by Neil Jordan
So George has returned. I see him at night round the hayricks like a dog that has lost its master, the burns on his face always covered with a scarf. He senses a presence inside, a ghost, a malingerer, remembers the Hester of his childhood. Or else the thought of fire comes to consume him, afraid that after they’d burnt the factory, they’d come for the house. He stays intermittently in his parents’ cottage, which Janie leaves each day for her teacher-training course, claims his disability pension, becomes suspect in the townland for taking the King’s Shilling: it is not the time, we have to understand, to advertise such a stipend, what has been up is now down, what was down is now up. And they come one night with the rags and cans of petrol, and George is waiting for them behind a haystack with his father’s shotgun; he lets off two blasts and retreats inside, closing the gates behind him, so they have to content themselves with burning the hay ticks instead. Janie, cycling home from the station, sees the orange glow and thinks they’ve finally done it, Baltray House has gone the way of all the others. But she meets Georgie by the avenue, the sparks falling over his face like yellow snow. She sees the pride and the gathering lack of reason in his face and leads him home by the hand like a giant child, telling him he’s got to stop this, they’ll not let him off lightly, leave that sort of thing to the peelers. But of course, the peelers had been burnt out too.
~
“Lovers,” says Gregory. “The term seems ridiculously French, though of course it’s not. Love, I can’t think of a more Anglo-Saxon verb unless it’s fuck or shit, all nouns too, I might add, English and direct. But lovers, the plural seems French or Latin somehow in its propensity for drama. Yes, she had lovers and I supervised them, I regarded it as my filial and managerial, even dare 1 say it my dramatic duty. And my duties went like this: approval, in those languorous initial stages. Some of her choices were impossible, let’s face it. Those burly prop-hands, those immense electricians, they reminded me of George, which is maybe why she flirted with them and why I ensured, like a well-meaning lago, that all she did was flirt. I discovered the class system, you see, a mathematical precision in its organisation that was quite missing at home, and I had my own uses later for those ersatz Georges. No, her choices had to be above all of use, had to advance the cause of the Irish Rose and her imprecise shadow, me. Intervention, then, in the latter stages when I could see the need descend on her, the sense of belonging inappropriate to those English verbs, love, fuck, shit. For courtship, engagement, marriage, those impossibly French nouns, had to remain just that, impossible. For both of us.”
~
The director with the drying skin knew he would sleep with me that evening. He was wearing shorts because of the heat in whatever glasshouse it was, Lime Grove, I think, in Shepherd’s Bush. I tried dress after dress to satisfy him, knew each time I disrobed he could see me in the wardrobe mirror and knew that he knew that I knew. I crossed Piccadilly with him that evening in a taffeta skirt, felt his shoe underneath it at dinner and glanced at Gregory across the table and knew that he knew. I let him remove it from me later in his quarters above the fish restaurant and remembered that scaly smell from my father’s factory by the river. It seemed as appropriate as the smell of semen that covered my chest before he had even removed my stockings. And there, I thought, I was wrong about that too.
40
THEY COME BACK some nights later; not for the house, but for George, who still keeps vigil outside the front gates. They give him what is colloquially called the mother and father of a hiding. It takes seven of them, with hurley sticks and pickaxe handles, given his size and his strength. His blood spatters the hayricks and they leave him there with the owls flitting round him. And he crawls inside the gate, where my father finds him in the morning, drives him to the same hospital where we both recovered from the fall. He is bandaged and plastered, a much larger version of the broken child that lay there. Janie visits him with her mother, and sees in his unfocused eyes how some retreat has begun inside him, he is becoming one of the malfunctioning, inarticulate ones.
He emerges six months later, his shoulders bowed, his burnt skin pale and whey-coloured from confinement in plaster. And my father, sitting alone in the kitchen at night, hears from outside a distant, rhythmic creak, as a tree-trunk would make in a hard, steady wind, but when he walks out into the courtyard there is no wind, only a breathless evening with a moon barely hidden in concentric circles of motionless cloud. The rhythm is still there though, like the creaking of a leather halter off a horse’s straining neck, and he follows the sound through the arch, past the glasshouse, down the lawns, and before he sees its source, knows it comes from the movement of the swing he constructed all those years ago. He moves down the grassy field and sees the huge shape, hunched on the seat, moving gently, silhouetted by the water.
“George,” he says softly as he comes behind him.
“Hush,” says George, “you’ll send her away again.”
“I would never want to do that,” says my father softly, and places a hand on his shoulder.
“No,” says George. “If a hart lack a hind, let him find out Rosalind.”
“You should be home, George,” says my father, “in your bed.”
“I can’t leave her here,” says George.
“Yes, you can,” says my father, “she’d want you to sleep.”
“Would she?” asks George with a child’s innocence, and places his huge hand on my father’s.
“Yes,” said my father, “every boy needs sleep.”
He leads him by the four-fingered hand, off the swing and across the grassy hill, to the road by the river, past Mabel Hatch’s barn to his father’s tin-roofed cottage. And his idiocy proper begins there, a spell for three months in St. Ita’s, Portrane, by which time the new Civic Guard is formed, and George on his release is apprehended outside the Bettystown Funfair in a fracas with a strongman. Three nights in the Drogheda cells and my father, for George’s safety as much as anything else, gets him employment as a merchant seaman, Drogheda to Liverpool first, then to Ostend, Rotterdam, and each spell of leave for George ending in incarceration of one kind or other. He travels further— Marseilles, Constantinople, Hong Kong, Macau, Australia—and the gaps between the spells at home grow, and Janie gets a teaching job, and the barred room in the Portrane asylum comes to seem like, whenever he revisits it, home.
~
“I had my own ghosts,” says Gregory, “my reasons, if she had married I don’t know what I would have done. I can remember that evening I arrived in the kitchen with my case wrapped in twine and she, or was it me, invented the fiction that I was posted from England, posted as what? As a gift, of course, to her. If I had anticipated such a sister, such an equal in everything but sex, it could have been different maybe. But a life began for me then, another life, and the thought of it ending felt like an end for me too.
I traced my mother’s grave to a small churchyard in Surrey, which I visited and saw her name on the brown gravestone already covered in lichen. Annabel Martin. In the village beyond, with its spire and smoke curling in the September air—it was September I remember—there was a house, a substantial house I assumed, substantial enough for Sir Henry Martin to exclude her and me from its favours. I wondered for a mad moment would that have been my name—Gregory Martin—but it seemed impossible, two first names and no surname, and I realised I became what I was when I walked into that kitchen and saw her, Nina Hardy. I was Gregory Hardy and didn’t know what I would have been without her. I was her gift, I was in her gift, as she was and would always be, in some way, in mine.”
~
When did I come to hate them, those artificial dramas with their chases, their stunts, their pratfalls, their flouncing, sweating period dresses, their simpering close-ups, their manufactured mystery and suspense, their light and shade? I think around the time they broke up the houses of glass and photographed the events in the great soundproofed stages. And maybe what I had liked had nothing to do with the river of blac
k and white that ran through the cameras, but the glasshouses themselves, those cathedrals of light with the sun pouring through from ceiling to floor. In those glasshouses I was never too far from our game of pretence among the sweltering tomato plants, the four of us swapping affections like sugared sweets. When they shattered the glass and built the walls and brought in the lamps with their sparkling carbon, I began to hate the presumption of those lights, the darkness behind the halated glow. I could see my lost succubus there, wheeling in the dust behind the carbon arcs. I came to agree with those primitive peoples who believe the camera is sucking out the essence, the soul, the succubus. It was no longer me, moving in the caked make-up, the costumes stiff at the armpits from someone else’s sweat. It was her, a person I didn’t know any more, called Nina Hardy.
And that’s when I thought I should have changed my name, called myself Isolda Birtwhistle or some such pretension, because at least the separation between us both would have been complete. I came to hate the reduction of meaning to whatever way she crinkled her face when the lights blazed, the camera turned. I wanted true artifice, not this artificiality, Rosalind’s artifice. And that’s when I said to Gregory, we have to stop this, I have to do the stage. But the money was too good, I realised, for him at least, and my reputation stank too much of this fairground wonder.
And at the same time I came to realise that Gregory’s affections were not really, or not exclusively, fixed on the young blonde ingenues around me, the make-up and costume girls, but on the barrel-chested prop-boys, the electrician hefting that lamp, the muscles on his biceps twisting into cords. “Do you miss George, Gregory?” I asked him. “Sometimes,” he answered, “I pine for him.” And I came to realise the game of desire we had played in our garden of Eden, our first glasshouse, was far more complicated than I had ever imagined.
Mr. Shaw effected my release, came to the studio one winter’s morning on a quasi-regal visit, to view the source of this new phenomenon that was filling the picture houses, promising me a play that was like those pictures, one hundred percent talk. I had tea with him in Adelphi Terrace, sandwiched between two ladies in mourning black where all three of them expressed implicit approval of his “new Irish Rose.” We followed them to Malvern where he swam each morning in the pools, his beard preceding him in the water like a duck’s nest. I played Orinthia in The Apple Cart, to everyone’s approval but that of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who had once been, it seemed, his old Irish Rose. His septuagenarian affection proved as thrilling as that of any nineteen-year-old and his jealousy even more compulsive. He followed the production to London and for two hundred and fifty-eight days plied me with advice on performance, diction, deportment and style. I was to be the last of his intellectual romances, he warned, so I must humour his ardour.
“How better can I humour it?” I asked.
“We are due to spend time,” he said, “in Italy, Lago di Como. You must join us.” He seemed proud of the way he pronounced those prolonged Italian vowels.
“Can my brother come too?” I asked.
“Il suo fratello?” Again the same pride, the lips forming the O out of the oatmeal beard. “Certissimo.”
41
MY FATHER PAINTS, sketches relentlessly, the riverbank, the Lady’s Finger, the Maiden’s Tower, the water beneath it, he hints at a girl beneath the ripples. He paints his wife gardening, on the summer and the autumn lawns, hoping for a glance at his endeavours, a word of appreciation which never seems to come. She lets the Meath Hunt occupy her winters, the golf-course her summers, gardening and crosswords everything in between. He embarks then on a sketching tour of the antiquities of the Boyne river, starting at the well at the foot of the hill of Carbury, where Boinn ran from the rising waters. He sketches each ruin first, from Carbury Castle to Monasterboice to the Maiden’s Tower and the Lady’s Finger, then begins an assiduous depiction of the megalithic remains: Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, each detail of those ancient interiors. The project grows from winter to summer, summer to winter, its scope expands. He begins sketching a series of dramatic tableaux, starting with the mythic, the retreat of Boinn from the river’s waters, ending with the historic, the rout of King James’s forces by King Billy, William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. He flirts with the idea of publication by the Meath Historical Society but realises, at his present rate of progress, it may never be finished.
~
The lake was dark, darker than I thought water could have ever been. From the terrace of the old hotel above one of its corners we viewed its immensity and entertained ourselves with stories.
“I can imagine a cast of characters,” GBS told us, “confined to this hotel, unable to face the gathering gloom in the world outside, with nothing else to pass the time but narratives of each other. Each narrative ends in one of the parties’ demise. So the audience shrinks, story by story, to an audience of one, a soliloquy which concludes of course, in an act of auto da fe”
“Is there a metaphor there?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, “nothing as vulgar as that, what in the end is fiction but a way of passing the time? You first, Nina Hardy.”
“Can I be last?” I asked him.
“A suicidal soliloquy would hardly suit you,” he said, “a sentence, by the way, the sibilance of which hardly suits this beard of mine.”
“On the contrary,” I told him, “I would dive from the castellated wall here into those insanely dark waters below and wouldn’t find death there, I’d find another kind of life.”
“What other kind of life?” he said with prosaic petulance. “There is no other kind of life.”
“I would find,” I told him, and I only told him this to trouble him, “a monastery garden with a riderless horse, an old Abbot asleep underneath a moulting cherry tree with a pair of sinewy feet in sockless sandals and a beard large enough for bees to make a hive in.”
“What does this Abbot do?” he asked me, his eyes flickering with recognition.
“He dreams,” I told him. “He dreams of me.”
He took me rowing on the lake towards the town of Bellagio, but barely made it from the shoreline.
“Why an Abbot,” he asked me, “why bees in his beard?”
“Because the Abbot is old,” I told him, “and the bees do his pollination for him.
“Does this Abbot ever wake?” he asked.
“If he did,” I replied, “what existence would I have?”
He raised the oars on the rowlocks and perched them on the gunwale of the boat so the lake’s water dripped on my face and my dress. How odd, I thought, that the dripping water isn’t dark after all.
“Forgive me,” he said, “if I have husbanded my resources so frugally that when the time comes to spend them, they have quite dried up.”
I kneeled, then, on the gently rocking boat and leaned forwards between his tweed-covered legs because I knew he wanted me to. I pressed my bosom on his bearded chest and placed my own lips against his pursed, leathery, literary ones.
“Can I let you in on a secret?” he asked softly, and the Irishism of the phrase sounded odd in his timbre.
“Let me in,” I said, as softly.
“I do dream of you,” he said, “and with your permission, would like to continue.”
“Don’t stop,” I said.
~
Another riderless horse clops down the avenue one summer’s afternoon, foam drying round its mouth and its sides heaving. The horse we rode through the monastery barley field must have long become horsemeat, but this one followed the same route, throwing its rider before the finishing post, throwing arcs of spray down the long beach with its bridle swinging behind it, leaping the small crumbling wall by the Maiden’s Tower straight into the river with its leaping salmon. My mother stands up from her flowerbed, throws off her gardening gloves and walks to it, stroking its trembling sides, hushing it into silence. She knows horses, whispers arcane phrases into its pricked-back ear the way George once did, and for a moment I think she m
ight mount it, take her husband on its back and leap through the fields of barley to the monastery garden where the Abbot lies in the afternoon heat, under the moulting cherry tree, dreaming of all of us. But no, of course not, she calls Dan Turnbull, and Dan leads it by the wet reins down to the reconstituted RIC station, where young Buttsy Flanagan, Civic Guard, strokes his beardless chin and wonders whence it came.
~
He had a dream, he told me, that I was in Twelfth Night at the Lyceum, and I understood that this was less a dream than a desire, an arrangement he had already mooted with the management, and found myself walking down the Strand with him expounding on the character of Viola. Viola, cousin to Rosalind, surely, both of whom, through an odd alignment of parenthood, were second-cousins to the melancholy Jacques. So I began rehearsals and wondered where Viola had been all my life. Viola, with an even more complex predilection for disguise than Rosalind, loved and lost her brother Sebastian, last saw him lashed to a mast, holding acquaintance with the waves, on the seas off Illyria.
Prove true, imagination, Oh, prove true, that I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you
He had himself chosen the youth who played Sebastian and chosen well, he was my fictive brother after all, long feminine lashes leading like fans down to alarmingly sculpted cheekbones. Jonathan was his name, Jonathan Cornfold; he kissed me in the empty stalls when he thought the cast had gone, and what’s this, I thought, as his cock stood to attention in his sequinned tights.
“What’s this?” I asked him out loud, as I ran my fingers down the sequinned shaft.
“An exclamation-mark,” he said.
“Are there exclamation-marks in Shakespeare?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “the text is full of them.”
“It will have to remain,” I told him, “a question-mark for the moment, until I have need of exclamations.”
