The Gathering (9 page)

What hurts now is the fact that Daddy is dead. He died in 1986. So he never did walk into a shop where they sold condoms by the cash register. He never had to change his mind, not even slightly. I think of him, too, when I palm the cuttlefish bone that Rebecca finds on the beach, because it reminds me of a mango pip; the fact that when Daddy died no one in Ireland ate mango, though I think kiwi was all the rage by then. And I feel I must console him for mangoes. I must console him for the distance we have moved from the place where he stopped.

His ghost, incidentally, could not give a damn about who I slept with. His ghost is beyond sex. And sometimes I think that so am I.

Still, there was Michael, before the storm, shaking my father’s hand and my father not saying, ‘Weiss? What class of a name is that, at all?’

Me coming into the kitchen in a bronze-coloured Jenny Vander dress, looking, at a guess, pretty good. The two of us walking away from the house where I grew up, Michael Weiss beside himself with delight.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. Everything you said. It’s all true.’

And I was–I still am, even as I write this–mortified.

ADA’S HALL DOOR
was flat against the street. There was no garden or path up to it so people passed by, very close, without ever coming in. This arrangement was as implacable as Ada herself, and as exciting. She was, in my mind, always at cross purposes to the world.

In the summer, the door had a cream canvas cover, with thick and thin rust stripes. There was a horizontal mouth cut out for the letterbox, a long slit for the knocker, and a little round hole for the bell. The door underneath, if you lifted the cloth, was painted bottle green.

The house was in a terrace of identical little houses, each symmetrical to the next, so the doors cosied up to each other in pairs. We slept in the back of the house. I remember standing at the bedroom window and looking out at the little garage at the end of Ada’s little garden, and at the lane beyond. We had two beds between the three of us, a wide one for the girls and a narrow one for Liam. The wallpaper was a pattern of blue-green flowers, bulbous and slightly metallic; they made the whole place writhe a little under my steady child’s eye.

Here’s me, at the age of three, with my ear pressed against the beige tin cliff of her washing machine, or looking in over the lip, to see the swirl and jerk of the clothes: Ada pushing stuff through the mangle (
Don’t touch the mangle!
), the last soap hissing out while some dress, catastrophically wrecked, slowly slides, then shoots out from between the rollers, to drop into the bucket like a Crimplene turd.

Here’s me eating Ada’s rubber bathing hat whose famous yellow flowers appeared in my nappy the next day. Though, of course, it must have been Kitty’s nappy–hardly mine, at the age of three. Ada shouting for Charlie, who looked over her shoulder and said, ‘Where did we get such a clever girl?’

Of course I was jealous of my little sister, but I had a peculiar, fierce love for her too. It is not surprising that I steal her memories for my own. Though no man, I now realise, ever puts his hand into a dirty nappy, as I can see Charlie doing in my mind’s eye, to pull out a posy of shitty yellow flowers.

Here’s me, definitely, pulling the bathing cap over my face. I lick the salty inside of it, until it seals me up–the smell of Ada’s hair in the sea. Then I start to drown in the pink light, that explodes with soft flowers of bright red, and a curiously bright black.

Did this happen? The world hurting as the cap is pulled away; Ada, outside of me, shouting. Me being pushed into her meagre breast, that tasted of Lux flakes and wool.

More probably, it was Liam put the hat over my face and nearly killed me. Or it was Kitty who got smothered by the two of us. We played at fainting all the time, which would place the hat–the delicious, fantastic pink bathing hat, with the floppy yellow flowers–in the world of an eight-year-old as opposed to the world of one who is only three.

Sometimes, in second-hand clothes shops, I look for objects like these, thinking that if I could hold the hat in my hands, if I could stretch it and smell it, then I would know which was which and who was who out of Kitty, and Liam, and me.

The second time we stayed at Ada’s our father drove us across town on a traffic-free afternoon–it might have been a Sunday–with suitcases in the boot. And the thing that astonished me then was how he knew the way.

This is where the silence happened–as I stood in the back room and looked out at the garage and the lane. It was an overwhelming silence, like the air was made of wood, and the bulbous flowers of the back-room wallpaper both writhed a little and were entirely still, under my eight-year-old eye.

And–I don’t know why this should fit in, but here is my father in the kitchen of Griffith Way, maybe six years later, holding the thickness of the wooden table like it was a bible, and he’s shouting at Liam in a careful voice the lines, ‘I loved your mother from the day I first set eyes on her. I worshipped the ground she walked upon.’

This would be Liam saying something completely insulting, at the age of thirteen or so. My father’s lips thin and purple, his chest working like a bellows, squeezing it out, phrase by windy phrase.

‘I LOVEd your MOTHer from the DAY I first set EYES on her. I WOrshipped the GROUND she WALKED upon.’

While Mossie read the paper, and I got on with my homework, and Midge cried about something else altogether and made a cup of tea.

He certainly meant it. My father, trembling, in that moment before something was flung or broken. Liam calling him a fucking baboon then, probably.

‘You’re a fucking baboon!’

And flying out of the room, before he could be caught and given a thump.

My father was a small man. And his chest always whistled and sang. And I remember nothing like I remember that silence after he closed Ada’s front door and lowered himself into the front seat of the car and drove away.

Ada’s little garden was probably just a yard, but we thought it an exciting place, with crab apple and nettles: the door to the garage was sometimes open and sometimes bolted, and the fact that you never knew if Mr Nugent was in there only added to the interest. Liam used the tools on the workbench or played with the wrecked car in there. I used to sit on the stitched blue leather of the front seat, which was tight in places and ripped in others. I didn’t try to drive; the dash was too strange. I just used to slide up and down the upholstery, or squirm across the nice rows of stitching, and talk in a grand voice to whoever was driving, whether or not he was actually there.

Two double doors led out to the back lane, where there was another car up on blocks, a pastel blue and chrome affair with great American fins. Even now I can not see a derelict car without a pang. Mr Nugent came and left by the doors to the lane, and fiddled about on the workbench, or stuck his head under the bonnet of the American monster if the weather was fine. On a Friday he came round to the front door to knock, and he always had sweets for the children. He wore a hat, which he doffed when Ada opened the door. It was many years before I wondered at the formality of this arrangement, or what was going on.

Ada called him Nolly, though we all knew that what you called him was Mr Nugent, if you called him anything at all, which we didn’t. Sometimes she called him Nolly May, she’d say it after he was gone, ‘Oh, Nolly May,’ pushing the chair he’d sat in back up against the wall. He didn’t do much except sit there getting insulted by the wallpaper, but there was always a slight sweat on him, and he cleared his throat a lot, and you could tell how much he wanted Gran.

She had gorgeous manners, Gran. She liked to put things on a tray. She had opinions about lump sugar and where was the right place to keep your biscuit between bites, all of which made you feel really uncomfortable and very well loved. She made dresses in the boxroom upstairs, and sometimes she worked in the theatre, which is why everything had to be so respectable. It made for a kind of twisting of the air between herself and the actors who sometimes came for a fitting. They seemed to wring something out between, until–oh, go on!–the room was ripe with implication. Though she would put the crockery away after the same guest was gone and tell me that the stage was an interesting life but it made you very bitter. Or she would say something strangely memorable like, ‘Sex gets you nowhere in this world. Remember that, sex will get you precisely No Where.’

Though Charlie was often away, she had us for company, and sometimes one of the actresses slept in the boxroom, if she had a show in town; squeezed in behind the tailor’s dummy and the electric sewing machine. At least I think she slept in there. The dummy worked strangely on my imagination; I can not even get the door open in my head, now, to look inside.

Peggy McEvoy, that’s what she was called. And she was engaged to someone on the telly.

And there was Nolly in the good room, clearing his throat and swallowing, while we ate the VoVos he brought, and the Blackjacks. I knew him by the taste of sweets and by the glint in his glasses, or the heaviness of his pockets, or the peculiar small growth flowering inside his ear. His hands were placed square on each knee, and he always leaned forward slightly, not resting quite on the back of the chair. He sat like someone who wasn’t getting much sex, now that I see him in my mind’s eye–and his glance was too casual, in a way that I also now recognise. Though he had, in his grim way, four children and a wife we never saw, called Kathleen. When Ada was out of the room he would get up out of the chair and walk over to the television and turn it off with a clunk. Then he would sit back down and look at us. After a minute he would manage something out of his pocket.

‘It’s not a toy.’

Though it was always something interesting. One day it was a white mouse–or, it must have been a rat–with red eyes and a pink tail, and he lifted my jumper at the wrist, to let it run up my sleeve and on to my chest: Ada coming in then to scream.

She served up tea on one of those little tables that had two more tables tucked into it, each smaller than the other. ‘Put a cloth on the table nest,’ she’d say to me. And ‘Charlie says’ this and ‘Charlie says’ that, she would say to Nolly May, setting the tray down or handing him over a cup of tea. This was our Granda Charlie she was talking about, who, when Nugent wasn’t sitting there, was, ‘What time did he go? Did you see him take the money from the shelf?’

I don’t think Charlie drank (even his vices were old-fashioned), he just did everything else. Or nothing else. It was hard to say what he did, except absent himself. And sometimes he came back in different clothes.

‘Oh, he treated her like a queen,’ as they would say over the funeral cooked meats. They had a story, Ada and Charlie, that is for sure, in which they each played the most important roles, and when she walked across the room to him, you could tell how fated they felt, as if their love was a great burden to them as well as a joy.

One time I came into the front room and they were sitting on either end of the sofa, and he had her old foot in his lap, and was massaging it through the sheer of her stockings.

I couldn’t tell you what Nugent did, though it has stuck somewhere in my head that he was a bookie, or a bookie’s clerk, that he put on a grey cashmere coat from time to time, and got into a black car, and was driven to the racecourse. All I really know is that he used the garage out the back for his old jalopies and you never knew if he was in there or not. I thought–if I thought anything at the time–that Ada allowed him to use it because she had no car of her own, and by that time, Charlie did not drive.

SO HERE THEY
all are, going to the races, finally. It is Easter Monday and every car in Dublin is making for Fairyhouse in a convoy, there are charabancs in a line down O’Connell Street and trains going every twenty minutes from the station at Broadstone.

The drab days of Lent are over, the Legion’s mission has been triumphant, the brothels have been raided by the police, sprinkled with holy water, bought off by Frank Duff, and closed down. A great religious procession has been held and a cross raised in Purdon Street by the man himself, who stood up on a kitchen table and drove in the nail with a surprisingly large hammer. Twenty girls have been decanted into the Sancta Maria hostel and dried out at either end. Everyone has been praying day and night, night and day, until they are fed up with it, the whole city has had it up to here, they have suffered the ashes and kissed the rood and felt truly, deeply, spiritually
cleaned out
: Easter dawns, thanks be to Jay, and when they have eaten and laughed and looked at the daffodils they go to bed and make love (it’s a long time, forty days) and have a big sleep and, the next morning, they all go off to the races.

It is Easter Monday, a still-tender time. It is the day Christ says, ‘
Noli me tangere
,’ to the woman in the garden. Do not touch me. It is too soon. It is too soon to be touched.

Oh Nolly May.

Though maybe Ada makes some kind of attempt. Maybe she forgets, for a moment, that Charlie is the one she will love for evermore and does her best with Nugent. He is the one who invited her, after all; lingering after Mass, to mention the possibility of the outing. Of course she’d be going anyway, so it’s not so much a tryst he is suggesting, as a lift.

‘You said you’d like a go in a car,’ he says looking down at the path between them.

She fixes her eyes on the same spot and lifts her eyebrows to say, ‘Can I bring a friend?’

So Nugent is the lover in all this, Charlie is the transport, Ada is the wraith and lilith the lovely girl the fallen woman the sad whore the poor orphan the safe bet, whatever way you look at it, and with her is Ellen, who is company for Charlie and just a maid.

Nugent and Ada sit in the back of the Morris and the daylight suits her surprisingly well. There is fresh blood in her cheeks and her hair is thick in the wind, and he feels stupidly easy there beside her, he feels like he could just talk–her understanding is so direct. A man could speak to a woman like this and feel like a better person, he could forget altogether the night thoughts and the struggles of his conscience, the gaping wound of his soul that opens–in some dream or waking dream–in his chest.

It is gone, this queer fragment, it is whipped away by the festive drive in an open-topped car, in cavalcade with every other car in Dublin, now that Lent is over, and the races are on. Nugent’s hand is steady and the girl beside him is as frank and poetical as an animal, and so he is safe. With Ada, he is safe.

And so they drive–up the Navan Road, past the Guinness estates where Charlie lifts his imaginary hat to give a cheer for the lovely brew.

‘Hoo hoo,’ he says. ‘Hoo hoo!’

And they are having a grand time now, singing a song–what is it?–‘The Harp that Once’, ‘Silent O Moyle’–big, open-air songs. Charlie belting them out in his fine English baritone, looking at everything but the road, so the view that Ada has is of his shoulder blades, covered in fat and resting on the top of the seat in front of her, the flutter of his scarf reaching for her as she sits behind, the tips of his waxed moustache, signalling over his shoulder, now and then, cheerful thoughts of manliness and cleanliness and, if you considered them long enough, a tickling sensation on the inside of your thighs.

But Ada, we are sure, does not think like this. Ada has suffered enough from our imputations. She turns to Nugent as he talks of the races to come, and the possible odds, and the need for a clear hand from the minister of finance in all of this, because everyone likes a flutter, it is as much an Irishman’s right as any other Christian man.

It is surprising to hear so much out of him at one time. Ada gets the feeling that Nugent speaks all at once or not at all. He is the kind of man that women were told to ‘draw out’, in those days–hard work, in other words, and fantastically easy prey.

But it might be compassion as much as anything else, that leads her to touch him, there in the open-topped car. Or thoughtlessness. She is only trying to draw his attention, but to what? Lord and Lady Talbot de Malahide driving the whole way on the wrong side of the road, with the chauffeur’s gloved hand stuck to the horn. Or something quieter, a straw horse in a farmer’s field propping up a sign that says, ‘Drinks Here’.

It could be a response to something he has said, ‘They’ve made such a hames of it already,’ meaning, of course, the Free State government; or a more intimate comment, like, ‘Personally, I’ve never minded a spot of rain.’

The impulse is, at any rate, to touch him.

How will she manage it? She will lay her finger on his arm. She will lay her whole palm on his forearm. Or, later, she might take the crook of his elbow under the hinge of her wrist, and link him as they walk to the rails. And whichever one of these she does, she will feel Nugent flinch away.

Here is Charlie in front of her, bowing as he presents the open mouth of a bag of boiled sweets.

‘Oh, comfort me with apples,’ he says, before remembering himself and turning to offer first choice to Ellen, the friendly, double-chinned maid.

For the rest of the afternoon Lamb Nugent looks after Ada, while the corners of her jaw squirt painful juice for Charlie’s apple drops. He puts on a penny a time with Myrellson of Dame Street, who knows him and forbears. Pride of Arras for the three o’clock, in which Ballystockhard makes all the running, Ada saying, ‘Is that mine, is that mine?’ and Nugent saying, ‘No, it’s not yours.’ All afternoon he watches his luck dribble away, Street Singer, Con Amore, Daisy’s Boss–who is picking these nags? Oh, but they have to back Ellen’s Bean for the Fairyhouse Plate, they just have to, and when the horse comes in second Ada has more sense than to say, ‘What does that mean, “on the nose”?’ Coolcannon falls at the second last and with it all his hopes, and then Ada finally gets lucky on Knocknageena.

Yaroo!

The whole party is, by now, so worn out by the surge and loss of each race, and by the endless waiting in between, that when Ada jumps and lifts her fists, nothing is hidden from any of them. She might stay like that–Ada ascending–frozen in victory, from her clenched hands to the tip of her down-pointed shoes. By the time she hits the ground again it has been settled: one of these men wants her to win, and the other wants her to lose.

And she knows it.

Ada’s horse came first. But it was only a horse–it’s not exactly her fault. So maybe it is her sense of justice that makes her choose Charlie, who is pleased for her, as opposed to Nugent who is insulted by her good luck. But there is no doubt–the choice has been made.

On the trip home, Ellen sings in the front seat; the shreds of her lovely voice coming back to them on the wind, ‘When Other Lips’, ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt’. They understand each other completely, each person in this car. They sit and think what it all means: Charlie has won Ada, Nugent has lost her. And this stirs in them thoughts of other things.

Charlie, for example, is thinking about all the girls he has pushed to the brink of ruin before letting each of them go. He is bidding it all farewell, the ravishing, tawdry, endless
tristesse
of one woman or another, one woman or another, until a man had to address his member as you might a dribbling dog, ‘Enough, sir! Enough!’

Ellen is thinking that she will never get married.

Nugent is trying to catch last night’s dream, sure that it was telling him that he had lost, already, before he ever tried. It was a dream about his soul, a gap opening in his chest–because the soul is a she–there is a girl flowering inside him, breaking through, there is a hole weeping nectar just above his heart, it is opening to his hand, there–just there–a place where all good things are, as hope and loving-kindness, a place he can find a gorgeous kind of rest, and enter or be entered, over and over again, over and again, finding as he does so, the soul’s own sweet ecstasy, until he wakes to the horror of his blasphemous thoughts and the after-shock of his seed just spent, and waits, in the dark, for the mess to go cold.

I don’t know what Ada was thinking in the car on the way home. She was probably doing the sums in her head, wondering why she had to fall for the one who had a hole in his pocket. But even so she holds out her hand to Charlie and says, ‘Thank you for a lovely drive.’

And to Nugent, ‘Thank you for a lovely day.’

She looks Nugent in the eye. And she knows what he sees. And she doesn’t care.

I do not know why Ada married Charlie when it was Nugent who had her measure. And though you could say that she did not marry Nugent because she did not like him, that is not really enough. We do not always like the people we love–we do not always have that choice.

Maybe that was her mistake. She thought she could choose. She thought she could marry someone she liked and be happy with him, and have happy children. She did not realise that every choice is fatal. For a woman like Ada, every choice is an error, as soon as it is made.