It was extraordinary to watch her, strolling with Liam’s father down the passage leading to the garden, lamb-white cardigan over her shoulders. They got on extremely well, discussing obscure works by Tolstoy or William Morris’s ideas of social reform. One was struck not just by her beauty but by the heritage of this moment. Sarah Thompson bore a remarkable resemblance to her forbear, Elizabeth Kenneally. She was unaware of similarities, a fragment of bone structure, a whiff of blonde on pale Nordic skin, the breadth of her shoulders, her inquisitive hunch.
Somehow Liam and I were left out of the picture. It was an episode between Dr Kenneally and Sarah, languorous conversations and an eye always in the garden to the weather, the sudden squalls that blew in from heather bog or distant ocean.
Summer term a curious thing occurred. This affair which flourished beneath red and white striped awning for Liam and Sarah suddenly shifted emphasis. I was now intermingled in their moments together and suddenly out of this confusion emerged an unexpected pattern. Sarah Thompson more often than not clung to me for friendship, conversation. Drinking ice-cool orange in the Shelbourne lounge or slender glasses of iced coffee in Bewley’s it was me she touched, my hand she chose, recognizing somewhere inside her, I think, that in the aftermath of death she and Liam were too close, both having intuited death.
Of the two of us I was the simpler, the less confused, the one more likely to lead a normal unruffled life. So Sarah chose me, my evenness, the journey of my experiments which any day could glide into normality and the social acceptability wrought by a desire for the untwisted truth, the commonplace. Liam sensed this. The ease of our camaraderie, our laughter.
One afternoon he returned to find us in bed together and that was it. Some essential privacy eroded, the boy with the blond hair by the lace curtains horrified, frozen into a new realization that abysmal love affairs don’t necessarily last, that beautiful relationships don’t necessarily continue, rising and shooting forth like spring leeks.
On a day in mid-May Liam hopped on a train for the North, visiting distant relatives who lived on the extreme north coast of Antrim. When he returned, his birthday buried in those days, he informed me and Sarah about them, sitting in a morning tea-house as though nothing had happened, nothing had come between us.
His relatives were Protestants, living in a bungalow by the ocean, a husband, wife, two daughters. The wife dressed in semi-Victorian clothes and had been instrumental in founding a free school in Scotland. Their garden held a bounty of fruit and vegetables. Their house accommodated lost masterpieces by Irish mystic painters and two very Trojan Irish wolfhounds manned the ocean against invaders. Liam’s uncle had a beard more like whiskers and wore high stockings, striped blue and white, and a pair of pantaloons. He owned a factory in Belfast and talked with Liam about bygone collectors of folklore or botanists famed or infamous for some moral peculiarity in their character. The daughters were both painters, running to and fro to Paris.
But on one thing Liam’s uncle was firm, the foolhardiness of the Irish Free State. ‘A cabal of fools.’ Nineteen-sixteen, he said was an idiot’s outing, a party game for entrepreneurs, do-gooders, academic deviants and political hysterics. Suddenly on a beach in north Antrim Liam found himself defending the revolutionaries of 1916.
Men of honour, he said. Noble men. Men who aspired to the political unity of a country. Men who changed history. Men who founded a new state, as yet uncertain of itself, but born of such nobility of character and statement bound some day for great things. His uncle had shrugged. Under no circumstances would he ever surrender his Unionist kingdom to the Southern State. Freedom was priceless he said. Freedom from bigotry. Freedom from mind-boggling obscurantism.
The wind blew in, became harsh on their faces. The conversation ceased. They retired to cups of hot cocoa and a view of the sea, turbulent under a May storm.
Somehow the potential argument, confusion between Sarah, me and Liam disappeared in the advent of final examinations. One drank much orange. One lazed in the garden.
Sarah’s mother invited us both to dinner one evening and we sat in the kitchen, eating on an old wooden table, without the sun secretive and deep with evening. Sarah’s mother had cooked a dish of red cabbage and chicken and we ate peaceably. ‘You have two boyfriends,’ Sarah’s mother said over the meal to Sarah, ‘what an exciting time you must have.’
We drank tea in the parlour and the lady spoke of her polio clinic, her hopes for it, for raising money, for dedicating it to her husband’s memory. There was a frail woodpecker-like quality about the woman, her face in evening sunlight looked even more sharpened and resolute.
‘Basically,’ she said, ‘I wish to continue with what Gerard was doing, building a sanctuary one way or the other for the defenceless.’
Liam spoke a little about Galway, his home, the river, the convent, the orphans, his mother, the dead Russian woman with the face fine as red sandstone along the river Volga and the body firm as a river-going vessel. I spoke about my parents; my father, a well-known lawyer, of Dublin origin, my mother of a well-to-do Westmeath farming household.
Origins waved aside we discussed art and Mrs Thompson brought us to her bedroom and fetched a painting from under her bed, a newly acquired one by Jack B. Yeats. The Cavalier’s Farewell to his Steed, a horse, white, dying in the fold of his maroon clothed Arab.
I went to the window and looked out at the emerald lawns of Dublin, held for a moment before being relinquished into darkness. It was our last summer at college, perhaps our last summer in Dublin. I waited for that final moment of darkness and accompanied Sarah, her mother, Liam down to the parlour again for tea before parting.
After the final examinations due to be held in September Liam and Sarah planned to go away together. It was as though they’d renegued on all confusion in their relationship and wanted to prove they were one. Examinations over, a huge tiredness lifted, they left the North Wall of Dublin, heading south.
I went home for some weeks, watched the ebullience of harvest by the river, connived in little tea parties in the back gardens of limestone houses, lingered gently over what to do next, then journeyed back to Dublin to become an apprentice in a solicitor’s office.
Autumn gave way to winter, evidence in the soft air of cold, of tormented spray. A cold wind blew Baggot Street to nudity.
Copies of The Irish Times accumulated on a solicitor’s desk. News of hurlers, prelates, American politicians. Then one day Hungary was invaded and Sarah returned.
Her body burned into mine weeks of November. Fear, pain in her limbs, breasts. She looked older, harrowed. She’d lost weight, her eyes big like an East European orphan. But she didn’t speak of her weeks with Liam until much, much later, some aspect of Hell caught sight of.
They’d gone south to the exotic, untravelled places of the South of France. Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo. The last of summer penetrated Antibes, and old women, seated on benches in Monte Carlo gazed south. The ghost of Camus was felt in Monte Carlo, a game of baccarat intuited, the weather changing, autumn arriving, a definitive grey. The couple traversed a border to Italy; on a train to Verona a drunk offered them wine. ‘Romeo e Giulietta,’ he remarked.
Il Trovatore was sung in Verona, a soprano’s voice echoing over a darkening Roman city.
In Venice they knew it was over; they encountered a wall, nowhere further to go, row after row making them both violent in different ways, she sulking, introverted, he smashing her face with his hand one morning. That was it.
She turned back, a waif on the train consuming bread, encountering a Hungarian girl wearing a flame-like scarf who informed her of the rising in Budapest.
Where was Liam? One didn’t know.
The weather became unexpectedly bad in Dublin, the Dublin Mountains breathing foul gusts of rain like a dragon.
Women who had previously been contained were inspired by madness, running around the streets of Dublin shouting about the Pope, captive cardinals, the Hungarian rising. Banners b
earing ikons of cardinals enthralled the skyline and women with faces without eyes marched the streets, the city exploding into one unified candle flame. A Hungarian communist living in a Dublin block of flats was besieged and generally an ancient fear ambled in the streets of Dublin, fear of a vacuum always present in Irish life, rarely acknowledged.
Sarah became pale and thin like a child in war. Eventually even my Trojan efforts could not appease her and she wept a lot, broke down crying in an odd trail of places like the Monument Café, the Shelbourne lounge. She took to wearing dour clothes, browns, near blacks, a widow’s weeds. The only colour in her disenchanted appearance was an odd scarf of white, with naïve emerald dots. Sometimes she looked aged, sometimes a twelve-year-old orphan. I knew her to be travelling to a frontier. There was no name for this frontier. No one had travelled to it before.
The women of Dublin looked mournful as the statues of the Madonna in dark suburban churches.
I wanted to reach Sarah, to call her back. I knew Liam would have a power over her if he’d been here. But he was nowhere in sight.
Prostitutes dangled by the canal. Politicians’ widows presented flowers to nuns. Even the mannequins in Brown Thomas’s window mourned.
Sarah began going to mass, repentant. Visiting the poor, giving the alms of her beauty, giving advice. She took to social work, social investigation. She visited the over-burdened women her father had tended and on 10 December told me she was going to be a nun in a stiff, self-punishing order who administered to the poor. I knew she’d flown from us in insanity. Outside Bewley’s Oriental Café in Grafton Street there was little or nothing I could say.
She told me that her father’s death had affected her deeper than anyone had known, that the idea of death had left a crater in her life as empty as the moon, that the only way she could cope with it was to devote her life to the transcendence of death and to work which would regain for her the kingdom of the spirit, the area she’d known tending with her father the beehives in the back garden or the infinite area of marigolds in the front garden, a patchwork of oranges and golds which infused the mind and set the spirit aflame.
She was holding a handbag. Her coat was long and brown. She told me gently she did not wish to see me again. Her mother she said knew of her decision. She would go north to Drogheda, dress in a habit white as skulls, kneel before crimson Christs like the poor of Dublin did, eventually journey abroad to Africa, redressing the ignorance of the Western world which abandoned huge areas of the universe to starvation. ‘I want,’ she said, ‘to be. I haven’t been since Daddy died. I want to continue doing, trying to make the world an easier place to live in.’
Her choosing of orthodox Catholicism to do this was her perversity. She subjected herself to cannibalistic rites to prove the humility of her intentions. There was something almost pantomimic about her outside Bewley’s. One would almost have demanded a halo for her.
Eleventh of December a letter came from Liam.
113 Heath Road,
London S.W.8.
26 November 1956
Dear Sean,
How are you? I’m living here in London, working for British Rail. I found a room in Battersea. It’s lovely cycling to work in the morning. I bought a bicycle for 2/6. The weather’s cold. I pass by Cheyne Walk in the mornings where George Eliot and Swinburne lived. The foreman thinks I’m the IRA but I say I’m half-Russian. Then he tells me I’m a Red.
London is full of storm clouds but there are moments when the sun comes out.
How’s Sarah?
Tell her I was asking for her.
Tell her I’ll see her soon, that I have a gift for her, a locket with a genuine Russian ikon inside. It’s beautiful. Gold and black. I’m filled with grief here. But then there’s always Ireland.
Love and farewell,
Liam.
By some crux the letter came too late. Sarah had already journeyed to a macabre destiny.
I met him off the boat at Christmas, Liam changed, hollowed like a young soldier.
He went to see Sarah. I told him not to. It was devastating for him, a young woman in white under a picture of St Anthony surrounded by writhing demons. She looked at him, eyes like patient rubies but a farawayness about them. She didn’t see him, didn’t acknowledge him. Sarah was in the grip of her own demons. I told Liam that it was guilt, her father’s guilt over a broken statelet, passed on to her, that she was making amends for the failure of the 1916 revolution, but Liam had gone beyond another frontier, the frontier of comfort.
He went home, stayed with his father, found a room in Galway city, giving tuition in English, and I lived in a big apartment in Donnybrook with a young Roscommon man. This man was a teacher, a national schoolteacher, one always talking about the Fenians, the Famine, French writers who had died in the First World War and British poets. His name was Michael and I rarely saw him. I was dating a young girl called Laura. We fed ourselves on Hollywood movies and popcorn.
She was from the countryside near my home, a Member of Parliament’s daughter. In Dublin she studied domestic science. The Dublin skyline blurred for us, was wicked for us, but not excessive. It told the truth about two young people up from the country, more than likely destined to return to it. About this time Christine reappeared. I met her in a pub one evening. A famous literary pub with high ceilings and rounded stained glass. She was with a poet, scarf on her head, cigarette in her mouth, sluttish, sullen, but her face still the arabesque of a clown’s, full of wrinkles and smiles.
I was with Laura. I sat with Christine, spoke to her. It emerged she lived with her poet. She washed floors. He wrote. He was from a big town in Kerry. His accent was an offspring of that county and his prose larded with poetry and extravagant quotations from Gaelic poets who’d served on ships in the eighteenth century. He came from a large merchant family, now had designs on Olympus. Around were numerous other would-be poets, their women, women just, men just, glinting bachelors, barmen with an eye for beauty. A middle-aged lady with hair red as Maureen O’Hara’s sang ‘Carrickfergus’. Tears came to many faces. A German student was enthralled.
But beneath the cloak of romanticism Christine just turned to me and whispered ‘Where is he?’ meaning Liam and I knew by her eyes that it was Liam she still hated, not me.
She lived in a rough dungeon of a place off Grafton Street. She lived next to a church. As of old she never said prayers but watched Dublin’s poor ebb and flow from mass. Christine Canavan had cultivated a bitterness all this time. I could see it in her, a pain as deep as rejection, a sliver as of desert sand in a light breeze. She was still hurt by Liam, hurt by him as of the night she discovered he and Sarah were lovers. I at least had succumbed to her, been her lover in my twisted retrograde Catholic way.
As there was a renewed IRA campaign in the North, bridges blown up, radio stations, electricity installations, the literary population of Dublin pledged themselves to support the victimized Catholics and Christine’s lover went off North one day with a gun, a bunch of ragged winter roses and a bottle of cheap wine. He was found some days later drunk in a Dundalk bar.
Christine entertained the literary populace of Dublin in her flat, the drunks, the fallen women. I touched on her life, me and Laura going to see her once or twice with a carton of Guinness. I visited her as though revisiting a hesitant point in my life. There was less I needed to know about Liam, Sarah, Christine. I was free of past, had a tranquil girlfriend, played rugby on filthy pitches.
But occasionally, just occasionally a face haunted, Sarah’s in the wet of Grafton Street, a virgin again, disconsolate in the never-yielding, forever-blackening Dublin rain. I didn’t wish to tell Laura about this part of my life. I went to Chrstine’s parties as though observing a ghost in motion, intrigued that I should once have been other than I was now, a young man on his proper course.
In March Liam came up from Galway to stay with me. There was evidence of initial blossoms. March breezes rushing to and fro and everywhere the ripple, the
return of life.
A famed American poet visited town and one day threatened to throw himself out of the Gresham Hotel, standing on an upper window, a delighted crowd rallying below, Christine in a brown coat among their number.
I was going somewhat between Christine and Liam. Christine’s lover ran naked down a Dublin backstreet one night, was caught, brought to court, fined despite protest from illustrious relatives.
‘The sow who eats her own farrow,’ he was heard to whisper. He and Christine were planning on leaving. Up and going to Paris. A tricolour raged against a souring St Patrick’s Day sky. Mother Ireland was waving farewell to her vigilant young.
Bombs exploded in the North, Brookeborough Barracks was blown up and a ripe young body returned, that of Seán South, killed in action. For weeks now the population of Southern Ireland did not know what to make of renewed war but with the possibility of a hero they turned out in droves, Franciscan friars like medieval devils blessing the coffin and a nation singing ‘A Nation Once Again’ and ‘Faith of our Fathers’ until suddenly the people of the South tired of this folly and forgot it.
A noted botanist threw a party in Killiney one night. Liam and I were invited. It was May. We got an 8 bus there, walking from Dalkey. Inside the door crowded with eager Dublin faces I perceived Christine. Now a curious thing had happened in those weeks. Liam had become friendly with a girl, a confidante of Christine’s. Somehow they’d had amorous contact. It hadn’t worked – the memory of Sarah was too deep in Liam – and in the course of the party, Christine drinking like a goldfish became irately drunk, pushed her way to the front of the crowd and began shouting in Liam’s face.
‘You’re incapable, incapable of making love.’ There were a few derisive sniggers, silence, Christine evaporated into the crowd and again talk was about a show by Tennessee Williams, wherein the actors were being brought to court for displaying a contraceptive on stage.
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