Beyond the Breakwater

by Catherine Foley

  RoseAnn, as director, decided to hire the Theatre Royal for an afternoon and ask a local actor, Hank Regan, to come and play the part of the great singer. She asked him to mime the singing of ‘Mo Chuisle, Your Sweet Voice is Calling,’ and then to bow to an imaginary, rapturous audience.

  The beautifully restored Victorian auditorium, horseshoe-shaped and intimate, was eerily dark and receptive when we arrived. My job was to climb up through the narrow passageways and ladders to the gantry behind the stage and to man the switch that would both release and raise the red velvet stage curtain as was needed.

  There was hush as the lights came on, throwing a lovely glow over Hank. As he mimed, I waited for a quick call on the mobile to tell me to release the curtains. It came and I pressed the switch. The weights in the curtain’s hem brought them to a halt with a satisfying drop. I did it again and again, as the filming continued. I waited in the quiet and looked down from above. All the world was a stage.

  I was free to dream as I sat in the gantry that day. Under the roof of the old theatre, I began to listen to the ghosts of thespians whispering all around me. I imagined the productions, the smothered laughter, the tippy-toe dashes behind the wings, the divas and the stars; I imagined all the lives that were tied up in that space. I’m not sure whether it was the intoxication of those small darkened corners, the precariousness of the platform I was standing on, the maniacal nature of our endeavour to create a sense of Frank Ryan’s life on stage, or the sheer joy of being at play in a theatre – maybe it was a combination of all these factors – but being in the gantry of the Theatre Royal created a powerful sense of giddiness in me that afternoon. As I released the curtains again, I tried to smother my laughter. Between takes, I boogied up and down, and I imagined myself flying down to the footlights, airborne like a trapeze artist.

  As I tried to stifle my giddiness, my own solo moment on the stage of the Theatre Royal many years earlier came back to me. As a child, I had played the part of a guardian angel in a school play for Féile na Scoile. I had been dressed in white to my toes and I wore wings that were made with wire hangers and covered in white mesh edged with silver sequins and held on with elastic bands. I was to sing solo. My arms held aloft, I glided on and sang about how I would protect ‘the two little orphans, a boy and a girl who were lost and alone in the snow’.

  I remember my five-year-old self on stage that night and how the footlights blinded me as I looked out at the audience. I can still recall the energy, the electricity of that moment when I made my debut on the Waterford stage. I recall the combined intake of breath as I backed away and how I sidestepped nicely to avoid the upright piano that had threatened to obstruct my exit.

  Then I remembered Miriam, my younger sister, on the same stage of the Theatre Royal as a seven-year-old, conducting her class in a performance of ‘How Much is that Doggy in the Window?’ With her back to us, her long blond hair shimmering in the footlights, she kept a steady beat with her baton and we all gloried in the emphatic rhythm and skill of her one-two-three, one-two-three hand movements. How proud my parents were.

  In a few short years we had left Lower Newtown in Waterford, but my pulse still races when I see Rice Bridge spanning the River Suir on the way into the city or when I travel up around Reginald’s Tower and along the Mall. My heart quickens when I hear the lovely flat Waterford accent.

  The tug is still there, the tug of that place and those days when the Theatre Royal was a focal point for us in primary school and when we were both thrilled and terrified to be stepping out onto a city stage on a night filled with firsts.

  61

  The Premiere

  Excitement began to mount as the time of the guests’ arrival drew closer. Even Pingin, the dog, picked up on the air of anticipation in the house in Baile na nGall, barking and jumping up on the armchairs.

  We had screwed two hooks into our sitting room ceiling and hung a pole. Then we draped a white sheet over this to create a screen. It was perfect. The homemade canvas seemed to lift the room onto another plane. Suddenly I knew how the Lumière Brothers must have felt. It would be a premiere like no other. Our sitting room was not large but we crammed enough chairs in to turn it into a mini picture house. It was to be our own Cinema Paradiso.

  We moved the couches back and put the sideboard into a corner where we assembled drinks, glasses and nibbles in readiness for the party. We hung fairy lights from the lamps and the paintings. Outside we rolled out a strip of red carpet that RoseAnn, who was the film’s director and its main instigator, had bought especially for the occasion in M. J. Curran’s shop in Dungarvan.

  We’d invited many of the participants who had taken part in our documentary. Most of them were coming. We borrowed a projector from an engineering company in Cork and we’d run the film to make sure everything was working.

  It was a warm, balmy night in September 2009 when cocktail dresses and off-the-shoulder tops seemed just the ticket. It was a night for a party and it was just getting dark when the cars began to pull up.

  I took up my position with a camera and stood behind the red rope we’d hung by the edge of the carpet. I was at the ready à la paparazzi to snap the ‘celebs’ as they arrived.

  They parked in our driveway and on the road outside. It was our own Boulevard de la Croisette; Cannes had come to Baile na nGall. When Carol Anne Hennessy from Midleton, who played the part of Molly Keane in a few short scenes in our film, arrived with her mother, Angela, I asked them to wave for the cameras as they walked up to our front door.

  It was my recent reading of a new book about Molly Keane by her elder daughter, Sally Phipps, that brought it all back to me – making that documentary about the great Anglo-Irish writer, the creator of the masterpiece and Booker-shortlisted novel Good Behaviour. It had been a thrilling experience, possibly one of the best films my sister RoseAnn and I ever made; but by far and away the best part of having the world premiere of our half hour film was that we celebrated it at home that night with our parents. Our mother’s health was failing and our father’s memory was going. There was a sense of fragility about their presence with us that night. Each of us – Miriam, RoseAnn and I – felt time was running out. We knew we had to commemorate and cherish the time we had left with them.

  On the night, Sally herself appeared with her husband, the late George Phipps, and her sister, Virginia, also came along with her husband, Kevin Brownlow, who won a lifetime achievement Oscar the following year for his work in silent film. They all arrived, the girls bearing pots of jam, bottles of wine and homegrown flowers. Their friend and neighbour, Tony Gallagher, a boatman and sometime film-maker, came too, smiling and eager to see how his own contribution to our documentary would appear. Neighbours and friends came too.

  We packed in, introducing each one to our elderly parents. Then we took our seats, turned off the lights and the projector hummed into life. Immediately the lively music of long ago seduced us along with Molly’s lovely open face and her clipped upper-crust accent.

  We were well into her story when the projector had a little upset and the film stuttered to an end. On went the lights. No need to panic, RoseAnn assured us. But my father, hemmed in on the couch at the far end of the room, stood up and made a rush towards the door. Thinking he’d been caught short and needed to get to the bathroom, I pushed bodies aside in my panic, knowing that time was of the essence.

  ‘This way, Daddy,’ I said, whispering, ‘the bathroom is this way.’

  ‘What? No,’ he said, refusing my arm. ‘I want to buy a drink. Where’s the bar?’

  I smiled apologetically at those who were seated and brought him to the sideboard, loving his irrepressible sense of occasion and his redoubtable ability to maintain the social niceties.

  It was a night full of memories like that, all shot through with the delight of having my parents present. And I imagined Molly Keane herself, who adored parties, scooting along on her way towards us, as described by Sally in Molly Keane: A Life: ‘driving in
her Morris Minor and (later) Renault 5s, she was like a lone sailor on a small craft, watchful, all senses on the alert, open to adventure’.

  62

  Ardkeen Visit

  My mother and father are in bed smiling at me like bold children. Tucked up, lying side by side, they watch me as I leave the room. I stand by the door and their eyes, expectant and loving, rest on me, their eldest.

  Her eyes twinkle. ‘Hands off the serge,’ she says to him, pretending outrage, smiling all the while as she removes his hand from hers. There’s a spark between them still and I’m caught off guard. They are entertaining me with that oft-repeated line of fey authority – a phrase that had been common in Waterford when they’d both worked there many decades before: it had once been uttered by a draper’s assistant with notions of superiority in a shop in the city after a customer dared touch some expensive fabric on the counter.

  As I go to leave the bedroom, my father calls me back, worried. ‘Where’s Ena?’ he wants to know.

  Lying beside him, her eyes dim with disappointment, my mother discovers what it is to be alone.

  ‘She’s there beside you,’ I say.

  He lifts his head and looks. ‘Ena, is that you?’ he says, delight and relief flooding his voice.

  Soon after this incident I take my father to Ardkeen, the hospital in Waterford, to be reviewed by the doctor and his team. Again and again as we drive towards Waterford I have to explain where we are going.

  ‘You have an appointment with the doctor,’ I tell him.

  When we arrive and the kind Dr Hassan sits down to talk to my father, he looks again to me for reassurance. ‘Is this the doctor?’ he asks. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Will he help me to … to exist,’ he wonders, searching for the correct word.

  Once, when I’d been a student, the mediocrity of life at home felt like a rash all over me. However, that was some time ago now. I no longer railed against suffocating days of regular meals and bright fires. There was no more angst and there was no more pulling against him. There was only the slow, inexorable beat of days moving towards a sad diminishment and an end that will leave an empty space by the fire, a cold bed and a free weekend to loll and drift. The weekly schedule of shopping and cooking will be gone and we will swing away in confusion, heartbroken and weightless, lonely and released, dangling free in the empty days. I harden myself to it before it has happened.

  When we were small, we sat around my father on the strand and he told us a story about a mermaid. We listened, mesmerised, as the sun warmed our backs and the tide slipped over the rocks, pulling the seaweed every which way. My mother boiled a kettle on a little hill of stones and driftwood that she’d built on the sand. It was a day of magic. We have all forgotten the details of the story but not the spell it cast over us.

  All our childhood we were three little girls, little princesses, washed in soft sudsy soap, dressed in fresh cotton, fed on boiled new potatoes, Batchelor’s beans, kippers and smoked haddock. We did their bidding, little goslings, chirruping and escaping the nest occasionally, but always reeled back in with them clucking and admonishing us, feeding us and admiring us, worshipping us.

  What a happy household.

  The tables have turned. They move like tortoises now. They have handed the reins over to us. I stay at home more and more as it’s clear I am needed here. We help them wash and dress. Now, there is the chance to caress my father’s cheek, to rifle in his manly-smelling pockets and help him transfer his wallet, keys, handkerchief and comb from one pair of trousers to another. I help my mother close the clasp of her gold watch around her rail-thin wrist. I pull on her socks and wait to carry her handbag for her.

  ‘Where are we?’ my father queries later that night. ‘What’s the name of this place?’

  ‘You are at home in Baile na nGall,’ I tell him. I don’t remind him of its meaning, which translates as Home of the Strangers.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks, unconvinced, unhappy with my answer. He’s still at sea. I begin to take my leave and kiss him goodnight. When my sister pops in to say goodnight he has rephrased his question in order to elicit a more revealing response.

  ‘Where do you think you are?’ he asks her, placing gentle stresses on the more significant second person pronouns. It is a clever philosophical conundrum. She tells him he is at home. She gives him the exact address and reassures him that it is his house. But we both look at each other doubtfully, each of us questioning our certainty. We shake our heads wryly. Dada, seeing us pause, sensing our momentary reluctance to commit, seems pleased. After that, he settles down quietly.

  A stranger called to our house recently, lost and weary. I gave him tea and an éclair. He sat and tried to regain his composure but we could see he was struggling with his own inner demons. He’d just cycled fifteen miles to meet his brother who lived nearby but no one was at home. My father, sitting at the fire, his native, irrepressible sociability coming to the fore, asked him his name and where he was from.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said then. ‘I don’t mean to ask personal questions. I’m in the way. Don’t mind me at all.’ The stranger looked at him, sweat still forming on his forehead. It was an odd meeting. They were both lost, both apologising. I took my chance to rub my father’s cheek and tell him he was in his own house and that he was in no one’s way.

  The days are full of remembering here. It’s like being bathed in the long shadows of a dying sun. I was seven or eight when I went through my wild stage. I remember one evening when I caused my mother great upset. I didn’t mean to, of course. I was just happy and I forgot to come home. I remember looking down on the little holiday village of Passage East from the hill that hung overhead. I could see tiny people walking from one corner to another, disappearing into the maze of little streets and then re-emerging onto another square or quay. In my memory, I see my mother, in an aerial Fellini-esque type scene, running out of Gran’s house, calling me, racing across the square, past the pump, down the lane, looking for me frantically. I waved and shouted but she never heard me.

  ‘Look, Mama,’ I called.

  I had no sense of wrongdoing. I was blithely following my heart, playing with a couple of boys and girls. After the great hill, we climbed down again and went out in a canoe, out beyond the breakwater. We glided like angels over the water through a sparkling arc of light. It was late when I arrived home, replete and exhausted.

  My mother shook me. I was never to do anything like that again, she told me, and truly, I haven’t. My father must have been at work that day but I’m sure he was told about my boldness and the danger I’d been in. Sometimes I wonder if that escapade wasn’t a dream time.

  Together my parents created a pattern day after day that shaped and regulated our days. Sometimes I imagine him leaving for work in Waterford, suited and shaved, kissed and waved off. ‘Slán leat,’ she may have said, or maybe she whispered something more private. Then we’d leave for school, life stretching out ahead of us, days of blue skies. No radio, no noise, only my mother’s voice calling in Irish to go safely – ‘Slán libh.’ Her voice seemed to echo down the street. Her right arm upraised, her left holding the gate closed. These distant, distinct mornings shimmered as we made our way across and up the hill to concrete yards, tiled corridors and nuns with beads and black rushing robes.

  The mornings don’t seem as newly minted any more but my mother still stands at the front door, her arm raised like a stick to wave me off whenever I leave. They stand together now in the doorway and smile, warning me to take my time. I pull away in my car, watching them in the rear-view mirror. They are framed at the hall door, and are again in my mirror, doubly captured in a freeze-frame, poised for a camera shot. She is in front of him, smaller. How long more, I wonder. And I accelerate up the hill until the house is out of view and all the mornings in between back then and now, all the partings, all the stillness, is a pattern, a thread of time, of light. They are there now, but their image fades quickly.

  It has been over fifty year
s. The hours are drawing in. They sleep longer and wake less. They slip into a snooze by the fire. In his suit recently, preparing for a celebratory birthday meal, I helped comb his hair.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked, full of devilment. ‘I want to ask her if she’d marry me.’ I pointed to the room where my mother was being prepared like a young bride for an outing. In the midst of having her hair done and her make-up applied, there was a little knock at the bedroom door.

  ‘Ena, are you there?’ He opened the door tentatively, his foot on the threshold of my sister’s inner sanctum.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked, his eyes full of fun.

  ‘I will,’ she answered, smiling with delight, looking at him, handsome in his tailored jacket. Her eyes danced and so did his.

  The passion is there still.

  Not that things were always perfect. For one thing, my father had a bad track record with gifts. Once, he brought her fine strong scissors from Cork as a present. Although it was something she needed, my mother did not view this in a favourable light. As a gift, it was an unflinching failure. Another resounding flop was the long-playing record of brass-band marches that he brought home to her; my mother let him know it was not acceptable. She remained cross with him, even though my father was at a loss to understand what was wrong with this glorious vinyl offering.

  He sometimes asks about friends and family who are long dead. ‘Is Breandán dead?’ he checks. ‘I don’t remember that at all,’ he claims, angry and disappointed at the discovery that his brother has gone. He often wonders about his mother, too, though she has been dead almost fifty years.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asks. ‘I don’t remember my mother dying,’ he declares, and for a moment he slumps, overcome with the grief and confusion of losing her. It is the same with all his relations and friends who pop into his head from time to time.