The Past (12 page)

S
O WHEN JAMES Vance entered the Abbey Green Room what would your first sense of him have been? Vance, from the Huguenot Vans, by now a widower, years after his eucalyptus, one Catholic son at home in his Bray house; a grandfather inhabiting an upstairs floor who was there and gone, there and gone. He walks in with his tripod wrapped in his cape. There is his way of opening doors, dressed in corduroy and braces. The stage hands are following him, holding an arc lamp. He asks them in a low voice to put it down. You can hear him, however. People carry their worlds with them. You can sense its shape, if not its precise features. You sense the way people seem to know him and the way he seems ill at ease. You have been sitting on the long couch under the portrait of the man with the removed eyes for twenty minutes now. Una has been tying and untying your bow, placing her hands magisterially round your head, then striding round the room in her black dress. You know how the long wait is eroding the public strength of her grief. You don't mind her grief being so public. She knows this photographer who enters, everyone in the room seems to know him, exchanging those taut nods of recognition that imply acquaintance, not friendship. The stage hands hold the arc lamp with a familiar, somewhat contemptuous patience. You are mapping out the landscape, the long
stretches of hill and plain, the terrain in which your mother lives. It is a different world. In the two days since your father died she has entered your life suddenly and fully. You know it will be your world now. You have met people you have never seen before who greet her as old friends, who know your name, your age, your habits. You stare calmly at the creatures of this new world. They seem to you the inhabitants of reason, obeying laws of gesture and glance which must be reason's alone. You watch each new face and how each new face greets this photographer. He is restless and embarrassed and on the edge of the picture and because of that you sense you will remember him, more foreign to that room than you are. The man with the three legs and the black cloak. Your mother stares at him, leaning back on the couch.

‘This was where you took Sarah Allgood?'

‘No,' he says, obviously puzzled. ‘That must have been someone else.'

‘Now that was a photograph—'

Her tone is peremptory, with a slight edge of malice and implies a judgment on him. You sense this but cannot know that the tone is one that the bona fide Republican would always adopt with the fellow-traveller. There has been a history of tangential encounters at political meetings and Gaelic classes so they would now nod if they met on a street. They would rarely exchange words, however. You sense your mother judges him to be insignificant but don't know why. Perhaps because of his tripod, his cape, his box, every action of his seems to you to be important. You could not have known that this would be his forty-ninth theatrical photograph, that even as he is assembling the arc lamp the figure won't leave his head, seven sevens,
his idle taste for mathematics telling him there's no significance in the figure, his aesthetic sense, always quickened by the imminent flash, insisting there is. So he plugs in the lamp, and mother and daughter in their dark dresses on the satin couch are lit by a white glare. It is the picture of the diminutive girl in the black dress, the cream-blonde hair against it, her eyes shut tight, her hands gripping the couch that prints itself somehow in the base of his mind, already a negative, so intense is the light. He rubs his eyes and looks at her clutching the satin, and something more than his aesthetic sense tells him that here is significance.

‘It won't do here, Mrs—'

He tries to drop the sentence casually, for he has forgotten the woman's name. He can't believe himself, that name that has filled two days of headlines, the woman he knows by sight, that he surely must have talked to.

She has sensed, of course, and taken umbrage.

‘Why not?'

She wants to be Sarah Allgood he thinks, turning away, mumbling something about refraction of light, pulling out the plug on the arc lamp. He is about to take refuge in more technical details when suddenly, blessedly, he remembers.

‘Against a flat, Mrs O'Shaughnessy. It would hold the light better.'

She walks past him towards the door. He follows them, mother and daughter, through the foyer, through the dark aisle of the theatre towards the stage. The dust is circling and circling in what light there is. He is wondering why he moved them, what he is searching for. He places mother and daughter against one flat, then another and
gets the stage hands, whose patience is nearing exhaustion, to move the arc lamp in a slow itinerary round the stage. By now he knows that his forty-ninth theatrical photograph will have some significance. The significance is already there in this girl's black dress against the barest of possible lights. But will it seep into the print, he wonders, and some impulse pulls him from flat to flat, dragging his tripod with him. From this theatre, which he had always entered like a moderate imbecile, so willing to be of service, he now brooks no complaints from its stage hands or its leading lady. When she protests now he answers with a curtness that shocks him. But it shocks her too, even out of her stance of grief and she moves with tight lips and flushed face to the next flat, the next floorboard to assume her pose once more. But each flat is too dark for him and with the black dresses of mother and daughter makes their hands and faces appear dismembered, as if in a masque or a dumb-show. He stares at them through the cone of light, alive with eddies of dust, the mother's strict image of grief and the daughter's total lack of expression. The resemblance between them that at first seemed natural, unremarkable, like mother like child, comes to seem tenuous and then non-existent. Where did that face come from, he wonders, and whose replica is it? A white hand moves up from nowhere and brushes an isolated lower lip. He cannot reconcile it, the auburn of the mother with the cream of the daughter. And yet he knows the mother's hair could be dyed and her round face must once have been slender. He thinks of the third face, the dead one whose power is already mythical, and for him too, since he never met the man. Do some faces belong to our heritage of seeing, indescribable, being part of ourselves? He has seen her face before, lit with harsh stage lighting. But when he says, to the mother's
annoyance, that the light there isn't what he needs either and when the group have ensconced themselves once more in the Green Room, the resemblance returns with the daylight, quite natural, ordinary after all. The girl is on the couch, the mother's hands on her shoulders, her white, plinth-like arms bordering her face. He can see the resemblance in their mutual opposites, those features that make the woman coarse make the child pretty, those cheekbones with the low forehead of the mother would have led in the daughter to ugliness, but with her tall forehead could some day turn to beauty. And the pose is natural and he cowls his head and squeezes, realising as he does so that he has lessened his demands. All he wants now is the ordinary, from her, her mother and the sofa beneath them.

She exhales to the smell of phosphorous and he raises his head from the cloth, bringing his thoughts with him, none of which she could have read. She will forget perhaps the precise balance of those moments unless she sees the print one day; and then the memories will have to do with her father, slipping like a horizon out of her vision, with her mother and the new world of which she is now a part. He will carry his memories like a penumbra, as will everyone who met her then. But then he will have the print. He takes the train home, winding just above the sea and below the slopes that hold his eucalypti.

H
E DEVELOPED IT the next day, and a portrait of Dev, and so the blonde child's head that had moved against the black flat took its place in that pit and hoard of memories that might never be spent, together with the first smell of paint in his father's attic, the smell of waxed flowers on the altar of his first wife and the wind that whipped over the Clare election meeting, necessitating de Valera to keep one hand eternally on his soft hat. They rustled there, useless and unused, like leaves in the dry pit, waiting for the rain one day to slough them to the top. And perhaps a hint appeared in the negative of the depths which memory would lend, given time.

Three days later it appeared in the national dailies, and satisfied him. Surrounded by the black print that would be read by thousands, and the headlines ‘Mother and Daughter Mourn'. And the dots the image was reduced to would have had the elusiveness of wraiths. Phot. James Vance, in smaller print.

HIS SON, LUKE, would by then have been five. Lili will tell me nothing about this man—she claims ignorance, but her silence smacks of jealousy—about his crumbling house and his thin trickle of
dividends, his father ageing on the prom, his spouse four years dead. The word spouse conveys an image, a pale face, a hesitant bride in white, and love somehow absent. An Irish teacher, maybe, in the National Schools; a Catholic. James takes instruction for her sake in that faith that must have seemed awesome in its simplicity, its vulgarity and its threat that in the end each word might be seen to be fact. She promises a life to him, a union with that past, that faith from which his circumstances have removed him. It is a whim, more rootless even than his politics, but this whim bleeds into life and time and gives birth to Luke. He has bought her, using the most profound, the most suspect coinage. Her body awes him into an impotence that can only silence hers. There is a green rug, grass underneath, the sound of a river. There are the lupins and tulips, the dahlias perhaps, in the church where he marries. They have the same sweet, promising texture of those that litter the altar at her funeral. He marries at Easter and she dies at Easter. And Easter flowers I remember as stiff, coated with the stillness of beeswax, more solid than real, like the ritual purples and blacks of the Easter cloths. Its pomp, its frigid succession of colour, its hierarchic universe can only appal him, the green stamens and the broad spurts of leaves, like gushing water frozen round the dark heart of flower. Does she visit Luke from further back than memory, fold her black shawl around him each night? The boy sleeps below, the father above him. The wash of sea carries up the street to their windows. Each wave falls with a lack of finish.

B
UT I WILL still have the Bray curate walking the Bray prom, from the sacristy behind the church on Main Street past the bowling green and the intimate brick of the railway station to the front. The wind whips his soutane there and dots the ocean with white and only the bravest of hotels have their awnings spread. Ultramontane, intellectual and too plump for his years, Father Beausang's nature is childlike and innocent rather than priestly. He has been visiting the obscure Protestant since the days of his marriage. His brief was conversion, then. If he asked what his brief is now, he couldn't answer. For the visits kept on, through marriage and bereavement and dropped all pretence towards instruction on the way. Until now they have lasted so long that the bishop finds them suspect. But yet, the curate insists, though this Protestant agnostic has not yet said yes, neither has he said no. And there is after all a Catholic child to be catered for, his needs all the more pressing since his Catholic mother died. But the truth is, he knows, as he walks along the tiles past the flapping canvas, that he has come to enjoy their conversations. Ethics, the moral law and the necessity of a credo have killed themselves as topics. Only the barest of philosophic questions are touched upon. Rather they weave themselves, one afternoon every two weeks, from initial and sincere pleasantries
through the fog of current events to the two subjects that alone interest them—mathematics and photography.

Years later I will walk with him past the flowered pots on O'Connell Bridge towards the dried-up canal. He will talk about maths with the same passion as he did then, with more passion even, for by then his soutane will be flecked with snuff and dandruff, there will be an unashamed smell of alcohol on his breath and his smile will have grown wiser, more abstract and innocent, from the crooked, sad crease that you photographed. Your arm is around his shoulder in that snap, the open door of your house frames you, both of your chests puffed out, endlessly amused because both of you, photographers, were photographing each other. You did it by means of an extended puff-cord which explains the way your hand is stretched out, a minor invention in the march of the camera soon to be made redundant by the timed exposure, but one in which he would have delighted in then, bringing it to you like a child, though your delight would have been more muted, I suspect, since you were after all the professional. That smile will light again when he talks to me of mathematics and tells me that God in His essence is a mathematical symbol and that love is a figure like pi, the calculation of which never ends.