by Neil Hegarty
Philomena brought in more stacks of newspaper. What had Cormac been doing, filling the roofspace with newspaper? – but he had never been good at throwing anything out.
He was dead now two weeks, and the clear-out had begun. Patched corduroys, and voluminous underpants with the elastic shot, and books about the war and the Nazis and Pearl Harbor, darned socks, and old shirts washed into translucence that he could never stand to throw out. And bales of newspapers that he must have brought from the old house, and stuffed into the roofspace of the new one.
‘Talk about a fire hazard,’ Philomena marvelled. ‘I never knew he crammed them all in up there. The place might have gone up like a torch.’
The kitchen in the new house faced east, and the sun poured in this morning through its wide window; and Philomena seemed to have a pep in her step. A merry widow, already.
Roisin turned back to the newspaper.
Thirty years ago and more, of course, but she could remember such brooches vividly. They had glinted and winked in the light, pinned on the lapels of half the population, back then. There was no avoiding them. And no avoiding this yellowing photograph today either: it filled half of a broadsheet page, it commanded attention.
It made her think of Maeve, and this was unwelcome. Maeve was gone, and she wasn’t coming back.
Now, she caught her mother’s eye, and set the newspaper down on the kitchen table.
‘I’m glad you weren’t browbeaten into wearing one, at any rate.’
She spoke in her now-usual flat tones, and watched as Philomena’s eyes scanned the kitchen – although, who did she think was going to swish through the back door?
‘Oh,’ said Philomena. ‘No.’
They got along, or well enough: but just the same, she would bustle away, given half a chance. This was boggy territory, where grief and memory lay just below the surface, all dark water and oozing black peat. Philomena feared being bogged down, trapped and drowned. So much was clear.
Cormac had worn his brooch with pride. Those poor English babies, he’d said, butchered, he said, by the thousand and the million. Turned into dog food, so the stories went. Well, it would never happen here in Ireland. He would wear his brooch, his two little silver feet, with pride, he’d said. And he would vote the right way on referendum day. He still had some notion, back then, that Roisin remained a religious sort of girl, apt to see statues of the Madonna moving and walking on every street up and down the land, and Roisin wasn’t going to disabuse him of the notion.
But she remembered the late sunshine on the grotto walls. The wire, and the blood on the ground.
‘I got myself a cryin’, talkin’, sleepin’, walkin’, livin’ doll,’ Maeve had sung one evening, falsetto, and Roisin could have beaten her to a pulp.
She put the memory away.
Now, she watched as her mother got to her feet, abruptly, and went to the window and looked out.
This had been the way of it throughout her whole childhood. When Maeve was alive, and when Maeve was dead; the tenor of the household remained unchanged. They sidestepped the silences, they ignored what could be ignored, and they did what they could to stop the house from falling down. From time to time, they attacked the furry mould with a bottle of supermarket bleach: it vanished and then it came back, and all that really happened was that the rooms, with their sad, shiny yellow walls, stank of bleach for a week or so. Eau de Domestos, Maeve had liked to call it, in another life, fretting that the smell would attach itself to her school uniform, her basketball kit, her hair.
‘Be quiet,’ Roisin had said at such times, an eye on the bedroom door. ‘Daddy’ll hear.’
He had in fact tended not to hear: though just the same, most conversations in that damp bungalow had been conducted wisely, on the quiet, even when Cormac was out about his business. The women of the family had all known that although Cormac was not, maybe, a man given to fists and whacks, sometimes he was; and the girls had seen him give their mother the occasional thump across the back of her head, where a bruise wouldn’t show.
He’d punched and thumped only sometimes. Only very occasionally, because of course he was not a very aggressive man. ‘I’m feeling riled,’ he would say, and he would hit one of them. He never spoke with much heat: ‘I’m feeling riled,’ as though commenting on a result at the hurling, or a par round that morning at the golf: and then he would hit one of them a thump. It all depended on who was closer, he had no favourites – and it was usually across the back of the head. Once, a thump across the side of Roisin’s head. This was what Roisin’s Enid Blyton books meant when they described such-and-such a character having their ears ‘boxed’: it had never sounded too bad, but after this episode, Roisin knew that it was, because her ear rang as she stepped away, and continued to ring afterwards.
But that would be that, over and done with for a while.
As for the mould – they all understood that this was Cormac’s fault. Their bungalow had been built badly, in some unspecified way; and built in the wrong place, in a dip, and too close to the bog. Eventually it was condemned. ‘Best not to look back, a mistake is a mistake,’ their mother had said – but they all knew that Cormac must have skipped over the details, and engaged a cheap builder who had used the wrong materials.
They worked it out, their mother dropped a line here and there. There was mica in the aggregate. The house, given time, would fall to pieces. The mica was there to be seen: it gleamed in the light, it twinkled pleasantly, it reminded Roisin now of a long-forgotten past; you’d hardly know that it was the mischief in all of this. But twinkling and all as it was, they were paying the price now, and would for ever more. Roisin knew this, her mother knew it, Maeve had known it. They all knew to keep quiet.
Roisin felt differently, now, about the glint she saw in the local rock.
And as Philomena used to say: never mind. It wasn’t all bad. The house would crumble, but not yet. The mould only reached so far up the walls, and no further; there seemed to be a line it was unwilling to cross; and besides, there was always the bleach, the defence of last resort. The world would never run out of bleach.
And then Maeve was gone, and there were other things to think about in the crumbling house.
And now, the house was gone.
And now, Roisin looked at her mother’s back, and spoke again.
‘Well, fair play to you. It must have taken guts, in those days, not to wear a badge. In spite of everything.’
You had to build a bridge sometimes, and get over things – especially when you had escaped, and were well away and out of it. The old house was gone, and her father was dead, and her mother seemed set fair as a merry widow. And Roisin herself well away, and doing her own thing.
‘I’m very happy for you, you know,’ her mother said, turning a little in the sunny window. Her profile was black and sharp against the light. ‘Your big job, and a smart girl, and you’re well out of this place, and I’m glad of it. I won’t lie: I never was so confused in my life as when you decided to go off and study paintings.’
‘Well, art history,’ Roisin said.
‘But lookit, you’re very good at it,’ her mother went on, ignoring her, ‘that’s clear, and you have a career, and I’m very proud of you.’ Philomena paused. ‘But you don’t seem very happy, and I wish you were.’
But how could I be happy? A pause, and Roisin smoothed her hand across the yellowing newspaper.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘You don’t need to worry about me.’
*
And besides, the gallery would be reopening soon. This blessed period was coming to an end: the place was reopening, a date had been set, the rewiring and rehanging and reordering, the reroofing and replanting and reimagining: it was all almost complete.
And the fact was that Roisin herself had had a stake, too, in the whole endeavour. She had chosen the blues – the cerulean blue, the lapis lazuli blue, the beautiful, otherworldly gentian blues – in the third-floor galleries. She had chosen
the pinks – the porphyry pink, the orchid pink, the dusty, layered pinks – in the fourth-floor galleries. It had lifted her spirits, had made them soar briefly, when she clipped up the new stone staircase to the upper floors, and saw the gallery walls decked in their beautiful peacock colours.
The rehang had destroyed this beauty – though, no, not destroyed completely, for these spectacular surfaces were still there, and the imagination could remove the paintings, could do what was needful, could bring the walls back into their glory.
The art was the thing.
This was what she said, but of course this was untrue. The walls were the thing: ordered and controlled, made beautiful, inviolate. They were not made to be violated, by the hanging of paintings or anything else. There was nothing to be done about any of this: but at least she knew her own mind. At least she knew how perfection might be achieved. At least she understood her own vision, and at least she knew how it might be achieved.
Her beautiful, inviolate walls.
As she walked, her memory pulled her back, as it always did, again and again and again, to an unviolated past, when the grain of her life was illuminated gloriously, welling with warmth, scattered with diamonds, with tiny, untouchable, unreachable points of light.
27
Roisin’s house was in Portobello, only a fifteen-minute walk through pleasant Dublin streets from the gallery. She had picked up the house for a song during the crash, and she counted herself lucky. She had come over from London for a long weekend, a reconnoitre visit, with this precise area in mind, and the house was the first she set eyes on: a red-brick, deceptive in terms of space, with stairs up and stairs down, and a little garden at the back.
What a miracle.
‘Adjacent to the waters of the picturesque Grand Canal’: later, Roisin reflected that, while the brochure was in other ways thoroughly misleading, this particular claim was fair enough, the canal was five minutes away on foot, max. But ought water to be considered a selling point nowadays, in these times of floods and torrential downpours? Where by a lock niagarously roars the falls… Canal water and rainwater, getting on her nerves, under the front door. And the rats, too. Rats and canals went together like love and marriage. No, thank you.
No: better for such issues not to concern her: not floods or rats, and certainly not love and marriage. She made an offer on the house, and she knew that the offer would be accepted, and that was that. She had snuffed the air, and realised that desperation was the name of the game, here: some poor desperate soul somewhere needed a quick sale, and she had been there, on the ground. With a vacuum cleaner and her tough heel hovering over the ‘on’ button, ready to suck up the property. Someone had been unlucky, and she had been lucky, and someone else’s despair was in any case nothing to do with her, and the house was good enough to live in, best of all. She would rent it until she was ready to make the return from London.
She hadn’t told her mother about her Dublin weekend. Not until it was over, and the deed done. Philomena then took the news in her stride, or so Roisin told herself: even if her mother did not exactly like being kept at arm’s length, she was surely accustomed to it by now.
‘Well, I’m relieved, is the main thing I would say.’ Her voice came lightly over the wires. ‘It’s good to have a bit of property to your name.’ Was there a note of reproof in her tone? – that she hadn’t so much as been consulted? If so, she might as well have kept it to herself, because Roisin wasn’t about to pick up on it. ‘Though,’ and her mother’s voice did indeed sound politely perplexed, ‘I’m surprised, is what I would say, at the thought of you wanting back to Ireland.’
Roisin didn’t pursue this line.
One wall of her small red-brick in Portobello was hung thickly with paintings. The rest were bare. This single wall, running from the front door and along the narrow hall and up the stairs, was designed to overwhelm, and at the same time to stop any questions about her other walls. To provide a talking point, to prove her professional credentials. A giddying collection of nineteenth-century art in oils and pencil and watercolour, none of them valueless, and one or two of them costing a pretty penny. Picked up over the years, in sales here and sales there, for she had an eye, and the art of the period was still not as appreciated as it might have been.
There were more in boxes, wrapped and stacked neatly, in her little attic.
And the rest of the walls were bare.
She had painted them all, and expensively: a distemper paint that cost a fortune, that promised – and delivered – a slightly dusty finish, a finish that could not be sponged down to remove marks and stains, a luxurious but impractical finish. And there would be no marks and stains: there would be nobody in the house to generate a mark or a stain. No children, no annoying house guests. There would be Roisin only, and Roisin, she was prepared to say to anyone who might enquire, neither marked nor stained.
She had caused them to be painted, was closer to the mark: a Ukrainian man – Viktor – had been engaged to paint them, and he had done a nice job. He had complimented her on her choice of paint: at first, Roisin thought he was laughing at her; then, and belatedly – halfway through the job, in fact – she had realised that he was on the same wavelength. Viktor valued a distemper finish; he understood what she was after. It made it all more bearable.
For walls were her speciality, now. As Keeper of Displays at the gallery, a job which might have been designed with her in mind. It was a sort of ante-room in her profession, a sort of scullery, it was deeply unfashionable – but Roisin had come to live for her walls. For the clean sheets of matter, on which (if it came to it) a new universe of meaning and beauty might be hung, a universe that would mean nothing without the right background, the right context, the right finish. The right wall.
She had said as much in her interview. She had permitted herself a little passion, though not too much of it, and she had seen the panel look at her, with – with what: with surprise? With a glimmer of understanding? With – something, at any rate; with a something that had given her the position in Dublin, and the move back to Ireland.
In a crevasse in her memory, a stretch of granite. The mica is blank, black, in the deep darkness of this place. For Roisin, the surface was everything: but not to be touched, now. The granite, long ago, is warm, welling with Donegal summer sunshine. The donkey pulls at the green grass, wraps its squeaking stems with a long, muscular tongue, pulls it out by the roots. ‘Look at his tongue!’ squeaks Maeve, and they laugh together, uproariously on the grass. ‘Imagine being able to do that.’ The donkey crunches his apple, the granite is radiant with heat, the mica wells with glittering light.
The mica caused the house to fall.
The mica winked in the granite, in the grotto, long ago.
Roisin preferred different surfaces, now.
‘We’ll be in touch with you,’ Dr Read had said quite coolly, and she held out a cool hand, and wished her a good day. Giving nothing away – but Roisin had seen the momentary change of expression on Dr Read’s face, and had understood that the job was hers.
The house in Portobello, of course, represented a dry run. With its dusty walls, its one thickly hung wall, it was a practice run, undertaken in a controlled environment where she need please nobody except herself. She had probed Viktor: was he, perhaps, as interested in hanging paintings on walls as he was in painting the walls himself? Might he stay on for a day or two to hang her paintings? – as directed, minutely, by her? Would that be a possibility? – for a few extra quid, of course. Viktor stayed, and did the job, and now the walls of Roisin’s house were as she had always wanted them.
‘And this?’ asked Viktor. She had baked an orange cake, and he had eaten it, two slices, and now they were assessing each piece of art.
Or rather, he was assessing them. She had set out, pencil on a piece of paper, exactly where she wanted each piece, each painting, on the distempered wall. A cheery beach scene, all bathing machines and donkeys with a blue sky shining overhead;
a classical nude reclining amid a rain of delicately pink rose blossoms; ragged children with bare feet turning head over heels on London railings, the Thames a shining fish-silver in the background; more children, two of them, pointing at a stained-glass window, through which light poured in flows of green and red and blue; a busy railway terminal, alive with crowds picked out in a million hues, and overlaid with a roof of white smoke; soldiers and a cavalry on a tawny foreign field of war, the horses golden-brown and chestnut, the soldiers a feast of light.
People, and colour, and light.
‘I see what you like,’ Viktor said, and broke off a piece of his orange cake. ‘Action,’ he said, ‘you like action, you like colour. Also,’ and he paused for a moment to eat his morsel of cake, ‘these will all look good against this paint.’
Roisin knew this already, but she nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘This was good paint,’ Viktor had said, and nodded approval. ‘Very nice to work with.’ Now, he brushed a few crumbs from his fingertips, and once more ran an appreciative hand close to the dust of the walls, not touching, just hovering close to the chalky surface. ‘Very, very nice. And the paintings too. Very nice.’
Roisin’s thing, her big thing, she might have told him, was nineteenth-century art. British narrative art: deeply unfashionable, for the most part, though she thought she detected nowadays a renewed glimmer of interest from certain quarters. She had seen pieces in the papers, pointing out that these paintings hung – for free – in galleries up and down the land, that they ought to be looked at and appreciated anew; that the public had an obligation, indeed, to go and look at them, because more footfall meant salvation for the galleries themselves. Roisin, seated on her dark velour sofa in her house in Dublin, had read one such piece, had read with silent pleasure as her favourite paintings were brought out – as it were – from cold storage, and mentioned warmly, and petted, and permitted to pirouette on a vast stage: oil after Victorian oil, portraying the glamour, the drama of life; death and life, poverty and wealth, story after story brought wonderfully alive now in her mind’s eye. Frith and Landseer and Millais, Thompson and Stanhope.