Ghost Light: A Novel

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘What in the name of Holy Moses are you doing?’

  ‘You huer’s melt and cur. You may leave me well alone from this out. You may sleep in your blasted hammock, my buck.’

  ‘Is the hysteria to continue, do you know, at all?’ His words are measured carefully but she can see that he is frightened. It interests her to glimpse his helplessness before a woman’s anger and she wonders about the source of that fear. He blurs in her eyes as she commences to weep. He takes the broom from its hook, his boots scrunching quietly on the debris.

  ‘If you open the door, I shall help you clear up, Molly. These little accidents happen.’

  She begins to pack her clothes into the ancient carpetbag she always brings on tour.

  ‘So you will leave when I need you? How do you intend returning to Dublin?’

  ‘On my feet if I must. I am damn well able to walk. It’s the only useful thing knowing yourself ever taught me.’

  ‘You are ridiculous, of course. You will jeopardise everything.’

  ‘Do I take it that you will refuse me a shilling for a train fare?’

  ‘For the love of Christ, woman, need you act in this manner?’

  ‘Call it payment if you like. Call it payment! Do you mind me? I want never to see your liar’s face again.’

  A tour in northern England. Then Wales. Then Scotland. His telegrams and letters you ignored. But speaking his lines every night brought him to you anyway. A ferociousness to his words, full of deliberate discords in their arrangement, that would make you draw in your breath and mutter and turn to your neighbour and feel strange things were being named in the room.

  What had happened between you became a thing that would have to be let go. You sensed the messages from him were either a duty he felt he had to keep faith with or a sort of weaning-off he needed too. You were unmooring one another. Perhaps nobody would be hurt. One evening after a performance in Manchester, you went walking with your sister and told her a little of your feelings, of the promises not kept. She pointed out that you were speaking of him in the past tense now, advised you to allow him a last chance. What was holding you back? You owed it to yourself to try. The worst that could happen was a final rejection, but could you continue in the lie that you did not care for him any more, a fiction you must surely be able to recognise?

  You dreamed of Wicklow: hidden lakes, the ruins of old mines, bog meadows, Ravens’ Glen, the waterfall at Powerscourt. You had been a reason to visit again the places of his childhood summers – that was all you had been: a diversion. A reason to speak the place names he found soothing to say, the words sounding beautiful in his Kingstown accent: Djouce Mountain, Tonduff, Carrickgollogan. Knocksink. Aughavanna, Glenmalure, Annamoe, Lough Nahanagan. The graves in the Protestant churchyard at Enniskerry, not far from Lover’s Leap rock. You had asked him to show you his favourite view of all; he’d brought you hiking up a switchback path above the forest at Kilmolin. On the eastern horizon you could make out the peaks of Snowdonia, the bald drumlin of Holy Island at the entrance to Holyhead. You dreamed of that vista and awoke in a boarding house in Liverpool. There was a letter from him waiting. You burned it.

  Manchester, Oxford. The Medway towns. York. Carlisle. Great Yarmouth. You dreamed of being with him at Brittas Bay, grim sandwiches in the dunes, and of the ruins of a fairy ring near a maltings at Arklow, still transmitting its menace a thousand years after it was made, according to the children hunting wrens nearby. A farmer had tried to fell it; his hammer had burst into flames the moment he entered the rath – he was dead before it hit the ground. ‘That’s as true as Jesus, Mister, I seen it myself.’

  ‘Way to God, you gowl,’ scoffed another lad, whispering lowly to his girl. But the first boy insisted on the veracity of the story. ‘I’d no more cross that circle than pish on a grave. They’d come after you, so they would. They’re evil, so they are. An oul tinker used to live up the way told me ma the fairies took his wife. An’ if you seen him yourself you’d believe it.’

  You played London for a week in August. He was rumoured to be coming. A note arrived from him to the effect that he was grateful for your first-night performance but unfortunately had had to leave early, due to illness. The costume girl read it to you. You made no response. Someone brought champagne. You drank it.

  He had written that he missed you, had wanted to meet you off the train at King’s Cross, had set out from his club before realising it was too insistent a gesture, something you might not want. He had walked the streets around the station in the rain and the wind, sat in a café trying to sort his thoughts. He watched the trains coming in. You would be on one of them, he knew. To approach you across the platform, to embrace you, take your bag? Would you be happy to see him there or find his presence unnerving? In the end he had sat so long that you must have arrived by then, were probably in the cab to the hotel, or the theatre. Doubtless, you did not wish to see him anyway.

  You dreamed of him that night, you were walking Russell Square in London, and there was such freedom and lightness in whatever he was saying that to wake in the dark of morning was hard. You began what soon became a love letter; it was honest, too lengthy. You wrote that you had come to think of him as the source of whatever happiness and courage you knew; that the thought of a future without him was unbearable. You considered a long time before writing the word ‘unbearable’, sensing declarations of such heatedness would frighten or anger him; they would certainly have this effect on you. And then you simply let go, writing anything you felt, for you knew you would never send it, lacked the mettle to be revealed. Foolish phrases came crowding. It didn’t matter now. Quotations from love poems, from songs that had come to mean something. As you watched the letter burn, you felt the strange, bright hope that its destruction would somehow anatomise the realities it had tried to describe. You wondered why you had spent so long writing it.

  A thunderstorm in Leeds. His chest against your back. From outside on the street you heard the young people shrieking. You had missed a cue earlier. The house had been poor. At the hotel, you’d had too much to drink.

  First time it ever happened. Dr Leverett’s Tonic Wine. ‘For feminine maladies and general regularity.’ The room was very cold, the blankets too heavy. You heard him singing quietly into the nest of your matted hair.

  Last year, at Lady Mary’s Fair … and I being in Dundee …

  I met a boy I’d parted from … and he being on a spree.

  His company I did accept, and with him I did go,

  But to my sad misfortune, it proved my overthrow …

  ‘I’m warning you, if you want any sleep, you better stop,’ you whispered.

  He stopped. And he started again.

  And you know it was only a dream but it didn’t matter at the time. In Leeds, one night in a storm.

  After you broke with him, it became your habit to walk in the evenings. Stephen’s Green was a sort of destination but often you would circle back, to the bookshops on Nassau Street, through the quadrangles of Trinity College, along the north quays of the Liffey, through the bleak expanse of Phoenix Park. Autumn was coming. Darkness descended earlier. Schoolchildren would come into the park to fell chestnuts.

  It had always been the season when you saw the most beauty in the city. One afternoon you walked to the old library to see an exhibition of rare volumes but found the sight of the guillemots whirling in the sky over Kildare Street more touching than what could be written in verses. It was one of those Dublin summer evenings that smells of fresh linen; pale golden light was spilling into the streets and it made even the shop windows seem magical.

  You had paused to look at the stacks outside an antiquarian bookshop when you felt a presence behind you on Duke Street.

  ‘Molly?’

  You turned.

  His expression was a mingling of hope and defensiveness. A cautious, half-fearful anticipatory look, as one testing the edge of a blade or a word.

  ‘Molly. Dear God. How are you?’
>
  ‘Quite well.’

  ‘What a surprise. I was literally only thinking of you this minute, as a matter of fact. Thought I saw you from the tram. How rum.’

  Your impulse was to hurry away. You felt doors opening inside you, and you didn’t want to go through any of them again.

  ‘What has you in town, John? Were you going to the theatre?’

  ‘Thinking of it. Vaguely. But there’s nothing much playing. Just gypsying about, to tell the truth.’

  The crowd moved around you. A fire-juggler began performing.

  ‘You look healthy, Molly.’

  ‘I don’t.’ You glanced at your watch. ‘I’m after putting on the few pounds. That’s what comes of going on tour, of course. They think when you’re Irish all you eat is the potatoes. Half the company’s gone the size of a balloon.’

  ‘You’d barely notice. It suits you. Your face has filled out.’

  ‘Dossie Wright says a troop of actors always weighs the same amount. There’s some do go up and some do go down but all together it comes to the same. Like a family.’

  ‘What an interesting theory. How is Sally keeping these days?’

  ‘She’s mighty. I think. Course, I wouldn’t be told if she wasn’t. That’s our Sally, as you know. Keeps it close to the chest.’

  ‘Molly –’

  ‘Maybe she’s the wise girl to do so.’

  ‘Could we perhaps take a cup of tea together? You’ve probably no time, have you?’

  ‘I have an appointment presently.’

  ‘An appointment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ten minutes, then? Or fifteen? Are you terribly pushed?’

  ‘I think it would be better not to. My friend would be offended. And there is nothing I want to say to you anyhow.’

  ‘I quite understand. Only spare me five minutes? For old times’ sake, if it must be?’

  You didn’t want to go with him and yet found it impossible to decline. You passed through the street and to the Imperial Café, but there were no available tables at first. You stood together on the stairway that led to the mezzanine. He was hot, shocked, fumbling his sentences; he had never been good at being in a café. You could smell the musk of his shaving soap, the pomade in his hair. You wondered if there was some way to leave without making a scene you’d no heart for. You didn’t want to give it to him to say. All the time you waited for a table, you kept up your side of the platitudinous conversation while desperately wishing you could smoke.

  A silence descended. It was as though some uninvited bore had sat down between you. You could see that he, too, was regretting having invited you. Shouts and catcalls arose suddenly from the street below, where policemen were chasing a slum child.

  ‘I think about you often, Molly. Every moment of the day. There is so much that I have wanted to say to you. About our quarrel, our misunderstanding.’

  You hadn’t a reply. He looked younger than you’d remembered. Strangely distancing to hear him speak your name. He had combed his hair differently, was wearing a cravat with a triple-spiral pin and expensive-looking clothes you wondered how he could afford. It was too hot in the café; his spectacles were misting. A church bell was tolling in the alley nearby. People made the sign of the cross.

  ‘And your friend?’ he asked quietly. ‘May I enquire if I know him?’

  ‘I do not see that that is a question you are entitled to put, John.’

  ‘Is it Wright?’

  ‘I hardly think it is any of your business.’

  ‘No. Just so. There it is.’

  ‘And your mother is well, I hope?’

  ‘I believe so. Of course, she is never terribly well. But she sort of soldiers on. It’s rather admirable and stoic in its way.’

  ‘I must go to meet my friend. I am meeting him at the bridge.’

  ‘May I walk with you?’

  ‘All right. I must hurry.’

  Your heartbeat was that intense you could feel it in your gums as you went together through the crowded streets. Silently you linked his arm as you crossed College Green. In front of Trinity gate, young people were waiting for their sweethearts, and a woman with a baby in a blanket drifted between them holding out a cup. It was after six o’clock and the offices were closing. You were walking through the city for the last time together. He was talking about a piece he was writing, the tour to Scotland and Wales; all the things that did not matter at all. A balladeer bawled a chorus and shook his fist at the sky, raising mockeries from a party of passing schoolgirls. Too quickly you were standing by the steps to the Ha’penny Bridge. Wind blew dead ivy-leaves slowly along the quay and one of them clung flappingly to his lapel.

  ‘Could we start again, Molly?’

  When you looked at him he was weeping, his head bowed low, his shoulders shaking fiercely. Like a man who is ashamed to weep.

  ‘John – for pity’s sake – people are staring.’

  ‘I am sorry. Truly sorry. For the hurt I have done you. I beg your forgiveness, Molly. It’s a wretched fool I’ve been.’

  ‘What is done is done, John. I do not make you happy. There is some other girl who will. We must be courageous now.’

  ‘There is no other girl, Molly. There never shall be again.’

  ‘You mustn’t say such things. You are a very fine man.’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. They have told me I am dying. Not in those words. But I know. I know.’

  The crowds pushed past you. In the river there were cloudscapes. You took him by the hand and watched them.

  You are walking up Bray Head with him, as you often do on Sundays, and the sea below the cliff path is a rolling grey-green. There were evenings in the past, you would have gone as far as Greystones. Lately it’s too far for him. He leans heavily on your arm. People are nudging. They know him now. The Kingstown little tinker who wrote that filthy play. The dirty Protestant smut-monger. His turncoat slut. Making us out to be savages and murderers and drunks, our women nothing but whores in homespun. Oh they laugh at us in England. And why wouldn’t they laugh? Judases like Synge and his tart of the tenements will always sell their country to the conqueror. Sometimes for money, other times for power: this time for the spittle on the overlord’s lips as he wipes his cackling maw in a playhouse. Synge, the bitch’s traitor, puppeteer of stage-Irishmen, contriver of the seductively garrulous killer, part Frankenstein’s monster, part clown. He does not seem put out, nor even surprised. ‘We are an event,’ he tells you, and you carry on with the climb. Pushing together, into the slab of the gradient. It is as though he is trying to persuade himself that none of it matters. (‘It makes me rage when I think of the people who go on as if art and literature and writing were the first thing in the world.’) He is so disingenuous sometimes. A protection.

  Soon he will alter his term of address. ‘My child,’ he will call you, instead of ‘my changeling’. He is ageing with every step, is often in crippling pain. ‘I am so proud of you,’ he says. ‘I am so fond of you. I love you.’

  He is in Germany recuperating from failed surgery when his mother dies of cancer, so old that he doesn’t remember her age. His loyalty to her ghost is unqualified, fervent. It is as though she is still in the house, watching over his shoulder, still waiting for him to atone for all the disappointments. ‘I cannot tell you how unspeakably sacred her memory seems to me,’ he will write. ‘There is nothing in the world better than a single-hearted wife and mother. I wish you had known her better. I hope you’ll be as good to me as she was.’ How hard it must have been to write such words. But harder to have had to read them.

  He will stay on in the big house at Glenageary for a time, but will find it difficult to be alone in the old empty rooms, with only ‘that little donkey of a servant’ for company. He will inherit some money, not very much, but enough to live quietly in some suburb like Dundrum. That is all he wants now: his child and Dundrum. A home without memories. A few quiet years together. He is becoming like Lear, as the play nears i
ts end: begging for the consolations he refused in Act One. Being killed by the gods for their sport.

  He will talk to you again about marriage, the future. ‘If only my health holds we will be able to get on now.’ But the cues have all been missed; he did not recognise them when they came, and the long rehearsals are not to be realised. He is brought to a nursing home in the city, where the orderlies wheel him to a window so he can see his beloved Wicklow Mountains in the distance. He withers, drugged by ether, gaze fixing on lost Wicklows. You soak your handkerchief, touch it to his lips, his eyelids. There comes a night when he manages to murmur for a sip of champagne. Five painful months after the death of his mother, he himself will die, aged thirty-seven, following a hopeless operation for Hodgkin’s disease. Distraught, you will beseech a priest to say a requiem mass, but will be told that the request is difficult to grant. He was not one of us. He was of the other persuasion. There have to be limits, after all.

  Probably he would have understood, would not have wanted any fuss. All his life he had to attune to subtle transmissions of his unacceptability. He knew what it is to find yourself walled out, separated by boundaries you did not yourself make; to have to gaze through whatever chink may be found at the people whose acknowledgement you burn for. At the time of his death, no member of his immediate family has ever seen one of his plays.

  ‘My dearest Love,’ begins his farewell letter. ‘This is a mere line for you, my poor child, to bid you good-bye and ask you to be brave and good and not to forget the good times we’ve had and the beautiful things we’ve seen together.’

  It is signed ‘Your old Friend’. He is no longer the tramp. There is no need to be in character any more.

  Her daughter will be called ‘Pegeen’ after her mother’s greatest role: the heroine in The Playboy of the Western World, a woman who loves a storyteller, but loses him too soon, when the past lurches out from the dark backstage in the shape of his wounded parent.