Tales and Imaginings (17 page)

When I was invited to address a conference marking the centenary of the birth of a distinguished Irish essayist, I was gratified; the lineup of speakers included several well-known names in whose company I was proud to be numbered, the venue was in a cathedral city I was curious to visit, and I had long revered the style and ethos of the man who was to be our subject. In the event, nothing
disappointed
; it was a weekend of physical and mental wellbeing. On the train down from Dublin I met some wits and poets I knew, veterans of the convivial circuit of arts festivals. We the honoured guests were met at the station and conducted to a grand eighteenth-century townhouse that had been converted for the purposes of civic
hospitality
without cramping its dignity; my bedroom must have been thirty feet long and proportionately broad, with a semicircular bay of windows looking across a formal garden to handsome stable buildings, beyond which the battlements of a medieval castle rose into the blue and gold of sunset. At the official dinner that night I was introduced to members of the family of the writer whose
excellence
had brought us together; they all, I observed with
appreciation
, shared his inheritance of patrician bone-structure and sensitive features. That family had been a part of their county’s social fabric for many generations; in fact the subject of my own lecture was a historical study the writer had undertaken out of his deep love of
the locality and its traditions. At the end of our two days of lectures and discussions we were privileged to visit the family home, a
Georgian
farmhouse a few miles out in the countryside, for a reception. We admired the lovely river-valley it overlooked and the horizon punctuated by the ancient spires and towers he had written of, and when the evening grew cold we drank wine and looked at dark-
varnished
portraits in fire-lit drawing-rooms and read the spines of books in studies that wore their learning as comfortably as old
slippers
. Then, having been for a time so graciously made part of a long-continued dwelling in home and city and land, we dispersed with mutual esteem and promises of return.

There was a strange man among the crowd waiting for the train next morning. I instinctively moved away from him as from
something
suspect. A shadowiness about him, and his incomprehensible brief addresses to people pushing by, who ignored him, made me wonder if he was a refugee from eastern Europe. He might have been in his late thirties, wore a dark blue anorak, and carried a large black plastic bucket. A few minutes later in the train, while I was taking off my coat and locating my reading-matter before taking my seat, he came along the corridor with his bucket, repeatedly darting one hand up into the air in an odd greeting. He had a
gentle
little smile, and, assuming that he was begging, I dropped a few coins into the bucket. He stopped in surprise, said, ‘You’re decent!’, gave a low bark, and continued past me.

When he shortly reappeared and sat down opposite me I sighed inwardly; I had already opened a book that demanded close
reading
. ‘There were three sets of twins in the family‚’ he said. ‘My father took off.’ He put his head down and barked two or three times. ‘I have Tourette’s Syn … Syn …’ he explained. ‘Ah, I’ve heard of that‚’ I replied, ‘I read about that in a book by …’ He went on straight away: ‘It’s a circuit in my brain. When I see a taxi I have to put up my hand and say ‘Taxi!’ even though I don’t want a taxi.
It causes trouble. They sent me home from the Christian Brothers, I was cursing and cursing, I couldn’t help it. Nobody understood. My mother didn’t understand. I was born with a club foot.’ He reached down to his leg and twisted it up to show me the hump on his foot. ‘I was in hospital for a long time with the foot. My mother came once a week. She was bawling every time when she went. So was I.’

I asked him where he was from, and he named a small town in Waterford. He said he had slept rough the previous night, in a park; I was not quite sure this was true as his anorak didn’t look damp and he was clean-shaven, but it could have been so. He had a rather appealing face, with wistful grey-blue eyes and a tender little pursed-up mouth. His nose looked as if it had been knocked crooked and there was a little scab on one side of it, but otherwise he was quite neat and clean.

‘I got the bucket out of a skip, cleaned it up, put some old cloths in it‚’ he said. ‘I went to McDonald’s to ask if I could wash the
windows
. They said they had their own staff for that. I’m going to Dublin now, wash a few car windows. Get myself some gear, clothes and that. I might go to Liverpool.’ He obviously had nothing with him apart from the bucket and the rags in it. He fished my coins out of it and counted them. ‘One pound forty – it’s a start!’ he said brightly. ‘I can’t stay at home under my mother. Something makes me take off. I went to Belfast once, went into some places, they wanted to beat me up. It’s been a hard life, sometimes I wish it was over, just go to sleep, get some peace. When I ran away to Dublin the first time I was bawling in the station, I didn’t know where to go. I was frightened sleeping rough at first. And in the hostels with the druggies. I got mugged once. I had one hundred and
seventy-three
pounds saved up. This man gave me a lift in a taxi. I thought it didn’t look like a proper taxi but I got in. These other fellows got in and they took me somewhere and bashed me with …’ – he
sketched some angular object in the air with his arm – ‘They said not to look round when they were going away. But I can look after myself now. When we get to Dublin I’ll ring the Homeless and they’ll tell me where to go.’ He got up suddenly and went off down the corridor, barking, saluting people on either side. I sat back, and decided I might as well give myself to this encounter.

When he took his seat again, his legs had a minute-long spasm of kicking, during which he stared out of the window. ‘Ride that horse!’ I said with a smile. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked, when
stillness
returned to him. I told him my name, and he looked off into space. ‘Names go in one ear and out the other,’ he said rather
forlornly
. ‘I went to London once,’ he continued his story. ‘I had a job in a pub, cleaning the floor. The North London Tavern, do you know it? I went into a church there and lit a candle in front of the statue of Our Lady. I felt a deep sense of peace.’

‘Was that the big church on Quex Road?’ I asked.

‘How did you know that?’

‘I’m a thought-reader!’ I joked. He asked me what I did, and on hearing that I was a writer he said, ‘You’re intelligent. Did you write that book?’ – putting his thumb on the book in front of me. ‘No, that one would be beyond me,’ I said. (It was a work by the
American
philosopher Hilary Putnam.) ‘But I should be writing down your story,’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Mattie Laffin. I’ve had a sad life. When I was a kid I got a job in a hotel, but they said I was disturbing the guests. They wanted me to work in a dark shed at the back. I’m afraid of the dark ever since my brothers came at me with Hallowe’en masks. I went off to Galway. I took an overdose in the Cathedral, ended up in the Regional Hospital, that’s where they diagnosed me.’

‘I know the Regional, it’s very good‚’ I said.

‘It’s lovely! I was five and a half weeks there. I didn’t want to leave, but they had to put me out in the end.’

At this point the ticket inspector appeared alongside us, punched my ticket, and with a slight smile made some pretence of punching a ticket for Mattie, who whispered to me, ‘They don’t bother me on the trains.’ Then the refreshments trolley arrived and I bought him a sandwich and a coffee, which he enjoyed, but
without
urgency. We joked about the book I could make out of his life. ‘I fell in love with a girl called Cynthia once, but she took off‚’ he told me.

‘How long did that last?’ I asked.

‘Four weeks!’ he said, and we both laughed ruefully. ‘Do you have a family?’ he asked.

‘Just my wife‚’ I said. ‘We don’t have children.’ He sighed so compassionately that for a moment I even felt sad about the
matter
, which in fact hasn’t troubled me for thirty years.

‘Can you write?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I can write, I went to school till I was fourteen or sixteen.’

I gestured at the compass-rose logo on his tee-shirt; ‘Could you write down for me where you’ve been?’ There were some blank pages at the back of my book; I pushed it over to him, and he began to write. He had to ask me the spelling of many words, but his script was quite neat. When he had summarized his past he smiled and said, ‘Where will I go next? I’m a wanderer!’

‘We could call it “The Wanderer”,’ I suggested. He agreed, and I wrote it in above his text.

Here is Mattie’s itinerary so far; I have changed one or two names only:

On my reminding him, he added:

By the time he was finished the train was coming into Dublin. Two young American women in the file of people passing along the corridor hailed Mattie with ‘Come on down here, we’ve got
something
for you.’ He followed them, and came back smiling. ‘Look, they gave me some food in a bag. Cheese and bread and stuff. That was decent of them, wasn’t it?’ In the meantime I had fished in my wallet for a twenty-pound note for him, and had also decided not to give him my address, imagining him turning up on the doorstep of our orderly life unexpectedly. (Later I was ashamed of that
decision
.) He took the note with a nod: ‘That’ll get me started!’ We
shook hands and parted. ‘I’ll have a rest in the station, get a snack, before I go anywhere‚’ he said as he went off ahead of me. Later, as he wandered around with his bucket and I filled in the hour before my connecting train was due by visiting the paper stall and the bookshop, and going out to lean on the parapet and watch the idle dirty river water for a bit, our paths crossed two or three times, and he nodded to me cheerfully. I expect and hope that he took the evening train back to where he had come from.

When I had settled myself in the Galway train I opened my book. Unnoticed by me, Mattie had written a dedication into the front of it. ‘god Bless you always – Matthew James Laffin‚’ it said, just under the book’s title,
Realism
with
a
Human
Face,
which, I now saw, would do well enough for the extra chapter it had acquired.

‘Do you remember that fantasy of ours, about letters mysteriously delivered to us during a postal strike?’

‘Dimly. It was a dream, I think. And I believe I dreamed it, not you. What was it exactly?’

‘All the letters we’d ever regretted sending for one reason or another were returned unopened, and the letters we’d hoped for or feared but that had never come turned up at last. Reminders of things left unresolved, neglected relationships and so on. Everybody else continued to receive such letters too, including the ones we should have written and didn’t, so that by the time official
deliveries
were resumed all our accounts with the past were drawn up and balanced.’

‘I don’t usually have such consequential dreams! You must have shaped it up if you got it from me. But I forgive you; it’s part of your crafty craft, to steal ideas and return them improved. What reminded you of that?’

‘I was thinking about a letter I wrote, which I really wish had come back now. That one to Joy.’

‘But that was years and years ago! The one you wrote when Benny died?’

‘That’s the one, though if you remember it was actually almost a year after he died. We hadn’t written to them for a long time, and then the telephone rang and it was that librarian woman from the Athens college saying she was just passing through London and Joy had asked her to ring and say hello. And I asked her how Joy was, and she said ‘She’s just fine!’, but when I asked about Benny she went quite silent. She had no idea we didn’t know. She was terribly embarrassed, and I suppose she was shocked that we hadn’t kept in touch, because she would have known what good friends we all were.’

‘Well we didn’t really have much in common with them. They were fun to go on holiday with, out to the islands. Joy was fond of you.’

‘Not too fond?’

‘No, of course not. They were passionately engaged with each other, I’d say. And it flourished in that blinding physical light. Remember that time in Naxos out on the rocks by the bit of a ruined temple? We had that huge yellow melon but no knife and couldn’t get into it, and old Dimitri came by and showed us how to lift it high in both hands and whack the end of it down on a sharp stone. It fell into segments as neat as if they’d been carved, just the right number too. And the juice splashed on Joy’s thigh and Benny made a great performance of licking it off.’

‘One of Benny’s “triumphal moments”, that was, the perfect
splitting
of the melon. “To burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” …’

‘Yes, he was always ready with a scrap of Keats, usually with a ribald application. Every evening we had “the true, the blushful Hippocrene”, whatever Hippocrene is; it sounds like horse-rub.’

‘“A beaker full of the warm south …” – which was exactly right for those evenings on the seafront with the sky ripening and the first stars popping into existence, drinking that tarry wine we became quite fond of and watching that wild ragged fellow with his
little shadow-theatre.’

‘Weren’t we fortunate to experience all that before it was
overrun
! But we knew it was coming to an end, that those were the last performances; nobody wanted those idiotic adventures of
Megalexandros
and the Turkish Bey, or Black-eyes and his dreadful twin sons – though they could have come out of the Simpsons, come to think of it.’

‘Each generation likes to imagine it’s the last, that we caught the last light of the great days. It’s all we have against the presumptions of today’s young. The pre-war philhellenes whose books brought us to the islands would have thought of us as part of the trampling horde of aftercomers. But it certainly wouldn’t be the same quiet place nowadays. We couldn’t lark around in classical nudity in
Ariadne’s
Temple with nobody to see us. Joy with a big beach-towel slipping off her shoulder, turning away with one arm up in the
attitude
of the Ariadne in the National Gallery, the Titian – Benny said she looked fit to be “charioted by Bacchus and his pards”.’

‘And the dynamite-fishing – we wouldn’t dream of doing that nowadays.’

‘No, that was disgraceful! But at the time it was an irresistible adventure. Benny was desperate to go with Dimitri when we heard that he still did it occasionally. I remember the lady we rented the room from shaking her head and telling us there were lots of
unemployable
men hanging around the Piraeus who’d lost a hand or an arm that way; but we just laughed at her. Actually it was the
dynamiting
episode that I described in my letter to Joy. I just wanted to share a memory with her, but once I got going it all came out like a short story.’

‘Is that why you wish the letter could come back? You should have taken a copy.’

‘It wasn’t so simple, taking copies in those days. Now you just click “save” and its done, but then you had to fiddle around with
carbon-paper, and half the time you’d put it in the wrong way round and end up with a mirror-image copy on the back of the sheet. Anyway, wouldn’t taking a copy have made the letter more of a literary exercise than a spontaneous expression of sympathy?’

‘And it wasn’t?’

‘There certainly was something about it that disturbed me. I could have written the usual anodyne formulaic condolences. Instead I was taking a risk, intervening in another life, trying to express a shared sense of loss – the sort of thing I know I can do, “with consummate craft” as the reviewers say, or craftiness as you’d say. But I couldn’t be sure Joy would be open to reliving the high old times. After all, the woman on the telephone had said that she was “just fine”, so I might only be upsetting her. However, I wrote what I wrote, and I was pleased with it, and I stuck it in an
envelope
and posted it straight away – because, I suspect, I wanted to convince myself I’d written it solely to help her with her grief, and not because I was carried away by the thrills of writing. Then the weeks and months went by with no answer, and I got more and more anxious, but eventually it faded away into the back of my mind.’

‘So what brought it to the front now?’

‘Well, as usual, I’m trying to devise something really difficult to write. Remember the old slogans about consciousness-raising? I’ve come to think that writing should raise consciousness to an
unbearable
degree. So I’m planning a text in two parts. The first could be a conversation, like this one, that would give the reader some background, set the scene, set the trap – for myself, that is. And the
second
part would be the letter.’

‘The real original letter?’

‘There’s the crux. What is
it one is
reading: a letter, or a literary reconstruction of a letter? There would be no external clues. Maybe the real letter did come back, such things happen, and the reader
isn’t to know. Or maybe I did take a copy, in which case was I really writing to Joy at all, or was I exploiting her grief, and mine too, come to think of it, for the sake of literature? But suppose I
genuinely
have only the vaguest memory of what was in that letter so long ago and yet I succeed in producing a pretend letter convincing enough to raise such doubts in the reader’s mind, does that suggest the original letter was also a skillful concoction? So the first part of the text would put me in an impossible position for writing the
second
; it would be like trying to forge my own signature.’

‘You seem determined to show the business of literature in a tricky light, like kids holding a torch under their chins to give themselves skull faces at Hallowe’en. Whereas I’m always bidding you take art easy, as leaves grow on the tree.’

‘I know, I know. And I am old and obstinate, and with you do not agree.’

‘I just wish you would put all that hyper-self-consciousness out of your mind, and simply write. Write about Benny. He represented something there hasn’t been too much of in our lives since those days. You admired him.’

‘Yes, he could be brilliant sometimes, finding unexpected
connections
. I’ve been trying to recall his theory of memory-dust.’

‘Something about a line three inches long, wasn’t it?’

‘It didn’t have to be three inches long. But suppose it was, and you take out the middle inch, leaving two bits. Then you take out the middle third of each of those bits, so that you have four little bits left. And take out the middle of each of those, and so on ad infinitum.’

‘What on earth does that leave you with? Nothing?’

‘Something called Cantor Dust. Cantor was a mad mathematician Benny had read about. It would look like a line of dust-particles, but if you took a microscope to one of them it would turn out to be made up of a line of even smaller particles, and each of those would
be a line of yet smaller ones. God knows what Cantor invented it for – to prove something about infinity in the little, I suppose. But for Benny it was an image of memory. There are whole years of one’s life one remembers little or nothing about, and in the periods you do remember there are forgotten times, gaps. And so on down to the most vividly recalled incidents; they are riddled with lost details.’

‘And the longer you live the more worm-eaten the past becomes, I fear. I’d forgotten Cantor Dust. Well then, dust to dust! Why not try to sweep up a bit of it, in memory of Benny? Write it as a letter to Joy. She must be retired by now, but the College would forward it. Or else dig out that copy I suspect you took.’

‘No, memory-dust it would have to be. If enough of it subsists …’

Dear Joy

We heard from Mrs R. of Benny’s death. I didn’t write straight away as I wanted to wait for a quiet time in which to think about him, and about you, because you were both very special to us and if we haven’t kept in touch it’s a failing on our side, I know. I mean that it
doesn’t
mean we are forgetting you, just that so much has happened since that has been so complicated – for good and ill – I didn’t want to just baldly state it in letters and the effort of explaining and expressing it all felt too much, something one put off. So I fell out of the habit of letters, though we relished the occasional note from you, and Benny’s jokey cards. And M as you know only puts pen to paper under duress.

But we’ve often talked about how you helped us find our feet
when we came out to the College, and then led us into that Aegean world that was almost too bright for us at first, and felt precarious somehow, and the better for being so. ‘We are all living on the rim of a volcano nowadays’ – that’s what Benny wrote in the visitors’ book of the taverna on Santorini. He was always looking for
perfect
moments, and he could give himself to them in a way we
couldn’t
imitate because we were afraid of them shattering themselves. He loved explosions. That old fisherman Dimitri in Naxos, Benny used to pretend he was the last surviving witness of the Santorini eruption in whatever BC, when all those delicate Cycladic statuettes went up in the air. Benny had long conversations with him about the sea and storms and fishing even though they had only four words in common – ‘whsh-whsh-whsh’ for calm weather, ‘pshooooo-pshooooo’ for a storm, ‘ssssssssh’ for a fuse, ‘boooom’ for dynamite. No, Benny told me that last one was always in
capitals
, ‘BOOOOOOM’. And he said D’s description of the eruption as seen from Naxos in the minutes before the tidal wave swept over it was superb, using only the same four words.

D was delighted to find someone to listen to him mumbling on about the old days, and especially when B asked him to take us dynamite-fishing. He hadn’t done it for years, I think because he couldn’t dive to collect the fish and the local lads were too much under the eyes
of the police to risk it. The illegality of it attracted Benny, the planning, us all sneaking out of the village by different routes before dawn, meeting up at one of those tiny whitewashed chapels dotted over the hillsides (religious conveniences, B called them) where D prayed to the Madonna for a long time, then down to that hidden-away beach. I remember so clearly the reek of that bagful of squashed-up cheese and anchovies D flung out into the deep water to attract the fish. Then we sat and waited for sunrise, everything was silvery, we watched the little waves fitting
themselves
into the details of the shoreline and had an absurd
conversation
about whether any two waves had ever broken in exactly the same way. You – Fraulein Freude was your nickname with the
language
-students; did you know that? – you quoted Faust proposing that if ever he was caught saying to the moment, Stay, you are so beautiful, then Hell could have him. And we agreed that if the
Universe
should ever repeat itself in any of its parts or periods it would be instantly snatched out of existence, and deservedly.

Then the sun came up to warm us and the rocks turned
honey-colour
, and D started to prepare a stick of dynamite. It was like a bar of toffee, I thought. And there was a little brass cartridge of gelignite, the detonator, which had to be bitten firmly onto the end of the fuse. Poor toothless D looked at each of us in turn,
pretending
to inspect our teeth, and handed the thing to Benny. It was a test of course, and B was so anxious to prove himself he almost bit the wrong end and we all leaned forward to him with arms
outstretched
crying ‘No!’ I don’t suppose there was any real danger, but I saw you were shaken. But Benny just pulled a long face, imitating our landlady, and said ‘There’s many a fine young lad hanging around the Piraeus without a head through that mistake!’ Then D tied the detonator to the dynamite and lit the fuse and blew on it till it was sparkling away, and flung the lot as far as he could into the middle of the bay. Nothing happened for a couple of seconds, and then came the solid satisfying BOOOOM, and a slim column of water rose into the air, glittering, and hung there, and in my mind it hangs there yet, it was so beautiful. And it was as if we could hear the sound rushing away from us up the hillside and out to sea like, Benny said afterwards, the voice that went all over the
Mediterranean
once, crying ‘The Great God Pan is
dead!’