Time Present and Time Past (4 page)

Lucy and her little friend Emma are sitting at the kitchen table, with the empty lasagne dish between them. Emma is putting the last forkful in her mouth as Colette comes into the room, and Lucy says to her coldly, ‘It wasn't very nice, Mum.' At that, something brushes against Colette's cheek, gentle, tickling, but there is nothing there. ‘You're not a very good cook, are you?' Again there's that distracting feeling of something soft against her face. She puts her hand up to brush away whatever it is. ‘What are you doing here?' she says. ‘I can't believe you ate the whole thing,' and for the third time, something touches her cheek. She shakes her head in irritation, and opens her eyes wide to find Fintan leaning over her, smiling.

He is holding the cord of her own dressing-gown and dangling the tassel on the end of it softly against her face to waken her. This is how they used to wake the children when they were babies, gently, so as not to startle them. The empty chocolate mug is still in her hand.

‘I woke up and you weren't there,' he says, still smiling. ‘Come back upstairs while the bed's still warm.'  

When she opens the door to Fintan, Martina is wearing a cream jumper with fine grey horizontal lines, well-cut grey trousers and flat velvet pumps. He registers the general elegance of all of this, but not the detail. Unlike his own dear wife, Martina does not dress down, even when she is merely sitting at home for the evening. Not for her the worn tracksuit bottoms and holey jumper beloved of Colette. She greets him and remarks upon the weather as she leads him up the hall. Her voice has a slightly English inflection from her years in London. She is a beautiful
woman
, remarkably so. Even now, in her forties, people might turn to look at her in the street.

There is a fire lit in the sitting room and Beth is sitting beside it, with a tartan rug over her shoulders and a cat asleep on her lap.

‘Look at her,' Martina says, as Fintan bends down to kiss his aunt. ‘Isn't she like a sweet old lady out of central casting? I'm just about to spoil things and pour her a whiskey. What can I get you?'

Fintan would love to join Beth but he is driving and settles for a cup of tea, which Martina goes off to prepare. There is music playing softly in the background, a Mozart concert being broadcast on the radio. The house has changed over the years and particularly since Martina has come to live in it. There are muslin curtains on the windows where once there were dusty nets, and the gloomy green foliage, the ivies and the Swiss cheese plants, have been replaced with potted orchids and fresh cut flowers. She has made it fresher, less dingy, but it remains a strange place, quite unlike any other house that Fintan knows of. The wind-up gramophone is still there: Beth always lets Lucy select and play a record when she comes to visit. The vases with the pink lustres, the odd woolly pictures, the hooked rugs and the big mirror, all these remain. There is still that same air of the past that Fintan remembers from his first visits here, of the quality of time itself seeming different in these rooms.

‘So how was the sea bass the other day?' he says, and she laughs.

‘The sea bass was grand, and I was very grateful to you for it, Fintan. If you hadn't come along when you did and backed me up, Joan would have bullied me into having something else, of that I'm quite sure. Martina was a bit cross when I told her what had happened. She's always saying I should stand up for myself, but Joan's been making me do what she wants for seventy years now, so I suppose things are hardly going to change at this late stage.' They both laugh.

‘You look well, Beth.'

‘I'm well looked after.' He means what he says. She looks better than she had done the other day in the restaurant. The soft light of the fire and of the lamps are kinder to her than the glare of daylight had been. She strokes the cat's head and they chat about the restaurant, about Joan and the family in general until Martina returns.

She is carrying a tray with tea and biscuits for herself and Fintan, and a cut-glass tumbler for her aunt. From the bottles on the sideboard – several types of whiskey; sherry, both sweet and dry; vodka and gin – Martina makes her choice.

‘I'm going to give you some of the good stuff,' she says. When he sees the label Fintan particularly regrets that he is driving and cannot join Beth. It is a twenty-year aged whiskey, and as Martina pours it out there is the surge of a complex fragrance, tobacco and turf, a very adult smell. ‘Say when.' Beth lets Martina pour her a surprisingly large measure.

‘Don't tell your mummy,' she says mischievously. The whiskey is a fabulous topaz colour in the light of the fire. It has the fire of a cut jewel, the limpidity of a peaty river in the mountains as it pours over stones. Martina serves Fintan his tea, they raise their cups and glass in a toast.

‘
Sláinte
,' Beth says. She takes a sip and then she closes her eyes, lies back in her chair. ‘Oh, I needed that,' she says softly. Then she opens her eyes and looks sideways at Fintan. ‘It helps me to sleep.'

‘I bet it does,' Martina says ironically.

‘It was Christy introduced me to whiskey. He was a great man for it, not that he was a heavy drinker, as you well know, but he had a great fondness for whiskey. He knew all about it; he knew how it was made. He had a grandfather worked in the distillery in Midleton and so there was always a tradition of it in the family. He had a good palate, Christy, so he was able to teach me how to tell all the different flavours and aromas there were, and he showed me the difference there was between an ordinary whiskey and one that was something special. Single malts, whiskeys that had been aged. Ah he was a great man. He taught me all kinds of things.'

Fintan looks over at Martina, expecting his glance to be acknowledged; but she is watching Beth,
listening
to her and smiling indulgently, as though Beth were her child rather than her aunt. The light of the fire is kind to her too. Martina is sitting holding a tea cup cradled on her lap and he notes how her looks are more striking in mundane moments such as this, when she is simply sitting by the fire, than on more formal occasions.

Martina is a great beauty, in a way that is most rare. It is more than regular features and good bones, although those attributes are certainly there: the huge clear eyes, the heart-shaped face. There's something mysterious to it. A couple of nights earlier Fintan had read
The Snow Queen
to Lucy as a bedtime story, and had found himself thinking of his sister. Not of course that she is a wicked person, but there can be something unsettling and cool about her, particularly towards men. He knows it is unfair, but he cannot help comparing her to Colette, whose kindness and guilelessness are written on her face. But you could spend a lifetime looking at Martina and wondering who she was. Her beauty suggests much more than what she is: a woman who lives with her aunt and who owns a clothes shop. There is a weight, a melancholy and mystery to her that is part of what makes her so fascinating, to both men and women; and yet it is combined with a good heart, a kindness equal to Colette's, and a jolly sense of humour, attributes that are often not immediately evident.

Martina is talking to Fintan now; she asks after all the family, what they are doing these days, how they are keeping, and she sends her love to them.

‘Be sure to tell Colette', she adds, ‘that I took delivery the other day of some jackets that are just perfect for her. Tell her I'll set a few aside in her size, in different colours, and if she drops over to the shop she can see what she thinks.'

Fintan promises to pass on the message.

‘Oh, and before I forget,' Martina says suddenly, ‘I'll find that photograph for you.' When he had phoned in advance to say that he would visit them, as Beth had suggested, he had asked if he might see a particular old family photo that he had recently remembered. Martina gets up and fetches a small cardboard box from the sideboard.

‘I left this out, but I haven't had time to go through it yet.'

She tips the box out onto the rug before the fire, spilling out a jumbled heap of all kinds of pictures: colour, black and white, sepia; snapshots and studio photographs. There are fuzzy shots from long-ago family holidays and birthdays; there is Joan looking stern and lantern-jawed at her own wedding; and a picture of Fintan himself at his First Communion, with hands neatly joined and a ribbon rosette in his jacket, but without a full complement of teeth. They laugh and talk over these until suddenly Fintan says, ‘Here it is. This is the one I wanted.'

He pulls from the pile a postcard-sized sepia photograph which is pasted onto a heavy cardboard mount, a studio portrait of a young woman from the early years of the twentieth century or the end of the nineteenth. She is seated in a low armchair and is wearing a muslin summer dress, with a broad-brimmed straw hat lying on her lap. Her pose is unusually languid for the time: Fintan has seen many other photographs from that period of anxious
women
standing bolt upright and clutching at the backs of chairs, ill at ease and frumpy. But this woman is completely relaxed and is smiling at the camera in a way that is both beguiling and slightly unnerving. She is clearly fully conscious of her own extraordinary beauty and the power that gives her. But what gives Fintan pause is that she looks exactly like Martina, so much so that one might almost persuade oneself that it actually
is
Martina, tricked out in the clothes and accoutrements of another era. There is the same full mouth, the same huge eyes and abundant hair, the same strange smile in which there is a kind of knowledge and complexity, a sort of power. Even Martina herself, when Fintan hands the photograph back to her, admits that the resemblance they bear to each other is quite uncanny.

‘And yet the sad thing is, I don't think we have any idea who she is,' Martina says as she turns the photograph over and glances at the back of it, hoping for some information there. ‘Any idea?' She passes it to Beth, who narrows her eyes and peers at the image.

‘Well it's my side of the family, that's for sure,' she says, ‘not your daddy's, because I remember seeing this photograph in the house when I was young. It might be a sister of one of your grandparents.'

‘So what would that make her to us?' Martina asks, frowning and taking the photograph back again. ‘A great-aunt?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Your great-grandfather', Beth goes on, ‘was a greengrocer in Rathmines.'

‘Was he, indeed?' Fintan says, surprised. ‘I never knew that.'

‘Strange that Mummy never told us,' Martina says, ‘given how proud she is of my commercial ventures.'

‘Ah now Martina,' Beth pleads gently, ‘you know she doesn't mean the half of it.'

Martina doesn't reply, but throws her brother a knowing look which he understands only too well, then she looks back at her other self, her beautiful ancestor. ‘I hope you gave them all a good run for their money, girl.' She places the photograph on the sofa beside Fintan, and sifts again through the heap of pictures on the floor, then gives a little whoop of laughter as she pulls another one out and shows it to him.

‘Do you remember this?'

It is a black-and-white photograph but Fintan doesn't laugh when he sees it, for he is too moved, and for a moment is capable of neither speech nor laughter. It is a picture of such charm as to appeal to anyone, even someone unacquainted with any of the people in the photograph. It shows a farmyard with stables. The top of one of the half-doors is open, and a horse is looking out. There is a group of people gathered around: an elderly woman, and three small children, a girl and two boys. The girl is Martina and one of the boys is Fintan. Everyone in the picture is laughing, laughing wholeheartedly. Even the horse, with its upper lip drawn back, appears to snicker.

‘Granny Buckley, my God!' Fintan says eventually. ‘And Edward, he was everything to me, he was my hero when I was a kid. And me, look at the state of me!' Fintan in the photograph is a little fat buck-toothed boy with droopy socks and clumpy black shoes, bare knees and a shapeless jumper. Martina's hair spouts from the side of her head in two uneven bunches, each tied with abundant ribbons and she is wearing a pale dress.

‘I remember that frock, I remember arguing with Joan when she bought it, it was white with blue flowers and she wanted me to get the one with pink flowers. It was one of the rare times when I was a child when I got my own way with her.'

This surprises Fintan. His memory tells him that Martina got the better of Joan in pretty well all of their many disagreements. He has a clear memory of Martina as an adorable-looking child. At no stage in her life had she gone through a gawky or awkward phase. Thinking of her now, Fintan considers that she had been like one of those seemingly cute animals with thick fur and big round eyes – some kind of lemur, perhaps – that have razor-sharp claws concealed in their little paws, and that would slash your flesh if provoked. Martina's tiny frame had held an enormous will, and she battled against her mother in a way that had surprised Fintan. He hadn't realised that there was any option except to go to Scouts or serve Mass or go to swimming lessons or any of the other things which he didn't much care for but which his mother presented to him as an obligation. It had been a revelation when Martina flatly refused to recite a poem at the school concert, or to attend Irish dancing classes or piano lessons. There had been real battles between Joan and Martina over such things, which Fintan had observed, awestruck and slightly frightened. It had been like watching a little squaddie defy the Commander in Chief. It was somehow against the natural order of things and it had unsettled and disturbed him to hear Martina's tantrums, even as, deep down, he had silently egged her on.

‘What colour were the stable doors? I can't remember; can you? It's a pity it's in black and white rather than colour.'

‘Given how long ago it feels, it's a wonder it isn't in sepia. When exactly would this have been taken?'

 Fintan stares at the photograph as he says, ‘Do you know, I think that this could have been the last summer that we went up there. I'm going on the ages we look to be.'

‘Do you remember arguments about it when we stopped going?'

‘Vaguely. I don't think it was so much Mummy and Daddy quarrelling about it; I suspect it was more complicated and strategic than that. I think it was Granny putting pressure on Daddy. It was her wanting us to keep going back in spite of the Troubles, and him then trying to coax Mummy, and her having none of it. I suppose she had a point,' Fintan says, but Martina disagrees.

‘Oh come on, Fintan, the Troubles were only an excuse. She always hated us going up there. There was no love lost between her and Granny Buckley. Can you remember Joan ever going up, even once?'

And Fintan has to admit that he can't. In all his memories of being delivered or collected when he went to stay, or on the day-trips they would make at other times of the year – in the autumn to collect apples, or at Hallowe'en, and always before Christmas to collect a turkey – it was their father that he remembers being with them. And he recalls how there was something slightly different about him when he was back in the house where he had grown up. Fintan can see him standing on the flags of the kitchen that was dark as a cave, can see him drinking tea, talking and laughing with his mother, Fintan's Granny Buckley. But when he tries to think of his own mother there, he can't. His imagination fails at the idea of Joan sitting in that room, in the collapsed armchair beside the stove, with its hand-crocheted cushion made from scraps of coloured wool, even though it was the most comfortable chair he has ever come across; nor can he see her at the long kitchen table, whether bare or with an oilcloth on it.