A Story Lately Told (9 page)

When Mum and I were in Paris, we stayed at her favorite hotel off the beaten path, the Hôtel des St. Perès, on the Left Bank. We went to lunch in a restaurant with white tablecloths and polished glittering surfaces. At a table, wreathed in pipe smoke, sat Lucio García del Solar. Mum was wearing a thin pale yellow wool sweater. Underneath, the embroidery of appliquéd petals on her bra was clearly visible. This had not disturbed me until the moment Lucio said teasingly, “I have x-ray eyes! Your mother is wearing a brassiere with flower petals.” And my mother became a little pink. “That’s not x-ray, I can see that, too,” I said. I was ashamed and embarrassed when she wore something revealing. I was happy my mother was beautiful, but I did not want her to be desired by men other than Dad.

Later, when I was eight, Mum took Tony, Nurse, and me to Greece. On our short stay in Athens, we visited the Acropolis, nothing more to me than a group of gigantic yellow pillars, and took a plane ride to the islands, simmering on the runway in the infernal heat. I am sure Mum met Lucio there, because
she left us with Nurse in Corfu after a few days to “go on a boat trip around the islands.”

When she returned, she took us to Mykonos, a perfect little village on a hilltop, its whitewashed streets leading down to an aqua sea. There was a beach shack where we ate roast fish and octopus with lemon, and the owner’s ancient mother carried the dishes to the water’s edge to clean them. Mum said that she must have been very beautiful once because of her fine profile, but to me she was just an old woman in black.

I preferred the gaudy women from the Club Mediterranée in Corfu, who wore bikinis and bartered with colored beads that hung from their necks. Every night, a little girl, younger than I was, danced on the tabletops of a local café for the tourists.

I loved Greece—the white sand and the clear blue Aegean; how bright it was, compared with the soft gray skies of Galway.

•  •  •

Like most children, I spent some time trying to understand the nature of my parents’ relationship and the relationships of men and women in general. For instance, I knew that men and women sometimes shared a bedroom, but I had never seen my parents do this, and I had no way of knowing what went on in other households.

There weren’t many comparable lives in our neck of the woods—literally, forests and vast fields, under a veil of silvery rain—against which to measure how other children lived or how their parents behaved. My parents were cosmopolitan and sophisticated, but this was the west of Ireland, strictly Catholic and very private. Sex, of course, was never discussed. The matchbox houses off the main road were not ours to explore or to use for measuring how other families lived.

I got a harsh reminder of this one day when Mary Lynch and
I were dropping off some eggs to Mrs. Holland, who lived in a cottage down the road from St. Clerans. Standing in the gloom of her small kitchen, I caught sight of a fine brass bed beyond an open door and politely complimented her on it. Suddenly she picked up a kitchen knife from the table and, wielding it above her head, chased us from the cottage. Whenever we passed her house after that, we ran as fast as we could leg it.

Meanwhile, my own household had its mysteries. Why was Mum spending year after year restoring the Big House for Dad, while she, Tony, Nurse, and I lived in the Little House? Was this simply a pastime she found interesting, or was she trying to restore their relationship as well? Maybe she just wanted to complete the contract, by which time she would have the strength to leave Dad and cast her net into an uncertain future.

One for sorrow

Two for joy

Three for a wedding

Four for a boy

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for a story lately told

Whenever we were out in the car, or walking the boreens, we counted our luck in the numbers of magpies we could spot. A black-and-white bird, like a crow in a dress shirt, might descend among the scores of ravens to raid the freshly plowed earth, pecking for worms in the open brown potato fields. Once inside the gates of St. Clerans, there was the contrast of green stillness under a canopy of trees, the plump gray pigeons batting overhead from branch to branch, their soft warbling throughout
the day, the cherry-chested robins, the tiny wrens in the bamboo and dogwood by the river, where the heron stood, ready to strike, in the shallows. There were fleeting appearances of a kingfisher the color of lapis lazuli over the waterfall, rabbits bounding under cover of the thickets of box hedge and laurel, nettles and dock leaves—they always grew together; dock leaves are the antidote to a nettle’s sting.

In a hidden glade outside the walled garden, I came upon a nest of lily of the valley. In the banks by the fields, there was a profusion of wild strawberries, violets, buttercups, dandelions, thistles, primroses, bluebells, and daisies. Where the cows had fertilized the pastures, Mary and I would go out with baskets to collect mushrooms. In the fall we picked hazelnuts and blackberries. We strung shiny brown horse chestnuts from a knotted string in a game called Conkers, in which you would try to smash your opponent’s with your own. Being in the fields and woods was part of the day’s routine; there were always places to inspect, to excavate—so many secrets buried at St. Clerans.

•  •  •

I was sitting on the radiator by my bedroom window at the Little House, looking down at Punchinello in the courtyard. The windowsill was littered with dead and dying wasps. “Nineteen fifty-nine is a very good year,” I said to myself. For no particular reason, it felt like an epiphany.

We were having our first Christmas at the Big House. Friends of Dad’s were coming and they had a daughter, Joan. Her father, Jules Buck, had been Dad’s cameraman during the war on his documentaries
Report from the Aleutians
and
The Battle of San Pietro.
Both movies had been commissioned by the War Department as recruitment films, but the message had proved contrary—my father once said, “If I ever make a movie that’s
pro-war, take me out and shoot me.” The Buck family had been living in Paris and London, where Jules was now working as a movie producer.

It was early evening and dark outside when I met Joan and her parents in the main hall of the Big House; they had just come in from Shannon Airport. Her mother was called Joyce. She had short hair and wore high heels and she was very pretty and friendly. She urged Joan to share her comic books with me. I had heard that Joan was three years older than I. We were about the same height, and she looked at me suspiciously. She had a pale complexion, dark shoulder-length hair, full lips. She thought I was tiny and mouselike with big front teeth. Joan claimed to her mother that she had a tummy ache. From her shoulder hung a green leather bag with a gold medallion clasp, which fascinated me. Under her arm she carried a stack of
Archie
and
Little Lulu
comics. She seemed to have a pretty firm grip on them.

I trailed upstairs as the Bucks were shown to the Grey Room. Beyond a gold Japanese screen, night was falling through the bow windows overlooking the wide horse pastures, between the side roads reaching out to Craughwell and Carabane. Joyce Buck pulled aside the brocade curtain that framed the alcove to the toilet in the bathroom and raised her skirt, as I looked solemnly on. Joan attempted to pull the curtain to shield her mother from my obvious interest. Joyce laughed and said, “We’re all girls here!” She explained to Joan that she would be going down to the Little House to stay with me in my room. This idea did not seem to please Joan one bit. Tony had moved over to the loft above the stables that Dad had occupied before the Big House was ready.

I don’t really remember what it was that forged our friendship,
or why Joan, already a sophisticate at eleven, should have tolerated the attentions of a fawning eight-year-old. But Joan and I became best friends that Christmas. I wished I were Catholic so that Jules and Joyce might become my godparents.

Jules Buck was working with Peter O’Toole, who had created a stir in the West End in a play called
The Long, the Short, and the Tall.
Peter had signed to do a film about Lawrence of Arabia with the great British director David Lean. He and his wife, the glamorous Welsh actress Siân Phillips, had been invited to stay over at St. Clerans on their way to their own home in Connemara for Christmas. Peter had blond hair and crystal-blue eyes. He looked like a god. He spoke theatrically, with an Irish inflection. A few days later, Cherokee Hart arrived. At one time a girlfriend of Dad’s, she had since married the novelist Hans Habe, from whom she was now separated. She brought her daughter, Marina, a beautiful eight-year-old green-eyed blond, who joined Joan and me, sleeping on a foldout cot in my bedroom at the Little House. Cherokee was staying up at the Big House, and Marina cried for her mother the first night. Marina introduced me to her Barbie dolls. I was mesmerized by them. She wore a red nightdress with a bib that read “don’t tease me,” which gave you the idea to do just that. Eric Sevareid, the distinguished broadcaster, and his wife, Belén, arrived to complete the guest list.

I only dimly remember my mother’s presence in the midst of all of these visitors, but I know that it was from this time that Joan formed her deep attachment to Mum. Joan said later, “I just fell in love with her; she was always ready to play.” She told me that when she would see me crawling all over Mum, she was sad not to have that with her own mother. Mum gave her approval, stimulus, ideas, books—opened worlds for her
and was the most profound influence in her life. Even before she entered her teens, Joan was an extremely intelligent person with a highly developed critical eye and an even higher level of expectation from her friends.

A few days into her stay, Joan decided that we should perform a theatrical piece for the adults, and, having given it serious thought, had opted for the three witches from
Macbeth,
act four, scene one. We earnestly set about finding our costumes. Marina chose a blue silk nightshirt of my father’s, and Joan a maroon kimono. I chose one of the car rugs—a heavy, rustic sheep’s-wool blanket. With back-teased hair, I felt the look was most effective. Tony was in charge of the special effects and had been persuaded to click the lights off and on to simulate lightning during the performance.

Clutching our wooden spoons, we took our places in the dark around an African brass cauldron into which an ample jug of tomato juice, doubling as baboon’s blood, was to be poured during the performance. The audience—Bucks, O’Tooles, Sevareids, Hustons, and a smattering of kitchen help—were seated in the marble foyer, facing the inner hall. Suddenly, what had begun as a lark turned deadly serious. As I looked out from the shadows at the illuminated faces in the outer hallway, my heart began to race. Tony turned on the lights; there was a murmur and a brief spatter of applause. Joan started her verse and then turned it over to me. Heat rose in my cheeks alongside pure panic. I felt like someone had slapped me. Overwhelmed, I gasped for air. The line “Toad, that under cold stone” rang out thinly and died off into silence. I stood up and dropped my wooden spoon. “This is silly!” I cried, and fled from the scene, trailing my thick black Connemara blanket, to hide in shame behind the curtains in the study. Tony set up a hunting party to
find and flay me for ruining everything. The girls sounded furious. Finally, after a good wait, I emerged to seek my mother, to curl up in her lap and cry hot tears into her polo-neck sweater. Not what you’d call a very auspicious beginning.

I saw Peter O’Toole recently, after all these years. He was in Hollywood, putting his hands and feet in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre; he was frail but ever beautiful. After the ceremony, I sat beside him at Musso and Frank’s and revived the story of my historic Shakespearean failure. “Don’t you remember?” he said. “You caught my eye . . .” And all at once it came back to me—the flash of electric blue, and then the total loss of memory. I was astounded that he remembered the moment.

Despite the traumatic aftereffects associated with my introduction to Shakespeare, I went on to write two set pieces that Christmas. The first was
The Drama of Love,
imaginatively based on the supposed affair between Martin Tierney, our valet in training, and Vera, a slender, pretty girl who worked in the kitchen. The pages were heavily illustrated, with Vera’s mouth drawn in the shape of a heart. The other piece was a one-act play involving a pope, a fisherman, and a priest, in which every sentence began with “Bless you, Father” and ended with “Amen.”

Other than the botched attempt at
Macbeth,
I can recall only a few early theatrical experiences—one, a vague memory of playing an acolyte to the Virgin Mary in a nativity play that the nuns had put on in Loughrea, and the other, going to see a friend of my parents, Sonia French, from the next county, sing “Oklahoma,” which, rather than inspiring me to sing, gave me the idea to create a surrey for Penny, which she of course hated. I hazily recall attending a pantomime with Nurse in Dublin, and a Chinese woman, all done up in a red-and-gold costume,
with tiny little feet that she couldn’t even walk on. She had to be carried around in a litter, and the bells in her hair made a tinkling sound. Other than that, we sometimes went to the circus, which in rural Ireland usually consisted of a couple of acrobats, a clown, and a dancing dog.

Mum was traveling when I appeared in the nativity play, so I described the experience to her in a letter.

St. Clerans

Craughwell

Co. Galway

1960

Dear Mum,

The show was wonderful, there were lot of senes for exampel, the flower girls witch wore lovely bonnets and dresses, the lourdes where they prayed before the Virgen Mary, the girls had white dresses with vails I was in that and I dident stirr from my place but I think you could hear my heart beat for miles away. Then came the Japanese Princess—and the first play, well, you see there are two plays one at half ten in the night and one at half three in the day. And what I mean to say is that, I was very frighten in the three o’clock and you could see my hands shake and I was so frighend that I frogat my mouvements and to keep my head up and look proud and hauty. But in the night show I did not fuss up and shake my hands and I kept my head well up. Mum I never saw such a big croud of people, dad came, glades came, Bets came, Tony came, Nurse came, Mary came, Idelette came etc. I was in the two plays four times and I loved it I and we got a maveluse clap I forgot to tell you Bye Bye Have a good time in Swesser or Austrer