The Past (20 page)

OUR THOUGHTS WERE interrupted by the door opening again and banging against the hatstand and the entry of two well-heeled families, everyone clutching the auctioneer's brochure. We turned abruptly from the torn wallpaper as if to dispel any possible connection between us and it and I sensed, gratefully, that we had in common a mutual feeling of guilt. His was complicated by an added factor, however, since both families, despite the profanity of their staring open-mouthed at the torn wallpaper without noticing the mural, all turned to him and smiled as we walked towards the door, repeating among themselves the word ‘Father'. This embarrassed him, I am glad to say, as much as it incensed me and so when we reached the open door and the view of the night sea I felt a positive bond between us. He placed his hand on my elbow as I'm sure he did to Luke, as I'm sure he did to all three of them, at first to steady himself as we went down the steps but then to confide in me, as we made our way out of the gate, with the warmth in his palm and his voice of what I felt for an instant must be a much younger man.

‘
I
DIDN'T KNOW HER,' he said when the wind hit us, 'but I assume it must be her. Yes, although I've never seen her I've imagined her just like that. Luke described her once across the grille, a bizarre confession, but then all confessions are bizarre, there's just the pleasure of listening, a refined pleasure, let me tell you and one that has to be nurtured. As a young priest it used to terrify me, I used to slide back the hatch at any opportunity I got, would you believe, just to let my face be seen and if possible to get a glimpse at whoever was muttering the words but of course that was just a palliative, there was no cure was what I had to realise, people ceased to come to me for after all the sinner demands and deserves the right to whisper unseen. And the only way to live with the objects of one's terror after all is to take pleasure in them, which is what I had to do. Listening sets the imagination relatively free, you see, on a leash with a hand guiding it. But there was a whole country at it then, with radios, villages would gather in the bicycle shops to hear the Saturday match and so it was a confessional state, you see, in its early days, in more ways than one since everyone had their ear bent to a speaker. And so I—'

He stopped and I felt his hand on my arm again.

‘Will we walk round by the Head?'

I nodded and we turned and walked back down the prom.

‘And so I, instead of building a blow-by-blow account of the hurls on Croke Park from a cracked speaker, built a picture of her from a year of rumours, from one confused confidence of Luke's and even from my philosophic discussions with James, God bless his heart, since though he never mentioned her name, his thought around that time became somehow more inclusive. She was plumper, I may tell you, in my mind's eye, plumper than we have just seen her on that wall but that, I suppose, could be attributed to the old man's faulty vision. I have seen him on the prom here, on that patch of grass which used to be bald from his stool and easel, staring at the Irish Sea and yet something more akin to the Mediterranean appearing on his canvas. But I have no doubt, have you, that what we have just seen is her—'

I had no doubt. She had an adaptable figure, Lili had told me.

‘I visited the house for years before she came, and the year she came my visits stopped. It was a house without a mother, you see, and in a sense it was waiting for her, and perhaps that's why my visits had to stop. If you detect a hoarseness in my voice it is because I am close to tears even now, thinking of it. Yes, I did look forward to those visits, to tea and cucumber sandwiches and to Luke taking out the tray. James and I talked mathematics and theology, we compared notes from the current journals, he stopped taking instruction after the first year, but that didn't matter. What mattered I suppose was a young curate walking from a presbytery to this household on the Bray prom and the light coming in from the bay window. Or did that matter? Our arguments were extraordinarily intense. We would hold positions for weeks on end and then drop
them suddenly on a whim, because of the weather or the colour of the bay outside. James retained a fundamentalist frame of mind, you see, despite his agnosticism, he brought an intellectual rigour to the examination of the new state to which that state could never conform. A sense of chaos however is endemic to Catholic thought and a very definite mistrust of the intellect, and that of course was endemic to me, no matter how bad a priest I later became. And so we faced each other over the gulf of our background, I could see the weeping Huguenot in him, the personage his father had lost but which must have been reborn in him by proxy as it were, from perhaps his father's father, for likenesses I have always noticed recur across two generations, rarely one. And so through the years I lived his various schemes with him, you have heard about his schemes no doubt. He allied himself to A.E.'s agricultural movement at one stage, at another he bought that school in Connemara to show the Bray slum youth the west of Ireland, and later he made a foray into politics—what was it his brochure said—‘to draw the current Irish dialogue into a European framework'. Of course he lost his deposit, a two hundred pounds which he could ill afford, but perhaps that was better, since we all know what happened to the European framework for the current dialogue. In fact I am tempted to say that it was better that all his schemes failed, schemes like his should fail, since the execution of them could never approach the delight of their conception and their failure at least allowed him to continue scheming, which the success of any one of them would have precluded. And he returned each time, of course, to his abstract art, the one we shared, mathematics, and the one that both consumed and fed him, photography.

‘So you can imagine how much I loved that house with its cucumber sandwiches, “cues” I see they are called now in the vegetable shops, and its three generations of males and perhaps it was the fact that there was no woman there that enabled me to call so often. You see, once June began my visits had to stop since the Vance family, minus grandfather of course, would take off on holiday, not your two-week holiday, but generally two to three months in the country. Of course there were invitations to visit whatever small house they had rented along the western seabord but I never took them up, no, holidays for me were at the open centre in Carnsore Point, any request to visit a whimsical Protestant family in the west of Ireland would have definitely been suspect. Was it this we shared, I wonder, this absence of femininity, because it often seemed that all our discussions in that sagging house concerned an absence which all three of them suspected might one day be filled. James's distance, the old man's brusqueness when he saw me and the day I sat in the wooden box in the church on Main Street and this figure stumbled in and talked hoarsely in a voice that was trying to disguise itself but that I recognised as Luke's, they all added up to—'

WE HAD COME to the end of the promenade tiles and the beginning of the cement path that still led along the sea but that had fields now to its left and moved upwards towards the Head. There were chunks of rock and pebbles set in the cement and he held my arm again as we walked.

‘THEY ALL ADDED up to not so much a figure but the impression one has of a figure when it—she in this case—has left the room. The smell of scent perhaps, the cigarette stubbed out on the ashtray—though of course she didn't smoke—a certain mustiness in the case of women which I as a celibate am peculiarly alive to, hanging round a chair, and above all the attitude on people's faces, the look of delayed surprise, affection or fear, retaining as they do the expressions with which they gazed on her even after she has left. Now all the words passed between us in those years, the small tensions, James's elbow, which I often grasped when excited, and good Lord, I did get excited at times, the hand with which I used to pat Luke's head when she eventually did come, in 1933, and my visits stopped—of my own accord, let me hasten to impress on you—James implored me to visit again, but I knew it was finished, we both knew and what contact I did have with them was in my presbytery or on the steps of the church or now and then on the Dublin train—when she eventually did come I could see as clearly as, if you will allow me the simile, Augustine saw his city of God, I could see that all those points in our contact over the years were signs, hints if you like, about her. And that is why when we stood in the hallway just now and I ripped back the wallpaper, I could tell that the figure painted there was her, I could say quite truthfully that I recognised her. Though as I said to you, I would have thought of her as plumper—'

WE HAD BY now come to the end of the cement walk and we turned as if with one mind and walked across the fields, upwards. We came to where the pylons for the chair-lift were and stopped. I stared up at the empty cables.

‘WE DID WELL to leave that house, for how can you confine it to an auctioneer's brochure or price it at thirty thousand? Better to let it fall down, don't you think, decay in its own time, let the roof fall in and the plaster bulge and peel off the walls? But things aren't let die, are they, they're bought again and redecorated, shoved into life once more to house other families, give birth to new memories in turn, there'll be a television where the circular sofa was and maybe an electric cooker in place of the range, all to house new myths that people think will die as they do and if they were to return like us they'd be appalled to find the resilience of objects and the indestructibility of life, to learn that the end was in the beginning even as it happened, and the beginning in the end. And even that cable that you're staring at will carry another yellow chair—'