The Past

by Neil Jordan

  28

  ‘I DIDN’T KNOW HER,’ he said when the wind hit us, ’but I assume it must be her. Yes, although I’ve never seen her I’ve imagined her just like that. Luke described her once across the grille, a bizarre confession, but then all confessions are bizarre, there’s just the pleasure of listening, a refined pleasure, let me tell you and one that has to be nurtured. As a young priest it used to terrify me, I used to slide back the hatch at any opportunity I got, would you believe, just to let my face be seen and if possible to get a glimpse at whoever was muttering the words but of course that was just a palliative, there was no cure was what I had to realise, people ceased to come to me for after all the sinner demands and deserves the right to whisper unseen. And the only way to live with the objects of one’s terror after all is to take pleasure in them, which is what I had to do. Listening sets the imagination relatively free, you see, on a leash with a hand guiding it. But there was a whole country at it then, with radios, villages would gather in the bicycle shops to hear the Saturday match and so it was a confessional state, you see, in its early days, in more ways than one since everyone had their ear bent to a speaker. And so I—’

  He stopped and I felt his hand on my arm again.

  ‘Will we walk round by the Head?’

  I nodded and we turned and walked back down the prom.

  ‘And so I, instead of building a blow-by-blow account of the hurls on Croke Park from a cracked speaker, built a picture of her from a year of rumours, from one confused confidence of Luke’s and even from my philosophic discussions with James, God bless his heart, since though he never mentioned her name, his thought around that time became somehow more inclusive. She was plumper, I may tell you, in my mind’s eye, plumper than we have just seen her on that wall but that, I suppose, could be attributed to the old man’s faulty vision. I have seen him on the prom here, on that patch of grass which used to be bald from his stool and easel, staring at the Irish Sea and yet something more akin to the Mediterranean appearing on his canvas. But I have no doubt, have you, that what we have just seen is her—’

  I had no doubt. She had an adaptable figure, Lili had told me.

  ‘I visited the house for years before she came, and the year she came my visits stopped. It was a house without a mother, you see, and in a sense it was waiting for her, and perhaps that’s why my visits had to stop. If you detect a hoarseness in my voice it is because I am close to tears even now, thinking of it. Yes, I did look forward to those visits, to tea and cucumber sandwiches and to Luke taking out the tray. James and I talked mathematics and theology, we compared notes from the current journals, he stopped taking instruction after the first year, but that didn’t matter. What mattered I suppose was a young curate walking from a presbytery to this household on the Bray prom and the light coming in from the bay window. Or did that matter? Our arguments were extraordinarily intense. We would hold positions for weeks on end and then drop them suddenly on a whim, because of the weather or the colour of the bay outside. James retained a fundamentalist frame of mind, you see, despite his agnosticism, he brought an intellectual rigour to the examination of the new state to which that state could never conform. A sense of chaos however is endemic to Catholic thought and a very definite mistrust of the intellect, and that of course was endemic to me, no matter how bad a priest I later became. And so we faced each other over the gulf of our background, I could see the weeping Huguenot in him, the personage his father had lost but which must have been reborn in him by proxy as it were, from perhaps his father’s father, for likenesses I have always noticed recur across two generations, rarely one. And so through the years I lived his various schemes with him, you have heard about his schemes no doubt. He allied himself to A.E.’s agricultural movement at one stage, at another he bought that school in Connemara to show the Bray slum youth the west of Ireland, and later he made a foray into politics—what was it his brochure said—‘to draw the current Irish dialogue into a European framework’. Of course he lost his deposit, a two hundred pounds which he could ill afford, but perhaps that was better, since we all know what happened to the European framework for the current dialogue. In fact I am tempted to say that it was better that all his schemes failed, schemes like his should fail, since the execution of them could never approach the delight of their conception and their failure at least allowed him to continue scheming, which the success of any one of them would have precluded. And he returned each time, of course, to his abstract art, the one we shared, mathematics, and the one that both consumed and fed him, photography.

  ‘So you can imagine how much I loved that house with its cucumber sandwiches, “cues” I see they are called now in the vegetable shops, and its three generations of males and perhaps it was the fact that there was no woman there that enabled me to call so often. You see, once June began my visits had to stop since the Vance family, minus grandfather of course, would take off on holiday, not your two-week holiday, but generally two to three months in the country. Of course there were invitations to visit whatever small house they had rented along the western seabord but I never took them up, no, holidays for me were at the open centre in Carnsore Point, any request to visit a whimsical Protestant family in the west of Ireland would have definitely been suspect. Was it this we shared, I wonder, this absence of femininity, because it often seemed that all our discussions in that sagging house concerned an absence which all three of them suspected might one day be filled. James’s distance, the old man’s brusqueness when he saw me and the day I sat in the wooden box in the church on Main Street and this figure stumbled in and talked hoarsely in a voice that was trying to disguise itself but that I recognised as Luke’s, they all added up to—’

  WE HAD COME to the end of the promenade tiles and the beginning of the cement path that still led along the sea but that had fields now to its left and moved upwards towards the Head. There were chunks of rock and pebbles set in the cement and he held my arm again as we walked.

  ‘THEY ALL ADDED up to not so much a figure but the impression one has of a figure when it—she in this case—has left the room. The smell of scent perhaps, the cigarette stubbed out on the ashtray—though of course she didn’t smoke—a certain mustiness in the case of women which I as a celibate am peculiarly alive to, hanging round a chair, and above all the attitude on people’s faces, the look of delayed surprise, affection or fear, retaining as they do the expressions with which they gazed on her even after she has left. Now all the words passed between us in those years, the small tensions, James’s elbow, which I often grasped when excited, and good Lord, I did get excited at times, the hand with which I used to pat Luke’s head when she eventually did come, in 1933, and my visits stopped—of my own accord, let me hasten to impress on you—James implored me to visit again, but I knew it was finished, we both knew and what contact I did have with them was in my presbytery or on the steps of the church or now and then on the Dublin train—when she eventually did come I could see as clearly as, if you will allow me the simile, Augustine saw his city of God, I could see that all those points in our contact over the years were signs, hints if you like, about her. And that is why when we stood in the hallway just now and I ripped back the wallpaper, I could tell that the figure painted there was her, I could say quite truthfully that I recognised her. Though as I said to you, I would have thought of her as plumper—’

  WE HAD BY now come to the end of the cement walk and we turned as if with one mind and walked across the fields, upwards. We came to where the pylons for the chair-lift were and stopped. I stared up at the empty cables.

  ‘WE DID WELL to leave that house, for how can you confine it to an auctioneer’s brochure or price it at thirty thousand? Better to let it fall down, don’t you think, decay in its own time, let the roof fall in and the plaster bulge and peel off the walls? But things aren’t let die, are they, they’re bought again and redecorated, shoved into life once more to house other families, give birth to new memories in turn, there’ll
be a television where the circular sofa was and maybe an electric cooker in place of the range, all to house new myths that people think will die as they do and if they were to return like us they’d be appalled to find the resilience of objects and the indestructibility of life, to learn that the end was in the beginning even as it happened, and the beginning in the end. And even that cable that you’re staring at will carry another yellow chair—’

  AND SURE ENOUGH the cable creaked as I was looking at it and began to roll. I could see the grease glistening in the moonlight and a yellow chair passed over us, swaying towards the wooden cafe at the top. It was approaching summer, I surmised, and some Bray businessman had revitalised the lift.

  29

  THE FIRST THING Rene would have noticed coming down the Bray prom would have been that lift. She has just come off the train and the directions the photographer scrawled out for her lead back past the station, over the tracks and down towards the sea front. The promenade before her is a mile and a half long, narrowing, it seems, towards this mass of green, neither hill nor mountain, shouldering a gaunt half-circle into the blue sea. And the yellow chairs are moving up and down the Head again. And what crowds on the prom, in the heat, in the middle of summer! She makes her way between them, wearing another pair of silk stockings and of high-heeled shoes. The heels are slightly lower now but still sharp enough to catch in the gaps between the tiles. So she throws her weight forward to the balls of her feet, walking in the way she would if she were barefoot. There are the awnings of the hotels and the porches, some makeshift for the summer, all of striped canvas; the facades of the hotels all facing the beach with the striped deckchairs and the circular canvas tents. Ireland in the heat is a different country, she told herself, imagining boxes with palms bound around with hoops. She changes her pace to avoid the flow coming towards her, but keeps her eyes on the yellow chairs. They go up the Head in jerks, swaying as they move. Her father held her on the yellow chair, showing her the vista. Home, Jack, he said, down the promenade. The voices around her are Scottish now, for the cycle has begun. Heat in summer makes the strollers seem to dance, raises their feet above the surface, blurs the tiled promenade. Perhaps they saw her walking on air, as she saw them, inches above the melting tiles. Or are Scots naturally incurious? The curate certainly doesn’t see her, though she sees him. A figure in black on such a hot day stands out. Walking quickly, from what he doesn’t yet know will be his last afternoon discourse. She smiles when she sees him; turns, hoping to catch his attention. She is as demure as with Sister Paul, wants to meet all kinds of religious. But Father Beausang’s head is full of Descartes, sweltering inside his circular stove, for it’s on that appropriate theme that their talks have ended. He senses an ending as he walks, and he is not sure why. Is it the sea, blurred and distended in the heat to abolish the horizon? But he hardly notices the sea. Perhaps it is his suit, which as he walks has covered his body in a film of sweat. The figures that come towards him on the promenade seem to dance in the heat. As he claimed, after she had come, it was as if he knew all along she or something like her would. And so he must sense the ending. And passing the young woman who has smiled at him with an invitation to stop, he just sees another melting figure among the strollers coming towards him and wishes the heat, anyway, would end. And she turns, after a moment standing still, looking after his figure under its creased hat, which soon melts like the other strollers. She walks on to where the hotels give way to residential houses. She stops outside the largest of them, takes her eyes from the yellow chairs and walks in.

  JAMES VANCE OPENS the door. He sees her standing, framed by the doorway as in both of his prints. But now the sea is behind her and she is a woman. She is shifting her weight from foot to foot too, as the girl in his prints could never have done. He sees her shoes and silk stockings, like the ones he photographed, their silk perfection vanishing under a very imperfect, even shabby, skirt. She has been doing more adverts, he thinks. Perhaps he wishes she could be held static like the girl he photographed, for when she moves into the hallway to stand beside him, he stays looking at the frame of the door. The sun comes in round its edges, bleaching the sea. He will later remember how glad he was, and how ashamed to be glad, that Father Beausang had left.

  He says, Come in, which is unnecessary, since she is already in, staring at the extraordinary scene that covers half the wall. He stands at the open doorway watching her against that scene, thinking how her features blend with it. The old man, sensing something, clatters from his attic to the top of the stairs and gazes at her distracted, thinking the woman of his imagination, coaxed by his mural, has at last come alive. And Luke comes from the living-room with the tea things. He is now sixteen.

  30

  AT FIRST SHE taught her brand of Irish at weekends but she must have felt immediately at home there, for she soon comes to flood the album, and all the vistas that were photographed without her find themselves in print again, with her in the foreground and Luke or James behind. Some rustic fencing with its border of roses which must have bloomed that summer acts as a frame for her, with Luke leaning sullenly against one of the poles and her hand on his sixteen-year-old head. And the old man finds his way in too, finally, magnificently. He is standing bolt upright on the prom, his huge white mane with a sharp quiff at the parting, from which all their quiffs sprang. He has her arm firm through his arm and is clutching it proudly, as if she were his young wife. The Head can be seen behind them and the yellow chairs, which in the print show like puffs of fawn. I can see them having walked the length of the prom, the breezes from the east that came in waves lifting his mane of hair and the hem of her skirt. She has constantly to hold down her skirt, which fills with wind, billowing like a canvas tent, while the old man entertains her with his version of time lost, tells her about the Barbados, about boarding-houses in New York and about the yards and yards of canvas he has filled with paint. Every memory recalls a bad canvas and as he recounts it it seems he dispenses with it, clears himself of the burden of looking once and for all. He shows her the bald patch of lawn where he has sat sporadically throughout the last six years, painting the scene through which he is now walking, a scene that never seemed as perfect as it is today, and as he says that he lets go her arm and tells her to walk forward so that he can see her against that backdrop of blue sea and the very edge of the prom and the cones of the canvas huts nosing upwards from the beach. He stands back on the grass so that he can look at her, narrowing his eyes which are clustered everywhere with wrinkles from the effort to focus, turning his head to one side the way painters do and certain species of seabirds, and the updraught of the wind from the beach to the edge of the prom lifts her dress violently so that she limps towards him, laughing. But he barks at her with a voice he might use for servants and tells her to stand there and forget about the wind and so she stands there, her dress billowing over her knees and watches his smile, an old man’s smile at a young woman, who has for once seen a perfect pair of knees—

  Technically, too, this group of prints is an immense improvement. You’ve forgotten your reticence in the face of objects. I can see it, that you focus with such a clarity on one that all the objects around her fall into place. You do not see it, perhaps, but Father Beausang’s remarks on Poincare have been proved correct since the intractability of the world you looked at through your shutter seems to have given way, as if a veil has been lifted. And where you caught Luke clumsily, sixteen years ago, in a Moses basket and a woman’s hand comes awkwardly into the picture from the left-hand corner, now you catch the woman unashamedly, face-on, and the world falls into place behind her, just like, in fact, the landscape behind the cave in Leonardo’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’. How can Bray and its environs, the Dargle valley, the eucalypti around Killiney hill and the wildness of your back garden suddenly assume this neatness, this aptness, how can this solid world suddenly know its place—a place firmly behind the people that inhabit it—when for years it has edged quite brazenly and vulga
rly into your vision, the horizon always at an angle, walls, trees and the ever-present seascape always at odds with and sometimes even crushing the faces you placed alongside them? I assume you didn’t notice this change, and that the pleasure you always took in your photography was for once lost in the pleasure you took in the objects you photographed.

  There are three photographs of the chair-lift. There is Rene with Luke in two and in the third Rene with your father. In the first Luke is sitting bolt upright in the yellow chair and staring without expression towards you, towards the camera. Rene is holding a black bag on her lap, looking towards the camera with a quiet smile. The yellow chair would have been swaying slightly, for the Bray that we can see behind them in the space between Luke and Rene is somewhat blurred and because of that even more like a miniature town, a miniature world. They are both staring at me now from the print as they must have stared at you, and Luke’s face seems to express some resentment towards me, as father would to son, but perhaps I am only interpreting that as resentment in the light of what I know happened later. And Rene is looking at me with a smile which seems to contain whatever is between us two.