Ghost Light: A Novel

by Joseph O'Connor

  Dearest hand of Jesus, but he does go on. He’ll be running up the tricolour in a minute. Oh then don’t be so mean, Molly. He is so good-natured, keep smiling. Conversation, for Mr Ballantine, is a sort of perpetual-motion roundabout, an occupational hazard for all persons who earn a living where alcohol is dispensed, and the next time it revolves in the direction of the Christmas cake it will be important for you to jump on and hold firm.

  ‘I will need a gill of inexpensive brandy in which to soak the fruit, Mr Ballantine. Do you think you might possibly assist me?’

  ‘Thing is.’ He sucks his moustache and releases a small sigh, as though what he is about to say is hard for him. ‘There’s a little owed on the slate, pet. I don’t mean to mention it. Only it’s four pound ten. Been owing a little while. There’s questions been asked in Parliament, if you take my meaning. The missus has been giving me earfuls.’

  ‘I am expecting a considerable cheque from the BBC presently. They are most dreadfully tardy. One often thinks they’re all Communists. Or millionaires. The very moment I receive it, we shall settle up without delay. I give you my private word of honour, Mr Ballantine.’

  ‘I shouldn’t, my pigeon. Really and truly.’

  ‘A week. At the absolute latest.’

  ‘Not a word to the Contessa then? She’ll have my guts for garters.’

  ‘I quite understand. Careless talk costs lives.’

  ‘Blummin castrations, more like.’

  He returns behind the bar, wraps the bottle in a fold of newspaper and hurriedly pushes it into her pocket.

  ‘Just a tick,’ he adds quietly, disappearing into the kitchen. She stands amid the laughter and the howls about dart scores and by the time he comes back, bearing a brown paper bag, one of her headaches is starting to bloom. Easing the bag into her hands, he accompanies her towards the door, whistling a tune she recognises vaguely but whose name will not come.

  ‘Good day to you, Mr Ballantine.’

  ‘God bless, love. Mind how you go.’

  She wants to say more. But she is not certain what it is. His wife is peering at her strangely; tight-lipped; hard. Mrs Danvers in curlers and housecoat. Their son, Miss O’Neill supposes. One must be understanding; forgiving. It is not easy for a mother who has lost a child to war. Mr Ballantine clasps her elbow lightly and opens the door to the traffic.

  ‘Wrap up against the cold, won’t you? There’s my darling girl.’

  In the bag is a pair of socks and a packet of cigarettes. But it is the bottle of milk that makes her weep. At last.

  3

  KINGSTOWN, A PROSPEROUS SUBURB OF DUBLIN 1908

  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, but that is not all. There are the differences that cannot be noticed in an instant.

  And then – where can she be? – she materialises through the smoke. There she is, beckoning circumspectly from a secondclass 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, 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 cannot 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 an act of 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. She uses the journey from the city to learn her lines. Nobody 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 dazzle of light, and the panorama of the bay is magnificent: Italian. Along the clifftop at Shanganagh. A cormorant hangs in the air. It will not be too long 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 play-writing – 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 knew, would care. His companion has appeared in three of his plays: bit parts at first, but she was soon elevated to leads.

  Cold, grey wavelets breaking on the stones. The suck in the runnels of strand.

  When she came in with her sister, he was standing near the bookcase in the downstairs rehearsal room, wearing a burgundy velvet smoking-jacket that looked as though it had once belonged to someone larger. A peasant-man’s neckerchief draped loosely about the collar, a tuft of withering heather in the lapel. His eyes ranged everywhere except upon the assembled actors, whose presence seemed to embarrass him, as though a fuss were being made. Lady Gregory had introduced him: John Synge, our friend. A coming giant of the drama, a veritable Shakespeare. It appeared that each commendation was another nail through his heart. He flushed to the maroon of his jacket.

  His hair was black and glossy, pomaded a little too heavily, and yet it was untidy too, like a ploughboy’s. The strangeness and the beauty of his mode of speech. He made even plummy Yeats seem down to earth. His accent was of the Protestant Dublin suburbs, modulated, deaconish, replete with correctitude, but complicated by an Irishry that felt very slightly overemphasised, as one note that wanted damping in a gorgeous chord. The soft Dublin ‘t’ in the way he pronounced theatre. The long Etonian vowels in drama. He addressed the gathering for ten minutes, checking the allotted time on his fob watch, rarely meeting anyone’s stare. Similes, self-contradictions, allusions to Gaelic fairy tales, quotations from French novels and dusty Greek myths: he took it for granted that everyone knew what he meant. The actors were a little afraid of him, and he of them. He never met your eyes unless he wished to.

  She walked the longer way home that evening, across Sackville Street, down the quays, past the junkshop above which she had been born, past the bookstalls and the boarding houses, for already she had come to a point where the ghetto life of Mary Street could only b
e endured by postponing it. A squabble was stewing in the house, about money, the rent. A black pot in the kitchen seemed to bubble with rage, its lid clicking furiously on the rim. She had gone immediately to the little bedroom she shared with her sisters and grandmother, looked for a long time over the scutch-yard at the rear of the tenement. Boys had found an abandoned piebald and tethered it near the ash-pits, where it was feeding from a rusted bathtub. The tolling of the quarter-to-eight bell from Mary’s Alley coaxed the slaughterers from the market, their grey overalls reddened, in silent twos and threes to the pub. And the sky reddening, too, and the steeples slowly blackening, and the siren from the gasworks through the rain.

  Sara had not come home by suppertime; there was a Francis Street boy she liked and she was bankrupting the poor fellow, a junior clerk in Crosbie & Alleyne, by making him take her to dine at Burton’s. The nightly rosary came and went. It grew dark in the bedroom. Shadows lengthened and disappeared. She dreamed she was in the junkshop on a Saturday afternoon, assisting her mother with the customers, endlessly opening drawers in old sideboards, the faded green felt of their linings. A woman who might have been Lady Gregory had passed on the quay – but it was hard to be certain through the rain-spattered window. When she awoke, it was dark. Sara was asleep beside her, the little ones curled in the foot of the bed. She could hear the repeated triple-toned bark of a dog. Her mother’s only coat had been placed over her.

  Next morning as she was walking to rehearsal she saw him near the General Post Office in Sackville Street, as still as a lamppost and staring up at a rooftop, his battered tweed tam and drover’s muddy boots giving him the appearance of a countryman lost. His scarf looked as though it had once been employed to mop up a stable after a flood. Was it a bird he was looking at? A steeplejack working? Lord Nelson on his pillar, perhaps? A nun passed him quizzically, herself glancing up at the sky before continuing her progress towards the river. He raised a hand to shade his gaze. He looked frail; older than yesterday. Perhaps the nervousness of having to address them had rushed blood to his face. Now it was the colour of ashes.

  ‘Mr Synge, sir,’ she had said apprehensively. ‘Are you all right? Is that yourself?’

  The fragility and gentleness of his mien as he turned to her. ‘Forgive me, Miss. Do I know you?’ His eyes moving fitfully as though he had been listening to strange music in the halls of his mind and it had altered its tempo or stopped.

  ‘Miss O’Neill, sir. Molly O’Neill. I work at the theatre.’

  ‘At a theatre you say? Well, that is a nice pancake.’

  ‘At the Abbey, sir, yes. I am one of the apprentice players. You were in with us yesterday. Are you quite all right?’

  ‘Oh, entirely. I was just daydreaming. I was thinking about Germany. Were you ever in Germany at all?’

  ‘I was never out of Dublin, sir. Have you been there yourself?’

  ‘Interesting sort of place. The music and so on. Would you like to have a plum? I bought some in Moore Street.’ Patting his overcoat pockets and searching inside his jacket. ‘Oh, Moses. Seem to have mislaid them somehow.’

  ‘Are you going to the theatre, sir?’

  ‘Yes I am. May I walk with you?’

  ‘Of course, sir. I have to hurry along but.’

  ‘There was an enormous storm cloud – it has passed now – which reminded me of Cologne Cathedral. Exact silhouette. Quite remarkable. They say the devil appeared there once. Do you believe in the devil?’

  ‘My mother does be saying it isn’t that gentleman but the living we’d be wise to fear, sir.’

  ‘I dare say that’s right. What did you say you are called? I’m so sorry, didn’t catch it. I was away with the faeries.’

  ‘Molly Allgood is my given name, sir. I go by Maire O’Neill.’

  ‘Ah yes. I have you now. You are Sally’s sister, I think?’

  ‘I am, sir.’

  ‘I believe she will be a very great artist, likely far too good for Ireland. Tell me: do you and your family call her Sally or Sara?’

  ‘Sally, sir. Though she’s been called worse now and again in the house.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I was – making a joke, sir. About Sally.’

  ‘Ah. Quite. I have you now. Please forgive me.’

  ‘For what, sir?’

  ‘Well, for being such a silly muff and not recognising you and whatnot. I am not at all good with faces. But I remember your voice. It is beautiful. Most musical. I was thinking about it yesterday evening. You have a voice of some potential. Have you ever considered singing lessons?’

  ‘Lessons? I haven’t, sir, no.’

  ‘If you’ll take my advice, you will do. It would be a string to your bow.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I will. I like singing.’

  ‘Lovely, that little verse of Yeats you were speaking in the break. Quite brought it to life for me. Hadn’t truly got it before. Good on the stars and so on, old Yeats, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is, sir.’

  ‘Yes, old Yeats does the stars. I do everything else.’ He smiled shyly. ‘Little joke of my own.’

  It had been difficult to concentrate that morning at rehearsal, for progress was maddeningly slow. The leading man was absent, his understudy was unhappy, kept forgetting his lines; asking for prompts, simplifications. Yeats and Lady Gregory had been tense, exchanging inscrutable looks, like Easter Island statues contemplating adultery or murder. But he would change nothing at all. Not a speech, not a syllable. He had that curious conviction of those privately lacking confidence and an unusual amiability in its deployment. Also, he had money, or had once had it anyway, and the bearing of wealth never fully departs, even as the stock markets plummet. What haunted the rehearsal room was the uneasy certainty that if he didn’t receive complete obedience he would leave. And he would do so in a way that would not give affront or cause a scene. He would simply gather his notebooks and numerous pencils, probably apologising on his way out the door. He was invested elsewhere. He didn’t take his coat off. He could say things without having to say them, appearing puzzled by simple questions. Even his aura of eccentric ineptitude came to seem a means of getting his way.

  ‘Begging your pardon, Mr Synge. But that is not how the country people do be talking here in Ireland, sir. I mean no offence to you. But it’s a little bit music-hall, sir. A touch on the flowery side, if you get me.’

  ‘Really? Do you tell me so, Mr Grennan? We certainly don’t want to gild the lily.’

  ‘It’s lovely and melodious, sir. God you’d nearly sing it so you would.’ Some of the other actors emitted affirmative sounds, for Grennan had a Dubliner’s ability to express disapproval by the giving of compliments, a useful facility in his profession and in many others. ‘It trips like a ballad. The poetical aspect. I don’t doubt that it’s fine literature, sir. It’s the true Ally-Daly. It’s only it’d nearly want to be more – what is the word?’

  ‘Are you – asking me a question, Mr Grennan?’

  ‘More … natural. If you get me, sir. Lord, what is the phrase? Truer to life I suppose is my meaning, sir. Like the country people themselves. Down to earth. Not too fancy. The audience do get a great kick out of a thing being true to life.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Oh they do, sir. You can tell. And you up on the stage playing. There’s a silence does come over them, or a certain class of laughter, and you’d nearly hear them nudging one another and saying That’s you or That’s the mother. Do you get what I’m driving at, sir? It’s a lovely thing when it happens. There’s a nice sort of an innocence in the room like.’

  ‘Might I use your Christian name, Mr Grennan? One finds surnames so formal.’

  Yeats glanced about himself suspiciously, as though suspecting a practical joke of some sort. Lady Gregory appeared vaguely in need of the smelling salts. She now seated herself wordlessly, as though a performance were about to commence, and when Lady Gregory sat down, especially when she did so wordlessly, it was almost as
worrying as when she stood up.

  ‘God of course, sir,’ murmured the understudy, himself a little discomfited. ‘Blaze away. Sure we’re all on the same ticket here.’

  ‘I was born in Ireland, Willie. I have walked a good deal in Ireland. Have a decent enough smattering of the old Gaelic too. Know a bit of it yourself, I expect?’

  ‘Not really, sir, no … Not as such like.’

  ‘Ah. Pity. That may well be the difficulty. Anyhow I must reassure you and set your mind at ease, there is not a line in the piece that I myself have not heard spoken, in Aran or Wicklow or the proper Irish places where an artificially imported way of talking has not taken root among the peasantry. Perhaps you need to clear out your ears, my good Willie Grennan. Perhaps Dublin has polluted you. Eh? But I will consider most carefully your point of view on the question and I am supernally grateful for your admirable frankness.’

  The smiles from the players were watery, uncertain. He had clapped the understudy on the back in an overly familiar way, as a master might buck up a recalcitrant manservant whose request for a holiday is impossible. And then he had slunk back to the bookshelf in the corner, leaning against it lightly, his eyes closed fast; his ring-covered fingers propping his chin like the Thinker’s as he waited for the rehearsal to resume. It was itself a performance and she apprehended this. She sensed he was frightened behind the front.