On learning that she was half Irish, half South African, I suggested teasingly that as the four of us had Africa and Ireland in common we should all dine together.
Pretending not to hear, Richard quickly started to talk of plans to visit Greece. Perhaps he felt that he, whose father had been the governor of the Bahamas, could not be seen with a man who wore North-African-made royal-blue suits. Or perhaps he already knew that Patricia, though she could be both generous and warm-hearted, was also capable of indulging in Fascist rants. This sidelight would not emerge until he and she were married and living in Ireland, where her reported outbursts, which I never heard myself, could have been provoked by the priggishness of our more po-faced citizens. In the end allowances were made by and for her, who, due to having belonged when at Oxford to a set which included John Wain and Kingsley Amis, and having only recently wound up an affair with Philip Larkin, had, as Richard acknowledged, acquired a lofty manner and a way of stopping conversations with an impatient ‘Yes, yes, we know, we know.’ This was not calculated to go down well in Ireland, but may have helped dissolve tensions which arose whenever her mega-rich father was gripped by a paternal urge to protect and control. Without stirring from South Africa he contrived to torment her and Richard by dangling offers of financial help tied to unworkable conditions. Dealing with him proved as difficult as dealing with a leprechaun – and he sprang similar surprises. For instance, he bought them a spacious lakeside house in County Wicklow which had belonged to Edna O’Brien and her husband. Then, four years later, when Richard and Patricia had arranged it to their liking, had a daughter and seemed happy, a summons came from South Africa. Patricia flew there – and the marriage collapsed.
Here the old link between money and mating seemed at its most stifling.
Thinking back to how the Morandy girls were kept isolated on their mountain, then forward to Patricia’s problems, I wondered why families, though presumably eager to see their bloodlines carried on, were so often hell-bent on stopping daughters taking a hand in the process. Why? Possessiveness? Distrust? Half-conscious incestuous feelings? I suspected that all of these played a role.
*
In Paris I was sometimes lonely, as I had not been in Rome, where people were gregarious and where, after a very few days in the convent, I had become close friends with my room mate, Romana. She was from Forlì and had come to the capital in pursuit of a fidanzato who, on qualifying as a public prosecutor, had been posted there and risked forgetting her. Chasing after him was a bold move for a nice Italian girl so, not long after we exchanged vows of friendship, her mother summoned her home. To my indignation, the gormless fidanzato then tried to date me, without even pretending that we would be meeting to discuss Romana’s needs. In other words, he neither knew the decent way to steal one’s girlfriend’s girlfriend, nor had the nous to turn his prosecutor’s eye on himself. Maybe, up till then, law exams had taken all his attention. A swot! So – intermittently – was I, but when what you’re swotting up is French and Italian literature, you learn a few things along the way about life and love. Not so, it seems, if you plan to be a public prosecutor. By then she and I were fond of each other so, though we exchanged letters for a year, I kept mum about her fidanzato’s perfidy.
She adored him. ‘Il mio procuratore!’ she used to sigh, and once spent three days queuing to see Padre Capello, a miracle-working priest who, she hoped, could work one for her. The queue outside his confession box was smoothly organised, and numbered tickets were issued to those in need of a sleep or snack or what sports commentators call a comfort break.
*
After Seán’s plea, ‘Leave your Frenchman, or your mother will leave us both,’ I flew home so often to argue my case that even long afterwards the view from a plane circling Dublin Bay could trigger stomach cramps probably as sharp as those which the sight of Martello towers scattered along its coast had been designed to provoke in Napoleonic invaders. Back then, though, many Irishmen hoped the Frenchies would invade and trounce the Brits. Madame de la Tour du Pin’s great grandfather, General Arthur O’Connor, had been all set to help.
There are said to be about fifty of these towers along our coast, each built in sight of the next. From a plane they look like squat wine corks, or the chess-pieces known as rooks. Most are in disrepair, as I and Grace found when in our student days we threw a party in the one on Dalkey Island. We hired boats, prepared a picnic, got men friends to drive my father’s old wind-up gramophone to the harbour, lug it into a boat, row to the island, then carry it up into and through the high, narrow opening in the tower. With hindsight this was a ridiculous enterprise, as we had no lights apart from the smoky flicker obtained by lighting a fire.
In those days, however, we would do anything for a party, no doubt because ours was a tame generation for whom parties became vital escape valves. Even in our twenties most of us still lived with our parents. Few had money and none had a job. The Irish state had given too much power to the Church, which used it to bully its flock, with the result that the flock, lured by emigration, failed to stay home and develop a robust secular state.
I and my friends were lucky. We got through college. Yet I can name ten of us – maybe more – who emigrated as soon as they graduated. Not all went back either. I read recently that ‘Over 500,000 people left independent Ireland’ – meaning what is now the Republic – ‘between 1945 and 1960.’ We didn’t just leave to find jobs. We needed to be with a peer group and decide who we were. So parents who tried to postpone the break were infantilising us as, in another way, was the father of another friend, a circuit judge who went away regularly leaving his house available for three-day parties: a dangerous move, since crashers could arrive and squat. Crashers were gangs of young people who, on learning from some loose-lipped barman that a party was planned, would turn up at the planners’ house with crates of drink and hope not to be turned away. Often they were hard to get rid of, though we never thought they’d crash our picnic. But our plan leaked out and a group from Trinity College managed to hire a rowing boat and join us. Well, the tower was not our property, and our male contingent, being Dramatic Society aesthetes, were no good as bouncers. So the invaders climbed in unopposed and, as we had by then occupied the best stretch of floor, had to make do with one where sections were starting to give way. We learned this too late. At the time it was too dark to see the danger, and the first we knew was that several crashers had crashed, i.e. fallen down four or more feet onto jagged rubble.
If this happened today, several people would have mobile phones with lights. We were lucky to have matches. A pretty Trinity girl was found to be injured. Medical students to the fore, some of the more muscular men hauled her from the hole, then gave her whiskey for the pain while others rowed to the mainland for help.
It was dawn before an ambulance-boat was sighted being rowed towards us by men in dark uniforms. The white-swaddled stretcher looked like an image from a film, and before the hurt girl, by now knocked out by pain or whiskey, could be laid on it she had to be lifted down through the steep slit of the tower’s entrance. She didn’t respond when we tried to commiserate.
Grace reminded me in a whisper that she and I had given our addresses to the boat-owners so, if any laws had been broken, it was for us the police would look.
‘Will we take a boat and make a dash for it?’
‘There’s no point if they know our addresses. Anyway,’ I reminded her, ‘I can’t leave my father’s gramophone. He doesn’t know I took it.’
Just then a group which had managed to get that gramophone down from the tower put on a Neapolitan record. One of Seán’s, it reminded me that he would soon be up and that, when he was, it would be hard to get the cumbersome thing into his study without his knowing.
Out over a pink, satiny sea floated the syrupy music, afflicting me with that yearning which tells you that this would be a perfect setting for amorous adventures. But, although people in our group knew, liked and trusted each other, ther
e were few couples among us.
Oddly, the song we were hearing on one of Seán’s 78s was about a girl whose parents didn’t want her to make love.
Mamma non vuole, Babbo nemmeno.
Come faremo a fare l’amor?
I doubt if there had been much chance of amor at that picnic.
*
In the end returning the gramophone discreetly proved impossible. Coming face to face with two of my men friends crunching down our gravel path with it, Seán got them to say where we had been.
I expected an explosion, but instead he was eager to share the experience. How was the injured girl, he worried. Did we know her name? ‘I’, he mused, ‘feel responsible. Maybe I should phone to find out how she is?’ Clearly our company made him feel young.
‘Ah no!’ As they edged past him, the gramophone-bearers’ arms strained under its weight. ‘Best not encourage crashers, Mr O’Faolain,’ they warned. ‘They’d be knocking at your door with a “God save all here” next time you had friends in.’
Seán laughed and invited them to join us for breakfast. What may have pleased him about our mishap was that it could have featured in an old-time Boys’ Own Annual, innocent of sex and impropriety.
*
Remembering this later, when hostilities in our house were at their worst, I concluded that he hadn’t wanted me to grow up.
It was then that both Eileen and I got stomach cramps and were diagnosed by our GP as having ulcers. I disputed this. Dr S, a small-town misogynist, had, I knew, always thought Eileen’s illnesses imaginary and in an attempt to forge a male alliance with Seán he advised him not to worry his head about her. I suspected him of giving her placebos, guessed that ‘ulcer’ was code for ‘women’s notions’, and greatly offended him when I asked for a copy of the X-ray showing my alleged ulcer.
‘I want to show it to a French doctor,’ I told him.
He refused angrily.
I explained that the food in the students’ restaurants in Paris would aggravate whatever was wrong with me unless I could prove my need to eat at one reserved for people with a delicate digestion.
When he offered to write a letter about this to the French authorities, I pointed out that it would have to be in French. That foxed him and he surrendered the X-ray.
Back in Paris I took it to the doctor who could get me a card for the special restaurant. There were technicians with him who asked to see what sort of work the Irish did. Holding up the X-ray to scrutiny, they opined that what our Irish GP had taken for an ulcer was a photographic blip.
I felt some shame for, though S might be a poor doctor, I had committed the capital sin of letting the country down in front of foreigners.
*
Meanwhile Jean-Paul and I were having rows. Although these had been set off by Seán’s asking us to keep away from each other for a year, even when that year’s start had been postponed to let me produce sample chapters to show my thesis director, we met rarely. This was due both to Jean-Paul being unable to join me for meals in the invalids’ restaurant and to my having furtively begun to date the doctor. This, I knew, would enrage Jean-Paul if he found out, since he was only a medical student, whereas Dr P was a hospital consultant and, being neither North African nor a Communist, might appeal to my parents. I despised myself for harbouring such thoughts and was in a fix since, having insisted that I was in love and knew my own mind, how could I now unsay this?
Did I want to? Yes and no. No because I mustn’t let them think I had been mesmerised – as their letters implied – by sex which, according to them, confuses the mind. Had I ever, they asked, seen the old woodcut of a naked whore riding astride an equally naked Aristotle who, down on all fours, was letting her flout his sense of decorum? They had a reproduction of it somewhere. Here it was. Take a good look. Did I suppose my defences were better than his?
With hindsight I see that my relations with Seán and Eileen were more important to me, both in good and bad ways, than anything I felt for either Jean-Paul or Dr P, with whom, because I disapproved, priggishly, of two-timing, I had gone out only four times, one of which, having started as a medical visit, didn’t quite count. But I was attracted, I found him pleasingly adult and had let him kiss me while strolling along the quais where anyone could have seen. It would have been un-adult, after all, to have dragged him behind a tree or a vespasienne. Worse, we hadn’t been all that far from the École de Médecine, so I must be more careful next time if there was a next time, which I guiltily wanted there to be. Like it or not, deciding which man I preferred was going to require some two-timing.
*
Meanwhile, Professor Moreau, my thesis director, put my typescript into his briefcase and proceeded to give a class to the half-dozen of us who were taking his course in Méthodologie. How discussion of a literary figure whom he described that day as ‘a sincere hypocrite’ fitted that heading, I forget, but I remember fearing that the definition fitted myself and that, when he produced examples from novels by Bernanos and Mauriac, my stomach pains grew worse, either from guilt at having gone out with Dr P, or from eagerness to do so again.
A ‘sincere’ hypocrite? Was I? Remembering my prim disapproval of Romana’s fidanzato, I felt ashamed. After the class I went into Gibert’s bookshop and bought a novel by Bernanos which had featured in Moreau’s discussion, and, on reading it, was shaken by the fanatical and possibly heretical Catholicism by whose standards the writer judged his protagonist, Monsieur Ouine – whose name suggests weasels, fouines – and the village where he lived. This was said in the novel to be in the grip of evil and described by its new priest as ‘a dead parish’ which, when the book first came out in 1943, may have been taken to stand for France itself. For all their talk of Cartesianism, the French, I was starting to think, could be more excitable, not to say deranged, than the earthy Irish ever could be. Intrigued by this, now that I could see my way to finishing my main thesis, I had asked Professor Moreau whether he thought I could write the obligatory subsidiary one about some aspect of the poet, playwright and actor, Antonin Artaud, a mad but seminal figure whose work I had been reading with fascination in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Moreau sent me to talk with Artaud’s sister, who was understandably reluctant to speak about her brother’s drug addiction, eccentricities, spells in mental homes, possible schizophrenia and general oddity. Why, I asked myself, should she let someone as unenlightened and self-deceiving as myself discuss him? He intrigued me, though, and so did his manifesto, The Theatre of Cruelty, in which he explained that by cruelty he meant no more than a resolve to force audiences to know what they didn’t want to know and rid them of ‘the false reality which lies like a shroud over our perceptions’. No wonder Ireland had appealed to him.
*
My worst fight with Jean-Paul happened on a bus where, when a priest took the seat opposite us, Jean-Paul put a possessive hand on my thigh then, when I removed it, retaliated by making anticlerical comments. I stood up and told the priest that I hoped he would forgive my companion’s ignorance of big city ways.
‘He’s from the colonies,’ I told him, then pulled the overhead wire and, before Jean-Paul knew what I was doing, had stepped from the bus as it moved off.
Soon my cramp was worse. Self-punishment? Or – oh dear! – an ulcer? I was tempted to go to confession for what would be the first time in years: a notion which must have come from reading Bernanos, whose novel was clogged with words which coalesced in a vision of a cold, temporal hell. Recurring ones were ‘glacial’, ‘nothingness’, ‘indifferent’, ‘hollow’, ‘malign’, ‘empty’, ‘muddy’, ‘inactive’. I wondered why Moreau had headed me towards this bitter writer, then remembered that it was my Dublin professor who had sent me to Moreau. Perhaps dealing with Irish Catholics was a speciality of his, and the French Right a terrain where he felt we would be at home. Today, when I think of the relatively recent German film, The White Ribbon, which portrays a sick pre-Nazi society, it is hard not to compare it with Bernanos’s Monsieur Ou
ine which describes an even sicker pre-war French one, remnants of which still lingered in the Fifties and which lay fermenting in the old magazines, obituaries and reviews of prewar plays that I combed through in the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, a library specialising in drama. Hindsight could sharpen their thrust, as happened for me in the case of Robert Brasillach, a brilliant theatre critic whose work had been delighting me for months before it occurred to me to find out about his life. When I did, he turned out to have been the only man executed after the war for ‘intellectual crimes’, i.e. editing a newspaper called Je suis partout, which favoured collaboration with Germany and gave away the whereabouts of hidden Jews. De Gaulle, ignoring an appeal signed by, among others, Valéry, Mauriac, Cocteau, Camus, Colette and Claudel, had refused to commute the sentence. And a current newspaper supplement which I happened to buy showed a murky photograph of Louis-Fernand Céline lurking behind a barred gate clearly intended to suggest a prison. Some people must have wanted him executed too. Having grown up on Irish Civil War stories about fratricidal murder, this should not have upset me, but did because I admired Céline’s novels and suspected that extremists on both sides had had more in common with each other – passion, activity, eagerness for change – than with people who condemned them, but themselves did nothing at all. This, I had to admit, was a notion I’d inherited from Eileen.
*
The topic of my main thesis, suggested by Moreau, was Gaston Baty, a Catholic theatre director who had roused hostility by keeping his theatre open during the occupation and welcoming the German ambassador to the best seats. He died in 1952, thus entering the pool of artists on whom university theses might be written. As an animateur, his chief characteristic was the primacy he claimed for directors over playwrights and his belief that actors should be as pliant as puppets. Clearly a martinet, his stage productions were as hard to assess in retrospect as a vanished sunset.
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