by Neil Jordan
Years later I will walk with him past the flowered pots on O’Connell Bridge towards the dried-up canal. He will talk about maths with the same passion as he did then, with more passion even, for by then his soutane will be flecked with snuff and dandruff, there will be an unashamed smell of alcohol on his breath and his smile will have grown wiser, more abstract and innocent, from the crooked, sad crease that you photographed. Your arm is around his shoulder in that snap, the open door of your house frames you, both of your chests puffed out, endlessly amused because both of you, photographers, were photographing each other. You did it by means of an extended puff-cord which explains the way your hand is stretched out, a minor invention in the march of the camera soon to be made redundant by the timed exposure, but one in which he would have delighted in then, bringing it to you like a child, though your delight would have been more muted, I suspect, since you were after all the professional. That smile will light again when he talks to me of mathematics and tells me that God in His essence is a mathematical symbol and that love is a figure like pi, the calculation of which never ends.
RAIN BEGINS TO fall on the promenade and Father Beausang quickens his step. You see him through your bay window, hurrying towards your door. The bay window is large, with a curved sill on which it is pleasant to sit. It affords two separate views, one through the left-hand curved panes of the Villas heading downwards towards the sea and sloping towards the yellow chairs that crawl up the Head; and through the right-hand curved panes are the Villas again, rising towards Main Street. It is the window on which the Jewish model sat, naked on velvet cushions before the outraged eyes of the curate’s superior. There is a table there surfaced with green felt, standing in the half-circle of the window. The light is always changing from the window so those who sit there come to know intimately the moods of street and landscape under the rain, the squalls and sheets forever falling on the bay beyond. In summer the window catches the sun for a full six hours. So summer is marked by a yellow glare and the yellow boxes of the chair-lift creaking towards the summit and by the bleaching of the green felt table. The quality of that room, though hardly remarkable, must have been constant, for Lili hated it, the curate when reminded of it grew nostalgic and I, when I visited it, could see at a glance what the one hated and the other loved to remember.
The drops gleam on Father Beausang’s cheeks. His eyes are damp with pleasure and rain. He slips a book out from under his soutane. Luke comes down the stairs and stands on the last step while the priest ruffles his hair. You tell Luke to bring in tea and sandwiches. Father Beausang touches your elbow and holds up the book. You read the title and smile. Arithmetic and Mensuration by Eamon de Valera.
Once inside the unheated room, though, the book is forgotten. The curate has made a much rarer discovery—a French mathematician whom he came across, quite by chance, in the Proceedings of the British Academy. He tells you his theories and the sheaves of his person seem to fall away, his eyes illuminated, straining through logic towards what he hopes is beyond. You feel quite sad, listening, anticipating his inevitable return. He relates an analysis of the process of mathematical research and discovery which, he claims, could lead the secular sciences back to the point from which they departed in the late Renaissance—to a recognition of simple illumination, Divine Wisdom. He has as yet read only accounts of these theories, has gulped them down whole in his excitement, but his sense of discovery is so real that it excites you, unwillingly, in turn. Poincare, the curate tells you, between hurried mouthfuls of cucumber sandwich, sees mathematical research not as merely the inevitable unravelling of applied logic but as a series of leaps into the unknown, for which the light thrown by logic alone could never suffice. The logic, he claims, by which the scientist seems to proceed could never suffice for his journey. The very choice of an area of investigation eliminates an infinite number of possible choices. And progress is made in a series of intuitive steps for which logic is the language but never the instrument. And there comes a point, beyond that language, beyond the resources of intuition even, at which the material amassed simply resists analysis. The curate turns towards you, lit by the grey light from the bay window. All resources seem to fail here, he tells you, and the mind is just a filament, waiting for a current. He quotes a remark by Einstein. The problem, stated and restated interminably, harried over for months gives way suddenly, quite arbitrarily, like a shattering mirror. The mind is admitted into the realm in which scientific discovery is made. And this moment is likened by Poincare to instantaneous illumination, a step beyond the realm of the rational, through which understanding is bestowed on the mind like a gift . . .
YOU TURN AWAY from the dialogue to watch the rain falling in sheets now on the prom. You can see the snout of Bray Head nudging past your window, a thin strip of the promenade resistant to the water hopping off it and the broader band of sea which accepts the rain, mottled by the squalls. The dialogue has come round to that point you had hoped it would resist. This innocent, glowing cleric is drawn to it, independent of himself. A faint disturbance rises in you, the kind of upset that could be due to bad digestion, you want to fart and blame it on the cucumber sandwiches or the inordinate amount of tea you have drunk. His excitement has carried you with it. You sense it springs from your own perplexity. But your disturbance is more than gastronomic. You remember the stiff wax flowers of her funeral, the flowers the church was drenched in at your wedding, all Catholic flowers, a display of faith in the natural object placed at the heart of the human event, an insistence that those same objects are more than themselves, are symbols of what the human event pertains to, limiting it on both sides, the flowers that brushed soundlessly the first time and that stood stiff and waxed the second. And you wonder whether the curate’s drift towards that point, the point at which these memories emerge and sidle towards you like forgotten enemies, to be confronted or evaded, is just an extension of his pastoral duty. Though your Tuesday conversations haven’t touched on these things for years, his very presence is a subtle reminder of them. Your discomfiture gives way to mild annoyance. Some unspoken agreement has been broken. You suspect he has been breaking it all along. You resent being reminded, through the theories of an obscure, possibly dilettante French mathematician, of your agnosticism, your perplexity and your deceased wife.
The curate moves from the window and places his hand on your arm. You aren’t used to hands on your arm, you are made as uncomfortable by them as by opening doors. But all you feel through his hand is the depth of his liking for you. This is another subject that has never been broached. Even that, the pressure says, will fail us some day. You look for words to answer him, somewhere between affection and faint resentment, but you can’t find them. He saves you again, as if saving is always his duty. His words are like your flowers, hedging round that miniature human event. He mentions the book he has brought.
‘I wonder, can Dev enlighten us?’
The door opens as he smiles. Luke comes through. You smile, almost in gratitude.
I WILL HAVE Luke open doors as quietly as James, but with the added ability to do so unnoticed. Like a good waiter, unembarrassed by silence, feeling no need to explain his presence. He has a transparent complexion at the age of eight, luminous eyes that stare all the time but rarely seek attention. The grandfather’s bluster makes way for the father’s reticence and for Luke’s transparent quiet. The youth whom Lili met at eighteen implied just such a boy. You tried to imagine him, she tells me, as a boy: did he carry himself just that way when he was twelve, eight or ten? And the boy who possessed that odd intensity, that appalling certainty would, she says, have been an intimidating boy indeed. Her impatience with the boy’s father is only matched by the rapturous approval with which she remembers the son.
So he comes in quietly to take away the tea things, knowing the discussion to be all but finished. Standing there, taking in with his eyes the rain-filled window and the two figures by it, Luke understands the embarrassment of the curate’s ge
sture, he already knows his father’s dislike of hands on arms and elbows. He sees his father in the window-light and listens to the opaque mystery of their conversation, the last soft wave of dialogue, those words of more than three syllables which characterise adult conversation for him, breaking to those pleasantries which for both of them signify an ending; though Luke doesn’t grasp at the pleasantries but at the fading scent of the argument, at the curate’s round diction and his choice of words. The words are new to him and carry an exotic allure. He is a thin, erect child who holds himself rigidly, a little like an older man. It’s only in late adolescence that he acquired the look of youth that Lili characterises as ‘slender’. Now he is thin and luminous, something aged about his silence, looking at his father and the curate, catching the drift of those ultramontane words. Their use is therapeutic for the curate, for whom the realities of parish life have formed a bitter contrast with his scholastic novitiate. They remind him of St John Lateran’s College in Rome, of his first love, theology, and of his present ambition, to unite the logic of belief with the logic of science. They would have carried to Luke the germ of that summa which every utterance implied. Standing there, waiting for the pressure of the curate’s warm hand on his father’s elbow to cease, for them both to turn with that sense of finality which would be the signal for him to pick up the tray with its cups and remaining sandwiches and carry them outside. And of course they turn and Father Beausang and Vance look at the tallish boy with the brown hair flat on his head, sharp stickles of a quiff on the right-hand side of his parting which lend to the luminosity of his eyes an air of constant surprise. The curate thinks of his duty towards this child of a Catholic marriage, he probes the child’s features gently as if to find some air of loss, of deprivation there. He can find none, however, and so he stretches out his hand and feels the stickles of the quiff with his palm.
‘I have something for you,’ he says. His eyes shine. ‘If your father doesn’t object.’
James has his back turned, his face to the window. You stare from him to the curate, whose palm has stopped kneading your hair. He hands you the book.
‘Bless you.’
HE LEAVES, WALKS back out through the hall to the door and the rain on the promenade. The odd sense of maleness in that house, that hall, the rather bare order over everything, like a presbytery or bachelor residence, makes him feel he’s leaving one home to go to another. The house was cleaned, but never softened, by a combination of three maidservants. There was a hatstand near the front doorway. And a mural, running down the stairway, covering the left-hand wall.
IT WAS A moving picture, Lili tells me, a sprouting forest of the old man’s mental world. He works on it in bouts and then leaves, returns months later, having decided to change the theme. So stories run through that wall in waves, conflict at each end and meet in the centre. Three muscular, bare-breasted women run downwards behind the stairway, over the peeling plaster, towards the front door. He has given the doll-like face of the local chemist to the one who stoops for the apple while she runs. He has put Grecian hills behind them, a Doric pillar, crumbling, in the left-hand foreground. But he must have changed in the course of it, switched his obsession, got afflicted with what Lili calls a ‘bout of Irishness’. He changes the background ruins into something like stone cottages. He adorns those hills with a necklace of low stone walls.
AND THE CURATE moves past the bare breasts and the lesbian contours and the Hellenic pillars and the Connemara walls. James follows, leads him to the door. The hills at that end melt into blue, the beginnings of a sea, Atlantic or Aegean. The curate opens the door and walks through the rain to a view of real sea. James watches him go. Luke clatters from the inner room with the tray of tea things.
LUKE MAKES HIS first appearance in a Moses basket surrounded by a sward of green. There is a plaid rug there and a woman kneeling on it. Of the woman one can see the bottom part of a gabardine coat, hands placed deep in each pocket, one sleeve pulled back to reveal a thin wrist. She must be looking at the child in the basket as James must be too, with perhaps the same sense of approval. One can’t tell since one can’t see her face, but James approved, obviously. The shot is worse than most. He has ignored the simplest rules of composition, as if his approval blinded him to them. There is no idea even of where the basket lay, Powerscourt, Bothar-na-Breena, the Dargle Valley. It is just seen from above, with the grass around it. James ignores the woman for the child, who is lying on his back. His head seems to be attempting to turn.
19
HE WALKS OUT himself, some hours after the curate. The rain has stopped by then. Does it only stop at night? The roads are quite deserted and the chairs on the Head are glowing like yellow moths, but motionless. He walks up the road and away from the sea front and the spaces between the houses become smaller and smaller. The road no longer merits the term Villas, becomes gradually a street. He has a longish tan gabardine coat pulled tightly round him, belted too, for the winter winds are in again after a summer of picnics and photographs, perhaps not too unlike the ones in which she appeared holding the baskets or prams, ones with large wheels that dominate the frame, as obsolete now as steam engines, graver than current ones with hoops, as on flower-baskets, covered in lace. The street has become a main one and the houses one wall of red-brick, one up, one down. He met her in the Gaelic rooms in Parnell Square, could never have met her here. The huddled square could well have housed some of those who worked on his great-grandfather’s delft. There was a twig pattern with a necklace of lozenges for leaves that needed a miniature, feminine hand. A factory of women, year of Our Lord 1809, when the delft still rang across Europe, when the china dust still billowed in the workshop. Does he fall in love in memory of them, at adult Irish classes, Parnell Square? Stuttering through this rural tongue with his unfortunate blas, the eucalyptus chewer with the bad conscience, it is the gulf between them that attracts him as much as the person herself. There is chalk-dust in the air, without the billowing texture of the dust of china. But nevertheless the young teacher’s fingers, which he wants, he needs to hold, are coated white. It is love, but always as an afterthought, the unique syllable lost among the consonants of Gaelic. Her plain dress is whitened in places as he looks at her over the row of benches through a halo of chalk. She has brown hair, blue eyes and an oval face. And when he comes to hold her chalk-whitened fingers which smudge his own in turn, his love gains the intensity of all his mental agonies. Her fingers are Irish, Catholic and youthful. He drifts towards marriage holding them, since he can do nothing else. And Eileen becomes Eileen Vance, with that unbridgeable gulf between fore and surname.
I will call it loving, though it was forgetful on his part and cruciform on hers. She doesn’t so much age as contract under the pressure of that gulf. That terrible forgetfulness that never focussed on her face, that never caught the sunlight on its contours in the Dargle Valley or the Devil’s Glen. He was kind, like all intelligent men, and therefore amazed when she began to weep one day on the Dublin-Bray train, where it brushes the sea just past Killiney. This child will be Catholic, she said, her curve outlined by the train window and the sea behind. Even if you won’t. His amazement changed to perplexity when her weeping didn’t stop. It lasted through her ninth and final month, until he could only wonder how so much weeping could rest in one person. It seemed to fill each room with an element not quite water and not quite air, but definitely liquid, through which he moved slowly and only saw her from a distance, until her weeping was augmented by her breaking waters and the pain of her delivery of their child.
Does he think of her, walking past the mock-Tudor town hall at the crossroads and out towards where the houses stop, giving way to the sweeping lawns of Lord Meath’s estate? Eileen Vance. The name implies the lightness Lili sees in Luke. Her face that never slid into his frame but found itself reproduced in his only child. He walks down the road with a hesitant amble, a constant phrasing of a question too deep for an answer. He cannot but form it and so his f
ate is to seem wrong. He reaches out through the countryside, his body arching forwards with that curious perplexity, that gait that would probably irk anyone who passes him as much as it did Lili. No one passes him, however. Though there are footsteps behind him. And her memory is still in him, as alive as ever and just as abstract.
The footsteps behind him grow louder. He hears the clunk of metal on wood. He turns his head as he walks and sees a young man behind him, with a bicycle propped against an oak tree. The young man has a bucket and a roll of posters. He takes a brush from the bucket and pastes a sheet against the bark with one wet stroke. James stops. The youth cycles past without a word. James can make out a slogan and a bareheaded sharp profile, dampened by the paste. He walks back to it. There is a sharp aquiline nose, a rigorous mouth without a trace of humour, and a pair of wire-framed spectacles. The eyes on the poster reflect his own abstraction, and with it a quite terrifying certainty. They stare into the distance, embedded with the mathematics of vision. He watches as the damp spreads round the face. There is something foolish, horselike in the features which only adds to their allure. The corners of the mouth sweep downwards, in one clean line. James smiles. Years ago he photographed it, at a Clare election meeting. He sees those features and their certainty mould into the tree’s roughness as the spreading paste weds the bark to the lettering. ‘De Valera—Clann na Poblachta: Vote for the Republic!’