The Past

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ALSO BY NEIL JORDAN

TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER

T
WO POSTCARDS OF the holiday town in the south-west of England. They show the same scene which makes me think they were chosen thoughtlessly, bought together maybe in the same shop without caring a whit what the picture showed. Or bought separately, two months between them. She had forgotten, of course, what the first one displayed by the time she came round to needing the second. Both are yellow and with serrated edges, yellowest at the edges as if singed by a match. But the flame is time and the smell, far from the smell of burning, is the smell of years.

THEY DON'T SHOW the sea or the town, just the esplanade. But from the look of it, even across years, one can't doubt that this row of dowdy four-storey houses faced the sea. And from the look of them too one can surmise a town behind this esplanade that lives off this esplanade and all year waits for the time when the canvas awnings are stretched out and the canvas deckchairs are placed in the front porches. For the houses are obviously hotels and the angular porches are so obviously looking at what in the brochures must have been a sparkling blue sea, one can be sure that the esplanade was wide and
elegantly paved, that there were railings on which to lean and maybe even white iron chairs on which to sit and watch that sea, perpetually blue and be cooled by its salt breezes. And there were rows of primitive paddle-boats (they had them then?) rocking, listing on the edge of the tide, and along the strand itself a row of canvas bathing huts. Canvas! Yards and yards of it are implied, painted in those circus stripes, those warm blues, fawns and yellows, stretched over windbreakers, tautened umbrellas and Punch and Judy stands and even barrel-organs. Was it the age of canvas? For the esplanade is full, there must have been attractions galore with which to fill it—and a spa too, behind the town, backed on by the houses, with the heavy lead taps and the metal baths. Was it the age of spas? For of the people who fill the esplanade, immobile and thronging, the women are most obvious, carrying sun-umbrellas. Was there devotion to water, a suspicion of sunlight? In the postcards they look like white, straight brushstrokes, their umbrellas like brighter dabs. And behind each woman, in her shadow almost, is always the predatory form of a man. They arouse my jealousy these men, suspicious themselves of sunlight, at times each man could be each woman's shadow, so much in her shadow he is. But then the whole image is drenched in sunlight as if the shot had been over-exposed or the card bleached by its years on some green felt desk near a window, through which the sun shone. But despite the bleaching of years, the blaze of sunlight could only have come from the day itself, a hot ‘salad' day, and there were more of them then for the handwritten date on the back is June the First 1914. The message scrawled underneath is peremptory, almost irrelevant. Back in two weeks, Una. This though she knew, she must have known, her stay would last more than seven months. Which
brings us to the main fact the card can speak of, besides sunlight and years—that she was a compulsive liar. The second card bears the same scene, the women still encased in sunlight though the sky must have leadened in those seven months since season, even then, must have followed season. And the message too promises a two-week return. But the signature is different—Una, Michael, Rene—and behind that last name there is a coy mark of exclamation (!). Which brings us to the prime fact that this card proclaims—the birth of her child. And one third fact, perhaps subsidiary, proclaimed by the months that intervened—between the first card and the second the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo.

L
ILI'S HOUSE RISES four storeys, like those hotels. Lili lives on the fourth. There's a door which I put my shoulder to, then a dim staircase. There's the smell of moist brickwork, of the canal outside. Memory, she told me once, is mother to the Muses. But what do I know of all those years, of Dev and the Clare election and the Custom House fire? The ashes rose over the city, she told me, of the burnt files of each birth, marriage and death. Then they fell like summer snow, for three days. Lili walked through them, maybe held out her palms, caught the down of her birth-cert on the rim of her schoolgirl bonnet. I would petition her for memories like these. I felt a sharp angle in the banister's curve. I saw the landing then, and Lili's room. I saw Lili, by far the oldest thing in that room. When I entered, she turned in her perpetual cane chair. She smiled.

‘UNA WENT THERE,' she told me, ‘to have the child you want to know all about. She went there because she was pregnant, had got married because she was pregnant, one of those sublime mistakes they made then as well as now. He did the dutiful thing, though I'm sure he loved her. I can't imagine him not loving anyone and by all
accounts she was a beauty then, not the blousy Republican I got to know later. They married and chose that place for their honeymoon. He was from a Redmondite family, a lawyer with that blend of innocence and relentless idealism that was admirable then, really admirable, and that took the Free State to sully it. He was the best of them, by far the best of them, he was marked out for what would happen to him later, I've heard that said, having no way of knowing, my only memories of him are in the kindergarten school out near Mount Merrion, he'd come to visit us in his Free State uniform, the darling of the nuns with those glazed eyes that told you precisely how much he hated it, the heavy ridiculous belts and the shoulder pistols, he must have hated it even more than de Valera hated him, he would walk through the classroom in his wide boots, stammer while refusing the nuns' offer of tea and lift Rene on to his hip. I remember her crying once, with joy at first, and then pain at the buckle of the belt against her backside, his large hands lifting her higher to nuzzle against the shoulder pistol. Then there would be a few words of affection that only demonstrated how little they knew each other when there would be a respectful knock on the school door, the shadow of an N.C.O. outside, and he would have to leave. I learned later it had always been like that, ever since she was old enough to know him, which is the trouble with public men I suppose, especially the kind of public men we had then. But those few brief meetings were enough to convince anyone of his innate goodness, the quiet enigma of him, which I suppose she inherited. And you could see how marriage to Una, who was supposed to be a beauty then, who was pregnant by him, would have been natural to him, an extension of that undifferentiated love
with which I imagine he first made her pregnant. But then I could be wrong, we could be all be wrong.

‘All I can really tell you is that they went there, that she was pregnant when they went there and that they stayed nine months. The war had broken out, which would have afforded him an excuse to stay. They would come back, a married couple with a child with a respectable if somewhat fine interval between ceremony and birth. And though I would lay such duplicity at her doorstep, he must have been party to it. The only point behind all this information being the fact that Rene was a love-child—'

S
O I EXTEND the picture on the postcard beyond the serrated edge with a line, say, of unobtrusive shrubs, not quite trees, between the esplanade and the road proper. These shrubs are in wooden boxes, bound by metal hoops, smaller than those ladies and their parasols and so invisible in that miniature scene; yet stretching down that esplanade far beyond the confines of the postcard to where the esplanade must end, to where steps must run down to the strand leading to a wharf, the upright stakes of which reflect in the water beneath, the scene most perfect, most symmetrical when the water is calm. These shrubs will grow, of course, into the palms I imagine them to be with their aching stems and stunted foliage, redolent of a more torrid climate since they are transplants, burgeoning their way into later postcards, ones that I shall never see. Though they stand now in their temperate soil and their hoop-bound boxes with just their palms flapping in the breeze for their trunks are resistant. Facing the esplanade, the wharf, the water. And behind them the road proper, the line of houses. Not just that row of regular Edwardian facades behind the postcard parasols, but a row differentiated into houses and hotels. More hotels than houses, if the town is as I imagine it, and these hotels in turn differentiated into those which drew attention to themselves and those which didn't. Among those which
didn't, one moderately anonymous, intimating solid comfort on a small budget. With a canvas awning like the others and a tiled porch, the walls on either side painted blue and cream, the windows white. The paint was three summers old perhaps, bubbling under the brick. And its name, Excelsior, painted of course in gold above the first row of windows, rich between the blue below, the cream above.