Time Present and Time Past

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘There was such a reality,’ Fintan says, gesturing to the open book on the table.

  ‘Yeah, but come on, for how many people? It’s not the whole story.’ They sit in silence for a few moments, drinking their tea, and then Niall remarks, ‘It’s kind of interesting, though, to think about the past in this way, I mean the really distant past, ’cos photography is one of the things that makes the biggest difference.’ He says to Fintan that the visual impact of visiting a new place must have been infinitely powerful if one had not seen in advance sharp colour photographs of it, ‘and of course you couldn’t see photographs like that at the time, ’cos there was no such thing.’ He cites Goethe’s nigh-on ecstatic account of visiting Rome at the start of the nineteenth century: the shock of the beauty of it; the strangeness.

  Fintan doesn’t agree. He says that no amount of documentary evidence had prepared him for the reality of seeing Venice for the first time. He says that Granny Buckley had described to him the arrival of the American soldiers in Northern Ireland during the Second World War, and how their second-hand familiarity – ‘They were like people in the films’ – had only made them seem the more exotic.

  ‘What I’m saying’, Niall argues, ‘is that we tend to think that the past was more interesting than it really was, and my point is that it was more banal than we give it credit for, but also more complicated. And anyway, we’re talking about “The Past” ’ – he makes inverted commas in the air around the words as he speaks them – ‘as if it was a discrete period of time, which is just stupid. I mean, if it comes to that, you can actually remember “The Past” ’ – he does the thing with his fingers again – ‘can’t you, Dad?’

  ‘Not a time before colour photography, no,’ Fintan deadpans, and they both then laugh.

  ‘But seriously, Dad, you must be able to remember things from ages ago, from when you were a kid?’

  ‘It’s very strange when I look at newsreels from the Troubles,’ he says, ‘because it does look familiar to me, and yet it also looks quaint: all the boxy little cars, the women in headscarves. But it wasn’t quaint at all, it was bloody awful. I knew that, even when I was little. I remember being in Armagh with Granny Buckley one day, shopping, and we walked round a corner. There was a soldier coming the other way, holding a rifle, and he bumped into her. That is, the butt of his rifle hit her right in the solar plexus. The soldier swore – I think he said something like “Fucking hell!” – I don’t exactly remember, but it was strong, whatever it was, because I was almost as shocked at someone swearing like that in front of Granny as I was at them nearly shooting her.’

  ‘And how did she react?’

  Fintan laughs. ‘You have to hand it to Granny, she played a blinder. She said to him, “You mind your language, mister, and mind what you’re doing with that thing.” And then she swept on round the corner. But as soon as she was out of sight of the soldier she stopped and she leant against a wall and closed her eyes and she said over and over again, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” She was really shook, and it took a lot to rattle Granny. I mean when you think back on it, in one way it’s kind of funny, and in another way it’s horrific. And I’ll tell you this,’ he went on, ‘I really do remember that as if it happened yesterday.’

  ‘It’s a strange thing, how memory works,’ Niall remarks. ‘I can remember you and Mum from the whole way through my childhood, from when I was small; and it seems to me in those memories that you don’t look any different to how you do now. But if I look at photographs from that time, you look quite different. You both look much younger.’

  Niall has finished his tea. He rinses his mug and leaves it on the drainer, then crosses to the window. ‘Is it raining? I was thinking of going for a walk.’ Fintan looks out into the garden, at Lucy’s swing and the wooden bench.

  ‘I don’t think it’s raining. It’s hard to tell; it’s a soft kind of day. I’d take a chance on it, if I were you.’

  Niall drifts out of the room again, and Fintan continues to leaf through his book. He comes across a group of photographs from the First World War, of trenches and field hospitals, which are disconcerting because they look like stills from a film, even to him, who has always found historical movies unconvincing; the combination of period costume and the kind of teeth that only modern dentistry can provide striking him as particularly risible. He turns the page, and now he regrets that Niall has gone, because he has found a photograph which he would have liked to show him.

  It is a picture of a red apple sitting on a mirror. There are other studies of fruit alongside, including a bowl of rather gnarled pears that look very much of their era, of a time before pesticides.

  But the apple is perfect. It is one of those deep red, round apples, its skin so highly polished that the light reflects off it in a white spot. Apples have always been a potent fruit for Fintan, and not just because he loves eating them. They remind him of his childhood in the North, where his granny had a little orchard. The caption on the photograph states that it was taken in 1907, which Fintan can scarcely credit, so exactly does it look like something he might buy and eat with his lunch.

  He glances up from his book and looks out of the window. It is definitely raining now, but it is a fine, soft misty rain, the sort you have to narrow your eyes and look closely at to be able to see it at all. The swing and the bench have disappeared, and the garden is full of apple trees. They are witchy and stiff; gnarled and sculptural; their branches ascending at first before inverting and pointing resolutely downwards. The colours are all drab, greys and shades of olive green. Fintan is aware now that he is actually sitting on the windowsill, which has become wider than it was before, as the window itself has become smaller and more deep-set; and Martina is sitting beside him, only she is a little girl. She is looking out into the orchard. ‘Look,’ she says. ‘Look, Fintan. The trees are moving.’

  She’s right. Some of the trees at the back of the orchard have begun to move forward. Fintan and Martina watch without speaking. The moving trees continue to approach through the dankness of the day, and then Fintan says, ‘They’re not trees. They’re soldiers.’

  It’s a foot patrol, in camouflage fatigues, and as soon as Fintan and Martina realise this, the illusion of trees vanishes. As the soldiers draw nearer they can see them clearly: the metal helmets covered in net and all stuck with leaves; the blocky flak-jackets like perverse buoyancy aids, designed to make you sink; the long dark guns in their hands. They are moving closer, still somehow fitting in with the trees, in harmony with them, and yet also distinct now, as soldiers, as people. They are advancing inexorably towards the house. The sound of their voices is audible, the crackle of walkie-talkies. Fintan is afraid.

  ‘Down! Down! Quick, before they see us,’ Martina says, and she slides off the windowsill. As she goes, she grabs Fintan by the ankle and pulls him after her, so that he falls clumsily, and hits his head off the edge of the table with a tremendous bang, knocking himself out.

  He opens his eyes. He is a middle-aged man, sitting at the kitchen table, not under it. There is a book, a mug and a teapot before him. In the wet garden there is a swing and a bench. Dizzy and unmanned, he is stunned, as if someone had closed the heavy book of photographs and brought it down hard on his skull.

  TEN

  She looks in on Beth as she always does before leaving the house, quietly adding a jug of milk to the tray that had been set the night before: the bowl of cereal with a plate over it; the fruit; the cup inverted on its saucer; the tea-caddy; the little kettle. When she wakes, Beth will prepare her own breakfast and eat it in bed. Mid-morning, Martina will ring her from the shop to check that she’s up and dressed, that everything’s fine. But for now Beth is still fast asleep; and the cat too, curled in the crook of her knees. Martina withdraws and carefully closes the bedroom door.

  She reaches the shop at eight-thirty. She raises the external electric shutter with a key; and as soon as she opens the door and goes in, the alarm sta
rts to beep. She hurries through to the stock-room at the back to tap in the security code and immediately the beeping stops. Now she can relax. She walks back into the main body of the shop, and savours the silence.

  Martina looks at herself in one of the many large mirrors provided for the customers. Today she’s wearing an olive-green silk dress, simply cut, with an amber necklace. It looks perfect, she thinks, and the shop is perfect too. Recently refitted, it is all pale wood and chrome, with new racks designed to make it easy to put together an outfit: co-ordinating pieces are displayed beside one another, together with accessories, scarves and bags. It always astonishes her that many of her customers, including her own dear sister-in-law, fail to pick up on this rather obvious guidance.

  No matter where she has worked, Martina has always loved this moment of being in a shop just before it opens, just before she moves fully into her professional persona. She is sensible to the theatrical nature of what she does; is aware of it every night as she selects from her own wardrobe what she will wear the following day. She likes the slight distance there is in her dealings with the public, enjoys constructing a self for the customers to encounter.

  By evening time, when the shop closes, it will be in disarray. There will be empty hangers, garments replaced in the wrong sections or displayed askew, the wooden floors will be grubby and scuffed; but this does not bother her. Before going home she will put everything to rights, and tomorrow morning it will all begin again.

  The family doesn’t appreciate what an accomplishment it has been for her, opening this shop and making such a success of it. She’s always proud when it’s mentioned in magazine features as being a special place: somewhere with exceptional stock; hard-to-find labels; things that you can’t buy elsewhere in Ireland. It had always been her dream to have her own shop, but while she was living in London it had never been a possibility. Well, it had all worked out, in spite of the circumstances that had brought her home. She pulls her mind back from that line of thought, as she habitually does.

  In the storeroom at the back of the shop she makes herself a cup of green tea, and as she drinks it she thinks about last night. She’s sorry now that she loaned Fintan those photographs. She would have liked to have had them at hand yesterday evening, for she would have liked to look again at the picture of Edward, after having spoken to him.

  She’d always liked him. Even as a child he’d been steady and sensible in a way she admired: he wasn’t a cry-baby like Fintan, nor an imp like herself. She remembers playing cards with him on wet afternoons; remembers him giving her a robin’s nest to take back to the city. There’d been something slightly courtly in his country manners, a formality that had appealed to her, and made him seem always older than he was.

  He served at Mass. The first time she saw him up on the altar, walking out from the sacristy behind the priest in the company of two other little boys, she’d started to laugh, and Granny Buckley had had to smack her on the knee to make her stop. She hadn’t laughed because she thought it was funny, but because it was strange, so incongruous; in the same way that she’d laughed when she saw Fintan on stage in the school nativity play, dressed as a shepherd. Edward’s ecclesiastical duties had become more familiar to her, but they never lost their particular glamour, and she watched him closely as he snuffed out candles, as he generated clouds of incense from a smoking thurible and rattled the chain of it.

  Last night when she’d gone to ring him, she’d misdialled at first and got a wrong number. An old man had answered the phone, and she’d quickly ascertained her mistake, but the old man had been uneasy. She’d understood his anxiety and guessed that he was living on his own, was fearful of burglars and confidence-tricksters. She told him she’d been trying to ring her cousin, she’d reassured him, and then he said in the soft accent she remembered from her childhood, ‘That’s grand, Daughter. Goodnight.’

  She’d been strangely moved when she hung up. No-one had called her ‘Daughter’ in that way, as a term of endearment, for so many years now that she had even forgotten this particular usage. It made her feel that the old man to whom she had spoken was close geographically to the old home-place but distant in time; as if the phone had allowed her to communicate with someone who was still living in that world she had known as a child; as if he were one of the old farmers who had knelt beside her in the pew, as she watched Edward ringing a small golden bell.

  The last time she saw Edward was at her own father’s funeral, when they were both teenagers. Her own wild grief at that time she might have expected, given her attachment to her father; but there had been a surreal quality to those days that she could never have predicted. And one of the strangest moments had been at the graveside, for there was Edward walking towards her; but Edward as if he had been bewitched, as if the calm freckled child she had known years earlier had been conjured into this pale young man through whose kind but unfamiliar face she could see shimmer the look of her old companion.

  There’d been a cautious mending of the relationship with her father’s family over the years, but she and Fintan had never gone back after the end of their visits north in the early seventies, and their cousin had drifted out of their lives. Although they had all three been glad to meet again at the funeral, it hadn’t marked a real resumption of their friendship. Too much time had passed. They were shy and strange with each other; awkward in the way of adolescence; and over the years it all dwindled into Christmas cards and stray bits of news – marriages, the births of children, Martina’s move to England, the passing of Edward’s parents. That was how things had stood for years now.

  She rinses her cup and checks her watch, decides not to ring Fintan just yet, even though he too likes to arrive early, and will have been in his office for some time now. Martina doesn’t know how her brother can stand his job, doesn’t know how anyone can stand office life. Decades of looking at the same old colleagues, fiddling around with paperclips and photocopies: it seems even worse to her now than when she was eighteen. She might well have ended up in an office if Joan had got her way: she had wanted Martina to go to college when she left school. ‘Selling lipsticks isn’t much of a job, is it?’

  Well it had been a very good job indeed, as far as Martina was concerned, and right from the start she had loved working in a shop. She has never forgotten the words of her first supervisor: ‘Remember, you’re not selling cosmetics, girls, you’re selling beauty.’ Even today she considers that she is not selling dresses and jackets and skirts so much as she is selling confidence. She loves helping women to be all they can, coaxing them out of dowdy garments in drab colours and into more flattering attire. She loves dealing with customers who love clothes as much as she herself does, who have the knowledge to put together certain pieces to create a look which women with less style and audacity would never dare. They ask her advice. They confide in her. Women buy new clothes for all sorts of reasons. They’re going to a party. To the races. To a wedding. They buy clothes because they feel good. They buy clothes because they feel miserable. They’ve fallen in love. They’ve been dumped. They’ve got a new job. They’ve been sacked. They’ve had a windfall. They’re broke, but they still deserve a treat. Martina has seen women come out of the cubicle, look in the mirror and be shocked. She has seen them look in the mirror and be thrilled. She has seen wives step out of the changing room and husbands gasp. She has seen daughters step out of the changing room and mothers weep. Martina thinks that you have to have worked in a clothes shop to understand the depths of human emotion and pathos to be found there; to know the drama of it all.

  She crosses to the window and looks out onto the street, sees the fishmonger from two doors up; and they smile and wave. All the traders in this little parade know each other. She’s glad to be back in Ireland. It’s not that she hadn’t liked London, but she wouldn’t have the energy for it now. The sheer volume of customers she’d had to deal with then in the big department stores where she’d worked had been of a different order; and then ther
e was the city itself.

  It had frightened her, to begin with, and she’d coped by denying this, by not admitting, even to herself, how much the crowds appalled her. She knew why she was there: because she’d had more than enough of Dublin by the time she was in her early twenties. She’d been sick of her mother’s criticisms; of going out with men only to discover that they had been at school with Fintan; of breaking up with boyfriends only to bump into them in town two days later. If the anonymity of London spooked her at times, it was also one of the things she had gone there to find.

  ‘Do you miss London?’ People were always asking her that, even now, when she’d been home again for so many years. ‘Do you miss London?’ She missed it today because it was a Thursday, and that had been her day off towards the end of her time there. She’d loved sleeping late, waking to the light in her own little apartment, taking her time to get washed and dressed instead of rushing for the Tube; and then going out for breakfast, drinking black coffee and reading the papers. She might go shopping herself later in the day, in the high-end stores in Bond Street or Knightsbridge; or meet friends for lunch. She has a great many happy memories from her time in London, from parts of the city she had grown to love: the lights of the Embankment at dusk, the green-and-white striped deckchairs in the parks in summer, the theatres as the lights went down and the curtain rose. Wine-bars and restaurants. Memories that were like bright stones you could keep, that you could take out and inspect and admire; hold them to the light; see them glitter.