The China Factory (10 page)

‘Claude… That's a strange name for around here,' she said. It was late and we were sitting on a low wall outside the dancehall in the local town. Her hair was dark and silken. She had just qualified as a nurse.

‘I'm not from around here,' I said. ‘I'm from Dublin. But my mother was from Kilcash. I'm staying over there with my aunt.'

I watched her take this in. I had noticed how country people—even the staff in the boys' boarding school where I had come to teach—treated me with a little reserve, reverence even, when I said I was from Dublin.

‘And who called you Claude, if your mother was from Kilcash?' she asked.

‘My father's name was Claude. He's dead now. He was a Protestant. He had to convert to marry my mother.'

She was quiet then. Perhaps she was thinking what I had thought as a child—that my father must have loved my mother greatly to have crossed over.

‘It's not as drastic as it sounds,' I said. ‘He wasn't religious. Protestants aren't glued to their religion like us Catholics.'

I saw relief in her eyes. So it wasn't the idea of my father's sacrifice for love that had silenced her before, but worry that I too might be a Protestant. ‘And you,
Suzanne?
Why aren't you a Mary or a Margaret or an Ann?'

She smiled. ‘My mother had an aunt, a nun. She spent a few years in a convent in France—near Limoges, where the famous china comes from. There was a young novice there called Suzanne. She'd arrived at the convent gates one evening after walking for miles, and the nuns took her in. She was an orphan. She saw terrible things in her young life—I don't know what, maybe the war. Anyway my mother said if she ever had a daughter she'd call
her Suzanne. And she did. But then Suzanne died when she was a year old, and a few years later she had me. I suppose she didn't want to waste the name.'

Our names, in this place, had bound us. We were a little apart, she hauling the dead sister around, me with the Protestant blood in my veins. We spent evenings together. She told me her mother could be severe on people, even on her. One day we took the train to Dublin. She was very shy at the start. We went out to Howth and walked along the pier and then up the hill. I told her about Yeats and Maud Gonne and the day in 1892 when they cycled out there from the city.

‘They went out to visit Maud's aunt, or some relative,' I said. ‘They walked along the sea cliffs. Afterwards Yeats wrote a poem, “The White Birds”, about that day.' I did not say that the poem held the wish that the two lovers be together forever, like the seagulls. I was not sure what I felt. I had nothing to pit the day against, no past loves. We walked around the city. In a pub, in a moment of joy and brief forgetfulness, she put a hand out to touch my arm and then, remembering herself, she shrank back swiftly, painfully, as if stung. It was this nervousness and her nearness that moved me. Nothing more. That day a huge Irish wolfhound had come towards us on the pier and in panic she'd crossed to my other side. I should have taken her hand. I saw how easily she was shaken—startled by the train's sudden jolting or by car horns or cries on the streets. On the way home the train slowed and stopped in the middle of nowhere and in the eerie quiet of the carriage she looked out at a dark forest. I felt a wave of tenderness for her, for the part of her that so feared the world.

What came to mind in that moment were afternoons at university with my head full of Homer, sitting next to a fellow student in Greek Studies, and being briefly, easily, understood.

I wanted to want her that day in Howth, and other days. I wanted to charge our moments with romance. But as soon as she
showed any sign of closeness or keenness or intimacy—even the mention of a next meeting—I withdrew in sullen silence.

One February night she came to my aunt's door. ‘I'm going away,' she said. Her voice was strained. ‘I have a job offer in London.' My heart gave a little flutter. I felt such relief. ‘Unless you want me to stay,' she added.

That evening last summer after meeting her on the road I came home and opened a bottle of wine and let
The Köln Concert
fill the house at high volume. When Jarrett began the climb in the first movement, I felt each pensive note brush my thoughts, I felt him pluck silence from inside me and put notes on it, put an act of faith in it. It was the same quiet collapse I'd felt on first hearing it thirty years ago. The notes rose and swelled and then fell away in that beautiful mesmeric descent. All my life music and books have been the refuge of my mind, the means of striving towards something pure and absolute and sublime. But how can I know what poets and musicians know? They suffer. They feel deeply. They weep for parched sparrows. And for some every angel is indeed terrible. Once I read a story about a woman whose job it was to care for an old bedridden man. The old guy still craved physical intimacy, and one day, moved with compassion, she locked the door and took off her top and let him fondle her breasts. There are some people for whom one will give almost anything and tolerate almost anything because of what they have suffered, because of the high order of their souls.

Over the years, over long winters and occasional melancholic nights I would often think ‘How bad could it have been, marriage?' Other men manage. It would have brought its comforts—a family in whom to hope, a wife to direct a man outwards. Then I would find myself behind a woman in a queue and my eyes would fasten on her heavy arms or on flesh bulging over a band of her clothing and I'd feel a small jab at the base of my spine. Or I'd see a local
couple drive by on a Sunday afternoon, the back seat full of kids, a wife in the front, and in the man's face a glimpse of the cloying nature of domesticity. I'd turn in my gate, open my door, enter my quiet sheltered life with astonishing relief. She sent me a card that first Christmas, her address on the left-hand side, and a PS underneath.
If we're good, we'll keep
. They did not sound like her words, but I knew what it took for her to write them.

A year after she left, in springtime, my aunt suffered a stroke and was dead by the following autumn. She left me her house and it was the local builder whom I'd hired to do renovations over a year later who told me of Suzanne's return. He was building a house for Tom Cleary, he said. ‘I believe the sister is back from England.' He must have seen something in my face or known of my connection. ‘Did you not hear? Oh she's back a while now but no one has laid eyes on her—she doesn't go out or go to Mass or anything, and if you ever called up there there'd be all this shuffling and whispering and running around inside before they'd answer the door. The mother doesn't let on that the daughter is back. In fairness, the brother is a nice fellow… She was a nurse in London, I believe.'

That winter I saw something that knocked me sideways. One morning in the dark I was awoken by a strange prompting. Something drew me outside. The world was encased in frost. I walked along the road and up the hill and into a field. My breath came in little bursts of vapour. I walked deep into the fields and there, ahead of me, rose a colossal ghostly silhouette. Horses… seven, eight of them, standing still and silent. Even when I drew close they did not stir. They looked at me and I at them, in perfect accord. Then the sky lightened and a ray of sun broke through and blazed on the horizon and steam rose from the horses' backs and their coats shone. Still they looked at me, with dark patient eyes. I have never felt such wholeness, such oneness.

No, that is not correct. There was an afternoon long ago at
university, with the sun slanting in through high windows and beside me, in the seat next to me, a pale youth from the west of Ireland, with fair to reddish hair and delicate cheekbones and tired misty eyes. Whenever he spoke he cast his eyes down, and his eyelids flickered. I would see him in the refectory among loud youths from the country, and I had an impulse to say,
They are not your kind
. His hand lay on the desk inches from mine that day. Something tender and unsayable lay there too. Perhaps it was the intensity of the Greek discourse, the tragic heroes and their reliance on the gods, and a wish on my part to inhale everything pure and radiant and divine then, but his presence and the still dreamy air of that afternoon filled me with a great upflow of joy, of benevolence for all of mankind.

For a while, forty years ago, Suzanne's return subverted my thoughts. I suspected a child, given up in England—or maybe even kept and concealed there in the house with the mother's collusion. Such things happen. No one saw anything and gradually, over the years, people forgot and the story faded. I forgot too or doubted that she was ever inside that house. Years later when her mother died she still did not come out. Her brother delivered provisions to her door. Then, following a long illness, my own mother died in Dublin. Sometimes, feeling guilty that my grief was not greater, I would drive over by the lake at night and find myself approaching Suzanne's house. What did I expect—that I would come upon her taking the night air too, or out walking a large odd-looking child on a lead under the stars? I remember the moon, its thin fragile crescent hanging delicately over her house. I walked down to the lake's edge one night and let the water lap at my feet. I am not certain there was feeling in my heart for anyone—for my dead mother, for Suzanne, even for myself. I had my life, tight and contained, and few regrets. I drove to school every day, attended to my teaching duties, hoping—particularly in the early years—that
my teaching duties, hoping—particularly in the early years—that something, Homer perhaps, might affect the boys and alter their lives. I came home in the evenings and listened to music and cooked and read late into the night. In summer I took trips—Athens, Vienna, Bayreuth. Little, apart from the odd metaphysical ache, ever caused a ripple on this composed life. Occasionally, moments in the classroom when I'd be pulled up by a line or an answer or an insight from a boy. Moved by a recitation of Socrates' speech from the dock, or Achilles' lament for great-hearted Patroclus. Such pitiable things. Once, after a morning considering Orpheus, I read aloud from Rilke's sonnet and there, standing on the raised dais in my classroom, I came briefly undone. I was hearing the notes of Orpheus's lyre, seeing his anxious head glance back and glimpse Eurydice, feeling his bereftness as he ascended the underworld without her.
She's dead
, Hades said,
You cannot have her back
.

Last year I retired. I do not know where the years have gone. I do not know, either, what difference, if any, I ever made to a boy's life. There were, over the years, a few whose sensibilities, whose casts of mind, were similar to my own, yet I never felt compelled to follow their progress or career paths. Perhaps I was afraid I might see in these boys my own unborn sons. I must have known I would never engender life like other men. That the nearest sires I would have would be those boys in the desks before me, the only offspring the gods and goddesses pressing forth from the pages, needing delivery. On weekend visits to my mother in the early years I would occasionally run into old school and college friends in the city, with a child or two in tow, and I would smile and admire the children and enquire after their lives. One day in a bookshop a college classmate asked if I'd heard about Cóilín McDonagh. My eyes might have narrowed a little at the name, I might have had a brief intake of breath, bracing myself for news of
me that somewhere on the west coast of America, Cóilín had crashed his motorcycle into a tree and been killed instantly. As he spoke I was staring at the spine of a book behind his head, and thinking of palm trees and ocean swells and open-topped cars on a Pacific highway. And fine cheekbones being smashed against a redwood. I think now that leaving university was my first real encounter with grief. A sickly unease in those final weeks, a paralysis, a constriction of the heart at the prospect of parting. But what could be done? What could be said? There was no call for farewells.

I am determined to travel more. Last month I went to Berlin. The Middle East—Jerusalem—calls to me. I picture myself, a contrary old atheist, moving along the narrow alleys of the city, stopping to talk to old men in doorways—Jew, Christian and Muslim alike—curious to glean something ancient and abiding in their faith and catch a glimpse of the God gene that has bypassed me or lies inert within me. Lately I am intrigued by genes, by the randomness of genes, the randomness of any gene being switched on or off, and how that determines what we are, what makes us one thing or another.

These were my thoughts driving home from the airport last month. As I neared the village I drew up at the T-junction and yielded. A slow-moving hearse drifted into view and passed before my eyes, heading towards the cemetery. Half a dozen cars crawled behind. I turned right into the village and stopped at the shop for milk and bread.

‘Whose is the funeral that just passed?' I asked the woman behind the counter.

‘Oh, that Cleary woman—you know the odd one with the bike from over by the lake? The brother found her dead in the bed the other day.'

*

She had lasted just one summer. The thought struck me that she might have had a premonition, a foreshadow of her own death, and opened her front door in early summer and ventured out to confirm that this place—such a place as this—had really existed, and she was not mad after all. Or only a little mad—just enough to discern some dark knowledge, a latent memory in her cells that sensed the stirrings of a new omen.

I went over there that evening, parked in the pub car park and walked along the road towards her house. Behind me I could hear the old Guinness sign swinging in the breeze. A bird flew low across my path, heading for the lake, its long scraggy neck almost level with my eyes. Then I was standing between the two pillars in front of her house, looking in. It was a long low bungalow with three small windows and a green door. I walked in the drive and around the back. Her bicycle was lying against the gable end of the house. A bag of turf sat outside the back door. I peered in the windows but could make out little through the dense net curtains. I tried the handle of the back door. A few fields away, a cow lowed. I sat on a low stone wall for a while. I did not like to think of her silence, like a dark mass enclosing her for years.