The South (21 page)

Suddenly, as they got near Curracloe, the flashes from the lighthouse began.

“There used to be another lighthouse,” he said. “The Blackwater Lightship, which flashed with a fainter light. I used to paint them in the twilight.”

“I’d love to see some of those paintings.”

“I’ll never paint down here again.”

He was morose, but she let him go on just as he had often listened to her.

“A few of them used to come on bicycles to visit me in Brownswood sanitorium. They always had such a look of doom as if they were sick and dying instead of me. I’d be upset for a whole day after they left. I used to go off for a walk, sometimes the nurses would let me go up to the top of the hill so I could see the Ringwood and the river. That’s how I started painting. I was getting worse that time. So one day, my brother asked me if there was anything I wanted and I said some paints and a bit of board.

“So they all clubbed in, about ten of them, my brother and some of the fellows and bought me a load of oil paints and brushes and an easel. It was like a farewell present and it was the only time I ever cried. Some in that ward still died even
though the streptomycin became available soon afterwards. A lot of them had no faith in the cure.” He sat down and took off his shoes to shake the sand out.

As they walked on up the hill towards the hotel, it started to drizzle. The bar was empty except for one couple with their children. She gave him money to buy her a gin and tonic; he had a pint of Guinness.

“I remember how ill you looked when I met you first in Barcelona. Your skin was all yellow.”

He didn’t reply.

“Does being back in Ballyconnigar upset you?” she asked him.

“I don’t know. I suppose if you hadn’t been here I would never have come back.”

“Are you really sorry you left Ireland?”

“No, I’m not. I was just being sentimental about what it would be like if I hadn’t left. I used to hate it. I used to hate facing teaching every morning.” He spoke slowly, as though he found it difficult to find the words.

“How long did you teach?”

“I started in 1940 and I kept at it until I went into the sanitorium.”

“I was married in 1940,” she said.

“In Enniscorthy?”

“No, Tom wanted to go to Ferns Cathedral for some reason I can’t remember.”

“Are you ever sorry you left him?”

“No.”

“Are you going to visit your family often?”

“Yes, I am. Richard and Deirdre have said they’ll do up one of the outhouses for me. It’ll be private, away from them. You’ll be able to come and stay. They’re building a studio. I’m going to spend a lot of time with them.”

“They must like you.”

“My son likes me.”

“Do you like your son?”

“Yes,” she laughed, “yes, I didn’t think I would, but I do.”

“Is he like you?”

“No, he looks exactly like his father. Even when he was a child he used to look and behave exactly like his father.”

They talked for the rest of the afternoon until it was time for tea; every so often she would find that his mind had wandered—he was thinking again, brooding over the past. He wanted to sit near the window so he could see the lighthouse. Outside the drizzle continued.

“Do you know something?” he said. “I have always thought the social difference between us was the reason you could not marry me.”

“Social difference?”

She was puzzled by the importance he seemed to be giving this.

“Yes, where you’re from and where I’m from.”

“I thought other things were in the way,” she said.

“Like what?” he asked.

“My being with Miguel when I met you. I have never recovered from what happened, you know that. By the way, social considerations don’t make any difference to me.”

“I think they make a difference to everything you do and say.”

“They make no difference to my relationship with you.”

“I think they do.”

“How, tell me how.”

“I don’t think you would ever marry a Catholic.”

“This is mad. It’s just loony talk. Let’s go.”

He said he wanted another drink.

“You turn nasty when you drink.”

“I want another drink. And you have the money.”

“If you’re drinking, I’m going to drink,” she said.

At closing time Michael asked the barman for a bottle of whiskey and some Guinness. Katherine wanted to try and find a car but it was too late and there were none.

By the time they reached the marsh at the bottom of the hill in Curracloe they were both wet.

“How are we going to find our way along the strand?” Katherine asked as soon as they felt the sand under their feet.

“Tuskar, the light of Tuskar,” Michael replied.

“Why don’t we go back and stay in the hotel for the night?”

“The walk to Ballyconnigar will do us good. Come on, the hotel’s probably booked out already.”

“It’ll take hours.”

“We’ll do it in an hour if we walk fast.”

They linked arms and tried to walk fast. Drops of water were dripping down the back of Katherine’s neck. A few times they found themselves at the edge of the sea.

“How far have we come?” she asked him.

“I think we should be getting near Ballyvaloo,” he said.

“Is this half way?”

He stood in the drizzle at the edge of the sea and held her against him. His breath sounded as though he were sobbing. She listened. At first she couldn’t make out what he said. Then he spoke again. “Don’t leave me destitute, sure you won’t?”

She reached for his hand and she held it hard as though she was trying to hurt him.

“No, I won’t. I promise I won’t.”

They walked on in silence.

“When we wake up,” Michael said, “it’ll be a fine blue day.”

“We’re nearly there now, aren’t we?” she said.

“Just another bit. It won’t take us long.”

THE SLANEY

It was a Sunday morning in December. Katherine went down the spiral staircase from the low ceilinged bedroom to the living room below. At the back of the converted outhouse was the studio from where she could see a half mile stretch of the river. Her work of the previous month lay about the studio, resting against the walls.

Despite the studies she had made, and despite her intense concentration day after day, painting from early morning and working long into the evening, despite this exhaustive involvement in the work, she was still unsure, she still felt that some of the work was too abstract.

Between the outhouse and the studio there was an old building where she had stored paintings and sketches going back over thirty years. To relax for an hour or two during the day, she worked on paintings that had been half done over the years in Dublin, in the Pyrenees and in Barcelona. But she knew that eventually she would have to face the present work.

*   *   *

She wanted to have a show which was not a collection of scraps, work done in bits and pieces. It was ten years since her previous exhibition. She had shown work from Spain in the Dawson Gallery; she had been included in the Living Art in Dublin; she still had all the Ballyconigar watercolours and oils. She was ready to exhibit these watercolours and have
them framed, but the oils, she believed, would take years to complete.

The Slaney north of Enniscorthy and south of Bunclody. This was the land the English had taken over and tilled. They had cut down the trees, they had given new names to each thing, as though they were the first to live there. In the beginning she had been trying to paint the land as though it had no history, only colours and contours. Had the light changed as the owners changed? How could it matter? At dawn and dusk she walked along by the river. In the morning there was a mist along the Slaney, palpable, grey, lingering. In the evening at four when the light faded, an intense calm descended on the river, a dark blue stillness as though glass were moving from Wicklow to the sea, even the sounds then were muted, a few crows in the trees, cattle in the distance and the faint noise of water.

*   *   *

She began to work; she started to paint as though she was trying to catch the landscape rolling backwards into history, as though horizon was a time as well as a place. Dusk on the Slaney. Over and over. Dusk on the Slaney and the sense of all dusks that have come and gone in one spot in one country, the time it was painted to stand for all time, with all time’s ambiguities.

In the distance the rebels lie bleeding.

In the distance no one has yet set foot.

In the distance a car is moving.

In the distance the sanitorium at Brownswood in Enniscorthy.

In the distance Enniscorthy Castle squats at the top of a hill.

In the distance is the light and the darkness falling, the clouds moving, the Blackstairs Mountains above Bunclody, Mount Leinster, the full moon rising.

*   *   *

She often worked at the end of the promenade along the Slaney, near Enniscorthy. She faced down the river. She had planned twenty-four paintings and asked Michael Graves to help her stretch that number of canvases, each the same size: just under six feet in height and four feet in width. She could chart each one, first on paper with crayons and then on a smaller canvas. When the time came to paint on the big scale she did so indoors, under artificial light. She waited until the evening and worked in the studio.

She made it clear to Richard and Deirdre that they were to visit her whenever they wished. Michael Graves had years before told her the story of the man from Porlock who had disturbed Coleridge when the poet was writing Kubla Khan in a frenzy of ecstasy and concentration. It became a joke. Clare became the little girl from Porlock and Richard the man from Porlock. Clare came after school and talked for an hour or two, or went for a walk or drove with her into Enniscorthy. She also did some painting or played in the studio.

Richard visited at lunchtime. Katherine had taken a stereo into the studio but she never listened to music when she was working. She played some music for Richard every day. As soon as he came in she put on a record and made him guess what it was. He adopted the habit of lying on the floor dressed in his work clothes, his eyes closed, not saying anything, listening to the music. If there was a light on in the evening he would come in for half an hour and talk. Deirdre did not come unless she had a message or an excuse.

“You’ve been so good to me since I came back,” Katherine said to her one day. “I really appreciate what you’ve done.”

“It was the least we could do,” Deirdre said.

“No,” Katherine insisted, “I am talking more about
you
, how much you have done and how good you have been.”

“But I’ve done nothing,” Deirdre said.

“You have. This whole studio and the outhouse were all your work.”

“Oh I enjoyed that,” Deirdre said.

“And also, maybe more important, is the way you didn’t try and stop anything happening. Another person would have, you know.”

Deirdre did not reply.

“I’m very glad you married Richard. I say that sincerely.”

“That’s very nice of you,” Deirdre looked at her directly.

*   *   *

Before her mother died the old lady had wanted to see Richard and Deirdre and they had gone to London together. Her mother, too, had agreed with Katherine—Richard was lucky to have married Deirdre, luckier than either his father or grandfather had been with their wives. Her mother was dead a year. She had left her jewellery to Clare just as she had promised and left nothing else at all.

*   *   *

There were days when Katherine had no idea what to do. Days when the paint did nothing, when she knew there would be no point in going into the studio at night to develop the ideas she had worked on during the day. She had to learn to let herself rest and stay calm. She had to keep looking, keep watching the river, just concentrate on that. And a few times late at night, she left her flat in the converted outhouse and went back to her studio and turned on all the lights—she then would take out everything she had done, all the plans, notes, sketches and the big canvases, and she would look, and walk around the studio. There would be no sound.

She tried to empty her mind, to let nothing in apart from seeing what was in front of her. No ideas, no memories, no thoughts. Just the things around her.

Three or four times like this the break came. There was a way. Any mark on the canvas would be a way. A random stroke, meaning nothing, pointing towards nothing. Any colour, any shape. There must be no doubts. Thus in the small hours paintings came into being.

The valley in red and brown, not as though it were autumn and the red and brown were the colours of the trees, but as though it were winter in red and brown. Dusk on the Slaney in winter in red and brown. The river of small pools and currents.

The valley as though painted from beneath, as though it were a map. The curve in the Slaney snaking across the painting in every colour to re-create the water, the sky in the water and the river bed underneath. And then there was the land around, the way it had been tilled, the farmed ground. And the house her father built during the Troubles. And everywhere the sun pouring down light on the world.

THE ROAD TO DUBLIN

On the road to Dublin. April. Michael Graves lit a cigarette for Katherine and handed it to her.

“Why don’t you learn to drive?” she asked him.

“I’m too old.”

“You’re too contrary.”

“I’m too contrary.”

“Sometimes I become tired driving. My back hurts.”

“You’re too contrary,” he laughed.

“I’m too old,” she said, “that’s why my back hurts. We’re both too old. That’s why I wish you could drive.”

“I wish I was a maid again,” he sang. “But a maid again I never will be till cherries grow on an ivy tree.”

It was two weeks since all the paintings had been delivered to the gallery in Dublin. Sixteen of the large canvases were ready and framed. These paintings would fill the two rooms upstairs in the gallery. Down in the return they could hang some of the watercolours from Ballyconnigar: the small modest images of sand, sea and sky, muted, almost colourless. They made no statement, they tried nothing new, nobody could dislike them. They were competent; they had ease.