by Neil Jordan
‘I LIKE ECCENTRICS, anyway, and Protestant eccentrics most of all. I went with her now and then, when she visited the house. “How’s my fashion-cover girl?” he’d greet her in that room covered in tobacco smoke and the stench of his illness. She always bore it better than I. He had a photo of her knees in silk stockings, taken from an ad in the Freeman’s Journal. He’d pull it out and ask to compare it with reality. She’d lift her dress and show him. He claimed he’d never seen knees so perfect, given all his years with artists’ models. And knees, he claimed were the pivot of the female form. There were rumours once—this was years before Rene—of a naked girl with her back to that bay window downstairs that faced on to the street. Of him bringing the habits he’d learnt in Paris home to Bray. Rumour flew the way it flies and grew in colour as it flew and it reached the parish priest as a story of a girl from the cottages on the west side disrobing each afternoon for filthy lucre. And so the priest knocked on every door in that labyrinth of artisan dwellings, interviewed each girl only to hear each girl deny it, protesting her modesty. But what else would they do, the priest thinks, these that keep coal in their baths, but deny it? So he upped and went to Sydenham Villas. And picture it, if you can, a hot day in May maybe, he in a black overcoat, his stocky black hand knocking at the door of Number One, the old man answering, the priest humming and hawing, muttering eventually vague threats about Catholic girlhood. And so at last it dawned on old Vance and the story goes that he grabbed the priest like an errant schoolboy, dragged him into the inside room and showed him, on a satin pouf, in a room misty with tobacco smoke, a naked, dark-haired and utterly bored young woman. “There’s your Adam’s Rib,” he shouted and propelled him back to the door. “She’s not under your jurisdiction,” he fulminated, loud, so the whole street could hear. “She’s Jewish.” ’
THEY COME DOWN from Dublin for three months of every summer, from the days when the railway was first built, taking villas by the bowling green, the young Jewish daughters walking on the prom, plump and olive-skinned. That’s before the droves of Scots and their cheap weekends. But then the story of houses and towns is decay. From the heyday of the Jewish girls and the first Great Southern line. Would the priest have transgressed years before, would he have dared call on Vance without an invitation, without coach and four to take him up the long drive with its views to the left of the Meath estate?
‘STILL, THE OLD man knew who he was. He didn’t have to learn Irish, stagger into rooms with a look of pain in his face, photograph every Mick and Pat with snot on his nose and mud on his boots. You could talk to him, you could love him and not despite his being an ascendancy boor but because of it. And that’s the tragedy, isn’t it? James, with all his reservations, got the worst of both worlds. Brooding, you see, is always unlucky. The old man never brooded. James did—’
IT BEGINS TO rain. The water falls in separate threads at first and then comes faster, closer, with no wind to impede its falling. A tropical downpour. James leans against a eucalyptus, which is useless since the leaves of that genus are tiny and form a laughable contrast to the smooth sweep of its bark. He is soon wet through, with the rain streaming from the trunks and the drops hopping from the ground and turning to spray and the spray turning to mist. The air becomes fetid, the odour more resinous, as if the moisture is clinging to it and it to the moisture. He stares across the bay and sees the sheen of the water, for once without trace of current or wind, transformed by rain into an even sheet of hammered tin. The tart taste of bark is in his mouth and his gums are hot and alive. The water pouring down the skin of the trees is unable to dim the cream-coloured stripes where the bark has peeled, and he sees those stripes as unlikely murals, scoured by some careless finger. He feels there is a life sleeping in him, being awakened now by this odour of tropica. It is as if the rain has recreated the home of this bark. There is a hill, weeping in a blue haze, the huge trees dipping from it, losing their coats in long fleshy stripes. His tastes are mathematics and photography, his sympathies Republican, his background Protestant. He has entered a Catholic marriage and his wife has not long ago died, having left him a son christened Luke. He has a self that has always merely watched, merely waited and observed and that seems about to rear now like a tapeworm, pulled by this moisture through his opened lips. He stares at that hammered sea as if waiting for a face to emerge from that multitudinous pressure of drops, quietly, unheralded, each detail sculpted aeons ago, before rain and sea started, like those faces that form themselves on his metal plates.
Would he ever see that face? The meaning we demand from the span and the whole but in particular the surface frieze of the sensual world is never forthcoming; or if it is, not in any form that comforts. If it comes it comes too late, if it speaks, it is always in retrospect and the message he wants from the grey sheet of sea and the tepid air comes only when both have been dulled by memory and by time and when quite another message is demanded. And by then, besides, the rain has stopped, the sea is quite achingly blue, it washes another shore maybe, another bay and the only fresh piece he retains is the one he in fact never saw, that edged into his picture from nowhere; that face, perhaps, or that imagined hill with its outlandish climate, its quite imaginary eucalypti. And yet it still clung to him, a dogged belief in surfaces. He would have even then liked to photograph that scene, to capture that precise balance of elements, why the rain was thus on the sea, why the trees made it mist and channelled the water in sheets and perhaps it was precisely for that reason—that tomorrow the sea might be blue and the air contain nothing but the odour of dust and sunlight. And it could all be held then and pasted in his black book on his green felt table and seen as evidence of, if nothing else, the impossibility of answers. How it was, each print would say, on this day, the sun hit Luke’s face in such and such a manner, and he was seven then, and longer than his years. This is Benburb Street, another would say, in the great days of hand-painted signs. And so the prints accumulate, each one a document of how, of a present that becomes past as soon as it’s developed and only through the future gradually reveals its secrets; the accumulation of them across the years becoming a question mark, a dogged, nagging why? And perhaps he suspected as he gathered them with that fatalism common to collectors that each one was the attempted formulation of an ultimate question and that all answers are retrospective, and so it took months and years of prints for him to even know what he was asking; that he could never hope for arrival, at the most for a judicious departure. And besides, he had a passive nature, he suppressed the general, paid obsessive attention to detail; the kind of passive nature that, when the rain stops falling round the eucalypti and the blue is out at last, walks from the thin shelter they afforded and stops thinking of them too.
16
SO WHEN JAMES Vance entered the Abbey Green Room what would your first sense of him have been? Vance, from the Huguenot Vans, by now a widower, years after his eucalyptus, one Catholic son at home in his Bray house; a grandfather inhabiting an upstairs floor who was there and gone, there and gone. He walks in with his tripod wrapped in his cape. There is his way of opening doors, dressed in corduroy and braces. The stage hands are following him, holding an arc lamp. He asks them in a low voice to put it down. You can hear him, however. People carry their worlds with them. You can sense its shape, if not its precise features. You sense the way people seem to know him and the way he seems ill at ease. You have been sitting on the long couch under the portrait of the man with the removed eyes for twenty minutes now. Una has been tying and untying your bow, placing her hands magisterially round your head, then striding round the room in her black dress. You know how the long wait is eroding the public strength of her grief. You don’t mind her grief being so public. She knows this photographer who enters, everyone in the room seems to know him, exchanging those taut nods of recognition that imply acquaintance, not friendship. The stage hands hold the arc lamp with a familiar, somewhat contemptuous patience. You are mapping out the landscape, the long stretches
of hill and plain, the terrain in which your mother lives. It is a different world. In the two days since your father died she has entered your life suddenly and fully. You know it will be your world now. You have met people you have never seen before who greet her as old friends, who know your name, your age, your habits. You stare calmly at the creatures of this new world. They seem to you the inhabitants of reason, obeying laws of gesture and glance which must be reason’s alone. You watch each new face and how each new face greets this photographer. He is restless and embarrassed and on the edge of the picture and because of that you sense you will remember him, more foreign to that room than you are. The man with the three legs and the black cloak. Your mother stares at him, leaning back on the couch.
‘This was where you took Sarah Allgood?’
‘No,’ he says, obviously puzzled. ‘That must have been someone else.’
‘Now that was a photograph—’
Her tone is peremptory, with a slight edge of malice and implies a judgment on him. You sense this but cannot know that the tone is one that the bona fide Republican would always adopt with the fellow-traveller. There has been a history of tangential encounters at political meetings and Gaelic classes so they would now nod if they met on a street. They would rarely exchange words, however. You sense your mother judges him to be insignificant but don’t know why. Perhaps because of his tripod, his cape, his box, every action of his seems to you to be important. You could not have known that this would be his forty-ninth theatrical photograph, that even as he is assembling the arc lamp the figure won’t leave his head, seven sevens, his idle taste for mathematics telling him there’s no significance in the figure, his aesthetic sense, always quickened by the imminent flash, insisting there is. So he plugs in the lamp, and mother and daughter in their dark dresses on the satin couch are lit by a white glare. It is the picture of the diminutive girl in the black dress, the cream-blonde hair against it, her eyes shut tight, her hands gripping the couch that prints itself somehow in the base of his mind, already a negative, so intense is the light. He rubs his eyes and looks at her clutching the satin, and something more than his aesthetic sense tells him that here is significance.
‘It won’t do here, Mrs—’
He tries to drop the sentence casually, for he has forgotten the woman’s name. He can’t believe himself, that name that has filled two days of headlines, the woman he knows by sight, that he surely must have talked to.
She has sensed, of course, and taken umbrage.
‘Why not?’
She wants to be Sarah Allgood he thinks, turning away, mumbling something about refraction of light, pulling out the plug on the arc lamp. He is about to take refuge in more technical details when suddenly, blessedly, he remembers.
‘Against a flat, Mrs O’Shaughnessy. It would hold the light better.’
She walks past him towards the door. He follows them, mother and daughter, through the foyer, through the dark aisle of the theatre towards the stage. The dust is circling and circling in what light there is. He is wondering why he moved them, what he is searching for. He places mother and daughter against one flat, then another and gets the stage hands, whose patience is nearing exhaustion, to move the arc lamp in a slow itinerary round the stage. By now he knows that his forty-ninth theatrical photograph will have some significance. The significance is already there in this girl’s black dress against the barest of possible lights. But will it seep into the print, he wonders, and some impulse pulls him from flat to flat, dragging his tripod with him. From this theatre, which he had always entered like a moderate imbecile, so willing to be of service, he now brooks no complaints from its stage hands or its leading lady. When she protests now he answers with a curtness that shocks him. But it shocks her too, even out of her stance of grief and she moves with tight lips and flushed face to the next flat, the next floorboard to assume her pose once more. But each flat is too dark for him and with the black dresses of mother and daughter makes their hands and faces appear dismembered, as if in a masque or a dumb-show. He stares at them through the cone of light, alive with eddies of dust, the mother’s strict image of grief and the daughter’s total lack of expression. The resemblance between them that at first seemed natural, unremarkable, like mother like child, comes to seem tenuous and then non-existent. Where did that face come from, he wonders, and whose replica is it? A white hand moves up from nowhere and brushes an isolated lower lip. He cannot reconcile it, the auburn of the mother with the cream of the daughter. And yet he knows the mother’s hair could be dyed and her round face must once have been slender. He thinks of the third face, the dead one whose power is already mythical, and for him too, since he never met the man. Do some faces belong to our heritage of seeing, indescribable, being part of ourselves? He has seen her face before, lit with harsh stage lighting. But when he says, to the mother’s annoyance, that the light there isn’t what he needs either and when the group have ensconced themselves once more in the Green Room, the resemblance returns with the daylight, quite natural, ordinary after all. The girl is on the couch, the mother’s hands on her shoulders, her white, plinth-like arms bordering her face. He can see the resemblance in their mutual opposites, those features that make the woman coarse make the child pretty, those cheekbones with the low forehead of the mother would have led in the daughter to ugliness, but with her tall forehead could some day turn to beauty. And the pose is natural and he cowls his head and squeezes, realising as he does so that he has lessened his demands. All he wants now is the ordinary, from her, her mother and the sofa beneath them.
She exhales to the smell of phosphorous and he raises his head from the cloth, bringing his thoughts with him, none of which she could have read. She will forget perhaps the precise balance of those moments unless she sees the print one day; and then the memories will have to do with her father, slipping like a horizon out of her vision, with her mother and the new world of which she is now a part. He will carry his memories like a penumbra, as will everyone who met her then. But then he will have the print. He takes the train home, winding just above the sea and below the slopes that hold his eucalypti.
17
HE DEVELOPED IT the next day, and a portrait of Dev, and so the blonde child’s head that had moved against the black flat took its place in that pit and hoard of memories that might never be spent, together with the first smell of paint in his father’s attic, the smell of waxed flowers on the altar of his first wife and the wind that whipped over the Clare election meeting, necessitating de Valera to keep one hand eternally on his soft hat. They rustled there, useless and unused, like leaves in the dry pit, waiting for the rain one day to slough them to the top. And perhaps a hint appeared in the negative of the depths which memory would lend, given time.
Three days later it appeared in the national dailies, and satisfied him. Surrounded by the black print that would be read by thousands, and the headlines ‘Mother and Daughter Mourn’. And the dots the image was reduced to would have had the elusiveness of wraiths. Phot. James Vance, in smaller print.
HIS SON, LUKE, would by then have been five. Lili will tell me nothing about this man—she claims ignorance, but her silence smacks of jealousy—about his crumbling house and his thin trickle of dividends, his father ageing on the prom, his spouse four years dead. The word spouse conveys an image, a pale face, a hesitant bride in white, and love somehow absent. An Irish teacher, maybe, in the National Schools; a Catholic. James takes instruction for her sake in that faith that must have seemed awesome in its simplicity, its vulgarity and its threat that in the end each word might be seen to be fact. She promises a life to him, a union with that past, that faith from which his circumstances have removed him. It is a whim, more rootless even than his politics, but this whim bleeds into life and time and gives birth to Luke. He has bought her, using the most profound, the most suspect coinage. Her body awes him into an impotence that can only silence hers. There is a green rug, grass underneath, the sound of a river. There are the
lupins and tulips, the dahlias perhaps, in the church where he marries. They have the same sweet, promising texture of those that litter the altar at her funeral. He marries at Easter and she dies at Easter. And Easter flowers I remember as stiff, coated with the stillness of beeswax, more solid than real, like the ritual purples and blacks of the Easter cloths. Its pomp, its frigid succession of colour, its hierarchic universe can only appal him, the green stamens and the broad spurts of leaves, like gushing water frozen round the dark heart of flower. Does she visit Luke from further back than memory, fold her black shawl around him each night? The boy sleeps below, the father above him. The wash of sea carries up the street to their windows. Each wave falls with a lack of finish.
18
BUT I WILL still have the Bray curate walking the Bray prom, from the sacristy behind the church on Main Street past the bowling green and the intimate brick of the railway station to the front. The wind whips his soutane there and dots the ocean with white and only the bravest of hotels have their awnings spread. Ultramontane, intellectual and too plump for his years, Father Beausang’s nature is childlike and innocent rather than priestly. He has been visiting the obscure Protestant since the days of his marriage. His brief was conversion, then. If he asked what his brief is now, he couldn’t answer. For the visits kept on, through marriage and bereavement and dropped all pretence towards instruction on the way. Until now they have lasted so long that the bishop finds them suspect. But yet, the curate insists, though this Protestant agnostic has not yet said yes, neither has he said no. And there is after all a Catholic child to be catered for, his needs all the more pressing since his Catholic mother died. But the truth is, he knows, as he walks along the tiles past the flapping canvas, that he has come to enjoy their conversations. Ethics, the moral law and the necessity of a credo have killed themselves as topics. Only the barest of philosophic questions are touched upon. Rather they weave themselves, one afternoon every two weeks, from initial and sincere pleasantries through the fog of current events to the two subjects that alone interest them—mathematics and photography.
