Peeling Oranges (10 page)

My mother minded the shop until Muddy recovered. Business was not hectic. As she records to Patrick, there was competition now from new multipurpose stores with brighter fronts.

***

I had held my dreams in check for a long time now as I sorted letters and diaries and papers and cuttings, and tried to put them into a semblance of order and chronology, while simultaneously blending them into the wider text of historical narrative, in my effort to see the whole picture. I had thought of myself as increasingly rational and sane. But at night, during this stage of my reading, my mind filled with all sorts of imaginings. I saw Gearóid and Peg making love. Her nightdress cut from the Union Jack. I saw Peg holding up pictures of the English monarch for the IRA man to kiss. I saw his steel revolver melt like a clock in a Dalí painting.

Did Peg become pregnant? Was that perhaps why she was disowned in the past? When Peg was ‘showing me off’ as a baby in a pram in Saint Patrick’s Park or wheeling me over the humpbacked bridge in Saint Stephen’s Green, was her claim that I was her baby really true after all? Martha used to joke about it, letting the ‘the old maid’ have her way, but she never contested it.

Peg, in early photos, is blue-eyed and only slightly fading-blond, just like my mother – just like me. But I knew Martha was my mother. Every child knows his mother surely (whatever about his father) by smell or instinct, or some unwritten chemistry.

I could have asked Peg straight out about my father, though she wouldn’t have answered me even if I had the nerve to ask. All information she gave was volunteered; that was her way. Non-knowing meant non-hurt in her book, just as it did in my mother’s. At least they had that much in common.

***

Patrick succeeded in getting his post back in Madrid without promotion after the War (when Irish neutrality was no longer an issue?). My mother commuted between Madrid and Dublin, but the more she did so, the more she became unsettled in both worlds, and the fading prospect of having a child introduced a strain in her relationship with Patrick.

Impotence in a partner can be grounds for an annulment of a marriage, but not then:

All my efforts to convince M about AI have failed. She makes me feel like a fool, an oddity. My health is not good in this heat. The things one does for a job. M wants to return to Dublin to settle there permanently. But I am positioned indefinitely now in Madrid, even though the JJ incident still hovers like a black cloud over me. There are so few people one can trust. But that is the diplomat’s world. The world I chose, or rather the world I was ushered into after Clongowes.

***

An attempted theft:

M and A have just returned from the Retiro. They are distraught, or at least A is. They said they were sitting on a bench in the park with their eyes closed to the sun, when M said she felt something like a rat nibbling at her handbag. When she opened her eyes she saw the long, unclean nails of a beggar trying to open her bag to steal her purse. He clung like a leech to the bag, and despite the shoo-shooing of both women he was hard to shake off – hunger makes the poor fearless. When the wretch relinquished his grip on the bag thanks to a push from A’s ample arms, M dipped into her purse and gave him a one hundred peseta note. The would-be thief walked away as puzzled as A was, or as I myself was later, on hearing about the matter. I gave out to M (perhaps unfairly; she started to cry, and said that I had no charity). I told her that a diplomat’s wife must stay clear from all public incidents, and reminded her of the JJ matter. As part of the corps diplomatique we must always remain calm and circumspect even when many tongues wag.

***

The seeds of doubt:

Maybe I should never have married her. I built up her expectations and then shot her down. G is nearer her own age, and nearer her own class too. That is why I fear him so much. Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped JJ that day. My role would have been made easier as a diplomat and as a husband, and without doubt as a what? in the other area too. I mean what do I care about gunmen or revolutionaries? I would like to see a united Irish republic, but only if obtained peacefully. I am no fanatic.

***

My mother returned to Dublin again in the spring of 1947.

‘The break will do you good,’ Patrick said.

My mother recounts to Patrick that there was a lush spring growth in the countryside of Rathfarnham in nineteen forty seven: grass lengthened, yellow furze brightened the hillsides, buds appeared on trees. As the days got warmer, she visited the house more often, and enjoyed sitting in the garden when the sun shone. Wrapped in a shawl, she embroidered or read or wrote a letter.

One of the… perhaps the only drawback, Patrick of a Liberties’ dwelling: no garden of one’s own. Your glasshouse is still standing, but there are just weeds growing through the seed trays.

I can hear the wireless in the kitchen playing. It’s Deanna Durbin singing, Spring In My Heart. (By the way I paid the licence bill which came for the wireless: twelve and sixpence).

The lilac has come into bloom – such a perfumey scent; and the clematis, like little stars, is beginning to shine on dark foliage, concealing the dead poplar. You’ll have to dig it up when you come home. How many years is it there now?

I am learning the names of all the plants from gardening books – after all you did tell me I read too many romances. I planted a little yew tree, a little golden Irish yew. They say it will live for a thousand years. Oh, will I tell you a good one? When I said to Peg the clematis are growing, she thought I said tomatoes, and she exclaimed that she loved ‘the small Irish ones the best – they are so juicy’.’ Well, I chuckled. It was the fist time I ever heard Peg praise anything Irish. I tell you, sister or not, that woman is a puzzle to me. She wanted to know where ‘Gerry’ was. I told her I’d Gerry her. I sent her on her way and told her not to come to this house again without permission.

I never saw so many dandelions. All the seeds floating in the air. It’s all chance, Patrick, whether there is life or not. It’s not for us to interfere with the ways of nature. Qué será, será.

By the way, I have a crow to pluck with you: when I was rooting through your clothes, I discovered loads of socks thrown in a box. All they need is darning; they shouldn’t be thrown out. Don’t you know there are many poor folk who would be glad of them?

I am happy to be on my own just for a little while, Patrick. Sorry, that sounds all wrong. It sounds like I don’t miss you. I do. I do. I know you think it’s a terrible thing to be childless, to be married and childless. A child cements a marriage, you say, but you talk as if a child were a thing like a bag of mortar. How could I agree to what you suggest? You will pardon me for speaking like this, but I must say what I feel. You believe you have a right to have a child (and I suppose I too believed this in the beginning). You think that childlessness is an illness that can be cured by medical science. I am reading lots from library books; they are on the index, but Miss McKenna, the librarian in Kevin Street, knows me well and she gets them for me and hides them under the counter. The environment must be right for the child, Patrick, not just for the adult; there must be warmth and love and security. We have no right to bring a child into the world unless we can provide these three things. We owe it to future generations. I realise now that a woman who gives birth to thirteen children is no more than a breeding machine. And you and I, Patrick, longing to produce even one offspring. Nature is strange but true, and we must not contravene her. But don’t worry; I won’t be talking to anyone about us over here. I never break a promise.

***

I continue my research. A good historian must be objective, must keep a cool head. But I keep thinking of the words tripping off my mother’s tongue:
warmth and love and security – w
ords which were anathematised from my world. Why? How could my mother talk like that on paper and then treat me as she did, as she still does?

I go into the kitchen. She is scalding the teapot.

‘Will you have a cup, love? It will warm you up. There’s a chill in the evening.’

‘Warmth! What about the other two things?’ I say, the words of the reading still swimming around in my head. And the word ‘love’, I think to myself, that she bestows so freely on everyone she meets is just a meaningless piece of speech.

‘Sugar and milk’ she says, turning around to go to the press.

I’m about to say not those things but the things that every child needs, but I don’t say it for fear she’ll take the letters away.

‘There you are now, love,’ she says, putting the milk and sugar on the table with the tea, ‘the three essentials.’

***

My mother spent the summer of nineteen forty seven commuting between the shop in the Liberties and the house in Rathfarnham. Many of her old friends from Jacob’s (
Jacob’s mice,
as they were called) were now either laden down with children or had emigrated. She felt a sense of isolation; she was a woman wandering between two worlds, a displaced person.

When September arrived, the weather had turned very cold. It did not augur well for the winter.

I went to the house – Patrick, we should put a name on this house, but I suppose it is waiting for us to fill it, as a family. We are waiting a long time now, but we must continue to live in hope. A woman who lives near Mrs Chaigneau has just given birth to a baby girl after an eleven year interval. Isn’t that wonderful? I want to try again so much. There are things that I know now that I didn’t know before. I long to see you, to tell you. Anyway, when I got to the house I got a bit of a land to find a pile of dirty dishes in the sink in the kitchen. And in the master bedroom the bedclothes were ruffled. The bathroom contained an unknown toothbrush almost worn away like the second-hand ones for sale in Madrid, and a very sharp shaving knife, not at all like your little blade, and there was a residue of soap on the side of the trough. It was only when I returned to the kitchen that I noticed on the pine table the sprig of white heather, and I knew I was safe.

I lit the paraffin heater first, and then I lit a log fire. When it was blazing I snuggled into the settee and started reading Forever Amber. I know you think I’m a brazen hussy reading such a book, but it’s not dirty at all. I don’t know what all the hullabaloo was about.

Outside I heard the wind rise in the trees. I felt so safe and warm here, especially knowing Gearóid was not far away. Despite his indiscretions, I know he’d never let anything happen to me. There was so much upheaval in Spain, Patrick, I could never feel secure there. Hopefully, with the war over, things will be more settled when I go back. I really miss you. Our little differences heal themselves in absence, don’t you think?

It was just after midnight when I heard knocks on the drawing-room window – I knew it had to be Gearóid; everyone else would have knocked on the door; besides, it was the three familiar knocks that we always used as children.

When I opened the door, I saw no one at first; then a hand appeared with the middle finger curled around a trigger; and slowly his face became visible, as if it were hanging from a black canopy without a body attached to it. He saw the house light on, he said in Irish, but he wanted to be sure it was me. He seemed very troubled. He said he had been up North, but he wouldn’t tell me any more except that he wished Tomás were alive. There was a smell of drink off him. He had been hiding here for a few days and hoped I didn’t mind. He asked if he could hide out for a little while longer. I never saw him looking so worried before. How could I refuse him?

Just a few days, he said, and he would be out of my hair.

***

My mother did tell me some things – distant things, neutered by time. She told me when she was born – 1904. (I was able to confirm this when I found her baptismal certificate in a biscuit tin). Her people had a shop on Bride Street in the Liberties across from Saint Patrick’s Park, the park attached to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. I was often brought to the park as a baby in a pram. Around the corner from the shop was Jacob’s biscuit factory.

On the mantelpiece in Muddy’s drawing-room over the shop there was a photograph (without a frame) of two young men, one of whom was my uncle Tomás. The other man’s face was hidden by his hands. Mam said she couldn’t remember the concealed man’s name. He was someone from the Liberties who was obviously camera-shy. She said he was shielding his face from the glare of the sun. Aunt Peg said he was Gerry McSweeney, the IRA man, and that he was on the run. I don’t know where the photograph is now, but I remember its corners curled up like the magic cellophane fish you got in Christmas crackers.

The shop had glass jars for sweets with screw-off black lids. A wooden counter. A weighing scales with heavy brass weights. A sharp cheese knife and greaseproof paper. Loose cigarettes. Woodbines, a halfpenny each with a free match – hence the half-full match boxes which customers often complained about. Coal in the yard in the back: a small rectangle of greyness walled all round like a prison yard. There were long hours standing and varicose veins. There was the taking of pennies for the Diddly club. And sticky fingers from handling the
Bulls Eyes.
And presents at Christmas for the customers: puddings, bottles of sherry, boxes of chocolates, Jacob’s biscuits. And memories, always in black and white, the silhouettes of men in the drawing-room and muffled voices and the sound of feet hurrying through dusky lanes.

The shop is no more; it was taken over by an Italian fish and chips’ café. The same building, the same bricks breathing different worlds. Commerce imposes incongruities on culture. Will the Italians find the secrets hidden in stone? Or will they find a chair passing strange in the drawingroom where Michael Collins once sat? Stones and wood build history. New stones replace old stones. History is painted over.