*
The black-clad gathering was not in my honour. No. It was, the bilingual aunt told me, a funeral party which had earlier attended a Mass for the elder Morandy son, a keen mountain-climber who, years before, had fallen into a crevasse, and whose perfectly preserved body had now been uncovered thanks to a small avalanche. He had been reburied. There had been a lunch, and now people were starting to leave. She, though, would stay on for a day or so, to help me settle in.
‘Then I’ll go back’, she gave me a plucky smile, ‘to my retirement home for old ladies.’
Taking this for a joke, I laughed, saw that it wasn’t one, and blushed. I had supposed her to be the family’s mother-substitute, and was saddened to think of her being stuck instead in some grim institution probably run by nuns – handing them spare coupons to sell, washing her underwear in a portable basin, then bending, despite pains in her joints, to mop up spills. I knew about such places from Killiney village. Yet why could she not have stayed here, the way Aunt Kate had stayed with us?
By now, though, Aunt Kate, who had lived into her nineties, had been dead two years. And I rarely thought of her. Perhaps, by associating her with the Morandys’ aunt, I was hoping to repay to the live woman the sympathy I owed the dead one.
Perhaps I would light a candle for her after Mass next Sunday?
*
Not knowing quite how things here worked made me uneasy.
I had guessed one thing right though. There was a mother-substitute. It was one of the girls themselves. Claude was neither the oldest nor cleverest. The two sisters who were had earned teaching diplomas and taught in schools further up the mountain. At this time of year they were home for the summer vacation, but in winter would be back above the snowline. Claude, meanwhile, stayed home and ran the house. She was quick, tender and funny, could slice a carrot as deftly with a knife as anyone can using today’s electrical implements, and appeared to get all the satisfaction she needed from looking after her family. The others adored her, and I too would soon fall under her spell. Watching her cook was a delight.
*
However, life, as I now began perceiving it, was full of gaps. As I missed much of what was said, I thought of my view as being like the one people must get from inside those Moorish balconies whose carved screens conceal them from the street. The Morandys had cousins in Egypt who had sent photographs of these, and I guessed that, when sitting in them, their perceptions would be as porous and puzzling as mine became when the bilingual aunt went back to her convent, since the girls’ attempts at English were as opaque as their French. Jacques, the surviving son, was keen on jazz which he pronounced ‘jets’. Correcting him was tricky since he might have got his pronunciation from one of the clever elder sisters who, he now informed me, taught English. Did they say ‘jets’, I wondered but, fearing to embarrass them, didn’t ask. I didn’t correct them either when I heard one tell a younger sister that the English pronounced the word ‘bouquet’ as ‘bucket’.
MADAME DE LA TOUR PIN COMES TO TEA
One side-effect of my poor French was that at first I believed my hosts to be happy and that the place truly was an Eden. How could the thought not occur to me when I had seen, plucked and tasted my first peach and apricot on their terrace, not to speak of my first muscat grapes and mirabelle plums? In the evenings we sat outside enjoying the cool air and watching fireflies swoop. Sometimes a storm on distant mountains lit snowy peaks with pink and green lightning. Sometimes, earlier in the day, we bicycled down to Aix-les-Bains on the Lac du Bourget or up to high pasture lands, where the tinkling of cowbells was the only sound, or else equipped ourselves with baskets and dispersed into the woods to collect boletus mushrooms and wild strawberries. It was a paradise, I wrote in my letters home. All that first summer I held to this view. Quarrels were muted, and it was only in my second year that I began to tune into tensions reverberating just out of earshot. In my third one, a few things grew clear. Claude, the beloved ‘little mother’, had spent a month in Pau, on the other side of France, looking after an ailing aunt, and there had met a perfectly suitable man. They had promptly got married, and, after their honeymoon, she brought him to stay. They were still there when I arrived in June. But the atmosphere was stormy. She who, when I came first, had been the undisputed mistress of the house, had been elbowed aside. Resentments flared. By now my French was good enough to pick up snide remarks, but the reasons behind them were never spelled out. Was it envy? Anger with Claude for going away? Or possessiveness? Was money involved? Were the children of their father’s two marriages at odds with each other – over an inheritance perhaps? Or had she invited one of her sisters to stay with her in her new home so that she too might find a husband? If so, were the others jealous? And had the sister whom she had invited been forbidden to go?
Or did I, in my fifteen- and sixteen-year-old ignorance, get everything wrong?
Signs were hard to read. A hand of cards might suddenly be smashed down during a decorous game of bridge. Or someone might knock over her chair and run out to the terrace. Someone else might run after her. Sometimes there was sobbing. Then the game might take up again.
Surely Claude’s attempt to reclaim her old position in the house could not have caused so much bad feeling? How could it have, if she and her husband were only here on a visit and would soon be gone?
I never discovered. But questions floated through my mind. Why, looking back on the many fêtes which the family had celebrated during my visits, could I never remember there having been a male guest – apart from Claude’s husband? Not even the curé was invited, even though, judging by a glimpse I had caught through the open door of his house, he was painfully poor. He was by far the poorest priest I had ever seen, and could surely do with a free meal. Why did Monsieur Morandy invite no personal friends, only the aunts? Why, come to think of it, had they chosen to invite me who, being Irish, might be expected to have an undesirable accent? I wondered, indeed, if the bilingual aunt had been delegated to check on this. But what I began to think now was that, during the recent war, Monsieur Morandy might have made enemies. If he had and was still resented on some account, inviting someone from a neutral country would pose less problems than inviting one from England.
If I were writing fiction, this would be the point where my narrator would find something out. A sexual intrigue could come to light when Julie – I was still called Julie, especially in France – witnesses Claude’s husband engaging in a tryst with one of the other sisters. Or voices, floating from an opened window, might name partisans who had hidden in this mountainous area. Had some family member denounced them – or become too friendly with them? Was the dead son’s fate connected with some version of these events? Blackmail could have been threatened. The family’s introversion could be due to their being ostracised. Dreams could interact, and a plot knit or unravel.
But I am not writing fiction.
More plausibly, Monsieur Morandy, having lost two wives and a son, might be more protective of his family than most fathers. It is fair to speculate that far. Especially as Jacques, who was eighteen in my first summer and longed to get away to Paris, talked more than once about how his father would do his damnedest to keep the girls from going there. ‘He thinks it’s a den of vice,’ he once burst out bitterly. ‘He thinks that any girl who goes to Paris is bound to end up as a lost soul!’ He himself wasn’t sure he could get away either. I don’t know why. Perhaps he had repeatedly failed his exams? Something of the sort seemed likely, for I heard him weeping one evening in the room next to mine and being comforted by his father. Or else – this would have made things harder for him – he may have felt that he had to make up for his brother’s death by staying home and taking his place? The father, who, the family agreed, had always been strict with them, was strangely tender in that overheard conversation. ‘Mon petit Jacques,’ he kept murmuring, while I wondered if I should alert them to my presence by opening, then closing my bedroom door.
Was I becomin
g a snoop? Could trying to learn French turn me into one? Maybe imitating the way people talk – and so think – leads, willy-nilly, to abusing hospitality and burgling minds? Outsiders who try to become insiders must be a trifle suspect. The British Ministry of Information or some such entity had, I now remembered, invited people who had travelled on the Continent before the outbreak of the war to turn over their holiday snaps.
Spies?
*
An unexpected visit drove such scruples from my mind.
Madame de la Tour du Pin was a granddaughter of Arthur O’Connor, one of Napoleon’s generals, and the mother of Patrice de la Tour du Pin, a major Catholic poet (1911–75) of whom even I had heard. The La Tour du Pin had had an earlier Irish connection, too, when a marquis of that name married one of the Dillons who had been part of an exodus known in Ireland as the Flight of the Wild Geese. These were Jacobite Irish officers who fought in the Williamite Wars, lost and left for France, where they founded the Irish Brigade which remained part of the French army until the revolution. Henriette-Lucy Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin, wrote a lively memoir, describing her high times at the court of Marie Antoinette and her thin ones when she had to flee, for some years, to the US.
The lady who called on the Morandys and no doubt asked to see the little Irish girl may have heard of my existence from the nuns. We had tea. And to me who had read my way through the Dún Laoghaire Carnegie Library’s stack of novels about the Irish Brigade, this was like meeting a descendant of the three musketeers. I imagine we talked English, and that I wasted another chance to show off my curtsy. Or I may have remembered how Frank O’Connor – always keen to cast down the mighty from their seat – used to say that the Wild Geese should not be mourned but blamed for running off and leaving their country leaderless. Eileen, on the other hand, enjoyed singing rollicking songs about them, but I, having no ear, could not produce one for Madame de la Tour du Pin. Instead, I thanked her for her visit, and let her hear my best English, in case the Morandys asked her if I was teaching them to talk with a brogue.
They needn’t have worried. At my junior school, an elocution teacher, called Miss Burke, on discovering that I was a mimic, had insisted on my taking her class.
‘I must have that girl,’ I heard her tell the nuns. ‘I’ll put her in for verse-speaking at the Feis Cheóil. She might win the medal.’
Might I?
Years of humiliation owing to my lack of a musical ear were instantly effaced. Miss Burke and I hadn’t met before, because her class was in the afternoon and Eileen believed that afternoons should be spent in the fresh air. I had agreed to this, since most afternoon classes – singing, dance and playing an instrument – required an ear for music. But mimicry, it turned out, somewhat surprisingly, did not. So I joined the class, went in due course to the Feis Cheóil, where I parroted Miss Burke’s posh accent for a poem by some Elizabethan poet and Seán’s mimicry of Yeats for one of his and won two medals. Sealed by satisfaction, my accent changed forever, though the medals were soon lost.
*
Back in Ireland for the winter, even unprepossessing foreigners attracted me. For months a fat Belgian who wore a beret and sometimes took our bus confused me by the contradictory responses his accent touched off whenever I heard it. He sometimes made mistakes in English, and in my fantasy I intervened to explain that what he wanted was not a billet but a ticket. ‘Do yez mean a billet-doux?’ teased the fantasy bus conductor cheekily, and from there the imagined dialogue could go anywhere.
Then I met Stephane, a dark-eyed, lean, hollow-cheeked man who looked like the concentration-camp survivors who were being shown on the newsreels. And that, in a way, was what he was. He was four years older than I and, every Sunday, for what felt like a long time, while we walked on the beach or biked to Enniskerry or up the Dublin Mountains, he told me about the sufferings of the Jews, and how his parents had died in the camps, while he spent the war working on a French farm, and pretending to be a Catholic.
Raised, as I had been, to feel for suffering, both Christ’s and that of the gallant Wild Geese, I was easily persuaded to extend compassion to Stephane’s lost relatives. When this did not stop him obsessing over his pain, I understood that too. Victims harp on their woes. I knew this because I had learned off pages of Gaelic ‘anger poems’, as we all had. But I knew enough, too, not to compete in victimhood. Stephane’s loss was too vast and fresh. Besides, Ireland had been neutral in the war, and I guessed that he must be holding back censure.
Ours was an odd friendship. We didn’t flirt, and if we laughed, I don’t remember it. He lent me books and took me to films about anti-Semitism. I felt accused. At the same time, I guessed that we were using each other, but couldn’t quite see how. He, being older and clever, was teaching me new things, and, besides, I was practising my French. But what use to him was I? He was living with his Uncle Serge, whose wife had also died in the camps, having failed, like Stephane’s parents, to get away to Ireland in time. Now, though, Serge and his daughter seemed well integrated in Dublin society. It occurred to me that, as their sorrow must have dulled or at least calmed over the years since their arrival, Stephane’s fierce unhappiness might seem to them like a reproach. Perhaps he saw this and tried to hide it – but needed to express it, too, and did so with me?
His pretty cousin Rachel got married while he and I were seeing each other, and I attended the ceremony. The synagogue, into which, according to our Church’s rule, I should not have put foot, struck me as rather grand, and so did the convivial congregation, none of whom I knew. This made me wonder whether, like Monsieur Swann, Stephane kept his friends from meeting each other. Why? Had I been right in thinking that he wanted to be melancholy with me and cheerful with his uncle and cousin? Eileen, who had written a piece on Serge’s hat factory for one of the first issues of The Bell, had another theory.
‘Remember’, she warned me, ‘that for both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil’ – the main Irish political parties – ‘we are pariahs. When he got here first Serge would not have known that. Now that he does, he may prefer not to get too close.’
This, in the light of later events, was less paranoid than I thought. For some of the big beasts in Irish life, Seán was indeed a pariah. And the beasts rarely forgot a grudge.
Here is a slightly expanded account of a row mentioned earlier.
In 1948 de Valera’s government lost an election to a coalition of other parties and in 1951 the new Minister for Health, Dr Noel Browne, tried to introduce a Mother and Child Scheme without a means test. To Irish doctors, this savoured of socialised medicine and, given the likely cost, was anathema to John A. Costello, the head of the coalition to which Browne’s party belonged. Shrewdly, as Conor Cruise O’Brien would later note, Costello, ‘to quash Browne’s scheme, called in the help of the Catholic Church’. He did this by revealing that he had asked Archbishop McQuaid whether the proposed measure was ‘morally sound’ and, on being told that without a means test it was not, asked Browne to include one in his scheme. Browne refused. His party leader promptly demanded his resignation and soon afterwards the government fell. Browne then published the correspondence between himself, Costello and the Church, which threw light on the sort of stitch-up which was normally carried on in the shadows.
Controversy ensued, and Seán published an article entitled The Dáil and the Bishops, pointing out that, as was now clear for all to see, there was ‘a parliament in Maynooth’ – the country’s chief seminary – ‘and a parliament in Dublin … The Dáil had, when up against the Second Parliament, only one right of decision: the right to surrender.’ As McQuaid’s biographer, John Cooney, would observe later, ‘Not for the first time the commentator who angered McQuaid most … was Seán Ó Faoláin.’
McQuaid bided his time. Then, eight years later (churchmen, as the old phrase puts it, ‘eat their vengeance cold’), he tried to get the Taoiseach to withdraw an offer he had made to Seán – who had accepted it – to appoint him Director of the Arts
Council. The Taoiseach, Costello, was only too ready to appease McQuaid. To make this easier to do, he asked Thomas Bodkin, a former director of the National Art Gallery, if he would take the post instead. Bodkin, who had witnessed Costello’s offer to Seán the week before, refused. McQuaid, allegedly, spent an hour trying to twist Bodkin’s arm, but failed. Since I never heard any of this at the time, Seán may not have either. At all events, he took the job, then in 1959 resigned from it when the Arts Council proved too underfunded to do the work for which it had been set up.
Irish struggles back then were apt to teeter into farce. A man with a nose for that was the sparky Flann O’Brien – alias Brian O’Nolan alias Myles na gCopaleen – who signed off a petition to the Council with the jeer, ‘Arts Council my arts’. The petition was for a grant to take him to an island where he could write without fear of being distracted. It would, he promised, be an island without a pub. Seán wondered if Myles thought he had never heard of moonshine – in either sense of the term. My feeling, then as now, was that, no matter how little money there was (or how much poteen), Myles should have got the grant.
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