by Neil Jordan
She was glad, if the truth be known, when he led her out of that hellish interior, but was happy again when he knelt with her by the river and watched its molten immensity flow past and told her once more the story of the river’s birth. How the well at its source blinded anyone who was bold enough to gaze at their reflection. How a girl of surpassing beauty, with flowing locks like her own, came to wash her hair in it. How the waters rose, shocked at her beauty, how she ran to escape them and how they finally overtook her here, at the seashore near Mornington, deprived her of both her sight and her life. Her name was Boinn, so the river was called Boyne, after the name of its first victim.
There were long tendrils of seaweed beneath the water which rippled with the moving tide. And looking down on them, she could well imagine a long bed of hair beneath the shifting river, the young girl of surpassing beauty still beneath it, the waters perpetually washing her ever-growing hair. Looking up, she could see the obelisk of barnacled stone that sprang up where the river met the sea and was called the Lady’s Finger. Beyond it was the ruined hulk of the Maiden’s Tower. When sailors wished to enter the river’s mouth, her father told her, they would shift their boats until the Lady’s Finger was in line with the Maiden’s Tower, then know they were at an angle to strike the bar. What strike the bar meant she had no idea, but a river whose mouth was guarded by the Lady’s Finger and the Maiden’s Tower and whose source was a young girl’s hair seemed without doubt to be a womanly river. And the men who angled their sails through her, who pulled the fish from her in dark wet nets, who dragged the scallops, cockles and mussels from her seaweedy depths were lucky to have a woman of such bounty. She wondered were the drowned girl and her secret companion one and the same. But she decided on reflection that they could not be, since her ghost wore clothes that were of a later time and the clothes were never, ever wet.
~
Shade. Of a bat’s wing, of a sycamore at noon, of an ash in thin moonlight, in the biggest shade of all. Nightshade. Shade of what was. I am that oddest of things, an absence now. A rumour, a shade within a shadow, a remembrance of a memory, my own. A stray dog forages with my Wellington boot, buries it in the potato patch, digs it up again, buries it again.
George sits in his cottage in the grounds after the event and listens to the accounts of afternoon race meets on his radio. There is a distant creak from the ironwrought gate by the house entrance as the postman pushes it open. The faint sound of crunching footsteps, as he wheels his bike down the curving avenue, stuffs a handful of bent brown envelopes through the letterbox which fall on the varnished floor. As the tide turns, the winds drop and the clouds quieten their movement, the white horses subside. A low, endless mackerel sky forms a backdrop to the falling sun. Oystercatchers pick their way along the mudflats of the estuary. A film of ice forms along the edges of the river. The blood on the grass grows white with hoar-frost. The world becomes a painting without me in it.
George rises from the car seat that is his only chair, walks out of his cottage leaving the door ajar, the radio on. He moves between the copse of ash and elder like a ghost himself. He wades across the river in his twine-tied boots, leaving elephantine prints in the mud behind him. The water reaches his neck, almost washes him clean. He makes his way along the other side of the river as the moon rises, picks mussels from the frozen shore, eats them raw. The words in his head are estuary, anglo-saxon, monosyllabic—mulch, shit, loam, earth.
He lies face down in the wet sand and feels the brine seeping through his old tweed jacket with the leather elbow-patches. The casts of lug worms stretch away before his eyes to the rippled sand of the shore where the water laps sluggishly in the moonlight. If he could burrow his way into the sand beneath him, he would. If he could shed his coat, his flannel shirt, his greasy jeans and the orange twine that binds them, his flesh and the tissue that binds it, if he could shed the whole of him and throw it up as wet cast, he would.
He is beyond connective thought, but the words thrum through him. What covers the earth is mulch and decay and he has delivered the living to it. He has partaken in the savage order of things. And George now feels the murmur of renewal inside him. A spider crab crawls between his fingers and edges into a wormhole. A kittiwake squawks and he rises, walks along the Mornington shore and the suck of wet sand beneath his feet changes to the crunch of broken seashell. Scallop, cockle, mussel, periwinkle, every footfall tells him of the necessity of death and how the earth needs its skeletons.
Mornington, Bettystown, Laytown, he covers each strand and wades waist-deep through the mouth of the Nanny river, a large hunched figure dark against the phosphorous glow of the breaking waves. He is on a journey back from reason, to the place he was released, St. Ita’s psychiatric hospital, Portrane.
It is morning when he reaches it. He walks from the shore past the round tower to the lawns with the red-bricked citadel of the asylum in the background. The nurses are arriving in their wrappings of stiff white. Beneath the barred window he once knew he stands covered in brine, sand, silt, any trace of the blood he spilt encrusted beneath it. He seems lost and wants asylum, in the old sense. Dr. Hannon drives by in a black Ford car, stops and says, “George, what on earth.” And George says, simply, “Home.”
3
HER MOTHER, UNLIKE her father, seemed unexcited by the onset of the new century. The house was hers, had come to her through her father, Jeremiah Tynan, whose fortune rose steadily from the early days of the Drogheda Steampacket Company and who bought it with the profits gleaned from the first iron paddlesteamer, the Colleen Bawn, on the Drogheda-Liverpool route. He had died before the launching of the Kathleen Mavourneen, the largest steamer built for the Drogheda Steampacket Company, two hundred and sixty feet long, with a beam depth of one hundred and fifty feet and a gross tonnage of nine hundred and ninety-eight. But the fortune remained intact, indeed prospered, until the company was sold and the house passed to his wife and eventually his youngest daughter, by which time it seemed to have been theirs for ever. Baltray House, on the northern banks of the mouth of the Boyne river, with a view of Mornington, across the river, to the south.
His only daughter had been spared the vicissitudes of trade, had been educated at the Siena Convent on the Chord Road, Drogheda, founded by Mother Catherine Plunkett, grand-niece of the martyred St. Oliver, for the education of young Catholic ladies. On her graduation she had travelled to Siena itself in the company of a nun of her mother’s choosing and had there acquired, instead of a taste for the mysticism of St. Catherine of Siena, a taste for the fine arts. In Arezzo she dutifully copied the Piero della Francescas, and later, in Florence, the Raphaels at the Uffizi and the towering marble of Michelangelo’s David at the Accademia.
And there, in front of the David, she met a young Englishman named David Hardy who was tracing, on his rectangular pad, everything about the statue but its marble penis. A conversation was struck up under the watchful eye of the chaperoning nun which was resumed two years later, after a chance meeting in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square under the canvas of Velázquez’ Immaculate Conception, Elizabeth Tynan having travelled to London to further her studies in the fine arts. There were tears streaming down his face and the reason for those tears, when she questioned him gently, moved her deeply. They were caused, he told her, as he dried his cheeks on the handkerchief she had lent him, by his feeling of utter inadequacy in the face of the perfection of the canvas in front of him, a perfection he could never hope to match. In fact the tears, she would learn some eight years later, when the son that had been denied him entered their lives, had quite a different source. But in front of the canvas, the serene beauty of the Virgin’s face seemed a more than adequate explanation, and soon she was crying too. So he gave her back her handkerchief, and their fingers touched.
Indifferent artists both, their interest in Velázquez was soon overwhelmed by their interest in each other, and a courtship ensued, an irregular one, given that both were orphans in effect, the last pare
nts on both sides having recently died, the mother in her case, the father in his. And soon the first of many trips across the Irish Sea began, from Liverpool to Drogheda on the Kathleen Mavourneen, now in the ownership of the British and Irish Steampacket Company in which Elizabeth, with her four brothers, retained a substantial interest. David Hardy, of sufficient means to be unembarrassed by his fiancee’s estate, fell in love with the ship, the music of its name and, when he saw it, the thin, dun-coloured vista of the Boyne estuary which reminded him of nothing so much as the Flemish landscapes of Jacob van Ruisdael.
Perhaps he fell in love with it because he needed to, needed a home for his turbulent emotions, so radically different from anything he had hitherto known. That he was in love with Elizabeth was for him beyond question. And perhaps, again, he should have questioned that emotion, as to whether the long drama it was leading him towards was a symptom of the short drama he had left behind. But there is a third supposition, that this moment was fortuitous in the way few moments are, that he could bring whatever consolation was needed to the small-boned hand that he held in his. And when he leaned against the curved metal casing of the giant steam-paddle, placed his other hand around Elizabeth’s thin waist and saw the obelisk of the Lady’s Finger drift by, with the Maiden’s Tower in line with it and beyond them both the long stretch of Mornington Strand, he felt that strangest of affections, for a landscape and country he had never seen before, never imagined he would see.
~
As night comes down again the radio speaks to itself in George’s empty cottage. A weather-man predicts unseasonable sunshine. The amber lamp in the radio dial illuminates the frosted window. A pale wash of moonlight pencils each branch of the ash trees beyond. Sadness, if I could feel sadness, would be what that disembodied voice would evoke. He left it on, and the coming days of winter sunshine are broadcast to nothing human. As the night progresses and the moon moves and all the shadows of the trees move with it, it seems the calm the radio predicted has already descended. The winds that have blown for the last three days are bound for the Azores.
I should have read the signs, of course. George, like all of us, had his weather too. He had seemed restless because of those winds, obeying instructions other than mine. Instead of grass verges clipped, manure was spread around the roots of the blackcurrants and cherries in the walled garden.
“It is winter, George, the ground is frozen, why manure the frozen ground?”
“I’m doing what I’m told,” he said.
“I didn’t tell you,” I said.
“No,” he said, “what do you know about gardens?”
By the river’s bank I had found a sparrow with its head cut off.
“Who would decapitate a sparrow, George?” I asked him.
“A mink,” he said. He pointed towards Baltray, where the mink farm was. But the head had been sliced neatly, as if with a shears.
“Maybe it was you, George, clipping.”
“Why would I clip,” he had asked me, “in the middle of winter?”
Why indeed, I wondered, and forgot about it.
I had come upon him that afternoon, lying face down in the frozen grass beneath the apple tree.
“You’ll freeze, George,” I told him.
“Maybe,” he said, “but I’ll warm the earth.”
“And I’m sure the earth will appreciate your efforts, George,” I said, “but why not let the spring do it for you?”
“The spring needs help,” he said, “the summer needs help too.”
“Are you an Adonis then, George, in overalls?”
“Who is Adonis?” he asked.
“Adonis revived the earth,” I told him.
“He was a gardener then?”
“Yes,” I told him, “of a kind.”
“We used to lie here,” he said, “just like this, the four of us.”
“Yes,” I said, “but in the summer and the grass was high and we were children then.”
He raised himself at that and stood, awkwardly, as if re-entering his oversized adult limbs.
“You took my part,” he said, or I thought he said, and turned away.
“I what?” I asked.
And he repeated, over the blowing wind, “You took my part.”
I stared at the outline his body had left in the crushed winter grass. I remembered the tiny theatre of the four of us beneath that apple tree in the long September grasses of my childhood. His part had been Touchstone, not Adonis. And he would strike me more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.
4
THE HOUSE, WHEN David Hardy came to view it—or it came to view him, for its approach was calm and silent as Dan Turnbull’s handling of the grey mare that pulled them past the limestone pillars of the gates—seemed like a folly to him, an imitation of a civilised facade set arbitrarily in a vista that could have been the Azores or the Antipodes, or the Flemish estuaries in those paintings of Jacob van Ruisdael. There was a strangeness about it that never left him, the strangeness he felt when Dan manoeuvred the horse through the half-open gates, when the wheels of the trap crunched over the long-uncrunched gravel and swung round the back, which, to his mild surprise, he realised was the front.
I know now, of course, what he had left. How do I know this? It is the only grace of my state. I am everywhere being nowhere, the narrative sublime, a kind of mote in his eye as he rubbed from it the dust stirred up by the mare’s hooves and saw the house he never expected to see, its lumpen limestone an affront to the lowland fields.
I would blame her, for many years, for a state of things engendered by him. His corduroy trousers, his tweed jacket, the military belt I loved to finger with its copper clasp, the linen shirt with its blue and red tracing pulled tight beneath it, the studded shoes that touched the gravel as he helped her out, all concealed something as banal and Victorian as a secret. And secrets, he should have known even then, will always out.
He took her elbow with an assurance that he cannot quite have felt. He concealed, because he had to, his trepidation, his fear even, of what this house might hold for him. She dismissed Dan with a nod and led him, by way of her elbow, the thin forearm pressed reassuringly on his thick, hesitant fingers, towards the door. She felt he was in need of reassurance and thought she knew why. He was in another country, the house was large and Mary Dagge, who opened the door, was all starch and unnatural whiteness.
Come into my world, she intimated, a world I promise will cloak you with delight. And he wondered, as he entered the shades of that interior, how the promise would be kept. They made love in the early afternoon on the large oak bed of the room they had decided would be theirs, and if there was a kindness in the low rays of the October sun that touched the bubbled window, the bedspread and her tangled stockings, there was an emptiness as well. He was a stranger among her familiar things. He had chosen to be this stranger, this journeyman. He wanted his journey to end here, but he wondered would it: would he always be a stranger here too, no matter how familiar this place became.
And then, maybe, or if not then, some time in that first month the child was conceived, another stranger in her body. And as it grew inside her, it slowed her movements, hampered that angular swiftness of which she was so proud, imposed a weightiness on her that she never quite forgave. He was overjoyed at the prospect of replacing that which he thought he had lost. But for her, childbirth and motherhood were an estrangement from her girlish self, a burden she never did repeat.
Two strangers, then. And the sense of strangeness released in him energies he never knew were there, energies he expended in, of all things, crustaceans. He loved to walk the banks of the rivermouth, on its Mornington and Baltray sides, hear the crunch beneath his feet of decades of scallop-shells. He loved to paint the fishermen as they pulled in their salmon-nets, listening to their talk as the oil-paint dried. He heard how they were flush for the season of the salmon run, then starved the rest of the year, noted the lobsters and prawn they flung back into the waters,
began his first tentative co-operative, shipping ice-packed boxes of lobster, prawn, cockle, mussel and scallop on the steampacket to Liverpool. Liverpool’s appetite for shellfish proved insatiable and the shipments grew, spread their tentacles to Blackpool, Southampton, Brighton, London.
Soon the string of fishermen’s huts grew inadequate for the enterprise it had become, and a factory was needed which he financed, and so found himself, nearing the end of the old century, a surprised and surprisingly successful man of business. And soon he was rooted in this strange land, this strange house, as if he had been here for ever, the only hint of the life he had left being the tears that flowed occasionally from his hazel eyes, always unexpectedly, which he would explain to his young wife with the single word: Velázquez.
So Velázquez had become their word, for the eternal lost in the quotidian, for those lingering hopes one had but had to forget, those ambitions that were thwarted because of accidents, inability, or both. And, in the way of such words, for that moment when they had met the second time, and had known, within minutes of meeting, that they would be together for ever. That globe on the canvas, suspended in its dark background of dimly glittering stars.
And when she arrived, that’s all he thought of, the child-virgin with the pinched face standing on the apex, utterly alone in the chilly universe. And when the doctor informed him that this child would be their last, tears were not an issue. He could not imagine this perfection ever being repeated.
