an artisan.

  THE SEEDS OF those eucalypti were brought from Tasmania by what Victorian adventurer? A hill, weeping in a blue haze, the huge trees dipping from it, divesting themselves of bark in long fleshy stripes. The bark falling to earth at the trees’ roots, steaming, each stripe like leather, malleable, even useful. And the temperament that could transplant such seeds, over continents and dips and crests of climate, to root them by this bay where the rain falls in sheets and squalls, never in vertical lines. Their odour of resin and tomcats, plucked from that torrid world to fill this grey one. I walk along the hill and chew the eucalyptus. It cleans the gums, cures colds and freshens the nasal passage. I could dive into that Italianate bay, the erotic stripes of the trees above me.

  IT WAS THE old man’s temperament, impatient with geography, seasons, seas, impatient with everything. His rugged Bohemianism and bad taste. His tweed trousers and laced boots that were like his son’s but that scarred any number of parquet floors. His voice, that never lost the haughty gruffness bequeathed him by generations of dealing in delft.