Ghost Light: A Novel

by Joseph O'Connor

  And at some point he realises he has twenty strong pages. Then what becomes important is bravery. To go on might yield nothing – everything can die. Anyone can make a beginning; to embark on a second act takes the courage. It is like building a house, he says. The smallest error is fatal. Every course of brickwork must be angled correctly or the whole will collapse in the end. By fifty pages, sixty, he knows if the impossible is happening. The people summoned into being by the old power of words might begin to unfurl, to walk about and love, to say things he himself would never dream of uttering, in voices not his but theirs. It is like watching the muzzle-flash of a gun through fog yet wanting the bullets to hit you, he says. Essential to hold your nerve, not to let the excitement of the alchemy throw you into crowd-pleasing stupidities or grandiosities. Who can say where they come from, these people who never lived? But he is one of the intermediaries they come to. He seems to think of himself in the third person, as perhaps all do from to time. Is it possible he sees himself as a character?

  It is whispered among the costume girls that his people are landlords down the country, that they evicted tenants in the bad times, burned their cabins. Many’s the penniless tramp created by a Synge, someone says, and relatively few of them fictional. She refuses to believe it, turns her ears from the rumours. She gathers that he has quarrelled with Mother about political matters, but Mother pointed out, evidently with scriptural vehemence, that the tenants down the country were paying for his freedom to write, so he was hardly in a position to be adopting revolutionary poses. Mother and her sister grew up on the neighbouring estate to the Parnells’, often rocked the Chief’s little cradle when he was a baby. In later years, Aunt Jane grew fond of remarking what a pity it was that they hadn’t strangled him.

  Months turn to seasons. Rehearsals turn to shows. His eyes are darkening; the weather she sees in them is sullen. He seems half in love with death, like Keats watching nightingales. Operations come and go, and he coughs like a broken train, and still the old lady refuses to die. He is nearly always sick now: the growth on his neck makes him quake. There are fears he might be tubercular. He may need aggressive surgery. Often, he takes to his bed for days. He becomes convinced that the effort of writing brings fever.

  And there is trouble at the theatre; there are faction fights, rows. What is it in theatre people that they must always squabble? He is not a committee man like Yeats, or a battler like Her Ladyship, though he is conscientious about management, thinks it important to be a peacemaker. But he’d rather be in Wicklow, roaming his rocks, ‘away from all good commonplace people’, he says. He starts to advise his changeling to become a playwright herself. She is already a sort of playwright; it is only that she doesn’t know it, hasn’t realised he is making notes of her phrasings and coinages. Loving her is becoming the same for him as loving his work. ‘My mirror, my air,’ he calls her.

  They write to each other daily, sometimes twice in the space of a morning. Often, while he is headlocking the playboy in Glenageary, or bicycling the dappled avenues, which he likes to do at dusk, when everything is quiet and he can breathe a little easier, she drifts on to the stage of his mind. He loves her so fiercely; he won’t let anyone hurt her, ever. ‘Not even yourself,’ he can’t help but add. His true nature is so kind, so scrupulously gentle; but always he feels the need to cloak it in ironies. He is the saddest kind of man, the sort who seems embarrassed by his own decency. ‘An afflicted poor devil,’ as he sometimes says.

  She feels that if they courted more openly and often there would be less of a need for letters, and that this would be a relief, like the windows of an old mansion being thrown open. He rarely stops chiding her for not writing to him more. She doesn’t say what she means, she writes too briefly, she forgets about his illnesses, she breaks all her promises, she wants too much from him, she doesn’t want enough, she looked at him coldly, she winked at some spear-carrier. ‘You are rolling the stone off my grave.’ A Kingstown postmark makes her feel trepidation; the way his mother would feel if she glanced up from Leviticus and saw a tricolour flapping from the conservatory roof. If only they could spend time actually having their feelings, rather than thinking up new ways of putting them into words. But he seems to think nothing is real unless it is written down. The heroine of his Mayo play will be first encountered writing a letter.

  She has noticed that ‘lonesome’ is the adjective he most uses about himself. He is nearly always lonesome in his missives to his changeling. Another word he likes to deploy is ‘disappointed’. It is sprinkled over his letters like a tartish cologne. She disappoints him so often, so deeply and unforgivably, that there are times when she can’t help but wonder what he is doing with her at all.

  He often repeats a story she has always found curious, emblematic of him in some way neither of them quite understands: about a particular sojourn he once made in Wicklow, when the room in which he was quartered was directly above a kitchen, so that if he knelt down on the floorboards and put his ear to the chinks, he could eavesdrop on the serving girls talking below him. An admirer of Shakespeare, perhaps he thought of Pyramus and Thisbe, those lovers doomed to commune through a fissure in a wall. Maybe – is it possible? – he sees her as a conduit, a way of negotiating away that separation? It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Kingstowner to navigate that eye in the floor. She is the only woman not of his class with whom he has ever been truly intimate. Unless some gurleen over in Aran? – but no. He’d be afraid. Is her role to be conductress, to allow him admission to something? ‘Be careful not to get greasepaint in your eyes,’ he once told her. Be careful yourself, she wants to reply. The twilight is not real; it is only limelight burning low. So much in the theatre is smoke and mirrors.

  She sees him in the lobby of the Abbey, surrounded by admirers. Would he consent to inscribe a programme, would he shake the hand of an enthusiast? Monsieur Synge, cher maître, I bring you salutations from France. She watches from the halfcurtained vantage of the dressing-room door, Dossie Wright and the other actors behind her, laughing, drinking. Yeats and the old lady leading him by the cuffs across the foyer, their latest exhibit, like something dug out of a bog. She wants to scream at them: Leave him alone, you are breaking him; can you not see it? You smash the very thing you want from him. He turns and meets her glance but offers no other acknowledgement. He vanishes in a snowstorm of compliments.

  They are kissing in a printer’s doorway, hands in one another’s coats. He turns from her, throwing glances over his shoulder at the street. The last tram to Kingstown is about to depart. Its wet, dark windows. The people inside, wrapped up.

  —Might I see you home at least, Molly?

  —The neighbours might notice.

  —I wish I had the courage to ask what I want.

  —There will be other nights again. I love you.

  The tram jolts down Sackville Street. She is alone with his ghost. Home to his mother in Kingstown.

  Like many self-doubting people, he sometimes has the arrogance of a Pharaoh. She has received love letters before, but never like his. Who in the name of the suffering saints does this thread-arsed playmaker think he is? The proper mode of such correspondence, when written by men, is to pronounce oneself unworthy of the fairy-one’s favours, to do a little begging and gasping about your sleeplessness, and make a few suggestive comparisons to mythological hip-swingers. It doesn’t matter that you don’t mean it: Christ, it’s only good form. But the playboy doesn’t play. These are not billets-doux.

  He tells her, approvingly, that she is ‘pretty and quiet and nice’. Is that really what he burns for in a lover, she wonders, and is this sandwich of stone-like, deadly words the best way a poet would have of presenting it? Why does he never say exactly what he wants? If beauties were before me, stepping out of their clothes, it would be you that I’d beg for; it could only be you. Why can he never write her anything like that?

  Mostly, his tone is sardonic, schoolmasterly; so brusque h
e seems to want to push her away. ‘I will not wait for you in Bray, so don’t miss your train.’ ‘I’m afraid I’m spoiling you by writing to you every day.’ ‘When I have anything I don’t approve of, I’ll let you know fast enough.’ ‘Why are you so changeable when you know how much it harms me?’ He is an example of the man many women have known: the suitor who craves you but secretly wants to be dismissed.

  Their quarrels are Vesuvian tirades of invective. ‘You are ludicrous!’ she accuses him, reefing her handkerchief into two with rage. ‘You may stop your letters if you like. I don’t care if I never hear from you again, so there!’ She is faithless, he is ‘selfpitiful’, she is spiteful, he is ‘an old stick in the mud’. She is making him ill. He is wearing her out. She will leave off acting and ‘get a shop’ if he keeps this up, or be a dancing-girl in some low pantomime, and how will he like that? One of her outbursts is countered by Glenageary’s ultimate denunciation: ‘You have finally ruined my holiday.’

  They beg him at the theatre to make changes to the Mayo play. It is going to cause trouble. The patriots won’t like it. You cannot portray an Irishman who boasts of being a murderer – a thug who has slaughtered his father! It is folly. And for the heroine to be aroused by his claimed brutality is tantamount to inviting the burning of the theatre. Rehearsals are uneasy. The reviewers will destroy it. The authorities will close the place down. The scene in which the peasants are seen to torture a man by fire – it is too much; it is grotesque and obscene. He will not change a word. It must be what it must. This is the role that will make her a legend, he promises. Is that what she wishes to be?

  The Sunday before The Playboy of the Western World receives its premiere, they take a cold, rain-soaked walk from Carrickmines to Glencullen, through a boulder-strewn valley with a distant view of the Sugarloaf. That night she dreams of him in a wild garden, rhododendrons gone to seed, a hawk perched on his boot, feathers bloodstained.

  He does not attend the first night: too ill, short of breath. She imagines his presence, sees him slipping in late, seated by himself in the consoling darkness of the balcony, watching her move about in the scorch of the light: the poise with which she holds herself, her strength as she speaks his lines. The fact of her speaking them, a lovemaking.

  She moves across the footlights, knowing he is watching – in the black-dark windows of his fevered room in Kingstown he can see the reflections, the rage. Up here, she is the artist, he the apprentice. He is out beyond the point where anything matters. Not riots. Not hypocrisies. Not batons. Not policemen. The hatred of the crowd means nothing. Their spittle and her sweat will all be washed away, and the show will be played to the close. ‘That is not the West’ a man in the audience cries out, as though he were in the play, which, in a way, he is; he will always be in it now, no matter where or in what circumstances it is ever performed again. To America, Australia, places she never thought she would see, the memory of him will follow, his denunciations ringing. And she feels for this man. She understands his grief. All those years he was told his West was a land of apes. He wants it to be a land of angels, is upset and frightened that it isn’t. His grandparents starved to death in the land they were born in, a country where the idle took everything but the stones. His people died in the workhouses, on the ships, in the prisons, they were not worth the price of a grave. He cannot bear the shame and the cruelty he has inherited, spat into his face by this story. But she clings to the lines. People are screaming. As the cries grow more wounded, the insults more brutal, she pictures her lover silently mouthing his lines along with her, alone in a rainstorm on Kingstown Pier, the spray in his beard, on his clothes. She feels like weeping, but that will not happen. She breathes and speaks, she speaks and breathes, and the words he wrote in silence are pushed into the air. Acting is breathing: the body gives life. Some reason, a small one, but it isn’t nothing, to go on existing in this vicious world, where hurts abound, and the body fails, and the crushed hopes of childhood are never far away. It is an act of mercy, the thing she does every night. She breathes for him; allows him to die temporarily. Most nights, he stays at home.

  The neighbours in Mary Street give long, cold glares. The whole town is speaking of that filthy, vile play. A disgrace to Irish womanhood. A libel on the peasantry. A cur who savages his father; the Jezebel who lusts for him – imagine such a crawling horror on the stage of a Christian city. The traitress who would demean herself by appearing in this affront to a people’s innocence – could she ever be forgiven such a betrayal?

  6

  A LETTER TO THE TIMES

  November 1952

  Sir –

  Something will have to be done about the number of indigent persons roaming London. Recently, whilst on a visit to our capital city, I happened to cross Trafalgar Square at approximately half-past twelve on a weekday, accompanied by my wife and our daughter. We were assailed by the sight of a woman of not inconsiderably advanced years who was asleep at the base of Nelson’s Column. A bottle was visible in this female’s hand. She was in a condition of quite revolting disarray. As a taxpayer, and as one who served his kingdom proudly in time of war, I was affronted and not inconsiderably angered that I should have to subsidise the indolence of a person such as this, who should know that impressionable younger people might be going about their business, not to mention the effect on visitors to the city. The female, on being approached by a member of the constabulary, proved herself a native of a neighbouring island – I might add, a Republic – that has been notably far from friendly to Her Majesty’s subjects, whilst continuing to export multitudes of her own. It really is ‘a bit Irish’, if I might coin a popular phrase.

  Yours, etcetera,

  Concerned rates-payer from Berkshire.

  7

  INTERMISSION AT GLENCREE

  Two people are walking the rutted, tussocked cart track that leads northward out of the village of Annamoe, in County Wicklow, through country of tweedy purples and rain-bleached umbers and hip-high ripening barley. Past stone-filled, hilly, irregularly shaped fields that are bordered by low walls of lichen-yellowed boulders. At the edges of the meadows, masses of wet bluebells under lowgrown, crooked willows. The stillness so pleasing; the damp Irish emptiness and the faint smell of rained-on goats.

  It has rained the night before, it has rained all night; but as the sun rises higher, slow as molasses, the morning warms and mellows, and a coconut aroma arises from the gorse-covered outcrops. A ewe emerges cautiously from a tumbled thatchless cottage that has bog cotton growing in its rafters. Seeing the man and the bicycle and the girl go past, it stares as though rooted by an apparition. The strange bloom of the red bracken in the early morning sun is like the sheen, remarks the man, from a pregnant woman’s skin.

  ‘Like the what?’ she laughs.

  ‘Is that not right?’

  ‘It’s away with the faeries you are.’

  Tufts of sheep-fleece on the jags of rusting barbed wire. Rainwater pooling in the lowland meadows.

  Nine miles they walk until the track becomes little more than a footpath, overgrown here and there by nettles and blackberry copses grown madwoman crazy from neglect. The curlew. The gannet. Do you remember those, too? He was telling you their Latin names.

  They climb the cliff track slowly; it is stony and loose. He sweats as he wheels the old bicycle. The girl is suffering in the heat, but the man, being a man, is permitted to unfasten his shirt. Oh the air lividly murmurous with bees and wasps. Armies of water midges in the puddled, narrow laneways that are formed by the high, wild hedgerows. The girl, a city-dweller, beats at the air around her. ‘They’d have you demented,’ she says.

  Crushed butterwort and heather and the odour of mountain chives. Sheep-shit, honeysuckle, bog myrtle and rose-root; the sweetness of wet wild strawberries. In the distance, breasting the coast, the southbound train from Dublin leaves an afterthought of smoke in its wake. The trundling of its engine is borne faintly to them on a breeze that smells of the peat an
d the dulse. A shrieked, mournful hoot as it chugs into a tunnel gouged years ago through the groin of Eagle Mountain. The cry summons a neighbour’s boy, a cellar-digger by trade, who emigrated to Brooklyn and died in an explosion there. Beyond the tracks, the sea is an impossible colour – the iridescent blue of the Virgin’s sash in a Renaissance Italian altar-panel the man once showed her in the gallery. And they can see the little pleasure-boats that ply out of Greystones and the fishermen’s smacks trailing petticoats of netting, but an immensity of gnarled granite arises through the breakers, lending strangeness, an anxiety, to the scene. Around the island bob black coracles, from which navvies hurry with grapples, and with slates and jemmies and spikes and coils of chain, for they are constructing a beacon on that wave-beaten rock – the old lighthouse has been decommissioned.

  The girl and her companion take turns with his telescope. The task will be gruelling, the man mutters. She watches a soldier on the crag driving in iron stakes with a mallet; his high, hard, rhythmic swings. Like any living creature observed through a telescope, he looks mysterious, otherworldly as an angel. A sergeant is bawling at him but she cannot hear his commands. The soldier strikes harder with the hammer.

  They walk on. The bicycle creaks. The map he has is old, has been folded so many times that its creases are frayed quite through. Someone has inked contour lines here and there on its quadrants, as though the declivities they reference have somehow not been noticed by the cartographer. A bookplate has been pasted on to its cover near the cartouche, reading Ex Libris Trinity College Dublin. Below it, in elegant copperplate, a hand not the man’s has inscribed a curious rhyme.

  If this chart – thou steal’st away,