Portobello Notebook

by Adrian Kenny

  JOE LIVED in the sort of shabby smart street he had once dreamed of: up-market, downtown bohemia. As he rang the bell he noticed a jazz bar next door – just right for Joe who had spent evenings long ago trying to win him over to Charlie Parker. The door was buzzed open and he was in a space before another door, of glass, which was buzzed open too. But – excited under his calm now – he missed it, and stood there trapped until Joe came down the stairs.

  ‘That happens.’ Joe gave his old smile.

  His hair was white, but otherwise he was the same tall thin 1960s’ schoolboy, his long fingers still bony and red. Talking, interrupting each other, they went up black-painted wooden stairs to a lofty apartment where Joe’s wife embraced him and turned her cheek for him to kiss. He hardly knew her, only at the last minute retrieved her name, and said, ‘Sally.’

  He too was a Sixties’ boy still. He felt disappointment at the neat rugs and paintings, the tidy shelves of books, including an effort of his own, the cushions on the sofa in a row. He had half-expected Joe to have cut himself dramatically clear of the past, but Joe had done what he himself had done: made an adult compromise. There were a couple of old prints of Dublin scenes from a set he remembered in Joe’s parents’ home. He smiled as he noticed, pinned to the kitchen memo board, an Irish postcard of silage bales daubed ‘Feck off crows.’

  That was the Joe he had known: a sniper, hiding downstairs in the kitchen from his deep-voiced, successful father. Joe had tried everything within bourgeois reason to escape the life his parents had seen as natural. He had dodged Law, tried Medicine instead, but had disliked that too. A working-class boy went to jail for a while, a country boy flogged the cattle and ran off to England, and a middle-class boy in those far-off days had a nervous breakdown. Joe had done his stretch in the desert of loneliness and confusion, then married Sally and gone to live abroad. They hadn’t any children – a quiet No to that past, he thought.

  He was a smoker still, so they sat outside in the sun on a timber veranda. Joe said he had given up cigarettes – another break from the past. Otherwise, Sally did the talking. She worked for a famous international firm, and mentioned by first name people he knew only from newspapers. He tried to include Joe, turning the talk back to the time when they had been close, but besides not sharing these memories Sally’s role seemed to be centre-stage, and Joe seemed to prefer it that way.

  Looking at her, he saw a resemblance to Joe’s father: the same authoritative manner and heavy build. Joe had been closer to his mother; living with her when his father died; the curtains drawn in summer as they watched Wimbledon tennis, sharing their cigarettes; both insomniacs, comparing notes on their sleep. Sally had rescued Joe from all that, he thought.

  She was looking at him now, like a teacher at an inattentive pupil. He nodded to show he was listening. She was talking about her mother’s first meeting with Joe’s mother.

  ‘… They began to mention people they knew, and suddenly it was like – You know the Fitzgeralds too? – And straightaway they were on the same wavelength!’

  She wasn’t bright, he realized, or even confident. He tried again to nudge a way through her talk, asking Joe what he had been doing since they had last met. But Sally took over again, saying they had been in Hungary where her business had taken them. He finished his cigarette, and Joe brought him inside to see a picture they had bought in their travels. Sally stood behind him as he looked at a large painting of hobby horses in a merry-go-round. He didn’t like it. It was like a mural for a fashionable bar. He turned to a smaller, unframed picture. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘You gave it to us.’ Joe’s voice was dry.

  ‘That’s right, as a wedding present!’ Sally said. ‘A Charlie Parker, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s another Charlie.’ Joe corrected her gently.

  ‘His widow died yesterday,’ he said, and explained that he was going home to the funeral.

  But even as they talked of that, he saw annoyed embarrassment in Sally’s eyes. She wasn’t used to being wrong. That wasn’t her role. She stepped forward, again taking over the conversation. They had a place in mind for lunch, it was just around the corner. ‘You’ll like it. It’s full of books!’

  ‘Well –’ Joe’s mild voice was almost self-mocking. ‘Half-full.’

  He went to the bathroom and washed his face in cold water. Sally was heavy going. He felt her presence even in the spotless mirrors and black marble counter. It had the look of a place where a maid – another shade from the past – came in. Tubes, bottles of make-up and perfume breathed the question: sex?

  He looked at them as they went outside – Joe in a blue denim yachting cap, Sally in sunglasses – and tried to imagine them in bed; skinny Joe buried between Sally’s big breasts. She interrupted this reverie, saying how much fun their street was, pointing out a drag queen, a gaunt stubble-jawed freak in a frock and high heels. He was afraid she was going to know the guy by name. She would have liked that. But she was too straight for that. But without her kind the world wouldn’t work, he conceded as she led the way through a doorway in an old brick wall, across a courtyard, into a bar with a plank floor and wooden stalls. It was just the sort of place he liked, where good plain meals were served. He would never have found it on his own.

  In his own eyes he was as mild-mannered as Joe, but he hadn’t grown up without effort. Defeated in New York, hurt pride as much as confusion had driven him to fight back. His upbringing had failed him in the big world, and he had declared war on its limitations. He had found other friends, such as Eileen, who had shown him that there was security only in freedom.

  Sally seemed nervous of him now, as if she sensed his reserve. She mentioned a public figure, a friend of hers, whom they had taken to dinner in this restaurant. He nodded and she went on, floundering in heartiness. ‘Mary loved it – you know, she could shake off her shoes, say piss and fuck without anyone noticing!’

  ‘I never noticed,’ Joe said.

  It was a normal complicated marriage, he thought. They defended each other. Sally provided the muscle, and in that shelter Joe’s quiet confidence could grow; in turn protecting the other, soft side to her bluster, which no doubt she revealed to him, perhaps in bed.

  She said the lunch was their treat; the beer turned out to be a good strong brew, and he warmed to her. She asked about his life. He said his wife was still in the same job, and he was still working at home.

  ‘Just like us!’ Sally smiled. ‘Joe’s face simply lights up when I leave in the morning!’

  He didn’t return the smile. The comparison implied they were the same, that he still lived in the world he and Joe had once shared. They had been close then because their problems had been the same: protected and repressed, afraid of life and women, they had huddled together like swallows on a wire before the inevitable migration.

  He didn’t want those days back – never, never – but they were all he had in common now with Joe, and he tried again to turn the talk back to that long golden sunset of boyhood when they had travelled across Europe by train. With Anthony, another school friend, they had visited Paris, Vienna, Athens, Istanbul, even the ruins of Troy. Joe didn’t respond. He had forgotten, left behind, or wasn’t able for those memories, and the dark drop that had followed. The conversation stalled. Sally, like a good hostess, took on the duty of starting it again.

  ‘How’s Anthony? Still hiding in the closet?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ He smiled, but raised his eyebrows coolly.

  ‘Well – single and fifty-eight …?’ Sally laughed. ‘He’s gay, obviously!’

  ‘He always has a girlfriend.’

  ‘Camouflage!’ Sally laughed heartily again.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind some of that camouflage. His latest girl’s a 29-year-old Japanese.’

  Sally backed down, but she had lost face and had to make it up. She began talking about her high-flying job, but it reminded him of a golf-club lady beaten to a parking space, accelerating blindly to find another.
She was used to being right. That was the deal. She maintained the high privet hedge and black spearhead railings of Joe’s old suburban home.

  That was where his irritation was coming from. He hadn’t had Joe’s bourgeois inheritance to help, or hinder him. He had run out of it straight to New York, cracked up and gone home, and after his own journey through the desert had married and settled down. His life seemed suddenly a mirror image of Joe’s. His irritation became cool anger. He waited quietly, let Sally advance. She began talking about South Africa, where she was going next week to oversee some training programme.

  ‘What’s the programme?’

  ‘We’re training the junior staff, local people we’re training to take over.’

  He remembered that we-know-better voice from the past. He was able for it now. He nodded. ‘What will they be doing?’

  ‘It’s a training pack we’re having printed.’

  ‘You’re bringing the training pack with you?’ He sprinkled a little salt on the side of the plate.

  ‘Yes, they’ll take over then. It’s very simple.’

  ‘That’s what you were doing?’

  She blundered on. Finally she was silent. He glanced at her deep-set tired eyes, the brown slack skin beneath them. She put a good face on her defeat, asked for the bill and insisting on paying. As she signed a MasterCard slip she said, ‘I’m sure you and Joe have lots to talk about. I have to go to my office.’

  He hadn’t had any wish to hurt her. He had been defending himself, the little freedom he had won. Calm again, he kissed her cheek goodbye.

  Now he and Joe were free to talk, but they were silent as they strolled the sunny streets. He suggested sitting down, and Joe led the way to a bench in a small sandy, tree-shaded square. He lit a cigarette. ‘What are you doing with yourself?’

  Joe did a Cockney accent, as he had long ago. ‘I do a bit o’ writing, myself.’

  ‘Anything published?’

  Joe shook his head.

  ‘What do you write?’

  ‘Plays, mostly.’

  ‘Any performed?’

  Joe shook his head again.

  ‘Why not? Have you tried?’

  There was a glint of steel in Joe’s boyish smile. He backed down. Joe glanced at his cigarette. ‘What are they?’

  ‘They’re not bad. Turkish.’

  ‘I sometimes smoke the odd one … outside.’

  Sally had banned smoking, and Joe was signalling for help? Having a little rebellion? Making an effort at intimacy? He handed him a cigarette. The way Joe drew on it deeply reminded him of that long-ago intensity, the desperate innocence of their high-spirited talk as freedom had drawn close; a night in an Austrian bar when they had silently watched workmen at the next table drive pins into their powerful arms, challenging each other’s endurance. Joe breathed smoke slowly down his nostrils, then dropped the cigarette on the sand, half-finished. ‘What would you like to do?’

  He thought it was some great question, but Joe meant simply that. They wandered down the street to a vast bookshop, where he looked for a present to bring home. He felt a small shock as he saw Joe lost in a book, shutting it reluctantly as he approached. Already Joe was returning to his own world.

  ‘Would you like to meet my daughter?’ That was the best he could manage.

  ‘Sure.’

  Together they walked to her flat, not far, but their silence made it seem endless. When he rang the bell, she came downstairs with her boyfriend. The owner of a music shop next door stepped out onto the pavement and they chatted gratefully with him for five minutes more. Then it came down to small talk.

  ‘When are you going back?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  His daughter picked up the silence. ‘Would you like to come in?’

  Joe looked at his watch, gave his aloof self-mocking smile, and turned away. ‘I must go back to my Sally.’

  He wanted to run after him, suggest a drink, in a bar try again for that past togetherness. The blue yachting cap disappeared into the crowd. He grasped at images – All things are Buddha things – the paling post enfolded in the old tree’s bark. But the facts were that he was going back to Ireland, and Joe was staying in New York.

  Kestrel and Starlings

  ALMOST ALL THE MEN in the townland had the same name, but in different forms – Paddy, Páraic, P.J., Pak – so you hardly noticed they were the same. You noticed it in the graveyard on the hill when you saw the full name on each headstone. Some houses had a statuette of Saint Patrick set into their gate pier, but if it was smashed by a tractor or a delivery lorry reversing it wasn’t replaced. The few young men left were busy all day. Each small farm had its own small advantage and disadvantage: a stream or a well, and some wet land; or some good land on an awkward slope.

  They were shy. If a man saw a stranger come up his boreen, he might step back into his house and wait until there was a knock before coming to the door. They were used to hearing their accent imitated by comedians on TV. They didn’t often visit each other, but when they passed on the road they stopped and rolled down their car windows and talked until another car moved them on. To fall out with someone was terrible; someone with the same name, whose father lay beside your father up in the graveyard, whose great-grandfather had helped your great-grandfather build his house – whom you had to pass on the road now without talking, every day, maybe forever, until you lay side by side up in the graveyard under the same full name. So they were tolerant – of moodiness and oddness, drinking, not shaving, bachelor clothes and untidy homes. In winter they often vanished from each other’s sight for months. They no longer went to work in England or America, but that memory had made them casual with long absence. When Marcus appeared they just said, ‘You’re down again.’

  HE HAD BEEN GIVEN a name in keeping with the new life his parents had made in the city, but as a boy on summer holidays this poor farm had been his second home. As a young man he had hardly visited, but it had always been at the back of his mind. What he had seen down here – an owl blundering from an ivied tree in daylight … fallen ash leaves plastered on the wet road – remained clear of daily habit, as fresh as when he had seen it first. By middle age this place had become as an image of certainty, a fixed point. But when his uncle died and left it to him, he was shocked. It had meant so much to him that he feared to see it now. He drove down from Dublin with his wife one weekend, to look at it and decide what to do.

  The first glimpse, through a lank hedge as he came around the bend of the narrow road, was another shock: the 1950s’ bungalow, the field spattered with rushes at the foot of the small hill. It seemed to be in a hole. Failure, isolation, the grip of the past – all the fears he had gathered since boyhood sprang up. The boreen was overgrown, his car skidded over sheets of lodged wet grass. His shoulder caught a blackthorn branch, and cold raindrops showered on his head. He breathed in the raw silence, the rank sweet elderflower smell. When he opened the door it caught on an ESB bill. The envelope was damp. The ashes in the hearth were sodden by rain that had come down the straight wide chimney. Wind rumbled under the slates. But when the fire was lit and he looked out the big kitchen window, down over hedges to the silver flash of the lake and the blue shapes of the sea-coast mountains far beyond, he felt peace.

  All his deepest delights had been here. His city home had been shadowed by his father’s long struggle to succeed. This place had meant wild freedom – his uncle holding a mug of tea under the mare to whiten it with her milk. He remembered her sweat-wet flanks stuck with hayseed, the green-foamed mouth and bared teeth as the bridle was caught and she was backed between the shafts after dinner for more work; the hedge trembling as she drew the heavy blue and orange cart; the crunch and roll of the ironshod wheels down the sand road, the snap of the leather rein-ends on her rump, the bone-shaking trot, the crack of horse farts, the tail pluming up and the smell of falling gold dung …all day until the long sleep under blankets that smelled of turf smoke.

  When he woke
in the morning his wife was sitting up in bed, reading. He watched her put down the book and look out the window. A white butterfly was flitting about tall nettles that nodded above the sill. He sat up beside her and watched the butterfly rest on a leaf, its wings closed, its body curved underneath.

  ‘What’s he doing? Does he drink from the flowers?’

  ‘It’s a she. She’s laying her eggs.’

  When they had dressed they went outside, and he lifted a leaf to show her the pale-green eggs fixed like tiny rivets underneath. She laughed with wonder and turned her face to the sun, opening her arms as if for an embrace. ‘Oh lovely light.’ She closed her eyes and swayed from side to side. That was why he had married her. She was good. She had put up with his dreaming and wandering, and now they were home. He felt that boyhood peace again.

  She came from another world; this place meant nothing to her. She knew nothing of the yellow nettle-roots she dug, that turned and rooted in the clay again, and in days sent up fresh stinging leaves. Like him she tossed them on the thorn hedge to wither, and pulled dock leaves to soothe the white blisters the stings raised. They worked all morning, and had their lunch of milk and sandwiches outside. The breeze blew through the sally bushes along the ditch, lifting their leaves, showing the pale grey underneath. As naturally, quietly, they lay down together in the wild grass: he stamping his mark on this childhood home, she gathering his strange adult peace into herself. They slept then until rain fell warm and heavy on their face, but they lay there for a minute more, watching a frog, green-gold, motionless, in the damp roots before they went into the house. The peace there was like the peace he felt inside. The disorder – a sheep clippers, a rusted tin of beans, a bag of sugar like a rock on the table – only made clear the simple pattern of his uncle’s life.

  ‘He never married?’