Ghost Light: A Novel

by Joseph O'Connor

  Later that evening, as she made her way homeward through the city, she stopped before the windows of a musical instrument shop on Capel Street. Dusk reddened the panes. A slum child was calling for alms. It was ludicrous, utter folly, the differences between them – his age, his class, his accent, his crippling wistfulness, his way of eying the walls when he spoke to her, or about her. It could never happen. She wouldn’t want it to happen. Probably he wouldn’t either. This wasn’t a play.

  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 ‘steadily polite’ to her fellow actors 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 man who gazes into a hedgerow like a debutante contemplating 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 ceaselessly hard, no matter how she feels. There are no housemaids, no servants in the place she calls home. Her wages are thirty shillings a week. She rehearses all day, is on the stage most nights. 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, Mr Fay, is pushing her hard. Her accent is too common, too Dublin, not artistic. You must not say ‘draymin’. The word is ‘dreaming’, Miss O’Neill. You are playing a druidical princess, not a fishwife. The work is exhausting. She has to help the seamstresses. The wigs are louse-infested and heavy. So she sees walking as primarily a means of getting to some destination, whereas her storyteller appears to regard it as an end in itself. Occasionally she suspects he feels the same way about courtship. An agreeable hobby, leading to nothing but literature.

  The embarrassing son, the pretender to beggary, the tramp in Savile Row boots inherited from his father, whom he does not remember and does not resemble and whose feet were a larger size. But his mother never discarded them, and anyway they were his father’s, and if every man must walk in his father’s boots, one may as well do so literally, he smiles.

  And he walks and he walks in the chafing old boots, and she walks alongside him, through the heat and the rain. They are so often beside one another, hardly ever face-to-face, and their footprints on a strand form graciously pleasing parallels that only occasionally merge.

  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. The phrase strikes her as odd. It would look queer on a poster. He wants her to take pride in what he insists on terming 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 since his schooldays. 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, such is the plea of unhappy Pygmalion to the cold marble effigy he so agonisingly 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. 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.

  The subject of setting a date drifts into the conversation. Always he finds a reason to talk about something else. As a student, a capable violinist, 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, croup-racked, asthmatic, flailing at the banshees that swoop at his cot.

  He doesn’t belong. Doesn’t want to belong. Wanting not to belong is exhausting. ‘I am always a kind of outsider,’ he claims, yet he never stops fretting about what people will think. Life is unendingly dreary in the bourgeois suburbs: ‘Kingstown, the heat, and the frowsy women.’ But it is to here he returns at the close of the day, when the rambles are over and the house lights fade up. His changeling is left to rehearse unspoken lines on a train to a room in the city.

  When they see one another at rehearsal in the theatre during the week, he does not like them to converse privately. People might be eavesdropping. ‘You must not mind,’ he writes to her, ‘if I seem a little distant. We can have our talk on green hills that are better than all the greenrooms in the world.’ Her sister and the priest in Confession advise great caution: when a man is not willing to be seen in public with a girl, there is something deeply the matter, or his word is not true. And never to have a child? How could any woman agree? It’s a diversion he’s after, an escapade with a wild native colleen, before marrying a filly of his own inbred sort, some Henrietta with her eyes just a tad too close together, webbed toes and a dowry of diamond mines. But she won’t be counselled: they don’t understand. She is not yet nineteen; she knows this is love. What matter if he’s a little odd? Writers often are.

  There are weeks when he disappears, journeying alone into Wicklow, where he roams the hills and glens like a hermit. Few know where he lodges, when he plans to return, how his mountain days are filled, if they are permitted to be empty. If she has a rival, it is Wicklow, the motherland of his solitudes; he vanishes when she calls to him, roves her byways, craves her emptiness – yet avoids her in the everyday and unimportant conversations, as a husband deflecting attention from an infidelity. There will always be Wicklow. It must be accepted in silence. Some men bring a lost love, no matter where.

  In the ladies’ lavatories at the theatre, one rainy Friday morning, as she approaches the sink to bathe her face after a nosebleed, she sees words traced in the condensation that has fogged the splintered mirror. JMS HAS SIFILIS.

  ‘Mister John, you are welcome home, sir,’ the elderly housekeeper says quietly. ‘Will I help you off with your coat and the haversack?’

  ‘Thank you, Alice. I am bushed. Supper almost rea
dy?’

  ‘It is, sir. I’ll tell the girls. You had good walking down beyond?’

  ‘What? Oh yes. All shipshape here? Holy Moses, look at the muck on these boots.’

  ‘Your mother is … not in the best, sir. She’s been out of sorts while you were gone. Above in the room half the day and barely the pick itself of food. I thought I should tell you, sir. I hope I amn’t speaking out of turn.’

  ‘No no. Thank you, Alice. Been particularly bad, has it?’

  ‘Dr Haughton was up to us the Tuesday, and again yesterday morning. She swore me not to tell you, sir, I don’t rightly know why. But I felt, in all conscience …’

  ‘Quite. You acted correctly. You appear worried, Alice. Not yourself.’

  With dread, he now sees that the housekeeper is weeping. The woman turns away briefly, the back of her neck reddening. ‘Mister John,’ she begins, but then pauses, dabbing her eyes with her apron, and when she speaks again her voice is controlled. ‘I don’t know, Mister John, if she’ll be with us long more. That’s the God’s living truth, sir. Thank God you’re come home. There’s a light after going out of her, sir, I seen it happen before, when your father Lord have mercy on him was taken.’

  ‘Alice – oh my dear Alice – I’m so sorry you have been distressed. Please won’t you sit down a moment? Would you take a small sherry with me, perhaps?’

  ‘I’d rather not do that, sir; I’ve the girls in the kitchen to think about.’

  ‘If we stepped into the library a moment, I don’t think anarchy would result.’

  ‘All the same, sir, I’d prefer not. But will you go and talk to her, Mister John? We’re all frighted half to death. She’s been so good to us down the years. If there’s anything we can do, sir. Anything at all. I’ve the girls offering the rosary for her this night.’

  ‘She’s a game old bird, Alice. She’ll see us all down. Come on now, there’s the good scout, buck up.’

  ‘You don’t understand me, sir – begging your pardon, sir – but what it is I’m trying to tell you …’

  ‘Dear, kind Alice … Oh no … Please don’t cry.’

  ‘Lawyer Morgan is after being here, sir. He was sent to Dublin for, yesterday. He was in with her an hour and another man along. Bridget was asked for paper, sir, and a bottle of ink. When the tea was brought in beyond, they were talking of your mother’s Will, sir. It’s my opinion it’s come to that, sir … I don’t know what to do …’

  ‘I see. Well, don’t be upset. The girls need your example. And we mustn’t put the worst complexion on matters we don’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t be letting on to herself that I told you, sir. Sure you won’t?’

  ‘Of course not. Thank you, Alice. Your discretion does you credit. We are so fortunate to have you. You are not to worry about anything. Now, tell Bridget I’ll be ready presently. And assist my mother to the dining table if you would.’

  He washes in his bedroom, looking out at the trees, the walls of the neighbours’ gardens, the conservatories. To be away from people now. In some quaking, black bog. To raise one’s face to a rainstorm.

  ‘Good evening, Mother. Have you been well?’

  She does not reply. The dining room is cold as a November orchard.

  ‘I am sorry my return was delayed. I was down in Wicklow, walking. The weather was that charming I took a room at the inn in Rathnew. I asked a local type to send a telegram for me but I gather from Alice it didn’t arrive.’

  ‘Do you wish to kill me, John? Has this family not suffered enough?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Have I not been wounded and cut at sufficiently to placate the wicked selfishness you appear to regard as a devoted parent’s due?’

  ‘I can see that you have upset yourself, Mother. Now what is the matter?’

  ‘Teasy Ryan was able to tell me that you had been seen at Greystones. Swimming.’

  ‘What of it?’

  ‘With some female. Is this allegation true?’

  ‘Is it an offence against the by-laws to bathe on a hot day? I shall take care not to commit it again if so.’

  ‘With a female? Can you be serious? Is this disingenuousness or stupidity? Have you the scantest regard for propriety? You are not in Paris now!’

  ‘She is a friend. It was sunny. We went bathing at the public strand. She is a colleague at the theatre. Afterwards we had ices. Now you have the entire penny-dreadful.’

  ‘I knew it. Your so-called theatre. Some little typist who sells tickets. I imagine she must be good and proud of herself to have ensnared you quite so readily. One need not speculate as to how.’

  ‘She is not a typist, Mother. You may as well know she is an actress.’

  Her frightened, beautiful face seems to lose all its colour, and a quiver briefly distends her mouth. ‘So it is true, then. The worst is true. Do you hate me so much? The woman who gave you life?’

  ‘Mother –’

  ‘What have I done to you?’ Tears come staining her cheeks. ‘Have I not loved you enough? Protected you? Supported you? It is commanded of us that we honour our father and mother and yet this beautiful injunction, on which all decent society is predicated, is to be trampled with its nine companions. To imagine that you would invite an individual of that sort to an inn, as you call it. You are aware, I think, that we are known throughout Wicklow? Have the words “shame” and “scandal” been expunged from your vocabulary? That is to say nothing of the girl’s reputation, if she has one.’

  ‘She is a person of faultless integrity and she quite obviously did not stay with me at the inn, which is incidentally a perfectly respectable establishment. She came down on the train one morning and returned to Dublin in the evening. We had a day outing; that is all. I stayed there alone. I felt one of my fevers coming on and thought the mountain air would do me good.’

  ‘A Roman Catholic, one assumes?’

  ‘For pity’s sake, Mother –’

  ‘Where are your loyalties? Is allegiance so unknown to you?’

  ‘My friend – she is called Miss Allgood – is of a mixed marriage, as it happens. Her late father, if it matters, was a Presbyterian, I am told. And you are being – if I may say so – well, I would rather not use the word.’

  ‘I am reliably informed she was born in a rag-and-bone shop. Is this so?’

  ‘I think you will find, when you meet Miss Allgood –’

  ‘When I what, sir?’

  ‘I had hoped, in the fullness of time, to have the honour of introducing her. She is a person of the most warm-hearted and gentle, courageous kindness.’

  ‘Never! Do you understand me? Never, John. Do not ask it. Should you be deluded enough to assume that I shall legitimise whatever infantile flouting this represents, you will find that you are gravely mistaken.’

  ‘Very well, I shall not ask. But I shall live by my own lights. If that inflames your petty bigotries, for that is what they are, I wash my hands entirely of blame and wish you happiness.’

  ‘May I remind you, sir –’

  ‘Do not call me “sir”, Mother. It is demeaning in the extreme.’

  ‘May I remind you, sir, that every farthing in your idle pocket is supplied by myself through the providence of your late father? No natural respect or affection you have for his widow – this I know too well – again and again you have made it quite clear – but one would have imagined you might have some regard for what people say.’

  ‘They may say what they wish. I do not give two damns what they say.’

  ‘Do not blaspheme in my presence, John, I warn you – I warn you.’

  ‘Teasy Ryan, a woman who enters this house to collect laundry once a week, is now to be public arbiter and informant as to morality?’

  ‘She has been loyal to this family always. How dare you presume to speak of her in that manner?’

  ‘Is one to care about the prattle of tinkers and peasants?’

  ‘You seem fond enough of tinkers, from what I am inform
ed of the female.’

  ‘Withdraw that remark.’

  ‘I shan’t.’

  ‘Withdraw it, Mother. Immediately. Or I shall leave this table without delay.’

  ‘You must do as you will. My response shall be the same: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image—’

  ‘I have heard it before – I have heard it all my life …’

  ‘Or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. The theatre is the liar’s house. It is itself a lie. And any woman who would solicit remuneration by exhibiting herself publicly merits a word I shall not utter but you know.’

  ‘Say the word, Mother. You are burning to do so.’

  ‘Listen to how you are speaking to me. Listen to the hatred in your voice. The woman who bore you. The widow of your father. I am broken with their whorish heart, which hath departed from me, and with their eyes, which go a whoring after their idols.’

  ‘Is this your Christian charity? Do they comfort, such sanctities?’

  ‘I shall speak my conscience freely at the table I supply. You will obey my orders, John. And that is an end to it. While you reside beneath my roof, you will comport yourself in a manner I deem to be appropriate. Your standards shall be mine, not those of the supposedly aesthetic louts with whom you have chosen to surround yourself.’

  ‘I am thirty-seven, Mother.’

  ‘And you would do well to reflect on it.’

  ‘I am to be a prisoner, then? Is that what you wish?’

  ‘The door of this house opens. You may use it at any time. It also closes. And it locks. And the prison you inhabit, if inhabit one you do, is guarded by the magistrate in your heart. He will always be there, John. You will face him at the close. You shall stand before the Mercy Seat one terrible day. “He shall come to be glorified in His saints”.’