The Past (25 page)

IMAGINE JAMES'S CAMERA swinging forlorn from the hatstand. It seems out of place there, squat, so contained in its leather case. All the coats that have hung there for years, their folds seem to stiffen as they hang, enclosing in a kind of stillness the fluted trunk of the stand. But the camera swings when he places it there, to and fro, glancing off the surface with each return. So he listens to the stand rocking faintly and looks at the unfinished mural his father left, the Connemara landscape forming a window, a gateway into this odd expanse of hills that his father imagined to be Greece; the woman's face pinioned between both as if he could never decide quite what background she needed. He can see now that it isn't quite her, the
neck is too Grecian, the cheekbones are too flushed and Irish, she has been only caught in that fringe of blonde. James leaves the hall and goes into the living-room and the camera still swings from the hatstand. He pulls out the drawer in the cabinet and takes out a sheaf of papers, deeds of inheritance, mortgages, old litigations, the whole penumbra of unfinished business left untouched now for three generations. He leafs through signatures of gentlemen and Papists, Bray burghers, certificates of birth, marriage and death until he comes to a small compact pile of invoices and inventories of stock all filled in in the fine nib and hand of a long-forgotten clerkship. The stock of the forgotten pottery he finds was numbered at seventeen hundred units, ‘unit' being specified as a set complete with cups, saucers, side plates and serving bowls. Their value he finds assessed in pounds, in single numbers, the total stock having been rendered almost worthless by the influx of machine-made delft from the English midlands. The whorls and curlicues of the unknown clerk's hand remind him of the fine blue lines on the delft itself, that solid grace and attention to detail that seem to him to have walked across water to here from an unknown country. He should take the train now and get off at Killiney and stand on the moulting hill again among the stripes of eucalyptus, inhaling again that scent of resin and tomcats, the wet dust of the bay. But he doesn't, it's not yet time for him to take the train. He goes upstairs and urinates in the bowl, surrounded by the odour of fathers, of the slow drip across the years, of inheritance, colouring and temper, from father to son and father to son.

WE WALKED FROM O'Connell Bridge to College Green and Clarendon Street. As we passed the brash, coloured pietà in the courtyard of the church, I stopped him and pointed at her curved plaster mouth. If the Father, I asked him, fathered His own Son and yet the Son was the Father, does that mean the Son fathered Himself? Something like annoyance crossed his face, and then a hint of a smile. I apologised for my lack of acquaintance with what I remembered he had called that exquisite system of triadic ambiguity, and tried to rephrase it. In other words, I asked, if the Son fathered Himself, did He by that very act create His own Father? He smiled fully then and pulled me on. You are leaving out, he whispered, the third corner of that exquisite triangle: the Holy Spirit.

LUKE FINDS THE front-of-house doors barred and makes his way along the side. From somewhere he can hear brass music. He walks with his hand against the russet brick that leads him to the stage entrance. The door is open and he hears voices coming from the inside gloom. He gets the odour then and I can shiver at the precise feel of that rust crumbling dryly at the touch of her fingers and the roses as she leant close and smelt them as their bowls blew soundlessly over the leather. But it is the dust Luke smells, of an unused stage. He runs his hand along the metal bar, walking inside.

WE REACHED LILI'S house and shook hands and I watched him walk across the bridge, over the grey ribbon of canal. He seemed fatigued all of a sudden. I had promised to call him when all the questions were finished, when I came back from Clare, but looking at his slow, dark walk I realised how little promises mean to the old. He didn't turn or wave, so I rang the bell and listened for Lili's difficulty in coming down the stairs.

‘
C
AN YOU IMAGINE,' said Lili, quite unnecessarily, rocking softly once more in her cane chair, ‘the impact of that extraordinary boy on that group of Thespians? You know what Rene meant to them, but can you imagine how the effeminate hams fawned over him, delighted in him, loved him even? The boy was their dream, they would have had him as Ophelia in a white dress strung with real watercress and lilies. But then he'd never, no matter what the inducement, go beyond carrying sets. Besides which he would have been a terrible actor. He hung around walls even more than his father did, which might be why it suited him. He'd stand behind flats, walls within walls, and watch the open stage from there. But can you imagine that gaggle of cynical, poverty-stricken actors, dedicated to nothing but the next night, willing to sell their grandmothers for the dual ends of simple survival and the practice of what they called their “art”—can you imagine them roused to all the possibilities of innocence by a love affair between their A.S.M. and their second lady? It was a conspiracy, you see, enacted on the Free State, on that society we played to. We moved through those towns, the names of which I can hardly remember, like early Christians carrying the message. But the message was sent out in an elaborate code. After the first few shows it came out that she was pregnant. Now that's a
message we couldn't have spelt out. But can you imagine the pleasure in conveying it while disguising it? The happy falsity, the artifice? We did botched-up versions of the comedies,
Measure for Measure, As You Like It,
we did all the old staples,
The Colleen Bawn, The Workhouse Ward, The Rising of the Moon, The Countess Cathleen.
But no matter what story each of them told, the same story always told itself through them. Which was love, I suppose. And I can never think of that word outside a story.'

LUKE, YOU SEE, has found his home. The man with the flowing mane of hair and the velvet jacket and the cigarette forever in its holder who meets him just inside the stage door reminds him of his grandfather. He withdraws his hand quickly on the handshake and orders him briskly to come inside. And Luke walks into the gloom and feels instantly, unmistakably, in the home of his emotions verified. That cluttered world of dust, spiralling from the bare yellow light bulb, all his movements constricted by the canvas flats. He finds truth in the falsity he finds there. The number of flats is limited, he notices, a few bare, timeless scenes having to serve any number of purposes. There is a living-room wall with an ornate window, and through the window a vista of beach and sea. This serves, he is told, for worlds as varied as the drawing-rooms of Sheridan to, at a push (and it is a push, MacAllister smiles), the court of the Duke of Mantua. There is a garden of course, vague enough to belong to any period, defined only by a stretch of green, a border of flowers and an arch of trellis tumbling with roses. And there is a cluster of white Doric pillars
against a background of blue which must be by turn ecclesiastical, courtly, or plain Athenian.

A man in a check jacket whose name must be Brogan emerges from the gloom and Luke watches him stabilise flats, sees how to intimate an infinity of spaces from a handful of canvas rectangles and some square yards of stage. The dust is drifting from the foot-lights to the hanging lights and Luke stands in the cones of dust and sees Brogan carry that deeply satisfying vista of beach and sea and drawing-room window from stage left to stage right.

‘IT WAS SIMPLY a tour, like any other. I remember the trains, towns flitting past the windows. We played all the parish halls and stayed one night in each—Clones, Birr, Ballina—what do I know about names? All I know was MacAllister's grand plan which hadn't changed for donkeys' years and which was to push through the midlands, do all the seaside towns in summer and do September in Lisdoon. But don't ask me for details. I remember successions of small hills. Small crowds. Until we came to Knock. Then we all noticed.'

I
AM LOST IN the midlands but I found Knock to be a small stretch of houses, miles from the main line, awaiting the centenary of an apparition of the Virgin there in 1879. I walked through it at night and found it lit by those flashing coloured bulbs that more humble townlands reserve for the apparition of a fun fair. Wooden stalls formed a wedge down the centre, a positive danger to those motorists who sped through it towards Mayo. She was there in every conceivable pose, rows of her upon the stalls, lit now by bulbs from the inside, now by luminous paint, in metal, in plastic and all kinds of alloy. They ranged from the very cheap to the moderately expensive, and I chose one of the expensive ones. She was blue and glowed from the inside and was standing on a pedestal. Walking through the stalls I found it easy to convince myself that each one celebrated quite a different visitation—the one of Rene, Luke and Emerald Theatrical Productions Ltd, all of whom stopped, I surmised, at the small wooden hall wedged behind the giant grey church which stood some yards from where the row of stalls ended. It would be appropriate, I thought, that every stall and every statue sold remembered an event that the visitors and the stall owners had quite forgotten. I knew that the urge to visit shrines is deeper and more crass than memory. And there was an empty touring bus by the church and it pleased me
to think of those busloads celebrating an event of which they knew absolutely nothing, though it pained me to think that the trains had stopped and that somewhere outside the town was a disused pale granite station, beside a canal perhaps. All this though my statue didn't resemble her at all. And sure enough, when I had reached the end of the coloured lights and the street had become a country road, I came upon parallel ruts in the road through which tracks must have run. And I looked through the hedge and saw the tracks running eastwards, rusted of course, with the small pale granite station dripping under trees and beside it the canal.