Ghost Light

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘All art is a collaboration,’ wrote the father of the play.

  ‘To me, he was everything,’ said the mother.

  8

  THE THEATRE DISTRICT, LONDON

  1.10 p.m.

  Eros on his plinth; his arrowless bow. Around the fountain’s filthstrewn basin, clustered youths are looking murderous as they eye the passing street-girls and policemen. Through Jermyn Street and Haymarket, and the feathers of snow. If the Lyons Corner House were open, you would have a little plunge: perhaps a cup of beef tea, some of those pretty iced cakes. It would be wise to take a coffee now; you have had a little too much of the brandy, and drunkenness in daylight is not a pleasant sensation, especially when the daylight is grey. But the café is closed. How strange. And it coming up to lunchtime. You stare at the doors, as though staring could unlock them. It is the curse of modern England: people don’t want to work. Idleness has corrupted the kingdom.

  Not like in your day. By Jesus, no. Your growing had exhausted you; perpetual faintness in the month of your fourteenth birthday, a swimmy-headedness you both feared and found queerly exhilarating, but out to work every Saturday morning come rain, sleet or hurricane, and devil the malingering accepted. The doctor at the public dispensary had recommended a patented iron tonic, with a nightly glass of Guinness – it would help. And your grandmother mocking such prescriptions and those who availed of them. It’s well off are the young women and never a minute’s peace out of them. In my own time we’d no excuses for idleness.

  The summer you left school, exultant never to have to talk to another nun. You apprenticed in Manny Scheindlin’s, stitching hems, tracing patterns, accompanying your employer’s sons to the market for the silks and the bobbins of English chenille. Those teasing, handsome lunks – what’s this was their names? The particular way sunlight shone through the high old windows of the market; the hagglings, back-and-forthings, banterings among the merchants, the apples and ices you and the boys would sometimes buy as you wended a way back to Little Jerusalem. The elder lad so lazy; his brother so conscientious. You were happy as a threaded needle.

  A length of American cotton draped across your wrists one afternoon, like a banner of dignified surrender.

  Rudolf, was it? Jacob? Or was that someone else? Oh so maddening, how memory works, or doesn’t work, when you are old. Every square in a counterpane you owned when you were five, you remember the sequence, the colours. But then people so important to you, and now even their names are melted away. Molly, you old fool, you’re drifting.

  And when that younger boy would sing, oh dear Jesus, was it beautiful. Unearthly, the grace of him, and the grief in that voice; it would make a glass eye weep. ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ or ‘Che gelida manina’ or ‘The Ballad of Brave Michael Dwyer’.

  The soldiers searched the Wicklow vales, and toward the dawn of day

  Discovered where the outlaws bold, the dauntless rebels lay.

  Around the little cottage poor, they formed into a ring

  And called: ‘United Irishmen! Surrender to the king!’

  Then burst forth war’s red lightning, then poured the leaden rain;

  And Wicklow’s hills did echo with the thunder peals again,

  Brave Dwyer and his comrades bold, they fought and fell with pride,

  And the skies of Wicklow wept that morn, when Michael Dwyer died.

  Their father ancient and placid, handsome as a prophet, and his accent a waterfall of vowels. (‘Dressing vell it is a talent, a way of surviving, little Molly. We do not need money for to do it, no, no. You will remember three things, yes, every woman need to know? Keep your clothes clean and mended, and rest them when you can. And buy one wery good skirt. It will last.’) For a man who worked with his hands he was clumsy in his movements, and yet his stitching was flawless, better than any seamstress’s in Dublin. Oh from Kingstown they’d come, and Killiney, and Drumcondra, and the wilds of Chapelizod and the jungles of the Coombe, for his nearly invisible fixings. (‘Only two things in life cannot be mended, little Molly. The heart and a buckled wheel.’) And then sometimes him and his wife speaking the Hungarian to one another – little endearments or scoldings and, for some reason, measurements – they would never use the English words ‘yard’ or ‘inch’ – it was as though it were a private superstition between them. On their Sabbath they went to the synagogue where Mr Scheindlin was a cantor, leaving you alone in the sewing room with the spools and the tweeds and the shears and the skeins of yarn. Once – you had ensured you were alone – you found yourself touching the breast of one of the mannequins. The day was swelteringly hot. Something fierce had stirred in you. You found it hard to look at the boys when they returned.

  Another time, while bowed over at work, you heard him singing the sacred music upstairs – his sons pulling smirks and muttering quips in their language – and the mournfully beautiful music had welled your tired eyes. It was the day your periods began – the shocking redness of that blood. You had been stitching a child’s shift, had pricked your finger like Sleeping Beauty, and for many years afterwards, in the middle of the month, you would remember the moment when that entreating music had entered you, would relate the music to your womanhood, your womanhood to the music, and both to a half-forgotten afternoon.

  And it wasn’t long afterwards you first attended a play, in the Printers’ Union lecture hall at the back end of Kevin Street. Oh the glamour of it all. L’élégance! Your sister was one of the bit-players. It was appallingly done. Twenty rows of desks and the half of them empty and Ophelia like a Prussia Street scrubwoman. Dismal weather – oh Molls, do you remember the sound? For the smack of the sleet on the corrugated roof was nearly the only applause. But then, after the performance, when the players were gathering up their props, didn’t a little clerk approach the platform and he handing Sally a flower. A bedraggled auld lily – but an offering all the same. And he asking her for an appointment, turning his cap in his hands, and if Sally had declined, she had nevertheless been asked. And that, my little Molly, was that, so it was. Then burst forth war’s red lightning.

  Hurrying home through the rain aware that your life had been altered and could never again be as it was. No, it wasn’t joy you felt, not a falling-in-love. For you knew what had happened to you would bring many sorrows; that you’d always be poor, that you’d never inherit the shop, that your mother would disapprove, that your father’s ghost would rage, but that one night someone unexpected would materialise out of the darkness with a bundle of Easter lilies in his hands. God be with the youth of you. Such little you wanted. Well, it is as it is. You chose it.

  Roaming the countryside, crossroads towns, sleepy villages. You’d arrive at the hall in the early afternoon to make ready for the one-night stand. Elsinore would be improvised from whatever junk was available: chairs, tea chests, there might be a yellowtoothed piano for the fanfares; an old door would do duty as a battlement. The manager passing out handbills announcing the show. The Greatest Hibernian Artistes.

  Farmers, tinkers, barefooted tenants. There are nights they still come to you in dreams. Some of them never saw a play before, didn’t know why they should bother seeing one now, but were drawn by the promise of escape. And they applauding the love scenes or nattering to one another during a death scene, remarking that the corpse was still breathing. Puck him agin, Mister! Another poke and he’s gone! Taking bets on the sword fights, huuahing their champions, hissing and blaspheming the villains. Or a vicar might come, with his wife and neat children – always greeted respectfully, no nonsense, no nonsense – but never, for some reason, a Catholic priest. Perhaps he would have seen the players as rivals.

  The audience eating noisily, or drinking, or conversing, the little ones wandering about, left to roam by their mothers, and a pedlar straggling in and out as though the show were a fairground and he moseying the aisles with his ribbons. And by God, you earned their tolerance. If you didn’t, you’d regret it. The audience was always a part of the play. That�
��s one thing you learned good and hard.

  And the beds in railway station hotels, and the tours in Wales and England. And the cutting up at night, the flirtations, and communal breakfasting. Walking a wintry town the morning after a performance and the cornerboys and spalpeens eying you from the grog-shops and they whistling with false courage in your wake. A goddess, you were. You could have any living one of them. People said you were prettier than Sara.

  You were bold once or twice. Oh you were, don’t pretend. Poor, dear Dossie Wright. How many years now is he dead? Well, he wasn’t dead that night. All there, so he was. God forgive us, but the size of it fairly crossed your eyes so it did, and it stiff as a beefeater outside Buckingham Palace when the Queen is sighted coming down the Mall. What he wanted you to do to it, the dirty little monkey, and the balls of him hefty as fat, juicy oranges and he begging and coaxing and promising. Oh, the beautiful face of him, arch-liar and messer and lascivious whoremonger that he was. But by Jesus, did he know what to do with his hands and all of it nicely forgotten in the morning. Did he ever get married? Poor wife, if he did. He’d need a two-bucket woman to put manners on him.

  And what about the other time, with that handsome cad Shannon? Mr J. Seamus Shannon. Fifty was he, maybe? To you, he seemed ancient. Often played druidical chieftains, or the kindlier uncles in Dickens. He was married with eleven children and a house in the suburbs and a wife who did not understand. It occurred to you that she had understood at least eleven times, but perhaps it would be rude to point out the obvious. There was friendship, said Seamus Shannon, and then there was desire, the bliss of the angels, the honey of longing; the ecstasy of the climactic moment. (‘Le petit mort, as they call it. You speak French of course, my child? You do not? Ah – so much to learn.’) Yes, the pleasure of which he spoke was a glimpse of the Paradise that was awaiting the faithful for all eternity. It was a matter of theology. The body was holy. We must conquer our ignorant fear of it. Heaven was a state of perpetual culmination, in the corporeal as well as the spiritual sense. You had probably not heard these terms? Did you know to what they adverted? It was a catechism that had not been given to you by any of the nuns, and the fact that one or two of them might be experiencing perpetual culmination now was a somewhat uneasy thought. Paradise must be a tiring place and also a noisy one. You’d want to keep your eyes closed as you went about.

  Molly, you are bold! There is badness in you, Changeling. Mr J. Seamus Shannon, poor lecherous auld goat. He’d stick his lad in a ham sandwich if he thought there was pleasure in it. Yes, and ate it afterwards. Probably down in Purgatory at this stage of the game, and he convincing the lady devils that to ride him ragged would be a punishment. We should never be ashamed, my dear. We are artists. Rebels. We must scoff at bloodless convention. It is our duty not to serve. No artist worthy of the calling could ever be a virgin for he, or she, would be merely half living – insulting life, in fact. His, or her, impulses, the juices, the zest, would be evaporated by the heat of such a denial. The Hindus saw the act of coition as a godly endowment. He was personally a devotee of Brahma.

  You were a young woman, he assured you. You had a tremendous future. He had seen many young women come into the profession. Not one of them had ever shown such remarkable possibility, such sweet buds of potentiality, if he might employ a poetical phrase. And then he had uttered the remark that had opened your dress: ‘You have a far greater talent than your sister’s.’

  But a young woman had needs, he assured you repeatedly. The silly old sausage. Why didn’t he just ask? A young woman often stirred at night thinking thoughts of raw hunger, felt her body wanting to give itself – it was natural, pagan. (‘That is what we do, my dear. We give. We only give. Never think of it as acting. It is giving.’) You felt it wiser not to mention the existence of a brat named Jimmy Gunnery, with whom you had often gone walking when your mother thought you were at Mass, in whose hands you had experienced, if not the blisses of Bangalore, the occasional nice revelation.

  Evidently what Mr Shannon wanted was a girl-next-door purity; well, that was all right. It was well within your range. Anyone who had ever played an Irishwoman on stage would know how to masquerade innocence. Indeed, it might be somewhat difficult for you to play anything else, since harlots were kept mainly in the wings. No, you told your mentor, you had never heard those words. Yes – you tried to blush – you had sometimes found yourself beset by certain thoughts. Once or twice you had even – no – it would be too shameful to say. You would think so little of me, Mr Shannon, if I confessed the reprehensible sin. Oh I couldn’t, I really couldn’t; you are so kind and good. I had to be given ten Hail Marys by Father Furey in Confession. He told me blindness would be inevitable if I persisted.

  Mr Shannon radiated compassion as he crossed his legs. You were not to believe such nonsenses; they were circulated by the lifeless, those who wished upon us only fear and servitude. Little wonder, he added sadly, that the asylums of this poor benighted country were howling with those who had denied themselves. And a bit more of his guff about the intoxicating sap of youthfulness and how they did things on the Continent and the Greeks and William Blake, and you nodding back shyly, doing fascinated yet-demure, wondering if he would ever get around to the point.

  Not only would it be bourgeois for pleasure to be denied – in his own case it might be physically dangerous. He gave you his heart – that was how he put it – one torrentially rainy night in Borris-in-Ossory, while in the parlour downstairs a one-legged fiddler played ‘The Croppy Boy’ to an audience of commercial travellers. He was breathtakingly skilful – Seamus Shannon, not the fiddler – and vigorous for a fat man of his age. He had read passages in many French novels that had been banned throughout the Empire and he seemed to know what they were secretly about. Orotund pronunciation of Shakespearian soliloquy was not the only thing he could do with his gob. But there was an efficiency to his prowess that was somewhat off-putting, in that you felt he was constantly expecting something, had mentally advanced to the next scene, like a smiling but impatient waiter who wants to go home, and that whatever bliss you were experiencing, as you gaspingly were, redounded to his credit and existed mainly to be observed. After a while he produced ‘a device’, rinsed it desultorily in his shaving bowl, and attempted to roll it onto his mickey. A difficult moment ensued as he began losing what interested you most. The poor dunderhead was visibly embarrassed. You wondered if you should give him the attention Jimmy Gunnery was never done requesting but you felt it might be riskily forward. Instead you uttered the phrase: ‘Please – I beg you – you won’t ever tell anyone you ruined me?’ and it stood to attentive readiness like a flagpole. You took it in your hand. He was soon tiptoeing on the spot and spouting extracts from the Song of Solomon.

  The following nineteen minutes were never less than interesting. A reviewer would have described them positively. When you opened your eyes in mid-throe only to observe him glancing at his fob watch, his thrusting, white buttocks reflecting palely in the windowpane, it temporarily put you off what he insisted on calling your ‘stride’ but otherwise you had no complaints. He asked, with sweaty seriousness, if you had ever seen wild horses mating – a relatively uncommon sight in Mary Street and environs – but its imitation proved pleasurable to the fraudulent old booby and, to be fair, had the desired effect on you too. He was generous, attentive and pleasured you practically unconscious before asking your permission to ‘bring down the curtain’. As ‘The Croppy Boy’ reached its heart-rending crescendo, so did J. Seamus Shannon, and you felt he had thoroughly earned it. On returning to Dublin, he had returned to his wife, accompanied, presumably, by his heart. Jimmy Gunnery received a pleasant surprise, indeed something of an education. He would be engaged many times but would never marry.

  —You better not have done on that ‘tour’ of yours what I think you done.

  —How do you mean, Mother?

  —Innocent Annie. Is it simple you think I’m after going? You are not gone so big
and bold that I will not redden your arse for you. You are not in your playhouse now.

  —That is nice talk to your own daughter.

  —Is it wrong, all the same? Look me in the eye if you dare, and don’t be flashing me your impudent face or you’ll feel my hand across it. There isn’t a decent man in Ireland wants to buy a cracked jug.

  —I do not get your meaning. You will have to explain.

  —Oh you were rared a pet, weren’t you? It’s a nice reputation in store. Do you think I don’t be seeing you flaunting yourself to every gurrier on the street, like the first girl in Dublin ever had a rump on her to swing or a couple of handfuls in her blouse?

  —Am I not allowed to speak to a fellow barring I ask your permission?

  —The brazen lip of you, Miss, and you barely out of school. Let me tell you, they run good and fast when they’ve taken what they want. Get up to that bed and say a prayer.

  Giddy Aunt, to be indoors, to get out of this coldness. That cinema on the corner, perhaps? An extravagance. Yes. But we can be too sensible for our own good, and there are no pockets in a shroud after all. And it will be a talking-point, later, at the BBC, when you and the other actors are having coffee and cigarettes, and the sound-effects producer is taking glockenspiels from his suitcase and hitting them with little hammers, looking serious. Yes, I popped into the pictures earlier, I was just in town and felt restless. Do you know, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Quite marvellously vulgar. And the young people will chuckle at your mischievous Irish spirit and the effects-man will activate his cuckoo clock.

  Giant masks of Comedy and Tragedy by the entrances to the lavatories. But the leer of poor old Comedy is distastefully licentious, and the frenzied glumness of Tragedy looks like a clown’s, put on. There is a counter where sweets and orangeade are sold, but nobody is attending it now.