Portobello Notebook

by Adrian Kenny

  One night he walked home from the pub with Mike Reilly, and as they drank whiskey from teacups in a ruined kitchen he learned that Mike’s wife had gone. Mike pointed to a faded newspaper photo pinned to the wall, of himself as a long-legged, handsome young jockey winning a race. That was all he remembered, though they talked until almost dawn; and though he was drunk he made his way back to the school over fields white with frost and moonlight. He was finding his feet.

  JANE, one of his old university friends, answered his letter with an invitation to a party. The embossed card said At Home. He had been away for so long that he felt like the schoolboys as he drove up to the city, and through the suburban roads where he had been reared. He didn’t call to his parents: he was starting a new life of his own. Jane told the others what an amusing life he led, but when he didn’t amuse them, they went back to talking among themselves. Most of them were lawyers, they all wore suits; he counted five sets of cuff links as he stood alone. Jane introduced him to a shy fat girl with goose-pimpled legs, then joined the others’ conversation. The girl looked at him in silence, as if at her reflection in a mirror. Then he walked over to Jane and said, ‘I have to drive back to the country. I’d better go.’

  ‘Of course. I understand.’ As she saw him to the door, she squeezed his arm and said, ‘Keep in touch.’

  He squeezed her arm and said, ‘We must go out together some night.’

  ‘Of course.’ She shook his hand firmly, to make things clear.

  It made something clear. As he drove back to the school, he said suddenly aloud, ‘Jesus Christ, never again.’

  THE OTHER SIDE of his old life had been in the west, where as a boy he had spent holidays. Now, when an uncle died suddenly, he drove there to the funeral. After a year in his new home this countryside of memories seemed threadbare. He had half-forgotten the flattened tar-barrels and old bedframes used as gates, the poor small fields, the friendly Lancashire accents of the women who had married local emigrants. His uncle had been one of those emigrants, but had never married; nor had his aunt. She cried and put her arms about him and asked why had God taken her brother? She had asked for so little, she said: someone to watch TV with in the evenings, to have sitting across the hearth. But as he watched TV with her in the evenings, as she sat the teapot on his Penguin book, talked of her sister’s drinking, took the tongs irritably to rearrange the fire he had laid, his anger returned. It was from that cramped home as much as from his Dublin one that he had fled abroad, and failed. He was glad to return to the middle ground he had found for himself, where he could start again, alone.

  AS ANOTHER spring came he went for walks along the back roads, exploring. One day at a signpost he met an old man on a bicycle, with a bundle on the back-carrier, who asked him the way to Ballinasloe. Justin showed him down to the main road. It stayed with him all night. Sitting at the head of the big classroom, supervising the boys’ study, he pictured the old man pushing through the dark to that country his mother had come from; and for a wonderful few hours he understood, and felt freed from her fierce nostalgia. Slowly, he was waking up.

  The headmaster had his own nostalgia for an imagined world, and as spring turned into summer he spoke of cricket again. He showed Justin a few stumps and a cracked bat in a tea chest, then directed him to Bill Galloway who might have something more. Following another back road, Justin found that it became the avenue to a big house. Wind was blowing through old beech trees; wood pigeons with puffed-out pink breast feathers looked down at him with small bright black eyes. It was a place where he would have expected to find another Anglo-Irish gentleman, but Bill Galloway was plain.

  He had been to the school where Justin was teaching, and his accent was as local as Mike Reilly’s, though with a firm tone. He said he played some local cricket and would gladly lend his equipment when the school had a proper field. He was up in his tractor, setting out to plough, but he sat there chatting of his life. His father had been born on a farm in England, but a remote relation had left him this Irish farm. Not sure what to do, he and his workman had cycled to Liverpool every Friday evening, taken the boat to Dublin and cycled down to maintain this place; then on Monday returned to England for another week. In the end, Bill said, his father had settled in this better, Irish place. Justin asked if he had ever seen the English farm. Bill shook his head and said that he had never been to England.

  A man crossed the yard to join them. Justin remarked on his voice, and he said that he had come from Mayo to work there twenty years ago. When he had gone, Bill said that he had come with only the clothes he stood up in and a kettle. The random way each had settled there, the way Bill spoke of the west of Ireland in the same easy incurious voice he spoke of England made this small safe place seem open to the wide world. Justin’s walks took him further week by week.

  Bob was another of the Protestant neighbours, a tall, lean, serious man with black curly hair, silver-streaked. He wore an old long coat of brown herringbone tweed to church on Sunday, and afterwards crossed the road to the pub for a single glass of whiskey. Bachelors tend to be very tidy or very untidy. Bob was very tidy. He was whitewashing the gateway to his farm when Justin wandered by one day. Bob finished a slow brushstroke, set the brush across the pail, then stood to talk. His brown hands were spotless. His great-grandfather had come from Yorkshire, he said, and arrived in this place only because it was as far as the fare allowed. The coach had set him down; he had found a bed for the night, and soon after found a job as what Bob called an ‘usher’ in the school where Justin taught. He had married, and in time his son had bought a few dozen acres, which Bob inherited. Justin learned that Bob had no time for parsons, or Anglo-Irish landowners; that he had refused Colonel Browne permission to shoot over his land, and refused the hunt, too. Then Bob picked up his brush and went back to whitewashing his gateway.

  EACH OF THOSE meetings gave Justin a root in that small place, and he felt himself growing with its nourishment. He was always hungry at dinnertime, and so tired after the day’s work that he slept without pills. One Sunday afternoon a pack of beagles met at the crossroads, and he recognized the master as a man he had seen working in the National Library in a khaki coat. Seeing him here in a green velvet coat, up to his knees in wet rushes, drew the city from the smothering past into Justin’s own present experience, and another root went down into that land. His aunt who drank phoned late one night, to ask what he had been saying about her to his other aunt; she cried, then asked for her car back, and put down the phone. His other aunt wrote to say her sister was drinking again, and asked him to visit soon. He said that he couldn’t, as he had no car. He was relieved. Now he was alone in this middle place with his new friends.

  MIKE REILLY saddled an old hunter, showed him how his legs should grip and the stirrups take his weight, so he balanced on the rhythm of the horse. As another summer came he rode in the evenings up and down Mike’s sloping fields, walled by wild hawthorn on the hilltop and at the bottom by a double ditch, a dyke of deep water between huge earthen banks where old trees grew. Walking to Mike’s stable one evening, he stopped at the main road and – as anxious, as eager as if he were jumping the dyke – thumbed a lift into town, where he stood at the canal bridge until another car pulled alongside.

  The man chatted about local news and asked what the lads were up to, all so casually that it was a while before Justin realized he was being pumped for information about the IRA. Seeing that he knew nothing, the man said he was on his way to a night’s duty in Dublin, that he was a guard in the Special Branch. He spent the journey talking of his hard upbringing, of his days in the army, of masturbating competitions that the soldiers held at night, with sixpence as a prize. He left Justin at the arch of Christ Church Cathedral, and said he would be there again at midnight on his way back.

  Now that he no longer visited his parents or old friends each time he went there, the city didn’t seem his smothering home. He walked the crowded streets, stood and looked up at pigeons roosting in th
e Bank of Ireland portico, like any other stranger. He saw a gallery where an exhibition was opening, and when he went inside and someone talked to him, he felt the same excitement he’d had in the Paris railway station when he met an old friend. All this was his, if he wanted it. Afterwards the stranger asked him to a party, in a flat on the quays. The windows looked over the black shining river; there was a scent of dope smoke in the tall old rooms. Someone sat on the floor with a block of Chinese ink, brushing letters on a sheet of paper; some people were dancing, the song of the year was playing on a gramophone:

  ‘If her daddy’s rich, take her out for a meal,

  If her daddy’s poor, just do what you feel.’

  He didn’t know what he felt except anxiety, and that it was better than Jane’s party. The Christ Church bells were striking midnight as he crossed the river, and a few minutes later the guard stopped under the arch. Now they hadn’t so much talk. The guard asked about his evening, but when Justin told him of the art exhibition and the party, he was silent. When Justin asked him about his night’s duty, he didn’t reply. His heavy face stared at the road ahead, he drove at sixty on the straight stretch by the canal. When they came to the town, he stopped in the main street and said slowly, ‘Will you walk the rest?’ His face had a dark smile as Justin hesitated, a scowl as he got out. It was three in the morning when he reached the school, but he felt so frightened and elated that he sat up playing records on Mr Porter’s old gramophone in the staff room until dawn.

  AS NATURALLY as he had come to learn the boys’ names, now he knew the people in the cottages and farmhouses that had seemed so strange a year before. When he saw wild birds flock above the road he knew that Rose was out walking, throwing stale bread along the verge. Colonel Browne stopped his van whenever he saw him, and rolled down his window to talk. In the pub at closing time he was invited into the kitchen to drink whiskey with the old parish priest. He learned that the woman Rose lived with was her illegitimate daughter, that Colonel Browne’s wife suffered from her nerves. He was settling deeper in this place. One autumn evening the headmaster took him to a Harvest Thanksgiving in a tiny church, filled with the scent of vegetables and fruit and ripe wheat sheaves, where an old man with a white moustache scraped the hymn music on a violin. Driving home through blowing drifts of golden beech leaves, the headmaster gave a fatherly smile and said, ‘I always wanted to be able to share all this with someone.’ Justin didn’t return the smile. Suddenly he wanted to be able to share all this with someone else.

  GEORGE MARRIED JOY and moved to a cottage in the school grounds, where they invited him one evening to meet their pastor. But when they knelt down after tea – under a poker-work plaque that said, ‘Cooking lasts, kissing don’t!’ – and prayed for Justin’s salvation, he felt that it was a place where he would not be easy again.

  Tom too was finding his own way. He asked Justin to go with him to a Fianna Fáil rally in the town, where a minister spoke to the crowd from a platform. When Tom heckled with a question, a woman struck them both on the shoulders with an umbrella, the minister looked down with studied sadness and asked was this what Ireland had come to? The crowd shouted, ‘Communists!’ A guard escorted them to the end of the Main Street, and told them not to return. Tom was excited, talking of his father, who had been in the Communist Party, as they walked the long road back to the school. Justin felt he was listening to Mr Porter calling Latin verbs from the classroom. He understood, but it meant nothing to him.

  Even Mr Porter left the school one Friday evening to visit Dublin. When he came back on Sunday night he was so drunk that he couldn’t teach for the rest of the week. The smell from his bedroom, of old flesh sweating out whiskey and nicotine, carried into the corridor; each time Justin passed it, his dread of wasting his life there returned.

  AGAIN THE DAYS grew short, but he borrowed Mike Reilly’s old hunter more often in the evenings, galloping up and down the same few fields until he sweated like the horse. From there he could see across the silent countryside to the lake. He was twenty-four; next year he would be twenty-five. He took to riding along the back roads, and one day found a stables where there was more land to gallop on, the demesne of an almost derelict mansion, which Bernie, a local woman, now owned. She was small, fat and handsome, lame from a fall, always in old riding breeches so torn that strips of the yellow leather lining flapped between her legs as she walked. When she saw that he could ride well enough not to be in danger, she left him alone.

  As soon as he mounted, the horse ran alongside a wall so closely that his arm was scraped raw. Next, the horse galloped under low branches of a tree, but he was in the saddles still. Finally the horse walked into a pond and stood there, belly-deep. The water was mirror-calm again when another horse appeared, going back to the yard. Justin’s horse followed. That was how he met Geraldine.

  She had a slight limp, he noticed when she dismounted. They talked as they unsaddled and rubbed their horses down. She lived in the town; she came out once a week to learn how to ride. Then they each paid Bernie their ten shillings and said goodbye.

  Two years of work and meals and sleep had calmed him. The school had become a big family, with the same gossip, laughter, aspirations and rows. The headmaster asked sixth-form boys to breakfast, as if he were a university tutor and they were the gilded youth who would run the country one day. When a boy pocketed the silver teaspoons and sold them in the town, a dark thrill ran through the school. When Lettie the maid inherited a fortune from a distant cousin, the whole school – even Mr Porter – rejoiced, and was sad when she had gone. Justin realized how happy he was in this small place, and wanted more than ever to share it with someone else.

  WHEN HE RETURNED next week to the riding school, Geraldine was there. They rode out together under the stable-yard arch and down the avenue. Again the chestnut leaves were darkening, the light-green chestnut shells had filled. When her horse shied at a blown piece of paper they slowed to a walk, talking as the road led them around the big lake and up the slopes on the other side. She said her father was a bank manager; she had grown up in a dozen market towns. He said that explained her accent, which seemed to belong to no particular place. She asked where he lived, and he said he taught in the Protestant school. She described one of the schools she had been to, with small glass booths like telephone boxes in which they had practised the violin. He asked was her father in the Bank of Ireland, she said he was, and Justin said they had met. The road went over the slopes and down into flat land that turned to bog. When they came to a long stony shallow lake, as jagged-pointed at either end as the Neolithic flint knife he had found, they dismounted, and explored a ruined house. She had heard that a nobleman had ended his days there. He had heard from Colonel Browne that the nobleman had been disgraced. It was almost dark as they rode back along the bog road, so they trotted again, then cantered, and as the horses neared home they galloped hard. She was as flushed and excited as he when they arrived. While they unsaddled and rubbed their horses down, he asked would she like to go out with him some night. She agreed. As she looked up at him and the stable’s cobwebbed light bulb showed her smile, he kissed her suddenly. Then he hurried away to the ramshackle house to give his ten shillings to Bernie.

  HE WAS ANXIOUS now, but was restless in the school. When the local rector invited George and Joy, Tom and him to dinner in the glebe house, he was glad to go out. The clergyman was lame – so many people there were lame – and minded like a child by his wife. They had an adopted son, who had grown up, gone away and never returned – the schoolboys said – so they couldn’t mention that. They sat at a small oval table in a dining room painted dark green, talking about the school and looking out the window at a big yew tree when a silence fell. When dinner was over the rector’s wife said to Joy, ‘We’ll leave the men to talk.’ They stood as the two women left the room, then the rector took a bottle of Sandeman port from the sideboard and they sat down. The yew tree faded into darkness as the rector told stories of his own scho
ol. He asked them a question that a master had asked him in Scripture class: ‘What did Saint Paul find when he went into the desert?’ George stared out at the dark, as if searching the Scriptures, frowned and gave up. Then the rector gave his old master’s answer: ‘He found no water.’ George’s bewildered face made Justin laugh, which turned out to be in order, for the rector explained that it was a joke, which made Justin laugh more, and then he was out of control, whimpering like one of the boys in class until he had to leave the room. As they went back to the school, Tom said, ‘What a limited life,’ and Justin thought again of his coming test.

  WHEN HE WENT to the riding school on his next half-day, Geraldine wasn’t there. He rode for an hour about the ruined park, testing his courage by jumping the trunk of a fallen tree, then returned to the yard. As he dismounted, she appeared from a stable, leading her horse, and he asked suddenly would she like to go out with him next Saturday? She said she would, then she rode out under the arch, ducking her head as usual, though the arch was twelve feet high.