Trespassers

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘The old earl must have been beside himself!’

  Thoughtfully, the beggar would now wipe bread around his plate. ‘The queer thing was that he dropped dead the next year. That roused talk. But once Bilton was Countess of Clancarty it died down.’

  ‘Was it true she had no talent?’

  ‘Divil a bit!’ Cheered by the thought, the Ballinasloe man laughed. His name – it comes back to me – was Fleming. He must have been descended from a soldier brought to Ireland by the Williamite wars.

  *

  Bilton’s story used to thrill me but, knowing I couldn’t pass the thrill on to Lauro, I didn’t try.

  Then one day he came home early with a headache. I was out, so he fell asleep, but was woken by someone ringing our door bell so persistently that, on seeing that the man outside was a beggar, he flew into a rage which was still on the boil when I got back. The beggar, according to him, had said, ‘I won’t deal with you. I want to talk to the signora.’ Lauro asked how much I used to give, and, when I wouldn’t say, we had our first major row, which was followed, over the years, by others.

  I don’t remember any at Reed, but later in Los Angeles, when I found what seemed to be a dying man on our lawn, the only thing that stopped me hauling him up our steps and into the house was his weight. Hoping for help, I rang Lauro in his UCLA office, only to be told that sane people did not bring strangers into the house. Next I appealed to our neighbours who agreed with him. Then I rang a helpline, only to learn that the only help on offer was from the police who would lock the man up. I was protesting at this heartlessness, when a glance out at the lawn revealed that the dying man was gone. No doubt seeing me telephone had led his thoughts to the police, too.

  My credibility shrank on the spot and vanished for good when we moved to London, where a man who claimed to be collecting for cancer research proved to be a fraud. I had reached the front door ahead of Lauro and by the time he joined me had handed over two twenty-pound notes in memory of a friend who had died of cancer. The self-styled charity worker had a collecting box and badge showing his ID, but Lauro rang the research charity anyway, which confirmed his doubts. The man, it turned out, had worked for them – hence the ID – then been fired for larceny and now, with the ease of the Artful Dodger, had slipped from sight.

  I saw no logic to this. Lauro should have been wrong, so I refused to believe that his rightness proved anything other than the world’s meanness. He couldn’t explain how he had come to distrust the man – or rather he could, but only by saying that I attracted con men and imposters who could smell my gullibility. This, need I say, prolonged our row when I observed that I had, not so long ago, attracted him.

  *

  In other ways, Lauro was more prone to melt than I. Not only did he weep in cinemas, but the very touch of 500-year-old documents in the Florentine State Archives set him agog with pleasure. Learning to decipher their Latin and Italian abbreviations did, too, and this was partly why his thesis was taking so much time, despite his often working on it until 3 a.m. His Harvard professor – the man whose reported gossip had upset my parents – had been little help, having known nothing about the archives until Lauro himself, who learned of them from a student of Theodor Mommsen’s at Princeton, submitted his project. There was, though, a stimulating peer group of young researchers who revelled in their work and, when in Florence, often got together for after-dinner drinks to share their excitement. A favoured venue for these sessions was the flat of an English scholar who had married the daughter of a fattore employed by one of the great Tuscan estates. Sometimes she took us down to her father’s wine cellar, whose rows of shelved bottles were like another archive. Some of these were venerable, in wine terms, so could turn out to be either delicious or disappointingly past their prime. For the researchers the city, too, was like an archive, since what most of its street names commemorated was itself: a proud, tight, in-turned, provincial world, which in spite of its architecture and past eminence reminded me of Dublin. Both places were self-absorbed, obsessed by memory, treasured small scandals, retold puns and gave the impression, when I first knew them, of disproving the dictum that one cannot step into the same river twice.

  *

  Yet changes did take place. On our first return visit to Florence we spent a week in Elba where, lying in a vineyard on a warm evening, we saw Sputnik orbit high above us, winking its prophetic way, like the star of Bethlehem, across a cloudless lapis-blue sky.

  Not only was it exciting to watch and wonder at, it would, at surprising speed, affect our lives when US authorities, shaken by the Soviet success, started to realise that academics, hitherto regarded as near-useless citizens, not to say arty-farty frills on the body of a serious, commercial society, could on the contrary affect the space race and the Cold War. Scientists’ salaries were promptly raised, and some trickle-down reached the humanities too. As a result we, who had two salaries during our Reed years, were able to pay off debts contracted during our year together in Florence and even to save. Things became easier still when in our second year at Reed we moved to a house on campus. It was airy and roomy, surrounded by trees and, once I had painted its inside walls and hung home-made, pin-striped roller blinds on its windows, struck me as charming. Others were less impressed. Kick Erlanger, a rich New York friend of Seán’s and Eileen’s, flew out to see us and, judging by a subsequent letter from Seán praising our ‘fortitude’, was taken aback by what she saw. But then Kick’s standards were high, as she owned two mansions, one in East 64th Street, New York, and the other in New Jersey.

  Months later, when our son, who had been born prematurely weighing less than three pounds, was big enough to come out of his incubator, Eileen also visited. By then the place must have looked better, for she showed no signs of shock. But then in the Twenties she and Seán had probably been no better off in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And meanwhile, gifts had come from Kick: electric cooking appliances, a Balenciaga coat for me, a nappy-laundry service for three months, a baby-carrier and several dresses from Bergdorf Goodman.

  This mix of grandeur and thrift seemed amusingly bohemian. Geoffrey Taylor, when poetry editor of The Bell, had, I now remembered, lived in a house full of furniture made from tea chests and butter boxes. I, who must have been about nine when I was first taken to visit it, had been thrilled to see adults playing house and now had my chance to follow their example. Furniture from charity shops was easier to recycle than butter boxes and when re-upholstered looked, I considered, rather well. We had brought a dozen antique champagne glasses and two baroque porcelain candelabra from Florence, and Eileen arrived with a gift of Staffordshire pottery from her friend Norah McGuinness, which both soothed our nostalgia for Europe and added style.

  Meanwhile letters brought news of friends. Among them came a copy of the first number of a magazine called Nonplus from Patricia Murphy, who had founded and funded it and enclosed a covering note reporting – tartly – that Patrick Kavanagh had taken up with Katherine Moloney ‘because he wanted a nurse’. What Patricia herself had wanted was a poet. Accordingly, when she came to the end of her affair with Philip Larkin, she had married Richard Murphy, with whom she had been living when I last visited them in a revamped Lake Park which he had turned into a setting fit for poets by adding such features as a Yeatsian flight of seven granite steps.

  The lake itself, though, struck me as gloomy. Wicklow water is often filtered through turf, and though bright as honey on your skin when you are swimming in it, can look, from afar, as dark and restive as a flock of starlings. Perhaps because of this, the two had now divorced and Patricia was living in Dublin near the Grand Canal.

  The copy of Nonplus contained three prose essays by Patrick Kavanagh and seven poems – a contribution seen by his biographer as ‘extraordinarily generous’. My own sense was that the generosity was Patricia’s, who clearly felt an urge to protect Kavanagh. Many Dubliners had succumbed to that impulse, including my father, John Betjeman when he lived in Dublin, and, more
surprisingly, the tyrannical Archbishop McQuaid.

  His soft spot for Kavanagh was the first benign thing I ever heard about him, and the explanation which springs to mind is a second. For Kavanagh was unworldly, though perhaps less from choice than because the world was too much for him. His view of it could be caustic. Take the lines:

  To be a poet and not know the trade,

  To be a lover and repel all women,

  Twin ironies by which great saints are made,

  The agonizing pincer-jaws of heaven.

  He did not himself repel women. On the contrary, verse like that is guaranteed to attract them, and there were reports of women who circled around him. But the hyperbole has a drumbeat which echoes the Metaphysical poets and some vernacular hymns – and may well have appealed to John Charles McQuaid. I suspect it might have pleased Seán, too, for he sometimes quoted early Gaelic poetry whose monosyllabic metre thumped out an even more insistently spasmodic rhythm.

  The unlikely connection between poet and bishop was watched with interest by neighbours who exchanged stories about ‘the Arch’ arriving in his chauffeur-driven car to call on Kavanagh who, not wanting his patron to see the squalor in which he lived, allegedly piling up empty sardine-tins and used tea leaves in his bath tub, once sent down word that he couldn’t receive him because he had a woman in his flat. The Arch, to his credit, is said to have smiled and remarked that the woman, if there was one, was no doubt a saintly do-gooder. And indeed Katherine Moloney, the same one who used to sing about her martyred uncle in cafés on the Île Saint Louis, seems to have done Kavanagh good, for in 1966 the two married. Before that, though, Patricia too extended largesse when he arrived in the small hours at her door in Wilton Terrace, drenched and shivering after either falling into the canal or – his version – being pushed. Patricia, a qualified doctor, knew how to help and did. She bought him a tweed outfit the next day, too, and now that she was his near neighbour often had him in for a drink. Judging by what we know of her relations with Larkin, she relished challenge when dealing with poets, whether lovers or protégés. And indeed, Desmond Williams, her last companion, was both brilliant and badly disabled. I saw her once feed him his dinner with a spoon, as you might feed a child.

  Maybe Kavanagh also welcomed disability. Here is a scrap of his verse which I learned in my pious childhood when he used to visit Knockaderry on Sunday afternoons. While my mother made tea, he and I would show each other our poems:

  We have tested and tasted too much, lover.

  Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.

  But here in the Advent-darkened room

  Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea

  Of penance will charm back the luxury

  Of a child’s soul, we’ll return to Doom

  The knowledge we stole but could not use.

  We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages

  Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour –

  I don’t remember having learned or even read the last two lines. Perhaps, when I was a child, they meant nothing to me. But ‘clay-minted’ has the ur-Kavanagh ring. In his verse, earth and ‘the stony grey soil of Monaghan’ are out to destroy him. His hell substitutes fire with clay.

  I have a notion that he may have courted my mother, not only because of those afternoons when he walked the ten or twelve miles from the city to Killiney just for a cup of tea, but because of five neatly handwritten poems which I turned up when going through the papers left in Rosmeen Park, the cul-de-sac where Seán and she lived at the end. One is dedicated ‘To Eileen O’Faolain’. Here are a few lines:

  There was no miracle of sky or earth

  The dream-witch high astraddle on her broom

  Vanished – and we had only slave mirth

  To cheat the Master of the Hags of Doom.

  Without the gate were we, talking of all

  The love green meadows lying somewhere south

  Where the black-faced Frustrator cannot thrall

  Pure souls. Or break the word in Passion’s mouth.

  Two children in a desert place were we

  Remembering there was once a fruited tree.

  Neat and copperplate though the writing is, I may have misread some of it. ‘Hags’ for instance could be ‘Hogs’. But the motifs are familiar. Is the broom phallic though? If so, Eileen might have failed to guess this.

  *

  The two events which marked our time at Reed were the birth of our son, Lucien, and the publication of Lauro’s first book, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists, which, thanks to his archival work, was able to relate the thinking of fifteenth-century Florentine intellectuals to their economic and political circumstances. The book went to press in 1962 and thanks to it – and perhaps to Sputnik – he got a grant to go back to Florence, and later more grants, so we were able to stay there for four supremely happy years while he worked on a second book and I did some translating from Italian, taught in the Scuola Interpreti and began to write short stories. As I write this, it is 2011 and The Social World is about to be reissued by the University of Toronto Press. Seán, Lauro reminds me, was both reassured and surprised when, on a trip to the US, he ran into a historian who told him what a good book it was. He had nourished divided feelings about Lauro and reproached himself for this.

  *

  The Florence we now came to know was livelier than the one we had known before. For one thing, thanks to the Italian ‘economic miracle’ of those years, people had more money and, for another, Lauro was now a fellow at I Tatti, so at its lunches and other junketings we met Florentine figures such as Berenson’s old friend and lover, Nicky Mariano, and her sister ‘the baronessa’, who invited us several times to her house in Vallombrosa. From time to time Harold Acton invited us, too, and so did Count Neri Capponi, who was an advocate at the Sacra Rota and a professor of Canon Law. He and his wife, Flavia, had links with Ireland, she because she had spent time there when her father was ambassador and had, to judge by Edward McGuire, left teasing memories of her young self with a generation of wistful young men. Neri’s connection was earthier, in being through his nanny who, he told us, had taught him how to say póg mo thón which is Gaelic for ‘kiss my ass’. Like the Capponi, other old Florentine names – Ricasoli, Corsini, Strozzi, Ruccellai, Gondi, Guicciardini, Antinori and the like – still belonged to the owners of the matching palazzi. We didn’t meet them all, but those we did were friendly and so were the owners of villas in the hills.

  To make a small, token return for their hospitality, we decided to give a drinks party. The flat we were renting on the via San Niccolò didn’t lend itself to dinner parties. It had a spacious reception room, a large, airy bedroom, and a large terrace canopied in wisteria season with mauve blossoms; but its kitchen was one floor up, at the top of a steep and narrow stairway down which anyone carrying trays of food could slither and fall. Cautiously, therefore, we stuck to drinks and invited everyone we knew. This proved to be a major gaffe, since it was now the Sixties. Academic friends tended to be left-wingers and the aristocrats wouldn’t talk to them. When, ignoring my invitations to mingle, the party split into two hostile phalanxes, a guest took me aside to explain why. He was Count Giovanni Buoninsegni Tadini who had driven up from his villa near Lucca.

  ‘Julia,’ he scolded, ‘you have invited us with Communists and people who plan to destroy us. You can’t expect us to socialise with them. It’s different for you. You’re foreign. But they want our property.’

  Viewed from the British Isles, such Cold War terrors had rarely seemed real, so Tadini was almost the first person I met who took them seriously. Besides this, Communists in France and Italy had been arguing for so long that they must ‘wait for the right moment’ before trying to get into government that few now thought this would ever happen.

  Next time we met, Tadini spoke more freely about his dislike of the Left. It was not entirely based on fear. There was also distaste. Florentines, he told us, fel
l into five groups, only some of which could be mixed. There were aristocrats like himself. Then there were the rich foreigners who lived in villas like Acton’s La Pietra, Violet Trefusis’s Villa dell’Ombrellino, and I Tatti in Berenson’s day. Both groups were his friends. Even foreign academics like Lauro were acceptable, because, unlike Italian ones, they knew how to handle a knife and fork. But Italian professors – ‘mostly Reds anyway’ – were out, and so were prefects, mayors and so forth, who weren’t too good with knives and forks either. The fifth category were the demonic Communists, a few of whom, like the aristocratic, but also Communist, film director Visconti, were class-traitors to boot.

  Tadini was the man I mentioned earlier, who liked to contend that the US army had taught Italian workers to wash more hygienically than people like himself, whose now outdated sanitary know-how came from English nannies. He was self-mocking, entertaining and could have written a lively guide to his own world. Mindful, however, of Poldy Loewenstein’s father’s riposte when the young Poldy wanted to become a doctor – ‘we do not become, we are!’ – I did not encourage Tadini to take up the pen.

  He was right about cutlery, though. As another Italian friend remarked when rummaging in a London street market for long narrow spoons with which to serve osso buco, a supremely Italian dish, England was the place to find them, because it was deeply middle-class, and that class had invented table manners. Sure enough, the osso buco spoons turned up in London. Meanwhile Tadini’s view of Florentine manners was bolstered by a scene I glimpsed in a trattoria where a man whom the waiter had addressed as professore was instructing his children about that topic. Manners, he told them, were essential, and, to endorse the point, waved his knife in the air.