The Past (6 page)

S
HE IS SEEN in frieze, as it were, on an impromptu stage in what looks like a drawing-room with elegant French windows. She is holding a spear and she has her head thrown back, her marvellous hair bound by what seems to be a leather cord. There are two youths on either side of her, dressed in pleated skirts which could be Grecian but for the elaborate Celtic signs emblazoned on them. And all three are staring towards what must be the cowled head of a photographer.

SHE IS IN a peasant shawl, with a flat behind her depicting the gable end of a thatched cottage. The drawing-room is larger and more sumptuous and the flats are bounded by a heavy brocade curtain, covering, I have no doubt, a set of even more splendid French windows. Her head is raised and her eyes are blazing with a kind of posed defiance. To her left is a figure with a grotesque false paunch and a large top hat bearing the legend ‘John Bull'. This figure is glowering, over her shoulders, towards an equally caricaturish figure on her right who can be taken, from his goatee beard and his spiked Prussian helmet, to represent the Kaiser Wilhelm. And between them Una's fleshy
arm is raised to point to a banner stiffly fluttering from the cottage's thatched gable. And the banner reads: ENGLAND'S DIFFICULTY?

AND IN THE last photo the drawing-room has given way to the interior of a theatre and the flats and the setting are more elaborate, though the scene they depict is even more decrepit. The scene is a room in a Dublin tenement in which a young man is sitting by a typewriter, his mouth open wide, obviously declaiming something to an unseen audience, his hand ruffling his unruly hair. I have no doubt that the play is O'Casey's first,
The Shadow of a Gunman,
and that the stage is the early Abbey; that the youth is Domnall Davoren and that the line he is declaiming is Shelley's ‘Ah me alas, pain, pain, ever, for ever', with which O'Casey for some reason peppered the dialogue. Behind him, peeping over his shoulder at his typewritten sheet, holding a bowl of sugar, is Una. And I have no doubt that she is meant to represent the most ideal and fragile of all of O'Casey's heroines, Minnie Powell; and that her Minnie Powell was on the plump side and definitely too old. She was thirty-three by then, and looked it.

T
HEY ARRIVED ON the Second of June 1915. In the Easter of the next year there was a revolution. A Gaelic League colleague of hers named Eamon de Valera held Boland's Mills and was lucky enough to survive the subsequent rash of executions. His pallid face, his gangling, unlikely bearing, his tenderness for mathematics and his strict academic air had, Lili tells me, been the butt of many of her private, rather caustic jokes. But when the revolution (which surprised her, Lili tells me, as much as anyone, though she later pretended of course, that she was in on it all along) extended itself into first months and then years of gradually accelerating chaos, then open rebellion, she lent to it her sense of melodrama and backstage intrigue, discovered a sudden liking for the gaunt schoolmaster.

‘And rumour had its heyday here, I mean that man who would stamp his unlikely profile on the history of this place as surely as South American dictators stick theirs on coins and postage stamps, the mathematical rigour of his speech, his actions, and her, who was fast becoming the
grande dame
of Irish Republicanism—not that there weren't others jostling for her place, but none of them had her advantage, she was an actress after all, a bad one maybe, but she knew how to upstage with all the cunning of her limited talent.'

How Michael became implicated is uncertain. Taking briefs at first, Lili tells me, in Republican cases and later assuming a full and active role in what would become known as the I.R.A. Una claimed it was at her behest, Lili tells me. I would like to imagine it was in remembrance of that promenade, remembering the affair of the bathing shelter, with the sense of holocaust, like the sea, all around them. His involvement gradually took its own momentum until by 1919 he had donned the cap and trenchcoat that characterised activists in the upper echelons of the guerrilla effort.

‘Never got his name on a street. That must be to his credit. It'd sound odd, anyway. O'Shaughnessy Street—'

He took at one stage to writing verse, a practice that seemed obligatory for activists in those days. He never mastered Irish. His verse is somewhat painful to read, only memorable for the number of instances in which he refers to Kathleen, the daughter of Houlihan, as blonde-haired.

I
HAVE TO IMAGINE you, Rene, since he took no photographs.

Una did, but only after he had died. You were three when you went to the convent on Sion Hill Road. You had a broad face for a child, eyes that could be seen as too small, but those who knew you didn't care. You were an ordinary child in every respect and what greater blessing can one ask for, than to have an ordinary childhood?

It's just your hair that is distinctive. Curls hanging all around your forehead. Your hair is thin but has a creaminess of texture that gives each strand its own way of falling. Flat near the crown but falling all around it to a fringe of spirals, like those clumps of flowers, the stems of which droop from the centre and the petals fall to make the rim of a bell. Blonde is a shade that catches the tints of the colours around it. Your hair is cream blonde and catches most lights and the outer strands make a halo of them. To have extraordinary hair is almost as good a thing as to have an ordinary childhood.

You sat with Lili on the small benches and the Cross and Passion nuns moved among the benches like beings from another world. Their heads were framed by those great serge and linen bonnets that nodded like boxes when they spoke. It is you at the time that Lili described, when your father would walk in in his Free State uniform and lift you on to one hip and then the other, trying to avoid paining
you with his shoulder strap or his shoulder pistol while the gun-carriage rattled outside and the nuns whispered like a litany their offers of tea. You would have been near six then. And your clearest memory could have been mine. Of the beech tree in the gravelled yard across from the windows of the classroom. The trunk is huge and pushes straight out of the earth and the gravel is thick around it, revealing no earth or roots to prepare one for its intrusion. It backs in its magnificence against an old granite wall. The branches nearest the wall have been sawn off to stop them crushing through the granite. So all growth of branch and foliage is towards the school, towards the window at which you would have sat, staring. It is really for you, the severed half-umbrella, the monstrous segment of tangled growth that shades half the yard. Across from it again is a small shrubbery, half-bald with grass, smoothed by generations of feet. A bell would have rung, a fragile shiver of brass notes filling the classroom around you, the nun's bonnet would have nodded towards the door and you and the class would have walked jerkily towards it and once outside you would have expended yourself in that circular burst of energy that erupts from nowhere and ends nowhere, scouring the gravel with your feet, the air filled with a patina of cries that seemed to hover above your head. Only when you had exhausted yourself would you lie by the tree. But the tree would renew spent energies, would gather a ring of small bodies around it, each newcomer jostling to rest her back against the bark. You would have won Rene, continually won, by reason of that quiet ignorance of the turmoil of others which would always have found its few square feet of bark. The bark moulded in scallops, rougher than skin is.

Your name would have brought you some attention among the Eileens, Maureens, Marys and Brids. Two thin white vowels, strangely unIrish and yet so easily pronounced, as if more Irish than the Irish names. Your father's visits would have brought you more. Most of the nuns would have baulked at the excesses of the Troubles but would have supported the Free State side and have been overcome by the mystique of your father's name. He looks a little like a statue, standing in the doorway. Two of them, though, would have refused to be impressed. One from Clare, with Republican connections, whose tight mouth whenever she passed you in the corridor would have said enough. And one old, quite beautiful creature, an avid reader of Tolstoy, who would have regarded the presence of gun-carriages in a school yard as an immoral intrusion. She is old and tall, like a long translucent insect underneath her habit. The thin bones on her hands and the shining white skin on them and her cheeks, which is all you can see of her beneath the black, seem to contain more reserves of energy than any of the younger novices. Her hands are hardly warm, they hardly linger on your hair for more than a moment; each of her movements is as brief as it can possibly be, as if her body is reserving itself for a boundless, ultimate movement. And the reserve, the iron quiet that she imposed on her life has had its recompense in the cheeks that face you at the top of the class, as smooth and pallid as those of a young, inactive boy, in the grey eyes under the black and white bonnet which reflect the impersonal rewards of a lifetime's confinement. Her presence is hypnotic, as are her maxims. ‘Keep your hands,' she tells you, ‘to yourself. Keep your hands from yourself.' You cannot understand the contradictions of this dictum, but through your efforts to understand them it assumes
a sense of truth that is, for you, greater than words. It hints at the mystery behind movement and gesture. You say the maxim to yourself in situations that have nothing to do with hands. You know the ideal is hands folded and demure on the lap of your unfolded legs, neither to nor from yourself, and you know too that this is not the final answer which, you suspect, has nothing to do with the dimpled, fleshy hands before you. Are there other hands, you wonder, unseen ones which these real hands must train to lie at rest, ready to suddenly bloom into a gesture of giving? The hands of the soul, you think, and stare at the nun who has repeated her maxim once more and is sitting, hands unseen, at the top of the classroom. Her name is Sister Paul and it expresses that maleness which must be the ultimate goal of her sisterhood.

Lili is your seat-mate. She is pert and alive, master of the social graces of that classroom. If anyone is the favourite it is she, catching the glances of nuns with the downward flickering of her eyelids. And even now I can see the small alert girl who would have arbitrated the loves and hatreds of that class, whose clothes would have been imitated, cut of hair, colour of ribbon, style of bow. She had a lisp and the lisp becomes in her an enviable possession. She is enthralled by you and your cream-blonde hair and yet can dominate you with her quickness and her tongue, for yours was more than anything an ordinary childhood.

You sit by the window and stare at the trunk of the beech. Sister Paul's voice wavers, like a thread held in air. Lili, to see the trunk, has to lean past you. You watch the shadow of its severed umbrella blacken less and less of the yard as the morning progresses. The first break passes and the second break, until the final bell rings and you
run into the yard once more and find your space against the bark and if the armoured carrier is there, you are carried off in that and if it isn't, you begin the long walk down the Trimelston Road home.