by Neil Jordan
“I have a brother,” she had said to her father as they sat by the banks beneath the factory, watching a different river go by. It was meant to be a question, not a statement, but somehow it came out that way, flat.
“Yes,” he said, looking at the water. “I have a son.”
“Why have I not met him?” she asked, and this time it came out as a proper question.
“Because sometimes,” he said, “certain things are not possible.”
“Why has he a different mother” Another question, harder this time.
“Because,” he said, choosing his words with unaccustomed care, “I was young and . . . different I suppose . . . and I met his mother before I met yours.”
“You were a painter,” she said, repeating what she had heard, “and they lead funny lives.”
“Indeed they do,” he said and smiled sadly, stood and threw a stone in the water. “They lead lives in which they think everything is possible and they come to realise most things are not.”
“Not possible,” she repeated. She was puzzled.
“I was young, and wanted to marry, but her parents refused, even when the child was born. They disapproved.”
“Disapproved,” she repeated. She could never imagine anyone disapproving of her father.
“Yes,” he said. “I was a painter. Painters lead funny lives. They sent her away. She travelled. France, Malta, India. He would never have come here, you need never have known, had his mother not become . . . ill . . .” He threw another stone, with his back to her. “But he’s coming, now And I can’t say I’m sorry, no matter what . . . “
He turned to her and lifted her up in his arms. “You’ll like him,” he said.
“How do you know?” she asked, her face close to his.
“Because,” he said softly, lifting her away from the river towards the road above the factory, “he is more like you than anyone I can think of.”
She had wondered what he had said to her mother. I have a son. I was a painter. Before I met you. They lead funny lives. She imagined her mother by the curved window on the staircase, her arms around her elbows, turned away. She imagined the cold grey light coming through the window. She imagined the cold grey fingers wrapping round her heart. And she wondered would anything ever be the same again.
She had tried to keep her curiosity about this new brother mild, whimsical, abstract, otherwise her heart would have burst. Whether with the pressure of those cold grey fingers, or with the unbearable anticipation of his arrival, she could not be sure. She tried to prevent her need to know from consuming her like a growing flame. She tried to think of him as a new species of being, like the gnu or the ocelot, one she had never seen but heard rumours of from distant places. If she had been told his name, she soon forgot it, took to calling him Half-brother, and then, simply Half. And the name Half was suitably diffident, if also alarmingly engaging. For if he, Half, was one half, then she, Nina, was surely the other. Half is coming, she thought, Half is in London now but will one day take the train.
She found underneath her bed a jigsaw from her early days, of the City of London, complete with curving river, fairytale Houses of Parliament and castellated Tower Bridge, and realised where the picture of the city behind the imagined woman’s face had come from. She rebuilt most of it one afternoon from Chelsea to the Isle of Dogs, and rose the next morning to finish it. She had reached Greenwich when the creak of the front gates sounded, and the crunch of hoof and wheel over gravel. She walked from her bedroom across the upper hallway and saw the trap, curving up the driveway, the anonymous figure sitting in the back. Half, she thought.
Through the tall windows of the stairwell she followed the passage of the hackney intermittently as it rounded the house. Half, she thought, will soon be whole. She lost sight of them then but heard the crunch and the creaking springs of the trap’s halting, the whinny of the stalled horse. She raced down the last few stairs, through the front hallway, down the scullery corridors, then slowed her feet, walked with suitable nonchalance and stopped at the door into the kitchen. She could see him over the pine table, stopping at the threshold of the door on the other side.
“What’s his name again?” she asked her mother.
“Gregory,” he said, and stepped inside.
She took him upstairs to his room with the new sailboat wallpaper and the smell of fresh paint and the wooden bed. He was tidy with his few things, the way she imagined an orphan would be. His case of scuffed leather was tied with a piece of string which he unknotted, opening the case across the bedclothes, meticulously spreading his clothes across the coverlet. She noticed a penknife, a piano-tutor and a clock left there, among the tangled braces.
“Did you take long to get here?” she asked him, with what she felt was the correct formality. She wanted to fill the air in the room with something other than his breathing.
“I took the train from St. Pancras to Holyhead and the boat to Dublin and then the train again to Drogheda.” He pronounced it, she noted, Drocheeda.
“Then I was taken here.”
“Is that long then?”
“I would say it’s long. A day and a night and another morning from Dublin.”
She relished those short English vowels and wanted to hear more of them. “Is that the longest journey you’ve travelled?”
“India was longer.”
“What happened in India?”
“That was a boat journey all the way. It took two weeks, I think. We stayed with the Peels. They’re Zoroastrians.”
“Zoro what?”
“Pharsee. It means fire-worshippers.” She could detect a hint of pride in his voice. “They’re English,” he continued, “but they became Zoroastrian when they went to India.”
“Are you a Zoroastrian?” She could feel an inordinate amount of pleasure when the word emerged correctly.
“No,” he said, “I’m C of E.”
“What,” she asked, “is C of E?”
“Church of England. When I grow up I might be Zoroastrian. I don’t know yet. Mother wanted to paint the fire-dances, and that’s why we went.”
“Your mother’s a painter?”
“Well,” he said, “she hasn’t painted for a while. She was, then, in India.”
She watched him open the drawers of the cupboards and place his clothes inside. She wanted to put her face to those shirts and inhale their smell. She wondered how much imagining she would have to do: London, Holyhead, Dublin and now India.
“Do you like your new house?”
“It’s big,” he said. “I’m not used to big houses.”
“Aren’t the hpuses in India big?”
“We had a bungalow.”
And perhaps it was the word Zoroastrian that made her come out with it. “The thing about this house,” she said, “and I don’t want to frighten you, but it’s—”
“It’s what?” he asked, and she could hear a hint of apprehension in those English vowels.
“It’s haunted.”
He stopped his unpacking. “So,” he said, and looked up at her. “You’re trying to frighten me.”
“No,” she said, and finally felt the freedom to walk inside. She sat down beside his shirts and things. She inhaled their odour, severe and fresh. “She doesn’t frighten anyone. Her name’s Hester and she’s always a little sad.”
“Does this ghost talk, then?” he asked and began his unpacking again. He gathered some clothes and moved to the cupboard, to get away from her, she felt.
“Dead people don’t talk,” she said.
“So this ghost is dead.”
“All ghosts are.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know about ghosts.”
“She has no name, really.”
“No name,” he repeated.
“We gave her the name Hester,” she said, “when my doll died.”
“Dolls don’t die,” he said.
“Well, Hester did,” she said.
“You’re
trying to frighten me,” he said, “but I won’t be frightened.”
“No,” she said, “I’m just telling you. Maybe so you won’t be frightened. And if you see her, you’re to tell me. That way I’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“That we have the same eyes. George, Janie, Gregory, Nina.”
“Who are George and Janie?”
“My friends. Would you like to meet them?”
“Perhaps.”
“Would you like to meet Hester?”
“It won’t work,” he said. “I won’t be frightened.”
“Well, if you do see her, you have to promise that you’ll tell me first.”
He took the clock from his case and placed it gingerly on the bedside table.
“Promise?”
He looked at her for the first time. She saw those green eyes, not the same as hers at all, but wonderfully present and hanging on her every word. She felt sorry for a moment that she had ever frightened them.
“I promise.”
15
HE SAW HESTER eventually, his Hester who was of course different from my Hester and different, so different, from George’s. Or he persuaded himself that he saw her, as I persuade myself that I am seeing him. We create these unseens and give them a kind of life, like St Anselm’s God, that exists because of our belief in it, because that belief after all is a kind of existence, that perpetuates and remains when we are gone as I perhaps remain now, persuade myself that I am listening to him finish his Mozart sonata in the derelict, wet living room with nothing but the broken panes of glass in the peeling window-frames to hear him. I am no longer I, and he is as far from the young boy who wandered the empty rooms, afraid of every shadow, every closed wardrobe door, as I am from what I was.
But of course there is a difference. The difference being that he can press those keys, create that ringing sound, the damp on his cheeks which may or may not be tears can dry, and he can stop, take out a notebook, walk round the house, make an inventory of whatever artefacts remain unbroken. The Chinese vases I bought in Kensington, the old oak bookcase with the mildewed library, the marble table, the sodden, circular Persian carpet beneath it. The hunting table in the dining room, the crystals and decanters lying askance, the Gerald Brockhurst, the Jack Yeats, the Lavery painting of Dun Laoghaire pier with the pale blue of the evening sky and the darker blue of the evening sea almost matching. Death is, of course, a series of inventories, of abandoned possessions to be noted, redistributed among the living. He has no wife, no child, so the line of my father’s issue will stop with him. He will be the sole inheritor of this stuff, this house and its gardens, lawns and fields, stretching down to the bend in the river. He will inherit me too, festering in my cesspit, and for a moment I am grateful that George left my corpse so cannily hidden.
He walks through the house for hours, filling his spiral-bound notebook. The Aga in the kitchen, the pine table, the tableware, the large four-poster in the room upstairs that I bought at auction in Kells and had restored in Drogheda. There is the safe, of course, which he won’t yet discover, with its Erte bracelets, its scattering of pearl necklaces and cut diamonds. Then there is my office, with its typewriter, its copies of signed scripts, its awards, its posters, some valuable, some not. I can imagine the advert in the Irish Times, Saturday, on the Fine Arts page, public auction of the effects of Nina Hardy, actress, among the items on view . . .
I can imagine it but hope I won’t have to see it, hope he will keep every item, every trinket, down to the spidery letters from Mr. Bernard Shaw and the bustier I wore in that burlesque western. And like most of my imaginings, I imagine this will be disappointed in turn.
Gregory leaves, when darkness falls. All of the fuses are blown, the bulbs broken, he has no torch and a dead house at night is no place for the living. His headlights scorch through the window, traverse the walls once as the car departs towards the Wheel Inn where Albert Tafife, who played double-bass to his piano at the tennis-club dances, sits behind the desk with his cigarettes and his ever-widening paunch. They will exchange pleasantries, commiserations, memories of me in my lilac dress, Gregory and George in uniform already, with Janie sipping whiskey from a forbidden bottle as Bertie sang “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” and the fight broke out between George and Buttsy Flanagan, no competition there.
Bertie perhaps will drink too much, recall the time he danced with me between sets, remember my long pale neck and my reddened lips, but will say nothing of the evening he walked with me on the newly laid golf-course, lay in the sand at the bunker of the seventeenth hole and put his tongue between my teeth, only to be stilled to rigidity by the sight of my purple brassiere. “You can touch it if you want.” But no, Bertie didn’t, or couldn’t, lost that cowboy swagger when he walked off-stage, drove his hands into the sand instead, and watched the grains fall through his fingers.
“Dreadful,” Bertie will say, “only dreadful, a terrible thing, who would have thought it.” And Gregory will drink too much, but not as much as Bertie, renew acquaintance with the locals, his English accent gradually losing itself in the sough, the hum, the babble of talk. Worse things have happened of course in the intervening years: suicides, patricides, infanticides, new-born babies found in hayricks, Balbriggan burnt, not to talk of the South Quay Barracks. However my death will have the symmetry of detail, obey the tragic unities, of time, of place, of action.
But Gregory has long perfected the sublimation of emotion, the smoothing of it into a convenient shroud. He suffers only in his own time and in private. He suffered a war and rarely spoke of it, and now suffers a death and can barely speak of it. He finishes his whiskey and ginger ale, bids the company goodnight and makes his way, on admirably steady legs, towards the stairs with the wagon-wheel dangling from the ceiling. He mounts them towards the fourteenth and last room of the Wheel Inn, falls on the bed fully dressed and is instantly asleep.
Two hours later he is instantly awake again, the preternatural alertness too much alcohol can bring. He opens the window for fresh air, gazes across the fields at the distant house, framed by the desultory shapes of trees. He imagines for a moment I am gazing back at him, a pair of eyes behind the broken panes of glass, as restless, as unsatisfied as his.
And how can I explain my eye that is bloodless, fleshless, my sight that is constant, the dark that comes down and envelopes it but doesn’t let it sleep? How I am everywhere and nowhere? The moments I have lived unwind before with the moments unlived, both numbered by the same clock. I am your perfect narrator, inhabit then and now, dance between both, am nothing but my story and my story seems already endless. There are rules to my condition but I haven’t learned them yet, haven’t learned to cross the river to the dull sea that laps beyond it, can see but not reach that window open in that hotel across those fields, those desultory trees, can sense those eyes that stare towards mine in that insomniac room. A grave would have done the trick in a vampire story, in a tale of horror like the ones I once screamed in, would have given this consciousness rest and finality, the blankness of non-being. But being I have and substance none, and this man’s father was your father’s son. And he closes the windows then and unlike me, his half-sister, finally sleeps.
~
Would half ever become whole, she wondered, as Dan Turnbull drove them, Father, Mother, Gregory and Nina, towards Drogheda. A Saturday, the morning after he arrived, and maybe, she thought, half already had become whole since she couldn’t for the life of her remember a time all three of them had travelled together. He sat beside her in the back, Mamma and Father with Dan up in front, as Dan lazily nuzzled Garibaldi’s ears with the riding crop.
“Half,” she murmured, “that’s what I called you, Half.”
“Half what?” he asked. His clothes were stitched and restitched, the elbows of his jacket reinforced with leather patches. He had a tweedy homespun poverty about him that was genteel and lonely all at once.
“Just Half,” she said. She wondered, g
lancing slyly at the uncut hair that tufted over his back collar, how much his mother missed him. She decided it must be a lot.
“You’re my half-brother,” she said, “not my whole brother.”
“If that’s the case, then you’re not my whole sister either.”
“Then neither of us is whole.”
“No, we’re both halfs.” And she heard him giggle, for the first time.
“I would really hate to be a quarter,” he said, and it was her turn to laugh. She watched her father in front, the wind coursing off his greying hair, and knew he had heard their laughter and was pleased. Her mother beside him sat stiffly, apparently unconcerned.
She held her hand up towards him and said, “Let’s measure.”
“Measure what?” he asked.
“Hands, silly.”
So he held his hand up to hers and she saw how one fitted into the other, almost half the size.
“Half,” she said, “my hand is half of yours.” Then she dropped her voice, to create a bubble around them in the back that they couldn’t hear up front. “I can show you something in Drogheda, if you keep being nice.”
“What can you show me in Drogheda?” he asked, and he still pronounced the ‘ gh” wrong, which made her like him even more.
“I can show you,” she whispered, “the shrunken head of a saint that was chopped off by the English.”
“You’re trying to scare me again,” he whispered back and she squeezed his hand to assure him she wasn’t.
They made their way along the river past the warehouses and a smell of burnt butter filled the car from the margarine factory across the way.
“Does everything in Ireland smell?” he asked.
“Probably,” she said, “but I live here so I don’t notice. What does it smell like to you?”
“Fish.”
“That’s not fish,” she said, “that’s margarine from the margarine factory across the river.”
