Ghost Light (10 page)

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Authors: Joseph O'Connor

BOOK: Ghost Light
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She pictures the cancer that is in him as a militia of tiny lights moving slowly around his innards, leaving no corner unscarred. She sees herself extinguishing a single one of them every time she does him a kindness. It has something to do with a sermon she once heard as a girl in the great vaulted bastion of St Nicholas of Myra church. The priest had said grace was a gathering of candles waiting to be lit by the sinner. It has stayed with her always, this evocative depiction, even as her faith gives inevitable ground to the editings and adjustments that come with adult life. God, providence, the balm in Gilead – they need to be met halfway.
If he coughs in her presence, she blesses him silently. If he gasps, she sends him a prayer. As though observing a vast city at the approach of dawn, she sees the lights of his cancer flicker out one by one. She envisages his lungs – radiant with pain – and the snuffer of her benignity sets to its work. If she could only touch them – physically touch them – the air in them would sweeten and cleanse and renew, and the flames that always scorch them would puff into nothingness like wicks pinched out by her fingers.
She encourages him to eat, to drink if he wishes to; he was raised with a puritan’s views on alcohol. He has gone into public houses while on his rambles around Wicklow, where he talks with the tinkers and trampers and poachers, but has never truly escaped from the notion of his rearing, that drink is the devil’s doorway. Porter is healthy, a tonic, she tells him. Her mother has given birth to eight children in her time and often says a nightly glass of porter was the only reason she had been able to do it. It was also, remarks her grandmother, in a meaningful way, the only reason half of them had been conceived.
He gains a little weight in their first months together. He abandons his talk of Switzerland. There is a clinic in the Alps for people with his condition, where they feed you up with strudel, stuff you like an archduke, and force you out to walk in the cold mountain air and to listen to yokels with alpenhorns. He laughs as he tells these stories but she can see he is afraid. He is often wild with gaiety when frightened.
He can be jealous, furiously so, if he senses a rival in the picture. She is not to talk to other men, never to take one by the arm. Dossie Wright, especially, is to be shunned, he insists. And there are others against whom he advises unceasing caution. Musicians are untrustworthy. Many have unspeakable diseases. Medical students are debauchers who ‘dangle out of actresses’ and brag of their seductions, of innocents ruined. He is not himself a dangler, a stage-door Johnnie. No gentleman would inveigle a girl by holding out false hopes.
He is not conventionally handsome; that goatee makes him appear shifty. A face like a blacking brush, as Sara sometimes puts it. He looks faintly like a typical Irishman in an old
Punch
cartoon: beetle-browed, mercurial, recently down from the trees. But he is not a typical Irishman: he loves to listen. His few true confidantes have all been women. (‘People like Yeats who sneer at old-fashioned goodness and steadiness in women seem to want to rob the world of what is most sacred in it.’) She talks to him about her clothes, about hats and gowns, her difficult
sister, problems with money, arguments at rehearsal, ghastly ‘digs’ she has stayed in, grim tours around the provinces, her painful menstruation. He arranges for her to attend an eminent gynaecologist in Dublin; cannot bear the thought that she would be in needless pain. As a child she had been sent to an orphanage following the death of her father, for her mother so suddenly widowed had been unable to cope. She tells him stories of the beadles, the bible-study, the gruel, how she escaped and ran back to Mary Street, begged her mother to allow her to remain. Her later life as a shop-girl in Switzers drapery: she tells him about that, and he listens as though entranced. She smokes like a soldier. He nags at her to stop.
She finds him so queer. He is ‘highly-strung’, he informs her. Every writer is. This is the price of art. She knows the price of art, has been paying it for some time. Some of the love poems she has inspired seem like howls of grief.
He talks to her about Paris, about Germany and the Aran Islands, where the people are serious and allow you to be alone. He longs to show her Brittany, Normandy, Inishmaan. Everything will be better when they marry, he promises, though his mother has often wondered aloud, as he himself has wondered in silence, how he and any wife could manage on a writer’s pittance. This appears to be Mother’s way of making it clear that the family silver will not be subsidising love in a garret. He hungers for the success that can give them independence. To escape from Glenageary, to make his own way: the need comes to fume in him like a lust.
He is working on a strange piece, set in a hamlet in Mayo, about a storyteller who bludgeons his father and somehow becomes a hero when he makes a boasting song of the crime. The play is sending him mad; he is afraid to follow whatever instincts he has about its shape and its poetry and its savagery. He has been trying to conceal his uncertainty with what he calls ‘strong writing’, but is beginning to discern that this is a cheat, that form and content must be inextricably wedded. It must be
what it must. It is not a pantomime or a parable. And if people do not like it, it still must be itself. He comes to feel there is a great role in it for his changeling girl. His ‘Pigeen’, as he has taken to calling her.
They discuss this role. He listens while she talks. She is adaptable, amenable. Which changeling is not? She thinks he is a genius. He tells her that
she
is. She loves his dedication, his monkish graveness. Beside him, even severe old Augusta Gregory can seem a high-kicker auditioning for a cabaret. He talks about his characters as though they were real. ‘I wrestle with that playboy,’ he jokes bleakly, but he means it. It is as though these voluble buckos and fiery-tongued beauties were to be encountered any evening on a stroll through Mother’s garden.
One warm Sunday evening on Killiney Hill, he reads her a few soliloquies of the play set in Mayo. A bachelor is a ridiculous figure, he recites, ‘like an old braying jackass strayed upon the rocks’. He looks up at her hopefully. Is that the right tone? Is it true? Is it funny? Will they laugh?
He claims to his changeling that he writes out of the desire for consolation, that something in story-making eases him, assuages his demons. But it also exhausts him. He has to be careful. (‘A man cannot work with the cream of his brain for more than six hours at a sitting.’) Late at night he goes to his study in the stilled, dark house and looks at what he has written that day. A quarter-measure of watered whiskey, and he reads over his pages, and the crippled old Labrador snores on the campbed that is set beneath a tapestry of hunters. She can picture the room, the green shade on the lamp, the leather-mounted blotter on the sea-captain’s desk, a Waterford vase of buttercups from the railway embankment wilting on the bedside table. The dim mullioned window, the soft scratch of his nib, his shirtsleeves unbuttoned like a gambler’s at a table where the game is running on long. Sometimes he looks out at Dalkey Quarry in the moonlit distance, or he listens to the servants moving quietly about the house. Where are they going so late? What are their
stories? Why do they pause by my door? The rasp of the match and the small globe of flame as he lights a last bowl of tobacco.
He knows there is only one thing that separates us from the beasts: it is that everyone carries an Eden, an inner realm of silence, and this is what some call the soul, having no other name for it. The point is to allow people to reach it, be blessed by it, even briefly, to save them from the filthy undermurmur of living.
And at some point he realises he has twenty strong pages. Then what becomes important is bravery. To go on might yield nothing – everything can die. Anyone can make a beginning; to embark on a second act takes the courage. It is like building a house, he says. The smallest error is fatal. Every course of brickwork must be angled correctly or the whole will collapse in the end. By fifty pages, sixty, he knows if the impossible is happening. The people summoned into being by the old power of words might begin to unfurl, to walk about and love, to say things he himself would never dream of uttering, in voices not his but theirs. It is like watching the muzzle-flash of a gun through fog yet wanting the bullets to hit you, he says. Essential to hold your nerve, not to let the excitement of the alchemy throw you into crowd-pleasing stupidities or grandiosities. Who can say where they come from, these people who never lived? But he is one of the intermediaries they come to. He seems to think of himself in the third person, as perhaps all do from to time. Is it possible he sees himself as a character?
It is whispered among the costume girls that his people are landlords down the country, that they evicted tenants in the bad times, burned their cabins. Many’s the penniless tramp created by a Synge, someone says, and relatively few of them fictional. She refuses to believe it, turns her ears from the rumours. She gathers that he has quarrelled with Mother about political matters, but Mother pointed out, evidently with scriptural vehemence, that the tenants down the country were paying for his freedom to write, so he was hardly in a position to be adopting revolutionary poses. Mother and her sister grew up on the neighbouring
estate to the Parnells’, often rocked the Chief’s little cradle when he was a baby. In later years, Aunt Jane grew fond of remarking what a pity it was that they hadn’t strangled him.
Months turn to seasons. Rehearsals turn to shows. His eyes are darkening; the weather she sees in them is sullen. He seems half in love with death, like Keats watching nightingales. Operations come and go, and he coughs like a broken train, and still the old lady refuses to die. He is nearly always sick now: the growth on his neck makes him quake. There are fears he might be tubercular. He may need aggressive surgery. Often, he takes to his bed for days. He becomes convinced that the effort of writing brings fever.
And there is trouble at the theatre; there are faction fights, rows. What is it in theatre people that they must always squabble? He is not a committee man like Yeats, or a battler like Her Ladyship, though he is conscientious about management, thinks it important to be a peacemaker. But he’d rather be in Wicklow, roaming his rocks, ‘away from all good commonplace people’, he says. He starts to advise his changeling to become a playwright herself. She is already a sort of playwright; it is only that she doesn’t know it, hasn’t realised he is making notes of her phrasings and coinages. Loving her is becoming the same for him as loving his work. ‘My mirror, my air,’ he calls her.
They write to each other daily, sometimes twice in the space of a morning. Often, while he is headlocking the playboy in Glenageary, or bicycling the dappled avenues, which he likes to do at dusk, when everything is quiet and he can breathe a little easier, she drifts on to the stage of his mind. He loves her so fiercely; he won’t let anyone hurt her, ever. ‘Not even yourself,’ he can’t help but add. His true nature is so kind, so scrupulously gentle; but always he feels the need to cloak it in ironies. He is the saddest kind of man, the sort who seems embarrassed by his own decency. ‘An afflicted poor devil,’ as he sometimes says.
She feels that if they courted more openly and often there would be less of a need for letters, and that this would be a relief, like
the windows of an old mansion being thrown open. He rarely stops chiding her for not writing to him more. She doesn’t say what she means, she writes too briefly, she forgets about his illnesses, she breaks all her promises, she wants too much from him, she doesn’t want enough, she looked at him coldly, she winked at some spear-carrier.
‘You are rolling the stone off my grave.’
A Kingstown postmark makes her feel trepidation; the way his mother would feel if she glanced up from Leviticus and saw a tricolour flapping from the conservatory roof. If only they could spend time actually having their feelings, rather than thinking up new ways of putting them into words. But he seems to think nothing is real unless it is written down. The heroine of his Mayo play will be first encountered writing a letter.
She has noticed that ‘lonesome’ is the adjective he most uses about himself. He is nearly always lonesome in his missives to his changeling. Another word he likes to deploy is ‘disappointed’. It is sprinkled over his letters like a tartish cologne. She disappoints him so often, so deeply and unforgivably, that there are times when she can’t help but wonder what he is doing with her at all.
He often repeats a story she has always found curious, emblematic of him in some way neither of them quite understands: about a particular sojourn he once made in Wicklow, when the room in which he was quartered was directly above a kitchen, so that if he knelt down on the floorboards and put his ear to the chinks, he could eavesdrop on the serving girls talking below him. An admirer of Shakespeare, perhaps he thought of Pyramus and Thisbe, those lovers doomed to commune through a fissure in a wall. Maybe – is it possible? – he sees her as a conduit, a way of negotiating away that separation? It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a Kingstowner to navigate that eye in the floor. She is the only woman not of his class with whom he has ever been truly intimate. Unless some gurleen over in Aran? – but no. He’d be afraid. Is her role to be conductress, to allow him
admission
to something? ‘Be careful not to get
greasepaint in your eyes,’ he once told her. Be careful yourself, she wants to reply. The twilight is not real; it is only limelight burning low. So much in the theatre is smoke and mirrors.
She sees him in the lobby of the Abbey, surrounded by admirers. Would he consent to inscribe a programme, would he shake the hand of an enthusiast?
Monsieur Synge, cher maître
, I bring you salutations from France. She watches from the halfcurtained vantage of the dressing-room door, Dossie Wright and the other actors behind her, laughing, drinking. Yeats and the old lady leading him by the cuffs across the foyer, their latest exhibit, like something dug out of a bog. She wants to scream at them:
Leave him alone, you are breaking him; can you not see it? You smash the very thing you want from him.
He turns and meets her glance but offers no other acknowledgement. He vanishes in a snowstorm of compliments.

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