The Past (21 page)

AND SURE ENOUGH the cable creaked as I was looking at it and began to roll. I could see the grease glistening in the moonlight and a yellow chair passed over us, swaying towards the wooden cafe at the top. It was approaching summer, I surmised, and some Bray businessman had revitalised the lift.

T
HE FIRST THING Rene would have noticed coming down the Bray prom would have been that lift. She has just come off the train and the directions the photographer scrawled out for her lead back past the station, over the tracks and down towards the sea front. The promenade before her is a mile and a half long, narrowing, it seems, towards this mass of green, neither hill nor mountain, shouldering a gaunt half-circle into the blue sea. And the yellow chairs are moving up and down the Head again. And what crowds on the prom, in the heat, in the middle of summer! She makes her way between them, wearing another pair of silk stockings and of high-heeled shoes. The heels are slightly lower now but still sharp enough to catch in the gaps between the tiles. So she throws her weight forward to the balls of her feet, walking in the way she would if she were barefoot. There are the awnings of the hotels and the porches, some makeshift for the summer, all of striped canvas; the facades of the hotels all facing the beach with the striped deckchairs and the circular canvas tents. Ireland in the heat is a different country, she told herself, imagining boxes with palms bound around with hoops. She changes her pace to avoid the flow coming towards her, but keeps her eyes on the yellow chairs. They go up the Head in jerks, swaying as they move. Her father held her on the yellow chair, showing her the
vista. Home, Jack, he said, down the promenade. The voices around her are Scottish now, for the cycle has begun. Heat in summer makes the strollers seem to dance, raises their feet above the surface, blurs the tiled promenade. Perhaps they saw her walking on air, as she saw them, inches above the melting tiles. Or are Scots naturally incurious? The curate certainly doesn't see her, though she sees him. A figure in black on such a hot day stands out. Walking quickly, from what he doesn't yet know will be his last afternoon discourse. She smiles when she sees him; turns, hoping to catch his attention. She is as demure as with Sister Paul, wants to meet all kinds of religious. But Father Beausang's head is full of Descartes, sweltering inside his circular stove, for it's on that appropriate theme that their talks have ended. He senses an ending as he walks, and he is not sure why. Is it the sea, blurred and distended in the heat to abolish the horizon? But he hardly notices the sea. Perhaps it is his suit, which as he walks has covered his body in a film of sweat. The figures that come towards him on the promenade seem to dance in the heat. As he claimed, after she had come, it was as if he knew all along she or something like her would. And so he must sense the ending. And passing the young woman who has smiled at him with an invitation to stop, he just sees another melting figure among the strollers coming towards him and wishes the heat, anyway, would end. And she turns, after a moment standing still, looking after his figure under its creased hat, which soon melts like the other strollers. She walks on to where the hotels give way to residential houses. She stops outside the largest of them, takes her eyes from the yellow chairs and walks in.

JAMES VANCE OPENS the door. He sees her standing, framed by the doorway as in both of his prints. But now the sea is behind her and she is a woman. She is shifting her weight from foot to foot too, as the girl in his prints could never have done. He sees her shoes and silk stockings, like the ones he photographed, their silk perfection vanishing under a very imperfect, even shabby, skirt. She has been doing more adverts, he thinks. Perhaps he wishes she could be held static like the girl he photographed, for when she moves into the hallway to stand beside him, he stays looking at the frame of the door. The sun comes in round its edges, bleaching the sea. He will later remember how glad he was, and how ashamed to be glad, that Father Beausang had left.

He says, Come in, which is unnecessary, since she is already in, staring at the extraordinary scene that covers half the wall. He stands at the open doorway watching her against that scene, thinking how her features blend with it. The old man, sensing something, clatters from his attic to the top of the stairs and gazes at her distracted, thinking the woman of his imagination, coaxed by his mural, has at last come alive. And Luke comes from the living-room with the tea things. He is now sixteen.

A
T FIRST SHE taught her brand of Irish at weekends but she must have felt immediately at home there, for she soon comes to flood the album, and all the vistas that were photographed without her find themselves in print again, with her in the foreground and Luke or James behind. Some rustic fencing with its border of roses which must have bloomed that summer acts as a frame for her, with Luke leaning sullenly against one of the poles and her hand on his sixteen-year-old head. And the old man finds his way in too, finally, magnificently. He is standing bolt upright on the prom, his huge white mane with a sharp quiff at the parting, from which all their quiffs sprang. He has her arm firm through his arm and is clutching it proudly, as if she were his young wife. The Head can be seen behind them and the yellow chairs, which in the print show like puffs of fawn. I can see them having walked the length of the prom, the breezes from the east that came in waves lifting his mane of hair and the hem of her skirt. She has constantly to hold down her skirt, which fills with wind, billowing like a canvas tent, while the old man entertains her with his version of time lost, tells her about the Barbados, about boarding-houses in New York and about the yards and yards of canvas he has filled with paint. Every memory recalls a bad canvas and as he recounts it it seems he dispenses with it, clears
himself of the burden of looking once and for all. He shows her the bald patch of lawn where he has sat sporadically throughout the last six years, painting the scene through which he is now walking, a scene that never seemed as perfect as it is today, and as he says that he lets go her arm and tells her to walk forward so that he can see her against that backdrop of blue sea and the very edge of the prom and the cones of the canvas huts nosing upwards from the beach. He stands back on the grass so that he can look at her, narrowing his eyes which are clustered everywhere with wrinkles from the effort to focus, turning his head to one side the way painters do and certain species of seabirds, and the updraught of the wind from the beach to the edge of the prom lifts her dress violently so that she limps towards him, laughing. But he barks at her with a voice he might use for servants and tells her to stand there and forget about the wind and so she stands there, her dress billowing over her knees and watches his smile, an old man's smile at a young woman, who has for once seen a perfect pair of knees—

Technically, too, this group of prints is an immense improvement. You've forgotten your reticence in the face of objects. I can see it, that you focus with such a clarity on one that all the objects around her fall into place. You do not see it, perhaps, but Father Beausang's remarks on Poincare have been proved correct since the intractability of the world you looked at through your shutter seems to have given way, as if a veil has been lifted. And where you caught Luke clumsily, sixteen years ago, in a Moses basket and a woman's hand comes awkwardly into the picture from the left-hand corner, now you catch the woman unashamedly, face-on, and the world falls into place behind her, just like, in fact, the landscape behind the cave
in Leonardo's ‘Virgin of the Rocks'. How can Bray and its environs, the Dargle valley, the eucalypti around Killiney hill and the wildness of your back garden suddenly assume this neatness, this aptness, how can this solid world suddenly know its place—a place firmly behind the people that inhabit it—when for years it has edged quite brazenly and vulgarly into your vision, the horizon always at an angle, walls, trees and the ever-present seascape always at odds with and sometimes even crushing the faces you placed alongside them? I assume you didn't notice this change, and that the pleasure you always took in your photography was for once lost in the pleasure you took in the objects you photographed.

There are three photographs of the chair-lift. There is Rene with Luke in two and in the third Rene with your father. In the first Luke is sitting bolt upright in the yellow chair and staring without expression towards you, towards the camera. Rene is holding a black bag on her lap, looking towards the camera with a quiet smile. The yellow chair would have been swaying slightly, for the Bray that we can see behind them in the space between Luke and Rene is somewhat blurred and because of that even more like a miniature town, a miniature world. They are both staring at me now from the print as they must have stared at you, and Luke's face seems to express some resentment towards me, as father would to son, but perhaps I am only interpreting that as resentment in the light of what I know happened later. And Rene is looking at me with a smile which seems to contain whatever is between us two.

The chair is swaying in the next snap too and this time what is blurred is Rene herself, for her head is hanging over it and Luke is pulling at her elbow in mock horror. She is at the opposite end of the
car this time, for Bray Head is behind them, fragments of what could be Wicklow, Wexford, dissolving into a blur, neither sea nor land. And in the third, the old man dominates, proud as he was on the promenade. He is pointing away from the sea towards the hinterland, the Sugarloaf and Lord Meath's estate. She is leaning past him to look and he must be describing the property he owned there and giving a gleeful account of the ways he managed to get rid of it.

Again there is nothing extraordinary in her face against the town of matchboxes with the railway station in the very centre and the line coming into it from Killiney and drawing away again towards Wicklow. Neither against the quite delicate line of the mountains on the other side of the chair-lift, going down this time, does she look extraordinary, Djouce, Tunduff and the Sugarloaf behind, its small peak of granite nibbling at the blue.

Which is not to deny the pleasure you took in those photographs. Whatever the object of your pleasure, your pleasurable eye is obvious. She fills them and the perspective with which you viewed her must be one of love. As if you have tried to embrace her, she leans through the prints, almost falling out of them. And the figures around her are blurred, as if the camera was jealous.

I
MEDITATE ON HER in a way and invent her in parts as you must know by now, for the secret must be out. And if it is out, I'm not sure whether I've failed, and if it's not out, I'm not sure whether I've succeeded. Anyway, if James was jealous, and jealousy I imagine is a faded, parched colour, that precise tint that all his snaps have acquired over the years, mainly, let me say, through the accumulation of dust, he was jealous of every brick in the world he looked at, of every image because he couldn't possess it and jealousy next to love is the most loving of all emotions. He was jealous of the world because he couldn't love it as he needed to and he was also jealous of her. But his jealousy for her was of a more delicate kind and even now, in these prints, was wheeling round to the point it would eventually reach, where its bulk would become thin and eventually invisible. You can imagine then that I am also jealous, having her take the Bray train each weekend over that summer in which Father Beausang stopped his visits for good. The perspiration which the heat from the window would have induced in her, her light cotton dress, blue with perfectly round splashes of white all over and the coarse material in the seat from which every movement of hers caused dust to spring. It is a moving picture I have of her, since she holds a battered dictionary, English-Irish, turns pages and sighs continually as she reads for,
as Lili tells me, she was never a great reader and the Irish lessons she gives to the Vance boy will be as bizarre and laughable as her own mastery of that language is. She is turning the pages anyway and constantly shifting from the page, to look at the procession of sea outside, sheared now and then by a thrust of beach or a stretch of heather when the tracks go inland. The insides of trains never hold for her the associations that the train viewed from just below the tracks does and so she loses her constant expectation of roses from the train windows the minute she enters. For not even the best of us can picture the outside from in and there is no way she could have seen, as they passed Killiney Head, the wheels shredding the lost strips of eucalyptus bark. But it would be unreasonable for the carriage in which she travelled and the polka-dot dress and the bristling chair not to retain the sense of those roses. And so I am jealous of every detail in any of those carriages in which she sat, all the more so since the Dublin-Bray train has been sheared of all its niceties over the years, the chairs now being movable and plastic and not even arranged in rows but fixed, backs to the wall, in a way that's more appropriate to a public bus. Bray has grown, you see. But the promenade's still there and the train that leads to it, and though it's more like a metal box than train carriages should be, it still has the bolt-marks in the floor where the seats that were more proper to it were fixed. I prefer to stand at the door with my hand on the window-sash and my cheek against the glass. That way I can see the procession of water outside, sheared by the beach, by occasional houses and stretches of green. And by the wonderfully squat governmental brick of the railway stations. Is there anything as sad as that red-brick, as the fawn, uneven granite of the platform and the tracks then, with the blue to one
side? The tracks were given to private tender, but those stations must be governmental. The schoolgirls rise and leave at each and nobody gets on. And this empty carriage with its plastic chairs will become the object of someone else's envy in turn as they wonder how it was then. But my urge anyway is to possess the lost carriage in which she travelled that summer and the dress which caught her perspiration as it passed Glasthule, Killiney, Shankhill. Once past Killiney the land becomes less crowded and the tracks seem to fall gently with the land, towards the sea and towards Bray. The pages of the dictionary turning and turning, rustling even now over the plastic seats. Those lessons must have been just an excuse for the tall man who met her on hard times just after her mother's death. He felt the urge to help her and also the urge to possess. Lili thinks so, Father Beausang imagines so and I imagine so too. But then we are all faintly jealous. It is through jealousy that we draw near her and because of jealousy, perhaps, that we never reach her. I have no doubt that his first instinct was the generous one, that shambling, uncertain generosity of his that Lili remembers with distaste. The payment was fixed at ten shillings a lesson, an amount that for a man like him is never enough, since the generous urge is even more bottomless than the acquisitive one. And no doubt after the first one he increased it, slipped twice as much into the brown envelope that neither of them seemed to notice, that was left with her name on it on the table by the hatstand. That the lessons themselves were an embarrassment she never realised of course, and none of them would have dreamed of mentioning it to her. The boy suffered gladly the Saturday afternoon spent learning words from Abacus to Acclamation, since her idea was to progress through the dictionary alphabetically and she hadn't an inkling of
grammar. And of course the beauty of that method was that there was never enough time, a lifetime wouldn't have sufficed, and by the end of the second Saturday they had only reached Artichoke. And so her visits became weekend ones, she would come on the Saturday morning and leave on the late train on Sunday, the extra lesson on Sunday afternoon being deemed absolutely necessary even to crack the sheen of that glorious mass of words. And of course after the third weekend, habit had set in and all four of them expected her and the current words would be repeated round the household like a litany. The old man even showed a surprising interest in Irish, the language he had hardly known existed. And habit brought its odd rituals too, the main among them being that the old man pestered her each Sunday to sit for him, and that Luke reserved for himself the right to wait for her at the station every Saturday morning and accompany her down Bray prom.