The Past (14 page)

IT WAS A moving picture, Lili tells me, a sprouting forest of the old man's mental world. He works on it in bouts and then leaves, returns months later, having decided to change the theme. So stories run
through that wall in waves, conflict at each end and meet in the centre. Three muscular, bare-breasted women run downwards behind the stairway, over the peeling plaster, towards the front door. He has given the doll-like face of the local chemist to the one who stoops for the apple while she runs. He has put Grecian hills behind them, a Doric pillar, crumbling, in the left-hand foreground. But he must have changed in the course of it, switched his obsession, got afflicted with what Lili calls a ‘bout of Irishness'. He changes the background ruins into something like stone cottages. He adorns those hills with a necklace of low stone walls.

AND THE CURATE moves past the bare breasts and the lesbian contours and the Hellenic pillars and the Connemara walls. James follows, leads him to the door. The hills at that end melt into blue, the beginnings of a sea, Atlantic or Aegean. The curate opens the door and walks through the rain to a view of real sea. James watches him go. Luke clatters from the inner room with the tray of tea things.

LUKE MAKES HIS first appearance in a Moses basket surrounded by a sward of green. There is a plaid rug there and a woman kneeling on it. Of the woman one can see the bottom part of a gabardine coat, hands placed deep in each pocket, one sleeve pulled back to reveal a thin wrist. She must be looking at the child in the basket as James must be too, with perhaps the same sense of approval. One can't tell
since one can't see her face, but James approved, obviously. The shot is worse than most. He has ignored the simplest rules of composition, as if his approval blinded him to them. There is no idea even of where the basket lay, Powerscourt, Bothar-na-Breena, the Dargle Valley. It is just seen from above, with the grass around it. James ignores the woman for the child, who is lying on his back. His head seems to be attempting to turn.

H
E WALKS OUT himself, some hours after the curate. The rain has stopped by then. Does it only stop at night? The roads are quite deserted and the chairs on the Head are glowing like yellow moths, but motionless. He walks up the road and away from the sea front and the spaces between the houses become smaller and smaller. The road no longer merits the term Villas, becomes gradually a street. He has a longish tan gabardine coat pulled tightly round him, belted too, for the winter winds are in again after a summer of picnics and photographs, perhaps not too unlike the ones in which she appeared holding the baskets or prams, ones with large wheels that dominate the frame, as obsolete now as steam engines, graver than current ones with hoops, as on flower-baskets, covered in lace. The street has become a main one and the houses one wall of red-brick, one up, one down. He met her in the Gaelic rooms in Parnell Square, could never have met her here. The huddled square could well have housed some of those who worked on his great-grandfather's delft. There was a twig pattern with a necklace of lozenges for leaves that needed a miniature, feminine hand. A factory of women, year of Our Lord 1809, when the delft still rang across Europe, when the china dust still billowed in the workshop. Does he fall in love in memory of them, at adult Irish classes, Parnell Square? Stuttering through
this rural tongue with his unfortunate
blas,
the eucalyptus chewer with the bad conscience, it is the gulf between them that attracts him as much as the person herself. There is chalk-dust in the air, without the billowing texture of the dust of china. But nevertheless the young teacher's fingers, which he wants, he needs to hold, are coated white. It is love, but always as an afterthought, the unique syllable lost among the consonants of Gaelic. Her plain dress is whitened in places as he looks at her over the row of benches through a halo of chalk. She has brown hair, blue eyes and an oval face. And when he comes to hold her chalk-whitened fingers which smudge his own in turn, his love gains the intensity of all his mental agonies. Her fingers are Irish, Catholic and youthful. He drifts towards marriage holding them, since he can do nothing else. And Eileen becomes Eileen Vance, with that unbridgeable gulf between fore and surname.

I will call it loving, though it was forgetful on his part and cruciform on hers. She doesn't so much age as contract under the pressure of that gulf. That terrible forgetfulness that never focussed on her face, that never caught the sunlight on its contours in the Dargle Valley or the Devil's Glen. He was kind, like all intelligent men, and therefore amazed when she began to weep one day on the Dublin-Bray train, where it brushes the sea just past Killiney. This child will be Catholic, she said, her curve outlined by the train window and the sea behind. Even if you won't. His amazement changed to perplexity when her weeping didn't stop. It lasted through her ninth and final month, until he could only wonder how so much weeping could rest in one person. It seemed to fill each room with an element not quite water and not quite air, but definitely liquid, through which he moved slowly and only saw her from a distance, until her weeping
was augmented by her breaking waters and the pain of her delivery of their child.

Does he think of her, walking past the mock-Tudor town hall at the crossroads and out towards where the houses stop, giving way to the sweeping lawns of Lord Meath's estate? Eileen Vance. The name implies the lightness Lili sees in Luke. Her face that never slid into his frame but found itself reproduced in his only child. He walks down the road with a hesitant amble, a constant phrasing of a question too deep for an answer. He cannot but form it and so his fate is to seem wrong. He reaches out through the countryside, his body arching forwards with that curious perplexity, that gait that would probably irk anyone who passes him as much as it did Lili. No one passes him, however. Though there are footsteps behind him. And her memory is still in him, as alive as ever and just as abstract.

The footsteps behind him grow louder. He hears the clunk of metal on wood. He turns his head as he walks and sees a young man behind him, with a bicycle propped against an oak tree. The young man has a bucket and a roll of posters. He takes a brush from the bucket and pastes a sheet against the bark with one wet stroke. James stops. The youth cycles past without a word. James can make out a slogan and a bareheaded sharp profile, dampened by the paste. He walks back to it. There is a sharp aquiline nose, a rigorous mouth without a trace of humour, and a pair of wire-framed spectacles. The eyes on the poster reflect his own abstraction, and with it a quite terrifying certainty. They stare into the distance, embedded with the mathematics of vision. He watches as the damp spreads round the face. There is something foolish, horselike in the features which only adds to their allure. The corners of the mouth sweep downwards, in
one clean line. James smiles. Years ago he photographed it, at a Clare election meeting. He sees those features and their certainty mould into the tree's roughness as the spreading paste weds the bark to the lettering. ‘De Valera—
Clann na Poblachta:
Vote for the Republic!'

J
AMES WALKS WITH Luke towards the photo with Miss Meredith, towards the tea it promises, along the railway tracks. The tracks loop around the Head, which looms over Bray and makes a gentler curve away from it.

But it is far behind them now, forgotten. James points out the marks of currents in the water, the glint of schist in the beach rocks, the banks of cirrus cloud above them. He explains the difference between flotsam and jetsam and the movement of tides. They come in view of Greystones harbour and the high houses behind it. Luke leaps from sleeper to sleeper, seems not to listen. They step down from the track and walk along the beach until the pebbles give way to clear sand and the sand rises towards the sea road.

Miss Meredith suspects that Mr Vance has intentions other than the sampling of her excellent high teas. She has the table spread when they arrive and they are the only weekend samplers. A widower who seems of her own persuasion, with one son cared for only by a housemaid. She has laid out her choicest dainties, cakes that are whorled with icing, cream puffs and apple-and-raspberry tarts. This Protestant gentleman, though, eats hardly anything, stares through the laurels at the haze above the sea. For today could be the height of summer and high teas are on the lawn, the lawn with such a riveting view of the
sweep of the bay. He covers her white cloths with flower-samples after the ritual gentlemanly greeting, and talk is mostly of the weather. She has come to despair of a more active demonstration of interest. And yet there's the photo. On a day like today, with one arm around Luke and one hand touching the wrought-iron table on which lie the dainties. I feel I know the house and the way the garden looked at the sea. There is a low wall, white, that hardly reaches your calf if you are an adult but forms a barrier for a child. It makes a sharp angle round a little chink of lawn which is in turn hedged round by a large expanse of gravel, a sort of drive really, leading up to the house. There is a sign above the porch advertising teas. There is a thin row of laurel bushes parallel to the house, facing the road, and the chink of lawn is to the left of both, edging out on its own, for all the world like a small promontory jutting out to sea. For beyond the wall only the sea is visible. Your three heads outlined against the white wall and the white horses, the white metal table and the blue china, an idyllic scene as I imagine it, and perhaps you would have taken more notice of the notice she took of you had it happened oftener, but the weather so rarely allowed it. How Miss Meredith must have cursed that rain, sweeping interminably over Bray Head, knocking the boats against the Greystones harbour. But she must rest content with her picture in your album, her arm around your son, who is staring at the dainties. She is looking towards me, a rather fattish face, a closed smile in which the teeth could be biting the left-hand corner of her mouth since her lip is drawn down somewhat, slanting while smiling. Her hair is drawn back tightly like a Spanish widow's, parted in the middle and clutched behind into a bun. You could have been sitting on the low wall, your back to the sea and the white horses, over which hung the four o'clock sun.

MISS MEREDITH POURS you another cup and asks whatever happened to the family's china. She has an immaculate cabinet upstairs, she tells you, which must get more valuable by the year. You tell her there is a store of it somewhere, down by the old factory, most of it worthless, rejects. The time is gone, you tell her, for small enterprises and small nations. Versailles, you tell her, would have taught anyone the latter and the economy of contemporary Ireland would teach anyone the former. You hold such daring opinions, Mr Vance, it's a wonder you don't publish more. There are people better able than me to articulate them, you proclaim, and proceed to tell her about the Venus's fly-trap, which interests you more. But she evades the topic of the carnivorous plant and returns to your opinions, which in her normal day she would shun, but which with you she feels she must air. We are both anti-Treatyites, Mr Vance, but I have heard from opposite points of view. You are really a Republican? I would favour, you tell her, a syndicalist model along the lines of Proudhon—, Ah, Miss Meredith interrupts, but he was a Frenchman and respectable, quite a different specimen from your de Valera, who is Irish and disreputable. American, you counter. Or is it Spanish—