The Past

by Neil Jordan

  ‘THE MORE SHE grew, of course, the better he could find us. The fuss got bigger as she did, the crowds kept coming, larger each time. And the reviews. That article compounded it. The Times couldn’t outdo the Independent or Press, I mean, and we soon had the problem of meeting all sorts of critics in the oddest places. The newspaper style then was the crushed cap and notepad and the chewed stub of pencil. You’d see them lounging in the back rows of those crowded halls, chewing and writing, chewing and writing. What was happening on the stage had almost ceased to be important. We changed the play, and they hardly noticed—’

  IN BALLINA, THERE is no beach, just the inlet of Killalla pointing towards the heart of the town. He finds a poster, flapping on a lamp post. He walks towards the hall in which the Emerald Theatre Company played. The bowls move towards each other and click. The front-of-house doors are arrayed with posters sagging from their pins. He pushes the bar and walks through the door, as hesitant as ever. It is a parish hall, with frames of de Valera and the Virgin on the left-hand wall. There are rows of seats screwed to the floor which give the hall some air of theatrical purpose. The open door throws light towards the stage and a breeze must be sawing through for the dust rises from the bare boards and wheels in circles and cones.

  ‘SUMMER HAD COME. The heat grew and there was a stretch in the days. Rene’s Rosalind grew with the heat. We used the white gown for her with oceans of room. We had to thread it with green. The heat in the halls was cloying, but we bore it. We weaved onwards, swelling as we went. MacAllister lost more of his hair—’

  HE KNOWS THEY must travel by rail and that being the summer they would favour resorts. He draws a rough itinerary of the seaboard towns nearest the rail lines. He will look for signs, he thinks, that will point the way forwards. These signs will be waiting for him, to be teased out from the facades of towns, the surfaces of streets. In one square there is a Civil War statue with a stone cap staring beyond the roofs of houses. In another lies a cement road crumbling into beach and burrows. Modes of transport, he knows, can tell him a lot, the texture of each station his train pulls into and the car or buggy that draws him when his train fails. Hotels can tell him more, the shapes of window, bed and wash handbasin, the odour of boiled cabbage lingering in the hallways. There is no hurry, he knows, for once his journey is measured in minutes no longer but in a unit of time that has its own momentum, has no need for numbers. He senses that his looking for them is as vital as his finding. He swims at each beach he comes to and is hesitant entering each stage door. He questions young girls in hotel porches about everything but her and finds himself led back to her in the most delightful way. He talks of the weather, of the holiday season, of the big house. The wave that hits his body at each new beach seems a cousin of the last one. The posters pull him onwards with a rhythm of their own. Summer golfers tell him how the wind drives each ball eastwards, how one’s best bet is to slice an angle towards the sea. Young maids have quite forgotten de Valera’s sweep of here in 1919. The rocks his father painted begin to seep through the landscape. Schoolteachers tell him the history of each rath, each crumbling wall. Her posters vanish from one town and reappear in the next. Everyone is somehow related. He learns of her by proxy, in the most delightful way. She grows in the descriptions of her as he moves downwards, or is it that people raise their voices more? The rock comes to flood the landscape, pushing out the grass. He avoids large towns, since they never speak as much. The grass grows lusher, in green defiance, as the rock encroaches. There is the plenty of the season and the vegetables crowd the shop-fronts and a vat of milk spills and floods a broad street. He walks through it past a church entrance where the milk laps the feet of the Virgin’s statue. They multiply themselves as he travels southwards and all roads lead to hallowed places, while seeming to lead just to other roads. He searches them out in turn, the trees copper with hammered pennies, the rivers flowing upwards, the cloths that simulate blossoms on the blackthorn branches. There are fields of rock now, intricate, ornate, more luxuriant than grass. A nun talks of her in Spanish Point on a beach where the sea meets a river. He finds she fills imaginations now and the white and pink house fronts of Milltown Malbay are dotted with posters. An election coming, a capped man told him, driving through. And beside hers, he sees, is one for de Valera. The posters thicken as he drives. The rock, having ousted all grass, gives way to grass again. The posters flap in the east wind and draw him away from beaches and he senses an end, or an arrival. He moves in a half-circle, skirting the coast. Descriptions of her grow, become personal, people talk more of her and less of those delightful incidentals such as weather. And on the train to Gort when a woman, fluttering her eyelids in the harsh sun of the seat opposite him, talks of a chance encounter with her childhood friend, he realises what he knows now he has all along known, that she is pregnant.

  ‘AND THE LAST few towns were those little ones in Clare. It was all her walk and her sense of poise could do to hide it, no matter what clothes she wore. We circled round those towns as if MacAllister wanted to exhaust the whole of Clare. Lisdoonvarna was to be the end, you see, the festival week, you know about it, September in Lisdoon. So he pushed his time to the limit, dicing with fate. We tried to walk as little in public as we could, was it verging on the blasphemous, I wondered. We met some nuns in Spanish Point, like awkward birds they were, clutching their habits in case the wind clutched instead, and I could have sworn they guessed. But we made it to Gort, which was the last one before Lisdoon. We drove into Gort as the sun fell over the square. I know the sun never falls but it seemed to be then, just frozen in fall, lighting the bronze hair of that anonymous man of ’98, was it, and the bronze shaft of his pike. We sat in the hotel lounge watching the light travel up to the tip of that pike as the sun went down. And it was that deflected, amber light full with the dust of late summer when I looked through the glass door out to the lobby and saw the front door open a little, then stop, as if outside someone had changed his mind. Was it a premonition or was it that I recognised his way of opening doors? I remembered that day in the advertising studio. I wasn’t surprised when I saw him stooping through the doorway. Neither was Luke, who jumped up, opened the other glass door to meet him and said with a voice that could have included the whole world, Father, we are pregnant.’

  SEVEN

  LISDOONVARNA

  43

  THE GREAT SOUTHERN Railway looped a triangle then round the miraculous Burren. The main line ran from Galway southwards, through Gort and Ennis where a narrow-gauge single-track flowed off, like a seasonal tributary, towards Ennistymon, Inch and the beaches at Kilrush. The line of the coast completed the triad. And though the narrow-gauge is long out of use, as I travel with Lili on the broad one towards Gort I think of how the bare facts of landscape are softened by patterns like these. There are platforms of rock, bare scourings on the landscape, the remains of stone churches that have the grandeur of signs. There is map upon map, the excreta of years, harder now than the rock itself. So the Great Southern line followed the contours of a landscape which set the pattern of ages and the movements of people who were followed by MacAllister who was followed by Rene who was followed by James and is followed by me. De Valera sped behind them in a car, towards his election posters. Everything, James Vance learned when he entered that Gort hotel, belongs to everything else. Brigit, the Vita Sanctorum tells me, traced her own Clare itinerary, leaving meadows where bogs were. The train shuttles and pulls us forward, equipped with broad felt seats and neck rests and Formica tables in between. Lili is delighted by movement. She points to the sunlight, sheared by the procession of hills. Did you notice a car, I want to ask her, speeding past the tracks bearing a gaunt frame in a gabardine coat? But she doesn’t hear. Who am I to question things? I wonder as the train pulls us through Ennis, past where the Kilrush summer track lies rusted and worm-eaten. I will follow James and alight at Gort and the texture of the platform will be a firm ageless blue-grey, the colour of those slabs that run from here,
I’m told, to Moher, that raise their grassless, earthless shoulders somewhere to my right and slope down, all cracked sweeps and crevices, to the sea. Flowers of rare beauty bloom in those crevices. I rest content with imagining them, as I must with imagining that other, innocent, narrow-gauge track and the black and gold livery of the G.S.R. engine searing like a dash of Victorian optimism through that landscape of grey rock and green to the garland of towns by the sea.

  The train gathers speed and Lili’s delight grows. Somewhere to my right she gave birth to the child with two fathers, father and son themselves. History headed towards that fact and seems to end in me as great gusts of air begin to shoot through the carriage carrying the odour with them, is it of decay, of limestone, of diesel or generation? Lili has opened the window, I see, and the air rushes in. I breathe in more than I should. The draught hurtles through the window to the melodeon doorway and lifts the black veil off a nun in the seat beyond us, exposing a pair of grey fluttering lashes and eyes.

  I stare at the sparse grass passing in the field beyond the bare whitethorn. It would have been the end of summer when James reached Gort and the whitethorn would have been just like that, bare since the spring, and he would have watched with me the grass slowly vanish, combed from the rock to leave it grey and formless, until the train slid between blocks, small ones first, then large enough to form a platform, and the train steams into that blue-grey texture, the steam and the rock surface both absorbing the light until all around the windows, through which James can see the town appear, is this metallic glare. The train stops then and the smell of diesel fills the carriage with the grey-blue light.

  ‘NOW WHO WOULD have known,’ said Lili, ‘when he stooped in that doorway, and Jesus when I saw his stoop the sinking feeling came on me again—I mean, I knew the average door-jamb was too small for him but why couldn’t he bend from the knees and make it a little less obvious, did generations of joiners and wainwrights, I mean, set about perfecting the average height of the Irish doorway just to give him an opportunity to stoop from the shoulders? But even given his permanent sense of apology to the world at large, who could have foreseen the odd marriage the three of them would make? Johnny Newham was at the bar and Ferdia O’Haodha and beyond them MacAllister and beyond him in turn me, in whom the old goat was at last taking some interest. But all three of us saw the door open a little and then close and then finally open fully and then this stooping shadow that we knew must have something to do with Luke—I mean, his length and his transparency were all there in embryo. Have you ever seen a plain mother whose features transpose themselves, item for item, to her daughter and emerge there incomparably more beautiful? Well this image of length and hesitancy that turned to beauty in his son got up to greet him and stood there, neither of them touching and yet both so much the image of the other’s hesitation it was as if they were embracing. And Luke said “Father . . .” No, you couldn’t have told seeing James Vance coming in the door what was to emerge. We had assumed Luke was the father. But seeing them beside one another you could sense it, scent it. The smell of that incongruous union filled the bar, I mean, like ripe apples or steaming hay—’

  WALKING OUT OF the limestone station a kind of fetid air like steam or hay did fill the streets. But then it had just rained and the last heat of the day was raising vapour from the pavements. There was the square, much as Lili described it, and not too far from the station either with a glorious stone pikeman the blue-grey of that whole county, the sun glancing the blade of his pike into fire. A cart loaded with September hay passed us and the scent of rotting stayed behind. Lili led me towards a plain hotel. The cart drove slowly round the pikeman to the westward road.

  IT IS WHAT all the surfaces intimated. The plate of dull metal, the sheen of blue, the shreds of eucalyptus rotting on the sloping hill. Everything turns into everything else, James realises, almost at the end of his passage through that country where everyone is related. Cousins once and twice removed, fathers, sisters, sons and brothers seem to await him in that bar which he fills now with his scent of damp hay, sweet, heady and glutinous. The scent of decay, he realises, is not far from the scent of birth. Nothing is separate.

  THE LARGE WOODEN doors were open and led towards a foyer in which everything was wood. The jamb was low so that even I had to stoop to avoid cracking my forehead. Am I as tall, Lili? She doesn’t answer, but walks briskly to the glass doors and pushes them open, squinting after the low sunlight outside.

  ‘SO THOUGH I had almost willed,’ she whispered, since the lounge before us seemed to impose silence, ‘his head to crack on that jamb, when he came towards us with Luke, I couldn’t. There were so many things I didn’t know, I realised, and one of them was that between Luke’s demeanour and his there was no difference, no difference at all. My sly passion for that whey-skinned youth, which was my passion for Rene, how could it not be my passion for the kid’s father with whom for all I knew Rene was more passionate than with any of them? That was one of the things I didn’t know. The other was that Rene was more pregnant than even I’d calculated. She always had an adaptable figure. Did I tell you that? And when they came towards me I couldn’t care which of them was father. Which of them was Luke even. And MacAllister’s beam was the largest of all. Well, I’m blessed! he said, when I told him who the tall one was. And when he was introduced, he said it again: Well, I’m blessed!’

  I WALKED FROM the lounge through the wooden foyer. Lili stayed there, at the glass doors. The wooden front doors threw in an oblong cascade of light and framed the square outside, half amber sky, half blue-grey brick. The foyer narrowed and changed to a corridor which narrowed again. I knew now it was eternally simple. Each through loving each loves the other, father, son and her. Could I forget the perennial which, I wondered, hoping the rooms would provide an answer. But the wood of the corridor gave way to veneer and to a white tiled floor. I realised that I was in a recent extension, an architecture that could never have been fifty years old. So I walked back to the foyer and climbed an oaken staircase, certain that it would lead to the old rooms, so strong was the scent of generation from above. The oak curved under my hand as I went upwards and I was suddenly weak with pity for her, whom they both loved through each other. The scent grew as I ascended, and with it my pity. She had to bear all of them, I thought, as well as me. Two rows of doors stretched down the upstairs corridor. I chose one, following my nose. I edged the door open and saw white gauze curtains flapping by an open window. There was a table beneath it, with a curved jug and an oval hole which once would have held a basin. I went inside. There was a narrow bed. I stood for a while breathing the scent of clean linen. The scent changed then, as if a woman had entered behind me. I turned, but there was no one there. The room was as empty as ever. Then I saw the open window, where the exhaust from the Lisdoonvarna bus was drifting past. Nothing is distinguishable, I realised. The exhaust curled through the window like a beckoning finger. A wind brushed the curtains once more. I walked out then, down the stairs towards Lili and the waiting bus.

  44

  THE ROAD TWISTS and turns so much that our bus seems always to plough through the cloud of dust and diesel it has just created. It is no coincidence that every bend is the bend we have just turned and that but for the balding landscape our road would seem almost circular, just as it is no coincidence that when Rene, James and Luke ploughed through this road (and there was more dust then) de Valera followed soon after with his driver, Jack. Neither is it coincidence that what fields there were on either side were strewn now, as then, with gouts of cut, yellowing hay. For all three trips were made in September the way most trips to Lisdoonvarna are and were, and the cut hay yellowed what fields there were round the town where the unmarried gathered on verandas looking for spouses and the feeble looking for cures. It seems more than the smell of hay as we all drive forward, circuitously towards the town that I have never seen, a recreative town, Lili tells me, without the sea. But how can people holiday, I ask Lili, without
beach, sea, promenade and Eagle’s Nest? There were spa waters there, she told me, which compensated. And that smell of hay which grows thicker as we corkscrew forward as if we are piercing towards the generative process itself reminds de Valera of nothing so much as the yellowing water that comes from the round hole of the sulphur spring. He is familiar with all the rites of his small nation. He has memorised the precise balance of sulphur, iodine and phosphorous in the separate springs and yet all four springs are one to him, part of that healing process, the bubbling core, the well of cold health, Clare, renewal, that elusive elixir of abstention politics and national health. Rene, being driven also by a hatted driver in a car in which Lili took the front seat with her and Luke and James the back, takes the smell as the corollary to the colour of her hair and her condition. And it was, Lili swears, as if it were made for her, a kind of supplicant enticement, and every field we passed through bright only in so far as its yellow gouts of hay matched the colour of her extraordinary hair. I could feel her responding to it, her leg would tremble against mine, or was it just the antics of that extraordinary driver? He remembered us from last year, you see, and even he had heard, knew in advance, the reputation of our current tour and drove so the car leapt over that road, seemed to rise from the tarmac when we took those tangential bends and seemed to be driving round, back up our own behinds, but with a speed and lightness that made it a journey, a real journey. Her leg trembled and I drank in the smell of vegetation, cut vegetation, hay-sodden grass or falling leaves, I couldn’t have distinguished, but the kind of smell created by those years of falling that made the boglands, didn’t they, I could hear the crashing of mile-high trees, evergreen leaves that you couldn’t see now and the vegetable matter pressed into earth, oil and peat-moss and growing and falling again, and that this whole circus left just this delicate film of hay on those stubbled fields seemed to me—well, a final affirmation if you like, that brutal machine of years and that yellow down which at times looked even more fragile than the flat, even watery, texture of her hair. But that tremor—it runs from her thigh now down to her instep—it could have been—I had no idea, as I said, how advanced.