by Neil Jordan
OUR BUS HEADS for a cloud of vapour that’s like an embryo of the fields that generated it and passes through it, leaving its own cloud of dust and diesel. I can see the hay is falling off the fields now and the fingers of rock are showing through, a kind of crystal greyness that makes one think at first it is a trick of light, a refraction of the blue above.
We turned a corner, Lili tells me, or rather lurched round a corner, and she was thrown against me or rather sucked against me as if by a wind, and I was pressed in turn to the door. I could feel the pressure of something more than her body though, was it the heat or that cloying autumn smell, for a kind of September heat did fill the car along with everything else. But it was more than just heat, it was a pressure which could have been her weight, for as I told you her figure was adaptable and I had—we had—no idea of how far gone she was. But it was more than that too because for once James Vance seemed to sit upright behind me and had discarded his stoop and for once the driver’s cap low down over his eyes didn’t irritate me. It was—I hardly dare to say it, is there such a thing—the pressure of our happiness. Or hers. On me. Then the car lurched the other way and she fell away.
THE WINDOWS IN Dev’s car are tight though as he is forced gently against the door and then forced away again with the car’s movement. His face is abstract and expressionless, though somewhat kindly, eternally fixed in that gaze with which it met photographers, as if now it is anticipating a photograph. It never changes. The mouth is turned downwards without a hint of sourness, but in a contemplative moral curve, hardly departing from a straight line that is sad if anything, conscious of its need for consistency. His eyes are grey-blue, echoing the rocks that are filling the fields now as the hay falls off and the strict, wire-rimmed glasses shine with a hint of that blue that is embedded in every transparency. His glasses are misting now with the vapour which, despite the closed windows, seems to seep through every crevice of the bodywork. Or is it just the heat he generates? Does his body steam with its own logic, embodying as it does generations of effort, the doctrines of eight centuries? This steam has the smell of hay, that musty, incongruously feminine smell as if, nourished on the peat of generations of the fallen, its inherited heat rubs, steams and oxidises. He is considering a scheme for turf-fuelled power stations. The steam on his glasses gathers, forms two separate tears which drop to his cheeks, as if his eyes had shed them. The car lurches once more and approaches the town.
WE TURN A last corner and travel upwards for a small hill, and the unmistakable sensation that we have arrived fills the bus. The air tells us, all of us, that we are here, where some moments ago we were not, though the bus is lurching one last time. The sense of water in the air when the bus exhales to what is surely a halt in a small square ringed with hotels led to by streets which are sprinkled with hotels as I help Lili down. The bus coughs and moves on, leaves the square to the two of us. But the porous quality of the air, the patient facades of the hotels, every leaded pane of which seems to anticipate a sea where in fact there is none. Where do these winds come from, I wonder, this invisible vapour, that sense of mild bluster redolent of hay instead of brine? Every house is an informant, every shop-front seems built for a beach, and the gaunt metal frames yawning from each window, some of which hold that loose striped canvas, seem to demand a placid stretch of canvas deckchairs, their wooden struts sunk in the yellow sand. Was there a sea here once, I wonder, that rolled back, the texture of which this town wants to re-create, remembering an impossible golden age? The hotels face each other in mute pathos, the expectations of each belied by the others’ presence, in mutual pretence that the others aren’t there. Which one did they stay in? I am overcome by the multiplicity of choices and the porous air. All four of us sit on the white metal seats.
WE WALKED TOWARDS a patch of green and a white metal seat. There was a black, bowed figure on it. I recognised the folds of fat round the neck and the collar flecked with dandruff. I tapped him on the shoulder and raised a small cloud of dandruff like pollen from heather. It was indeed Father Beausang. He rose and stretched his hand towards Lili, his head bending forwards, a little too eagerly. Forgive me for following, he whispered after I’d introduced them, but I couldn’t help myself. He squeezed my arm, as before. I took Lili’s, and we walked around the square.
I PICTURE HER wearing a bulky, shapeless fawn-coloured coat. They all spill out from the cars into the empty square. She has her hands in her pockets and so drags the coat downwards, pear-shaped from her narrow shoulders. She loses James and then Luke walking past the hotel fronts. They see her among the faces and lose her again. She walks past the awnings and the leaded windows wondering will one of these roads bring her to the sea that all the facades seem to promise. She comes to the square and sees the grey shoulders of the mountains beyond it. Luke quickens his step and comes up behind her but then stops when his hand could touch her hair to call her back. He lets her walk from him. There is a patina of dust in the air and from somewhere the cries of children. A hotel door bangs. Every shop is closed. She sits on the white metal seat. Jack swings the car round one last corner and into the square. The proxy tears have vaporised again on his master’s cheeks as the car circles once round her seat. There will be stuffed trout on the walls of his master’s hotel and a large plaster statue in all three bedrooms, grey walls that are saved by the poignancy of the window’s vista, the quiet graveness of this square and the yellowing landscape broken only by the grey mound of hills beyond. He will drive him to the spa under different conditions than in 1919 and watch him drink his yellowed sulphur water from the brass chained cup without any sense of urgency. Then drive to Spanish Point, perhaps, Quilty, Milltown Malbay and beyond. Each town square will have only the surprise of recognition for him, notable only in so far as it is so much the same. Before he hears the disyllable Home, Jack. He stops the car and helps his master out and they walk towards their chosen hotel.
OLD AGE BRINGS a certain sweetness, said Father Beausang. What a pity James didn’t experience it. I would get postcards from him from the places he went through. Knock, Strand Hill, Ballina, Quilty. I knew hardly any of them, Salthill was the West Coast to me, so you can imagine how they loomed in my imagination. Lisdoonvarna I pictured as a town of gazebos, white metal bandstands . . .
IT WAS TO be the climax of the tour, said Lili, but I must admit I can still remember our sense of anti-climax when we drove in. Other towns had been bustling, crowds lining the seawalk and the posters flapping for two weeks beforehand. Well the posters were here all right, but no crowds. Morris Minors lining the outsides of every hotel all right, but to all outward appearances, a sleepy inland town. That was what threw us, you see, the fact that it was inland. I had to remember all over again. These aren’t seaside hotels, I had to remind myself, though they looked like it. These are spa hotels. So we pulled up and opened the doors and that heady vegetable scent of fullness exhaled and seemed to fill the streets. I could almost see it, like the yellow dust that rises with haymaking, drifting towards each open window saying, We are here. That it would get to them I had no doubt, on reflection. I had to remember, you see, that here it all happens indoors.
WE CROSS THE square towards the spa road. Dev strides ahead and Jack follows behind. They talk mathematics as they walk, a mutual love, even a necessity for all his personal staff. Jack’s uniform becomes lined with sweat, inevitably; there is not a breath of wind and the green texture of his Free State jacket loses any semblance of freshness, that bright sycamore green conceived in the childhood of this state saturated with both dust and moisture seems aeons old now, dandruff-flecked as if seeking out and exhaling in its turn the odour of years of vegetation, falling, regeneration and decay. They discuss the combustible potential of peat turf in kilowatts, ohms and ergs. The miracles wrought by the historical Brigit occur to him, who created flames out of mud and sand in an empty grate, who transformed an arid bog into a field of yellowing hay. He makes a mental note to visit her well, Liscannor, on the h
eights beside Moher. He passes Rene who must have seemed the embodiment of this yellow, but of course he doesn’t notice since his sight, bad at the best of times, has become clouded with her vapour, condensing into tears again on his rimless glasses.
THE ROAD CURVES from the town and the hotels fall away to be replaced by the borders of nodding fuschia. The scent is musk and heady and there’s the hum of wasps. Your first impact with Lisdoon, Lili told me, is deceptive for it is only when you have entered your hotel, signed the guestbook and settled down in some lounge for an afternoon snifter you realise the secret life of the place. Those bent shoulders in those wood-panelled snugs don’t belong, as you might think, to the usual assortment of cattle-jobbers and afternoon chemists but to bachelors in search of unwed ladies, matchmakers, fathers, uncles, cousins once removed, all treating with beautifully embarrassed civility subjects of the utmost delicacy. There’s no spitting on hands and hearty jokes. Instead there are everywhere deep blushes and sweating necks under stiff collars and stifling Sunday suits. Which might account for the extraordinary humidity of the place which I noticed had grown ever since we left Gort and went round and round those yellow September fields, but which once I entered the lounge of the Spa Hotel I found what possibly might be an explanation. Ah, I thought, it’s the odour of embarrassment, the sweating pores of the rite known as courting, that vaporous sign emanating from the shy and gentle rural males of the snugs and lounges towards the spotless matron who sipped tea as a rule on the sun verandas facing the street. And morning and afternoon were just a preparation for night, during which the embarrassment and humidity reached their climax in foxtrots, quicksteps, halting conversations and even hurried kisses, in the midst of whatever entertainment the town could provide. It was with some trepidation that I realised then that we were to be the entertainment for the night, we were to provide the focus for this coughing, underspoken rite and MacAllister beside me, hands shaking as he poured his mixer into his gin, I could see he realised it too. Our last night, he said to the assembled company, and then—Dublin. Would Dublin be able to hold us though, I wondered, seeing the clouds of expectation gathered round the bar and the air settling in the street outside, the opaque texture of which might, I imagined, have originated from the spa and the sulphur springs.
DEV WALKS TOWARDS the spa with both fists clasped tight and his thumbs rigid, a brisk walk, his long frame upright and his profile etched against the afternoon haze, tilted slightly upwards, looking forward. The line of his nose, strong and almost elegant, is what seems to pull his body forward, echoed by two deep lines falling downwards to the curve of each lip. Were there ever lines deeper than those and is it the sense of smell that pulls him forward with the profile of his nose, towards some distant future? There is something military in his clasped fists, more than military even, since his pace is easier than that of Jack who is now quite drenched in sweat and the former bright green of his uniform is stained to what is more like an earth-coloured muddy brown. Used to cars, armoured carriers and even horses, this soldier is quite unused to walking and feels himself slipping into the mists of his own perspiration, can hardly find the will to keep his eyes raised to the rapid, easy feet of his chief, whose light step straddles the past and whose profile points towards any number of possible futures. The road curves and leaves houses altogether for a moment, then rises a little and falls again and Dev can see the fields with their splashes of yellow in the distance and the circular road through which we all have come and below him, on this road, the chalet which houses the spa. I slow my pace coming down towards it. Built of wood and raised on stilts, it is striped like a boating hat, rich cream and black, and between the stilts which raise the chalet like wary legs afraid of dampening the hem of a fine striped skirt there runs a river. A house over water. I think of how apt those hotels are with their beach-like fronts. But Dev is familiar, he is familiar with everything and he walks through the gates, down the avenue without losing a step.
LUKE, LILI TELLS me, despite the day’s heat and excitement, had the sets up an hour early. Bless that boy, MacAllister said, and dragged us down an hour early to rehearse. We had come to the end, we knew, of Rene’s costumes and I had managed to pucker the last one, her matron’s smock, into something like a gown. The hall was wedged between decrepit hotels, and there was Luke when we entered illuminated by that cloud of smoke in the yellow footlights brushing down his canvas pillars, forests and his palace facades. We went through the scenes like sleepwalkers, the lines had so gripped us through repetition that they seemed not to exist anymore, what emerged was simply speech, undefined by words. How doth, sweet coz, said Rene and I saw how well my puckering had done its job; her figure, as adaptable as ever floated from shape to shape, caught by one footlight then by the next, and was like the words, indefinable. There was yellow gel over the footlights which gave her that ripened look. But this is September, I said when MacAllister wanted to change them, and yellow’s right surely, and would you believe, I turned to James Vance for confirmation. I had forgotten his stoop, his apologetics, all my irascibility. We are all persons, I simply thought, or even person. Isn’t yellow right, James? I called down into the belly of the hall but he wasn’t there. I turned to Rene and would have pinched her cheeks to highlight the yellow but she wasn’t there either.
THE ROOF IS triangular. The water surges through the stilts and disappears. Then night was coming, says Lili. Amorous night. The humidity gathered and the chaff and the yellow had compounded the dark. It was a smell, that night, not a colour. All the sideways glances and the shy gazes and the throaty whispers. I was sent to find her. I found her down here by the pools.
WE WALK DOWN long halls beyond the depths of the chalet and doors lead on either side to the pools, the brass taps. The sound of dripping seems everywhere, or is it Dev’s footsteps echoed by those of Jack, or James’s memories, perhaps each one dripping into that pool, which now envelop everything? The yellow sulphur water he drinks from the brass cup smells almost resinous and the elegant curves which the waters make from the flowing taps streak themselves with yellow and cream like his eucalypti of years ago. Everything turns to everything else, he thinks, and every image he has slid from his acid bath reappears in the damp oozing from the limestone and the encrusted brass of the tap handles. I see those pools leading to the caverns below and the large sea and every image this town implies reproduced in that darkness which intimates every form.
FATHER BEAUSANG BROUGHT a cup to his ageing lips. The messages were cryptic, he said. But how they spoke to me. I thought of James, his need for words diminishing. Of the talks we could have had. I pursued my researches into that exquisite system. Logos, the Word made Flesh, the aural connotations of the Virgin Birth. I made notes, hoping for lengthy discussions on his return.
DE VALERA COMES to the sister pools. He compares the motive powers of water with the combustible powers of turf. He lowers his lips to one, then the other. He sees his own face reflected, his spectacles like pools themselves. The curve of his mouth loses its strictness in the water’s ripple. He sucks with extraordinary power.
45
WE WALKED BACK the long road from the spa to the square of hotels. The light was fading and from the hedges the fuschias gave their last musky exhalation. I walked between her and Father Beausang through the scent on each side until the bushes gave way to the first few houses and the hotels began. Night was then down, amorous night. All the coloured bulbs swinging from the rooftops now came into their own. They glowed against the dark blue sky and obscured the stars. They caught the bare outline of the fingers of rock behind. They swung back and forwards, faintly moving orange shadows across us as if in time to the thin music that came from some hotel ballroom. Lili led us across the square to the hall of the last performance and the lilt grew louder. There was a small queue of people waiting to get in.
DO I HAVE to tell you, she said, how packed it was? You could hear the silence and the held breaths and the close stiff bodies. The light
s in the house went down. The curtain came back and the amber lights came up. Rene began her Rosalind. She said each line with an extreme quietude as if the time were there just for her. She moved from left to right in a series of still poses that were hardly movement at all. We were terrified, offstage and on. How could they not notice—
I PAID FOR all three of us and we walked inside. There was a shabby corridor with a lady taking coats. I gave her Lili’s coat and got a ticket for it. Father Beausang kept his dark jacket. We walked towards the hall and the music got louder. I recognised the tune. Do you know it? I asked Father Beausang. He squeezed my elbow and whispered, the Anniversary Waltz.
