The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  It had taken him three months to complete the thirty-six four-by-six-foot panels that would join together, like a huge puzzle, to form the immense mural. The last thing he painted, on the final morning, was a third apple – airborne – tossed by a child juggler. The apples were like tiny planets, and the child, otherwise small and unexceptional, gained power through his manipulation of them. Kenneth had to break one last egg to paint this, and as he passed it from hand to hand, letting the white drain to the floor, and allowing the clean yolk to settle in his palm, he looked at this boy – his serene, confident expression, the three apples aloft, the face calm with the knowledge that they would be kept in the air indefinitely. While Kenneth mixed the yolk with the warm shades of ground pigment, he remembered the critic telling him to keep things on the picture plane flat, two-dimensional, and he smiled as the apple became spherical under his brush. When he could imagine the weight of it in his hand, he knew he was finished. Then he began to toss brushes, palettes, and pigments down to the floor below. There was a drill shrieking somewhere in the building. The clatter his tools made on landing must have been drowned out by its noise.

  Kenneth figured he had broken five thousand eggs, more or less, in the making of the mural, and each time he broke the shell, he thought of the critic’s head, the smooth baldness of the top of it. Humpty-Dumpty, he thought, this wall, and the wall of cultural fashion that could keep you out, for a while, until the great fall. By now he knew that fashion always fell, it failed and fell. He was happy to be free of it. And as he used the shell to separate the white from the yolk, he thought about Harding, a man who had never made use of egg tempera. He wondered what had become of him. And the woman Harding had loved, whether she had ever painted again, and whether or not he himself would ever come across a painting by Gentleman. The girl in Germany, the couple in Italy, floated by, a sense of them here and there in the mural. These narratives fought for space in his mind. But the mural itself, he knew, was divorced from narrative. As it should be, he whispered to himself, as it should be. Flight and Its Allegories.

  Once he was on the ground, he rifled through a canvas sack until he found the camera he was looking for, a Brownie Starflex, with six exposures still available. He shot the mural from left to right. Then he walked across the full length of the half-tiled floor. This was the last exposure and it would make the mural look incredibly small, like a two-inch-long piece of ribbon with an unreadable pattern on it. But he wanted to show its proportions to a friend and, in any case, the more professional pictures would be taken later, after he was gone, when the mural had begun to live its own independent life in the presence of an audience.

  For months now there had been noise, the workmen’s power tools and, in the odd moments when those were silent, the roar of the planes arriving and departing at the old, soon-to-be abandoned terminal. He had seen the passengers, through the plate glass of the windows, rivers of them, pouring down the steps that were pushed up to airliners, then flowing darkly across the tarmac. What would they make of Flight and Its Allegories? Would they be struck by it? Or would they simply pass it by, preoccupied by the mysteries of their individual lives as they walked forward or waited in the lounge? He was not unaware that public art could be – and often was – ignored. Still, what pleasure he had taken in the making of it.

  He hauled the canvas sack full of brushes and pigment out to the old grey car, a junker he had bought four months ago from a fisherman. He hoped this vehicle would be reliable for another couple of days, long enough to get him to Port aux Basques. He had not arrived, and would not be departing by air, and for the first time he became aware of the irony of this. There would be the drive across this huge, wild island, the ferry that would connect him with the mainland train, then days of train travel to the centre of his vast country. He would leave the car at the port, to be towed, stolen, or junked. He would step onto the ferry. Quite possibly, he would never return.

  Five or six years later Kenneth would pick up a newspaper to discover that there were fewer and fewer planes landing at Gander Airport. Larger aircraft with jet engines were now over-flying the “Crossroads of the World” – and its beautiful new terminal – on most transatlantic flights, as there was no longer any need to stop and refuel. A picture of the empty passenger lounge would be placed beside the article. In it Kenneth would be able to see a corner of the mural, but the shot would be so grainy and unfocused, the figures would be unreadable.

  But now, during the drive across Newfoundland, the Italian lakeside town of Orta was present in his mind, the ferry he had never taken, and the meeting that had not taken place. But he was finished with waiting now; he would leave that to the passengers, those who were adrift and pausing on their journey from one set of travels to another.

  THERE HAD BEEN TIMES WHEN SHE HAD FELT THAT Niall and his embraces had been forced upon her in some way. Not that he had forced his way into her world so much, but she had assumed that the person she had been when he walked through her door, the person she would be all through their long, sporadic, and fragile communion, had been all but powerless in the face of him and the way he filled a room. Lack of certainty, ambivalence, impossibility, and no hope whatsoever of resolution had all been sidestepped by her, sometimes completely ignored. It had been as if she had been running away from any reliable version of herself. And yet now she finds herself thoroughly caught in the most unreliable version of all.

  She looks up and sees a small female figure placed in the far right of the mural’s picture frame, lost in the shadows of dense foliage, a bouquet of something that is not quite floral in her hands. Oddly bridal, Tam thinks, though there is no veil and the woman is painted in brunette colours, not just her hair and eyes, but also her brown clothing, her shoes. And yet, in spite of her entanglement in pale shadows, in spite of the stillness of her pose, she appears to be emerging. She seems about to step away from her partner, a diminutive male figure, more emphatically situated in dense vegetation and shaded more intensely by greys and blacks. She would step forward, he would step back, or she would step back and he forward, whatever the dance they might be performing.

  And now this sudden choice: two planes, two Constellations gleaming on the tarmac, one heading for New York, the other destined for Shannon.

  She visualizes her small house, empty now of the life she has lived in it, with no lamps lit and a cold hearth. Sometimes a downdraft from the chimney might touch a curtain, but otherwise there would be no breath at all in the room. “Dark houses,” one of the neighbours had said about a clutch of stones that had once been four or five cottages at the end of the road. “Dark houses,” the old man had said. “We don’t like that kind of thing near us.” Near us, Tam thinks now. Dark houses.

  Beyond the windows, there would be drenched fields and tarry bogs slowly succumbing to the bruise-coloured dusk of an autumn afternoon. So beautiful really, and so strangely gratifying. She herself has seen, has been moved by such things, moved by the muscular weather and the departing light. The day could start fair and by early afternoon a gale of increasing ferocity might be twisting the two trees in the yard. You never knew how the weather was going to present itself or what your own reaction would be in the face of it. And occasionally there had been a man with her, a man who had predicted this weather and who would be preparing to leave. But she had known, essentially, she has to admit she had known, that he would always come back. The phone would ring, and the dance would begin again. Then there would be that heron, lifting out of the marsh, wind under its wings and the pull of a nest near the lake. “Desperate trouble,” Niall had said, “you could step into desperate trouble from something like this.” The dance. And then the lament.

  She looks at the mural, moving her head from left to right, taking in the full brunt of it in the rich, low morning light. She allows its chaos and its odd calm to enter her mind. Some of the figures are so emplaced they seemed to be wholly defined by the act of absolute arrival. Others are caught in the process of m
oving away. And far back in the trees, rendered in shades of grey, one or two appear to be poised on the edge of full disappearance.

  She thinks of Niall’s mother, her final desperate step. Had that walk into air and darkness been a comfort or a declaration of full despair? How had her face looked to her that last day in the oval that was her mirror? Did she waver, even for a moment, when her love for the two boys presented itself, as it must have done? She couldn’t have foreseen what would become of her youngest son, how he would collapse into the nightmare of rage. And she wouldn’t have known that the other, older boy would be unable to recognize his own fragility in the face of her defection. And yet in him, from then on, Tam now understands, there had always been hesitation and curtailment.

  For one moment she pictures the artist finishing up, descending from the scaffold, stepping back, and looking at the long sweep of what he had done. Something would have struck him then, a sense of loss: the knowledge of an ending. How intimate he would have been with the skin of the wall, with every square inch of it. For months maybe, the way he touched and changed that surface would have been the only real relationship in his life. Still, he would have collected his brushes and his paints. He would have climbed down from the scaffolding. And then he would have had to walk away.

  Year after year she had feared that each meeting would be their last. That they would be spent, or were already spent and not admitting it. But still they met, and still the flesh leapt to life, as if an essential transfusion were taking place. Whatever complicated collection of moods she had amassed during their time apart would be swept aside like an irrelevant detritus in a swollen river, drowned by engagement and communion. And afterwards she was elated or filled with grief. She could never predict which.

  Then, after years of restraint, the relationship had slipped over an unacknowledged edge and quietly deepened for her so that everything they had missed – a child, shared sleep, the comfort of morning rooms – began to feel like possessions wrenched unfairly from her rather than those she had never owned. It was as if they had made grave errors of judgment, she and Niall, and the grief – for her – was almost unmanageable. Alone she composed the perfect sentences she would never say to him about this, sentences about how she couldn’t bear to watch him walk away one more time, or the horror of suspecting that when all was said and done, he had decided against her in some crucial way. Still, he had always returned, and when he returned, there had always been those moments of joy. “This mystery,” he had said once. She remembers him saying that.

  She opens her handbag and searches for her ticket and her chequebook. When she finds them, she stands and moves away from the bench. At the counter, the man with Niall’s accent is absorbed by other travellers. There would be a new schedule for the day that is clarifying beyond the windows, a new list of passengers. The silver skin of the two waiting planes is something she is familiar with, that, and the almost-erotic desire to board one of them and to own the hand that operates the controls. Barely imagined, and never to be realized, the life in New York fades and withdraws, and she knows, suddenly, that Niall’s mercurial brother is not in that city. He is alive somewhere, with his own peculiar history active in his mind. The long narrative Niall had presented to her was not finished, not yet. “It’s not finished yet,” she wants to say to Niall, now, “not any of it. And there is no fault, no blame.”

  The passenger who had been standing in front of her moves to one side. When she places her hand on the counter, the ticket agent looks up. “Shannon,” she says.

  HE PEDALLED ALONG THE ROAD FROM CAHERSIVEEN, past the birthplace of Daniel O’Connell, the Great Liberator, over the Fertha River at the bridge at Carhan, then past the lichen-yellowed ruins of the old workhouse at Ballagh. The road began to rise slightly now, but Kieran barely noticed; each indentation and every hint of elevation was so familiar to him that the features of the road’s surface might have been extensions of his own body. A glimpse of the painted iron gates of the long-gone landlord’s house and splashes of pink, the surviving roses from the landlord’s abandoned gardens. And then to his right, the empty Gothic window of the church ruins, fragile over the potent shadow thrown by its own darkened walls. And all around it, the undulations of the burial ground, and those teeth of stone, unembellished markers for the graves of the poor.

  It was the gable end of the house he saw first, still painted blue, the shape of the chimney with some of its plaster gone and the stones showing, two orange chimney pots, strangely new-looking, but with no turf smoke moving out of them and over the valley. There had never been a lane – except the one that led back to the five fields Gerry O’Connell had built – and the grass had always grown right up to Gerry-Annie’s stoop. This grass was long now, and once he dismounted from the bicycle, it began to soak his shoes. The red paint he himself had put there years ago had peeled and faded, and the door was slightly ajar. Not knowing what to do or how to let his new self enter, he came to a halt in front of the threshold. He had torn in and out of this door as a boy but now hesitated to announce the man he had become. He saw that the white paint on the window trim was missing in most places, and he thought he would fix that in a day or two. He hadn’t yet noticed that one of the panes of glass was smashed on the ground beside him.

  With the flat of his hand he pushed on the door, but it didn’t budge so he used his shoulder to nudge it open, then stepped over the weed-choked threshold and into the room. So familiar were the shapes around him it took him some time to realize that the interior had changed, though Gerry-Annie’s belongings were everywhere in the room. Her kettle sat in the ashes of her fire, the iron bar from which it had hung having rusted and collapsed. The pattern on the oilcloth that covered her table was indistinguishable, furred by dust. Two cups and saucers sat on the table, similarly coated, and one was broken, likely by visiting sheep who had defecated, he was beginning to find, all over the concrete floor. In places the rising damp had removed the upper coat of paint from the blue-grey walls, revealing surprisingly vibrant colours that must have come from the time of Annie’s youth, when Gerry himself had still been alive.

  A breeze was moving through the window by way of the missing pane he now took note of, and Gerry-Annie’s disintegrating lace curtains moved with it. One of the curtains was stirring near his elbow and he caught it in his hand and held it there. He was moved even by something as simple as Annie’s stitches holding up the hem. But it was her two coats hanging beside the door that shook him; the one for everyday, and the one with the lambswool collar for Mass, a pair of shoes and a set of fur-topped galoshes neatly placed beneath. Each coat was cocooned in a shroud of pale spider webs, and each was like Gerry-Annie’s ghost standing near the wall. More than anything else it was the thickness of the webs that made him come to realize how long she had been gone.

  He found himself in the adjacent room staring at her bed. The quilt she had made from scraps given to her by Davey the tailor was there and one pillow, its slip much stained by leakage from the roof. He glanced at the Sacred Heart still hanging above the headboard, opaque under the dusty glass of the frame, and for a minute he thought he might want to say a prayer, as he knew she would have liked that. But the moment passed. What good had all that been to her in the end with no one left even to clear the most intimate of her belongings from her empty house? He hoped, however, that a proper Mass had been said for her and that some neighbours, at least, had stood by her grave.

  Walking back into the room, he realized he had planned nothing beyond this reunion with his childhood, the child he had been and the woman who had loved that child, and now he did not know what to do. He had slept outdoors for most of the previous three months and that, plus illness and the drink, had altered his appearance, made him look even more the vagrant than he already was, though he rarely thought of this, having little access to mirrors. But now he wondered. Had Annie been sitting near the fire, would she have recognized him as he drew near to her? Without her, there was no aven
ue of approach to the boy he had been, no way of keeping that boy alive. He couldn’t remember how she had survived, procured the meat for the stew, the bread for the table, or, beyond the tailor’s skill and his own father’s generosity, provided the clothes for his back, even shoes, for he had never gone barefoot except in summer. The tailor must be gone as well. He remembered him as an old man, in spite of his vitality, his expertise with the violin given to his grandfather, allegedly by a landlord, the way the birds had dived in through the door, stood on his knee while he fed them, then flown out again.

  The cow byre’s tin roof was loose on the boards and rattling in the wind, but it had held enough of the rain at bay that the spade and scythe he found beneath it were not rusted through. Neither were the bicycles, all twelve of them, though some had fallen and seemed to be clutching at one another on the earthen floor. He turned away from these, shaking his head and remembering.

  “Gerry’s spade, Gerry’s scythe,” he heard himself say, touching each object in turn and saying out loud the name of a man he had never known beyond the desperate role described by Annie in her stories about him. There was a metal pail as well, with only one small perforation in the bottom, and this he took out to the pump, where he moved the handle up and down. He was listening to the crow-call sounds of the pump’s inner workings with such concentration that he was startled when the water gushed into the pail and onto the ground beside it. It seemed like the beginning of something to him, life bubbling out of the earth, and he took some heart from it, and from the small tin cup still hanging from the spout.

  His mouth remembered the taste of the water as he drank.