The Past (24 page)

THE SMELL OF dried flowers that comes from your prints, after, as he says, all those years. How can the photographer himself blossom? He was rarely on the prom, a little like Luke in his preference for indoors. Summer smells too aren't often redolent of flowers. From where we sat I could smell the prom below us, the burnt metal of the amusement parlours and the wet sand in particular. But what the curate saw must have been like James Vance blossoming. He is
forty-seven and it's the summer of nineteen thirty-three. Your angular walk along the prom and the hesitant stoop that Lili described in you. Pliant now, and perhaps that is the word for it. Two miles away is the hill with eucalypti, still divesting themselves of their stripes of bark. And they don't blossom either, they drop off cones, nowhere near as elegant as their stripes of bark. You could only photograph others in flower and never flower yourself.

‘I WOULD BE lying if I said I wasn't faintly jealous. But then jealousy is the most loving of all emotions.'

He turned to me and smiled.

‘Next to love, that is. But while one can be jealous of what one doesn't know, one can't really love whom one doesn't know. So my most overriding emotion was—'

He smiled again.

‘—what I would say is yours—curiosity. And curiosity about her, happily enough, had become part of my pastoral duty. So I set about finding out about her.'

THE GIRL HAD brought more tea. She replaced the pot this time, but not the cups. Are these the original tables, I wanted to ask her, of the original Eagle's Nest? But she still wore that look of youthful annoyance so I desisted. A chill was coming in now, from the sea. Father Beausang poured for both of us. Those tickets were good
value, he said, with the emphasis on the ‘were'. I realised then that he had not realised he'd been asleep. ‘The one pastoral duty I've ever enjoyed. And one of the many I've failed at. I found out a lot. I went to Dublin, interviewed a young aspiring actress called—'

‘Lili,' I said.

‘Yes, Lili. I found out that our Rene was Catholic. I found out that if the old man painted her it was at odd moments and never unclothed. When I found out who her father was my pastoral duty stopped, since the children of the blessed are above suspicion, so to speak. But of the whole story I could only get a glimpse. Months later I heard the real fact—that she was pregnant—'

THE SUN HAD touched the Head and the light was coming down in movable fingers of infinite length, since they caressed the bay as much as they caressed us. We sat watching the shifting glory. I glanced behind me and saw the serving-girl, standing behind us. She was as awed as we were, with no camera. All three of us watched, Father Beausang with his face towards the bay. I felt the time had come. Your boss, I whispered to her. Who is he? And sure enough she smiled, her face towards the bay, and whispered a name.

A
ND SO SHE was pregnant and waiting in Dublin to tour the A country. There would be three of them soon, father, son and Rene, awaiting the arrival of the child, the father of whom no one has been able, or willing to name. And time becomes stilled for them while she grows, yet all they discover is one of its more secret rhythms. They are mastered by a unit as basic as a day, a month, a year, but of which they are only now made conscious. It must have seemed marvellously arbitrary to them, nine months, two hundred and seventy days. They think of the pregnancies of elephants and whales, butterflies and moths and feel that in an odd way they have annihilated time. They fall instead into an element of the same fluidity and texture as that expanse of water they have seen for years beyond Bray Head, that the yellow chairs have bobbed over, that Rene has watched from Trimelston Road, that other sea in which the world will immerse itself, basking like a glistening dolphin. And Rene of course holds the secret of that time. She expands on the grace of her first three photos, moves to a point for which perspectives are useless.

BUT BEFORE THERE were three of them, there would be two. There would be Luke and Rene, moving in a narrowing circle, changing town and parish hall every second or third night. For a while she takes the boys' parts, but after the first three weeks when her condition becomes obvious, an improbable boy, MacAllister, with infinite grace and tact, promotes her to female parts proper and even gives her a rise. So now she can wear dresses with bodices in place of the adolescent's doublet and hose. The female wardrobe of costumes is limited to four, which must serve for all parts from Kathleen to Cleopatra. And all sense of period is totally ignored, be it Roman, Celtic, Elizabethan or Edwardian. The past is simply the past, counterpoised with the present. And for the present there is no wardrobe whatsoever, the cast swap their working clothes as the parts demand. Sad, MacAllister would whisper with his inimitable smile. But these are the provinces, dears. And these four past costumes are of four distinct types as if woman herself, whom they feigned to represent, can be categorised in four. There is Queenly Beauty, Aged Refinement, Nurse/Nun/Midwife, and Youthful Innocence. Rene, through her tour, uses versions of all four, changing character and lines as her figure dictates. Lucky, as MacAllister whispers, these are the provinces.

THERE WILL BE no photographs, since James doesn't reach them until near the end, and Luke's flight destroys his faith forever in the perceivable object. And is that significant as well, I wonder, as he loses his urge at last to grasp at years, to stick his moments into albums and annotate each one. Does he too feel the annihilation of time,
staring from the green felt table out of the bay window, picturing both loved ones just through disappointment and desire? Nothing will revive his faith in photographs and when his faith itself revives, it will be with a strength that needs no photographs. His camera dies, and there is only the spoken word to replace it, and memory, and imagination. And all three are frighteningly elastic, handing us as a gift that freedom that annihilates more than time, the contours of our subjects themselves.

SO LUKE BRAVES the Bray train alone. He walks behind the hotels, clinging to the walls of the terraced houses, treading like water the spaces of the wide streets, past the Turkish baths and the bowling green and into the station itself. I descended the Head with Father Beausang and back down the long promenade to where the station made a wooden roof above the tracks, curved, to enclose the sea in its frame. As Luke waits the rain comes and each pointed eave contains its drop. When our train came I helped Father Beausang up the step, through the door and into the carriage of plastic seats. We moved out of Bray then and towards Shankhill, through the houses, through the green to where blue expanse was on our right and the eucalyptus slopes were on our left. I thought of Luke on the wooden seat with his neck against the shoulder of felt. The rain comes and hammers the blue into the colour of tin. The scene moves past his moving window, a succession of granite platforms leading to the largest one of all, and there he rises and walks slowly to the door and through the clouds of reassuring steam into that corridor of glass. The steam
billows and fades as the train pulls towards Amiens Street and Luke negotiates the platform and the slight incline of Westland Row down to the backstage of the Ancient Concert Rooms in Rutland Street.

F
ATHER BEAUSANG SLEPT through Westland Row despite my efforts to wake him. So we got off at Amiens Street, stood together on the moving stairs and had to walk towards Lili's modest residence along the canal. The giant pots on O'Connell Bridge seemed burdened with their flowers, hanging limp in the heat like the flags that hung from each new building. He refused my offer of a taxi.