So Dermot ran and he never stopped running, from Paris to Rangoon, from Melbourne to Morelia, until he ran right back where he started from, the prison of his own instability. And the rest of his life he looked for the things that had been taken away from him—his childhood, his security, a boat, a home that was not a prison. He ran away, always looking for duplicates, for substitutes, for distractions. On the way he ran into some people running, apparently, in the same direction, like Laure, but sooner or later their paths diverged and he was left alone, a solitary runner.
He didn’t return to the dinner table in Morelia and they knew something was wrong so Mouse excused herself and went to his cottage. She stood in the doorway and looked at him. Silently. Appraisingly. Unsympathetically. Analyzing, deciding.
He sat on the bed, head down, now lost. He told her about Laure.
He said, “It’s Laure. She’s jumped ship. Or kicked me overboard. I’m alone, all alone. Orphan in the storm. Sunk.”
Mouse quoted, “Courage, she said, and pointed towards the land.”
“Not funny, Mouse. I’m alienated. Outside it all. I can’t even look at the crew any longer.”
“No, Dermot. That’s clear. You hate the job. You hate the photographer. You hate the models. You hate the hotel. You hate Mexico. And you don’t like yourself. No wonder Laure left you. You are now the Compleat Misanthrope.”
“Yes, I find them all repellent.”
“The strange thing is you actually like people at times. Even the French. The ones here are perfectly nice, polite and interested in you.”
“At the moment I go mad when the people here talk to me. All the men have pokers up their arses. And when the crew ask me for direction I walk away. The job is sick. Sick. A new cigarette brand for chrissake!”
“How do you feel about Laure?”
“I don’t know. She’s fine. Special. I love her. But the marriage has been dead for ever. A virgin when I married her and she stayed a virgin. Locked up tight. Couldn’t be touched. Leave little Lolo alone! Except at the beginning when I think she forced herself and before the death of Penelope. Very offputting. Then, with gritted teeth, dry and desolate. Afterwards, hysterics. Leave little Lolo alone! Acting as if it was dirty. Wouldn’t see a shrink. Became almost suicidal at times. Wanted to but couldn’t. Like a young hunter that couldn’t take the fence. Went up to it and always shied away. Wanted escape and found a new prison.”
“Did she have a puritanical mother? Ultra religious? Taught her that sex was unclean? For procreation only? Or was she abused when young?”
“Dunno. She refused to talk about it. Hated her mother. That woman was certainly religious. Went to Mass every morning. Her father was very withdrawn. Very well mannered but totally unemotional. No communication there. A nice man but cold. Last century ideas of paternal authority. Nothing, family, daughter, son, allowed to intrude on his moth-collecting passion.”
Mouse said, “Classical. How awful for her. But you seem to get along together. Everyone thinks it’s an ideal relationship. Not me. Chalk and cheese. The cultural gap is too wide. But I can’t conceive of you splitting up. You must get along on some level. The vertical cerebral?”
“A state of suspended animation. An armed truce. No verbal contact most of the time. A constant anger. “C’est ridicule!”—that’s all she can say whenever I suggest something. Antagonism. At times like that she’s Laurence. I mean it. She calls herself that. A holy terror. Make a good camp guard. Laure, Lolo, Laurence, you never know which role she’s playing.”
Mouse lectured, “Same person, different personalities. Soon they’ll try to prove they’re different persons. Multiple personality disorder or some such drivel. We shrinks gotta make a buck. Merely different facets of the same personality. Protection as needed. Authority when we want to project it. We all do it to a greater or lesser extent. Little Lolo is like a hedgehog curling up inside itself and showing spikes to the world of predators. That’s you at times. She can be absolutely charming. I like her. She’s inhabited.”
“That’s another role. In company, she switches on the compliments. Knows how to flatter. With a fine French veneer of good manners.”
“Oh, cut it out! Think a little. Be kind. Defense mechanism, that role switching. Age regression as Lolo. Back to the child to deter unwanted attention. Don’t touch me! Frustration leading to domination as Laurence, the expert. I know more than you! Charm, a need for admiration, for affection. Dissociative Identity Disorder, the book calls it. Crap. Elementary psychobabble, mate. Three faces, three fees. Whacko! Well, she’s French. And you do have some pretty shaky habits and irrational ideas. No one could live with you.”
“Yes, Doctor. French is what she is. Unless something’s French it’s no good. We’re all idiots because we haven’t been brought up the right way and we don’t have their corrupt attitudes. Or their culture. Berlioz, Balzac and a lot of pretentious bollocks.”
“The old joke. When God made the world and all the others complained about Him giving all the good things to France, the Alps, the Pyrénées, Burgundy, The Mediterranean, the Atlantic, etc., and He thought and said, ‘You know, you’re right.’ And to compensate He made the French. Sure, they’re different. Unboring. And you’re being neither fair nor sincere. She has an enormous problem and you haven’t helped her to overcome it.”
“Maybe you should have married her, Mouse.”
“I wouldn’t mind. But I think she’s completely hetero. Needs to be penetrated but can’t do it. And you put it in elsewhere. No wonder they say your balls rule your brain. Still, I don’t blame you. But you’re hardly a pillar of support. Always away.”
“Nothing to stay for, only strife. Fuck the French.”
“That’s today, boyo. Tomorrow they’re the salt of the earth. Civilized. Yer man Cezanne. Matisse. Bonnard. Baudelaire. Verlaine. Flaubert. And Rimbaud. Your heroes.”
Mouse continued, “She makes no concessions?”
“Seldom. Everything I say, she questions. Everything she does, I find to be done the wrong way. I get fed up with the constant put-downs. The Irish are all clodhoppers. I can’t watch the international news because she’s not interested in it. Only French politics and half the ministers and mayors in jail for corruption and presidents tapping telephones of likely mistresses and ordering the sinking of Greenpeace ships. Everyone does it, she says. My books are trash, better written by some French type years before. No such thing as celtic or anglo-saxon or Scandinavian art. Jack Yeats? Bah! Munch? Bah! All her friends, little ugly swarthy types, dishonest creeps from the Louvre. Condescending, with superior smiles. No backbones, any of them, but swollen heads.”
“I always thought they were a fairly conceited race. And unscrupulous. But her put-downs are merely resentment. Hitting back. You failed her. What do you do that most irritates her?”
“Well, I admire the wrong women. If I comment favorably on a girl she sneers. My God, she says, you have terrible taste! Elle est moche! Especially if the girl’s tall and blonde and Scandinavian or American. Not suffering from duck’s disease like the French. Only the Latins have that special God-given superiority. That magic. That mystery. They have as much mystery as the peroxide in their blonde hair.”
“Well, she’s insecure. You shouldn’t admire other women. It’s not nice if Laure’s repressed. These other things are rather trivial. Not the real reason for the clash. Intelligent people should be able to reach compromises.”
“Not me, Mouse. I loathe that word. Like moderation. I want to break out. It’s constant hard labor. Cultural incompatability, that’s the problem. Sexual too.”
“What about the Danish pastry? The Amazon I met?”
“Nana? She’s Swedish. From Malmö. Married to a German. Alsen. Lives in Hamburg. Just has a house in Gilleleje, Denmark. Pretends to be Danish because it’s more acceptable than Swedish or German.”
“Nana. What a childish name. Nana, here’s your banana! I’ll bet she eats it, too. What on earth do you see
in her? Just sex?”
“Christ, Mouse, I need to relax at times. Get out of the conflict. Nana’s full of sin but she’s untamed and I like that. The exact opposite of Laure. Open. Fun, too. A gypsy like me. Another walking wounded. Vulnerable. And a walking invitation to every man in the place. Need to be wanted by everyone. I can’t stand her mood swings for more than a week at a time, but for that week it’s a narcotic. No cultural one-upmanship. Even though I know she sleeps with others apart from her husband and I mind like hell. I even think I’ve slept with Nana immediately after she’s been with someone else. In many ways she’s an innocent child. Not responsible for her actions. Treated as an object, a beautiful object since her early teens. Always on display. A status symbol for rich old men.”
“And you’re not even seriously rich! Why does she go with you?”
“She says she loves me. She does, at the time. But it rolls easily off the tongue. Love is a very transient emotion with her. The duration of it is measured in millions. Pounds, dollars or D-marks. I’m a distraction. She’s bored with her husband. Her third. He’s filthy rich but mean. Watches TV, travels economy even though he owns two hundred buildings in Hamburg. Nana is addicted to luxury. With me she travels first. But I’m not strong enough to take her. Nor rich enough. I’m a diversion. But then life is a diversion.”
“Kafka said it first, Dermot. You resent Laure because she has a different culture.”
“And she’s locked up tighter than the vault of the Bank of England.”
“Ego and ownership, laddie, apart from passion deprivation. I think Nana’s your antidote at the moment. Physical release. Get the dirty water off your chest. Your whore. The town pump of Copenhagen. You don’t owe her anything. Run wild. Remember the old navy rule: when in doubt, panic. Go and get a fix. Think through your cock again. It’s infantile but. Forget the job. I’ve got your list of final shots needed. We’ll get them done. I’ll leave a message on your answering machine in Paris when we pack up. Take the transparencies to the studio in Zurich. They have your scribbles. The client won’t expect to see anything for two weeks at least.”
“I don’t know where to go, Mouse. No base any longer.”
“Where’s Nana? Jaysus, that name. She should be in a kindergarden.”
“In Denmark for the summer.”
“To Denmark you go. Then, isn’t it about time you stopped jumping around like a blue-arsed fly and went back to Ireland? Stay there for a while. Talk. Walk the highways and byways. Find yourself. The house at Piltown is available. Eileen O’Connor will look after you. I’ll go back there on my way to Switzerland. Get the place ready.”
“That’s not a bad idea. Maybe I’m ready for it. Face the demons.”
Dermot hadn’t been back to Ireland since he made a fast visit just after the war to sort out a legal problem connected with the sale of the house and tenancy of the farm. That time acting on impulse decided to call on old Paddy Harrington. He would fill in the gaps in Dermot’s knowledge about his father. He got more than he bargained for. He fled, determined never to return.
Sitting in the Harrington farmhouse, watching the flames and listening to the old man, who must have been seventy-three. Paddy’s father bought the farm when the estate was forcibly broken up in 1923, or maybe 1924. The Bessborough Hunt used to meet up the road, outside the main gates of Bessborough House.
Paddy said, “It must have been May, 1918, when Michael—your father, came back. I remember the lilac was in bloom and thinking of Rupert Brooke’s poem. I nearly recited it but one look at him finished that. I went to Fiddown Station to get him in the pony and trap. He limped along the platform dragging an old Gladstone-bag. I wouldn’t have recognised him if I met him in Sackville Street. He was different in all sorts of ways. Diminished. Shrunk. And he wouldn’t talk. He just hauled himself into the trap and sat there huddled in the corner. Like a wounded dog, I thought to myself.”
Dermot protested, “But he was wounded.”
“Oh, he was indeed. Two bullets on the Somme in ‘16 and a bayonet in the thigh somewhere else. Scratches to him. I’d picked him up after he broke his collarbone at a point to point and it looked as if he’d lost one eye, and when he came to he said, ‘I’ll be alright now Paddy: one eye and one arsehole.’ No, it was the gas that did it. That was at Passchendaele. That’s what finished him. A miserable thing. Shrivelled his lungs and destroyed him altogether. They gave him a one-hundred percent disability pension and when they do that they expect you to have the decency to die before you draw it too long. But still.
“There was something else.
“We went slowly up the Long Walk, t’was a grand day, with the big beeches murmuring, and the rhododendron bushes coming in from either side, and the smell of decomposing leaves and mossy dampness, and the scent of the lilac, and always the steaming horse manure.
“It must have been better than the smell of rotting corpses and I thought he’d brighten up because he used to love a gallop down there. Nothing would bring him out of his shell. When we came out of the wood and the house was there on top of the rise I pulled up. Not a peep out of him. He hardly raised his eyes.
“He was bent up, all six-foot-four of him, under the front of the trap, you’d think it was a parapet, shrunken into himself with misery, staring ahead unaffected by the old house. You had the feeling that he didn’t much want to approach it.”
Dermot insisted, “Well, he didn’t much like the place, you know. He was always saying Ireland was a kind of Purgatory through which poor Irishmen passed before escaping to England or America.”
“Is that a fact? Is that all you heard him say? ‘This village,’ he would tell you, ‘Piltown, do you know what it means in Irish? A hole. Draw your own conclusions. Apt, it is. We’re living in a hole.’ Then he’d take off on one of his flights of rhetoric. ‘What comes out of the hole? Bubbling out of it is misery. And guilt. We’re all flawed by the misery and the guilt that boils up out of the hole. It’s pure and undiluted. One hundred proof misery. And the watershed never sinks much below the surface. Always in good supply. It’s the spring of Failure. Not the water of life; the reverse. Drink it before the age of three, as the priests say, and I give you a failure for life.’ Another of his favorites was the Upas Tree. ‘Ireland,’ he would declaim, ‘is the Upas Tree of Europe. You know (turning to all the ignorant yahoos around) the Upas Tree is a Javanese tree so poisonous as to destroy all life for many miles around.’
“Or, ‘The land in the valley?’ he’d ask, ‘Tis like glue. It sticks to your feet and you can’t shake it off no matter whether you go to Paris or San Francisco. Oh, you may think you’ve shaken it off but back it comes at different times through your life. It’s like elastic. It lets you go for a certain time or distance but then, Wham! it snatches you back from whichever heaven you’ve found. The Land of Saints and Scholars? The Land of Blackguards and Robbers.’ Yes, he was a Jesuit in reverse. Always preaching doom about the valley and the village.”
“But you expected him to jump for joy when you took him home, Paddy.”
“I despair of you. You’ve been too long in America where they never look under the surface. You know he was a sailing man. There’s the real wind direction and the apparent wind direction. The apparent is what you see by the direction of the burgee at the masthead. But that’s influenced by the speed and direction of the vessel and it’s not true. He was like that. Apparently he hated the place. In fact, he loved it.
“And that day it was at its best. A clear, fresh day with pale sunshine and a few harmless clouds. Slievenamon reared up with its peak in the sun and the shadows passing across the purple folds in it. It’s like the Montagne Sainte Victoire at Aix. Always there, always different, always friendly.”
Dermot smiled, “A pity we’re not a visual race. We need a Cézanne. Jack Yeats didn’t capture it the right way.”
“Yes, lad, you’re right, if a trifle over-sophisticated.”
Paddy went on, “And the Waterford h
ills, all covered in trees, soft and blue. And the Suir rippling slowly through the valley. The demesne of Bessborough. And over there Curraghmore. He knew it all like the back of his hand. The best land in Ireland. Hadn’t he hunted over all of it? And fished every hole in the river? And, to hear them tell it, poked every girl behind every wall in the county. You couldn’t drag him away if you tried. I slowed the horse to a walk going up the Long Walk because I had seen him, many’s the time, tired and happy, walking The Conqueror, that great stallion with the provocative name, back from a meet.
“And I’ve watched him, unbeknownst to him, looking at the house and the trees and the round pond with the waterlilies, and seen him tearing around with his sheepdog, Sailor, who wouldn’t leave him for a minute. You wouldn’t believe it, being a rational man, but I’ve seen that bitch looking up at him and crying, when he came back, with the tears running out of her eyes.
“It was in his blood and every time he went away he was pining to come back. Like the rest of us. Maybe you left too early. You wouldn’t understand. But whatever he said about Ireland or Piltown or the house, what he was really saying was ’tis a curse that’s a blessing and the soil of it goes up through your feet and once it’s in you you never lose it. All these facile comments by our national geniuses like Shaw and Joyce and O’Casey are all very well. ‘It’s the sow that eats its own farrow.’ Yes, it is. But that’s not the half of it.
Colonfay Page 5
