The Past (26 page)

LUKE CARRIES THE flat with the Grecian pillars from the train on to the platform and through the dripping trees. His cheek touches the canvas. And the feel of the paint reassures him as he walks through the pines with their eternal drip. He walks from sleeper to sleeper until he reaches the road and then carries his pillars down into the church, the small wooden hall. I see him walking back then through the pines to where they all stand on the fawn platform, jaded, laughing gently. Brogan hands him flat after flat from the train, which is gently steaming. The others strut on the platform, watching the moon through the pines.

THERE'S A NOTICE on the lamp post which flaps, a little like a flag. Rene is to play Rosalind. Those dusty halls have bare wooden stages
and the chairs are sometimes cinema chairs, joined with one long iron band against each felt back. When I ran my finger along the felt chair-backs small puffs of dust rose endlessly. The dust is a problem. It rises from the wooden stage, catches all the light. The stage itself echoes with each footstep and so Rene walks slowly on it, each movement plumbed with stillness. Most of the bulbs are burned out and so the stage is lit in pools with vacuums in between. MacAllister paces the back rows conceiving his version of the miracle through which the Duke will be exiled to a manifest Forest of Arden and the wrestling match will be a wrestling match. He is smoking and squinting and striking the felt seat impatiently when Rene walks into the inadequate lights and begins her lines. He sees her walking from the gloom to the light and notices the odd retraction of her movement. Then he sees her blonde hair and flushed cheeks in the moving eddies of dust under the lights and the dust seems to carve out a space for her, anticipating each movement, leaving a faint glow behind. MacAllister, sitting in the dark among the felt seats, realises with a sudden shock that it is the glow of her pregnancy. The lights above grip her, form a cone around her of gently wheeling dust as if they could lift her upwards but she stays on the bare boards, full and three-dimensional against the sagging curtains and the painted flats. There is a heightened flush to each of her words and every gesture she makes is somehow round, flows and yet has the glow and presence of someone standing still.

‘THE CENTRE OF the stage was wherever she was, just that, your eyes were drawn towards her and when she moved all the lines were
made redundant. Now she wasn't an actress in the normal sense of the word, in any sense even. She had inherited all her mother's faults, but where Una had the unhappy knack of turning every part into a public speech, Rene had the gift of turning each into simply herself. She had come to it by accident and stayed with it by accident. And now this self of a sudden spilled and flowed, is the only word for it, out further than the stage and those perpetually faulty lights. A happy occurrence, you might think. But what terrified us was that every line and move of hers had nothing to do with the story in question. She was telling a different, quite simple story. Every part of her said simply: I am pregnant.

‘Of course we all thought of the obvious: headlines in the provincial papers, sermons from the pulpit and theatrical riots. So when the hall was half-full as usual and there was the usual half-bored, half-ritual air of a fairground or a charity concert, we were all lit by a kind of terror backstage. What she seemed to reveal every time she moved into the footlights we were determined to conceal. And what emerged, happily, was nothing to do with our fears. From the word go that stage was heightened. The facts we knew meant nothing to the two hundred odd subscribers down there. But what the facts led to did. They didn't see her pregnant, they saw her simply resplendent. And they saw every other performance stretched to a pitch to conceal the secret. Since they couldn't glean the secret, all they could glean was the pitch, the richness. What they couldn't read of the real story made the apparent story all the more enthralling. And so when the curtain went down, if our sigh of relief was audible, the applause from the wooden hall was more than adequate to drown it.'

I
PUT THE STATUE on the mantle and felt the warmth coming from it. I asked Lili what the next town was. She demurred. I saw the pines again, dark green against the moon, dripping on to the pale granite platform, the tracks wet and silver, running towards another town.

‘SAY IT WAS Boyle. And if it was Boyle I've no picture of it anyway. Except maybe for a market. Yes, say there was a market and a main street with a chemist's shop and the train station was red-bricked, if you say so. But I can see a school hall, yes a hall that was used as a church once, the real church burnt down in the Troubles. Or was it just the high windows darkened with brown paper that reminded me of churches?'

THEY COME TO Boyle, maybe, where the hands of the dealers slap the bullocks' thighs and are spat on and shaken. There is Luke and the company walking through a square with streets running from all
four corners. They get dispersed of course in the mêlée of cattle, so many packed between the shop fronts that there can be no sense of an open passage. They lean to each other over the rumps of cattle and shout, unsure of which corner of the square to go towards. The ground is churned into ankle-deep mud and MacAllister is pretending impatience, his blue suit smudged by the flicking bullocks' tails and his grey hair blowing. But they are all laughing, stretching over hides and laughing, touching hands when they can and falling back when the motion of a bullock shifts them, laughing in the mud. This way, boy, MacAllister whispers to Luke, to whom the pressure of the hide is even healthier than the shoulders of priests. Luke follows him, carrying his flats towards the rectangular front of the Roscommon Arms Hotel.

‘IT WOULD HAVE been unthinkable, any other year, that he'd change his plans. But now it was unthinkable that he wouldn't.'

IN THE LOUNGE of that hotel which would have had a twelve-pound salmon, dried ochre scales gleaming with resin, its mouth permanently open behind the glass, he has his maps open and Luke is somewhere near as tall as him and with the same lank hair, and between them there is even a slight familiar air. If Boyle takes two days, Mountcharles will have to be skipped, but then there is Ballina, which might even take three. And the pattern of towns and halls, memories
of good nights and bad, dates on which they'll be full and empty and the logic with which he's bound them together over years slowly falls asunder and he can see, just barely, the dim outlines of the pattern that's to replace them. They must reach the sea, he knows, by mid-July and trace a thread of towns down the coast towards Clare. He plans in advance for this new element and then, looking towards Luke, who is gazing at the open salmon's mouth in the glass case, he senses that no matter how he plans, a pattern of which he can gauge perhaps nothing will establish itself. And that night in the hall, pacing, as Lili says, behind the end seats he hears Rene's lines, Well, I will forget the condition of my estate to rejoice in yours, and it strikes him that no matter how he times it, days, nights, weeks and months, there is a logic there that will draw them all from town to town at its own pace, a pace he knows nothing about and can only wait to discover. She is standing in the dark pool between the foot-lights and yet can be seen clearly with that roundness of gesture that nobody could photograph. Luke, standing behind his canvas trees, can see her clearly, the whole hall can see her, against all the laws of theatrical lighting and effect.