The Past (29 page)

‘THE MORE SHE grew, of course, the better he could find us. The fuss got bigger as she did, the crowds kept coming, larger each time. And the reviews. That article compounded it. The
Times
couldn't outdo the
Independent
or
Press,
I mean, and we soon had the problem of meeting all sorts of critics in the oddest places. The newspaper style then was the crushed cap and notepad and the chewed stub of pencil. You'd see them lounging in the back rows of those crowded halls, chewing and writing, chewing and writing. What was happening on the stage had almost ceased to be important. We changed the play, and they hardly noticed—'

IN BALLINA, THERE is no beach, just the inlet of Killalla pointing towards the heart of the town. He finds a poster, flapping on a lamp post. He walks towards the hall in which the Emerald Theatre Company played. The bowls move towards each other and click. The front-of-house doors are arrayed with posters sagging from their pins. He pushes the bar and walks through the door, as hesitant as ever. It is a parish hall, with frames of de Valera and the Virgin on the left-hand wall. There are rows of seats screwed to the floor which give the hall some air of theatrical purpose. The open door throws light towards the stage and a breeze must be sawing through for the dust rises from the bare boards and wheels in circles and cones.

‘SUMMER HAD COME. The heat grew and there was a stretch in the days. Rene's Rosalind grew with the heat. We used the white gown for her with oceans of room. We had to thread it with green. The heat in the halls was cloying, but we bore it. We weaved onwards, swelling as we went. MacAllister lost more of his hair—'

HE KNOWS THEY must travel by rail and that being the summer they would favour resorts. He draws a rough itinerary of the seaboard towns nearest the rail lines. He will look for signs, he thinks, that will point the way forwards. These signs will be waiting for him,
to be teased out from the facades of towns, the surfaces of streets. In one square there is a Civil War statue with a stone cap staring beyond the roofs of houses. In another lies a cement road crumbling into beach and burrows. Modes of transport, he knows, can tell him a lot, the texture of each station his train pulls into and the car or buggy that draws him when his train fails. Hotels can tell him more, the shapes of window, bed and wash handbasin, the odour of boiled cabbage lingering in the hallways. There is no hurry, he knows, for once his journey is measured in minutes no longer but in a unit of time that has its own momentum, has no need for numbers. He senses that his looking for them is as vital as his finding. He swims at each beach he comes to and is hesitant entering each stage door. He questions young girls in hotel porches about everything but her and finds himself led back to her in the most delightful way. He talks of the weather, of the holiday season, of the big house. The wave that hits his body at each new beach seems a cousin of the last one. The posters pull him onwards with a rhythm of their own. Summer golfers tell him how the wind drives each ball eastwards, how one's best bet is to slice an angle towards the sea. Young maids have quite forgotten de Valera's sweep of here in 1919. The rocks his father painted begin to seep through the landscape. Schoolteachers tell him the history of each rath, each crumbling wall. Her posters vanish from one town and reappear in the next. Everyone is somehow related. He learns of her by proxy, in the most delightful way. She grows in the descriptions of her as he moves downwards, or is it that people raise their voices more? The rock comes to flood the landscape, pushing out the grass. He avoids large towns, since they never speak as much. The grass grows lusher, in green defiance, as
the rock encroaches. There is the plenty of the season and the vegetables crowd the shop-fronts and a vat of milk spills and floods a broad street. He walks through it past a church entrance where the milk laps the feet of the Virgin's statue. They multiply themselves as he travels southwards and all roads lead to hallowed places, while seeming to lead just to other roads. He searches them out in turn, the trees copper with hammered pennies, the rivers flowing upwards, the cloths that simulate blossoms on the blackthorn branches. There are fields of rock now, intricate, ornate, more luxuriant than grass. A nun talks of her in Spanish Point on a beach where the sea meets a river. He finds she fills imaginations now and the white and pink house fronts of Milltown Malbay are dotted with posters. An election coming, a capped man told him, driving through. And beside hers, he sees, is one for de Valera. The posters thicken as he drives. The rock, having ousted all grass, gives way to grass again. The posters flap in the east wind and draw him away from beaches and he senses an end, or an arrival. He moves in a half-circle, skirting the coast. Descriptions of her grow, become personal, people talk more of her and less of those delightful incidentals such as weather. And on the train to Gort when a woman, fluttering her eyelids in the harsh sun of the seat opposite him, talks of a chance encounter with her childhood friend, he realises what he knows now he has all along known, that she is pregnant.

‘AND THE LAST few towns were those little ones in Clare. It was all her walk and her sense of poise could do to hide it, no matter what
clothes she wore. We circled round those towns as if MacAllister wanted to exhaust the whole of Clare. Lisdoonvarna was to be the end, you see, the festival week, you know about it, September in Lisdoon. So he pushed his time to the limit, dicing with fate. We tried to walk as little in public as we could, was it verging on the blasphemous, I wondered. We met some nuns in Spanish Point, like awkward birds they were, clutching their habits in case the wind clutched instead, and I could have sworn they guessed. But we made it to Gort, which was the last one before Lisdoon. We drove into Gort as the sun fell over the square. I know the sun never falls but it seemed to be then, just frozen in fall, lighting the bronze hair of that anonymous man of '98, was it, and the bronze shaft of his pike. We sat in the hotel lounge watching the light travel up to the tip of that pike as the sun went down. And it was that deflected, amber light full with the dust of late summer when I looked through the glass door out to the lobby and saw the front door open a little, then stop, as if outside someone had changed his mind. Was it a premonition or was it that I recognised his way of opening doors? I remembered that day in the advertising studio. I wasn't surprised when I saw him stooping through the doorway. Neither was Luke, who jumped up, opened the other glass door to meet him and said with a voice that could have included the whole world, Father, we are pregnant.'

T
HE GREAT SOUTHERN Railway looped a triangle then round the miraculous Burren. The main line ran from Galway southwards, through Gort and Ennis where a narrow-gauge single-track flowed off, like a seasonal tributary, towards Ennistymon, Inch and the beaches at Kilrush. The line of the coast completed the triad. And though the narrow-gauge is long out of use, as I travel with Lili on the broad one towards Gort I think of how the bare facts of landscape are softened by patterns like these. There are platforms of rock, bare scourings on the landscape, the remains of stone churches that have the grandeur of signs. There is map upon map, the excreta of years, harder now than the rock itself. So the Great Southern line followed the contours of a landscape which set the pattern of ages and the movements of people who were followed by MacAllister who was followed by Rene who was followed by James and is followed by me. De Valera sped behind them in a car, towards his election posters. Everything, James Vance learned when he entered that Gort hotel, belongs to everything else. Brigit, the
Vita Sanctorum
tells me, traced her own Clare itinerary, leaving meadows where bogs were. The train shuttles and pulls us forward, equipped with broad felt seats and neck rests and Formica tables in between. Lili is delighted by movement. She points to the sunlight, sheared by the procession of hills. Did
you notice a car, I want to ask her, speeding past the tracks bearing a gaunt frame in a gabardine coat? But she doesn't hear. Who am I to question things? I wonder as the train pulls us through Ennis, past where the Kilrush summer track lies rusted and worm-eaten. I will follow James and alight at Gort and the texture of the platform will be a firm ageless blue-grey, the colour of those slabs that run from here, I'm told, to Moher, that raise their grassless, earthless shoulders somewhere to my right and slope down, all cracked sweeps and crevices, to the sea. Flowers of rare beauty bloom in those crevices. I rest content with imagining them, as I must with imagining that other, innocent, narrow-gauge track and the black and gold livery of the G.S.R. engine searing like a dash of Victorian optimism through that landscape of grey rock and green to the garland of towns by the sea.

The train gathers speed and Lili's delight grows. Somewhere to my right she gave birth to the child with two fathers, father and son themselves. History headed towards that fact and seems to end in me as great gusts of air begin to shoot through the carriage carrying the odour with them, is it of decay, of limestone, of diesel or generation? Lili has opened the window, I see, and the air rushes in. I breathe in more than I should. The draught hurtles through the window to the melodeon doorway and lifts the black veil off a nun in the seat beyond us, exposing a pair of grey fluttering lashes and eyes.

I stare at the sparse grass passing in the field beyond the bare whitethorn. It would have been the end of summer when James reached Gort and the whitethorn would have been just like that, bare since the spring, and he would have watched with me the grass slowly vanish, combed from the rock to leave it grey and formless, until the train slid between blocks, small ones first, then large enough to form
a platform, and the train steams into that blue-grey texture, the steam and the rock surface both absorbing the light until all around the windows, through which James can see the town appear, is this metallic glare. The train stops then and the smell of diesel fills the carriage with the grey-blue light.