Trespassers (3 page)

Garret, with whom Eileen has persuaded me I am in love, is agile, curly-haired, six years my senior and disliked by Kitty. This is to be expected, since in almost all the houses we know, boys are to maids what dogs are to postmen: suspect, teasing, fond of pranks and hard to control. They track mud indoors on their shoes, untie
the maids’ aprons, tease them, and generally make trouble. I myself am full of admiration for Garret who is a champion tree-climber and may, I fear, visit us for the sole purpose of climbing our – but soon to be no longer our – vast old cedar. When he climbs high enough to be almost out of sight, he calls down tauntingly, ‘It’s nice up here.’ I have never even touched the lowest branch. Desperate to do at least that, I run round and round the tree, calling up to him and feeling ridiculous. Eager as a puppy, I can’t stop myself begging, ‘Please, Garret. Come down. Give me a hand up. Please!’ Around I go. I almost bark. I am tormented by the thought that once we leave Wicklow, I may never see him again.

Eileen, who will soon be preparing
The Little Black Hen
for publication, has put him into it. The story has the form of a folk tale, albeit one for primary-school readers. It is about an old woman’s pet hen being captured by evil fairies and about the risky adventures on which two children embark to save it. Their names are Garret and Julie, and Eileen will manage to keep their story going through a number of later books. She has made us into a couple, handing me a fantasy Garret in lieu of the unattainable, real one.

Illustrations in the US edition of her book will show two barefoot children with brightly, not to say clownishly, patched clothes. This is not how Irish people, especially not those now running or hoping soon to run our young state, like to imagine themselves. Garret’s parents are part of this group, the part opposed to de Valera, and Garret himself, when he sees the pictures, will – I hope jokingly – complain. Though he cannot guess that he will one day be Ireland’s most distinguished Taoiseach, tree-climbing has given him a feeling for hierarchy. I, who am untroubled by patched skirts or trousers, am glad to see that, unlike the real Garret, the boy in the illustrations is the right height to be a friend of the pictured Julie.

Julie was my name at this time and would be until I was in my twenties when I would think it insufficiently dignified for
my adult self and switch to Julia. On my birth certificate I am still Anna Julia to this day, but, for everyday purposes, my parents dropped the Anna when the aunt, after whom they had named me, went mad. Poor Aunt Anna! The rejection was a clear case of hitting someone when she was down, but, by the time I was told of it, I was Julie, and she was dead.

I had met her once. She called at our house in Killiney when my parents were out, and she and I went for a walk in the woods. She didn’t strike me as being at all mad. If she asked my name, I must have said ‘Julie’ instead of Anna, so I suppose she guessed what had happened and felt hurt. I am sorry about that. Her name still has a bureaucratic grip on me, relentlessly surfacing on electoral rolls and wherever else birth certificates are consulted. ‘Anna,’ NHS employees sometimes call out when I sit in their waiting rooms, and often I don’t realise that they mean me and fail to respond. Maybe they think my mind is slipping? Maybe Aunt Anna’s offended ghost is amused.

My last memory of the Wicklow house is a sad one. It has to do with Pangur Bán, our partly white cat, who had led a decorous and, I hope, happy life with us, until one day a family of spoiled children who had three spoiled dogs dropped by. The dogs, which were not restrained in any way, chased poor Pangur around and through the house while I screamed at their owners in impotent fury, for I was fond of Pangur. Utterly rattled, he bolted up a chimney, didn’t come down until long after the horrible visitors had left, and shortly afterwards disappeared for good.

Droppers-in would turn out to be even more of a nuisance in Killiney, where we were on a bus route and so, even during the war, when petrol disappeared, could be easily reached. People were still unused to phones and rarely alerted us. They just came. As Seán worked at home, this interfered with his writing, and on summer Sundays Eileen would feel obliged to produce afternoon tea and often supper. Habits were in transition between modernity and
old, hospitable, rural ways and, as Killiney had a pleasant choice of sea views and places to walk, friends of friends whom Seán and she had made in Boston and London thought it a good place to visit. We grew to dread them and, once the shrubs which we would soon start to plant grew large enough to provide cover, would sometimes hide when the gate opened. That, though, would not be for some years.

For now it was still only 1937, and Eileen’s mind was full of things like rugs, lined and interlined tweed curtains to keep out the cold, and the garden which she would soon start to create, with the help of a handyman, from the bare, tussocky, one-acre field in which the new house now stood.

‘Your mother used to be fearless.’

My father stares in wonder at the medicines which she, hoping perhaps to cure any lingering puniness left by the Great Famine a century before, has marshalled by the door, so that I may fortify myself every morning before leaving for school.

Today he is seeing me off, and, with luck, will forget about the medicines. To distract him, I ask what changed her.

‘Your birth! Remember?’

We laugh, because my birth was forgotten faster than most. It, or some side-effect, so nearly killed Eileen that no one took time to register it until the Somerset House record-book for its date was full and my entry had to be squeezed into a margin. This, plus the war, made it impossible to get a birth certificate in the Forties. So in 1942, when I was ten and due to be confirmed, our parish priest ruled that I couldn’t be unless Seán made out an affidavit swearing that he was my father. Else people, the PP explained, might think he wasn’t. Maybe, it struck us, he thought this himself.

Maybe I’m a love child, I told myself later, when the term cropped up in my reading and made my memories hum.

In the earliest of these, I am in our Wicklow garden, aged maybe three, staring in fascination at my cousin Denis, a towering
five-year
-old. Nothing happens. So why does the moment stay with me? Perhaps because I am amazed that there is such a thing as a cousin and that I have one. Not only does his presence enlarge our tiny family –
could
my Catholic parents, I will come to wonder, have used condoms? – but his visit feels like a convivial promise.

Sadly it came to nothing. Denis went home to England and stayed there until the war had come and gone and he had grown irredeemably English. Like his parents, he used the English form of our surname, Whelan, where we were Ó Faoláin. One good thing though: he and I were now of an age to flirt, and did.

Someone had taught me the phrase
cousinage, dangereux voisinage.
But I could see that he wasn’t dangerous at all. On the contrary, he was a uniquely safe young male. Perhaps he had had the same thought about me.

‘Cousin,’ he kept saying, as though reminding himself of my harmlessness. ‘Cousin!’ He talked about the minutia of military service, told me how to get a really good shine on your boots, taught me to kiss, though I am not sure whether we actually ‘French kissed’ and whether, if so, the act was purely technical – like shining one’s boots. The war had by then been over for three years.

We met again in the Seventies at his father’s funeral – I shall come back to that. Then in 1991, when my own father died, Denis sent me a condolence letter, mentioning that he had changed his name to Michael. There was no return address, and I haven’t heard from him since.

Denis, the name of the patron saint and first bishop of Paris, has Catholic connotations, which Michael doesn’t. So Denis/Michael may have been cutting his roots. Why? I can only guess. He was a solicitor, and the Irish can’t have been popular that year with
the English legal professions, since three separate Irish groups, convicted of terrorism in the Seventies, had spent a decade and a half in jail, before their convictions were found to have been obtained by British policemen arresting them at random, beating false confessions out of them, manipulating interview records, and suppressing evidence. With honourable exceptions, members of the British legal professions lost face.

‘Business as usual’ was the verdict of most Irish citizens and a watchful foreign press.

But the Whelans were not Irish citizens.

Back in the early Twenties, when the Irish Free State was set up, Irish civil servants, including Denis’s father, Augustine John, AJ, had a choice. They could go to England to work for the Crown or stay home and work for the new dispensation. The Whelans left. AJ became an English tax inspector and on his annual holiday, when he would come to spend some days with us, his handsome, bony, Jansenist face seemed to express awareness that what he saw before him were travellers on the road not taken. Was he thinking, we wondered, of Seán – his younger brother – as an anti-self whom he might resemble if he had stayed in Ireland? That seemed unlikely when one allowed for character. After all, when they both did live in Ireland, Seán had joined the IRA, and AJ the Civil Service. A tax inspector is presumably devoted to the status quo, whereas Seán, a writer and journalist, was for much of his life embroiled in polemics with the spiritual and temporal rulers of the new, young, divided country which he and his comrades had fought to establish.

So there was a definite flicker of mockery in AJ’s smile.

But at whom was it directed? He might, after all, have been wondering whether to regret the thoroughness with which he and his family had shed their Irish Catholic identity. Denis, who had attended a minor English public school, seemed to accept its undemanding Protestantism, but, as far as I know, AJ
himself displayed no interest in religion once he grew up. He had had a surfeit of it in his boyhood, when both he and Seán had it imposed on them by their pious mother and a zealous elder brother, who ended his days as a priest – indeed a monsignor – in New Zealand.

So when AJ, who was by then a widower, died, Denis was amazed to find that he had stipulated a Catholic funeral.

‘We’re counting on you’, he told me when I arrived, ‘to give the lead at the funeral Mass. Show the rest of us when to stand and sit and so forth.’

I, however, was unfamiliar with the rituals introduced in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, so our congregation’s gestures bodied forth a dither of false consciousness. This, according to my mother, had always afflicted the Whelans as a penalty for aping the English. She, who could be a left-wing snob, alleged that they didn’t even get this right. To her mind, they associated with the wrong sort of English anyway: soulless, golf-and-bridge-playing bank managers and their wives, some of whom she had met when she and Seán lived in London. She remembered them as conventional-looking women in twinsets who no doubt, in their innocence, mistook AJ for a wild Irishman!

As it turned out, her malice was only slightly off target.

The funeral was in a south-coast retirement town, possibly Hastings or Bexhill-on-Sea. The day was fine and, while the coffin was being lowered into the grave, something unexpected happened. One mourner, a woman who looked as though she might indeed play bridge and wear twinsets, began to rail against God. She addressed Him directly and angrily, raged at His cruelty in giving us the gifts of life and love only to then take them away, and, like Laertes grieving for Ophelia, looked ready to leap after the coffin into AJ’s grave. Her speech was so articulate and persuasive that, if I had been God or His priest, I would have felt deeply uncomfortable.

I can’t remember whether Denis and I mentioned this episode over lunch in a local hotel, but we did marvel at what might have provoked it: his father’s surprise return to the bosom of Mother Church, a move by then less common than it had once been among renegade Catholics. Surely, though, AJ’s reasons could not have been theirs? Wasn’t it likelier that he had admired that Church’s talent for putting on a good show in the same spirit as he had admired the British Empire? Distancing himself from the reckless tolerance of the Church of England was consistent with his earlier backing away from the splits and cock-ups endemic to new states. One does not
join
what might become a sinking ship.

Afterwards, reflecting on AJ’s reticence about all this and on his woman friend’s distress at losing him, I came to see that he must have harboured contradictions which none of us had imagined. Though clearly not ‘wild Irish’, he had known how to respond to the wild Englishwoman whose passion spoke in his favour. My father too was a passionate but reticent man, and it strikes me now that Denis may have been one too. He may have disappeared so as to pursue passions about which it is no business of mine to speculate.

Or he may – I had better face up to this – have simply found me unlikeably lacking in
pietas
. Family feeling. Solidarity with kin. People who have been raised without those can develop a craving.

Just now, looking through some old letters, I found one of his. It reports that he has been to Ireland in search of distant relations – Whelan roots – and met our very ancient, common
great-grandmother
with whom his letter urges me to get in touch. When it reached me I was living in California and must have written back explaining this. Secretly, I was probably relieved not to have to meet a relative with whom my parents had long lost touch and about whom I knew little. Perhaps he sensed this and disapproved. He could not have guessed at the hard truth concealed under my mother’s jokey hyperbole when she said, as
she sometimes did, that Seán’s polemics with some of the men who ran the Irish church and state had turned us into pariahs.

Members of a diaspora as varied and populous as ours – there are far more of us outside the Republic than in it – risk disappointing each other’s expectations.

As long as we lived in the wilds of Wicklow without a telephone, visits could be a surprise. The pleasantest of these, from my point of view, was that of Pamela Travers, the author of
Mary Poppins.