The lean grey wolves.
The poem appeared in some paper. I left it out of sight. There was a train to catch. Liam and I left this city of red brick, of uneasy mannequins, of Woodbine cigarettes and brimming hot cross buns on a June day in 1954, knowing it would not be long before we returned. Christine had gone home. Jamesy was helping his parents entertain for the summer, but Sarah had gone south, to be a children’s nurse in Florence, and in the course of the summer I could see that Liam was thinking of her, fluff flying by in the Galway air. Nothing had really registered between them, blond hair yes, a relaxation in white, white shirts, white dresses, but now I could perceive further. Lounging on a red and green striped deckchair in his garden I wondered did I perceive that Liam was in love?
We went to the Galway races with Liam’s father, we went boating on the river, we fished, we swam and then one day like a tramp Liam up and went. He caught a train from the station where marigolds were subsumed into the August light. He travelled by day and night until he reached Florence. I had a postcard from him.
‘August 23, 1954. Arrived.’ I detected on it the cathedral and baptistry in Florence. I wondered, I waited until he came back, drinking wine and then he came, flushed and brown and he told me, told me about the journey through France, his first sight of grapes.
‘It was so beautiful,’ he said, ‘women tending to grapes as though they were the genitalia of men. I’ll never forget that sight. I rose, looked through a window, wondered is this my life?’ And afterwards I couldn’t help wondering was this his life? A young man, forever drawn south, towards the sun, towards a way of life, easier, more creative.
But in early September listening to Liam I knew it all, his arrival, his walking with Sarah through streets glowering with heat in the day, at night lit by trattorias like candles. ‘There was Piaf,’ he said, ‘Perry Como, Palestrina, whoever you desired. GIs, whores, priests.
‘We drank cappuccinos. We feasted on them. The leaves were turning brown – like – like –’ and this I will never forget ‘– like a Caravaggio. It was excellent.’
They’d probably not even touched once. But such was love then, an outward gaze, a world one would have built again, if one could, a world of innocence.
They returned from the bogs, they returned from the parochial hall doors. They came from Clare and Monaghan, back to college. Young girls, young men, they returned to a city now where skies flourished over grey suits, searching bicycles, little men with eyes like Lenin who searched ledgers for a statement on life. ‘You are young once only,’ a nun stated on the corridor in Earlsfort Terrace and each of us heard it, me, Liam, Sarah, Christine and the news was reported to Jamesy at Trinity.
We were back, shunting of trains still in our ears, far-off places, bogs, blues and the whisper of geese in the night. Christine was back from her aunt’s place in Leitrim. She’d spent the summer feeding geese, tending to sheep, watching Atlantic skies wash in huge mistaken clouds. Her identity seemed somewhat shaken by the summer.
Liam, Sarah moved through the corridors of Earlsfort Terrace, quiet, Liam with hands in his blazer, Sarah often quite ridiculously holding a handbag, eyes ahead. It was as though the handbag both provided an ultimatum and guided her. She’d changed.
Jamesy in Trinity looked lost, a young man who’d become taller over the summer and me, I too, had changed.
Like Lord Nelson over Nelson’s Pillar I watched as a city engaged in its daily business, as the poor became poorer and mouths opened, singing an anthem like ‘Starvation Once Again.’
‘I dreamt about the tricolour last night,’ Sarah said one day, ‘I dreamt that I was caught by it as though by a huge bird, that it had enfolded me and that I was trying, trying to break free from it. I woke. I was sweating. There was blood on my hands!’ Our eyes glazed over her handkerchief-pale hands to detect blood but saw only the vulnerability of untormented fingers.
We went to mass and listened to priests drone in Latin.
One afternoon for want of something better to do we all trooped off to the airport to catch sight of a visiting thirties movie star, all except Jamesy. His father having acted in Hollywood he was used to it all. We watched her through binoculars descend from the aeroplane. She was ushered into the airport lounge, holding back from cameramen, hiding herself against the flashes of their cameras. We noticed her parrot-red lipstick, her eyes outlined in black merging into a puppet-pale face. For one moment she raised an eyebrow and it was as though we photographed her in our minds, a thirties film star, wandering into the fifties, frigid, performing foolish gestures of retracting fame – too late.
These were the minor moments of escape. A more major effort to shake off shackles occurred later in the autumn.
We hit the town in the evenings, going dancing.
Liam and I were living in another part of Monkstown, in a flat overlooking the sea. Earlier in the autumn Liam had read Rilke, Rupert Brooke, Francis Ledwidge, seating himself in a corner distant from everything but the sound of boats withdrawing and arriving in the harbour. Now however we indulged in the few lighted places in Dublin, dance halls with a few seedy coloured lights and interiors jammed like cattle marts with country bachelors.
Christine above all loved these places, dancing with country bachelors, egging them on, exacting the proposals of marriage from them. One man told her he had ten heifers in Galway and did she wish to marry him. Christine threw her stole in the air, said no and walked off.
One could detect Sarah and Liam dancing but they didn’t dance to the music of Glenn Miller or Benny Goodman. The music that united them was elsewhere, the music of flourishing oaks and odd primroses. Sarah was acquainted now with all aspects of Liam’s past, the peas in spring and the leeks oddly separated in the patch of earth under the oak tree.
Christine often noticed them lingering with one another after a dance was over, a fateful stopover, a cup of tea, a sherry consumed with excessive patience. She couldn’t figure out the rationale of these moments. They defied the spirit of a group. Yet nothing yet was certain; there were only momentary fears. The music played on, Christine often drank too much, raising her arms like an old lady at an Irish funeral and Jamesy, his eyes liquid and over-brown from drink, danced with the most elegant women in sight, women whose virtue was in peril.
Certain women had taken to the streets of Dublin, shouting about cardinals in far-off places. The Student Prince came to town and even the flower-sellers on O’Connell Street seemed to waltz to the rhythm of ‘Drink. Drink. Drink.’
There was talk again of the North, always a far-off reverberation, and a boy from Roscommon declared on Earlsfort Terrace one afternoon that Ireland had to rise from the mire, a phoenix reborn, but the small farmers still flocked from Mayo to London and the poor of Dublin looked knotted into their pain. Sarah spoke of the need to change, the need to ameliorate the condition of workers. She spoke of the slums of Dublin, places she’d visited on evenings walking alone. But no one listened.
Rain came in November like a deluge, and one evening Jamesy’s father threw a party.
Jamesy’s home lay outside Dublin, a two-storey house by the ocean. It stood upon rocks and always at night the sea seduced, distant lights, noise. One was led to the sea as though to an exterior effect of the house. It assembled lights, colours, an astonishing medley of sounds. Ultimately it told one something of Ireland, this ancient country, always bordering on sea, on sky, an unclear bond between it and other countries.
Music gently eroded the soft breezes the evening of the party, conversation rising and falling near the windowsill, women in black, penitential, the menfolk like bumble bees to a man, bellies swollen with drink.
A lady, Protestant, spoke in an arch voice about her acquaintance with W.B. Yeats. ‘The Greatest Irishman,’ she said, and a raucous Dublin accent called out, ‘What about Eamon de Valera?’
‘A stringy French bean,’ the Protestant lady issued over a liqueur and the Dublin man said, ‘Well we had Matt Talbot and S
ean McDermott,’ confusing an alcoholic martyr and a young hero. ‘And you call your man Yeats great.’
Whereupon the Protestant lady marched to the window, looked upon the ocean and cried as though to the Hill of Howth opposite, ‘And great art beaten down.’ The Dublin man, an actor, began singing ‘Kelly the Boy from Killane’ when a Hollywood starlet walked in past the swimming pool, a little black cape about her wasp-like shoulders. She smiled, hiding a multitude of complicity under the umbrella of her smile. A journalist veered towards her, a lady journalist and nearly fell in the swimming pool. Benny Goodman began to play up, saxophone music from New York troubling the night, the moon that had just emerged from the clouds, standing above Dublin Bay like a Roman sovereign.
Mrs Nesbitt, Jamesy’s mother, held a glass of sherry as though she was outstretching an antique thimble. She stood. People looked at her. She had certain airs, graces, blown at her from the Twelve Pins in Connemara. Daughter of an Anglo-Irish family, many of her relatives gathered, astonishing ancient men like jaded Irish wolfhounds, ladies from the mansions of Connemara or Wicklow, lichen virtually grown into their manners, their chins uneven, chins that told of an iron dominance of Ireland for 900 years.
Jamesy’s mother spoke to Sarah, Christine in that order. She spoke to Liam, to me, civilized conversation with Jamesy’s newfound friends. Sarah would have been impressive, Sarah in white, Sarah holding a handbag. The mixture of coquette and saint.
I perceived Liam in a black blazer and white shirt, the shirt singularly white, his hair the colour of daffodils before opening, green upon yellow. Odd moments I looked and he was there, totally there, there like the oak tree of old, holding out somehow, against time. He was totally present that evening, the sound of a New York saxophone edging in upon his silhouette against the darkening Irish Sea.
Someone entered and spoke of snow.
Someone else entered and told about a hungry protesting mob he’d seen.
A woman with a yellow scarf dotted with red still on her head entered, one flake clinging to her scarf, and her Anglo-Irish voice rebounding in the room, telling of a Catholic group she’d seen in O’Connell Street, bearing flame and pictures of prelates behind the Iron Curtain.
A parson with a voice rich as British vegetables spoke about the I Ching.
A dotty old professor muttered about Archimedes.
The film star had her picture taken.
As if as an afterthought Jamesy’s father announced it was his birthday. A birthday cake entered as though on a magic carpet. It was in fact borne by a maid. The Hollywood starlet got upset, began crying. A birthday serenade was sung.
Sarah sat by the swimming pool discussing Troubadour poetry with a young academic from Cambridge. Christine and the Dublin actor were singing ‘Carrickfergus’ in a corner. Liam was moping about, fingering porcelain, china, holding it as he had held little snails wrapped in their nuggets of shells as a child. The parson was loudly telling ghost stories, witches, ogres, poltergeists seen in Wicklow, when I discovered Jamesy with his trousers down making love to an older woman.
First time I’d ever seen anyone making love. I reckoned that evening it was a Protestant, Anglo-Irish thing to do. I’d drunk too much. I was aware of friends floating, each on their own journey. I now knew the illusion of togetherness between us but I didn’t wish to think about it. I knew the unalterable gap that lay between people.
The moon re-emerged and the Hollywood starlet could be seen standing on rocks, holding a glass of rosé, looking towards the Hill of Howth as though to Hollywood’s lost illusions and Jamesy’s father spoke of Hollywood, time he’d played an Irish priest in a film and a young American actor entered the confessional and said – the lines weren’t in the script – ‘Father, I don’t make love. I masturbate.’ A woman who looked like a wedding cake, layer upon layer of her, sang an aria by the piano and Jamesy’s mother in the absence of Jamesy, talked of Connemara, the mountains, the beauty, days on white horses among rhododendron bushes.
Someone addressed Jamesy’s father. ‘Mr Nesbitt, how come you never played Hamlet, always Polonius?’ whereupon Jamesy’s father recited the last lines of Othello, forgetting the very end, lapsing into Molière, then standing on a table, drunk out of his mind, taking down his trousers, waving them in the air, crying, ‘A glass of wine, a loaf of bread – and thou, thou, thou.’
No more was seen of the Hollywood starlet. People presumed she’d taken a boat to sea. The parson said what Ireland needed was the royal family. Jamesy’s mother had found a titled gentleman among the crowd, a relation of the Queen of England. Her husband was wandering around in his knickers, his balls bulging and his knickers huge like a child’s nappy. An English lady screamed that she’d seen a mouse and a leading Irish poet entered, accompanied by his cohorts, danced with a round Anglo-Irish lady, stuffed himself with English cheddar, accused everyone of being ‘a shower of fucking bejaysus wankers’, put an arm about Liam’s shoulders and said, ‘I can tell you’ve got sense.’
Liam walked away. He was quite drunk. I could suddenly tell his head was swimming with drink. His eyes were glazed. He made for the swimming pool and jumped in. There was horror. People stopped. Jamesy’s father who had fetched a photograph of himself with Lady Gregory was silenced.
One could see that Liam had disappeared to the bottom of the pool. I knew what was happening, recognized the glaze in his eyes from a long time ago. I jumped in, in my clothes.
I caught Liam. I knew that he was trying to drag himself down, that again it was a long time ago and a woman was weighting herself down to the bottom of a river. ‘Liam,’ I screamed. I caught him by his blond hair, tugged him up. His shirt was torn half off. He lay unconscious by the pool. A man gave him artificial respiration. Sarah knelt beside him. She didn’t touch him. Just looked.
And afterwards, long afterwards when Liam was asleep in an upstairs room I saw floating in the swimming pool a portrait of a well-known Irish soprano with carnation-red lips who had once sung in Liam’s home.
There was never any mention of this event in the weeks afterwards. It went untold, a dogmatic silence surrounding it and words fewer between us.
As it turned out it was a winter full of light and come spring we set off to the mountains on bicycles, surmounting the Dublin Mountains, stopping at pubs where Sarah entertained young Dublin workers out trekking for the weekend with ballads in Irish.
Only Christine complained, lazy laconic Christine who hated our ambition and was interested only in drink and sloth, sitting in pubs gossiping with farmers who had moustaches growing out of their nostrils. Sarah sang her way through Wicklow, songs about trees falling before Cromwellian invaders and forests laid to waste by the Cromwellian enemy. She sang of coves and monasteries in the West of Ireland, places her father once went to with British countesses to learn Irish.
Liam climbed the furthest, cycled to Olympian heights, the first shadows of spring arriving and young men, he, I, Jamesy, shedding jumpers for shirts and shirts for chests, nubile and tense.
Yes, go to Wicklow sometime, travel these paths, fairy places, places in Grimm’s and Hans Christian Anderson’s stories, and think, unsolemnly of Christine, fattish maiden pushing behind, Sarah, slender butterfly pushing ahead, Jamesy always in tow, never pushing too hard, Liam flying ahead, beautiful against time, possessed of a quality of looks that turned the heads of farmers’ wives and often upset munching cows.
Then there was me, Sean McMahon. Without me they wouldn’t exist. One puts them in an envelope, ancient photographs, forgotten nicknames. Sometimes my children ask me, a middle-aged lawyer, what it was like to be young. I tell them lies. I say it was great. And it was. It was for a while.
The first time I realized they were sleeping together was at Easter.
It came suddenly, night of Holy Thursday. I walked home from the Pro-Cathedral to Monsktown, ignored buses, clear on some course. When I entered the house I made little noise. I climbed the stairs. Tchaikovsky played within. The S
leeping Beauty. I opened the door. Inside was a lighted room, the Saturday Evening Post open on a sofa. I engendered some noise. Then I was aware – swift as incense was thrown in the Pro-Cathedral that evening – that there were people in the bedroom.
Someone, more, rushed for clothes. Minutes later Liam emerged, immaculate in a white shirt, white trousers. Then came Sarah. She smiled.
I’ll never forget her smile, a struggling little smile. More in the nature of a smile on a Dresden doll. But still a smile. Sarah left that night, catching a taxi home, as though bent on some errand that she suddenly remembered.
I perceived Liam staring at me, eyes gone from blue to green and a clarity about them which cut through me and took me back, shed covered in ivy, a trail by a yard into a garden, a garden filled with growth.
He didn’t speak about it. I didn’t wish to ask him.
I stayed up that night, drank tea bought in Smyth’s of the Green and encountered a mouse who looked at me with knowledgeable sadness and went away. I put it down to baby-sitting, time Sarah guarded her aunt’s young children and Liam stayed in the house with her. They’d been reading a lot, Dostoevsky, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Kate O’Brien, Edna Ferber, Evelyn Waugh, but I reckoned it was D.H. Lawrence, that wily Englishman, who did the trick, united them one evening as they sat over a fire reading The Rainbow in carnal knowledge. I had to be clear in my mind about it. I had to put things in order. I had to know, to expect the best of them. I wanted them to be happy. I wanted them to be enduring. I imagined Sarah’s aunt’s home, filled with portraits of elegant Irishmen, and wanted them to know that at least they had the gaze of heroic people upon them, poets, revolutionaries, those who’d bound the fate of a nation into their everyday lives.
The face of Sarah Thompson haunted me that Easter, at ceremonies in our home town, over Easter lunch, a face of a blonde-headed girl in a house full of Waterford glass and beaming pianos, saying grace with her parents or meditating as an afterthought on the tale she’d heard in church of the risen Christ mistaken for a gardener.
The Leaves on Grey Page 4