The Past (18 page)

BUT WHAT IS it that delights Una as she walks towards the agency with both of them beside her? It comes to her in an unfathomable shift, a sudden, unheralded flood of happiness. She has grown heavier, but she now holds her weight like a flag, a proud flag of she knows not what nation, an imposing black cloak thrown round her shoulders fluttering with the sea breeze that meets them on the bridge. The salt brings a flush to her cheeks as it had when she walked towards that spa, past the fluttering canvas, sixteen years earlier. She knows now that she loves this street with its giant pots and its green litter bins and its aura of sea coursing through it, keeping all those flags that crowd the rooftops jerking as if they themselves remember the course of events that put them there. The only faces that turn as they walk are those surprised by the unlikely aspect of this trio and she accepts the stares with equanimity, knowing that at last they are directed not at herself but at the daughter to her left whom she guides through the afternoon crowds like a statue, a more perfect image of herself. The wide, lengthy street seems a unit to her, an image of temporal home, and homes, she knows, are for leaving. A man steps from the crowd to catch her attention and the wind flaps his fawn overcoat as it does her cloak. He talks to her like an intimate and she hardly bothers to recognise him. He talks of the state and the arms dumps. They will be there, he tells her, waiting to be resurrected should Dev take
one step backwards. She remembers the old complicity, the common words and gestures, the nods of emphasis for certain names, of negation for others. He is reviving, he tells her, the Conradh classes in Parnell Square. He asks her to lend a hand. She nods, as he assumes she will, and she feels a hidden surge of delight at his mistaken assumption. She sees herself and her large cloak and the person she has always seemed facing him and another impulse makes her turn and continue her walk down that wide street thinking of everything that seems, of people in groups and nods of assent and flags jerking gracelessly from rooftops. She passes the General Post Office with its three females pointing heavenwards and the wide, wide street with its flapping banners stretches out before her as if the bricks had been laid, demolished and laid again, as if the bullet holes had scarred the angels' feet just so that she could walk finally down it, closing her hand around her daughter's elbow and lead her towards her first professional assignment.

‘SHE WAS MORE real than she ever had been. We walked up two flights of stairs into a room that was painted black. A man put the silk stockings on Rene. He sat her on a podium in different positions. Then the door was pushed ajar in a way that was irritating, hesitant. And I saw him coming through it for the first time. Was it the door that irritated me or was it him? I can't distinguish. And the boy Luke came behind him carrying the tripod. Chalk and cheese.'

LUKE STARES AT the legs of Rene. He wants to touch them, even then. Which of them, father or son, can I choose? James shakes hands with the voluminous Una and speaks to her in broken Irish. He looks towards her daughter through the dust of the arc lamp, rubbing his eyes. The man smooths the silk stockings.

‘SHE WOULDN'T LIVE to see her daughter's picture. We walked back down the street towards the G.P.O. and she held my arm so tight that it hurt. I turned to ask her to loosen it and I saw all the colour had gone from her face. I walked on. I was puzzled. Each of us is alone.'

THE WIND GATHERS far out in the bay, up the estuary to the bridge and coils down the street like a silk ribbon. It whips Una's skirts like a flag, she stands still, they wait for her to move again. It whips each fragment of her past into a gale, would lift her over the parapet and the angel's feet and the tips of the marble spears, make each memory sweet, each enemy a loved one. It smells of the sea, the divine pungency of salt, would lift her only to dissolve her. They wait outside the G.P.O. until she gathers enough strength to walk on.

‘BUT NOBODY DIES,' Lili whispered, ‘and now you're bringing her to life again. She just left a voluminous emptiness in the Pro-Cathedral.
It was emptier for all those who didn't attend. Where were they all, I wondered, from the great days? There was no mention in the papers, no photograph even. De Valera was represented by a mass-card. I sat with Rene in the pews, among the actors. We had the same black veils. James came up, without his black box this time. If there's anything I can do to help, he said. There would be something, though that would come later. Luke stood behind him, staring. I turned to see what he was staring at. It was the silk stockings, of course, which she had never taken off—'

I
F THERE'S ANYTHING I can do—James asked her on the Pro-Cathedral steps. And as Lili said, there would be. But did he search her out or did he wait for chance to tell him to search her out? The one event occurred that made a pattern of all the other events and without that event, he must have thought, months later, all the events before it would have been random. But the event occurred and took the others, like stringless beads, pulling a sudden thread through them. So afterwards he can muse in retrospect, on Killiney Head, always his incessant walks, kicking the cones away with his high-laced boots, how each must have held the germ of the significance with which it was later blessed. And so that photograph in the Green Room led to the next in the O'Connell Street dark room, each one gaining in portent with the one that followed. And the equations lovers tease themselves with—if A had not happened, then B would never have been possible, if we had never met there, we would never—he developed gradually into a mathematics of chance, passion and happenstance. We are all small nations, he would tell her later, and our past, present and future is a moving thread. And so he had photographed her twice when he met her the third time, and the circumstances of that meeting made him clutch, for the first time, at the thread. There were flowers on the altar again, funereal ones, and the priest moved
with his waxen gestures against the backdrop of the cross. He looked around him and saw actors he recognised, some of whom recognised him. He felt a slight puzzlement at the sense of occasion, even at his presence there. She had never appealed to him when alive, as an actress even, and yet dead she seemed to unite these few mourners with a sense of larger event. He remembered her husband's death and the whole streets with covered windows. Time, as it lengthens, magnifies its figures, where distance miniaturises. Where are the soldiers, he wondered, looking around him for medals strung to lapels, where are the politicians? Have all the great events happened? And yet she was larger, somehow, for their absence. Every actor there he'd photographed at one time or another. Lord, he almost prayed, open my lips. And then he saw her daughter from behind, centre of the event, the blonde hair threading through the black lace veil. He felt that the mother had left so that the daughter could be seen more clearly. He let his eyes travel upwards from her blonde and lace threads to the huge dome above, the two lesser ones on either side. He thought of a dome where each brick is the cornerstone. When his eyes travelled down again through the pantheon of saints on the wall below he saw that the mourners had risen and the actors were walking out behind her. He followed them to the steps outside and it was there, with the wind blowing down Marlborough Street, tugging at everyone's dark clothes, that he asked was there anything he could do.