I passed the years of my youth practising for the stage. I would prowl the back roads of the town, always alone, playing out solitary dramas of struggle and triumph in which I spoke all the parts, even of the vanquished and the slain. I would be anyone but myself. Thus it continued year on year, the intense, unending rehearsal. But what was it I was rehearsing for? When I searched inside myself I found nothing finished, only a permanent potential, a waiting to go on. At the site of what was supposed to be my self was only a vacancy, an ecstatic hollow. And things rushed into this vacuum where the self should be. Women, for instance. They fell into me, thinking to fill me with all they had to give. It was not simply that I was an actor and therefore supposedly lacking an essential part of personality; I was a challenge to them, to their urge to create, to make life. I am afraid they did not succeed, with me.
Lydia had seemed the one capable of concentrating sufficient attention on me to make me shine out into the world with a flickering intensity such that even I might believe I was real. When I first encountered her she lived in a hotel. I mean, her family home was a hotel. That summer, more than half my lifetime ago now, I would see her almost every day as she came and went through the revolving glass doors of the Halcyon, got up in outlandish confections of cheesecloth and velvet and beads. She wore her black hair very straight, in the soulful style of the day, the bold silver streak in it less pronounced than it would be in later years but still striking. She became an object of keen speculation for me. I had a room in a rotting tenement in one of those cobbled canyons off the river, where at dawn the drays let loose from the brewery gates woke me with the thunder of apocalyptic hoofs, and the nights were permeated with the sickly sweet smell of roasting malt. Loitering along the embankment I watched for Lydia by the hour, in the gritty airlessness of the summer city. She was an exotic, a daughter of the desert. She walked with a sort of sulky swing, rolling her shoulders a little, always with her head down, as if she were meticulously retracing her steps to somewhere or something momentous. When she pushed through the hotel door the revolving glass panels threw off a splintered multiple image of her before she disappeared into the peopled dimness of the lobby. I made up lives for her. She was foreign, of course, the runaway daughter of an aristocratic family of fabulous pedigree; she was a rich man’s former mistress, in hiding from his agents here in this backwater; certainly, she must have something in her past, I was convinced of it, some loss, some secret burden, some crime, even. When by chance I was introduced to her at an opening night—she was a great one for the theatre, in those days, and seemed to go to every production that was put on, with undiscriminating enthusiasm—I experienced an inevitable jolt of disappointment, as of something subsiding with a crunch under my diaphragm. Just another girl, after all.
“I’ve seen you,” she said, “hanging about on the quays.” She was always disconcertingly direct.
But that Levantine tinge to her looks, the hothouse pallor and stark black brows and faintly shadowed upper lip, remained a powerful attraction. The Hotel Halcyon took on for me the air of an oasis; before I entered there I imagined behind that revolving door a secret world of greenery and plashing water and sultry murmurings; I could almost taste the sherbet, smell the sandalwood. Lydia had a magnificence about her that was all the more enticing for her seeming unawareness of it. I admired her fullness, the sense she gave of filling whatever she wore, no matter how ample or flowing. Even her name bespoke for me a physical opulence. She was my big sleek slightly helpless princess. I loved to watch her as she walked to meet me, with that heavy-hipped slouch and that distracted, always vaguely dissatisfied smile. I basked in her; she seemed the very source and origin of the word uxorious; I decided at once, without having to think about it, that I would marry her.
I should say in fact that my tender-eyed wife’s real, or given, name is Leah; in the hubbub of the crush bar that night when I was introduced to her I misheard it as Lydia, and when I repeated it later she liked it, and we kept it between us as a love-name, and eventually it became established, even among the more easygoing members of her family. It occurs to me to wonder now if this surrender and substitution of names worked a deeper change in her than one of mere nomenclature. She had relinquished a part of herself, so surely she took something on, as well. From Leah to Lydia is no small journey. When I was starting out in the theatre I toyed with the possibility of taking a stage name, but there was already so little of me that was real, I felt I could not afford to sacrifice the imperial label my mother—I am sure my father had no say in the matter—pinned on me so that I might be at least a noise in the world, though at once everyone, including my mother, went to work shortening my name to Alex. In my first parts I billed myself as Alexander, but it did not stick. I wonder what it takes to be proof against abbreviation.
I looked up the name Leah in a dictionary, which told me that in Hebrew it means cow. Dear me. No wonder she was willing to relinquish it.
Over all my recollections of that period of my life there lingers a faint warm bloom of embarrassment. I was not entirely what I pretended to be. It is an actor’s failing. I did not tell lies about myself, exactly, but I did permit certain prominences to show through the deliberate fuzziness of my origins that were, frankly, larger than life. The fact is, I would happily have exchanged everything I had made myself into for a modicum of inherited grace, something not of my own invention, and which I had done nothing to deserve—class, breeding, money, even a run-down riverside hotel and a drop of the blood of Abraham in my veins. I was an unknown, as we say of fledgelings in our trade: in my case, truly an unknown, even to myself.
I think I took to the stage to give myself a cast of characters to inhabit who would be bigger, grander, of more weight and moment than I could ever hope to be. I studied—oh, how I studied for the part, I mean the role of being others, while at the same time striving to achieve my authentic self. I devoted hours to my exercises, far beyond the demands of even the most demanding among my coaches. The stage is a great academy; I mastered all manner of useless accomplishments: I can dance, I can fence, I can, should circumstance demand it, swing down from the rafters on a rope with a cutlass in my teeth. When I was younger I used to do a frightening fall, straight over, crash! like a pole-axed ox. For a year I took elocution lessons, at five bob a time, from a genteel old thing in black velvet and musty lace—“By a negg, Mr. Cleave, do you perhaps mean an egg?”—who at intervals in our weekly half-hours together would excuse herself and turn aside demurely to steal a swig from a naggin-bottle she kept hidden in her reticule. I did a course in ballet, stuck at it throughout a whole winter, sweating away doggedly at the barre, stared at by lumpen schoolgirls and doe-eyed ephebes of doubtful intent. I devoured improving texts. I read Stanislavski, and Bradley on tragedy and Kleist on the puppet theatre, and even double-barrelled old buffers like Granville-Barker and Beerbohm Tree on the art of acting. I sought out the most obscure treatises. I still have somewhere on my shelves Perrucci’s Dell’arte rappresentativa, premeditata ed all’improvviso—I used to roll that title around my tongue like a line from Petrarch—on seventeenth-century Venetian comedy, which I would carry about with studied aplomb, and some pages of which I even read, laboriously, with the aid of a primer. I was after nothing less than a total transformation, a making-over of all I was into a miraculous, bright new being. But it was impossible. What I desired only a god could manage—a god, or a marionette. I learned to act, that was all, which really means I learned to act convincingly the part of an actor seeming not to act. It brought me no nearer to that exalted metamorphosis I had so hoped to achieve. The self-made man has no solid ground to stand on. He who pulls himself up by his bootstraps is in a permanent state of somersault, and in his ear always is the world’s laughter as, look! there he goes again, arse over tip. I had come from nowhere, and now at last, through Lydia, I had arrived at the centre of what seemed to be somewhere. I was compelled to invent, of course, to elaborate on myself, for how could I expect
to be accepted for what I merely was in the exotic new accommodation she was offering me?
We were married in a register office, a scandalous thing, in those days; it made me feel quite the iconoclast. My mother stayed away, not so much out of disapproval of the miscegenous match I was making—though disapprove she assuredly did—as from a fear of what to her was the dauntingly exotic world I was entering. The wedding breakfast was held at the Halcyon. It was a hot day and the stink from the river gave to the celebrations a bilious cast of the bazaar. Lydia’s many black-haired, big-bottomed brothers, hearty and curiously childlike young men, clapped me on the back and made harmlessly lewd jokes. They kept walking away from me; that is how I remember them that day, walking away from me, all with the family’s heavy-hipped gait that in them was a waddle, laughing back over their shoulders with a sort of amiable scepticism. My brand-new father-in-law, a watchful widower with the incongruously noble brow of a philosopher king, patrolled the occasion, wearing more the aspect of the hotel’s detective than its proprietor. He had not liked the look of me from the start.
Have I described the Halcyon? I was fond of that old place. It is gone now, of course. The sons got rid of it when their father died, and then there was a fire, and the building was razed and the site sold on. It seems extraordinary, that something so solid could be so thoroughly erased. The interior as I remember it was generally brown, not the brown of mellowed wood but of old varnish, many-layered and slightly gummy to the touch, like toffee. A flabby smell of overcooked food stood in the corridors night and day. The bathrooms had enormous throne-like lavatories with wooden seats, and baths that seemed made for rendering murdered brides in; when the taps were turned on a tremendous knocking would run back along the pipes and make the very walls tremble all the way up to the attics. It was in a vacant room up there under the roof, one stifling Sabbath afternoon in summer, on a high broad bed troublingly reminiscent of an altar, that Lydia and I first made illicit love. It was like clasping in my arms a big marvellous flustered bird that cooed and cawed and thrashed wild wings and shuddered at the end and sank down beneath me helplessly with faint woeful-sounding cries.
That submissiveness of the boudoir was deceptive. Despite her scattered air, despite her father-fixation and her awe of the stage, despite all those bangles and beads and fluttering silks—there were days when she resembled an entire caravan undulating through a heat-haze across shimmering dunes—I know that of the two of us she was the stronger. I do not mean to say that she was the harder; I am hard, but I was never strong; that is my strength. She took care of me, protected me from the world, and from myself. Under the carapace of her safekeeping I could pretend to be as soft as any milksop in those Restoration comedies that enjoyed one of their recurrent popular revivals in the middle passage of my career. She even had money, eventually, when her dad upped and died one bounteous Christmas Day. Yes, we were a pair, a two-hander, a team. And now, red-eyed and crapulent, standing in my drawers at the window of my boyhood bedroom, above the morning-empty square, in bewilderment and inexplicable distress, I wondered when exactly the moment of catastrophic inattention had occurred and I had dropped the gilded bowl of my life and let it shatter.
Barefoot I made my shaky way downstairs and went into the kitchen and leant infirmly at the table with aching eyes and a frightening pressure in my head. The whiskey bottle, three-quarters empty, stood alone on the table with its shoulders set in what seemed a pointed rebuke. The room in sunlight was a luminous taut tent held down by studs of light reflecting at many corners, that bottle top, the rim of a smeared glass, an unbearably glaring knife blade. What had I said to Quirke? I remembered describing the night the animal made me stop on the road and I knew I must come back and live here. I had recounted to him my dream of being a child on Easter morning; I had even described the plastic chicken, and asked him if he knew what was the difference between a chicken and a hen. This last conundrum he gravely considered for a long moment, without result. Then I heard myself telling him of those afternoons when I would creep off to cry by myself in suburban picture-houses. Under the loosening influence of the whiskey it all came spilling out of me, another version somehow of those very storms of inexplicable sorrow I used to suffer there in the humid darkness, crouched under those vast, shimmering screens. And now in the pitiless light of morning I stood canted by the table with eyes shut fast and felt myself go hot with helpless shame at the thought of that blurted confession. The telephone began to shrill, giving me a fright. I had not known it was still connected. After a flustered search I found it in the hall, on the floor behind a disembowelled sofa. It was an old-fashioned model made of Bakelite; the receiver had the osseous heft of a tribal artefact, shaped and polished by long and murderous use. I took a moment to register Lydia’s voice on the line. I heard her dry laugh.
“Have you forgotten us already?” she said.
“I didn’t know the telephone still worked.”
“Well, it does.” A beat of breathing silence. “And how is the hermit?”
“Hungover.” I could see through into the kitchen; the window there had a flaw in one of its panes, and when I made the tiniest movement of my head a tree in the garden seemed to ripple, as if refracted under water. “I was drinking with Quirke,” I said.
“With what?”
“Quirke. Our so-called caretaker.”
“Much care he’s taken.”
“He brought a bottle of whiskey.”
“To launch you on your new life. Did he break it over your head?”
I could see the scene, the morning light like heavy pale gas and Lydia standing in the living room of the big old dark house by the sea that had been part of her inheritance from her father, with the receiver wedged between shoulder and jaw, a trick that I have never been able to master, talking sideways into it as if it were a sleepy infant cradled beside her face. There is the briny smell of the sea, the far cry of gulls. It all seemed so clear and yet so far away it might have been a vision of life on another planet, unimaginably distant from this one, yet similar in every detail.
“Cass called again,” Lydia said.
“Yes?” Slowly I sat down on the sofa, sinking so low my chin almost touched my knees, the sofa’s horsehair guts spilling out from underneath and tickling my bare ankles.
“She has a surprise for you.”
She breathed a brief laugh.
“Oh?”
“You’ll be amazed.”
No doubt I shall; a surprise from Cass is a formidable prospect. The tree beyond the flawed pane in the kitchen window rippled. Lydia made a sound that to my consternation seemed a sob; when she spoke again her voice was husky with reproach. “I think you should come home,” she said. “I think you should be here when she arrives.” I had nothing to say to that. I was remembering the day my daughter was born. She sprang into the world, a smeared and furious fingerling, bearing the generations with her. I had not been prepared for so many resemblances. She was my mother and father, and Lydia’s father and dead mother, and Lydia herself, and a host of shadowy ancestors, all of them jostling together, as in the porthole of a departing emigrant ship, in that miniature face contorted upon the struggle for breath. I was present for the birth—oh, yes, I was very progressive, went in for all that kind of thing; it was another performance, of course, inwardly I quailed before the bloody spectacle. By the time the baby came I was in a sort of daze, and did not know where to turn. They put the infant in my arms before they had even washed her. How light she was, yet what a weight. A doctor in bloodied green rubber boots spoke to me but I could not understand him; the nurses were brisk and smug. When they lifted Cass away from me I seemed to hear the twang of an umbilical cord, one that I had paid out of myself, severing. We brought her home in a basket, like some precious piece of shopping we could not wait to unwrap. It was winter, and there was an alpine sting to the air. I recall the pallid sunlight on the car park—Lydia blinking like a prisoner led up from the dungeons—and the cold fre
sh fragrant breeze coming down from the high hills behind the hospital, and nothing to be seen of the baby but a patch of vague pink above a satin blanket. When we got her home we had no cot for her, and had to put her in the open bottom drawer of a tallboy in our bedroom. I could hardly sleep for fear of getting up in the night and forgetting she was there and slamming it shut. Triangles of watery light from the headlamps of passing motor cars kept opening across the ceiling only to be folded smartly again and dropped, like so many ladies’ fans, into the drawer where she was asleep. We had a nickname for her, what was it? Hedgehog, I think; yes, that was it, because of the tiny snuffling noises she made. Bright, innocent-seeming days, in my memory of them, though the clouds were already massing behind the horizon.
“I am talking to myself here,” Lydia said, with a tight, exasperated sigh.
I allowed my eyes to close, feeling the rims of the inflamed lids hotly touch. My head ached.
“When is she arriving?” I said.
“Oh, she won’t say, of course—that would be too simple.” Lydia’s voice always takes on a bridling tone when she speaks of our difficult daughter. “She’ll probably just appear one day out of the blue.”
Another silence then, in which I could hear the rustle of my own breathing in the mouthpiece. I opened my eyes and looked out to the kitchen again. What struck me first about the image, vision, hallucination—I would not have known what to call it, had I thought to call it anything—that I glimpsed out there was the ordinariness of it: the figure of a woman, tall, young, turning from the range, abruptly handing something, it looked like, to what seemed a seated child. Slowly I set the receiver down on the arm of the sofa. No sound at all, except for a faint, a very faint hissing, that might have been no more than the sound of my own self, blood, lymph, labouring organs, making its low susurrus in my ears. I was given only that glimpse—the woman, if it was a woman, turning, the arm extending, the child unmoving, if it was a child—and then it was gone. I squeezed my sore eyes shut again, trying to retain the image. It was all inexplicably, achingly familiar.
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