Dublin Palms

by Hugo Hamilton

  The stairs were narrow. She went up holding the bannister rail. Her shoes were not right. We reached the second floor and she turned to ask – is it much further? I told her it was the next one. There was a bare bulb lighting each landing, a shadow of handprints along the paintwork. We read the nameplates, a freight company, a chiropractor, chartered accountants, the national chess federation, it was at the top of the building, a small office overlooking the city.

  We knew him before he became a solicitor. We met him through my friend gone to Australia. He had a broad moustache, he was on the phone when we arrived, he smiled and asked us to sit down. We waited. His office was in a corner building that was shaped like a triangle, you could hear pigeons on the roof. I looked out the window at the city lights, it was dark early, we could see traffic crossing O’Connell Bridge. A wide view of the rooftops, the lights reflected along the river gave the city a carnival atmosphere, an orange glow in the sky over the Phoenix Park.

  Helen took off one of her shoes and put it back on.

  We could overhear the conversation on the phone, it had something to do with finding a buyer, in perfect condition. When he put down the phone, he smiled – you don’t want to buy a shotgun?

  He laughed.

  His shoulders were jumping. It took me a moment to realise what was funny. Helen was quicker, she said – yeah, let’s shoot them all.

  He was a fan of American country music. He once got an autograph from a touring country star after a concert in Dublin. The piece of paper he held out to the singer was folded over, blank on one side, on the other he had written – I owe the bearer of this note a thousand dollars. The country singer laughed in a deep country voice and crossed out the figure, he wrote in its place, a pile of horseshit. The autograph was pinned up on the wall behind his desk.

  Most of the details had already been explained over the phone, I had sent him the documentation. It was laid out on his desk. He had been able to deal with some of the issues. He had managed to restructure the home loan with the building society. He dealt with the writ I had received for an electronic typewriter, it had a self-correcting feature, you could make as many mistakes as you liked, they had reclaimed the equipment and agreed to accept a small settlement for the balance.

  I loved the sharpness of legal wording. I admired the ground rules, striving to be as accurate and as minimal as possible, any excess gave doubt a foothold. By then I had read many writs and demands, I could see beauty in precision. There was no need for eloquence, no need to be interesting, no need for playful language. The meaning could be so easily misconstrued, the idea was to avoid all ambiguity, get to the point as fast as possible on the least amount of words. Stick to necessity, avoid punctuation, avoid adjectives, anything that might leak emotion. I thought of various crisp legal phrases – in contravention, left with no alternative, to be brought in line with immediate effect. I felt nullified. Empty as an empty swimming pool. One of my favourite authors started off as a lawyer.

  Our solicitor let us know the banks might not be the worst. He had already let them know we had no available funds. To keep them onside he made up an imaginary relative who might be able to step in with financial aid, it gave them hope, they could be asked to accept small monthly payments to pay off the capital.

  We’ll see, he said.

  Some of the other creditors were trickier. The company that carried out the promotional work on the café was not budging. He had trouble getting anywhere with the architect, it was too late to claim the invoice should have been made out to the company, not Helen personally. The architect always wore sunglasses on top of her head, her coat had an interesting design, green with a black collar going out over the shoulders, shaped in a triangle across her chest. Her surname was the same as a native singer I knew in the Aran Islands, but she could not possibly be related to him.

  Our solicitor told us to put our minds at rest, he would find a way of dealing with the rest of the claims.

  The relief made me want to cry. It was a kind of friendship I had never experienced before. Nobody had ever made me feel so much at ease with the place where we were living. I looked out the window at the city, the cars and buses waiting at the traffic lights, the familiar advertising on the front of the buildings, people crossing the bridge. I was seeing everything from a new angle, from above, I wanted to ask him if we could stay the night in his office, we could sleep on the floor, watching the city, refusing to close our eyes. I wanted to be there in the morning to see people coming to work, I wanted never to leave, never to go home.

  We had a short conversation about Canada. Helen told him her brothers and sisters were mostly in Toronto and Ottawa, one of them was a boatbuilder in Halifax, they all got together when she went over with the children in the summer.

  As we were getting ready to leave, he gathered up the documents on his desk and mentioned one further thing. He said it was nothing, merely out of interest – how would you feel about selling the house?

  I looked at Helen, she didn’t look back.

  It was just a thought, he said.

  On the way down the stairs, she went ahead of me. I was certain she was crying, but I couldn’t prove it. I couldn’t ask her to stop on the landing to check. The chiropractor’s door was left open, a worn blue carpet, a coat stand. A manual typewriter clacking in another room. The light fitting on one of the landings was broken. She carried on all the way down without me seeing her face. We were back out on the street and she turned to me with a smile – a glass of Guinness for the baby.

  All those rehearsals, the method-acting workshops, drama college in London, the small theatre in Dublin, Strindberg, Ibsen, Synge, her previous roles all led up to this moment. She could conceal from me, from her children, from the entire world, the stain of sadness, it never showed. She continued working, answering phone calls, teaching classes, smiling a lot, she would not even give in to a cold. Nothing would keep her from going on the radio every morning to cheer the city up and tell people in traffic how to relax in the rain.

  We stopped looking each other in the eye. We might have started blaming one another for everything that was going wrong. Talking straight was betrayal. We stayed false to each other. The only way of remaining faithful was to keep pretending. She remained loyal to the image of a plastic bottle rotating in a river. I stayed loyal to the footprints of a fox in a poem. Our thoughts never crossed. We sat in the car outside the house for a long time without going inside. The lights were off. We didn’t even have any music on the car radio. Just a long pause between us. She put her hand on the back of my neck. I put my head down to listen to her belly, it was like a salt mine in there.

  I have an idea, I said.

  She waited while I straightened up and put my hands on the steering wheel.

  I’ll get my job back, I said.

  What?

  They’ll take me back any time. The commander said it to me, he meant every word, they’ll bring me in at managerial level.

  Back to the basement?

  It’s not a bad job, I said.

  I don’t want to hear this, she said, turning towards me. I can’t believe it. Don’t you remember the bargain we made. I am having the baby, you were meant to start speaking.

  There was impatience in the way she tapped on the glass beside her, I ran around to let her out.

  On the phone to her mother in Canada, Helen makes a funny story of the woman who found a dead rat in the shower, running out into the café with only a towel around her and shampoo in her hair, saying Holy Jesus. She had to be comforted with herbal tea and given free classes for a year in compensation. A rubbish bin went on fire outside the café one night, it scorched the door and one of the small olive trees in a plant holder, other than that everything was fine.

  She tells her mother nothing about Martina, only that she went to Paris and brought her back a blouse with the word Calvados in the design, hidden am
ong the leaves. José came over to stay with us for a weekend while she was away. Helen never mentioned anything about the investor’s wife, Marie Delaney eventually getting a hold of Martina’s phone number, calls in the middle of the night – leave my husband alone.

  It seemed to me that the rapid collapse of our business coincided in some tragic way with the decline of the investor’s marriage. His descent was our descent. Everything was tied into his love for Martina, the anguish of his wife and family, how desperately she wanted him back.

  Martina was in the city one afternoon, she had arranged to pick Maurice Delaney up outside the Shelbourne Hotel. His car was parked in a lock-up at the back of the solicitor’s office. He was standing on the pavement in his blazer and tie, a schoolboy, a gentleman, a financier looking at his watch, scanning the traffic. It was a fine day, lunchtime, no wind, the pavement busy with people passing by. The hotel porter stood in his tailcoat outside the main door. The flags hanging from the front of the building were not moving much. Martina swung the car in and pulled up to the kerb, she switched down the music and pushed her bag with a Jamaican scarf attached off the passenger seat onto the floor to make room for him. She leaned forward with a smile, but he seemed not to recognise her. She called his name, gave the car horn a slight beep, a country touch, but he turned away. He was running back into the hotel, disappearing through the revolving doors as though he was avoiding her. She waited, realising how easily this could all come to an end.

  A woman’s voice shouting.

  The Belfast accent made it easy to work out. It was Marie Delaney in the car right behind her. The shock made Martina instantly pale, as though her make-up had been removed, a shiver along her back. She was afraid in a way that she had not been afraid since primary school, the brutality of teachers in a small country town. A rush of weakness shot through her stomach, her name being called. The panic set her off at great speed, accelerating with a yelp of tyres that made pedestrians look up. Everybody watching as she raced away in her bashed-up red car, with the screeching noise of a larger car behind in close pursuit.

  The afternoon was blind with fear. The map of Dublin became incomprehensible, streets appearing in the wrong order, no time for safety. The race through the city seemed out of touch with the pedestrians in their summer clothes, calmly walking across the street without heeding the traffic lights, skipping out of the way at the last minute. At the side entrance to Trinity College, Martina was forced to stop for people crossing. She saw Marie Delaney coming to a sudden halt behind her. In that stationary moment, she looked in the mirror and saw Marie Delaney’s eyes. Her mouth was moving. She could lip read the words like a mimed communication between them. Each begging the other to give in, to be reasonable, cursing as they moved on again at high speed.

  They drove the same streets twice, like a grid they could not escape. They came around by the dental hospital, past the chemist on the corner, back up around past the National Gallery, a closed circuit that kept returning to the Shelbourne Hotel as though they were in a race to get back to the starting point. On the street with the smallest pavement in the world, pedestrians spilling out onto the road were forced to jump back as Marie tried to overtake. The terror eventually caused Martina to take a gamble, driving down a laneway without knowing the outcome, where it would lead.

  Dublin is too small. Everyone can be seen. Everything is overheard. There is talk of running way.

  Helen’s mother has no news on her side of the water apart from the fact that they are building a new shopping mall outside the town. She gives Helen the news about the family, how her father has given up alcohol and so did the judge across the road, a lady never drinks alone. She goes through what each one of Helen’s brothers and sisters are doing, every good thing magnified, every bad thing minimised.

  She says the boardwalk by the lake is being redone, the ownership of the salt mine has changed, Champion Roads pulled out, that’s been a blow to the town.

  And – her mother has a new friend.

  Because her best friend Nessa is no longer talking to her and it’s well known around the town that the two Irish women are having an almighty row, like a marriage break-up, Helen’s mother started meeting another woman. They got to know each other at the hairdresser’s. Her new friend’s name is Vera, she is from Prague originally.

  Vera, her mother tells Helen, has a great story from her childhood. How she married her best friend at the age of nine, they had a wedding in front of a large mirror on the landing, dressed in all her mother’s clothes. When the Nazis arrived, her childhood friend had to leave for New York without saying goodbye. Vera stayed in Prague, her father joined the resistance movement against Hitler. She made her way to Toronto after the war when her family was expelled, she looked for her Jewish friend in New York but never found her, then she got married to a millionaire who invented snap-on tools.

  Helen’s mother was in the restaurant on the square one day having lunch with Vera when her former friend Nessa pulled up outside. Parking is diagonal, the car was pointed directly towards their table. Nessa got out and walked towards the restaurant without noticing her, maybe there was a glare on the windows and it was hard to see in. Nessa came in the door. It was only when she was standing inside the restaurant that she finally saw Helen’s mother with Vera. A new woman, a replacement friend, having lunch at the table normally reserved for two Irish women. Nessa turned around on the spot, the waiter came and opened the door, he even went out and opened the car door for her. They watched her reversing and merging back into the slow wheel of traffic around the courthouse.

  I went to see my mother. She was sitting at the breakfast table with her diary. Every morning, Greta got her up and dressed, she came down and had breakfast, then she sat at the table writing her diary. She was telling the story of her life from the beginning. Each time, she would start again, not adding on to where she had left off the day before, but on a new page. Often it began with the very same words – I was born in a strange time. Sometimes she changed it to – I was born in turbulent times. She began with her childhood, describing the stationery shop her father owned on the market square, how she was one of five girls, right in the middle, they played in the fountain in front of the house, sometimes the paper boats they made clogged up the fountain and the water came spilling over the edge.

  Word for word, she wrote down the same details every day, how her mother had been an opera singer, there was a grand piano in their front room, a casement window overlooking the fountain. She had written much more when she was younger. She often wondered if it was a mistake to be the child of two parents who loved each other so much. Her father was a funny man, everybody in the town loved him, but nobody had money to buy paper, the business went down, her father closed the shop. It was not long after that he died.

  When I arrived that morning, she had reached the point in her writing where her father died, she could not go any further. Normally she wrote neatly inside the ruled lines of her diary, this time the words drifted outside, they began sloping down the page and came to a stop – the scent of lily of the valley will always remind me of his coffin.

  As we sat together, I could not help asking myself if I had now become just like her father, who went bust before Hitler came to power. Was I following my German grandfather in all his failure, my Irish grandfather in all his tragedy, my father in all his love and anger, my mother in all her homesickness?

  My mother’s memory takes the same route each time, back to the last days of the war.

  It’s after Christmas. She goes to visit her sister in Salzburg, carrying a parcel of food concealed in her case, people are so desperate they keep asking her to share it. Nobody knows how long the war will go on. She is meant to have reported for duty in Berlin, she had been drafted as secretarial backup to the military, she was supposed to be in the capital, ready to be sent to the Eastern Front, to stop the Russians. She ignores the orders and manages to falsify
her train ticket. There is a town near Salzburg that has a similar name to the town she comes from. That gets her to the south, to the Austrian border, from there she manages to get another ticket for the short journey to Salzburg to see her sister. She walks up from the station to the house below the castle, hoping to live there until the end.

  She speaks to her sister about staying in hiding but that’s not possible.

  Her sister already has somebody hidden at the house. A Jewish woman dressed as a nun comes to visit from time to time, to help look after her missing husband’s mother. The woman stays a night or two, then she moves to another house, always going to see the same few people in rotation, mostly houses where old people need care. The nun makes her way around early in the morning, carrying a small case with holy water, some religious artefacts, a prayer book, an ebony set of rosary beads hanging down from the waist band. She never goes down into the city of Salzburg. She never goes to any church, never returns to any convent, keeps visiting the small circle of houses with sick people on the mountain. The house cannot take up another refugee.

  It was snowing heavily, my mother said.

  She waves goodbye to her sister. She makes her way back down the hill with big flakes falling across her face. Snow eyelashes. Snow shoulders.

  At the train station in Salzburg, the platforms are being patrolled, everyone is being questioned. They go through her documentation and discover she is meant to be in Berlin. Her name is called out along the platform. She is put under arrest, a deserter. The term for desertion in German means running away from your flag. She waits in a room at the station for hours, not knowing what is going to happen, she tells them nothing about her sister. After it gets dark, she is placed on a train, in a single box carriage with a boy soldier. The boy can be no more than fourteen. He is chained to the seat. She is afraid to talk to him, afraid to give him bread, it torments her that she cannot tell him to be brave, all this will be over soon, he will be going home again.