The Past

by Neil Jordan

  41

  THEY PUSH TOWARDS the sea in half-circles. The texture of the platforms changes as they circle nearer of course, and the neat flower beds of the midlands stations give way to blackthorns, all bending eastwards with the prevailing winds. Stations in the small resorts on the western seaboard, so poignant to imagine, don’t, regrettably, exist. To get to Strand Hill, for instance, which Lili mentions as their first holiday venue, you have to get off near Ballisodare and the grey blocks there, I imagine, must be weeping with the salt and water in the winds and though there would be alder as well as blackthorn and the blackthorns themselves would be relatively upright there must have been a hint, perhaps just in the emptiness of the station itself and the tracks running through the scrublands, waiting for trains, of the texture of coast itself. Luke holds his flat against the wind and is pulled by it down to where the platform ends, almost on to the tracks themselves. So he has to point his canvas drawing-room straight at the wind to walk forward at all.

  He hugs it with him to the two hired cars that are waiting. The drivers both wear caps and the company are standing around the doors, hugging their clothes against the wind. The wind beyond the granite walls pulls the flat again and Luke flies for a minute, the drawing-room in the air above him. He feels stretched like a bird, in one clean line, and bounces in a series of airborne steps to the company, the capped drivers and the cars.

  THESE BLACK FORDS took over after the farthest stations ended. It is the first road Luke has driven with them, from Ballisodare to the coast, and the fabric of the interior seems to come apart before his eyes, through the car window, as if the strands which held the pines and the blackthorn and the broken hills are being pulled out leaving simply fields, smooth and rolling towards the largest sea. The drivers would have known the company over a succession of years, both of them squinting through the rearview mirror, their curiosity hidden by their caps. They recognise old faces and examine new ones and have to swerve continually since their obsession with their rearview mirrors threatens to leave them in the ditch. And they come to the line of the sea then that is broken by what seems to be, just where it meets the sand, this continual surge of white, the effect of the wind on that body of water that seems to Luke to form one long wave that he imagines must surge north and south, spanning the coastline, from this small patch of cement and sand where the cars finally pull to a halt.

  ‘AND THE ONLY reason I remember Strand Hill is because of the two drivers who were brothers who took us from the train to the hotel. They seemed to wear the same cap and to be always holding it with the same hand against the wind. You see, there was always wind there, it must have been on a kind of headland, because there was more wind there than on any of those western towns that I remember, but then maybe I only remember the wind because of the two brothers and their caps. There was more wind than rain but the wind was the kind that even on the finest days seemed to saturate the air with spray. And this could be quite a relief on a hot day and on a wet day you blamed the rain anyway, not the poor innocent sea, but the effect it did have was to make the walls of all the buildings damp. Weeping granite, somebody called it, which quite catches the reality—these grey hotel fronts with large patches of damp facing the sea. And the patches of damp were, if you will allow me the simile, a little like the smears a child who has been crying draws with his palm on each cheek. There weren’t many of those hotels, three or four of them, and houses scattering away from them in no apparent order. Not a conducive place, you might say, for holidays, but isn’t that the mystery, how people crowd in groups into the most unlikely places, just because of the habits of people before them? And it wasn’t very large either, it would sustain one night at a stretch and even at that MacAllister would be huffing in the bars about just breaking even, about the venue being an act of duty, altruism, his cultural gift to southern Sligo rather than a commercial proposition. But even there we made history in our own small way because if the town could at the most sustain one performance we managed the quite extraordinary feat of playing twice on successive nights to what must have been to a man the same audience. By then, you see, Rene was far enough gone to have outgrown the first of our costumes, the one that was always used for the young, innocent parts, the Ophelias and Columbines. Most of her Rosalind was played in what you would now call drag—you do know the play—and for that she wore breeches and a smock that would have done for anything from The Saughran to Robin Hood. It was bulky, you see, hanging loose. But the scenes where she was Rosalind, the beginning and the end ones, she had outgrown the first dress and nobody had yet thought of the possibility of her changing into the more bulky, flowing, generally bald velvet or satin things that were pulled out for any part remotely middle-aged or regal. Our Gertrude dress, in a word. It seemed starkly obvious to us of course, her in that piece of cloth that was more like a nightdress than a theatrical costume. Her figure was adaptable though, and her movement seemed to melt her condition into herself, and needless to say knowledge of the fact of pregnancy leads one to see it in every gesture, but minus that knowledge one merely sees plumpness, roundness, or in her case, grace. But we had yet to be reassured by Rene in a larger dress and the pressure of her flesh on stage seemed to be caught everywhere in the lights, there was a desirability about her shape in that dress that was erotic, and so the fear and tension, the sense of urgency and secrecy, seemed to be rising on the stage like water. Or was it, I wonder, just her presence? She seemed to radiate desire and the pressure of eyes on her seemed to form a glow which made more people look in turn. But for me, I saw it as fear, fear simply of discovery, and the electricity of our combined emotions seemed to pull the play towards its end in one huge, erotic gasp. And again at the end we almost laughed with relief when the curtains went down and we heard, after a space, the sound of the clapping of hands.

  ‘But that had been the pattern since Knock. The reason Strand Hill was so memorable, and I can see it now, is the small man with the neat white beard sitting on the veranda of the Strand Hotel. He came on the second day, was instantly recognised and instantly avoided. He was, you see, the drama critic of the Irish Times. His and our embarrassment were naturally extreme, since he was on what he hoped would be a quiet holiday and was obviously on quite friendly terms there with a Roscommon widow with whom he wouldn’t be seen dead in Dublin. So company and critic passed one another in lounge and foyer and smiled gently as they did so as if to pretend the second-rate surroundings didn’t exist, or if they did, only for the benefit and use of the other. But he must have attended on the second night because several days later we got some column-inch in the Irish Times. He mentioned Rene by name and what is worse traced her mother’s acting history. The gist of it was, you see, that the west was somehow awake, that the dramatic genius of the first decade of the century was springing up a decade later, in the most unlikely of places—’

  THE DUNES ARE reputed to be unusually high, almost curling round the nearest hotel to them, and when the drivers have unloaded their cars and Luke and Brogan have carried the properties inside they must all walk down by the dunes, past the dunes and find that their bulk has been obscuring a long sweep of beach. Despite the wind and spray there is something compelling about a long stretch of beach, like the suck and draw of the tide that hits its left side, and so they are drawn naturally into the wide sweep of empty sand, almost as if they want to inhabit it, to mar its emptiness with their figures. And the hallucinatory pull of empty sand increases if anything with penetration of the beach, since there is always another stretch to be walked across, quite virgin, with only the ridges where the sand has gathered, driven by the wind. The brothers, standing hands on caps by the open doors of their cars, can see them set out as quite a homogeneous group and as they walk down farther, scatter gradually, like pebbles thrown across the white expanse by a hand, seen in slow motion. Rene is somewhere in the centre of that group, becoming a thin, almost single thread, only recognisable by the evenness of her walk. And the crash and b
oom of the tide on the wet sand that coats the air with its moisture. This is their first beach of that tour of course, and the reason for their tour of course is summer and beaches and so there they must feel that they have truly begun. That the other beginnings were rehearsals for this one. The more experienced ones of course, and Lili your experience with them then was three years old, would know while they would lose sight of that sea repeatedly through the rest of that summer, that sea would be their only plumb-line. It would be to them the way it is to a car, along a rocky coastline, where it disappears out of sight, is forgotten for long stretches and is welcomed on reappearance, like an old friend or an ultimate purpose. And they will leave it for nights, weekends, even half-weeks, when the line runs more conveniently through an inland town like Ballina. But there’s a perpetual return when each line reaches its end and there is the last small station, the structure of which changes continually, and the colour of the platform and indeed the nature of the platform’s adornment, and on leaving the station, there are the two hired cars to be taken to the view of beach and sand and sea once more. And the older hands will take a knowing pleasure of course in recognising the drivers, in greeting them with the quiet familiarity and lack of ostentation that characterises such recurrent relationships. And all the drivers will wear hats since it was, apparently, what characterised the hired car then, in the absence of a sign, from the car owned privately. And the hats will perhaps remind Rene of the much too large and angular hat worn by that youth who waited so patiently on the Bray prom until her father told him, ‘Home, Jack’. Though that first hat was military, but perhaps, like all first memories, the definition given to that hat was just like the definition given to first memories and she won’t have noticed such a difference after all.

  Lili, though, doesn’t admit or recognise the importance of beaches, but looking at her in those breaks between her talking, I can see the memory of that series of beaches written on her face, on the threads of tiny veins across her cheeks, for all the world like the criss-cross of currents on an expanse of water seen from above and on the still fine, though parched and paper-like skin on her hands, like those dried husks of cod’s roe one finds way beyond, generally, the sea’s edge, transparent, that scrape gently when you touch them and that are of course covered with a fine sheen of sand, for all the world like the down of hair. Her bones now seem as delicate as those of a gull’s skull, bleached, of course, and washed quite clean and when she opens her eyes to talk again they are bright, piercing and enthrallingly blue.

  42

  THE WALK FROM the Bray station to the Main Street passes a bowling green, a sunken lawn below sea level. It is flooded today as James passes and the black curves of three bowls can be seen, aqueous and silent. The wind which whips the bay behind him leaves that water unruffled. They greet each other at the presbytery door, both exhausted by the other’s absence. James moves into the curate’s parlour with relief and the decor of the small living-room brings back his ponderous, dark gestures that were once framed on Tuesdays by his own bay window. The arguments begin at once of course, although instead of Luke there is an aged greying lady in a green apron, strangely male in her angular movements, to bring in the tray with tea. James eats the tomato sandwiches and notes with affection how the flesh around Father Beausang’s collar has thickened. The excitement at their renewal of acquaintance, moderate at first, fills the room, then drifts and seems about to escape them, just to return, stronger than ever. Father Beausang’s eyes light with enthusiasm as he elaborates a conceit of his own, a numeral system based on trinities. James’s amazement is tempered by the curate’s smile, coloured once again with his old, wayward humour. No, not on the Trinity itself, he murmurs, but on a triadic base, which gives quite different, exciting results than that of your binary code. Would a society, Father Beausang muses, whose mathematics were built on a triadic code, have radically different social characteristics? Two, after all, is an oddly unsatisfying concept. With two one has the dialogue, the linear, but with three one has the conspiracy of space. And thus the triangle, perhaps even more than the circle, is the symbol of harmony; of definition within unity rather than just unity itself. Of course such a triangle can admit of no intrusion. A new element added and it becomes a square, another and it becomes a pentagon—

  Father Beausang stops and sees the world as a garden ravaged by intellect. James is staring into his cup. Father Beausang shifts forward and dust ruffles from his cassock, which blurs and haloes James’s face. I kept this for you, Father Beausang whispers, I thought you would want to know. He extracts the faded cutting from the Irish Times. James takes the square of paper from his soft fingers, which seem reluctant to withdraw. Emerald at Strand Hill, he reads. MacAllister’s Western Wonder.

  THEY WALK TOGETHER past the bowling green and the submerged bowls and part at the station. The curate grips his elbow as the train draws in.

  ‘YOU KNOW I never liked him. But perhaps that was jealousy. Or the impatience that uncertain people always rise in me. But then I loved Luke. They were so alike. Did I love him too? She did. And she loved me. When he came to that hotel in Gort and Luke saw him through the glass and ran to him, I hated him. I thought it was over. But I was wrong there too. I know that three of them were necessary. Now I know that. You ask me who was the father. I say both of them were. He had been following us, you see, from sometime back in Sligo. Some place, I mean,’ she thought for a moment. ‘And he found us in Gort. Or was it in Lisdoon?’

  AS THE TRAIN pulls him with an ease that must have been like a long silk ribbon, since he is not conscious of stops, station changes or of the evolutions of landscape through the window, he remembers those bowls sitting on the grass, the slight upper curve above the quiet surface and the sphere below distended and enlarged by the water that held them in its pool of green. He realises that bowls seem always at rest, even when thrown, but he has never seen bowls so much at rest as these, the spaces across which they normally spin occupied by water. And the water touching each eliminated distance, and the need for movement. He reaches Ballisodare about midday and books one of the capped drivers to take him to Strand Hill. The other driver follows close, capped and curious, since James is the only passenger.

  THE CAR WHEELS into the square of cement and comes to rest between the sea and hotels. They have left Strand Hill, of course. His conversation with the cloth-capped driver has told him as much. James pays and walks across the square to the hotel that looms towards the sea and weeps its granite. The few posters in the lobby tell him the same. He has forgotten the date, but no matter, those posters hang limply from their corkboard with the sense of an event that has passed. To where? he wonders. Another town, but which? He sees her round, childlike signature in the guestbook and books that room. It is a single room, he finds, with a bare, narrow bed. His eyes crinkle in disappointment or affection, imagining Luke’s bed three rooms down from it. He sits on the bed and the boom of the sea comes through the window like something solid and he regrets for a moment the camera he has left swinging in Sydenham Villas. The grey light of those western seaboards that seems more an echo, a reflection of light than light itself, that vanquishes the space between each stone, each hill, quickens his senses with the urge to capture it once more, to photograph. But instead he sits there with, I imagine, a growing sense of relief, drawing his eyes as near to the window as possible, and all the scenes he has taken come back with the precision of memory alone. They return fast as if pulled by the ribbon of those years, each replaced by another, the moving picture of their souls. He sees Luke age from puppy fat to sinew, he sees her move in three large leaps to womanhood and it seems to him that the only sprocket moving them is love. Their surfaces, as he views them, change and shift and never settle, but it is light, he knows now, only light that allows him to view them and the light is that of love. And the light that alone brings the booming sea outside to him floods through the glass, filling the room with its weakened cobalt, a presence itself.


  ‘YES, IT WAS Gort, Gort. We were in the lounge and he saw us through the glass, coming in. He must have travelled down the coast from Sligo. Difficult, I’d say, since the tour was out of rhythm. He must have gone to each town and asked. Then searched around for the next one. And asked again.’

  HE READS THE provincial papers but finds no ads anticipating her, only reports in retrospect, after she has passed through. He walks out on to the cement square. He sees the long stretch of sand, virgin once more, and feels their presence somewhere down that coastline. The air is wet with spray, the clouds are full again and his quest is somehow fixed, that fullness drawing him on. He knows their absence is illusory. He asks the driver to take him to the train.