by Colm Toibin
I only mention this because off-stage dead children always make me cry, and after many years of crying in precisely the same way for different dead children I realize that it is always the same child that is on my mind, and he (it is always a boy) is always blonde and curly-haired and about six years old. I don’t know why, it is just that when a woman, often in her slip, touches her belly and talks about the child she had that died, or the child she nearly had, that died, I feel a caption should scroll across the top of the proscenium arch saying, Women have their sadness too. Though it is possible that these male playwrights are saying that a woman’s sadness is the only sadness; there is no other kind, and all the rest is noise.
Illustration 10: Molly Allgood
10 Collaborators ~ By Joseph O’Connor
There is a part of the garden, by the cluster of sycamores, near the bend in the drive where the gravel is wearing thin. If he stands there, quietly, on a still Sunday morning, when none of the servants is around to annoy him, and when Mother is up in her room at her scriptures, he can hear the distant approach of the train from Dublin: the windborne shush-and-chug that means she might be coming to him again. He is thirty-six now, already very ill. Painful years have passed since he stopped believing he could be loved. The power of what is happening terrifies him.
He leaves his mother’s garden, makes hurriedly for Glenageary station: up the willow-lined avenue, towards St Paul’s Church of Ireland. Past the entrance to the quarry-lanes known locally as ‘The Metals’, through which the granites were hefted long ago for the stanchions of Kingstown Pier. There are days when he feels hammered; his breathing sometimes knifes him. But punctuality is important, a sign of respect.
The walk from his mother’s house takes about seven minutes. Often, he arrives as the locomotive is chuntering to its screechy standstill and belching grimy spumes of cinders and mizzle. He skulks in the station portico, not daring to hope, lowering his eyes quickly if a neighbour happens past. It would not do to be seen: not yet, not here. There is the age-difference between them. There are other differences, too.
And then – where can she be? – she materializes through the smoke. There she is, beckoning circumspectly from a Second-Class window. It is like a small moment out of Tolstoy, perhaps, one of those seemingly simple but reverberating images he values in the novels of Russia. He pictures her stepping down through the vapour, the soot, and then hurrying along the platform to him, parasol in hand. She comes to him through the filth, her face hopeful and kind, the steam moistening a strand of hair to her forehead. But this can not happen. People might see. There would be talk around Glenageary.
Instead he boards the train, takes the bench opposite her in the carriage. They are like a couple of collaborators plotting a treason. Outside, the conductor is slamming the doors. A whistle is blown. A green flag is flourished. As the engine gives a shriek and they judder away from Glenageary, he begins to feel something like relief.
From the pocket of her raincoat is protruding a playscript, he notices. She uses the journey to learn her lines. No one could say she is beautiful, exactly, but she is an actress: she is able to decide whether to be beautiful or plain. Like a ‘changeling,’ he tells her; his preferred endearment: like many sweet nothings, an ambiguity.
The train clatters into the tunnel at Killiney. He is alone with her in darkness. He feels her hand steal into his. This thrills him, charges him. No one can see. The moment passes quickly, there is a sudden dazzle of light, and the panorama of the bay is magnificent: Italian. It will not be too long more before they come coasting into Bray, where nobody knows him. Bray is safe.
Passers-by might think them a father and daughter, as they exit Bray station, and she links him at the elbow, and they go walking down the promenade in the direction of the Head, through a swirl of dirty gulls and old newspapers. He looks older than his years; she looks younger than hers. He has achieved some recognition in the field of playwriting – translations of two of his works have been performed in Prague and Berlin, he is co-director of the Irish National Theatre Society – but few in this frumpy Little Brighton would know he was a writer, and fewer, if they did, would care. His companion has appeared in three of his plays: bit parts at first, but she was soon elevated to leads.
Their affair is a year old. He has been hurt in love previously, has long been introspective, harrowed by depressions. Social life in Dublin he finds a crucifixion. He loathes the vulgarity, the backslappery and falseness: ‘the cheap commonplace merriment’ of it all. He tells her she should be civil to her fellow actors – ‘steadily polite’ is the way he puts it – but must always wear a mask, must never trust outsiders. (By ‘outsiders’ he means everyone except himself.) Above all, their engagement is to remain a secret. There could be whisperings in the theatre. People would have views. Yeats and Lady Gregory do not think it quite correct for a co-director and a mere actress to be so familiar. There is also the problem of Mother, of course. The news will have to be broken very gradually to Mother.
They slog around Bray, back to Loughlinstown, or Shankill, trudging weedy rutted laneways, puddled boreens, like a schoolboy and his first sweetheart on a glum little tryst with no money to go in someplace out of the rain. The things he finds fascinating, she can’t understand them. Rocks. Bushes. Moths. Deserted nests. A squirrel – look! – falling out of a tree! (‘Holy Moses,’ yelps the playwright: his favourite profanity.) This dreamer is a covey who gazes into a hedgerow like a debutante staring into a jeweller’s window.
She does not like all this walking, becomes tired very quickly. Unlike her Old Tramp – this is how he styles himself – she has to work hard, whether or not she is sick. There are no housemaids, no servants in the place she calls home. She rehearses most days, is on the stage almost nightly. She has not yet fully learned the breathing techniques of an actor, that acting is about the body as much as the instincts, and the director is pushing her hard. The work is demanding, often exhausting. So she sees walking as primarily a means of getting to some destination, whereas Mister Honey appears to regard it as an end in itself. Occasionally she suspects he feels the same way about courtship. An agreeable hobby, not leading to anything but literature.
He feels strongly that she should learn, should improve her mind. It is time for her to stop reading ‘dressmaker’s trash.’ He gives her novels he has selected, volumes of verse. Soon she will be ‘the best-educated actress in Europe,’ he says, as though the phrase might one day appear on a poster bearing her image. He wants her to take pride in what he calls her progress. She is to keep notebooks of her reading, as he does of his own, listing works for which she cares and the reasons why. He has ‘wheelbarrow-loads’ of such jotters at home in Glenageary. He has been keeping them for years. She should acquire this practice. There is a touch of Pygmalion and the Statue in what is happening between them, but there are times when she wonders which of them is which.
‘Come down and learn to love and be alive.’ In the version by William Morris, whose work he admires, this is the plea of unhappy Pygmalion to the cold marble effigy he so agonizingly loves. She wonders if her playwright, her lover of stones, has ever given thought to this supplication, how he would respond if he found himself its recipient.
He drifts, this tweedy tramp, dusty gentleman of the roads. Kilmacanogue. Enniskerry. The dolmens of Ballybrack. The backwoods and cart-tracks of the Dublin-Wicklow borderlands. He has no map, no compass, no plan except to keep walking. Over the crest of the next hummock, there will always be another one. Around lakes. Into grottoes. Through forests. Across streams. Jesus, can he walk. He must be the healthiest invalid in Ireland. No holy well or hermitage is allowed to remain unpoked-at. They traipse up and down the Sugarloaf until she can tell all the sheep apart. A pity love is not measured in worn-out soles; if it were, she would be a married woman by now.
Several times they have agreed on a date for their wedding. Always he finds a reason for the plan to be deferred. As a student, a capable violin
ist, he gave up the ambition of professional musicianship, because the petrifaction of stage-fright was too much for him to face. He is still frozen in the wings, she sometimes thinks, afraid to step out into the scene that is begging for him.
Probably some of this is Mother’s doing. His childhood was one of ‘well-meant but extraordinary cruelty.’ She gruelled him on the bible, on the castigations of Hell. He has been slowly roasted on the flames of her widowhood. He could never be a father, he resolved while still a child; parents bequeath us only their susceptibilities. ‘I will never create beings to suffer as I am suffering.’ She has an image of a terrified newborn, croop-racked, asthmatic, flailing at the banshees that swoop at his cot.
He doesn’t belong. Doesn’t want to belong. That isn’t quite right: he wants not to belong. ‘I am always a kind of outsider,’ he claims, yet he never stops fretting about what people will think. Life is drearily hateful in the bourgeois suburbs: ‘Kingstown, the heat, and the frowsy women.’ But it is to here he returns at the end of the day, when the rambles are over and the house-lights fade back up. His changeling is left to rehearse unspoken lines on a train to an empty room in the city.
Should they happen to see one another in the theatre during the week, he does not like them to converse. People might be listening. ‘You must not mind,’ he tells her, ‘if I seem a little distant. We can have our talk on green hills, that are better than all the green rooms in the world.’ Her mother, various friends all caution her to be careful, but she won’t be said: they don’t understand. She is only nineteen, she knows this is love. What matter if he’s a little odd? Writers often are.
Sunday is their usual day; she takes the quarter-to-eleven from Tara Street. It is a standing arrangement, but he often reminds her of it by letter. They roam the furzy slopes of Killiney Hill, or lie among its alpines looking down at the bay. The setting has the dual advantage of being Wordsworthian and discreet. Here they can be alone, almost certain of privacy. They feed one another the wild berries that grow near the obelisk: ‘fraughans’ in the vernacular, but she calls them ‘purple grapes’. This becomes one of their euphemisms, a love-phrase charged with intimate meaning. The fairy-woman and the vagabond, their transgressive liaison. It is like a scene from a folktale, the seed of one of his plays. Who is emancipating whom?
Sometimes he recites the lyrics he has written for her: his gifts. ‘I wrote another poem on you last night,’ he confides, as though he had somehow imprinted it on her flesh. But these verses are rarely sensual, are often a little oblique. Only seldom does he tell her, very shyly, like a boy, how much he likes to see her ‘in light summer clothes.’ At such moments, strangely, she has a powerful sense of his brokenness, of how difficult he finds it just being alive. There are days when he looks at an oak and sees only the makings of a coffin. He has no memory of his father, who died when he was a baby.
He can be jealous, furiously so, if he senses a rival in the picture. She is not to talk to other men, not to take one by the arm, is never to offer anything that might be read as an encouragement. Medical students, especially, are to be shunned, he insists. Such oafs are debauchers who ‘dangle out of actresses’ and brag of their seductions, of innocents led on. He is not himself a dangler, a stage-door Johnnie. No gentleman would inveigle a girl by holding out false hopes.
He is not conventionally handsome; that goatee makes him appear shifty. A face like a blacking brush, as one of his friends puts it. He looks faintly like a typical Irishman in an old Punch cartoon: beetle-browed, mercurial, recently down from the trees. But he is not a typical Irishman: he loves to listen. His few true confidantes have all been women. (‘People like Yeats who sneer at old fashioned goodness and steadiness in women seem to want to rob the world of what is most sacred in it.’) She talks to him about her clothes, about hats and gowns, her difficult sister, problems with money, arguments at rehearsal, ghastly ‘digs’ she has stayed in, grim tours around the provinces, her painful menstruations. He arranges for her to attend an eminent gynaecologist in Dublin; cannot bear the thought that she would be in needless pain. She used to be a shopgirl: she tells him about that. She smokes, quite heavily, and he nags at her to stop it.
He relishes the simple intimacies; of this she is certain. No man she has known has craved them more. And yet, when they holiday one weekend in the hills, he is adamant that they must take separate cottages. She finds him so queer. He is ‘highly-strung,’ he informs her. Every writer is. This is the price of art. She knows the price of art, has been paying it for some time. Some of the love-poems she has inspired seem like howls of grief.
He talks to her about Paris, about Germany and the Aran Islands, where the people are serious and allow you to be alone among them. He longs to show her these places. When they are married, he will. Everything will be all right when they marry, he feels, though Mother often wonders, as he can’t help but do himself, how he and a wife could manage on a writer’s pittance. (This is Mother’s way of making it clear that the family silver will not be subsidizing love-in-a-garret.) He hungers for the success that can give them independence. To escape from Glenageary, to make his own way: the need comes to fume in him like a lust.
He is working on a strange piece, set in a kind of Lilliputian Mayo, about a storyteller who bludgeons his father and becomes a hero in the process. The play is sending him mad; the correct shape for it is eluding him. He has been trying to conceal structural weakness with what he calls ‘strong writing’, but is beginning to discern that this is a cheat, that form and content must be wedded more tightly. He thinks there is a great role in it for his changeling, perhaps. His ‘Pigeen’, as he has taken to calling her lately.
They talk about this role. He listens while she talks. She is adaptable, amenable. Which changeling is not? She thinks he is a genius. He tells her that she is. She loves his dedication, his monkish graveness. Beside him, even severe old Augusta Gregory can seem a high-kicker auditioning for a cabaret. He talks about his characters as though they were real. ‘I wrestle with that playboy,’ he jokes bleakly, but he means it. It is as though these voluble buckos and fiery-tongued colleens were to be encountered any evening on a stroll through Mother’s garden.
He reads her a few soliloquies of the play set in Mayo, one warm Sunday evening on Killiney Hill. A bachelor is a ridiculous figure, he recites, ‘like an old braying jackass strayed upon the rocks.’ He looks up at her hopefully. Is that right, he wonders?
It is whispered among the stagehands that his people are landlords down the country, that they evicted tenants in the bad times, burned their cabins. Many’s the tramp has been created by this family, relatively few of them fictional. She gathers that he quarrelled with Mother about the evictions, but Mother pointed out, evidently with scriptural vehemence, that the tenants down the country were paying for his freedom to write, so he was hardly in a position to be adopting revolutionary poses. Mother and her sister grew up on the neighbouring estate to the Parnells’, often rocked his little cradle when the Chief was a baby. In later years, Aunt Jane grew fond of remarking what a pity it was that they didn’t take the opportunity to strangle him.
Months turn to seasons. Rehearsals turn to shows. His eyes are darkening; the weather she sees in them is sullen. He seems half in love with death, like Keats watching nightingales. Christmases come and go, and he coughs like a broken train, and still the old lady refuses to die. He is nearly always sick now: the growth on his neck makes him quake. There are fears he might be tubercular. He may need aggressive surgery. Often, he takes to his bed for days. He becomes convinced that the effort of writing ‘brings fever.’
And there is trouble at the theatre; there are faction fights, rows. What is it in theatre people that must always squabble? He is not a committeeman like Yeats, or a battler like Her Ladyship, though he is conscientious about management, thinks it important. But he’d rather be in Wicklow, roaming his rocks, ‘away from all good commonplace people,’ he says. He starts to advise his changeling
to become a writer herself. She is already a writer; she just doesn’t know it.
They write to each other daily, sometimes twice in the space of a morning. The reason, he says, is that she is never far from his thoughts. Often, while he is headlocking the playboy in Glenageary, or bicycling the dappled avenues, which he likes to do at dusk, when everything is quiet and he can breathe a little easier, she drifts onto the stage of his mind. He loves her so fiercely; he won’t let anyone hurt her, ever. ‘Not even yourself,’ he can’t help but add. His true nature is so kind, so scrupulously gentle; but always he feels the need to cloak it in ironies. He is the sad kind of Irishman who seems embarrassed by his own decency. ‘An afflicted poor devil,’ as he sometimes says.
She feels, if they courted more often and openly, that there would be less of a need for letters, and that this would be a relief. He rarely stops chiding her for not writing to him often enough. She doesn’t say what she means, she writes too briefly, she forgets about his illnesses, she breaks all her promises, she wants too much from him, she doesn’t want enough, she looked at him coldly, she winked at some spear-carrier. A Kingstown postmark makes her feel trepidation; the way his mother would feel if she glanced up from Leviticus and saw a tricolour flapping from the conservatory roof. If only they could spend time actually having their feelings, rather than thinking up new ways of putting them into words. But he seems to think nothing is real unless it is written down. (The heroine of his Mayo play will be first encountered writing a letter.)
