The Past (30 page)

‘NOW WHO WOULD have known,' said Lili, ‘when he stooped in that doorway, and Jesus when I saw his stoop the sinking feeling came on me again—I mean, I knew the average door-jamb was too small for him but why couldn't he bend from the knees and make it a little less obvious, did generations of joiners and wainwrights, I mean, set about perfecting the average height of the Irish doorway just to give him an opportunity to stoop from the shoulders? But even given his permanent sense of apology to the world at large, who could have foreseen the odd marriage the three of them would make? Johnny Newham was at the bar and Ferdia O'Haodha and beyond them MacAllister and beyond him in turn me, in whom the old goat was at last taking some interest. But all three of us saw the door open a little and then close and then finally open fully and then this stooping shadow that we knew must have something to do with Luke—I mean, his length and his transparency were all there in embryo. Have you ever seen a plain mother whose features transpose themselves, item for item, to her daughter and emerge there incomparably more beautiful? Well this image of length and hesitancy that turned to beauty in his son got up to greet him and stood there, neither of them touching and yet both so much the image of the other's hesitation it was as if they were
embracing. And Luke said “Father . . .” No, you couldn't have told seeing James Vance coming in the door what was to emerge. We had assumed Luke was the father. But seeing them beside one another you could sense it, scent it. The smell of that incongruous union filled the bar, I mean, like ripe apples or steaming hay—'

WALKING OUT OF the limestone station a kind of fetid air like steam or hay did fill the streets. But then it had just rained and the last heat of the day was raising vapour from the pavements. There was the square, much as Lili described it, and not too far from the station either with a glorious stone pikeman the blue-grey of that whole county, the sun glancing the blade of his pike into fire. A cart loaded with September hay passed us and the scent of rotting stayed behind. Lili led me towards a plain hotel. The cart drove slowly round the pikeman to the westward road.

IT IS WHAT all the surfaces intimated. The plate of dull metal, the sheen of blue, the shreds of eucalyptus rotting on the sloping hill. Everything turns into everything else, James realises, almost at the end of his passage through that country where everyone is related. Cousins once and twice removed, fathers, sisters, sons and brothers seem to await him in that bar which he fills now with his scent of damp hay, sweet, heady and glutinous. The scent of decay, he realises, is not far from the scent of birth. Nothing is separate.

THE LARGE WOODEN doors were open and led towards a foyer in which everything was wood. The jamb was low so that even I had to stoop to avoid cracking my forehead. Am I as tall, Lili? She doesn't answer, but walks briskly to the glass doors and pushes them open, squinting after the low sunlight outside.

‘SO THOUGH I had almost willed,' she whispered, since the lounge before us seemed to impose silence, ‘his head to crack on that jamb, when he came towards us with Luke, I couldn't. There were so many things I didn't know, I realised, and one of them was that between Luke's demeanour and his there was no difference, no difference at all. My sly passion for that whey-skinned youth, which was my passion for Rene, how could it not be my passion for the kid's father with whom for all I knew Rene was more passionate than with any of them? That was one of the things I didn't know. The other was that Rene was more pregnant than even I'd calculated. She always had an adaptable figure. Did I tell you that? And when they came towards me I couldn't care which of them was father. Which of them was Luke even. And MacAllister's beam was the largest of all. Well, I'm blessed! he said, when I told him who the tall one was. And when he was introduced, he said it again: Well, I'm blessed!'

I WALKED FROM the lounge through the wooden foyer. Lili stayed there, at the glass doors. The wooden front doors threw in an oblong cascade of light and framed the square outside, half amber sky, half blue-grey brick. The foyer narrowed and changed to a corridor which narrowed again. I knew now it was eternally simple. Each through loving each loves the other, father, son and her. Could I forget the perennial which, I wondered, hoping the rooms would provide an answer. But the wood of the corridor gave way to veneer and to a white tiled floor. I realised that I was in a recent extension, an architecture that could never have been fifty years old. So I walked back to the foyer and climbed an oaken staircase, certain that it would lead to the old rooms, so strong was the scent of generation from above. The oak curved under my hand as I went upwards and I was suddenly weak with pity for her, whom they both loved through each other. The scent grew as I ascended, and with it my pity. She had to bear all of them, I thought, as well as me. Two rows of doors stretched down the upstairs corridor. I chose one, following my nose. I edged the door open and saw white gauze curtains flapping by an open window. There was a table beneath it, with a curved jug and an oval hole which once would have held a basin. I went inside. There was a narrow bed. I stood for a while breathing the scent of clean linen. The scent changed then, as if a woman had entered behind me. I turned, but there was no one there. The room was as empty as ever. Then I saw the open window, where the exhaust from the Lisdoonvarna bus was drifting past. Nothing is distinguishable, I realised. The exhaust curled through the window like a beckoning finger. A wind brushed the curtains once more. I walked out then, down the stairs towards Lili and the waiting bus.

T
HE ROAD TWISTS and turns so much that our bus seems always to plough through the cloud of dust and diesel it has just created. It is no coincidence that every bend is the bend we have just turned and that but for the balding landscape our road would seem almost circular, just as it is no coincidence that when Rene, James and Luke ploughed through this road (and there was more dust then) de Valera followed soon after with his driver, Jack. Neither is it coincidence that what fields there were on either side were strewn now, as then, with gouts of cut, yellowing hay. For all three trips were made in September the way most trips to Lisdoonvarna are and were, and the cut hay yellowed what fields there were round the town where the unmarried gathered on verandas looking for spouses and the feeble looking for cures. It seems more than the smell of hay as we all drive forward, circuitously towards the town that I have never seen, a recreative town, Lili tells me, without the sea. But how can people holiday, I ask Lili, without beach, sea, promenade and Eagle's Nest? There were spa waters there, she told me, which compensated. And that smell of hay which grows thicker as we corkscrew forward as if we are piercing towards the generative process itself reminds de Valera of nothing so much as the yellowing water that comes from the round hole of the sulphur spring. He is
familiar with all the rites of his small nation. He has memorised the precise balance of sulphur, iodine and phosphorous in the separate springs and yet all four springs are one to him, part of that healing process, the bubbling core, the well of cold health, Clare, renewal, that elusive elixir of abstention politics and national health. Rene, being driven also by a hatted driver in a car in which Lili took the front seat with her and Luke and James the back, takes the smell as the corollary to the colour of her hair and her condition. And it was, Lili swears, as if it were made for her, a kind of supplicant enticement, and every field we passed through bright only in so far as its yellow gouts of hay matched the colour of her extraordinary hair. I could feel her responding to it, her leg would tremble against mine, or was it just the antics of that extraordinary driver? He remembered us from last year, you see, and even he had heard, knew in advance, the reputation of our current tour and drove so the car leapt over that road, seemed to rise from the tarmac when we took those tangential bends and seemed to be driving round, back up our own behinds, but with a speed and lightness that made it a journey, a real journey. Her leg trembled and I drank in the smell of vegetation, cut vegetation, hay-sodden grass or falling leaves, I couldn't have distinguished, but the kind of smell created by those years of falling that made the boglands, didn't they, I could hear the crashing of mile-high trees, evergreen leaves that you couldn't see now and the vegetable matter pressed into earth, oil and peat-moss and growing and falling again, and that this whole circus left just this delicate film of hay on those stubbled fields seemed to me—well, a final affirmation if you like, that brutal machine of years and that yellow down which at times looked even more fragile than the flat,
even watery, texture of her hair. But that tremor—it runs from her thigh now down to her instep—it could have been—I had no idea, as I said, how advanced.