That ancient unchristened banshee had tapped me on the shoulder once more. I froze, miles away from rudimentary merriment. A ghost smudged towards me, Christine’s face looking in a window of a confectionary shop on a misty day.
I couldn’t tell Laura what was wrong. She wouldn’t have understood. Or at least it was important for me to expect her not to understand. On our way to Kerry on our honeymoon I stopped to see Christine. In draconian black, face washed of freckles, pale, graceless. I asked her how she was. She replied, ‘Well, well.’ I asked her where she’d been. Paris. I didn’t want to know the rest but Ireland being as it is I discovered her boyfriend had renegued on her in Paris, gone south to Greece, left her a runaway.
‘I met Picasso in Paris,’ she told me in the Limerick mental hospital, ‘I wanted to tell him about us, you and me, Liam and Sarah. There were paper carnations on the table. It was at an American woman’s house. Gerry was with me. He began quoting poems by Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin and I spoke eventually to myself, under the Irish of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin, I said, “Life is as a tribe of birds, some of whom hit the sun, others who fail, fail utterly.”’ She was quite clear saying this, clear as though her madness was feigned but when I looked closer at her I saw her pupils had separated somehow from her eyes and were planets in space.
Kerry was Kerry. Kerry patterned by the abysmal ocean.
I couldn’t help thinking of her, even with a Laura in a newly constructed hotel surrounded by Americans. ‘Life is as a tribe of birds.’
The birds of winter were already flying low over the estuaries and planes hit their target of Shannon.
I sat on a veranda one evening, an American lady in a mink coat beside pots of geraniums nearby, troubled by scratching of planes, their lights blotted in the sky, and considered the intriguing distances between a few people once so irrevocably close.
Laura and I had three children in a very short time, christened Patrick, Annabelle and Jason. Liam’s father retired, left town for County Down and I, managing my father’s business now, needing more space, bought Liam’s home on the forefront of the street. I was closer to a road leading nowhere in particular but to the country, closer to the leaves, had an expansive garden temporarily bleached of memory by my childhood.
But that loss of memory was destined not to last too long. Walking that garden somewhere in the early sixties, face to the sun, sun splashing the oak tree, I realized it was upon me again, life, wonderment at being alive. The voices of the orphans sounded more distant but a childhood, always buried, was now present, herbs, parsley, paprika, books with daring illustrations of Russian princesses, buckets on some plaintive sunlit Connemara beach.
To protect myself I gave wildly to my children. I journeyed to Dublin, city which was dreamily committing suicide, bought expensive books of legend for my children, books about Connemara kings and queens, books by Anderson and Grimm.
What was it that reminded me? The spring breeze on my shoulder as I stood outside a second-hand bookshop, a passage from Simone Weil: ‘All the horrors which come about in this world are like the folds imposed upon the waves by gravity. That is why they contain an element of beauty. Sometimes a poem such as the Iliad brings this beauty to light.’ I was drawn back again, conquered by young men and women on bicycles. I was in love with some imprint that had never quite dissolved, a shadow on the wall, a hieroglyphic of sun on a house like Sarah Thompson’s house as it stood consumed by shadow on a late summer’s day.
Irish troops were sent to the Congo on a United Nations mission, some were murdered and came embalmed in coffins. This time we mourned heroes of peace.
Rows broke out in the Irish parliament over one Conor Cruise O’Brien who according to all and sundry was manhandling Katanga. The rugby team went north and played on Unionist pitches. We found the Northerners could laugh and down whiskey with us. Perhaps they weren’t quite so bad after all. Old wounds were healing, a new solidarity knitting middle class and middle class in Ireland. Laughter in a Portadown rugby house reverberated across Ireland, the laughter of the well fed, the expensively clothed. The rugby captain in Portadown had the same twinkle in his eyes as the rugby captain in Cork.
When John F. Kennedy was assassinated a new and peculiar note struck up in Laura. She took to wearing black and walking the town, woodland trapped by mists, emulating the poetic grief of Jacqueline Kennedy. Something had been trying to rise from Laura for a long time, something perhaps as simple as change. After three children she swore to having no more, birth pangs excessive for her, the trauma of bringing forth. Motherhood far from resigning her to an uncomplicated life opened areas in her, the nights when her children were born, their screams of pain.
Sometimes she asked me questions about the house – knowing I’d known the people who had lived there – but I was unwilling to answer. The chandelier was the same but walls were painted over and books long gone, the Newmans, the Tennysons, the Rupert Brookes and the odd rather bewitched copy of Virginia Woolf. Instead now the house was ingrained by legal books, Trojan American paperbacks.
I held my youngest child, Jason’s hand as the trees were cut down, all but one or two. And even they were drastically curtailed. The men’s club had long gone and even those trees, the two trunks looking ridiculous and ashamed, disappeared in time. Jason, my son, pointed to a bed of freshly fallen leaves under the truncated trees. ‘Birdies,’ he said, mistaking chestnuts for thrushes. We both stood, father and son, dumbfounded.
Laura began gardening and the garden produced again. The orphans wailed. Blackbirds dived to deaths. Clouds reigned, building the patterns of childhood, castles and synagogues in Russia. Laura read her first book by a serious author. William Faulkner. Things changed after that. The country girl became more sure of herself and her cheekbones stood out like toadstools. Her eyes, brown, were now glazed, her hair tied back, her gait alive and certain.
We threw a party one night when a composer of Irish music was visiting town and – in the strange way art and politics mingle in Ireland – Laura’s father was there and a host of leprechaun-looking political administrators were present. The man had given a recital in town and somehow our house was chosen to entertain him afterwards, a vestige of importance descending, hen-like local councillors arriving, wine and Guinness flowing, a banquet ensuing and a fire blazing. Laura was in her element, in black, arms showing, a sherry of commitment in her fingers and the composer’s children in bright jerseys railing about.
I was again aware of paintings of women of Aran. I was again aware of a chandelier shedding trinkets of shadow. I looked up, expecting a sign or a symbol from the ceiling but none was forthcoming other than the shadow of glass. Gossip dispensed with, the party hauling to a halt, the composer sat by a harpsichord provided for him and played songs, tunes that reverberated of eighteenth-century Ireland, songs about pirates and cavaliers and women who mourned runaway aristocrats by the ocean. A woman stood beside him, his wife, a tall lady with a high tragic forehead and everyone was touched, ignorant politician and local grocer by an unconquerable spirit and the nobility of an artist, his fingers tapping, his hair white and his forehead framed into a tightness and a brevity of control.
Laura held many parties after that, inviting the local drama club and ladies’ society, the house again reverberating with change, crackers pulled, laughter issuing forth, the girlish laughter of women who’d never known sex. Paint peeled, old wallpaper revealed itself, ornate pinks and French boudoir blues. Something was pulling us to Moscow, a woman again walked, albeit slow at first, a sleepwalker. Our house was taken over by the ghost of Elizabeth Kenneally.
It had been unpeopled when I moved in, the past gone but now shadows returned, swift as the spitting of flame. Not just the ghost of Elizabeth Kenneally haunted the house but other ghosts, ghosts of the Irish artists of the 1940s, the actor who almost took off his trousers, the soprano and the maker of stained glass. The wraiths of fog in the morning suggested the wraiths of fog in the 1940s when the caravans of trav
elling Shakespearian companies rested on the green and when gypsies, more colourful than they were now, arrived and stayed for weeks. I could hear again Elizabeth’s voice. ‘It was snowing in Moscow then. The cabin rose above the cornflowers. A raft came down the river bearing peasants. My mother went mad that year. An old Bolshevik stared at me. My doll, my doll.’
And I could most hear about the doll, the one she lost, the irrecoverable doll. She spoke at night when the children slept. She went over it again in detail. Her childhood, the church near their home, the Revolution, the city without lights and the beggars, her flight to the country, her mother playing the piano for lecherous gamekeepers, her mother’s exasperating and bewildering disappearance into a forest of birches which merged into a forest of firs.
Snow flowers, buttercups, cornflowers, the flowers of Mrs Kenneally’s childhood addled my head, most of all the poppies, a poppy of blood on a donkey’s back near Ryazan, a poppy on a Bolshevik’s kaftan, a scarlet scarf on his neck, a single poppy of triumph in a field of summer corn, the triumph of memory, of unmitigating love.
Laura knew what was happening and asked after her. She perceived the wallpaper peeling, saw the cracks in the ceiling, felt the floorboards going from beneath her. She walked in the garden. She untied her hair. Laura changed, a woman on a tightrope.
I walked the streets of the town by myself sometimes. It too was changing. Prosperity somewhere revealing itself. By the prom over and over again I observed a certain couple meet, a boy from middle-class background, hair brushed back poetically, a girl from lower-class background, and knew a certain courage to be pushing forward in the young. One condemnation of us I suppose, my college friends, one radical revelation of some falseness was that we kept to our own, the cosseted, those picked out by Mammon for a spiritual appetite. The prosperity of my meeting with those others was still with me, Sarah, Liam, Christine, Jamesy, but something of its axis was hatcheted.
It might have been the death of Camus that did it, an unheralded accident on a French motorway, or Christine’s death – Christine had committed suicide in a mental hospital roughly the same time as young Irish soldiers were butchered in the Congo. Whatever, it wasn’t that important; it was something more radical that had been between us, and I named that radicalism now.
It had been the ghost of Elizabeth Kenneally. She had transcended class, steam of rugby baths, wine of Dublin cafés. Her urgency, her truth had strode on through time. It had elicited a decision from the indecisive Sarah, an exile from Liam, from me now a slow reckoning with wife, time, and childhood.
The prom was marked by knifed confessions of love, initials on trees, benches. A boy sat on a red bench, reading Keats and drinking coke. A girl stood under a tree, hair tied by a ribbon, gathering some words together as she stared into the distance. I understood these young, their need for novelty, their reaching for something that only time could define for them and yet now was a reality because they believed it.
Laura began having literary parties. She gathered women of the town together, doctors’ wives, solicitors’ wives who would normally be playing bridge and they discussed the works of James Baldwin or Alejo Carpentier. A retrograde Jesuit dined with them and they discussed Teilhard de Chardin.
Censorship was lifting in Ireland; the books that had once been the guarded secrets of the Kenneallys were now given to the world; the artists declared to have been obscene and indecent marched in, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and little was heard again of censorship. A country was quietly becoming cosmopolitan.
At a New Year’s party Laura drank too much. She broke down, but having now read the works of the major modern writers her breakdown was eloquent and controlled. She spoke about this country, always divided within itself, the gombeen politicians and the quack artists.
‘I want to live,’ she said simply, ‘I want to live.’ And she walked out.
I suppose Laura’s outburst is what I always associate with the first shots in the North. The first volley of death. At first not admitted or celebrated as a phase in the development of civil liberties, an ugly monster soon raised its head.
Our adversity we knew to be history.
My children grew up to the daily headlines and news broadcasts of war, a mini-war, a war of the petrol bomb and the bomb under the café counter, injuring and blowing people to pieces.
Patrick, Annabelle and Jason verged on adolescence, couched by affluence, not knowing things like class weren’t quite so simple as they used to be. They kicked ball with the poor. They insisted on dressing in rags. I recalled Liam, his elegance at twelve, wondered if I could trade him for Patrick, decided on Patrick, little boy, in grubby jeans, dancing flirtatiously about a football.
When thirteen men were shot dead early in the year 1972, Laura, her finger cut and bleeding, snow rummaging and rifting in the garden outside, dwelt some moments on her wound, then said, ‘It’s funny how history repeats itself. Men never learn. We live by the wages of our own inhumanity to men. We build skyscrapers, block the earth with machines but a few simple lessons escape us, that there is no God worth talking of, no idealism worth living for except the simple precept of kindness.’ Laura had ceased going to mass. She sat by an oak table, sole legacy from the Kenneally dynasty, and finished by saying, ‘May God have mercy on their souls.’
I was thirty-seven now. Numbed I sat near her. Patrick entered the room, sensed something, stood.
‘Mammy,’ he said eventually, ‘can I watch Bob Hope on television tonight?’
Laura went away that spring by herself. She bought beautiful things for herself, often second-hand coats, ancient crockery, brooches. She wore lizards and rabbits. She locked D.H. Lawrence in her cupboard and kept a clock beside her bed – we slept in separate beds now – that told her the time, that told her to wake early and concoct strange French recipes to entertain her friends with in the evening. I was left out of the picture of her mind.
Sometime around then Liam rang.
Driving North to Derry on a May morning I concentrated on the effects of sunlight on the hills leading to Derry, dashes of rainbow and exuberances of gold, to avoid thinking.
The previous night had left an unusual aura in my mind, it had been exceptional for me to be alone, unique even to wake alone and confront the sea. It had not been unpleasant. I accepted it now as one would the tension of waiting at a railway station. I’d dressed somehow more carefully that morning, realizing that my clothes when I looked at them were not all they should have been, starched vests, navy trousers. There was a voice in the middle of my demeanour that asked for change. The formalities undergone, a British army post passed, I headed to the city centre to meet Liam. There was a vanguard march in Derry that day. Hordes were held up next to Craigavon Bridge. A lone piper played ‘Amazing Grace’, crowds hurled abuse from buses and two hitchhikers bearing flowers, gave sprigs to British soldiers while lunatic remnants of the Shankhill Road in Belfast shouted at them ‘Go back to San Francisco, you flower children ye.’
I walked to the city centre, each step leaving an element of me behind. The hills around Derry were bequeathed with flowers, they sung with buttercups, and altogether there were no signs of war in these hills, signs of a glorious Maytime infused with sun.
He sat on the steps of Guildhall, at first no older than I’d last seen him, broader though, face ruddied and orange with sun, hair sand-coloured rather than blond, and his overall appearance governed by a multi-coloured jersey, a jersey of blue and white and yellow and green and red. He smiled, the smile of a seventeen-year-old boy. I wanted to tell him there and then to go way. He tugged me into his hand-clasp. I said, ‘How are you?’ In moments we were walking through the streets and he was telling me about his time away from Ireland, fifteen years which any day I could take up like rotten apples and throw in the face of the presiding spirit of this island, if there was any, and being none in the face of all those who hurt and inflict injury on those blessed by the gods with a little more sensitivity than their fellows.<
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I told him about myself first, a few brief sentences, then he launched into an account of himself, the first time he discussed himself he said in years.
When he first arrived in California Liam Kenneally, a student from Ireland in a long Woodbine cigarette coloured coat, had been a brusque mixture of hope, despair, nonchalance. Somewhere buried deep inside him had been his mother’s splintered grief, the animating colours of a stained-glass window in a remote Irish church, the face of one Sarah Thompson, crushed like a yellow rose. He’d made the requisite gestures towards reorganizing his life, staying with an uncle at first, then discovering an apartment for himself in Berkeley. A student from Ireland with an ability to walk the verdure of Berkeley in a red-check shirt even on the dampest of days, he commenced his studies, Ireland generating only a distant reality, a flag, limply flying, streets of Dublin fettered with nuns. He decorated his apartment with the photographs of writers, read Hart Crane by a rose light, often wondering had it been real, years of growing up, his mixed heritage, the limestone street whence he came and the trees at the end of the street, more certain with time, larger, less debased.
All the time though in his ears were Christine’s words, her eyes, searching out his vulnerable spot, fixating on it with lewd grinning hatred. The girl who’d approached him so innocently once had done him harm and in doing harm intensified a portrait of Ireland, maker of wounds, tormenter of youth, ultimately breaker of all that was sensitive and enriched by sun, rain, wind.
Liam Kenneally retreated into himself, urging towards some point of self-annihilation and yet that point could not be identified as self-annihilation because it produced thoughts, long and rich, and discourses on the nature of being. Like Aphrodite Liam gained something in his loss of nation; he was bequeathed the sight of the Pacific, the slenderness of Golden Gate Bridge and a new country, one built with pain and effort, each image gained only with a maximum of precision, images of roses of Sharon buried beneath the tramline and poets, beards flourishing on them like down, reading their zany poems in pubs illumined only by the neon trickle of the jukebox.
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