Shade (23 page)
~
Something curdled inside me, on the quays with the
Kathleen Mavourneen
pulling away and the band playing. I put it down to loss or grief, but it wasn’t them, it was simple nausea. I leant down and threw up in the water and no-one noticed, every eye on the ship heading out to the Lady’s Finger, and I remember thinking, does grief empty you out that much? It was a presence, this nausea, call it grief, an active presence I didn’t want to recognise, and when I knew what it was, it left a bloody shock I never wanted to know again. Like my mother that way I suppose, I had my unmentionables, among them pleasure, the swoon on that stone floor was so intense with the stone woman and her hands between her knees. And it was around that time I came to hate my mother, I knew obscurely there was that inside me which would cause me to hate her. I took his side in all of the silences, there were never arguments, only silences, arguments would at least have had some objective existence. I took his side, his retraction into the abstract gentleness with which he would confront even unexpressed unpleasantness. If there had been love there, and there must have been, in Florence, in Trafalgar Square, the arrival of my half-brother, his full son, had dealt with it with scientific, exact precision.
L
IVERPOOLTOBASINGSTOKE
,” says Gregory, “where we marched for a month round the Hampshire fields, dressed in kit for the Western Front, dripping with sweat in the May sunshine, until one fine day we were given pith helmets and open-necked shirts and we knew we were going East. By train to Devonport then, where they packed us on a coal-steamer and set out into the Bay of Biscay. We watched the dolphins follow the coal-ship’s wake in the moonlight and knew our direction only by the gathering heat. The sun was too hot on deck and the air too thick in the hold, even the metal walls sweated. Everywhere men and the smell of men, stripped to their khaki shorts, playing twenty-one with the sweat-riddled cards, asking, where are we going?”
There is a sound like a distant train. Gregory’s eyes sink from Janie’s face, down the curve of her arm to the smoking cigarette and the kettle behind. He lays his fingers over the spout, feels the burgeoning steam.
“A woman called to visit,” says Janie, “a month or so after you’d left. Ida Lennox, sent by Sister Catherine from some Dublin dramatic society, with a prim straight back and more airs than the west wind. We had afternoon tea in the shadow of the chestnut tree, a hamper open on the grass. Mary Dagge bringing fresh tea down from the house, me buttering the warm scones and Ida Lennox talking about the theatre.
“ ‘I want to change the perception of the theatrical arts in the world at large,’ she said, ‘and
get
society to realise that, far from being a mere doorstep above streetwalking, acting is a noble aim for any young woman to aspire to. And you, my dear, with what I’ve been told are your obvious, even resplendent talents, should be placed in the care of His Majesty’s Prison Service if you consider anything else as a career . . .’
“I looked at Nina after she had left. ‘Who does she remind you of?’ she asked me.
“I was surprised, I remember, at the flatness of her voice. ‘Who?’ I asked and she said, ‘you won’t remember.’
“ ‘I might,’ I said, and saw her looking at the swing, gathering mould over the water.
“’Shawcross,’ she said. ‘Miss Isobel Shawcross.’
“And I knew something was wrong with her then, but I didn’t know what.”
“We steamed from Cyprus to Alexandria to fight the Turk in the Sinai desert,” says Gregory. “ ‘What’s wrong with the Turk,’ George asked, ‘what did he do to Poor Catholic Belgium, what have we got against him? I miss home, I miss Mozambique.’
“ ‘There’s a canal here too,’ I told him, ‘bigger than anything at home.’
“I wrote his letters for him. Dear Dada and Janie, I wrote for him, it is hot here and we are at dock in Alexandria waiting to fight the Turk in the Sinai desert, but mostly drinking sweet tea in the marketplaces, the tiny streets go on for ever and if it wasn’t for the woven thatch they string above them the sun would be unbearable. I have seen two hundred million flies and my body has been host to most if not all of them. We have been told today we are not to fight the Turk in the Sinai desert but in a place they call the Dardanelles.”
~
She was doing her crossword in the kitchen, sitting over a plate of Mary Dagge’s scrambled eggs, her heavily chewed pencil in her left hand.
“Colloquial stomach,” she said, as if nothing at all had happened, as if he had never been there, as if he never had left.
“Belly,” I said, as if nothing had happened too. Father was bending over her left shoulder, pouring a steaming stream of tea.
“The Laytown Races,” he said, “I thought we could pay them a visit, horses running on the strand at low tide.”
“When is low tide?” 1 asked.
“Four,” he said, “would you enjoy it, Nina?”
I nodded, and looked at her to divine what she knew, but saw that her face, if I watched it for a century, would reveal nothing. “Would you enjoy it, mother?” I asked her.
“I would enjoy,” she said, “whatever you both enjoy.”
He poured tea for me and kissed the top of my forehead with that abstract kindness of his. “So, let’s go.”
So the horses were arcing along the beach, raising spray, the jockeys’ colours bright like toy soldiers against the metal sea, the tick-tack men and the bookmakers’ stands all in a bunch by the hard sand. But that didn’t interest me. What interested me was the marquee on the green behind with the sign that read
The Tragedy of the Colleen Bawn,
Playing Nightly. And while they watched the horses, I walked to the tent and made my way inside to the smell of damp canvas and crushed grass.
There was a girl on a raised wooden stage, lamenting her undoing at the hands of a gentleman. There were painted flats behind her depicting a thatched Irish cottage in a landscape of bog. I watched the girl, and despite her stiff gestures and her mannered delivery was soon engrossed in her story, her impending death in the unseen lake behind the cottage. And I thought this was a use to which I could put this useless body of mine.
The girl was pale with a pimpled face and an English accent which she disguised in the thickest Irish brogue.
“You can’t be here,” she said, “I’m rehearsing, we don’t start till eight.”
I looked at her pale thin face with the pimpled forehead and liked her immediately. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I just wandered in, I’m not here for the horses, I’m a student of acting.” I liked the way that sounded, a student of acting, and the way it caught her attention. “How long are you here for?” I asked.
“Three nights,” she said, “then it’s over the river to Baltray and then back on the boat to England.”
“What’s the play about?” I asked her.
“An Irish girl who’s undone by an Irish gentleman,” she said. “The opposite of me. I’m an English girl undone by an English gentleman.”
~
“ ‘Hellespont,’ I told him, ‘Troy, the Aegean islands. Where Odysseus built the wooden horse and Achilles took the arrow in the heel. Gallipoli. There’s a narrow strip of water that leads all the way to Constantinople. They want to force it.’
“ ‘Penetrate it,’ he said.
“ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘into the womb of the Black Sea. Think of it in erotic terms. The thrust of the Royal Navy. Into the seraglio. The Ottoman Empire. Asia Minor. The Orient.’”
~
She sat among the odorous crowd on the unsteady benches and saw the rouged faces perform their little drama with a singular lack of intent, a laziness that she found strangely attractive. They seemed to take the drama as read, the death of the Colleen Bawn as a fact that they merely had to refer to, hardly emote, and no amount of histrionics could have enhanced the crowd’s rapture, the crowd’s engagement in the life, the death, of their sullied heroine. She realised she would love such an escape, into a life other than her own, nightly, any life, and she would love the anonymity the constant travel in those caravans would bring. Her face was pale enough, she realised now, not to need any greasepaint, and after the performance she walked amongst them, till she found the same girl, door open, illuminated by oillamp inside, struggling with the cords of her
bustier.
“Let me help you with that,” she said.
“Why thank you love,” the girl muttered and then saw her in the mirror. “You again,” she said, and lifted a cigarette with her free hand from the butt-filled saucer in front of her.
She heard her father’s voice then, calling from outside, “Nina, Nina love,” and she stopped what she was doing, made her goodbyes, left and closed the door behind her. And she could see the trap among the caravans, the rancid moon behind it, Dan Turnbull in the front, her mother in the back, her father beside Dan.
“Nina,” he called again, in that sad worried voice, and she wondered what day it would be that she would break his heart.
I
REMEMBER HIS
letters,” says Janie as the kettle boils over and she scours the pot with the scalding water, then throws in the leaves, “in your handwriting with his syntax, an oddly comforting juxtaposition of elements if I may say so, you two had become the one creature at last, elegant yet unlettered, the occasional erudite word sitting like an awkward jewel among the plain and pithy sentences. I read your own letters with Nina, and no matter how well expressed I could never quite see what was at issue. But those of Gregory-George, if I can call your union that, had the simplicity of direct depiction, direct speech, that allowed me to visualise. I could see the blue Mediterranean, bluer as he said than the cornflowers that grew round the turnip ridges in Keiling’s Farm. I could see the islands edging past the coal-ship the way the clouds edged past the Mourne Mountains or the chestnut tree when we lay in the dried mud at the trunk and looked up at them, sometimes for hours. I could see the coalrship then edge past the islands to reveal the isthmus surrounded by the floating pots and pans of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. Each battleship belching smoke, I think he wrote, or you wrote for him, like a primus stove.”
~
The pearl, the pearl, he seemed born to find glories under rocks, to pull fistfuls of Kerry Blues out of the wet earth, to find the mulch beneath a seashell, he chewed the flesh of that oyster and spat out that pearl, left me that pearl and I sewed it in my shawl as I promised I would. I thought of the speck of sand deposited by the river, growing slowly inside the horned shell, how long does it take pearls to grow I wondered, longer than whatever else was growing. We were lost, temporarily, without the two of them, the two of us, Janie and me, considering our futures.
Ida Lennox brought me to Dublin, asked me to consider acting as a future. I listened in the concert rooms to the girl reciting
Hiawatha
and curtseyed myself, did my own recitation,
Francis Farrelly
by Percy French. But of course it was impossible, my mother wouldn’t countenance it, and underneath the pig-iron bridge by the Customs House Ida Lennox kissed me and left me her card, please consider, and that was when I expurged again, into the brown waters of the river Liffey this time, I would have preferred it was the Boyne.
“Are you all right my dear, are you ill?”
“But no,” I told her, “it will pass, it seems to.” On the train back I felt weak and light-headed, supine and giddy at the same time. It was Mary Dagge who noticed first, the breakfast I expelled on to the kitchen floor. By her sudden stillness I could tell something was wrong, terribly, irredeemably wrong. She stared at me in her maid’s bonnet for one interminable moment. Then a swallow flew through the open door from the courtyard outside and she took it as a blessed release from the issue at hand, grabbed a mop and whirled it round the kitchen like a dervish, at the swallow, or was it sparrow, until she caught it a full-force blow and it bounced against the range and fell on the flagstones beside the vomit. Let me clean that up, she muttered, grabbed the pail, doused the mop in the greasy water and swept the regurgitated breakfast and the stunned swallow-sparrow out the kitchen door on to the gravel outside.
“How are you, Nina?” she said, her face turned away, and it was odd, she’d never called me Nina. Miss, girl or child were her particular terms of endearment.
“I’m fine,” I said, “never better.”
“No,” she said, “Nina, I’ve known you since you were born, I’ve nursed you through influenza, measles and scarlet fever, and I know enough to know this is not what anyone could call fine. Has someone been at you, child?”
And her head was cocked sideways as she said this, as if she couldn’t bear to take the answer, and my mother came in at that moment, saved me for once, or saved me for the moment. Her nose was twitching like a King Charles spaniel. “I get a whiff,” she said, “whiffy in here, Mary, has the dog been sick?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Mary, “that hound has been chewing grass again.” And I knew the subterranean awfulness of whatever was at issue then, if Mary Dagge could blame a dog for my vomit.
“Do the crossword with me, Nina?” she asked, mother that is, and I sat beside her as she chewed her pencil and Mary poured her tea. “Strung, around a barrel,” she asked.
“Hooped,” I answered.
~
“Poetry,” says Gregory, and he sips at the lip of the china, feels the scald on his mouth and blows it cold. “I took it down as plain poetry, and I can remember him now on the deck at evening in Mudros Harbour rocking back and forwards as he dictated, Dear Dada, dear Janie. But they were all poets then, before the thing began, subalterns thumbing through their school
Iliads
at dawn, wondering where on that broken line of pink mountains in the distance was Thermopylae, banishing the dust, the heat, the steaming turds in the Aegean sea with their scented imaginings.”
“And you,” says Janie, “didn’t you write?”
“No,” he says, “I didn’t, I wrote through him maybe, and that was enough for me, besides, who would I write to?”
