Trespassers (5 page)

He assumed I was a virgin, which by then I no longer was. The question bothering me was my emotional state, which depended on his and on the likelihood that feeling might play a role in this encounter – especially as I had just spent a year in Rome, where I had grown used to Italian readiness to indulge in patient, courteous, unconsummated foreplay, which allowed me and my male friends to warm ourselves in the glow of an old-fashioned
amitié amoureuse.

The evening with Robert, an honest man and an adult, was a débâcle.

‘She’s the race-horse breed,’ Eileen warned my husband, Lauro, when they first met. She had taught in Ballinasloe, whose schools closed down during the days when the International Horse Fair was on to let everyone get an eyeful of the
world-famous
horseflesh. I imagined tremulous muscles quivering in a paddock, and wondered if that was really how I struck people, old schoolmates for instance. I wondered about this again when, on one of my visits back from abroad, a group of them gave a dinner for me. Women only. This made sense, since, if our aim was to remember the past, why drag along husbands? Inviting old teachers might have been interesting, though. They were all nuns, so they and we had not been close. But now – it was the Sixties – convent rules had changed. So might we not get closer? No? Perhaps not. Yet some were clever women who, if born in more prosperous times, could have had enviable careers. Would they, I wondered, have liked to know that some of us thought so? Again, perhaps not. They might even have mistaken the praise for pity.

I didn’t query either their zeal or their vocation – the divine call. But how can it be denied that the call was seldom heard once opportunities for women increased, even before the advent of the Celtic Tiger, as the Irish economy picked up?

The ones who benefited from generations of talented women being obliged to settle for teaching were, of course, their pupils. I
know this because, in the Fifties, during the year I spent testing myself and my French lover, the Irish economy was at its nadir, so I went to London where I worked, among other jobs, as a supply teacher. This took me from a pretentious private outfit in St Albans to a rough one on the Mile End Road and in and out of many in between. Nowhere in this bird’s-eye view did I find the attentive efficiency of the Sacred Heart nuns. I didn’t see it later either, not in my son’s English prep school, nor in Bryanston nor at the French Lycée, which he had attended earlier in Los Angeles. This is not a puff for the nuns: their schools are now either quite gone or staffed by lay teachers, and that change must have put paid to the attentiveness my generation enjoyed, since lay teachers have a home life, whereas our only rival for the nuns’ attention was God.

Come to think of it, the Celtic Tiger’s brief prance owed them something, too, since one reason why international corporations set up businesses in Ireland was our well-educated population.

It is fair to admit though that, at the second convent school I attended, while the humanities were splendidly taught, we learned no science at all. The school was new and had no lab, so, while waiting for one to be built, the Department of Education let us substitute Thomistic Logic for the science subject which should have figured in our curriculum. Even now, I sometimes wonder if this left my thinking a little quaint.

How would I know?

At my old schoolmates’ dinner party, I marvelled as much at the intricately folded linen napkins as at the absent husbands who had presumably footed the bill for a display as immaculate as a feast-day altar. Perhaps I mouthed something about this, for a woman I didn’t recognise asked if I remembered the time I had
turned up for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception wearing the wrong uniform.

‘You had on the grey everyday one instead of the white. You had to be hidden in the back.
And
you left your lily in the bus! Dropped it!’

‘Oh God! Did I?’

‘It wasn’t for God,’ she corrected. ‘It was for Mary!
Mater admirabilis!
Tower of Ivory, Hope of sailors! She should have transformed herself into a clippie and patrolled the buses looking for your lost lily. If it had turned up, we’d have had a miracle to our name.’

Hooting with laughter, voices down the table from us chorused, ‘Oh Mary, I give thee the lily of my heart. Be thou its guardian forever.’ Former Sacred Heart girls, I remembered now, had a reputation for going to the bad in later life. As this notion seems to have stayed current longer among the English than it did with us, it may have titillated English boyfriends.

So, I understood, inviting nuns
would
have been a bad idea.

Every year on 8 December during our schooldays, we were each expected to bring a St Joseph’s lily – one of those funnel-shaped ones a bit like a dentist’s drinking cup – to offer to the Virgin. In practice we were supplying the nuns’ flower arrangement, so it was no wonder that the loss of a lily under a bus seat was remembered. Ten shillings, I think it cost. Or five? Even that was a lot back then.

‘You thought me odd?’ I challenged my hostesses.

‘Ah no,’ they protested kindly. ‘Just scatty.’

‘Easily flustered?’

‘No, no,’ they soothed.

But clearly my mother had been right. Then I remembered that
they
had seemed odd to me. Several had chosen to go to Swiss finishing schools and none to college. Hence, perhaps, the origami-inspired napkins.

In our school timetable, Latin and cooking classes had invariably clashed, as though to emphasise that choosing between them marked a parting of the ways. ‘Domestic Science’ pupils seemed to cook what they liked, for I remember them as always making meringues. White as my lost lily, these would be laid out to tantalise our Latinist nostrils as we clumped hungrily past their kitchen. We were never offered any.

On a later return to Dublin, I was taken to another
women-only
party. This one was for Muslim girls who were there to learn English. I forget where they were from – Lebanon perhaps? – but I was impressed, both by their exquisite silks and by the flair of whoever had picked Dublin as a safe place for chaste young women. Earlier, Spanish girls had come for the same reason and, earlier still, while walking the Dublin streets, the poet Antonin Artaud had had a revelation to the effect that to cut out reproductive sex would, by abolishing humanity, save the world from sin.

That, an acquaintance told me, was a tenet of the ancient Bogomil heresy. Dubliners, then, knew things like that. Heresies, like science-fiction, offer an escapist view and also, judging by Artaud, the opposite.

It strikes me now that I may not have wanted our
mater admirabilis
to have the lily of my heart, so dropped it partly on purpose. Religion, in a country like ours, could become a trap. At the end of our final school year, nobody showed surprise when one or two quite worldly girls revealed plans to become nuns. I remember our hockey captain doing so, and that when someone said she had too much team spirit for her own good, nobody laughed. In the late Forties the farewell dance held to celebrate someone’s entering a convent was sometimes still held.

So how easily flustered was I? Now that I am at an age when forgetfulness might signal the onset of dementia, I would be happy to know of other blunders made in my teens. Reports of old gaffes mean that I have got better, not worse. And what about
Eileen whom I abandoned to Seán’s unreliable care? After I left, she focused her energies on choosing and elegantly translating tales from the Irish sagas and turning her garden into an asset which doubled the value of the house so that it soared during the Irish property boom. None of us benefited, though, since Knockaderry had been sold before this happened. That was my fault. She had offered to hold on to it if I would agree to come and live there after she and Seán died, and I refused. I hope she never learned what leprechaun’s gold we might have had.

I console myself with the thought that for years she had enjoyed designing and working on the garden, which must have provided pleasure and therapy – not to mention pride. From 1937, when we moved in, she worked on it with the help of a succession of handymen and fed us as long as we stayed there on increasingly interesting vegetables, soft fruits and, eventually, apples and pears.

In 1937 Seán’s mind, too, was on a house, but perversely it was less on ours than on the decline and fall of an Irish ‘Big House’ which the novelist Elizabeth Bowen had imagined from an insider’s viewpoint in her novel
The Last September,
while he saw it from that of the rebels in his own story ‘A Midsummer Night’s Madness’. (Maria Edgeworth had, of course, got in long before either of them with
Castle Rackrent
.) Though Bowen’s novel had appeared in 1929, it was only now, eight years later, that he came across it. That was the year when he and Eileen left the US for England, so he must have been too busy settling into his job at Strawberry Hill to keep up with new novels. Now, though, he did read it and was captivated. He thought of its author as ‘an Irish Turgenev’ – an immense compliment, coming from him: not only because Turgenev was his favourite writer but also, as he started to see that his own novels were less successful than his
stories, he blamed this on the narrowness of social experience in the new Ireland where, as he would note in his memoirs, ‘a great levelling had begun’. Comparing this new Ireland to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s New England, his memoirs quote Henry James’s reflections on the compassion one must feel ‘for a romancer looking for subjects in such a field’. The quotation continues: ‘It takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.’ This complexity, wrote James, was sadly lacking in Hawthorne’s New England just as it was, Seán contended, in the new simpler Ireland.

As I type, my fingers slacken on the keys.

They itch to argue with him about the many powerful novels, even some of James’s own, which owe their punch to the narrowness of choice open to their protagonists. What about
The Awkward Age
and
Washington Square,
not to speak of
The Golden Bowl
? Need simplifies, and, in those books it is need, rather than complexity of manners, which drives their characters’ fate, as it does in
Vanity Fair, Madame Bovary, Ethan Frome
and great stretches of Dostoevsky’s narratives.

Meanwhile, Seán began to think of Elizabeth Bowen herself as ‘a dramatic character, strayed from perhaps
The Last September,
one of its young Irish girls become fifteen years or so older, married … more aware …’

The next – unacknowledged – step could have been to see himself also as a character, strayed perhaps from Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le noir,
which he adored, one of whose great scenes shows the educated peasant, Julien Sorel, forcing himself to take hold of his snooty employer’s wife’s hand and hold on to it long enough to test his nerve. Did Seán make the analogy? His memoirs don’t say, but their musings about novel-writing conclude that ‘the Czarist Novel’ – remember he is thinking of Turgenev – ‘was written by an élite, about an élite, for an élite’ and finally admit
that where this had been leading him was to stray, emotionally, albeit perhaps briefly,
into
a novel. Suffering from a nine-year itch (he had married my mother in 1928), he had developed a cerebral passion for his imagined ‘Irish Turgenev’. They hadn’t met, but to remedy this, an amused Derek Verschoyle, editor of
The Spectator
for which Seán sometimes reviewed, arranged a small luncheon party at his London club and, one may guess, prepared the ground by telling Elizabeth how keenly this ex-IRA man admired her. Seán was good-looking, and it seems that Bowen’s marriage, though solid, was unconsummated. So he and she began an affair. ‘Why’, he later remembered wondering during that lunch, ‘might I not learn as much from her about Woman as I had already learned from Turgenev about Writing?’

Interestingly, her next lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie whom she would meet in 1941 and love for thirty years, considered her writing ‘infinitely more exciting … and profound than E. herself’. Inspiring cerebral passions seems to have been her forte.

Seán describes a final visit to her in London on 31 August 1939, when, as they ‘lay abed, passion sated’, her husband rang to say that the fleet had been ordered to mobilise, ‘Which means war.’ It also meant the end of their affair, since neutral Ireland would now be isolated and Elizabeth, when she did come over, would be doing so – though Seán did not know this at first – partly at the behest of the British Ministry of Information, who were eager to have her report on how Irish people felt about the English threat to take back the Irish ports.

A letter from her to a former lover, Humphrey House, describes Seán without naming him and says, ‘we are … very much in love. It doesn’t feel like a love affair. It feels like a marriage … He is the best (I think without prejudice) of the younger Irish writers. I only read any book of his last summer …’ She claims that she nearly wrote him a fan letter. Then that he wrote
her
a fan letter,
so they met. This account of their manoeuvring is more hesitant and less Stendhalian than Seán’s, but probably slightly arranged – as no doubt is his. After all, both were writers. She says nice things about Eileen, mentions her husband and my five-year-old self, and says that, as they would both hate to upset anyone, ‘We are paying for our happiness by being very good. We are both, by nature, extremely secretive, which helps.’

The above information comes from their pens. All I knew at the time was that there was a bristle of tension in our house, that Eileen was restive and that Seán making trips not just to London but to Cork – and not to Cork City either, where his mother lived, but to Bowenscourt. Why, I heard Eileen ask, if he was going, as he claimed, to a house party, had
she
not been invited too? Airily implausible, he insisted that it was to be a professional gathering which only writers would attend. A likely story! And yet, given his view of Elizabeth as an Irish Turgenev, there was some truth to his claim. His interest was not only professional, but also a form of fieldwork.