Ghost Light: A Novel

by Joseph O'Connor

—I need a servant for Act Three. I can pay the union rate.

  —I do not play servants, Christopher. I think perhaps there is a confusion –

  Faces turn to look at you. A carpenter pauses. Backstage, the soliloquy ceases.

  —Molly, I’m going to have to ask you to lower your voice.

  —I shall sue. Do you understand me? I will finish you in this city.

  —Don’t speak to me like that, Molly. Who in hell do you think you are?

  —I am an artist trained by the Fays at the Abbey Theatre of Dublin, the greatest national theatre in the world, sir. The first of its sort ever to have existed. It was born before my country took her place among the nations and its birth helped light her way to whatever measure of freedom she now enjoys. I knew John Synge. I knew Augusta Gregory. William Yeats gave me praise as he accepted the Nobel Prize. Is it a scrubwoman I am to be? A walk on and off? I have filled this auditorium more times than you have filled your disgusting face. Am I now to be insulted in this manner?

  —You’re drunk, Molly. Go home. Don’t let people remember you like this.

  —You odious little leech, do you slander Maire O’Neill? That will cost you dearly, sir. I have witnesses. Witnesses! Perhaps your own mediocrity causes you to assume that everyone else is grubbing in the sewer with you?

  —Here’s ten bucks, get off my stage before I call the police. And never come back. You hear me? Get out. You washed-up fucking drunk!

  You are standing in the train corridor, light-headed with hunger, looking out at the lights of Chicago. Molly he whispers, behind you. My changeling?

  He is swaying at the forefront of a ragged silent fellowship of the boys and men who loved you. They are white-faced, wordless, every man jack of them, hatless, ghostly, in dumb show. Little Patrick Counihan, the scene-painter’s apprentice. Hutton, the coal-heaver. Blackmore, the plumber. Willie Pearse, the actor, and he riddled with bullets. Johnny Howlett, his fierce beauty, his arsenal of mimicries; the strut of him down Francis Street like a prince’s through his kingdom, a confetti of compliments swirling around his face and he blowing them out of his path with a pout. Died at the Somme when the poisoned gas swallowed him. Black bunting draped from the tenements. Mair the critic, and Sinclair the actor: both have the lustrous sadness of archangels. And then – so strange – those you don’t recognise at all. Here comes one in a beautiful suit, a portly man but muscular, like a one-time varsity oarsman who later became a barrister. He gazes at you shyly, beads of tears in his eyes. Was he someone in the audience, who came night after night? And a poor boy of the slums, who looks fourteen or fifteen, offering you – what is it? – an apple core? His hands cup it delicately, as though it is a precious jewel of Araby or the flame of his own lost life.

  You shuffle away from the window, begin walking the train, and you sense them following but at a respectful distance. You pass passengers who are sleeping, or eating, or talking. Your son and your daughter, both asleep under blankets. Up ahead you see a bridge and its approach makes you feel relief, for you know the pursuers will evaporate when the Missouri is crossed. Like all ghosts, they are afraid of water.

  It would be good to have a drink. Just to soften the edges. Your husband is looking weary, playing poker with two strangers. He gapes up at you unsmilingly. He needs to trim his moustache. He turns to his companions, both of whom are a little older.

  —Gentlemen, may I present to you the other half of my soul.

  The carriage rocks gently, a boat in a swell, and the whiskey in their glasses slops. One of the gamblers covers his tumbler, then licks the pads of his palm, then sucks his fingertips one by one.

  —You are an actress, Miss O’Neill?

  —That is correct. Mister … ?

  —O’Keeffe, ma’am. He tips his homburg. James O’Keeffe at your service. Commercial traveller. In paper and religious articles.

  —You are courteous, Mr O’Keeffe. You are a Southerner, I think.

  —I have that honour, Miss O’Neill. Jackson, Mississippi.

  —I have never played in Jackson.

  He grins.—I have.

  You allow it to pass. The flirtatious dog.

  —But excuse my manners, Miss O’Neill. May I offer you my seat?

  —Thank you, Mr O’Keeffe, but I am unaccustomed to card tables.

  —Of course. He nods.—Pleasure deferred. I hope to run into you again some time.

  You are alone in the dining car. Presumptuous, bold oaf. The moors of north Wicklow at dusk through the window and the fog bringing lights on in cottages. Gorse burning on the Sugarloaf. O the fire is flaring hard. I am covered in butterflies of pain.

  Pegeen is holding a soap bubble between the tips of forefinger and thumb. And now you become aware that the dining car has only three walls. Beyond the space where you imagined the fourth is the darkened parterre. Shadowed heads of the audience. Everyone watching. The ushers like statues in the doorways.

  There are eras of every life that have a carapace about them, a scar grown out of the woundedness. We gaze back on them as though they had meaning, contained intimations of future things – the seeds of the very subsequence we are now in a position to see. It is tempting to persuade ourselves we suffered a kind of illiteracy – we could not read the runes because we were young, or green, or undiscerning, or blind to the consequence. But that is not the truth, or not the whole truth, unmediated; for we sensed, even then, that this framed time must end and that all would be changed from this out. But we were adrift in a maelstrom of human feeling; already it was too late to swim. And we must somehow have wanted it, preferring the storm to the harbour: the hurts, the shattered feelings – the hurts to others, too. We are innocent of nothing we chose. It is my act of contrition. All our lives we do battle in the manacles of our mothers. But even the shaken chain has its music.

  There was once a holiday in Wicklow. We saw the bones of an old ship. His gazetteer said that it had been wrecked in the time of the Armada. It was black as his hair. There were seals in the water. Strange cries had been reported from the hulk late at night. But that day, there was only gull song.

  Come here to me, Moody. Sit down. Hold my hand. Let us listen to the train, my old love.

  14

  BROMPTON CEMETERY LONDON, ENGLAND

  MAIRE O’NEILL

  DIED NOVEMBER 2ND 1952

  SISTER OF

  SARA ALLGOOD

  DIED IN HOLLYWOOD

  Epilogue

  OLD LETTER FOUND AMONG HER PAPERS, UNMAILED

  Duane’s Inn and Grocery,

  Near Carraroe, Cashla Bay,

  Connemara,

  Galway

  24 July [year not given]

  Dearest Tramp,

  I am after writing out your name and looking at the page a hundred years. I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. So how are you keeping this weather and you without me up in Dublin? Are you fading away like the morning dew? I hope you won’t be thick with me for writing and you buried in your auld play like a miner. Tis midnight in Connemara and I can’t find the morphine. Downstairs they are at the drinking and the singing of sad songs. They live only for pleasure, the stony, grey islanders, and the dark, deep sup of the blackness. It’s said there’s a storm coming. No one seems to care. An hour ago a girl was singing ‘The Lass of Roch Royale’. And everything went still. O, as still as the air. And you came drifting in and sat down by my window.

  I was thinking about the night in Cork when that old drunkard was singing it near the market. Do you remember his hands? They were like gnarled bits of bog oak. We were going somewhere, or coming home – was it after the theatre? – and there was a fellow too old to be begging and he collecting money in a cap. And a dog on a rope with a scarf around his neck. And yourself – big auld Soft-heart – were crying.

  The sun would dry the oceans wide;

  Heaven should cease to be.

  The world will cease its motion, my love,
r />   E’er I’d prove false to thee.

  It was good to get your letter in Galway. You’re a lovely old Tramper. Don’t be fretting yourself about anything at all, little tinker – of course your stubborn girl understands your wanting a little month on your own and when your play is all written it’s the happy outings we’ll have, with the holy help of God. Meanwhile I have Sally here to mind me – though she’s not so sweet as yourself—and coming here for my lessons will soon have me speaking the Irish like a natural, native nun. That last was the charmingest letter you ever sent me yet. It’d be lovely to talk to my Tramp and hear his voice again. You are my greatest little pet. I love you.

  So is your play sending you mad? (Write me a BIGGER part than Sally’s.) I’ve an awful ocean of time here – I hope you don’t mind my plaguing. The post is only collected twice weekly down here – only once in the wintertime. It must be beautiful then. Easy knowing I’m a blow-in, saying something so stupid. I’d say November’s hard here. And January worse.

  The lessons are the hardest purgatory any girl ever had. We’ve this room in the guesthouse, quite small but it’s pretty and the bed is bigger than the one we’re in at home. There’s a view of the sea and the cliffs. The smell of the turf is lovely. You can hear the terns in the morning, it’s a beautiful sound. Mrs Duane says you stayed here yourself in the late fourteenth century, one of the Augusts you were down on your own. It’s nice to stir in the bed and hear the waves if it’s rough; that roar of the pebbles surging like billy in the breakers. I made friends with her daughter Mary who is twenty, same as me. She is a right piece of mischief. All the boys are sweet on her, so Sally is deadly jealous as you can imagine.

  They’d a wedding on yesterday in the chapel back the way and it was a sight for sore eyes to see the bride arrive in by rowboat with her people – she is from Aranmore Island – and her chap strolling out of the bogland like a vision. She was carrying her shoes as she came up the boreen below and His Gills whistling ‘The Coolin’ in her wake. Coat over the shoulder and the paws in the pockets, as carefree as a cornerboy on a saunter. I am reading The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s making me laugh. Aren’t they the right pair of unholy bitches when they start – the two girls? They make Sally and me seem like saints entirely. (I KNOW it should be Sally and ‘I’ – I wrote ‘me’ to vex you.) The way they go on stays in your head after you close the script. As I can always hear my Tramper, and his kind, soft words, even when he’s far from me. Because I love him.

  So all is good and fine. Musha, we can’t complain. I keep thinking I see you. It’s the queerest thing. Yesterday it rained when I was down at the cliffs on my own and I could see you taking off your coat that evening you brought me to the Shelbourne and the way you draped it over your arm and reached out to shake my hand same as you were meeting me to offer me a start waiting tables. And rain in your hair. I don’t know why I’d remember that. Sure it’s mad I am after going entirely, dear man, a wusha, bedad, and begob.

  I’ve been practising my blessed Irish the livelong day so you will be proud of your girl when I see you again. And I like the way they do be talking in English as well. ‘A dumb priest never got a parish’ being the Mary Duane way of saying: ‘I’ll ask you any question I want, my buckshee.’ O Tinker but you’d want to have seen her in the fine frock for the wedding yesterday – and she ordering around the potboys with extraordinary cursings and half the bucks of the islands with their tongues hanging out for her. At the end of the night she was dancing a step with her father. He’s a prince of a man, like a dolmen with limbs; they say he can pull a furze bush out of the ground with one hand. Could my Tinker do that? With his teeth!

  Oh, I wrote a love poem the other night with Sally. Here it is:

  A Protestant bishop called Synge

  Decided to kiss a nun’s ring,

  So he stripped off his mitre

  Which so did delight her,

  She soon was anointing his thing.

  It’s exquisitely fine, isn’t it? Will you show it to Yeats? (The poem I mean, not your thing.)

  Well, how is Dublin and your work? Has it got you in a straitjacket? Well, see you get a rest, you auld loon. A student lad who’s here told Sally it’s hot as the hobs up there. Mind yourself, won’t you? You know how you burn. I was thinking of making an [illegible word].

  Well, what other tidings? They’re still singing away downstairs. There do be a party of German scholars after descending here at the present time, some of them handsome young ladies of the yellowhaired persuasion, to the becrazement of the indigenous peoples. Ceilidhs do be held and the courting and the sporting and the pucking and the jockeying and night-rambling. This morning I was on the pier with Sally and her student lad when one of the fräuleins – I believe an archaeologist – went past us in a bodice of such a remarkable tightness that you could near enough make out what she had for her dinner. The boys will be all in educational mood and getting stuck into Elementary German.

  Mother of Christ I hear the rain coming up the road like a monster. Sounds a serious storm of wind, as they say in these parts. They’re saying it could be a hurricane yet. Johnny Coyne loves telling the English visitors: ‘A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded’. You’d believe it on a night like this.

  You’re right what you were telling me, it’s beautiful how they speak. Rolling around the vowels in their mouths like grub. Though there’s times it would give you a pain in your face. I mind you once saying they talk like Elizabethans. But maybe they only did that when they saw yourself coming, I’m thinking? ‘Chrisht, here’s that quare nighthawk down from Dublin – now quit looking happy and remember – Yr sixsteen brother emygrated unto Maachuetts in ye famine & ye ret of u ate tone & eaweede.’

  I can see Inishmaan across the Sound if I filch a loan of Mary’s da’s telescope. Seeing it makes me think of my Tramper. It’s myself would like to be walking and courting with you there, and kissing your knuckles and your eyelids. (Why am I telling you this? Sure, it fills up a rainy night.) I would like that, though. I miss you. I love you. Won’t it be palatial altogether when we’re married, Mister Millington? And they can all go and hump. And chew lumps off my rump. Come here to me till I tell you a little secret, Mister Honey – and you will think me a right schoolgirl when I tell you a silly fancy I had. There’s this little cabin over on Inishmaan used to belong to a lacemaker, and it neatly on the sea looking over to America. Do you know the place I mean? By the north shore cliff. It’s living there I’d fancy with my dear dotey Mister.

  Well Sally and I went out there in a little steamer the other day with Mary and her brothers and some boys and some sheep and some goats and a cock and a postman. It looks pretty through the telescope at sunset but when you actually betake yourself over there it’s a different state of affairs entirely. The gable’s collapsed and the roof-beam’s broken in two and a Sugarloaf of sheepshite in the lane. A couple of broken glasses was fairly much the only evidence of human occupation although when I foostered around in the rubble of what would have been the kitchen I found a couple of breakings of broken delft. Beautiful grey in the willow pattern – exactly the grey of your eyes. Pauric Danny – Mary’s da – says you’d need a diviner to find water inside a walk of it and there isn’t one on the island and it’s a sultan’s ransom to coax one over. So I’ll probably just leave our little cabin of pleasures for the terns and the wildflowers. It’s a nice picture to have in your head in Dublin.

  We met an old woman called Mrs Flaherty. I think she was sweet on you. ‘A grave poor man,’ she kept saying about Your Scrawniness, with this faraway look on her face. ‘He’d go into himself, do you know, and not come out the whole day. There’s some men do be fierce for the going into themselves, God between us. He’d be a type-writing machine. You never seen the like of it. But a grave poor sorrow of a natural man. And you’d see him going along the rocks there in the rain or the sun and the grief kindling away in the eyes of him.’ She repeats herself, the ol
d dote, the way old women do. Mary and the lads were good with her. I suppose it’s as though stories are stepping stones when you’re old, and you keep at the ones you know or you’d fall in. It was a prince of a blue day and this huge Italian sky, same as in a picture of the Mediterranean. There was this tall ship a few miles out. We watched till it disappeared. Below near the rocks there were these seals and a cormorant. The seals would send you a bit queer, their eyes are so human. Oh I went up to that little cottage where you used to stay every year. Funny old owl. Can’t have been easy for you all alone. I wished I could have been there with you. Am I allowed to say that?

  Well now, Mister Horn-Rims – I better off to my bed. Turn your back while I am undressing myself, you pirate! Can I tell you another secret? Do you mind that evening you took me to tea in the Shelbourne? I mean the evening you first invited me out. I can even remember the date. (Do YOU? Dirty liar – you don’t.) When you took off your coat and put it over your arm and looked at me with the rain in your hair and your spectacles smudged? I wanted to kiss you. Amn’t I awfully bold? Before we’d even said good evening or sat down at the table. You were burbling away about Yeats, or Paris, or something, and looking as grave as ten popes. I’d a feeling I would always know you – or that I’d met you in the long ago. It wasn’t only that you were the kindliest man I’d ever seen in my life; it was stranger than that. Like weather. All the people coming and going and I couldn’t even see them. And I was frightened too. I didn’t want to fall for anyone. I was bringing a mended coat up to my Auntie Eleanor in Francis Street that night. And I wanted to tell her. Wasn’t I mad? That’s one night I didn’t sleep, Mister. Should I hush up? You’re right.

  So anyhow. It’s raining hard. There we are. What else? It would be grand to go walking with you tomorrow and catch a lobster or two. I have been eating like a carthorse. Sally says I am gone too stout like one of the seals, and I better not go bathing else I’d cause a tidal wave, the bad rip. There’s a mirror in the hall downstairs, an old one, you know the sort, it says Arthur Guinness with a picture of a parakeet or some remarkably Irish craythur like that. I saw myself in it the other night – GLORY BE TO GOD. Funny thought struck me that my dear Tramp had looked in that mirror. I wanted to give it a kiss. There’s flattery for you now! But that way I’d have been kissing myself. You will not have such a fancy for your girl if she becomes a great big article, I’m thinking.