Ghost Light (11 page)
Authors: Joseph O'Connor
They are kissing in a printer’s doorway, hands in one another’s coats. He turns from her, throwing glances over his shoulder at the street. The last tram to Kingstown is about to depart. Its wet, dark windows. The people inside, wrapped up.
—Might I see you home at least, Molly?
—The neighbours might notice.
—I wish I had the courage to ask what I want.
—There will be other nights again. I love you.
The tram jolts down Sackville Street. She is alone with his ghost. Home to his mother in Kingstown.
Like many self-doubting people, he sometimes has the arrogance of a Pharaoh. She has received love letters before, but never like his. Who in the name of the suffering saints does this thread-arsed playmaker think he is? The proper mode of such correspondence, when written by men, is to pronounce oneself unworthy of the fairy-one’s favours, to do a little begging and gasping about your sleeplessness, and make a few suggestive comparisons to mythological hip-swingers. It doesn’t matter that you don’t mean it: Christ, it’s only good form. But the playboy doesn’t play. These are not billets-doux.
He tells her, approvingly, that she is ‘pretty and quiet and nice’. Is that really what he burns for in a lover, she wonders, and is this sandwich of stone-like, deadly words the best way a poet would have of presenting it? Why does he never say exactly what he wants? If beauties were before me, stepping out of their clothes, it would be you that I’d beg for; it could only be you. Why can he never write her anything like that?
Mostly, his tone is sardonic, schoolmasterly; so brusque he seems to want to push her away. ‘I will not wait for you in Bray, so don’t miss your train.’ ‘I’m afraid I’m spoiling you by writing to you every day.’ ‘When I have anything I don’t approve of, I’ll let you know fast enough.’ ‘Why are you so changeable when you know how much it harms me?’ He is an example of the man many women have known: the suitor who craves you but secretly wants to be dismissed.
Their quarrels are Vesuvian tirades of invective. ‘You are ludicrous!’ she accuses him, reefing her handkerchief into two with rage. ‘You may stop your letters if you like. I don’t care if I never hear from you again, so there!’ She is faithless, he is ‘selfpitiful’, she is spiteful, he is ‘an old stick in the mud’. She is making him ill. He is wearing her out. She will leave off acting and ‘get a shop’ if he keeps this up, or be a dancing-girl in some low pantomime, and how will he like that? One of her outbursts is countered by Glenageary’s ultimate denunciation: ‘You have finally
ruined
my holiday.’
ruined
my holiday.’
They beg him at the theatre to make changes to the Mayo play. It is going to cause trouble. The patriots won’t like it. You cannot portray an Irishman who
boasts
of being a murderer – a thug who has slaughtered his father! It is folly. And for the heroine to be
aroused
by his claimed brutality is tantamount to inviting the burning of the theatre. Rehearsals are uneasy. The reviewers will destroy it. The authorities will close the place down. The scene in which the peasants are seen to torture a man by fire – it is too much; it is grotesque and obscene. He will not change a word. It must be what it must. This is the
role that will make her a legend, he promises. Is that what she wishes to be?
boasts
of being a murderer – a thug who has slaughtered his father! It is folly. And for the heroine to be
aroused
by his claimed brutality is tantamount to inviting the burning of the theatre. Rehearsals are uneasy. The reviewers will destroy it. The authorities will close the place down. The scene in which the peasants are seen to torture a man by fire – it is too much; it is grotesque and obscene. He will not change a word. It must be what it must. This is the
role that will make her a legend, he promises. Is that what she wishes to be?
The Sunday before
The Playboy of the Western World
receives its premiere, they take a cold, rain-soaked walk from Carrickmines to Glencullen, through a boulder-strewn valley with a distant view of the Sugarloaf. That night she dreams of him in a wild garden, rhododendrons gone to seed, a hawk perched on his boot, feathers bloodstained.
The Playboy of the Western World
receives its premiere, they take a cold, rain-soaked walk from Carrickmines to Glencullen, through a boulder-strewn valley with a distant view of the Sugarloaf. That night she dreams of him in a wild garden, rhododendrons gone to seed, a hawk perched on his boot, feathers bloodstained.
He does not attend the first night: too ill, short of breath. She imagines his presence, sees him slipping in late, seated by himself in the consoling darkness of the balcony, watching her move about in the scorch of the light: the poise with which she holds herself, her strength as she speaks his lines. The fact of her speaking them, a lovemaking.
She moves across the footlights, knowing he is watching – in the black-dark windows of his fevered room in Kingstown he can see the reflections, the rage. Up here, she is the artist, he the apprentice. He is out beyond the point where anything matters. Not riots. Not hypocrisies. Not batons. Not policemen. The hatred of the crowd means nothing. Their spittle and her sweat will all be washed away, and the show will be played to the close. ‘
That is not the West
’ a man in the audience cries out, as though he were in the play, which, in a way, he is; he will always be in it now, no matter where or in what circumstances it is ever performed again. To America, Australia, places she never thought she would see, the memory of him will follow, his denunciations ringing. And she feels for this man. She understands his grief. All those years he was told his West was a land of apes. He wants it to be a land of angels, is upset and frightened that it isn’t. His grandparents starved to death in the land they were born in, a country where the idle took everything but the stones. His people died in the workhouses, on the ships, in the prisons, they were not worth the price of a grave. He cannot bear the shame and the cruelty he has inherited, spat into his face by this story. But she clings to the lines. People are screaming. As the cries
grow more wounded, the insults more brutal, she pictures her lover silently mouthing his lines along with her, alone in a rainstorm on Kingstown Pier, the spray in his beard, on his clothes. She feels like weeping, but that will not happen. She breathes and speaks, she speaks and breathes, and the words he wrote in silence are pushed into the air. Acting is
breathing
: the body gives life. Some reason, a small one, but it isn’t nothing, to go on existing in this vicious world, where hurts abound, and the body fails, and the crushed hopes of childhood are never far away. It is an act of mercy, the thing she does every night. She breathes for him; allows him to die temporarily. Most nights, he stays at home.
That is not the West
’ a man in the audience cries out, as though he were in the play, which, in a way, he is; he will always be in it now, no matter where or in what circumstances it is ever performed again. To America, Australia, places she never thought she would see, the memory of him will follow, his denunciations ringing. And she feels for this man. She understands his grief. All those years he was told his West was a land of apes. He wants it to be a land of angels, is upset and frightened that it isn’t. His grandparents starved to death in the land they were born in, a country where the idle took everything but the stones. His people died in the workhouses, on the ships, in the prisons, they were not worth the price of a grave. He cannot bear the shame and the cruelty he has inherited, spat into his face by this story. But she clings to the lines. People are screaming. As the cries
grow more wounded, the insults more brutal, she pictures her lover silently mouthing his lines along with her, alone in a rainstorm on Kingstown Pier, the spray in his beard, on his clothes. She feels like weeping, but that will not happen. She breathes and speaks, she speaks and breathes, and the words he wrote in silence are pushed into the air. Acting is
breathing
: the body gives life. Some reason, a small one, but it isn’t nothing, to go on existing in this vicious world, where hurts abound, and the body fails, and the crushed hopes of childhood are never far away. It is an act of mercy, the thing she does every night. She breathes for him; allows him to die temporarily. Most nights, he stays at home.
The neighbours in Mary Street give long, cold glares. The whole town is speaking of that filthy, vile play. A disgrace to Irish womanhood. A libel on the peasantry. A cur who savages his father; the Jezebel who lusts for him – imagine such a crawling horror on
the stage of a Christian city
. The traitress who would demean herself by appearing in this affront to a people’s innocence – could she ever be forgiven such a betrayal?
the stage of a Christian city
. The traitress who would demean herself by appearing in this affront to a people’s innocence – could she ever be forgiven such a betrayal?
A LETTER TO
THE TIMES
THE TIMES
November 1952
Sir –
Something will have to be done about the number of indigent persons roaming London. Recently, whilst on a visit to our capital city, I happened to cross Trafalgar Square at approximately half-past twelve on a weekday, accompanied by my wife and our daughter. We were assailed by the sight of a woman of not inconsiderably advanced years who was asleep at the base of Nelson’s Column. A bottle was visible in this female’s hand. She was in a condition of quite revolting disarray. As a taxpayer, and as one who served his kingdom proudly in time of war, I was affronted and not inconsiderably angered that I should have to subsidise the indolence of a person such as this, who should know that impressionable younger people might be going about their business, not to mention the effect on visitors to the city. The female, on being approached by a member of the constabulary, proved herself a native of a neighbouring island – I might add, a Republic – that has been notably far from friendly to Her Majesty’s subjects, whilst continuing to export multitudes of her own. It really is ‘a bit Irish’, if I might coin a popular phrase.
Yours, etcetera,
Concerned rates-payer from Berkshire.
Concerned rates-payer from Berkshire.
INTERMISSION AT GLENCREE
Two people are walking the rutted, tussocked cart track that leads northward out of the village of Annamoe, in County Wicklow, through country of tweedy purples and rain-bleached umbers and hip-high ripening barley. Past stone-filled, hilly, irregularly shaped fields that are bordered by low walls of lichen-yellowed boulders. At the edges of the meadows, masses of wet bluebells under lowgrown, crooked willows. The stillness so pleasing; the damp Irish emptiness and the faint smell of rained-on goats.
It has rained the night before, it has rained all night; but as the sun rises higher, slow as molasses, the morning warms and mellows, and a coconut aroma arises from the gorse-covered outcrops. A ewe emerges cautiously from a tumbled thatchless cottage that has bog cotton growing in its rafters. Seeing the man and the bicycle and the girl go past, it stares as though rooted by an apparition. The strange bloom of the red bracken in the early morning sun is like the sheen, remarks the man, from a pregnant woman’s skin.
‘Like the what?’ she laughs.
‘Is that not right?’
‘It’s away with the faeries you are.’
Tufts of sheep-fleece on the jags of rusting barbed wire. Rainwater pooling in the lowland meadows.
Nine miles they walk until the track becomes little more than a footpath, overgrown here and there by nettles and blackberry copses grown madwoman crazy from neglect. The curlew.
The gannet. Do you remember those, too? He was telling you their Latin names.
The gannet. Do you remember those, too? He was telling you their Latin names.
They climb the cliff track slowly; it is stony and loose. He sweats as he wheels the old bicycle. The girl is suffering in the heat, but the man, being a man, is permitted to unfasten his shirt. Oh the air lividly murmurous with bees and wasps. Armies of water midges in the puddled, narrow laneways that are formed by the high, wild hedgerows. The girl, a city-dweller, beats at the air around her. ‘They’d have you demented,’ she says.
Crushed butterwort and heather and the odour of mountain chives. Sheep-shit, honeysuckle, bog myrtle and rose-root; the sweetness of wet wild strawberries. In the distance, breasting the coast, the southbound train from Dublin leaves an afterthought of smoke in its wake. The trundling of its engine is borne faintly to them on a breeze that smells of the peat and the dulse. A shrieked, mournful hoot as it chugs into a tunnel gouged years ago through the groin of Eagle Mountain. The cry summons a neighbour’s boy, a cellar-digger by trade, who emigrated to Brooklyn and died in an explosion there. Beyond the tracks, the sea is an impossible colour – the iridescent blue of the Virgin’s sash in a Renaissance Italian altar-panel the man once showed her in the gallery. And they can see the little pleasure-boats that ply out of Greystones and the fishermen’s smacks trailing petticoats of netting, but an immensity of gnarled granite arises through the breakers, lending strangeness, an anxiety, to the scene. Around the island bob black coracles, from which navvies hurry with grapples, and with slates and jemmies and spikes and coils of chain, for they are constructing a beacon on that wave-beaten rock – the old lighthouse has been decommissioned.
The girl and her companion take turns with his telescope. The task will be gruelling, the man mutters. She watches a soldier on the crag driving in iron stakes with a mallet; his high, hard, rhythmic swings. Like any living creature observed through a telescope, he looks mysterious, otherworldly as an angel. A sergeant
is bawling at him but she cannot hear his commands. The soldier strikes harder with the hammer.
is bawling at him but she cannot hear his commands. The soldier strikes harder with the hammer.
They walk on. The bicycle creaks. The map he has is old, has been folded so many times that its creases are frayed quite through. Someone has inked contour lines here and there on its quadrants, as though the declivities they reference have somehow not been noticed by the cartographer. A bookplate has been pasted on to its cover near the cartouche, reading
Ex Libris Trinity College Dublin
. Below it, in elegant copperplate, a hand not the man’s has inscribed a curious rhyme.
Ex Libris Trinity College Dublin
. Below it, in elegant copperplate, a hand not the man’s has inscribed a curious rhyme.
If this chart – thou steal’st away,
What shalt thou say
– On Judgment Day?
Yet if this map be – wrongly drawn
Trav’ller – mercy – from thy scorn.
What shalt thou say
– On Judgment Day?
Yet if this map be – wrongly drawn
Trav’ller – mercy – from thy scorn.
She reads the final couplet aloud. He chuckles at her pronunciation. In his accent, it rhymes. In hers, it does not. For less have millions starved.
It was stormy last night; an angry wind roared up the mouth of the Liffey. Soldiers from the barracks were mustered to Phoenix Park; a stand of ancient elms had been toppled in the Lord-Lieutenant’s demesne, threatening the stable-blocks and guest quarters and the ice-house. It had seemed to the girl that the holiday plotted so carefully and long might have to be postponed a little longer. Each of them had told lies so as to allow it to happen. The hurricane was troubling, its so-sudden coming-on an intimation of exposure, punishment. The bilious roar of thunder. She could not face the bed she shared with her sisters. It was summertime in Ireland again.
The gaslight in the kitchen was warm, consoling. Her brother came in from his work. His dress suit was soaked – his work was waiting tables – and she helped him out of the waterlogged jacket. The restaurant had been busy. A party from the Castle. ‘West Brits and the turncoats who lick them.’ No more give you
a tip than the steam off their piss. Like many who make a living being fleetingly pleasant to strangers, his belligerence at home was almost constant. But his vehemence could be softened when his favourite sister was present, becoming merely a role he seemed to feel he had to play for her: the long-suffering drudge, the putupon mule, the man forced to live amongst women.
a tip than the steam off their piss. Like many who make a living being fleetingly pleasant to strangers, his belligerence at home was almost constant. But his vehemence could be softened when his favourite sister was present, becoming merely a role he seemed to feel he had to play for her: the long-suffering drudge, the putupon mule, the man forced to live amongst women.
‘There’s a night. Where’s Mother?’ His eyes were glimmering.
‘She went out to the sodality. She’ll be home in a while.’
‘Mother of Jesus, were we running.
Your
friend was there. That character Yeats. I’d say he says more than his prayers.’
Your
friend was there. That character Yeats. I’d say he says more than his prayers.’
‘Sit in to the table, Georgie, till I heat up your supper.’
‘That’s a covey I’d no more trust than I could spit a bloody rat. Says I: You know my sister, sir, she’s below in your playhouse. Know what he says to me?’
‘We’ve no bread in the house, Georgie. Will you take a mug of porter?’
‘She has a most refained speaking voice.
Staring up at me so he was, the dirty long drink of water. And his butties all chuckling into the soup like lords and they shaking the oyster sauce off their dewlaps. D’make you heave up your supper at the sight so it would. And the talk out of them – Jesus almighty. Some playmaker was with them and he spouting more drivel than you’d hear in a leap year’s travel. Manners of a carthorse, the whole plain crew. They’d nearly shite trotting if they were let.’
Staring up at me so he was, the dirty long drink of water. And his butties all chuckling into the soup like lords and they shaking the oyster sauce off their dewlaps. D’make you heave up your supper at the sight so it would. And the talk out of them – Jesus almighty. Some playmaker was with them and he spouting more drivel than you’d hear in a leap year’s travel. Manners of a carthorse, the whole plain crew. They’d nearly shite trotting if they were let.’
The whomp of her heart like a breaker striking a ship.
‘Don’t be cursing in the house, Georgie. Do you want the porter?’
‘Ah, go and boil the back of my arse.’
‘If you want it, it’s there. I’ve washing to see to.’
‘You’re gone fierce secretive lately. There’s nothing the matter?’
‘No, Georgie. I’m fine. Eat your supper.’
A go-between came at midnight, saying the appointment still held, she was to be at Westland Row station at dawn, was to sit in the fourteenth carriage. The man would board the train when it pulled into Glenageary. She was not to acknowledge or greet him.
‘Who was that article,’ demanded her mother, ‘and he calling at this hour?’
‘Only a boy from the theatre saying the tour isn’t cancelled.’
‘I’ll theatre him now. And yourself along with him. And you streeling to the door of a Christian house in the black-dark night in your pelt.
Close up your buttons for the sanctified Jesus.
Is it a wetnurse I’m after raring? Or worse?’
Close up your buttons for the sanctified Jesus.
Is it a wetnurse I’m after raring? Or worse?’
At the summit of Henry’s Hill they come to the triangulation point that was placed there, he tells her, by Queen Victoria’s sappers. The last of the haze is burning away; the day, they know now, will be violently hot, as a drover in Annamoe predicted when they approached him for directions. Below them, in the glen, is an L-shaped whitewashed cabin surrounded by the remains of a tillage field. No road leads down to the homestead but there is a trail worn through the sedge-grass, and as they pick their way along it they see head-high bulrushes, hear the mournful croaking of frogs.
The cottage is unlocked, its door on the latch, its foot-long key inside on a hook. Cauldrons hanging from the rafters and in the cinder-filled hearth. A cracked daguerreotype of Daniel O’Connell over the inglenook. The room smells of linseed and musty old linen that wasn’t allowed to dry properly after laundering. On the mantelshelf is a black candle that has no wick, and he looks at it curiously and hefts it in his hand. She has to tell him it is a cake of furniture polish.
The room contains a bed in a rusting iron frame that someone has long ago distempered black but the paint is flaking badly.
‘What is that you’re after taking out of your haversack, John?’
‘A hammock, you owl. I shall naturally sleep outside.’
‘That it may keep fine for you,’ she says, nonplussed.
The nearest shop is at a distance of eleven miles. In the mornings, very early, he bicycles to Annamoe for bread, fresh eggs,
yesterday’s London
Times
. (‘Should anything of consequence be occurring in Ireland, it will be reported in the London
Times
.’) If the huckster is open he buys butter, tobacco. He likes to converse with the postmaster and his three dirty children who are ‘surly as Satan’, he says. Sometimes he makes photographs of the villagers or their houses. He can be gone three hours or more.
yesterday’s London
Times
. (‘Should anything of consequence be occurring in Ireland, it will be reported in the London
Times
.’) If the huckster is open he buys butter, tobacco. He likes to converse with the postmaster and his three dirty children who are ‘surly as Satan’, he says. Sometimes he makes photographs of the villagers or their houses. He can be gone three hours or more.
While he is away, she sweeps the cabin, goes down to the streamlet for water, launders their clothes; reads quietly in the ruined yard. She finds the thought exciting that her mother does not know where she is. She has lied to her mother for the sake of a man. It has the makings of a novel or a certain sort of play. She wonders who the leading character is.
What is her mother doing now? Probably opening the shop, or sitting among the tallboys and wardrobes in the window, fingering her beads and waiting. She is a small, jolly, disenchanted woman, who, if you lick her hand playfully, as her younger children sometimes do, tastes faintly of disappointment. She was once haughtily beautiful, so the neighbours attest, cruel-tongued and dark and Spanish-looking. Every boy in the Liberties was destroyed by her in his time; her choice of husband disappointed her parents.
They were right
, she says.
I hadn’t a pick of sense.
She has a tiny back kitchen ‘for the steam and the smells’. Marriage smells of cabbage and twice-boiled mutton and towards the end of the week, of dripping. ‘A man’s body is the map of Ireland. Keep your hand away from Limerick. And if any of youse shame this house by coming home with a surprise in your belly, do you know what will happen before you’ve the door on the latch? I’ll put your grandmother out on the street – not you.’
They were right
, she says.
I hadn’t a pick of sense.
She has a tiny back kitchen ‘for the steam and the smells’. Marriage smells of cabbage and twice-boiled mutton and towards the end of the week, of dripping. ‘A man’s body is the map of Ireland. Keep your hand away from Limerick. And if any of youse shame this house by coming home with a surprise in your belly, do you know what will happen before you’ve the door on the latch? I’ll put your grandmother out on the street – not you.’
Difficult to read in the flat dead heat. The sunshine on the yellowed old pages. She attempts to make use of his hammock but the midges are so numerous beneath the twin bent yews that it is impossible to lie still for long. What is the history of this field, this cabin? Were children ever born here? Where are they now? And that rusted double bed with its creaking quoits – but
it is better not to imagine such scenes. She finds a crumpled dollar bill that has been glued beneath the dresser, the words
‘do not tell him’
inked across Abraham Lincoln’s face. On St James’s Eve – she is wildly over-imaginative, he has often teased her – she turns in the yard, her blood shocked to riot, convinced she has heard an infant mewling from the midden-heap. But it is only a cat in heat.
it is better not to imagine such scenes. She finds a crumpled dollar bill that has been glued beneath the dresser, the words
‘do not tell him’
inked across Abraham Lincoln’s face. On St James’s Eve – she is wildly over-imaginative, he has often teased her – she turns in the yard, her blood shocked to riot, convinced she has heard an infant mewling from the midden-heap. But it is only a cat in heat.
They hike to the abandoned lighthouse. The claustrophobically narrow spiral staircase, its heavy blockwork leading up to the beacon room. The putty around the shattered panes flaking to powder in her fingertips. In the distance, to the south, several miles down the coast, is the jagged island from which the arising beacon will glitter in two years. He will be dead by then. But neither of them knows it. They look out at the spray and the seabirds. In the bole of an oak she finds an eyeless rag doll, arms and legs gnawed to flitters.
One morning she bathes naked in Aurora Lake, the water fierily cold, lacings of moss on its surface. The echo of the corncrakes on the scree-terraced cliffs. She sees him silhouetted on the hillside as he returns from the village, pedalling hard, his cape trailing behind him. She calls out but some trick of the water means that he cannot hear her. Wild swans in the sky. An eagle.
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