The Past (13 page)

RAIN BEGINS TO fall on the promenade and Father Beausang quickens his step. You see him through your bay window, hurrying towards your door. The bay window is large, with a curved sill on which it is pleasant to sit. It affords two separate views, one through the left-hand curved panes of the Villas heading downwards towards
the sea and sloping towards the yellow chairs that crawl up the Head; and through the right-hand curved panes are the Villas again, rising towards Main Street. It is the window on which the Jewish model sat, naked on velvet cushions before the outraged eyes of the curate's superior. There is a table there surfaced with green felt, standing in the half-circle of the window. The light is always changing from the window so those who sit there come to know intimately the moods of street and landscape under the rain, the squalls and sheets forever falling on the bay beyond. In summer the window catches the sun for a full six hours. So summer is marked by a yellow glare and the yellow boxes of the chair-lift creaking towards the summit and by the bleaching of the green felt table. The quality of that room, though hardly remarkable, must have been constant, for Lili hated it, the curate when reminded of it grew nostalgic and I, when I visited it, could see at a glance what the one hated and the other loved to remember.

The drops gleam on Father Beausang's cheeks. His eyes are damp with pleasure and rain. He slips a book out from under his soutane. Luke comes down the stairs and stands on the last step while the priest ruffles his hair. You tell Luke to bring in tea and sandwiches. Father Beausang touches your elbow and holds up the book. You read the title and smile.
Arithmetic and Mensuration
by Eamon de Valera.

Once inside the unheated room, though, the book is forgotten. The curate has made a much rarer discovery—a French mathematician whom he came across, quite by chance, in the
Proceedings of the British Academy.
He tells you his theories and the sheaves of his person seem to fall away, his eyes illuminated, straining through logic towards what he hopes is beyond. You feel quite sad, listening,
anticipating his inevitable return. He relates an analysis of the process of mathematical research and discovery which, he claims, could lead the secular sciences back to the point from which they departed in the late Renaissance—to a recognition of simple illumination, Divine Wisdom. He has as yet read only accounts of these theories, has gulped them down whole in his excitement, but his sense of discovery is so real that it excites you, unwillingly, in turn. Poincare, the curate tells you, between hurried mouthfuls of cucumber sandwich, sees mathematical research not as merely the inevitable unravelling of applied logic but as a series of leaps into the unknown, for which the light thrown by logic alone could never suffice. The logic, he claims, by which the scientist seems to proceed could never suffice for his journey. The very choice of an area of investigation eliminates an infinite number of possible choices. And progress is made in a series of intuitive steps for which logic is the language but never the instrument. And there comes a point, beyond that language, beyond the resources of intuition even, at which the material amassed simply resists analysis. The curate turns towards you, lit by the grey light from the bay window. All resources seem to fail here, he tells you, and the mind is just a filament, waiting for a current. He quotes a remark by Einstein. The problem, stated and restated interminably, harried over for months gives way suddenly, quite arbitrarily, like a shattering mirror. The mind is admitted into the realm in which scientific discovery is made. And this moment is likened by Poincare to instantaneous illumination, a step beyond the realm of the rational, through which understanding is bestowed on the mind like a gift . . .

YOU TURN AWAY from the dialogue to watch the rain falling in sheets now on the prom. You can see the snout of Bray Head nudging past your window, a thin strip of the promenade resistant to the water hopping off it and the broader band of sea which accepts the rain, mottled by the squalls. The dialogue has come round to that point you had hoped it would resist. This innocent, glowing cleric is drawn to it, independent of himself. A faint disturbance rises in you, the kind of upset that could be due to bad digestion, you want to fart and blame it on the cucumber sandwiches or the inordinate amount of tea you have drunk. His excitement has carried you with it. You sense it springs from your own perplexity. But your disturbance is more than gastronomic. You remember the stiff wax flowers of her funeral, the flowers the church was drenched in at your wedding, all Catholic flowers, a display of faith in the natural object placed at the heart of the human event, an insistence that those same objects are more than themselves, are symbols of what the human event pertains to, limiting it on both sides, the flowers that brushed soundlessly the first time and that stood stiff and waxed the second. And you wonder whether the curate's drift towards that point, the point at which these memories emerge and sidle towards you like forgotten enemies, to be confronted or evaded, is just an extension of his pastoral duty. Though your Tuesday conversations haven't touched on these things for years, his very presence is a subtle reminder of them. Your discomfiture gives way to mild annoyance. Some unspoken agreement has been broken. You suspect he has been breaking it all along. You resent being reminded, through the theories of an obscure, possibly dilettante French mathematician, of your agnosticism, your perplexity and your deceased wife.

The curate moves from the window and places his hand on your arm. You aren't used to hands on your arm, you are made as uncomfortable by them as by opening doors. But all you feel through his hand is the depth of his liking for you. This is another subject that has never been broached. Even that, the pressure says, will fail us some day. You look for words to answer him, somewhere between affection and faint resentment, but you can't find them. He saves you again, as if saving is always his duty. His words are like your flowers, hedging round that miniature human event. He mentions the book he has brought.

‘I wonder, can Dev enlighten us?'

The door opens as he smiles. Luke comes through. You smile, almost in gratitude.

I WILL HAVE Luke open doors as quietly as James, but with the added ability to do so unnoticed. Like a good waiter, unembarrassed by silence, feeling no need to explain his presence. He has a transparent complexion at the age of eight, luminous eyes that stare all the time but rarely seek attention. The grandfather's bluster makes way for the father's reticence and for Luke's transparent quiet. The youth whom Lili met at eighteen implied just such a boy. You tried to imagine him, she tells me, as a boy: did he carry himself just that way when he was twelve, eight or ten? And the boy who possessed that odd intensity, that appalling certainty would, she says, have been an intimidating boy indeed. Her impatience with the boy's father is only matched by the rapturous approval with which she remembers the son.

So he comes in quietly to take away the tea things, knowing the discussion to be all but finished. Standing there, taking in with his eyes the rain-filled window and the two figures by it, Luke understands the embarrassment of the curate's gesture, he already knows his father's dislike of hands on arms and elbows. He sees his father in the window-light and listens to the opaque mystery of their conversation, the last soft wave of dialogue, those words of more than three syllables which characterise adult conversation for him, breaking to those pleasantries which for both of them signify an ending; though Luke doesn't grasp at the pleasantries but at the fading scent of the argument, at the curate's round diction and his choice of words. The words are new to him and carry an exotic allure. He is a thin, erect child who holds himself rigidly, a little like an older man. It's only in late adolescence that he acquired the look of youth that Lili characterises as ‘slender'. Now he is thin and luminous, something aged about his silence, looking at his father and the curate, catching the drift of those ultramontane words. Their use is therapeutic for the curate, for whom the realities of parish life have formed a bitter contrast with his scholastic novitiate. They remind him of St John Lateran's College in Rome, of his first love, theology, and of his present ambition, to unite the logic of belief with the logic of science. They would have carried to Luke the germ of that
summa
which every utterance implied. Standing there, waiting for the pressure of the curate's warm hand on his father's elbow to cease, for them both to turn with that sense of finality which would be the signal for him to pick up the tray with its cups and remaining sandwiches and carry them outside. And of course they turn and Father Beausang and Vance look at the tallish boy with the brown hair flat on his head, sharp stickles of a quiff on
the right-hand side of his parting which lend to the luminosity of his eyes an air of constant surprise. The curate thinks of his duty towards this child of a Catholic marriage, he probes the child's features gently as if to find some air of loss, of deprivation there. He can find none, however, and so he stretches out his hand and feels the stickles of the quiff with his palm.

‘I have something for you,' he says. His eyes shine. ‘If your father doesn't object.'

James has his back turned, his face to the window. You stare from him to the curate, whose palm has stopped kneading your hair. He hands you the book.

‘Bless you.'

HE LEAVES, WALKS back out through the hall to the door and the rain on the promenade. The odd sense of maleness in that house, that hall, the rather bare order over everything, like a presbytery or bachelor residence, makes him feel he's leaving one home to go to another. The house was cleaned, but never softened, by a combination of three maidservants. There was a hatstand near the front doorway. And a mural, running down the stairway, covering the left-hand wall.