by Neil Jordan
NEED I TELL you, said Lili, that they didn’t notice? They became one single eye, staring. I saw Luke behind the flat with the ducal pillars. He was reaching forward through the darkness as if always on the point of walking on stage. I saw James on the other side. He had to stoop to keep his head below the canvas. I could see the smoke of MacAllister’s cigarettes. I kept thinking of the end and the nuptial dance. I was waiting for it to come and hoping it wouldn’t come. It was all a dance.
WE WALKED THROUGH a pair of swing doors and the hall spread out before us. There was a band on the stage playing the chorus of the Anniversary Waltz. Couples swept in stiff and formal quarter-circles round the floor, mainly in one direction. They wore dark suits and white collars, navy skirts and patterned blouses, orange flowers on some bosoms, grey threads in hair. Some danced, some stood around the walls. The bachelors who stood around the walls waited for the dance to end. I excused myself from Father Beausang, took Lili in my arms and swept her out on the floor. Her hand clutched mine with a thin, brittle strength and the fluidity of her steps far outdid me. I trod on her toes. I apologised. My generation, I told her, has forgotten so much.
WE WERE QUITE bare, you see, on that stage. But there was a magic up here that disguised us. Her figure, as adaptable as always. Who would have known? I can remember a murmur down the hall then.
FATHER BEAUSANG SWEPT by me with a woman in blue. His small legs in their dark creases stretched upwards to accommodate her height. He was sharing some joke with her. She laughed out loud as she danced. He looked years younger, his face near hers.
I WAS AFRAID of that murmur. But it was just de Valera, I found out later. He came in late, with his driver chap.
LILI’S FACE WITH its multitude of creases and its fine down of hair. It was close to mine, her eyes were closed and her mouth had that smile of neither laughter nor pleasure but of remembered things.
You bring me back, she whispered. He was so like you.
Which of them? I asked her.
Both, she said.
I swept her up a small incline and on to the stage. The band were surprised but they kept on playing. The Emerald Ceilidh Band, said the lettering on the bass drum. We danced up there, while the hall danced below. The rhythm was 3/4, simple, eternal.
SO HE CAME in, said Lili, the father of us all. I didn’t see him. He took his seat like the rest of them. We waltzed towards the end.
THERE WERE SHREDS of curtain obscuring a proscenium arch. The footlights were weak, glinting in the metal of the organ and the electric guitar. I swept Lili past the band into the comparative darkness backstage.
THEN THERE WAS applause. Quite a wind of it. Huge gusts of it, shudders. It pulled her dress against her. It must have been a wind.
THERE WERE TATTERED flats of a landscape of hills, of a blue sky, a tree. I saw the white flash of what could have been a pillar. We danced between them, stepping wide of the canvas flats.
SHE BOWED. FROM the waist, like a clown or a girl.
I DANCED LILI out into the lights again and down on to the floor. I swept her in the longest of arcs towards Father Beausang and left her in his arms. They danced together, which was, I suspected, what they both wanted. I stood there while the couples swayed around me. I would have waved my arms, I would have orchestrated all their movements but they were all beyond me now, moving of their own accord. And it was a ladies’ choice, I discovered, when a youngish woman in a tight dress said to my face: Shall we dance?
46
WE TOOK THE Ennistymon road the next day in a hired car. Lili dozed on Father Beausang’s arm. His suit was crumpled and his eyes had a slow, meditative look. Tell me about Woman, I asked him. He smiled softly. Think of generation, he said, conception and birth in its scriptural shape. How man was made in God’s likeness and was given by woman to eat and how paradise died and the eternal now and how man became subject to chance, accident and time. But it was man who had eaten and woman who had given, man who engendered the seed of time and woman who nurtured it. Down to Joseph, he says, down to Mary and I can see that same haze touched with ochre and the almighty sun over some Judaean field and the oozing humidity of laurel groves. And woman therefore, says Father Beausang, loved by more than man, could not but give birth to the love-child untouched by time, resplendent, immortal. I see his eyes through the rearview mirror, shining softly. Lili shifts in the crook of his arm. We travelled, says Lili, back the roads we had come the next day, a sentimental tour you might say, but she wanted to see those trains again and we hired, would you believe, a separate carriage to take the whole company on the loop around the coast. Rene’s love for trains had affected all of us and out we journeyed for all the world like children with packed lunches and picnic baskets. Did it remind her and Luke and James, I wondered, of their beloved Bray express, could that account for the bliss that filled the carriage once the old porter had slammed the door in Ennistymon and the train moved forward in bumps, each one of which bumped her between them. It was our last day of course, and which of them I could call father I cannot even now fathom, both of them or neither. Her happiness rippled through the carriage and illuminated each of the seats the dust rising off the red felt covers as it was beaten out periodically by our laughing backs. And what, I ask Father Beausang, of woman now? Now as always and his words seem slurred, awaiting the second coming. Can God come twice? I ask and as the road whorls and whorls and we plough through our own clouds he gives me an inventory of signs presaging that event. Son will not know father, he tells me, and minor rail tracks will fall into disuse. Photographic images will substitute for faces, colours will reach us with the texture of smells, everything will become everything else. Jack drives de Valera towards St Brigit’s Well, Liscannor, and he stands on the heights and sees the historical Clare below him and points out the lands of Turlough the Packer O’Brien who could trace his lineage to Brian, to Niall, to Moses, to Adam and thence to God. Christ O my white sun, he murmurs and blesses himself passing the four crutches, entering the grotto, surveying layer upon layer of postcards, pleas and litanies fixed to the dripping stone. Who have recourse to Thee, he reads on the first one, Mother Immaculate he reads on the one below it. He peels away year after year until the dates and pleas become illegible, the faces of the Virgins fall away at his touch and he reaches the damp surfaces, whitened by mildewed paper, of the sodden rock where the water seeps through, beyond the reach of dates and years. The moisture clouds his glasses once more and promises tears. Home, Jack, he says. Could he be called a love-child? asks Lili, shifting in the crook of her prophet’s arm. Father Beausang smiles. Her happiness flowed outwards in waves, she says, in shudders that ran through the whole carriage, rattling the picnic baskets. Was it her I wondered or the small twin-cylindered engine puffing out its gouts of steam below us that seemed to answer to every ripple of hers. And MacAllister was staring with his cheek to the window blissfully waiting for the first view of ocean when I felt the water lapping round my feet, up to my ankles then over my knees, and that smell, was it hay or years or just the steam outside, and it was going through a small rocky field, I remember, coming to a level crossing that I realised the water was real, not just her happiness and I pulled the cord. Jack cruises to a halt and beeps his horn at the standing train but Dev patient as ever walks from the car through the field to the aqueous window. Father Beausang tips Lili’s cheek and now I in that standing train the steam of which was hissing towards silence through those waters and that musk of generation came.
NEIL JORDAN
NEIL JORDAN WAS born in 1950 in Sligo. He is the author of several critically-acclaimed novels including Mistaken, The Dream of a Beast, Sunrise with Sea Monster, Shade, and Night in Tunisia, a collection of short stories which won the Guardian Fiction Prize. He has written, directed, and produced a large number of award-winning films including The Crying Game, Michael Collins, Interview with the Vampire, The End of the Affair, and Ondine. He is currently the Creator and Executive Producer of the Showtime se
ries The Borgias. He lives in Dublin.
The Past
Copyright © Neil Jordan 1980
This edition published in 2012 by Soft Skull Press
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No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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eISBN : 978-1-593-76497-5
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