The Past (28 page)

Lili, though, doesn't admit or recognise the importance of beaches, but looking at her in those breaks between her talking, I can see the memory of that series of beaches written on her face, on the threads of tiny veins across her cheeks, for all the world like the criss-cross of currents on an expanse of water seen from above and on the still fine, though parched and paper-like skin on her hands, like those dried husks of cod's roe one finds way beyond, generally, the sea's edge, transparent, that scrape gently when you touch them and that are of course covered with a fine sheen of sand, for all the world like the down of hair. Her bones now seem as delicate as those of a gull's skull, bleached, of course, and washed quite clean and when she opens her eyes to talk again they are bright, piercing and enthrallingly blue.

T
HE WALK FROM the Bray station to the Main Street passes a bowling green, a sunken lawn below sea level. It is flooded today as James passes and the black curves of three bowls can be seen, aqueous and silent. The wind which whips the bay behind him leaves that water unruffled. They greet each other at the presbytery door, both exhausted by the other's absence. James moves into the curate's parlour with relief and the decor of the small living-room brings back his ponderous, dark gestures that were once framed on Tuesdays by his own bay window. The arguments begin at once of course, although instead of Luke there is an aged greying lady in a green apron, strangely male in her angular movements, to bring in the tray with tea. James eats the tomato sandwiches and notes with affection how the flesh around Father Beausang's collar has thickened. The excitement at their renewal of acquaintance, moderate at first, fills the room, then drifts and seems about to escape them, just to return, stronger than ever. Father Beausang's eyes light with enthusiasm as he elaborates a conceit of his own, a numeral system based on trinities. James's amazement is tempered by the curate's smile, coloured once again with his old, wayward humour. No, not on the Trinity itself, he murmurs, but on a triadic base, which gives quite different, exciting results than that of your binary code. Would
a society, Father Beausang muses, whose mathematics were built on a triadic code, have radically different social characteristics? Two, after all, is an oddly unsatisfying concept. With two one has the dialogue, the linear, but with three one has the conspiracy of space. And thus the triangle, perhaps even more than the circle, is the symbol of harmony; of definition within unity rather than just unity itself. Of course such a triangle can admit of no intrusion. A new element added and it becomes a square, another and it becomes a pentagon—

Father Beausang stops and sees the world as a garden ravaged by intellect. James is staring into his cup. Father Beausang shifts forward and dust ruffles from his cassock, which blurs and haloes James's face. I kept this for you, Father Beausang whispers, I thought you would want to know. He extracts the faded cutting from the
Irish Times.
James takes the square of paper from his soft fingers, which seem reluctant to withdraw. Emerald at Strand Hill, he reads. MacAllister's Western Wonder.

THEY WALK TOGETHER past the bowling green and the submerged bowls and part at the station. The curate grips his elbow as the train draws in.

‘YOU KNOW I never liked him. But perhaps that was jealousy. Or the impatience that uncertain people always rise in me. But then I loved Luke. They were so alike. Did I love him too? She did. And she loved
me. When he came to that hotel in Gort and Luke saw him through the glass and ran to him, I hated him. I thought it was over. But I was wrong there too. I know that three of them were necessary. Now I know that. You ask me who was the father. I say both of them were. He had been following us, you see, from sometime back in Sligo. Some place, I mean,' she thought for a moment. ‘And he found us in Gort. Or was it in Lisdoon?'

AS THE TRAIN pulls him with an ease that must have been like a long silk ribbon, since he is not conscious of stops, station changes or of the evolutions of landscape through the window, he remembers those bowls sitting on the grass, the slight upper curve above the quiet surface and the sphere below distended and enlarged by the water that held them in its pool of green. He realises that bowls seem always at rest, even when thrown, but he has never seen bowls so much at rest as these, the spaces across which they normally spin occupied by water. And the water touching each eliminated distance, and the need for movement. He reaches Ballisodare about midday and books one of the capped drivers to take him to Strand Hill. The other driver follows close, capped and curious, since James is the only passenger.

THE CAR WHEELS into the square of cement and comes to rest between the sea and hotels. They have left Strand Hill, of course. His conversation with the cloth-capped driver has told him as much.
James pays and walks across the square to the hotel that looms towards the sea and weeps its granite. The few posters in the lobby tell him the same. He has forgotten the date, but no matter, those posters hang limply from their corkboard with the sense of an event that has passed. To where? he wonders. Another town, but which? He sees her round, childlike signature in the guestbook and books that room. It is a single room, he finds, with a bare, narrow bed. His eyes crinkle in disappointment or affection, imagining Luke's bed three rooms down from it. He sits on the bed and the boom of the sea comes through the window like something solid and he regrets for a moment the camera he has left swinging in Sydenham Villas. The grey light of those western seaboards that seems more an echo, a reflection of light than light itself, that vanquishes the space between each stone, each hill, quickens his senses with the urge to capture it once more, to photograph. But instead he sits there with, I imagine, a growing sense of relief, drawing his eyes as near to the window as possible, and all the scenes he has taken come back with the precision of memory alone. They return fast as if pulled by the ribbon of those years, each replaced by another, the moving picture of their souls. He sees Luke age from puppy fat to sinew, he sees her move in three large leaps to womanhood and it seems to him that the only sprocket moving them is love. Their surfaces, as he views them, change and shift and never settle, but it is light, he knows now, only light that allows him to view them and the light is that of love. And the light that alone brings the booming sea outside to him floods through the glass, filling the room with its weakened cobalt, a presence itself.

‘YES, IT WAS Gort, Gort. We were in the lounge and he saw us through the glass, coming in. He must have travelled down the coast from Sligo. Difficult, I'd say, since the tour was out of rhythm. He must have gone to each town and asked. Then searched around for the next one. And asked again.'

HE READS THE provincial papers but finds no ads anticipating her, only reports in retrospect, after she has passed through. He walks out on to the cement square. He sees the long stretch of sand, virgin once more, and feels their presence somewhere down that coastline. The air is wet with spray, the clouds are full again and his quest is somehow fixed, that fullness drawing him on. He knows their absence is illusory. He asks the driver to take him to the train.