by Neil Jordan
20
JAMES WALKS WITH Luke towards the photo with Miss Meredith, towards the tea it promises, along the railway tracks. The tracks loop around the Head, which looms over Bray and makes a gentler curve away from it.
But it is far behind them now, forgotten. James points out the marks of currents in the water, the glint of schist in the beach rocks, the banks of cirrus cloud above them. He explains the difference between flotsam and jetsam and the movement of tides. They come in view of Greystones harbour and the high houses behind it. Luke leaps from sleeper to sleeper, seems not to listen. They step down from the track and walk along the beach until the pebbles give way to clear sand and the sand rises towards the sea road.
Miss Meredith suspects that Mr Vance has intentions other than the sampling of her excellent high teas. She has the table spread when they arrive and they are the only weekend samplers. A widower who seems of her own persuasion, with one son cared for only by a housemaid. She has laid out her choicest dainties, cakes that are whorled with icing, cream puffs and apple-and-raspberry tarts. This Protestant gentleman, though, eats hardly anything, stares through the laurels at the haze above the sea. For today could be the height of summer and high teas are on the lawn, the lawn with such a riveting view of the sweep of the bay. He covers her white cloths with flower-samples after the ritual gentlemanly greeting, and talk is mostly of the weather. She has come to despair of a more active demonstration of interest. And yet there’s the photo. On a day like today, with one arm around Luke and one hand touching the wrought-iron table on which lie the dainties. I feel I know the house and the way the garden looked at the sea. There is a low wall, white, that hardly reaches your calf if you are an adult but forms a barrier for a child. It makes a sharp angle round a little chink of lawn which is in turn hedged round by a large expanse of gravel, a sort of drive really, leading up to the house. There is a sign above the porch advertising teas. There is a thin row of laurel bushes parallel to the house, facing the road, and the chink of lawn is to the left of both, edging out on its own, for all the world like a small promontory jutting out to sea. For beyond the wall only the sea is visible. Your three heads outlined against the white wall and the white horses, the white metal table and the blue china, an idyllic scene as I imagine it, and perhaps you would have taken more notice of the notice she took of you had it happened oftener, but the weather so rarely allowed it. How Miss Meredith must have cursed that rain, sweeping interminably over Bray Head, knocking the boats against the Greystones harbour. But she must rest content with her picture in your album, her arm around your son, who is staring at the dainties. She is looking towards me, a rather fattish face, a closed smile in which the teeth could be biting the left-hand corner of her mouth since her lip is drawn down somewhat, slanting while smiling. Her hair is drawn back tightly like a Spanish widow’s, parted in the middle and clutched behind into a bun. You could have been sitting on the low wall, your back to the sea and the white horses, over which hung the four o’clock sun.
MISS MEREDITH POURS you another cup and asks whatever happened to the family’s china. She has an immaculate cabinet upstairs, she tells you, which must get more valuable by the year. You tell her there is a store of it somewhere, down by the old factory, most of it worthless, rejects. The time is gone, you tell her, for small enterprises and small nations. Versailles, you tell her, would have taught anyone the latter and the economy of contemporary Ireland would teach anyone the former. You hold such daring opinions, Mr Vance, it’s a wonder you don’t publish more. There are people better able than me to articulate them, you proclaim, and proceed to tell her about the Venus’s fly-trap, which interests you more. But she evades the topic of the carnivorous plant and returns to your opinions, which in her normal day she would shun, but which with you she feels she must air. We are both anti-Treatyites, Mr Vance, but I have heard from opposite points of view. You are really a Republican? I would favour, you tell her, a syndicalist model along the lines of Proudhon—, Ah, Miss Meredith interrupts, but he was a Frenchman and respectable, quite a different specimen from your de Valera, who is Irish and disreputable. American, you counter. Or is it Spanish—
And your imagination wanders, as it always does when confronted with the intricacies of politics, beliefs that refuse to form themselves into any semblance of order. There is a boy leading a dray-horse down the street and the boy is barefoot and each step of the dray-horse’s forelegs seems about to crush the heels of the boy, but somehow their feet move in counterpoint, a counterpoint whose rhythm you cannot pinpoint. The horse’s paw-like hoof is raised whenever the boy’s heel arches backwards and each time the steel hoof comes inexorably down, somehow the boy’s foot just withdraws itself. Is it a logic like that, you wonder, that impels politics, one that’s understood just by boys walking abstractedly, by shopkeepers, tenants and small farmers? You see de Valera’s face flapping from every lamp post now, since the election is drawing even nearer, and all around you, Luke and Miss Meredith on the chink of lawn is the sound of paper flapping, his face flapping against the tarred wood because a wind is rising from the sea now, a wind that makes you aware of his face, of the time and of how cold you are. So you rise and present Miss Meredith with a coin, which she refuses, which you proffer again and which she refuses again until your annoyance at last becomes real, at which point she accepts. You know that she would rather not accept, as you know that for you not to give it would imply intimacy you don’t want to allow. And so you leave this woman whom you photographed as you never did Luke’s mother and you trudge across the Head again with Luke. Father and son go back down the beach, beyond the sand, to where the pebbles make walking difficult. There is a horizontal scar where the beach ends and the land begins, above which runs the railway. As they walk this scar becomes a cliff. The pebbles he walks over accentuate his stoop. He talks about the rocks in the cliff face, the angular movement of them caused by a heave in the earth millions of years ago. The boy walks by the rock, rubbing his hands along it, seeming not to listen. The man walks behind him, looking at his boots, still talking rather forlornly. He walks carefully because of the camera swinging from his shoulder, a heavy object, like a box but for the melodeon lens.
MEANWHILE GRANDFATHER IS at home working at his mural, the cost of oils over his latest space having done him out of a week’s tobacco. So he works at the breast of Hellas with a bad temper. How does a breast look while a woman is running? He has never encountered the problem before, or a woman like this, statuesque and yet mobile. He pulls his hand back tetchily and the brush scrapes across her jaw. He curses and is about to abandon the brush to its jar of turps when he notices something. The smudge has drawn a shadow across the jaw, lengthened it even, made it what novelists term a lantern jaw. He smiles. He sees a resemblance between his lantern-jawed Hellas and a prominent member of Cummann na mBan. He remembers the puritanism of her public statements. He chuckles, takes out his brush again and with a few strokes completes the likeness. The figure becomes recognisably Irish, a cartoon sharpness about the profile. He stands back and surveys it and feels an odd, delightful surge of power. He returns renewed to her breast, as if the brush is pulling his hand.
HIS SON WAS up the Head and his own son beyond him, near the crest. And as James walked, the pace of his steps seemed to match his thoughts. He saw how walking was not a continuum but a series of leaps, how Luke’s feet in the distance leapt and landed and leapt again. His own thoughts leapt with them, finding themselves always somewhere else. He thought of how he would die one day and how each moment was a step leading him to that one. He reached the crest and stood there, letting his son run on. He looked at the sea below him, and the bay and he knew suddenly that death was not just like that sea, it was that sea and the only purpose of that sea was to remind him of his death. He felt that if he were to look at death, not death in general, but his private death, if one were to cultivate it like an acquaintance, or like the habit of afternoon tea, one could place all else in relief.
There was power and comfort in that thought, of the fact and moment of obliteration cultivated like a friend. His life rose before him, under a garish light. Why, he wondered, why? And the realisation came, shimmering and crimson. In the flash the curate talked about, time, how he had longed to shatter and suppress it and the end of time is death. And how acquaintance with your death would place time between your lips, like a silk ribbon, like a spouse whose mother was already your intimate. To embrace, a conquest and yet an act of love. He threw both of his arms out towards that blanket of sea so that they jerked in their sockets. He gripped it in his arms, that metaphorical sea which the real sea only stood for. It was grey, like when he smelt the eucalyptus and a fine vapour seemed to hover over it, barely there. He stumbled down the Head again. Luke! he shouted, Luke! He ran to where the chairs landed but could see only the ghost of his son below him, tiny, running down the shallow field that led to the first house. He stood there holding the metal pole, the yellow chair swaying above him.
FOUR
SANDYMOUNT, 1928
21
SOON RENE WILL appear in an ad in the Freeman’s Journal, wearing a pair of silk stockings and low-strung shoes. Lili admits herself to be jealous for the first time, really jealous, that is. She is still after all travelling down Trimelston Road each day to the convent school, while her friend’s education has come to consist of two years in Miss Conway’s school of acting on Clyde Road and whatever treasures she can glean from her increasingly weighty mother who has named herself to the educational authorities as the child’s official instructress. This means six-monthly visits from departmental inspectors to their Booterstown house, from which they are absent, for the most part. But when they find mother and child at home, they spend two amazed hours in the company of a thirteen-year-old who is hardly numerate at all, who can repeat Irish words with a wonderful blas and intonation but can hardly construct a sentence. She shows herself entranced by large sections of the Aeneid and without any of the rules of syntax can make wild and uncannily accurate guesses at the meanings of whole paragraphs. She can barely add, but loves the music of Euclidean geometry.
TWO FATTISH GENTLEMEN, each holding briefcases, mid-afternoon in a suburban drawing-room. They sit on couches covered in dust sheets. The curtains are drawn. A light bulb swings from a tasselled shade, compensates for the daylight outside. Mother and daughter seem on the point of departure or arrival, perpetually so. The girl in front of them teases out Pythagoras from the paper they’ve given her, as if discovering the theorem for the first time. She has crumpled the paper on algebra into a ball. The dark-haired gentleman smokes a cigarette, the fair-haired one a pipe. Signs of irritability seem to threaten their patience. They are used to the national schools, where a teacher would tremble at their every whim, where each class would be a model of discipline and order. But here they are dealing with more than a national school. There have been moves, lately, to rename the street their office sits on after this girl’s father. And different rules, they know, apply to those whose names have some connection with those whose names gave names to streets. So their patience is measured as they watch her grapple with triangles. Until the mother interrupts:
‘Give them O’Hussey’s Ode to the Maguire, dear.’
And Rene stands underneath the amber light and delivers the famous ode. Her voice is unremarkable, but her stance is eloquent. And the bell-like clarity of her words must compensate for her other failings. For the inspectors sigh, with either pleasure or relief, and close their notebooks. Una gives a slight shiver, then asks her again,
‘Give them Jacques’s speech from As You Like It.’
BUT THE BEST educations are always through default and Una’s determination to instruct her daughter in all the principles of bad acting led, perhaps more than any one thing, to the adult Rene. Una knew by this time that her star was falling and had decided not even to catch it as it came down but to impel her daughter’s upwards in its place. She had become resigned at last to the limitations of her talents and the erosion of her public appeal. People no longer said, ‘Isn’t that so-and-so?’ as she passed, forgetting her name but reminded inexorably of a ‘somebody’ by her flashing black hair and her regal carriage. By now her hair was streaked with grey, her figure was ruined and the clothes she could afford to buy were fairly nondescript. The invitations still came to public ceremonies, but she neglected to attend. For she had gained a sense of humour, a certain delight in incongruity. She laughed when de Valera entered the Dail at last and signed with his left hand over his eyes, and managed to make her Republican friends laugh too. When asked about her late husband she said, ‘Yes, Michael,’ and gazed towards the west with her old intensity, but realised now that she enjoyed the pose. She came to see, gradually, around her thirty-fifth year, when the only work she could get was in fit-ups touting peasant melodramas round the provinces, that here was a profession and that she belonged to it. She had always mixed political and feigned passion on the stage, been known above all for her ‘sincerity’, her ‘truth’ of performance, and she had in fact spoken lines as if not on a stage under lights, in front of flats, but as if in the dusty atmosphere of a nationalist meeting. She had done what all household names do, become an emblem, intruded her real self into the theatrical field and for almost a decade it had sufficed. But then a public, tired with the concerns of her real self and its emblems, had tired of her and she found herself adrift suddenly, in a profession whose mainstay is plain artifice. And she had realised slowly, like a cured invalid learning to use his legs again, the beauty, permanence and humour of the feigned passion. As the last illusion of the grande dame left her she found herself among the flotsam of the feigned passion, the permanent hybrids of the profession who keep its laws and pass them on, its humours, its superstitions, its attitudes of wrist, face and hand; the ageing queens, the comedians, the soft-shoe shufflers, the young tap girls, the matrons typecast as such, the outraged suitors, the overbearing parents, the lovers, passionate, true, false and profane: all of them stagestruck. She realised her talent’s home and its limitations: these were her people, she was a passable actress, Ireland was a splash of green on a canvas flat. But then, among the profession she had a strange lustre that carried her over her sense of limitation, for they, permanently stagestruck, all remembered her good days. And so she carried the reputation of a once-leading lady the way others did that of a good line in maidservants. And so found herself now, a parody of her former self, playing young heroines in an ageing figure on stages with less than three flats—a parody she enjoyed, revelled in even, carried over with gusto into her real life as slowly, slowly, the balance was reversed and where once she had sinfully pushed the real life on to stage she now extended the rim of the stage to include her boarding-house, her turn of glance in a rural street and all the minutiae of her private life.
YOU HAD GROWN alongside your mother since that breakfast of butter and sausages in the Killiney hotel when the Republican waiter served you so willingly. You still remember your father’s shoulder pistol and his clipped ‘Home, Jack’ as he lifted you into the open car on the Bray prom. Your life together since he died seemed a process of melting. There are healing graces in human affairs and you have more than your share of them. Through loving you she is reinventing him in a form she can love, expiating her former indifference. Which is perhaps why, when greeted by those who knew all three of you, in the old days, ex-lord mayors of major towns, ex-commanders of guerrilla battalions now heads of government departments, friends of his only, Free-Staters now, friends of hers only, Republicans now, all of those who knew the three of you say, ‘How like him she is’. And Una can take this without any rancour. She is even glad of the comparison, she resurrects him in you in a finer form. The part of him that lives through you is after all the mythical part, one simple image of the head framed by the ridiculously large cap and the shoulder pistol. One simple attribute, that of the man of action, distracted, regretful, uneasy with his role. His memory after
all has become the embodiment of how different it could have been if only . . . And so when you appear with Una at public functions or at any functions at all and people say how like him you are, they see in you this wonderful, mythical alternative, this possibility of how different it could have been . . . For you are already developing this propensity, this unconscious talent for being seen from any angle and seen differently.
AT THIRTEEN YOU are fattish and your hair has the same blonde look with the texture of cream that it had when you were six. Your hair and your walk distinguish you, since there’s not much that’s beautiful in your figure or your face. You smile a lot. There’s a lot to smile about for a girl of thirteen with no school to go to. You’ve adapted yourself to the company of adults since your father died, which could be why your walk is so relaxed. It gives a grace to your figure that shouldn’t have been there, belying all the canons of schoolgirl beauty; as if there’s a moving centre to you which your figure just follows. You always walk, even in the most high-heeled, the heaviest boots, as if you are barefoot. And all this gives you ease in adult company. You only lose it in the company of your peers, of girls of your age. They are made shy by your habits which, far from seeming adult to them, seem old-fashioned. And the too-adult child always does seem old-fashioned. You have picked up habits of speech and gesture which they associate with their more ardent teachers and the comparison leaves a distance between you and them. You are always polite, for instance, you address a remark to each member of whichever company you are in. You have no sense of exclusiveness, of secrets. You rarely whisper. Your hands are smallish—practical hands that move when you talk using gestures that are never hurried but always startling.
