by Neil Jordan
She walked with him through Flanagan’s on the Dublin road, and chose lawnmowers, spades, clippers and secateurs, and gave him as his first task the renovation of the glasshouse. She left word with the site foreman to supervise his duties, keep him supplied with whatever tools he needed, and by her next visit, in March, the renovation of the glasshouse was complete.
As the chirping of skylarks over the unkempt grasses was drowned in the dull bass throbbing of earth-movers, the sound of a JCB reversing, the thump of kango hammers, George, in what was very much like a homecoming ceremony, was installed in Dan Turnbull’s cottage. He then took his place among the hard-hats, the drivers of heavy machinery, the plumbers, elec-tricians and carpenters as the house’s archivist, the keeper of its memories, the guardian of its restoration, the inheritor of its soul. He relished any responsibility, embraced it like a long lost cousin, began consulting with the works manager on the restoration, remembered every detail of how it was and how it once more could be.
Dr. Hannon observed this with a wry sense of failure, and expressed himself one Monday afternoon to Nina, watching George at work among the tomato plants in the re-paned glasshouse, shocked at the futility of the years spent in the St Ita’s wards.
“Is it a comment,” he asked her, “on the uselessness of psychiatry? Three months here has undone what ten years there could never undo.”
“Perhaps,” said Nina, “it’s simpler than you think.”
“How?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” she replied gently, “he’s happy.”
Though whether happiness was the word for such undivided concentration, such relentlessly meticulous care for the utterly inessential, was a question they neglected to ask each other. He was content, definitely, to spend hours with a spliced rope, two sections of an old garden seat and two nuts and bolts.
“What are they for, George?” she asked as he riveted them together with thin strips of metal.
“You’ll see,” he said.
And she did see, on the morning she finally left the Neptune Hotel for London, having long tired of the room with its odours of damp, the evening walks on the windblown sand. The works were in good hands, George was in good hands, the house would now define itself at a pace she could hardly influence. And what she saw was this: George, grown to ten times the height he was when he first sat on it, pushing the new-made, empty swing over the empty river, a swing that was an almost perfect copy of the old.
48
THREE YEARS LATER, George woke with the dawn, as always. He boiled some water on the gas-ring in the tiny kitchen. He heard the purring of wood-pigeon outside, the clucking of a stonechat, the irregular chatter of wagtails and sparrows. He took a piece of yesterday’s batch bread in his hands while waiting for the water to boil and bent low under the jamb of the kitchen door, went through to the front one, edged it open with his foot. He tossed crumbs of white bread around the stunted rhododendron bushes and waited with the benign patience of a latter-day St Francis till the birds revealed themselves. When the first wagtail came he clucked his tongue off his teeth in symbiotic approval of its jabbing beak, its jerking feathers. A flurry of sparrows came next and he broke more bread and threw it towards them, watching them retreat and advance with each offering. He heard the mechanical thrum of wings off foliage and glimpsed the plumage of a cock-pheasant making a plumb line through the dark green, leaving a trail of broken sunlight in its wake.
Then the kettle sang. He turned from this breakfast of birds without a second thought, bowed low under the entrance to the kitchen, dropped a teabag in a smudged cup and poured the water. He took a bottle of yesterday’s milk from the battered fridge, watching the white milk turn the black tea brown. The swirl of milk in the oak-coloured liquid had for him the same intensity of interest as the jabbing, chirruping beaks outside. He looked around his dwelling then, and if there was gratitude for his new circumstances, he gave little sign of it. All phenomena seemed equally worthy of his attention. He lifted the spent teabag from the cup with a spoon and dropped it in the rubbishbin beneath the gas-ring.
Then he walked, cup in hand, through the low kitchen doorway, through the more generous confines of the front door, past the pruned and stunted rhododendrons, through the copse of trees—ash, elder, birch—to the reconstituted glasshouse.
He had replaced each pane, had hand-sanded the frames of rusting metal, painted them then with a red oxide and a white primer. He had re-erected the tracery of hanging wires that would support the tomato plants when they eventually deigned to grow. He was bringing into being a past that he remembered, a state of enchantment or grace he dimly apprehended, though not with any sense of joy, wonder, hurry, but with a methodical concentration that would have done a three-year-old child proud. The tomato plants were tiny as yet, their stems needed to be threaded to the hanging wires so as to gain enough purchase to grow upwards. George finished his tea then in one gulp, entered the humid interior of glass and streaming sunshine, applied his large scarred hands to the delicate green stems.
Around eleven, he was digging, near the roots of the old apple tree, the one with the large, bowed branches, each year bent permanently with the weight of an abundance of fruit that nobody wanted. The apples stayed till they fell off and small shrivelled frozen remnants clattered round his spade as he dug. The earth was frozen too, of course, he would have needed a kango hammer to really shift it, but he persisted. One root had overgrown and was protruding from the grass like a buried elbow. He had tripped continually on the triangle of bark and was determined to set it right.
Once a task was begun he plied it slowly and methodically to its conclusion, as if the task at hand was the issue, not the end result. So he dug, and by twelve o’clock he had opened a rough solid circle, half a foot down into the open earth. One old tin can, a horse-shoe, three coins from the turn of the century. Each demanded a pause and a cigarette, an examination by those unreadable eyes, then a careful setting aside, among the solid spadefuls of discarded earth.
So it was almost lunchtime when he saw it. The remains of a hem, with the fragments of lace still intact upon it, the cloth about it half-decayed. He edged his spade around it carefully, following the hem further into the frozen ground. He recognised the lace immediately, how could he not? It was Nina’s shawl, that he’d threaded through his fingers so often and so long ago. He bent now and held it just so, and felt it disintegrate further under his gardener’s fingers. He cut into the cold crumbling earth beneath it and raised this bundle from the past on his spade, laid it to one side among the dampening grass. A line from their play in the glasshouse sang into his brain, he wondered how he’d remembered it, and once it was there he couldn’t get rid of it. And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot. From the fool in the forest, he remembered, but he couldn’t remember the end. The cloth had glints of the peacock blue surviving the patina of clay or was it mould. Mould, he thought, like the furred surface of ancient meat, and the lines kept singing in his head, we ripe and rot.
The sun above him was well advanced and the grass was steaming gently with the melting hoar-frost. He gripped the hem and pulled it through one finger and thumb and the shawl turned in the wet grass. He felt a hard circular ball inside the hem, like a ball-bearing. He pulled the stitches apart and removed a rust-coloured bead from inside the cloth. He rubbed it between his tobacco-stained fingers and saw the shimmering texture emerge beneath, which he only gradually recognised as pearl.
We ripe and rot, the lines sang in his head again and he still couldn’t remember the end. But he remembered the day by the Boyne before the conflagration when he had opened the oyster with his army knife. He untwined the hem further then, as if it was a bow, tied by Nina long ago, concealing further riches inside. And the hem unwound and the shawl turned further and revealed whatever riches it had hidden, in the crumbling earth on the melting grass. Fragments of seashell, he thought at first, or the remains of crabclaws. He remembered the*
crunch of packed shells beneath his feet outside the shellfish factory and rubbed one fragment in his fingers and saw the whitened texture of bone.
The bones of a small animal, he thought then, a rabbit, a stoat, a kitten and he tried to remember a pet that Nina would have treasured as she treasured her doll Hester, or as she had treasured this bundle, to wrap it so carefully in her shawl, with the pearl he had given her. But he could remember no pet, the only loved, tiny object being the doll, with its puritan bib and smock. Yet Hester had been given to the waters, he recalled, and waked with orangeade and biscuits in a china teaset. He tried to imagine what Nina would wrap with such protective care in her shawl that had been peacock blue, that had the pearl inwoven, what she would swaddle like an infant and bury here beneath the apple tree. And the word infant then sang in his brain with the words ripe and rot, and he would have buried all three words then, infant, ripe and rot, in the earth here the way Nina must have buried her shawl when he was on that transport was it, moving towards the seething bullets or on the burning hill with Gregory dragging him or on the corpse-riddled beach, maybe, burying his own finger. But he couldn’t bury words, no more than he could drive them from his singing brain and so he stood and paced, as if to escape them, he walked from the apple tree to the glasshouse, but there was no escape, they were inside him the way those tiny, barely formed bones on the rotting shawl were once inside Nina. And he remembered the whole line then, of the fool in the forest. And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot and thereby hangs a tale.
It was a fool’s tale, he knew, and it hung round his neck like a fool’s bauble, visible to everyone but him. He had always been the fool and had dragged his fool’s tale with him, ignorant of its secrets, unaware of its plot. It was collapsing now with the weight of impenetrable years and he collapsed with it, down to the roots of that apple tree, where his head sagged forwards onto his knees and his tears flowed down the frayed corduroy and could have washed those bones beneath his boots clean of earth, there were so many of them. He cried, from the awful realisation, somewhere deep inside him, that all those years could have been different. He cried for the infant he imagined buried by Nina below him, for the cries that might have come from its tiny mouth were it not for the suffocating clay. He cried most of all to drown out those words, still crying out inside him. Infant, ripe and rot.
Then, and he couldn’t have told how many hours later, he gathered the bundle of rotting shawl replaced it in the hole and filled in the earth again, the earth which was by now unfrozen, crumbling, like the crumble Mary Dagge used to make. He lay over it like a gravestone, with his arms stretched out, and Nina came upon him later and said, “You’ll freeze George,” and he said, “Maybe, but I’ll warm the earth.”
“Are you an Adonis, George,” she asked him, “an Adonis in overalls?”
And the next day he came upon her in the glasshouse. He held the shears to her neck as she turned and with quite spectacular clumsiness opened a moonlike gash on her throat. He mistook her loss of consciousness for death, then brought the world back to her while he dragged her through the roses, the world with its scudding clouds above. He realised she was still living while lowering her into the septic tank, then spent one energetic minute severing the head from the body that he had known, in one way or another, since his early childhood. And so her last sight was not of sky, sea or river, but of his blood-spattered watch on his jagging wrist and the time on that watch read twenty past three.
49
THE DAY OF my funeral is a languorous, cloying one, hot, without a breath of wind, sodden precipitation in the air, a humidity that makes people sweat while they are standing. A day that seems designed for different latitudes, Mozambique, maybe, or Zanzibar or some tributary statelet along the Nile. Thunder was promised, but it never comes. The sky itself seems to bulge with immobile, dark-tinted clouds waiting, just waiting to spill their guts onto the church below, its slated spire in turn waiting to prick whatever membrane holds the rains in check.
The dramatis personae is minuscule, much to the disappointment of the supporting cast from the parish who have got news of the event. Yet they sweat together like a multitude. And perhaps the central players in any life would be comparably small, but the unseasonable skies above them seem to emphasize their fragility, the arbitrary nature of my absence and the lack of a centrifugal focus to their grief. What they’re missing, of course, is a coffin, the arrival of the hearse, the salving embarrassment of the ritual of hefting my weight onto whatever men would have been chosen for the task. Buttsy Flanagan and Gregory, though they could hardly have carried it between them; maybe Janie could have borne the foot-end helped by Bertie on the other side, wheezing from his emphysemic lungs. But the question doesn’t arise.
The church itself seems bound in a girdle of peace. The dust raised by the feet of the mourners beneath the yew-trees forms an umbra or a penumbra, I can’t be sure which, and lends the graveyard behind an aspect and a beauty that would have me believe in eternal rest, had my condition itself not implied otherwise.
The sky bulges lower and seems even to shrink. Any hint of infinity has been compressed into its immobile, humid folds, like a blouse concealing a large, sweating bosom. Come on clouds, burst. Drench them all. Janie, with her greying hair wrapped in that elegant mantilla, that black suit with the short hobble skirt, lavender silk stockings and high heels. Do her crying for her, quench that cigarette she’s smoking, underneath the yews. Throw a rivulet down Gregory’s elegant profile, a cascade of drips from the brim of his sober black hat. Allow the retired Miss Cannon to unfurl that golf umbrella she is holding and spatter her ancient, everlasting tweeds. The scene cries out for umbrellas, for some forced communion underneath a downpour. So the Moynihans, mother and daughters, could meet Dr. Hannon, from Portrane.
The priest comes late from the blessing of a meat processing plant in Slane, and his motorbike peppers the damp air with suspended globules of exhaust. His presence does at last what a coffin should have done, gives some shape to the event. They troop behind him into the thin, triangular interior with its single window, behind the altar, looking out upon the waters of the Boyne. And there is a strange relief in the fact that the tiny church is filled, that the event will have an audience after all, quite respectable in numbers. They genuflect and kneel, and cough and wait, while the priest vanishes behind the altar, to emerge after an infinity, his damp soutane covered by a greying chasuble, an altar boy in purer white behind him, carrying the bell and the cruets.
The drama begins then, intoned in toneless Latin, a celebration of another death, a long time ago, another body never found. There is some confusion round the gospel. Gregory has requested a reading, but doesn’t, of course, know when it should come. The Latin ceases for a while, the priest waits, then nods impatiently to the front pews, and Gregory rises, a prayer book in his hand. He walks to the lectern, coughs and reads, in slow, deliberate cut-glass tones, the lines of a hymn, “There is a balm in Gilead,” and manages to keep to himself his suspicion that in fact there is none. There was none in Jeremiah either, for the virgin, the daughter of Egypt. In vain shalt thou use many medicines, for thou shall not be cured.
But there is balm of kinds for him, if not in Gilead, and it arrives midway through his reading. A slim gentleman, in early middle age, in an Astrakhan coat and a Homburg hat, who genuflects uncertainly and blesses himself badly. Jonathan Cornfold, actor’s agent, of Gregory Hardy Associates, my half-brother’s balm and the other love of his life.
Gregory kneels by the front pews, Jonathan by the back, a bell rings out and between them the inhabitants of both banks of the Boyne river bend their heads in consecration.
A sacral hush descends, the coughing ceases and it is suddenly there, the event.
There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole.
The heavens open, the rain cascades on to the triangle of slates above and water drips onto the altar bo
ys starched, startling white. That hole in the roof, the priest muses, though he shouldn’t, needs mending, and with Mr. Hardy’s donation, he can now afford it. The sound from above is like the fluttering of wings, and I remember it again, the delicious patter on the corrugated roof of Janie and George’s bedroom, the three of us curled up in the blankets below, v each raindrop like a falling angel, the beating wings of a dove. The congregation rises and those who want to receive the unburied one walk forwards and receive. And the wings ascend now, or descend from the wooden, dripping rafters, and my mourners gradually go forth, as the dove demands, in peace.
There is more rain outside, and a different sound, and each of them feels, as they meet the rain in their various ways, some with unfurled umbrellas, some with cowled overcoats over their heads, that they have been released from inside an echoing drum. This rain is almost tropical and the diffuse mist the downpour raises over the bulrushes of the riverbank could equally inhabit the bulrushes in Egypt’s land, contagious, as the song says, to the Nile.
They gather in cars and the cars drive off, since the rain won’t allow for funereal conversation, to the house, now wrapped in curtains of water, on the river’s north side. Neither Gregory nor Jonathan knows whom to exclude or include, and Janie, who does, seems beyond caring, sipping as she has been from a baby bottle of Powers concealed in her handbag. So the entire dripping congregation floods the house, making short work of the Moynihan sandwiches and the trays of whiskey, sherry and Guinness Extra stout.
When the bottles on display are empty, Janie volunteers to go for more and is driven, to her quiet delight, by Buttsy Flanagan to the nearest pub, the Nineteenth Hole in Baltray. Buttsy sinks two pints in the wood-panelled interior, one for each of Janie’s double-whiskies, while the bar staff fill the back seat of the police-car with more supplies. Their return is delayed further by not so much a detour as an intermission, near Mabel Hatch’s barn, where Janie wants to listen to the sound, of a thousand watery hands drumming off the car’s metal roof. Buttsy lights a cigarette and mistakes Janie’s knee for the gear-handle, a mistake Janie suspects is no mistake at all. And the principal outcome of their subsequent embrace is the entanglement of her mantilla in the steering wheel.
