The Past

by Neil Jordan

  ‘SHE WAS MORE real than she ever had been. We walked up two flights of stairs into a room that was painted black. A man put the silk stockings on Rene. He sat her on a podium in different positions. Then the door was pushed ajar in a way that was irritating, hesitant. And I saw him coming through it for the first time. Was it the door that irritated me or was it him? I can’t distinguish. And the boy Luke came behind him carrying the tripod. Chalk and cheese.’

  LUKE STARES AT the legs of Rene. He wants to touch them, even then. Which of them, father or son, can I choose? James shakes hands with the voluminous Una and speaks to her in broken Irish. He looks towards her daughter through the dust of the arc lamp, rubbing his eyes. The man smooths the silk stockings.

  ‘SHE WOULDN’T LIVE to see her daughter’s picture. We walked back down the street towards the G.P.O. and she held my arm so tight that it hurt. I turned to ask her to loosen it and I saw all the colour had gone from her face. I walked on. I was puzzled. Each of us is alone.’

  THE WIND GATHERS far out in the bay, up the estuary to the bridge and coils down the street like a silk ribbon. It whips Una’s skirts like a flag, she stands still, they wait for her to move again. It whips each fragment of her past into a gale, would lift her over the parapet and the angel’s feet and the tips of the marble spears, make each memory sweet, each enemy a loved one. It smells of the sea, the divine pungency of salt, would lift her only to dissolve her. They wait outside the G.P.O. until she gathers enough strength to walk on.

  ‘BUT NOBODY DIES,’ Lili whispered, ‘and now you’re bringing her to life again. She just left a voluminous emptiness in the Pro-Cathedral. It was emptier for all those who didn’t attend. Where were they all, I wondered, from the great days? There was no mention in the papers, no photograph even. De Valera was represented by a mass-card. I sat with Rene in the pews, among the actors. We had the same black veils. James came up, without his black box this time. If there’s anything I can do to help, he said. There would be something, though that would come later. Luke stood behind him, staring. I turned to see what he was staring at. It was the silk stockings, of course, which she had never taken off—’

  25

  IF THERE’S ANYTHING I can do—James asked her on the Pro-Cathedral steps. And as Lili said, there would be. But did he search her out or did he wait for chance to tell him to search her out? The one event occurred that made a pattern of all the other events and without that event, he must have thought, months later, all the events before it would have been random. But the event occurred and took the others, like stringless beads, pulling a sudden thread through them. So afterwards he can muse in retrospect, on Killiney Head, always his incessant walks, kicking the cones away with his high-laced boots, how each must have held the germ of the significance with which it was later blessed. And so that photograph in the Green Room led to the next in the O’Connell Street dark room, each one gaining in portent with the one that followed. And the equations lovers tease themselves with—if A had not happened, then B would never have been possible, if we had never met there, we would never—he developed gradually into a mathematics of chance, passion and happenstance. We are all small nations, he would tell her later, and our past, present and future is a moving thread. And so he had photographed her twice when he met her the third time, and the circumstances of that meeting made him clutch, for the first time, at the thread. There were flowers on the altar again, funereal ones, and the priest moved with his waxen gestures against the backdrop of the cross. He looked around him and saw actors he recognised, some of whom recognised him. He felt a slight puzzlement at the sense of occasion, even at his presence there. She had never appealed to him when alive, as an actress even, and yet dead she seemed to unite these few mourners with a sense of larger event. He remembered her husband’s death and the whole streets with covered windows. Time, as it lengthens, magnifies its figures, where distance miniaturises. Where are the soldiers, he wondered, looking around him for medals strung to lapels, where are the politicians? Have all the great events happened? And yet she was larger, somehow, for their absence. Every actor there he’d photographed at one time or another. Lord, he almost prayed, open my lips. And then he saw her daughter from behind, centre of the event, the blonde hair threading through the black lace veil. He felt that the mother had left so that the daughter could be seen more clearly. He let his eyes travel upwards from her blonde and lace threads to the huge dome above, the two lesser ones on either side. He thought of a dome where each brick is the cornerstone. When his eyes travelled down again through the pantheon of saints on the wall below he saw that the mourners had risen and the actors were walking out behind her. He followed them to the steps outside and it was there, with the wind blowing down Marlborough Street, tugging at everyone’s dark clothes, that he asked was there anything he could do.

  THERE WOULD, As Lili said, be something he could do. He saw the print with the silk stockings in the daily papers. The brand turns out to be popular. It’s the girl we photographed, isn’t it? Luke asks him, lifting the newspaper from the green-topped table. He nods, wondering vaguely why his son uses the plural. You must learn to use the camera, he tells Luke, who shakes his head, always uninterested. You must learn Irish then. Why? Luke asks. You must do everything, he tells him. You must succeed where I failed. He looks at his son’s profile, half-lit through the grey window. Luke is tearing the print from the page. Listen, he says, you must listen. Why, Father? Luke asks, his face made translucent by the grey metal light. You are my beloved son, he says, you must be everything I am not. But you made me, Luke says, turning his face around to the light. Luke shows the cut-out square of print to the old man, who proclaims it a masterful knee. I won’t be with you much longer, the old man says, standing in the doorway. For a little while, then I won’t be with you. You are my father, James says, you will always be with us. You made me. You made me, says Luke, turning again from the light. The old man shuffles back upstairs to where he mixes his pigments. Up there he dreams of them both, with his shock of white hair. James walks around the table to Luke until they are both washed in the light. He takes the paper from his son’s hands.

  SOMEWHERE IN THE mass of print that swims around the space where her knees were, there is an announcement, in the curt phrases of exhibition notices, of a benefit concert for Rene O’Shaughnessy, daughter of Una. He meets her there of course, having taken the Bray train and seen the eucalypti from below, bare in the twilight, dipping hugely from the summit towards the sea. It is a sad enough affair in a governmental hall with rows of tubular steel chairs half-empty, a wooden seat and wooden back to each. A succession of artistes take the bright-lit stage and preface each act with a few words in remembrance. He listens to the tenor voices, the duos and trios, the recitations, the scraps from Boucicault and Synge. A sense of pity floods over him, whether for himself or her he can’t be sure. He watches a much younger Lili recite ‘My Dark Rosaleen’ and approaches Rene in the interval, flooded as always with kindness. Lili drinks tea and eats a damp biscuit and begins to learn her impatience with him. A man in a check jacket, whom Rene calls Brogan, hands her a cheque. Is it coincidence, he asks Rene, that I took two photographs of you, each one near a death? She must have smiled. You could teach my child Irish, he says, embarrassed by his impulse, if you’re in need of work. Your mother I remember had a blas. He stumbles with the unlikely word. She smiles, watching his lips quiver. But of course, he said, you act—

  DURING THE SECOND half he finds himself beside her. A man called MacAllister proclaims her talents from the stage. Something in the man’s air irritates him. The words are too pat, the phrases too ritual, she deserves more than this paternal show of warmth. She seems everyone’s favourite, though. She sits upright, like a child in class, dutifully looking towards that cone of light. When he turns he can see the tip of her profile, behind the fringe of hair. The outer strands could brush his lips. She has one leg crossing the other.

  26

  ‘FOR SHAPE
LIER LEGS’ says the caption. The contrasts are hard, as his gaze must have been. Rene’s calf swells from that phrase in a long arc away from the ankle-strap. A seam traces the line of her calf and disappears into the upper of a high-heeled shoe. Her other leg juts from the lower left-hand corner, to be crossed by the first, the one that fills the picture. This leg seems pliant, resting but not at rest, as if with a benign and wholly female tolerance of time it had been swinging for an afternoon and just stopped for the shutter to click.

  FIVE

  BRAY, 1933

  27

  LARGE HOUSES AREN’T in demand these days and so when I went to Number One Sydenham Villas at the time the auctioneer had mentioned, I found it empty. The door was half-open; it was daylight outside but not a voice came through that strip of shade. The villas stretched up to my right, none as big as the first. It had been built, I imagine, when there was nothing there but field, one imposing building on the outskirts of a miniature Bray. The street and the rest came later, each year another and a smaller house, shrinking through the decades, adopting a perspective as if time were trying to imitate space. I inched the door open and watched the strip of shadow grow. The sea boomed from the prom. I felt proud of these dimensions. Nothing smaller would have done you, father or grandfather, whichever you turn out to be. I stepped inside and I smelt his world, knowing each detail was right whether it happened or not, each fact was part of him, whether real or not. There was the hatstand with the ball-and-claw feet. My shoulder touched the door, which touched it. The feet tottered and the four whorled handles swayed. I stood there, watching it totter. The hall stretched out in front of me. There were two doors off it to the left. The wall where the old man’s mural should have been was covered in paper with an orange and green rose pattern, stretching up the stairs. It was soothing, even beautiful to stand there with the hatstand banging against the door and the breeze coming in from the prom below. I felt at home in the only home there is, that of imagination verified. I walked slowly through the hall and into a large kitchen, the one room I hadn’t catered for. I had quite forgotten the necessity of making meals and the fact that these three males would never have done so themselves, would have needed maidservant, char and cook. There was a range covered with a film of dust. But you can’t put in everything, I thought, though Luke must have sat curled up there for hours, dreaming in the heat. I went out to the hall again and into the front room and there was a bay window with a circular sofa and a piano against the left-hand wall. There was no green felt-topped table. But it could have been removed years ago, and besides, Lili gave me that piece. I felt the floor beneath me, the walls around me, the house, valued at £30,000 in the auctioneer’s brochure, needing repairs, the whole magnificence of fact. And the repairs would have been extensive. There were dark patches on the cream walls and the plaster bubbled from the ceiling and as I walked towards the bay window one of the floorboards gave way under my shoe. There was just the skeleton of how they lived there, overlaid perhaps with the decor and the knick-knacks of three generations, layers of paint and sheaves of wallpaper, decades deep. But when I lay down on the circular sofa and rested my elbow on the curved sill and stretched my legs along the damp felt I could have peeled away those generations with my eyes and left the walls the way they were then, a thin blue, I would imagine, or perhaps the palest of greens. I could see the white horses beyond the promenade and the long trail of a jet, dissolving as the daylight went. And the nose of Bray Head edged past the window, rippled and frozen in the curve of the glass. The yellow pylons were still there, and the wooden cafe at the top where the passengers of the chair-lift used to alight, but the yellow chairs were gone and so the cables swung now, weightless. Why are the earliest photographs touched with an irresistible melancholy and why do the faces of loved ones we never met seem as large as the prints themselves are tiny? Did everyone feel more then?

  I rose from the bay window and walked back across the room. I could have been walking on a beach, placing my feet in a trail of footprints much larger than mine. It took me years to cross from bay window to door, so huge had the room become. Halfway there I heard the front door bang. The hatstand rocked again, in counterpoint to someone’s footsteps. I reached the door and opened it quietly, so as not to startle a prospective buyer. I saw a figure with slightly bowed shoulders and a neck which must once have been sleek and plump but from which the flesh hung limply now like those stiff folds of cloth in ecclesiastical murals. He was wearing a black hat, flecked round the rim. He was staring at the far wall, much as I had done earlier. I spoke without thinking.

  ‘Can the paint have survived the wallpaper?’

  IT WAS INDEED the curate. He turned, not at all surprised, smiling faintly. He had aged, of course, from when I had imagined him. There were forty more years, with the thirty-one I’d given him. That he drank I could see from his face, but his eyes had stayed bright in the interval, alert with his passion for theology and maths. Had his hope survived, I wondered, not without a twinge of conscience, had he unified those disciplines I’d given him so rashly? He spoke then and I thought, yes and no.

  ‘Will we investigate?’

  His voice seemed to come from an extraordinary depth, roughened by the layers of dust it had to shake off to reach me. Most of his teeth were gone. His eyes brightened with a humorous twinkle as he reached one hand up, gripped a sagging corner of the wallpaper and ripped one strip away. We both stood back and stared at the Hellenic form, head, neck and shoulders revealed above the jagged edge. It was the face of a woman with those stiff, airborne curls, her head turned in profile, looking with benign curiosity at something hidden by the wallpaper roses. Her halo of hair, her neck and her beautiful muscular shoulders were suspended, superimposed almost, over a landscape of low grey hills, Hellenic or Hibernian I couldn’t have said. The curves and definition of those hills looked suspiciously like the background to Leonardo’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’, but the woman’s face was all the old man’s own; vibrant and childlike, primitive or kitsch, I couldn’t have cared less since it spoke to me. I have never made aesthetic judgments.

  ‘He mixed his own paints, you see.’

  The colours were still fresh where the plaster had bubbled with damp. They were spread thinly, evenly, with nowhere the mark of a brushstroke, as if he wanted to disguise the nature of his materials. It gave his colours the worst possible texture, the texture of a photograph, a photograph of beings who were somehow larger, whose poses were more deliberate than the landscape spread out before them; of a being, too, who had attained the grandeur of colour when the world was being photographed in black and white.

  OUR THOUGHTS WERE interrupted by the door opening again and banging against the hatstand and the entry of two well-heeled families, everyone clutching the auctioneer’s brochure. We turned abruptly from the torn wallpaper as if to dispel any possible connection between us and it and I sensed, gratefully, that we had in common a mutual feeling of guilt. His was complicated by an added factor, however, since both families, despite the profanity of their staring open-mouthed at the torn wallpaper without noticing the mural, all turned to him and smiled as we walked towards the door, repeating among themselves the word ‘Father’. This embarrassed him, I am glad to say, as much as it incensed me and so when we reached the open door and the view of the night sea I felt a positive bond between us. He placed his hand on my elbow as I’m sure he did to Luke, as I’m sure he did to all three of them, at first to steady himself as we went down the steps but then to confide in me, as we made our way out of the gate, with the warmth in his palm and his voice of what I felt for an instant must be a much younger man.