All this, then, ran through Margaret’s mind as she moved down Shop Street with her head to one side and her chin out. The way she saw it, it all came down to this man, this O’Luing, this Long fellow who had moved into her family’s life like a slow gathering storm. She imagined him as strong and romantic, a Galway man with black curls and a barrel chest, a musical voice, perhaps, sensual mouth, deep blue eyes. The better he looked the easier became the struggle within her, and by the time Margaret passed Peader on the path ten yards from the shop it is doubtful if any of the city’s inhabitants would have met the measure of her imagination. She strode by him without blinking, and it was he who took a second look, glancing over his shoulder before hurrying on and pondering all morning while he drove away from Isabel and the shop just whose mother or aunt she was.
It was a surprise visit. When Margaret found the shop she was surprised. When she stood back from it and crossed the street to see if in fact it was not derelict and that her eyes had not imagined the O’Luing name over the ancient gloomy brown shop, she was surprised. It was a surprise there were no customers. Then again, it was a surprise there had been any in the previous decade. The strange and sour scent that engulfed her as she opened the door, the shrill bell, the sudden dimness, the neatness and polish of the dull interior so contrasting with the outside, the opened but untouched look of the rolls of fabric as ready as flypaper, the dustless wooden floor beneath air thick with swirling flying falling dust which, after an argument, had just been furiously swept into rising were surprising, but most of all it was the look on her daughter’s face that astonished her.
Within the first half-minute, Margaret knew two things: her daughter was in love, and her daughter was not happy. She crossed the wooden floor still undecided, still torn in two. But by the time Isabel had rushed into her arms and pressed her face tightly against the rough tweed of her mother’s coat, Margaret knew which side she had chosen. She unbuttoned the big green button at the top of her coat and her chin came down. She felt the girl pressed against her, and in the moment before Isabel stood back, her mother understood everything. It only remained for Isabel to give her the details.
‘Tell me,’ she said.
As mother and daughter, Margaret and Isabel Gore had never been particularly close. There had been between them always the islands of two men, Muiris and Sean, about whose needs and presence they had come and gone like silent seas. When Isabel left for Galway it was her father and brother, not her mother she missed. She needed to be needed. For Margaret, the thing she missed was the dreamy and hopeful part of her husband that had gone with their daughter. Now, in the grim downstairs of O’Luing’s Wool and Tweed Shop, mother and daughter met for the first time as women. They sat on hard wooden chairs behind the counter, and while the cool autumnal light came and went from behind the clouds of the western sky, Isabel told her mother she was in love. She could not explain it, she said. He was nothing like the man she had imagined for herself, and yet, she couldn’t help herself. Sometimes, when she was angry with him, when he disappeared from the shop and didn’t return in the evenings and she went home to the house without seeing him, she could not imagine ever seeing him again. Then something happened. Something always happened. He showed up. She looked at him, she loved him. What could she do? He was marvellous and funny and would do anything for her. While Isabel talked on, sounding for the first time the months of unsaid feelings, her mother listened and nodded and tried not to show signs of the sadness filling up in her. She hoped her daughter would run out of things to say before the tears started welling in her eyes, for in the hour or so in which Isabel poured out her heart to her mother in a way she was never to repeat for the rest of her life, Margaret knew without doubt that the love would end in unhappiness. She listened and said nothing, even as in the upstairs bedroom Maire Mor hung her head over the edge of the bed and listened and said nothing also.
‘You’re very young still, Isabel,’ she said at last. ‘You should . . . well, does he say he loves you?’
It was hopeless, and the mother knew it and still could not warn her daughter of what lay ahead. Later, walking back to the ferry and feeling a noticeable chill in the streets, Margaret would tell herself she had failed in her duty as a mother, been too much a friend and not enough of a counsel, should have urged Isabel to be more careful, to hold back, to save that part of her heart which Margaret knew had already been given away. But it was hopeless, so hopeless. How could she, sitting there before the very picture of herself, tell herself not to feel the one thing in her life that had meant more than anything, the miracle days of first love?
The light had cooled and Margaret had listened. Before she rose and rebuttoned the top coat-button, she had realised that she was not going to talk about the Master. Isabel was not thinking about university and examinations now, she was thinking about a kind of play-marriage, about working in the shop indefinitely, about changing this and that, repainting it, new shelving, and as she talked her mother saw the stream of constant customers entering along the innocent and hopeful rims of her eyes. She stood up and they embraced. She asked Isabel to write a letter home, and then, with her coat shut tightly across her chest, Margaret Gore walked out of the shop for what she imagined would be the last time in her life. She heard the jingling bell ring as the door shut behind her and cried her tears openly as she followed her chin up the street. Isabel stood in the shop and reached for the sweeping brush.
She had told her mother so much, but not the one secret thing, not the knotted connection in her mind between Peader and a vivid moment in her past; for when Peader turned his love cold and walked out of the shop, Isabel felt it was what she deserved; it was the inescapable payback for what she had caused her brother all those years earlier; it was the judgement of God.
When her mother left, she lowered her eyes to the floor beneath the weight of that guilt, swept hard with the brush, and watched as it lifted into the air the inexorable dust of her life, which would still be falling three years and twenty eight days later when the stranger would arrive at the door.
Four
1
There is no such thing as chance. Of this my father seemed more or less certain, choosing to view the haphazard chaos of his life simply as order of a different kind. If you believed in God you did not believe in chance, he told me. The cattle that had broken through the fence and ruined all but two of the paintings were not the instruments of misfortune or coincidence. They were signposts, message-bearers, and it was only a matter of time before my father figured out just what they had been sent to say. Similarly, the arrival of my Uncle John at the house three weeks after our return from the west was no mere luck either. First of all, he was not my Uncle John. He was Mr John Flannery, my father’s old colleague from the civil service, and when he stepped inside the clean but empty hallway of our house in the crisp beginning of that autumn I doubt if even he knew the part he was about to play.
It was, in my interpretation, a stroke of good luck, but to my father it was simply the next revelation of divine order. When Flannery sat in one of the hard wooden straight-backed chairs in the studio and listened to what had happened to the paintings, he could hardly believe it. He was at once struck by two things: that the accident, as he thought it, was the coincidence of a lifetime, and that my father had believed in the paintings with such a passion and faith that he was now either entirely mad or a certain genius. He sat back and sipped the strong milkless tea I brought him, staring across the studio at my father and waiting to ask a question.
Due to my father’s belief, it did not occur to him to question the sudden appearance of his old friend at the hall door. He had welcomed Flannery, as he had done on one or two occasions before, without the slightest hesitation or questioning of what the purpose of his visit might be. He expected grander, greater designs of order to be more mysteriously revealed and was somewhat taken aback when Flannery said: ‘Actually I was hoping to buy a painting.’
My father sai
d nothing. Flannery explained. He was a member of a national organisation for the promotion of Irish culture, and had been commissioned to buy a painting to be given as a prize. I listened at the door. I was waiting for a new calamity when out of a long still pause I heard my father answer:
‘There are only two, they are over here, look.’
Flannery looked. I could hear him looking. I could feel in the quiet the slow magic of those fabulous pictures working on his mind, sense and smell the sea that was churning in them, the restlessness and beauty that my father believed were the restlessness and beauty of God Himself. Mr Flannery was overcome. I knew he would be for in the weeks since we had returned and I had come and gone from school and seen the work that my father did on finishing them, I knew they were at the very least extraordinary. Perhaps they did not amount to any fixed notion of art but there was an undeniable something in the raging of those colours. My father knew it too. He had already felt the sensation in his hand as he held the brush. He already knew that the rest of his painting life he would have no other subject than these sea views which he would paint time and again, trying to refind in each canvas the moments on the western shore of Clare when he had believed his brush moved with the presence of God. When Flannery spoke there were lumps in his throat.
‘Well, they’re something,’ he said.
My father did not reply. I imagined he was looking at them with amazement too.
‘How much are they?’
I could feel my mother rush down the stairs to listen for the answer. I could see the sudden brilliant end of all misery right there in front of me, the final vanquishing of poverty and doubt and hardship and the beginning of God’s reward. Then my father answered.
‘They’re free,’ he said.
‘No, no, William, how much are they?’
‘They are free, or they are not for sale.’
My heart sank. I knew the tone in his voice. My mother knew the tone in his voice, and even Flannery knew enough not to object more than twice. My father’s sole concession was to agree to hand over only one of the paintings, insisting that his old friend choose which one and making an invisible inner grimace when the man immediately pointed to his favorite. He smiled at the blow and picked up the canvas. He didn’t wish to hear any more about it, was standing in the bare centre of the studio on a slim thread of faith when Flannery tempted him a final time.
‘You’re sure, William?’ he said. ‘It doesn’t feel right. I have the money, here, will you take it? Or listen, give me something else, will you?’
A pause, my ear pressed against the wooden door almost hearing the rumble of that distant sea, then:
‘No.’
The painting left the house moments later. I watched from my bedroom window as Flannery carried it wrapped in brown paper to his car. My father shut the hall door and went back into his studio. He sat on the chair, looked at the last painting, and laughed.
2
Muiris Gore had not expected it. It was like a wink from above, he told two men in the pub where he went to celebrate. When the letter arrived it was his wife, as usual, who read it. It was one of her pleasures, her husband knew, to be the first to open and read their post, to sit there before him knowing he was waiting and watching her face for the smiles or frowns that she let him interpret, saying nothing until she had finished and he said ‘Well?’ and she said ‘Here’ and handed it to him. While he read, then, his wife let the news run around inside her. If it was bad, it went deep and quiet and quick to an unreachable place, and even when her husband stopped reading she would say nothing, swallowing the lumps of grief and getting up from the table to wash her hands. If it was good, as it was this time, the news would pop and bubble inside her mouth, she’d start a kind of captured giggle, trying to hold it between her lips until Muiris had finished reading and would look up with the smile that warmed her from her toes and freed the lightness of her laughter.
But this time, Muiris did not smile, he frowned. It was the frown of mystery and puzzlement that cleared to wonder as he held down the sheet of paper and looked across at his wife and understood for the first time that she was, quite simply, an angel.
How otherwise could he explain it? To a national competition for poetry in Irish she had submitted one of his old poems, and he had won. He was to go to Dublin to be presented with his prize.
When Muiris left on the ferry two weeks later, sitting carefully inside the open cabin in his good suit and noticing how the salt air was already dulling the shine off his shoes, he resigned himself to not visiting his daughter in the shop. This was not the time to talk to Isabel, he told himself, and sat into a smoker’s carriage where the journey across the country passed in a thick white cloud of oblivion. That evening he attended the presentation dinner. He heard his poem read by the Cathaorlach, Sean O’Flannaire, and thought of his wife back on the island with the rainbow smiles in her eyes. He swallowed hard and stood up to bow, falling in love again with young Margaret Looney as he reached out his hand and took his prize of a painting of the western sea by Mr William Coughlan.
The following morning Muiris Gore boarded the return train in Dublin, sat by the window with the painting wrapped in brown paper at his side, and on the back side of a bill of sale from Nesbit and O’Mahony’s Hardware and Household began his first poem in thirteen years.
3
Time does not pass, but pain grows; this is the condition of life, my father maintained. Time only exists if you have a clock. In our house the batteries in the clock on the kitchen windowsill had long since leaked the acid of Time, and so my father and I lived on in a kind of spell, marked by the dead rattle of leaves at the door or the sudden gaiety of spring showers at the window. After our trip together to the west, he seemed to abandon thoughts of returning there. It was as if he was certain the greatest of any paintings he might achieve would still be trampled and holed by God. Instead he retreated to his room and in the switched-off light worked over the brutal knowledge of his failure. I imagine my mother visited him there. He did not bring out paintings to show me. His pain grew.
Sometimes when we sat to tea and the evenings were brightening, he invited me by a look of his brilliant eyes toward the door, to go walking with him. And we did. Always hastening along, always without the possibility of any real conversation. My father made statements, not talk.
‘Life is a mystery, we cannot understand it. Once you accept that, it hurts less.’ A pause, and then: ‘Or should do.’
We raced along with our own hurts, energetic and silent, walking them around the edge of those outer suburbs as if the miles might act as a salve and everything look better if we were exhausted. But it didn’t, and my father, who looked old when I was twelve, returned to the house each time like a great-grandfather. He went into his room and sat down; his breath wheezed through his paper-thin chest and he stared at paintings he could not paint. Where was God now?
Six seasons flew past us, I got school holidays a final time, but we went nowhere. In the mornings we lay in our beds and waited for a sign.
But it never came.
How I came to join the civil service I am not sure. It may have been Flannery’s fault. It may have been my father’s. It was the end of school. Teachers stood before the class and took turns warning us about Life. I read the notice about the exams and sent in an application. To an interview in the city I wore my grey pants and an old school blazer with the crest on the pocket cut off. I think my father thought I was going to a party. Have a good time, he said, from within the studio, not coming out to look as I didn’t go in to show. Vaguely I knew it was not something to tell him. Two months after leaving school, he still had no idea of what I intended to do, nor did it seem to bother him. He never said Get out of bed, or Get a job, or Do something with your life. He just let me be, and in that way perhaps deployed the secret and most powerful weapon he had. He let Life come at me when I wasn’t expecting it, and I woke up on the morning of the interview with the sudden sense that
it was mine and not his life that was out of control. I had to do something. And as my father brushed and scumbled in the studio, intent on brushing out the beginnings of yesterday’s painting and failing again, I was setting out the door into the labyrinthine mystery whose forks and bends he had already negotiated.
It was a brilliant morning in late summer, a day so suffused with light and hope that even as the sun shone it seemed to burn its place into memory. The day I began the rest of my life, the day whose sunlight held the city glimmering and brilliant like the castellated and shining towers of a medieval dream, a place whose twin cathedrals and green-capped public buildings stood out along the coil of the river below me with all the promise and excitement of new discovery. I sat on the upstairs front seat of the bus and was carried forward through the changing reflections and brilliance of the sunlight, imagining for more than a moment that something extraordinary was happening. Something had begun, and was being heralded with blueness. I remember my hope as the sunlight of that morning. I didn’t notice the lost or fixed expressions of those around me, how thickly the traffic came together at junctions and made the whole slow progression slower still, all centering, closing like a funeral on the city, or how something somewhere shut tightly behind us with a soft click as we came down the stairs and hurried through the light, slipping through office doors of reflected sunshine that left childhood and innocence behind for ever. I was aware only of the new beginning which had been scripted for me, and moved into the building and out of the great and frightening vacuum of those end-of-summer days with my heart as full of hope and expectation as it was ever to be again.
Four Letters of Love Page 14
