The Past

by Neil Jordan

  He strode on, his boots raising clouds of dust, or was it pollen?

  34

  DESPITE LUKE’S FEAR of open spaces he must have ventured out that summer to a garden fete, a large open field where he seems restless even in the photograph, surrounded by upturned temporary tables and crumpled cloths. There are Jesuits in the background and among them a female figure which could be Rene. He seems like a large thin bull there, who would make of the field a pattern on a living-room wall, if he could. His hair is thin and lank so that the bristling quiff, so evident above his forehead years ago, is all but hidden. He seems to be leaning towards the camera, imploring it to release him, perhaps so that he can get back to the security of those massed Jesuits. There is accusation in his eyes. He must have been held there for an inordinate length of time so that his father could get the focus right. The space of this field in which his father has placed him appals him, but no more than the spaces of the world into which his father has thrown him. And he stands, apparently tottering forward for what seems an age before the shutter clicks, and then turns and walks stiffly, as rapidly as he can without running, towards the black mass of the Jesuits and the white tables.

  He meets their crowded backs with relief, their serge shoulders, shiny rather than black from rubbing against one another. The sandwiches on the long tables have gone soft in the heat but the Jesuits keep eating them and the maids keep running for more. These maids are squat and have freckled faces and wear aprons identical in shape if not in design. They approach the Fathers with slightly bowed heads, transport the blue and white plates with banana sandwiches, but once out of earshot they clasp each others’ hands, they giggle, running towards the refectory for more. The Fathers stand in groups, scattered round the white tables, round the mothers of the schoolboys. They stare at this agoraphobic boy, seeing in him perhaps a lost pupil and possibility. But he just stands there clutching the white tablecloth, inhaling the odour of Jesuit serge, looking for the small circle of massed priests among whom he hopes is Rene.

  James Vance brings tripod and box down past the longest of the tables and is approached by a lay brother who fifteen years ago took minor Abbey parts. I tend the garden now, this brother tells him, I dig trenches and grow vegetables for the community meals. Do you remember that snap you took of The Workhouse Ward where I could be seen in the background talking to the Peeler? The priesthood is not for everyone, this lay brother tells him, and not for such as me who grew up in that profane trade.

  The Superior is tall and rigid and one half of his crown is bald. Perhaps the only one of the Fathers who hasn’t eaten sandwiches, he walks among the tables towards James, holds him gently by the elbow. Hopkins, he tells him, was a poet. Swinburne, for whom I’ve heard you profess such a liking, has been responsible for the most blasphemous line in the last two thousand years. He quotes softly as if his lips are trying to separate themselves from the words.

  Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean;

  the world has grown grey from thy breath.

  The Superior’s crown gleams like a mirror with perspiration. His hand is firm and irritating. We must come to some arrangement, he lowers his voice, about all school photographs . . .

  A young athlete from the Sixth Form walks between the tables and the knots of priests. He is still dressed for running and perspiration and effort have stiffened his hair into a mass of blond curls. He acknowledges none of the Fathers’ nods, and yet the Fathers seem not to mind. Vigour, they seem to say, and youth obey their own laws. A glow of vapour and distilled effort surrounds him. A yearly figure, the Superior whispers, for portraits of all the forms . . .

  Luke walks between two maids, carrying empty plates. Take me to the house, he asks them. They walk beyond the tables, clasping their hands behind his back. One is taller than him, the other smaller. Do you all wear the same sized apron? he asks, noticing how the small one is wrapped in hers, the tall one choked by hers. No, says the tall maid, laughing, there’s two sizes. Too big and too small. She has a brace and her consonants click. They cross the large field, beyond the tables. Their clasped hands separate and fall around his waist.

  THE SUN CURVES gradually downwards and as the day grows cooler the Fathers disperse, Jesuit by Jesuit, from their small groups. The Sixth Form athlete walks towards the field exit arm in arm with a middle-aged, elegant lady. His mother, the lay brother whispers, shaking his head, is a saint. Our persuasions are different, the Superior muses. He tries to disguise his curiosity. The young woman who came with you, she’s not a local girl?

  Luke finds her in the kitchen, sitting at a wooden table, surrounded by the maids. Each maid is plucking her apron, laughing coarsely. Rene’s smile seems to include each one of them. We seen you on the train, says the maid with the braces, you getting off it and us getting on—

  35

  A YOUNG WAITRESS BROUGHT us the tea. She walked between the small patio and the Eagle’s Nest, bringing first the cups, then the tea and then the sugar and milk. It was a wooden building with a corrugated iron roof which sang whenever it rained. Luckily enough the sun had again come out so we sat outside. The whole arrangement was quite a suntrap since the Head loomed over the Eagle’s Nest, shielding it from the prevailing winds, and the Eagle’s Nest loomed over the patio. I asked the serving-girl had they had many trippers and she said no, that we were the first yet. Could you drink outside like this, I asked her, in the old days? I don’t remember, she answered. She seemed annoyed by the question and I couldn’t understand why until I realised she couldn’t have been born then. Is this your first job then? I continued when she came with the milk. What’s it to you? she muttered, her young eyes narrowing.

  We plucked the sprigs of heather from our trousers while she poured the tea. Between the last pylon of the lift and the Eagle’s Nest there was nothing but heather, two or three feet deep. We both agreed that there must have been a track there once and that a new one would appear soon when the lift caught on again.

  But we sat in silence once the girl had poured the tea, he hardly touching his cup, sitting with his face to the bay and his eyes half-closed. I wondered was he tired or was our silence caused by our sudden intimacy some moments back, just when the lift stopped? Or perhaps by the young girl’s annoyance? I put my face close to his but only the whites of his eyes showed through his half-opened lids; they didn’t register the blue bay before them. Perhaps old priests are like old horses, I thought, they sleep at odd moments only, in postures of waking. So I put his saucer on top of his cup to keep it warm and went ahead and drank my own tea. It was scalding, though a little weak.

  Time passed and clouds flitted over the heather, like heather themselves. Father Beausang stayed asleep. I sensed someone looking at me then and turned to see the serving-girl in the wooden doorway with a camera raised to her face. The camera clicked as I turned and she ran into the interior, clutching it to her breast. I rose from my seat quietly so as not to waken him and walked towards the door, and inside.

  I stood just inside the doorway looking across the wooden floor and the round tables to where she sat, behind the counter. Move over, she said, you’re blocking the light. I walked forward and the light flooded in behind me, which seemed to satisfy her since her air of annoyance faded and she focused on the camera in her hand with a kind of innocent concentration. Is this your first job then? I asked again, but she silenced me with a Shhh! and placed the camera on the counter where I could see it. It was an instant one I saw, streamlined and plastic with an aperture from which the print would slide out. We both watched the print slide out then and fall on to the wooden counter, as if it had a will of its own. It was a wonderful grey colour which gradually changed as if smoke was drifting across it and the gaunt shape of the pylon loomed out of the smoke and the broken shape of the coastline and the softer shapes of two figures at a table. For a terrible moment I feared that the pylon would be as it was in its heyday and the heather would be worn to a track by countless feet and the figures at the ta
ble would be those of Luke and Rene. But no, I saw my own surprised face and Father Beausang with his head towards the bay and the bay itself coloured in a glorious blue, more heightened, if anything, than the blue outside.

  I ordered two more teas. Outside Father Beausang was still asleep. I would have liked to ask her who had revitalised the lift when she came up with the teas. But she was still wearing her air of youthful annoyance so I asked her instead why she took the picture. Because you, she answered, are my first customers. She gathered up the old cups and set down two new ones with a fresh pot of tea. Father Beausang woke with the disturbance. He turned his head away from the water, towards me. It’s getting cooler, he said, and it was.

  His eyes were fully open and looking towards the yellow chairs. They only moved, I surmised, when there was a passenger.

  ‘SO I HAVE seen her. The whole promenade must have seen her, in one way or another. Certainly my superior, a parish priest named Cartan had heard and seen enough of her to be worried. If she were Catholic and modelled each weekend for a Protestant painter, you see, something would have to be done. I had to inquire then, discreetly, into her background. And discretion suited me especially since, as you know, I couldn’t visit the house any longer. It was not only a point of delicacy with me, it was my recognition that something had ended. My function in that house had been replaced by hers. Or to put it another way, the cup that I had half-filled, flowed right over with her. If I met James on the promenade or behind a bathing shelter we would continue our discussions for the length of a stroll, but meeting like that was never satisfactory. The room within bay windows was missing, you see, and the figure of Luke with his tray of sandwiches and tea, which incidentally—’

  He drained his cup

  ‘—was far, far better than this. And you can’t talk mathematics walking down a promenade, surrounded by Scots. I wasn’t jealous or resentful of her but I was intensely curious. I felt an odd affinity with her too. She was to take up my guardianship, after all, and I could sense from James on the promenade this air of blossoming after all those years. No matter how far our discussions had ranged, you see, their original purpose had never been quite forgotten. He was still “talking instruction”, I was still waiting for the staff to blossom. And there he was, blossoming after all those years.’

  THE SMELL OF dried flowers that comes from your prints, after, as he says, all those years. How can the photographer himself blossom? He was rarely on the prom, a little like Luke in his preference for indoors. Summer smells too aren’t often redolent of flowers. From where we sat I could smell the prom below us, the burnt metal of the amusement parlours and the wet sand in particular. But what the curate saw must have been like James Vance blossoming. He is forty-seven and it’s the summer of nineteen thirty-three. Your angular walk along the prom and the hesitant stoop that Lili described in you. Pliant now, and perhaps that is the word for it. Two miles away is the hill with eucalypti, still divesting themselves of their stripes of bark. And they don’t blossom either, they drop off cones, nowhere near as elegant as their stripes of bark. You could only photograph others in flower and never flower yourself.

  ‘I WOULD BE lying if I said I wasn’t faintly jealous. But then jealousy is the most loving of all emotions.’

  He turned to me and smiled.

  ‘Next to love, that is. But while one can be jealous of what one doesn’t know, one can’t really love whom one doesn’t know. So my most overriding emotion was—’

  He smiled again.

  ‘—what I would say is yours—curiosity. And curiosity about her, happily enough, had become part of my pastoral duty. So I set about finding out about her.’

  THE GIRL HAD brought more tea. She replaced the pot this time, but not the cups. Are these the original tables, I wanted to ask her, of the original Eagle’s Nest? But she still wore that look of youthful annoyance so I desisted. A chill was coming in now, from the sea. Father Beausang poured for both of us. Those tickets were good value, he said, with the emphasis on the ‘were’. I realised then that he had not realised he’d been asleep. ‘The one pastoral duty I’ve ever enjoyed. And one of the many I’ve failed at. I found out a lot. I went to Dublin, interviewed a young aspiring actress called—’

  ‘Lili,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, Lili. I found out that our Rene was Catholic. I found out that if the old man painted her it was at odd moments and never unclothed. When I found out who her father was my pastoral duty stopped, since the children of the blessed are above suspicion, so to speak. But of the whole story I could only get a glimpse. Months later I heard the real fact—that she was pregnant—’

  THE SUN HAD touched the Head and the light was coming down in movable fingers of infinite length, since they caressed the bay as much as they caressed us. We sat watching the shifting glory. I glanced behind me and saw the serving-girl, standing behind us. She was as awed as we were, with no camera. All three of us watched, Father Beausang with his face towards the bay. I felt the time had come. Your boss, I whispered to her. Who is he? And sure enough she smiled, her face towards the bay, and whispered a name.

  SIX

  THE PROVINCES, 1934

  36

  AND SO SHE was pregnant and waiting in Dublin to tour the A country. There would be three of them soon, father, son and Rene, awaiting the arrival of the child, the father of whom no one has been able, or willing to name. And time becomes stilled for them while she grows, yet all they discover is one of its more secret rhythms. They are mastered by a unit as basic as a day, a month, a year, but of which they are only now made conscious. It must have seemed marvellously arbitrary to them, nine months, two hundred and seventy days. They think of the pregnancies of elephants and whales, butterflies and moths and feel that in an odd way they have annihilated time. They fall instead into an element of the same fluidity and texture as that expanse of water they have seen for years beyond Bray Head, that the yellow chairs have bobbed over, that Rene has watched from Trimelston Road, that other sea in which the world will immerse itself, basking like a glistening dolphin. And Rene of course holds the secret of that time. She expands on the grace of her first three photos, moves to a point for which perspectives are useless.

  BUT BEFORE THERE were three of them, there would be two. There would be Luke and Rene, moving in a narrowing circle, changing town and parish hall every second or third night. For a while she takes the boys’ parts, but after the first three weeks when her condition becomes obvious, an improbable boy, MacAllister, with infinite grace and tact, promotes her to female parts proper and even gives her a rise. So now she can wear dresses with bodices in place of the adolescent’s doublet and hose. The female wardrobe of costumes is limited to four, which must serve for all parts from Kathleen to Cleopatra. And all sense of period is totally ignored, be it Roman, Celtic, Elizabethan or Edwardian. The past is simply the past, counterpoised with the present. And for the present there is no wardrobe whatsoever, the cast swap their working clothes as the parts demand. Sad, MacAllister would whisper with his inimitable smile. But these are the provinces, dears. And these four past costumes are of four distinct types as if woman herself, whom they feigned to represent, can be categorised in four. There is Queenly Beauty, Aged Refinement, Nurse/Nun/Midwife, and Youthful Innocence. Rene, through her tour, uses versions of all four, changing character and lines as her figure dictates. Lucky, as MacAllister whispers, these are the provinces.

  THERE WILL BE no photographs, since James doesn’t reach them until near the end, and Luke’s flight destroys his faith forever in the perceivable object. And is that significant as well, I wonder, as he loses his urge at last to grasp at years, to stick his moments into albums and annotate each one. Does he too feel the annihilation of time, staring from the green felt table out of the bay window, picturing both loved ones just through disappointment and desire? Nothing will revive his faith in photographs and when his faith itself revives, it will be with a strength that needs no photographs. His camera dies, and
there is only the spoken word to replace it, and memory, and imagination. And all three are frighteningly elastic, handing us as a gift that freedom that annihilates more than time, the contours of our subjects themselves.

  SO LUKE BRAVES the Bray train alone. He walks behind the hotels, clinging to the walls of the terraced houses, treading like water the spaces of the wide streets, past the Turkish baths and the bowling green and into the station itself. I descended the Head with Father Beausang and back down the long promenade to where the station made a wooden roof above the tracks, curved, to enclose the sea in its frame. As Luke waits the rain comes and each pointed eave contains its drop. When our train came I helped Father Beausang up the step, through the door and into the carriage of plastic seats. We moved out of Bray then and towards Shankhill, through the houses, through the green to where blue expanse was on our right and the eucalyptus slopes were on our left. I thought of Luke on the wooden seat with his neck against the shoulder of felt. The rain comes and hammers the blue into the colour of tin. The scene moves past his moving window, a succession of granite platforms leading to the largest one of all, and there he rises and walks slowly to the door and through the clouds of reassuring steam into that corridor of glass. The steam billows and fades as the train pulls towards Amiens Street and Luke negotiates the platform and the slight incline of Westland Row down to the backstage of the Ancient Concert Rooms in Rutland Street.