Ghost Light

by Joseph O'Connor

  Is it Joan Fontaine someone once told me I was the spit of? That part in the picture they made of the Daphne du Maurier novel, what’s this was the name of it now? Jesus God, Molly. Laurence Olivier was in it. About the woman and the chap and the house and the drowned wife and the dreaming you went to Manderley again. You pout haughtily in the mirror. Fiercely narrow your eyes. ‘I am Mrs de Winter now,’ you murmur.

  Today you shall walk. That is the plan. There must always be a plan, girl; otherwise we pull into ourselves like snails, and the devil conjures thoughts for the untidy mind and you can lose thirty years in such a withdrawal. This is how time unfolds when you are old and susceptible. Wander into its spiralled shell and it is hard to escape. The glisten that looks inviting to age-bleared eyes has a way of suddenly liquefying and then coagulating around your heart, and the womb in which you find yourself so numbingly cocooned is too enveloping to allow you to resurface. You will walk from your room to Broadcasting House, through the grey, busy streets of a late October London, perhaps digressing through Hyde Park, for there is no need to hurry; the rehearsal is not until five o’clock. It will clear your jumbled thoughts to be away from this room. A change is as bracing as a rest. You might even kill an hour in the National Portrait Gallery, where it is always warm in wintertime and the porters are courteous, or perhaps light a candle for the poor in St Martin-in-the-Fields, a church whose strange name you love saying. It only costs a penny and sometimes there is music, the choristers practising Bach, or an organist at rehearsal. The great, fat pipes of the sonorous organ like giant bottles lined up on a bar. And the ground-bass rumbling through you, to the meats of your teeth. It is not too long to Advent. There might even be Handel. Better to light one flame than be cursing the darkness. And the store windows on Jermyn Street will be beautiful.

  Was it stitched into a tapestry primer? Bloom Where You Are Planted. Because Sara was at the sewing of it all that summer I left school. Wasn’t it Georgie had it framed and it hanging in Muddy’s bedroom between the crucifix and the daguerreotype of Avoca. ‘Jesus, come down and give me a rest.’ Muddy’s joke when she was wearied by a long day in the shop. Does he be looking and you naked, Mam? Sally red with laughter. Would he bother, child of God, he’d have better to be looking at. And the way she rubbed your back when you were poorly that time, and her legends of King Arthur and Cuchulainn. Poor Muddy, God rest her and the faithful departed. But don’t be straying yourself into the glooms.

  And so life abounds with blessings. It is only a matter of noticing them. You are grateful to have an engagement, a reason to leave the hungry room, an interlude of parole from the cat’s grave stare, its reminder that man is not the Supreme Being. You will say to yourself, traversing the cold, great thoroughfares: I am walking through London because I am busy, a professional. I have an appointment with people who need me. Every role has its importance. London is full of actors. But I have been chosen today. And you will speak your few lines properly, with the austerity they demand, no bogus mellifluousness, no hamming or shamming, and the broadcast will be transmitted around the world like a wind, to India, Australia, Canada, South Africa, what a miracle, truly, when you think what man has done: airstreams of consolation engirdling the globe from a bunker in wintry London. And who can know what opportunities might result from today’s performance? An impresario could be listening, a casting agent; a director. A little playhouse in the provinces or in Ireland someplace. Well, it is possible; it is possible. Stranger things have happened. Everyone has a slow year. It is the nature of the profession. Bad 1952 has not all that long to live. Maybe the better times are coming in. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. People have braved the Atlantic for less of a chance. All you must brave is London.

  The producer, an elderly Dubliner, has remembered you at the last moment, has somehow dug up your address, when he could have chosen others, and to be remembered, for any actor, is a mercy. Such a cultured, benign man. Handsome as Ariel in a cardigan. You know what they say about him, Molly. Well, what business of theirs? Blessed Jesus, couldn’t we do with more love in the world, not less. And if men wish the companionship and the beauty of one another, didn’t God in His gentleness make us all? The pay is not good – it never is at the BBC – and they always pay late, but you have grown skilled at economising, as has everyone since the years of war. You will be able to make the two guineas last a fortnight, maybe more. Roll the pastry good and thin and you’ll never grow fat, and hunger is the best sauce anyhow. And you could salt away a shilling or two for a Christmas gift for your grandchildren. A little comic-book, maybe; a bag of sherbet lemons. Perhaps you might even be able to redeem some of your costume jewellery from the pawn. (‘Ain’t so much of a market in second-hand eternity rings, love. Stands to reason when you reckon. The girls think it bad luck, see. I’ll have a shufti if you like. But I couldn’t give you much.’) It will be a blessing simply to work, to see people again. Sometimes the younger actors are kind. They sense your fate to be the one awaiting most of them in the end. You have become for the young an example of What Could Happen. We should be merciful to those embodying our dreads, for the season of our own denouement will come, when we may embody the dreads of others.

  I know

  That my

  Redeemer

  Liveth

  Your daughter lives in Aberdeen with her children and husband, an organiser for the Furnacemen’s Union. Your twin grandsons are aged seven: James-Larkin and Emmet. You might go to them for the Christmas if you can somehow scrape the fare. Please God, some little job at the start of December. He is a good man, your son-in-law. But strict. Doesn’t drink. Pegeen is a most fortunate wife.

  She writes to you monthly, of schoolyard adventures, of head lice and hand-me-downs, second-hand furniture. They don’t have much. Is her chattiness hiding something? Her handwriting is almost identical to yours.

  To kiss the twins, smuggle them a sweet. So far away, Aberdeen. Five hundred miles from London, might as well be a thousand, for the night train is slow as a miser’s compassion and it’s rare you can afford the express. And the months tend to drift, and then tumble into seasons, and sure next thing you know it’s gone a year since you’ve seen them. Now don’t exaggerate, Molly. It is only eight months. And it shocked you, the last time, when she was waiting for you at the station, and hurrying towards your carriage with a smile would melt snow. It was like looking at your sister. For a moment, you couldn’t speak. The twins tugging your coat, leaping around you like terriers, and the thunderstorm of family resemblance.

  Your sister died two years ago, is buried in Hollywood. You and she had not met in some time. You did not attend the funeral – it was too arduous a journey, you had not been at all well. And money. Always money. The obituaries had been fulsome. Someone helpful had mailed them from Dublin. ‘Greatest Irish actress of her noble generation.’ ‘The peerless heroine.’ ‘Academy Award nomination.’ ‘No character actress of her era would ever rival Sara Allgood. (A sister, Maire O’Neill, also acted.)’

  —Envy is unbecoming in a woman who is an artist.

  ‘Go and blast yourself’ you say, aloud. ‘It’s all I have left me.’

  The wind chuckles feebly as it gusts down the Terrace and the rattle of the bin-lids is the rack of his breathing. You must not make me laugh so, with your scampish impertinence. You know asthma is made more distressing by amusement.

  Oh the cemetery is only beautiful – so you have been assured – and the funeral was a Cleopatran occasion. A dozen of holy priests and one of them in line for a bishopric and the others all as jealous as schoolgirls. Hitchcock read the lesson. Mario Lanza led the hymns. In a neatly wooded parkland overlooking Culver City. And a vineyard nearby. Oh the little purple grapes. Admirers are often witnessed placing lilies on the tombstone, or copies of play-texts, lighted candles. A half-mile of palm trees on an avenue of glittering quartz; a Roman temple of remembrance so impossibly white
it would blind you to look at it in sunshine. Mexicans tending the orchids. Hoses spraying the lawns. Negro ladies in pink uniforms polishing the headstones till you’d nearly see your face in the marble. They give you a map when you visit, indicating all the movie stars’ graves. It is whispered that Bela Lugosi owns a plot. So cool in the chapel on a blazing Los Angeles day. There is always music playing. Bach. Palestrina. A system of taped recordings. Onyx and porphyry. O, les petits muscats mauves …

  And if I had emigrated to America. He and I used to speak of it. The brave young country where differences do not weigh and all must create themselves over. They love and respect the outsider. We have fought in their wars, constructed their cathedrals, bridged their savage rivers. A Republic will always treasure the newcomer, the rebel, the player of wild cards, the frontiersman. You and I shall truly feel we are come home at last. There is nothing in this heartbroken Ireland for either of us, Molly. It is a mirrorland of celibates and killers on bicycles, a Lilliput of Reverend Mothers and pittances and fogs and embarrassing stains on the mattress.

  Rebecca. It was called. That picture.

  Even after he died, in the rainfall of his mourning, you would imagine your newfound land. Him watching Niagara roar, or in the bird market at Baton Rouge, on the steamboat for Great Falls, Montana. Some go to Paradise, others to Purgatory, but the good to an eternal West. And in the years after his passing, the seasons of your American fame, you thought of him during every bow. To be a citizen of Brooklyn, of tall, stately Chicago. To gaze on Lake Michigan on an Illinois Christmas Eve, the faint smell of lakewater, and Lilliput far away, and the frost bitter-crisp as champagne. But the bags had been packed, the return sailing taken. There had never been a moment when you had decided not to defect. It was something you simply hadn’t got around to.

  The clunk of doors closing, of hobnailed boots on the staircase. London is outside in the rain. The house’s barrenness looms at you, each partitioned-off room a stage in a theatre gone dark. Almost all who reside here are workingmen, labourers. No one in the house is married. It is impossible to imagine the laughter of a child ever lightening such corridors, or darkening them, for laughter can unease. And there would be no reason to imagine it, for it will never happen now. You hear them come and go; old men in their moleskins. Sometimes they pause on the landings conversing briefly of the weather, with the guardedness of men who do not like or trust one another and who have been hurt when they trusted or liked. Then the doors quietly close and someone switches on his wireless and there arises the stink of burnt frying. Pawned tools of a Friday. The pound sent home. The mail-boat on Christmas Eve. In your dreams the house screams with its murdered hungers. Its night-windows redden with lust.

  To have someone to share the room with. A few words of an evening. Someone to make a pot of tea when you’re sick. Lately you have caught yourself grumbling to the walls, to the turrets of broken-spined paperbacks that stand sentry about the floorboards, to the lamp with its ripped shade, its dishevelled aplomb, the pegs on the coatless hatstand. The night-thoughts are the hardest. You cannot talk to the night. If you do, it might start talking back.

  He is a good man, your son-in-law. Didn’t mean what he said. Every family has these little disagreements, when harsh words are spoken. You are his children’s only living grandparent, the mother of his wife. If you wrote and said you’re sorry and you’d give anything to see the twins. It’s been eight long months. If you promised.

  Wind shrieks in the chimney as you open your tobacco tin and extract the makings of a poor cigarette. Little flimsies of paper, like torn pages of a bible, and fag-ends picked up in the street. But we mustn’t complain. Haven’t we health at the least, and the hurting comfort of smoke? My throat is a chimney breast, these lips a venting smokestack. Always he pleaded for you to quit the filthy practice, yet he never quitted, the great hypocritical flue, with his burblings and his belchings and his clouds of condemnation and his sermonising ridiculous smugness. It is different for a man. You know that very well. Wilde said a gentleman must always have an occupation. It would be a nice pancake entirely if he didn’t.

  Papers strewn everywhere, blown around the room like old leaves, for one evening last week you forced open the jammed window, forgetting the storm that was billowing across London. The season’s weather has been violent, as though in overture to the hurricane, which struck last night as the street lights came on, with the bulb in the hermit’s ruin across the Terrace. You lay awake in Mr Holland’s bed listening to the wildness of the world, the racketing clatter; smashing roof slates. The bells of distant fire engines came borne on the storm. The house groaned like a ship in a cyclone. Around four in the morning there was a sudden brief lull and you realised that the public telephone on the street below was ringing. Who could it be? Would anyone answer? Should you yourself hurry down? Preposterous, dangerous. An insane notion came to you that it was Mr Duglacz in his bookshop, frightened among his Torahs and autographs and folios. Out of what junkshop of the heart do such yearnings arise? It rang almost twenty minutes. You let it.

  On the table is a letter from a postdoctoral student, a young Californian woman who intends visiting London ‘in late January or February’ and would like to conduct an interview. It would touch, naturally enough, on your recollections and impressions, your friendships and associations in the Ireland of those years, your time in America, especially on Broadway, your memories of your sister, her notable career in motion pictures, and of course on the question of Synge. The interview would be conducted with tact and sensitivity, as perhaps, if I may say so, without wishing to appear presumptuous or intrusive, only a woman could conduct it. Few of us, after all – I hope I do not trespass into the personal realm – have never been disappointed by a man.

  —Ignore it, Changeling. It is a ruse, nothing more. Tell them nothing about us. Do not even reply. We are too precious to be displayed before the rabble.

  I could offer a small sum as remuneration for your time. Would an amount of, say, $50 be acceptable? Alternatively I should be happy to send you anything you require to that value, since I know certain goods and foodstuffs are still quite scarce in England. There is another financial question I would like to broach, Miss O’Neill, and I hope I shall do so without offense. I understand that some years ago you sold to his surviving family all your letters of an intimate nature from Synge. My institution has authorized me to say, should other manuscripts having to do with JMS and his circle remain in your possession (scripts, revisions, juvenilia, notebooks, drafts, fragments, abandoned works, et cetera) we would be honored to acquire them for our archive. Our library has considerable funding for acquisitions. [‘Considerable’ is typed in red, Molly. That’s the Yanks for you now. Subtlety is no Californian trait.] American scholars take an avid interest in Ireland, as you know: her literature and history, her revolution and liberation, the lives of her great men of letters. Our collection is being developed and extended all the time. We like to think that there is little we are missing. I should have to see and appraise personally any material, of course. But we believe the proposal to be of mutual benefit.

  ‘Liberation’ is good, you think to yourself now. Liberation, my arse in parsley.

  The letter arrived almost four months ago, among the reams of final demands and sundry threats of disconnection. (‘Eviction is a recourse our client does not wish to pursue, but he shall have no alternative if the arrears remain unpaid.’) You did not know what should be done with it, whether to throw it in the trash. Similar effronteries have come before, nearly always from America; you have ignored them, discarded them, forgotten them. And yet, might it be redemptive, after all this time – not pleasant, but healing, a settling of the ghosts – to allow yourself to speak of those years? But what is there to say? He lived. He died. We wanted one another. He was afraid. A poor play it would make, with no hero or heroine, and all of its best lines offstage. And if it ever had a chronology – which it must have, it must have – the scenes are no
longer in the right order.

  ‘Mercia’ she is called. The author of the letter. A name holy water was never poured on. You imagine her – Dr Mercia Vinson – a startlingly vivid picture. A capable piece of work with full lips and plum-sleek hair, who was almost pretty as a girl but too foostery, too nervous, and was always outshone by the louder, gayer classmates who liked her in a pitying way. (‘Poor Mercia’s teeth. Poor Mercia’s clothes.’) But men want her all the same. They court her with ironies. There is a certain type of man who admires intelligence in a woman, a windmill against which he can pit himself, a quality he can punish, a reason for a woman to have to apologise frequently, which is what men find most arousing in women. Ah Molly, that’s not fair. Not all men are like that. Now Mercia sits in a library in hot California writing presumptuous, intrusive letters. But as suddenly as she forms, she vanishes into the odours of the room, for you have apprehended, in one of those moments of piercing clarity that can punctuate a hangover, that the young woman you are imagining is yourself.

  You cross slowly to the scarred sideboard, kneel before it, knees creaking, and open the loose-hinged door. It falls out of its frame. The cat gives a start; approaches the interior’s blackness cautiously, like a child encountering a waxwork of itself. A reek of mildewed newspapers and mothballs and old wood. Paper bags of ancient birthday cards, a sad-eyed dog in a deerstalker hat, cancelled ration-books, expired passports, redundant lengths of tinfoil. Because you have to save tinfoil, although you cannot remember why – a habit acquired in the war. The mice have been exploring; there are pellets in a broken souvenir ashtray someone brought you from a pilgrimage to Lourdes. You hear them scrabble late at night, especially now with winter coming, in the walls, beneath the floorboards, in the cupboard over the cooker. The cat makes occasional attempts, with infrequent successes. It sometimes seems to have grown frightened of its prey.