The Past (7 page)

THE WIND SWEEPS down the long avenue, at one end of which there is a half-built church in a new kind of granite and cement which make the half-walls rise sheer and inhuman. How large it will be and what a God it will hold. There is a group of boys playing near nettles chanting ‘Up Dev'. One of them is standing in the nettles, crying and leaping to retrieve his cap which either the wind or the other boys have flung away. You stagger with Lili through the wind. It is a spring wind and pulls the green of all the sycamores in the one way, towards the sea. There is a line of coast houses behind you and the sea, which seems hardly disturbed. You walk a few steps and turn to the sea and then face the wind again and walk. Lili is laughing and clutching her gymslip. The wind makes another sweep, you close your eyes against it and a melody suddenly courses through you like a long pendulum sweeping the tips of the sycamores in a heavenly arc. It runs its course and finishes, and just when it seems past recall it comes again, its long brass tones fortified by another one and you listen and walk while the two melodies boom through you. There is a rhythm of which each tree seems a distinct beat and the bass song, too deep for any human voice. It recurs and recurs with each sweep of the wind which pulls your slip against you, gripping your knees and thighs as if it were wet. Then it leaves you finally and the wind dies down and you are relieved. You turn once more to the coast
houses and the unruffled line of blue and then walk on with Lili, not saying a word. The boy has retrieved his cap and is standing near the nettles, smearing his legs with dock leaves, crying softly. Lili stops, looks at him as if she might console him, but then walks on. ‘Crybaby!' she whispers.

You walk past him, looking at his green-smeared knees. You have little that is defined or personal about you. You have not yet reached the age of reason. The melody flies and your soul waits for its return. You are like a mirror that catches other people's breath. One nun refers to you as that plump, blonde-haired girl, another talks of your slender, almost nervous quietness. You willingly become each, as if answering the demands every gaze makes on you. The most persistent attitude towards you is one of pity, touched by a warm, moral, faintly patriotic glow. You are the child whose father must rarely see her, immersed as he is in the affairs of the Free State, whose mother is busy, abstracted. Through you they see your heritage, the glow of newspring and newspaper reports, the profusion of rumours and heated discussions beside which you must seem something of an afterthought. You grow through the very stuff of those frustrated politics. You are Lili's most treasured possession, the prize that all her classroom graces have won her; though you are most at ease when unnoticed.

Are you already choosing between these images as to which of them you will eventually become? A choice that must be unconscious, but within which must lie the birth of real decision, as those glances we throw as a child are the breeding ground for the tone of gaze as an adult. Or are you, behind the screen of your ordinary childhood, holding each of them in balance, nurturing each to take part in the
eventual you? For you did become all of them. You hold your hands folded, a modest distance from your body on the classroom desk. Your knuckles are still only dimples, but from those particular dimples a particular knuckle will eventually emerge. As you walk down the Trimelston Road the sea is always in front of you, a broad flat ribbon at first and then, as the road falls, a thinner strip of blue serge until eventually, when the coast houses rise to your eyes, it finds itself a thin, irregular grey thread.

ONE DAY THERE is a statue in the window with fresh yellow irises arranged around it in jam jars half-full of water. The statue seems frozen in an attitude of giving. The silver nun teaches you the austere beauty of its observance, tells you that this is the First of May, the beginning of summer, Mary's month. And all those girls, more than half the class, whose first name is Mary or some Gaelicisation of it, Maureen, Maire, Mairead, bow their heads and smile.

You look at the yellow irises, flapping in their jam jars on the sill of the window, behind which the beech tree can be seen studded with green now as if the month of May has hastily flecked it with a stiff green paintbrush. You can hardly isolate any one spot of green from the tentative mass but you still try, with your young girl's eyes, their imperfection of focus, their totality of concentration. The points which are in fact small buds and which in autumn will become broader leaves with the texture of beech nuts and bark resist all your attempts to isolate them, merge and separate and finally through the tiredness of your eyes become what seems to be a pulsating mist,
forming a halo, the limits of which you can't define around that unlikely trunk, much like your own hair, which you also must be able to see reflected in the window-glass, and the image of your own blonde halo becomes merged with the first green pulsating of the month of May. You look from the confusion of yellow, blonde and green to the black and white frame of Sister Paul's face, who is explaining in her silver voice the intricacies of May devotions; how the name was filtered through to light on half the female population of this small nation, the class. You cannot know that your first name should have been Brigit, Mary of the Gael. Sister Paul tells you that the class will replace those flowers daily.

The narcissism that allows you to confuse the glowing strands of hair round your face with the mass of half-formed leaves on the beech tree, the yellow flags of the irises, is an innocent one and more than that, an honest one, and perhaps even more than that, a happy one; an unlooked-for gift that in later life will be the one thing friends will agree is yours, that must have shown its first contours in childhood. Later that night your nurse bathes you. Her name is Madge. She must have minded you since your mother's nights were divided between performance, rehearsal and political meeting. She takes you into your mother's room to dry you, wrapped in a towel, to the centre of that soft carpet, surrounded by the mirrors of that open wardrobe, the dressing-table and the oval, quite mysterious mirror on the wash-table with its enamel basin and swollen jug. The towel is draped around you as Madge massages your hair. Then your neck and your shoulders, and it gradually slips down as she rubs your stomach, your calves and your small feet, until you can see yourself, naked and dry in the three mirrors. Your stare has the concentration of a dream.
Your body is all dimples, the dimples of your breasts, your navel, your vagina, knuckles and knees. These will grow like the pinpoints of green round the umbrella of the beech, way beyond Mary's month, into the shapes of womanhood and you suspect this and your suspicion has the texture and emotional presence of the colours green, blonde and yellow that filled you earlier, but if it is a colour its hue is unearthly since you cannot picture it, merely feel it in the emotional centre where colours move you. Madge leaves the room to get your clothes. You are most attracted towards the mirror that is out of your reach, the oval one above the wash-basin. You drag over a chair and stand on it and try to see your flesh behind the reflections of the swollen jug and the basin. Your look is scientific in its innocence. You lean forward to see yourself better behind the white curves of the jug but you can't and so you stare into the water in the basin. You are reflected there, from above. Your face looms over your own cream expanse, shimmering in the water, your blonde curls sticking to your crown. You hear a gasp behind you and turn to see Madge aghast in the doorway. The chair totters and you fall, bringing basin, jug and water with you. You land in the wet pool and your elbow scrapes on the enamel curve and spurts blood. It runs down your belly and thighs, turning pink with the water. Madge runs forward with a stream of prayers and admonitions and grabs a towel and wrings it in the water and wipes your thighs and wrings it continually. She blesses herself with her other hand.

I
T MUST BE soon after this that you reach the age of reason which, like the age of the earlier maxims, makes the undifferentiated flow of your experience manifest and outward, placing it neatly in language and time, allowing others to say to you that you are different now from what you were then. And though you wonder how such a change could creep on you unawares, yet when you hear Sister Paul explain the metaphysics of reason to the class (though she seems to be speaking only to you) you accept that you must be different if only because you are being told so. You accept that your days and memories up to this moment are one thing and after that moment will be another. You suspect a cruelty behind this knowledge though and wonder whether if you hadn't been given it would the same be true? She tells you how up to that moment you could not sin because you were not aware of sin but how after that moment the awareness of sin that she is handing you like a gift will make it possible for you to sin. And you accept a further slice of knowledge which defines this sense of difference in you, the fact that now every action will have to be balanced and passed between the twin primaries of sin and virtue, and that between them there will be an expanse of medial tones and that, no matter how fragile this difference in tone, there will always come a point where white swings imperceptibly into
black, beyond which you will be able to say, Now I have sinned. You wonder whether this sense of sin is a gift to be developed, whether you must learn to sin as you once learnt to walk. You sense that these words she is imposing on the flow of your days are somewhat arbitrary, like the words she underlines, for obscure reasons, on the hymns she chalks on the blackboard. And yet there is comfort in the language and Sister Paul has after all impressed on you that knowledge can never be useless. You toy with this new knowledge, imagining some use for it while Sister Paul continues with an image of the soul as a droplet of pure water coming from God into the world, tarnished only by the fact of its birth. And you imagine God then to be a sea, remembering the water that splashed you from the falling basin, for a droplet must come from some larger expanse and a sea is the largest expanse you can imagine; you suspect that this sea is not the sea you know, always the lowest point in the landscape, but a sea that is placed somewhere above your experience, mirroring the sea that you know, permeating you with its backwards waves. But, Sister Paul continues, as our days multiply and as we progress from the age of innocence to the age of reason (and here she pauses, implying a multitude of ages, the texture of which you cannot imagine) this droplet becomes tarnished by the grains of hours and experience and only our own efforts can wash it back to something like its original purity. And you accept this image but fortify it with your own one, of that ocean in reverse washing over every hour of your days. And there is a slanting pencil of light coming through the window, falling on your hands, which are to yourself and from yourself, shaking slightly because of the wind on the umbrella of buds outside, because between your hands and the sunlight there is the tree. And Sister Paul
has continued to describe to you the sacraments that belong to the age of reason, those of Confession and Communion. She asks you to rehearse the reality. Each of you is to confess to her seat-mate the actions which, in the light of reason, can be seen to be sinful. Lili confesses to you a series of misdemeanours but the air of secrecy and confidence generated by your bowed heads is such that she ends with the confession that she loves you. And you confess to her another series and end with the confession that you love her. And thus you suspect a mystery in reason, sin and in the droplet of water far more bountiful than that which Sister Paul has explained; though watching her distribute the tiny pieces of wafer which are to substitute for Communion bread, you suspect she knows more than she has explained. And feeling Lili's hand curl round yours on the wooden desk you sense that reason, far from having tarnished your droplet of water, has washed it even purer and even more, has magnified it to a point beyond which it can no longer be considered a droplet, for such is the feeling welling inside you, you suspect it would fill a whole glass. All the other details of the age of reason seem ancillary to this: the Act of Contrition which Sister Paul writes on the blackboard, the pennies of bread which she distributes, which you place on Lili's tongue and she places on yours. And when the big day comes and you wear your white dress that comes nowhere near the brilliance of the yellow irises, when the events you have rehearsed take place, your real Confession seems to you a pale imitation of your first, rehearsed one. And perhaps you realise that the form of our public acts is only a shadow of that of our private ones, that their landscapes are just reflections and like that real sea below that imaginary sea, with its piers and palms and beaches, reflections in reverse.