The Past

by Neil Jordan

  37

  FATHER BEAUSANG SLEPT through Westland Row despite my efforts to wake him. So we got off at Amiens Street, stood together on the moving stairs and had to walk towards Lili’s modest residence along the canal. The giant pots on O’Connell Bridge seemed burdened with their flowers, hanging limp in the heat like the flags that hung from each new building. He refused my offer of a taxi.

  IMAGINE JAMES’S CAMERA swinging forlorn from the hatstand. It seems out of place there, squat, so contained in its leather case. All the coats that have hung there for years, their folds seem to stiffen as they hang, enclosing in a kind of stillness the fluted trunk of the stand. But the camera swings when he places it there, to and fro, glancing off the surface with each return. So he listens to the stand rocking faintly and looks at the unfinished mural his father left, the Connemara landscape forming a window, a gateway into this odd expanse of hills that his father imagined to be Greece; the woman’s face pinioned between both as if he could never decide quite what background she needed. He can see now that it isn’t quite her, the neck is too Grecian, the cheekbones are too flushed and Irish, she has been only caught in that fringe of blonde. James leaves the hall and goes into the living-room and the camera still swings from the hatstand. He pulls out the drawer in the cabinet and takes out a sheaf of papers, deeds of inheritance, mortgages, old litigations, the whole penumbra of unfinished business left untouched now for three generations. He leafs through signatures of gentlemen and Papists, Bray burghers, certificates of birth, marriage and death until he comes to a small compact pile of invoices and inventories of stock all filled in in the fine nib and hand of a long-forgotten clerkship. The stock of the forgotten pottery he finds was numbered at seventeen hundred units, ‘unit’ being specified as a set complete with cups, saucers, side plates and serving bowls. Their value he finds assessed in pounds, in single numbers, the total stock having been rendered almost worthless by the influx of machine-made delft from the English midlands. The whorls and curlicues of the unknown clerk’s hand remind him of the fine blue lines on the delft itself, that solid grace and attention to detail that seem to him to have walked across water to here from an unknown country. He should take the train now and get off at Killiney and stand on the moulting hill again among the stripes of eucalyptus, inhaling again that scent of resin and tomcats, the wet dust of the bay. But he doesn’t, it’s not yet time for him to take the train. He goes upstairs and urinates in the bowl, surrounded by the odour of fathers, of the slow drip across the years, of inheritance, colouring and temper, from father to son and father to son.

  WE WALKED FROM O’Connell Bridge to College Green and Clarendon Street. As we passed the brash, coloured pietà in the courtyard of the church, I stopped him and pointed at her curved plaster mouth. If the Father, I asked him, fathered His own Son and yet the Son was the Father, does that mean the Son fathered Himself? Something like annoyance crossed his face, and then a hint of a smile. I apologised for my lack of acquaintance with what I remembered he had called that exquisite system of triadic ambiguity, and tried to rephrase it. In other words, I asked, if the Son fathered Himself, did He by that very act create His own Father? He smiled fully then and pulled me on. You are leaving out, he whispered, the third corner of that exquisite triangle: the Holy Spirit.

  LUKE FINDS THE front-of-house doors barred and makes his way along the side. From somewhere he can hear brass music. He walks with his hand against the russet brick that leads him to the stage entrance. The door is open and he hears voices coming from the inside gloom. He gets the odour then and I can shiver at the precise feel of that rust crumbling dryly at the touch of her fingers and the roses as she leant close and smelt them as their bowls blew soundlessly over the leather. But it is the dust Luke smells, of an unused stage. He runs his hand along the metal bar, walking inside.

  WE REACHED LILI’S house and shook hands and I watched him walk across the bridge, over the grey ribbon of canal. He seemed fatigued all of a sudden. I had promised to call him when all the questions were finished, when I came back from Clare, but looking at his slow, dark walk I realised how little promises mean to the old. He didn’t turn or wave, so I rang the bell and listened for Lili’s difficulty in coming down the stairs.

  38

  ‘CAN YOU IMAGINE,’ said Lili, quite unnecessarily, rocking softly once more in her cane chair, ‘the impact of that extraordinary boy on that group of Thespians? You know what Rene meant to them, but can you imagine how the effeminate hams fawned over him, delighted in him, loved him even? The boy was their dream, they would have had him as Ophelia in a white dress strung with real watercress and lilies. But then he’d never, no matter what the inducement, go beyond carrying sets. Besides which he would have been a terrible actor. He hung around walls even more than his father did, which might be why it suited him. He’d stand behind flats, walls within walls, and watch the open stage from there. But can you imagine that gaggle of cynical, poverty-stricken actors, dedicated to nothing but the next night, willing to sell their grandmothers for the dual ends of simple survival and the practice of what they called their “art”—can you imagine them roused to all the possibilities of innocence by a love affair between their A.S.M. and their second lady? It was a conspiracy, you see, enacted on the Free State, on that society we played to. We moved through those towns, the names of which I can hardly remember, like early Christians carrying the message. But the message was sent out in an elaborate code. After the first few shows it came out that she was pregnant. Now that’s a message we couldn’t have spelt out. But can you imagine the pleasure in conveying it while disguising it? The happy falsity, the artifice? We did botched-up versions of the comedies, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, we did all the old staples, The Colleen Bawn, The Workhouse Ward, The Rising of the Moon, The Countess Cathleen. But no matter what story each of them told, the same story always told itself through them. Which was love, I suppose. And I can never think of that word outside a story.’

  LUKE, YOU SEE, has found his home. The man with the flowing mane of hair and the velvet jacket and the cigarette forever in its holder who meets him just inside the stage door reminds him of his grandfather. He withdraws his hand quickly on the handshake and orders him briskly to come inside. And Luke walks into the gloom and feels instantly, unmistakably, in the home of his emotions verified. That cluttered world of dust, spiralling from the bare yellow light bulb, all his movements constricted by the canvas flats. He finds truth in the falsity he finds there. The number of flats is limited, he notices, a few bare, timeless scenes having to serve any number of purposes. There is a living-room wall with an ornate window, and through the window a vista of beach and sea. This serves, he is told, for worlds as varied as the drawing-rooms of Sheridan to, at a push (and it is a push, MacAllister smiles), the court of the Duke of Mantua. There is a garden of course, vague enough to belong to any period, defined only by a stretch of green, a border of flowers and an arch of trellis tumbling with roses. And there is a cluster of white Doric pillars against a background of blue which must be by turn ecclesiastical, courtly, or plain Athenian.

  A man in a check jacket whose name must be Brogan emerges from the gloom and Luke watches him stabilise flats, sees how to intimate an infinity of spaces from a handful of canvas rectangles and some square yards of stage. The dust is drifting from the foot-lights to the hanging lights and Luke stands in the cones of dust and sees Brogan carry that deeply satisfying vista of beach and sea and drawing-room window from stage left to stage right.

  ‘IT WAS SIMPLY a tour, like any other. I remember the trains, towns flitting past the windows. We played all the parish halls and stayed one night in each—Clones, Birr, Ballina—what do I know about names? All I know was MacAllister’s grand plan which hadn’t changed for donkeys’ years and which was to push through the midlands, do all the seaside towns in summer and do September in Lisdoon. But don’t ask me for details. I remember successions of small hills. Small crowds. Until we came to Kn
ock. Then we all noticed.’

  39

  I AM LOST IN the midlands but I found Knock to be a small stretch of houses, miles from the main line, awaiting the centenary of an apparition of the Virgin there in 1879. I walked through it at night and found it lit by those flashing coloured bulbs that more humble townlands reserve for the apparition of a fun fair. Wooden stalls formed a wedge down the centre, a positive danger to those motorists who sped through it towards Mayo. She was there in every conceivable pose, rows of her upon the stalls, lit now by bulbs from the inside, now by luminous paint, in metal, in plastic and all kinds of alloy. They ranged from the very cheap to the moderately expensive, and I chose one of the expensive ones. She was blue and glowed from the inside and was standing on a pedestal. Walking through the stalls I found it easy to convince myself that each one celebrated quite a different visitation—the one of Rene, Luke and Emerald Theatrical Productions Ltd, all of whom stopped, I surmised, at the small wooden hall wedged behind the giant grey church which stood some yards from where the row of stalls ended. It would be appropriate, I thought, that every stall and every statue sold remembered an event that the visitors and the stall owners had quite forgotten. I knew that the urge to visit shrines is deeper and more crass than memory. And there was an empty touring bus by the church and it pleased me to think of those busloads celebrating an event of which they knew absolutely nothing, though it pained me to think that the trains had stopped and that somewhere outside the town was a disused pale granite station, beside a canal perhaps. All this though my statue didn’t resemble her at all. And sure enough, when I had reached the end of the coloured lights and the street had become a country road, I came upon parallel ruts in the road through which tracks must have run. And I looked through the hedge and saw the tracks running eastwards, rusted of course, with the small pale granite station dripping under trees and beside it the canal.

  LUKE CARRIES THE flat with the Grecian pillars from the train on to the platform and through the dripping trees. His cheek touches the canvas. And the feel of the paint reassures him as he walks through the pines with their eternal drip. He walks from sleeper to sleeper until he reaches the road and then carries his pillars down into the church, the small wooden hall. I see him walking back then through the pines to where they all stand on the fawn platform, jaded, laughing gently. Brogan hands him flat after flat from the train, which is gently steaming. The others strut on the platform, watching the moon through the pines.

  THERE’S A NOTICE on the lamp post which flaps, a little like a flag. Rene is to play Rosalind. Those dusty halls have bare wooden stages and the chairs are sometimes cinema chairs, joined with one long iron band against each felt back. When I ran my finger along the felt chair-backs small puffs of dust rose endlessly. The dust is a problem. It rises from the wooden stage, catches all the light. The stage itself echoes with each footstep and so Rene walks slowly on it, each movement plumbed with stillness. Most of the bulbs are burned out and so the stage is lit in pools with vacuums in between. MacAllister paces the back rows conceiving his version of the miracle through which the Duke will be exiled to a manifest Forest of Arden and the wrestling match will be a wrestling match. He is smoking and squinting and striking the felt seat impatiently when Rene walks into the inadequate lights and begins her lines. He sees her walking from the gloom to the light and notices the odd retraction of her movement. Then he sees her blonde hair and flushed cheeks in the moving eddies of dust under the lights and the dust seems to carve out a space for her, anticipating each movement, leaving a faint glow behind. MacAllister, sitting in the dark among the felt seats, realises with a sudden shock that it is the glow of her pregnancy. The lights above grip her, form a cone around her of gently wheeling dust as if they could lift her upwards but she stays on the bare boards, full and three-dimensional against the sagging curtains and the painted flats. There is a heightened flush to each of her words and every gesture she makes is somehow round, flows and yet has the glow and presence of someone standing still.

  ‘THE CENTRE OF the stage was wherever she was, just that, your eyes were drawn towards her and when she moved all the lines were made redundant. Now she wasn’t an actress in the normal sense of the word, in any sense even. She had inherited all her mother’s faults, but where Una had the unhappy knack of turning every part into a public speech, Rene had the gift of turning each into simply herself. She had come to it by accident and stayed with it by accident. And now this self of a sudden spilled and flowed, is the only word for it, out further than the stage and those perpetually faulty lights. A happy occurrence, you might think. But what terrified us was that every line and move of hers had nothing to do with the story in question. She was telling a different, quite simple story. Every part of her said simply: I am pregnant.

  ‘Of course we all thought of the obvious: headlines in the provincial papers, sermons from the pulpit and theatrical riots. So when the hall was half-full as usual and there was the usual half-bored, half-ritual air of a fairground or a charity concert, we were all lit by a kind of terror backstage. What she seemed to reveal every time she moved into the footlights we were determined to conceal. And what emerged, happily, was nothing to do with our fears. From the word go that stage was heightened. The facts we knew meant nothing to the two hundred odd subscribers down there. But what the facts led to did. They didn’t see her pregnant, they saw her simply resplendent. And they saw every other performance stretched to a pitch to conceal the secret. Since they couldn’t glean the secret, all they could glean was the pitch, the richness. What they couldn’t read of the real story made the apparent story all the more enthralling. And so when the curtain went down, if our sigh of relief was audible, the applause from the wooden hall was more than adequate to drown it.’

  40

  I PUT THE STATUE on the mantle and felt the warmth coming from it. I asked Lili what the next town was. She demurred. I saw the pines again, dark green against the moon, dripping on to the pale granite platform, the tracks wet and silver, running towards another town.

  ‘SAY IT WAS Boyle. And if it was Boyle I’ve no picture of it anyway. Except maybe for a market. Yes, say there was a market and a main street with a chemist’s shop and the train station was red-bricked, if you say so. But I can see a school hall, yes a hall that was used as a church once, the real church burnt down in the Troubles. Or was it just the high windows darkened with brown paper that reminded me of churches?’

  THEY COME TO Boyle, maybe, where the hands of the dealers slap the bullocks’ thighs and are spat on and shaken. There is Luke and the company walking through a square with streets running from all four corners. They get dispersed of course in the mêlée of cattle, so many packed between the shop fronts that there can be no sense of an open passage. They lean to each other over the rumps of cattle and shout, unsure of which corner of the square to go towards. The ground is churned into ankle-deep mud and MacAllister is pretending impatience, his blue suit smudged by the flicking bullocks’ tails and his grey hair blowing. But they are all laughing, stretching over hides and laughing, touching hands when they can and falling back when the motion of a bullock shifts them, laughing in the mud. This way, boy, MacAllister whispers to Luke, to whom the pressure of the hide is even healthier than the shoulders of priests. Luke follows him, carrying his flats towards the rectangular front of the Roscommon Arms Hotel.

  ‘IT WOULD HAVE been unthinkable, any other year, that he’d change his plans. But now it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t.’

  IN THE LOUNGE of that hotel which would have had a twelve-pound salmon, dried ochre scales gleaming with resin, its mouth permanently open behind the glass, he has his maps open and Luke is somewhere near as tall as him and with the same lank hair, and between them there is even a slight familiar air. If Boyle takes two days, Mountcharles will have to be skipped, but then there is Ballina, which might even take three. And the pattern of towns and halls, memories of good nights and bad, dates on which they’ll be full
and empty and the logic with which he’s bound them together over years slowly falls asunder and he can see, just barely, the dim outlines of the pattern that’s to replace them. They must reach the sea, he knows, by mid-July and trace a thread of towns down the coast towards Clare. He plans in advance for this new element and then, looking towards Luke, who is gazing at the open salmon’s mouth in the glass case, he senses that no matter how he plans, a pattern of which he can gauge perhaps nothing will establish itself. And that night in the hall, pacing, as Lili says, behind the end seats he hears Rene’s lines, Well, I will forget the condition of my estate to rejoice in yours, and it strikes him that no matter how he times it, days, nights, weeks and months, there is a logic there that will draw them all from town to town at its own pace, a pace he knows nothing about and can only wait to discover. She is standing in the dark pool between the foot-lights and yet can be seen clearly with that roundness of gesture that nobody could photograph. Luke, standing behind his canvas trees, can see her clearly, the whole hall can see her, against all the laws of theatrical lighting and effect.

  ‘AND IT COULD well have been Boyle because now that I think of it, the first of the write-ups we got was in the Roscommon Herald. Now that is a fact, though please don’t expect a yellowing cut-out, I never was one for keeping things. But I remember that one because it was the first of the write-ups, and write-ups for those summer tours of ours were more or less unheard of. Part-time journalists for those provincial papers used to writing up silage, sprout seasons and the county hunt began to shove small columns in the pages they normally reserved for litigations, commenting on the fact that instead of one night we stayed for three, that the audiences spilled outside the stage doors, things like that. Captions like “Resplendent Rosalind”, “MacAllister Breaks Through”, that kind of thing. Later, Dublin critics came to write us up but that was when Rene was bigger and we had touched the edge of Clare. The first was in the Roscommon Herald and said that Rene’s Rosalind would make Shakespeare enjoyable even to those whose reading had never gone beyond a train timetable.’