Patrick came in first; Annabelle returned at one and Jason cycled the avenues of town until two in the morning, a child gone mad.
With the same fatalism as Liam Kenneally put Billie Holiday records on our gramophone in Dublin a long time before, I knew my marriage was running into irascible difficulties. There were the children, there was the town; its henna-coloured spaniels, its old women. There were my expanding offices in Dublin. My name spoke of integrity in Irish legal circles but when I got the offer of a job with an international prisoners’ rights organization I left work placing young men of accomplishment in my offices.
I left Ireland in November 1975. I went to live in London. My marriage had speeded to a halt. Laura was none the worse for it, wearing regimental blacks, decorous jewellery, a limited quantity of makeup. She had begun doing something she had never done before, illustrating Irish folk stories, collecting tales, illustrating them with the refined colours of her imagination and with a delicate pen, spending laborious hours in the sitting room, bowed over pen and light drawing paper. Sometimes she came to stay with me, she and the children. Sometimes they came alone, most often Patrick.
London at first was the changing of the guards for them or some fat lady like the fish lady at home outside a sex shop, but gradually they saw it, a major city, visits to it changing them, my children, from Irish waifs disturbed by American TV programmes to young intelligent erudites, open to much, appreciative of a lot, indicating things to me which I myself would not have seen. Ireland blurred out. It would have gone altogether were it not for bombs and my work. I studied photographs which indicated bruises deep as clouds over the Comeragh Mountains on prisoners convicted of bombings. I spoke to these men, men from Antrim or Belfast, rarely from the republic; they’d been brought up on a diet of Pearse and flags and tales of heroism. They’d been nurtured by Church and State to violence, Church by its opposition to Northern government, State by its evil annihilation of life from Catholic workers in the North. I distrusted these men yet was overcome somehow by pity. These men, one or two from the South, could have been me had I the anger or the ignorance. I had not the anger but ignorance is something I suppose people choose, not to see all the possibilities, that there are other ways. Myself, I could not sacrifice my children to bombs. Besides I would not vaunt Protestant opinion in Northern Ireland but feeling desperate enough perhaps I should burn myself alive in Donegall Square in Belfast relating to people not the profound injustice done to the Catholic population but an incomprehensible situation, one born of ignorance and oppression, stalemated into two groups who would never understand one another except by force of some miraculous personality.
Still I talked to prisoners, those convicted of doing incalculable damage to human life. I unerringly took down their statements. I wanted to tell the world that once punished by law you couldn’t go on punishing people forever for crimes, no matter how terrible, done in an insane state, yet somehow telling of other people’s inability to act, other people’s inability to comprehend the obdurate suffering of minorities.
A man from Antrim told me he left a wife at home with two children. ‘Here I am abused, bullied, shit, piss thrown on me. But there is one thing I recall,’ he said, ‘even when they’re looking at me as though I am a bull with foot-and-mouth disease, I remember the first time I met my wife. In a café in Ballymena and Roy Orbison was singing “Silence is Golden”.’
I was a different kind of Irish person in England, one educated, representing a republic born in the conflagration of civil war. I came looking over the other side of the fence, at those not so fortunate.
I endured in a flat in Kensington but I could also see each time a bomb went off how it was the women in the canteen or the men on the road who suffered. I knew that violence was no way to peace. It hurt those who performed it, it hurt those not directly connected with it, the ordinary Irish in England, those leading humdrum lives. It explained nothing. It injured the ancient spirit of Ireland, the one Laura delineated in her line drawings with their splashes of colour, a swan over a lake, a king on a white horse, a monk lighting the Christian flame on a hilltop.
I was quite scientific about my work. I spoke to Laura about compromises, she coming to live in London or perhaps all of us living in Dublin, but something bound her to a simple town in the western midlands, leaves perhaps bordering it or the nuns nearby, tending honeycombs, educating children in Irish songs or merely drawing in coloured chalks ikons on the blackboard of woods and trees and little girls bearing baskets of primroses in typical nun mentality of untainted childhood and unshedding trees.
I was sitting in a café late one evening, work of an evening done, the British Library shut, when I saw a woman sitting by a table near the window who at first moved me and stilled me with remembrance. She was about forty, blonde, eyes dark with the dark of an amethyst, lips slightly painted, yet for all of middle age with a peculiar bird-like quality, that of an anxious sparrow. She was addressing herself to an older smaller woman. I listened. They spoke of school. Problems they were encountering. Rows with men in authority. Changes in the system. I waited for the thing that would identify her and then I heard it, a trace, an Irish accent.
Sarah. I went over to her. She saw who it was immediately, not surprised, having the manner of one who ushered in everything with an air of inevitability.
‘It couldn’t be.’
In minutes she was taking out a brand of French cigarettes, having introduced me to her friend, a fellow teacher. Sarah was headmistress of a girls’ comprehensive school.
I talked to her until the café shut. She did not want to go to a pub but invited me to her home, an apartment not far from mine. She told me she was truly astonished to find me working and living in London, that it all seemed so far away and long ago, Ireland, that she was thinking of returning there. Her mother ran a clinic. Unwed she was thinking of going back there and living with her mother for a while.
These encounters took place early in the spring. They were as unreal as glass marionettes. I journeyed delicately to her apartment, all the spring breezes of London ushered in. We talked of long ago, of now, of her endless problems with the girls, of their lives bound in like a concentration camp with sores, abortions, misfit boyfriends, ill-behaving parents. She was a kind of glamorous parent for them, a popular teacher, well known in London educational circles.
Sarah Thompson had left her order fifteen years before. Going to Africa she found the heat gruelling, the nuns far from being servants of Christ but slaves to Mammon, brutalizing and burning young Africans with a diseased and burdensome religion. She witnessed and tremored under the white heat of the sun; she wore blank white, she became blank white inside, only the charred crucifixes telling her of another world, another life, one of risk. She recalled her father in his weeks before dying, his face anxious as the chords of a piano, his eyes always on the same note, some point not undergone, some shame not remitted.
She heard again the clanking to Arbour Hill, saw the green on the tricolour as the green of shamrock, saw her father laying wreaths over the dead soldiers’ graves. She recalled this remorseless childhood scene and wished somehow to redress it, the blackening skies. She remembered Liam, her first succumbance to sensuality, its ardour, its pain. She recalled the woman she felt in him and how she recoiled from her, Elizabeth Kenneally, a demon in a summer dress.
She recalled the nights of Dublin, the neon lights like coloured daisies and the odd Italian cafés, splashing their lights into the wet night. She recalled the plane to Africa and would have gone mad with this remembrance, the decaying hippopotamus of a plane, grounding at last, unleashing her on a continent filling and spluttering already with Irish nuns.
When the revolution came she heard the gunshots and interpreted them. She saw pregnant women shot down, planes flying over refugees on the roads, suppressed by their baggage and the odd majestic snake still in the bushes. She wanted to cry out, ask this archetypal God whom she’d come to serve for help bu
t realized in the deepest most crystalline part of her young Irish heart that no such God existed, that Sarah Thompson was alone, seduced by another illusion, an illusion that one must sacrifice to be.
She left.
She journeyed to England, calling on a country where bananas were piled into boats, like a thousand eyes, and she arrived in England, wearing woolly white cardigans sent by her mother, started teaching, having a few affairs, almost marrying, for once losing her lover to another woman, a Swede like the man. She joined many societies, sat on many boards, made many decisions but somewhere in her modern independent heart a gall-less flag still flew, the Irish tricolour, refusing warmth or solitude, battering itself against an unjust breeze.
The woman I encountered was made of many things, different from the one I knew before, as though the past had disbanded in her and she’d started again, picking and choosing who or what she was to be. But one remnant of the past was unmistakable, a touch, a decisiveness of Liam Kenneally. You refuse entry to your past but something is still there, the unquenchable spirit of a vision, the look on the face of an eighteen-year-old boy or girl who discerns life for what it is, a flight of the spirit against a savage sun.
Sarah Thompson left London for Ireland early in the summer. She did not write to me. Our encounters folded, another page. This time however the effects lingered and in a tropical summer in London something gave in me, I cried, sweated, I called out like one left without form in a bombing. Laura came to see me, talked to me. Even she with her foundation of rural ease did little to help. We talked of the past and eventually she, almost in the fashion of a female doctor, got to the core, some weeks in Dublin once, an affair, a triangular relationship, one buried, unspoken but always there, a mystery, a voice in itself telling of some extraordinary dance, some exciting welcome into a world of love.
‘You were too affected by Liam Kenneally and Sarah Thompson,’ Laura said. ‘They’re different from you. More meteorites than people. Jesus, Sean can’t you see. They messed up your beautiful normality.’
Laura came a few times that summer. I began working again. A chance arose to go to the United States, to investigate the records of a Californian prison.
‘People speak of you in Ireland,’ Laura said, ‘wonder why you left. Maybe if you go to California now you’ll find out.’
I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to see Liam again. It was all too grotesque and painful and yet I knew that Laura was right, that something was undone, some mischievous element in experience, always battering and tormenting and wending its way in. ‘Sean,’ she said simply, ‘you’ve fooled yourself for years. Fooled yourself in marrying, in having children, in playing rugby. There’s something in you, a disturbance, a storm cloud never burst or maybe even gentle rain unfallen.’ And she ended – it was in my apartment in London – ‘I love you Sean.’
I met her in Dublin before I left. It was October. We walked through the streets. Sun was shining, leaves dallying, a saffron blaze. And we stopped to watch a street theatre show in Stephen’s Green. The show was performed by exquisitely good-looking young people and told of a girl gone from Famine Ireland, given the gift of youth by Mother Ireland, who journeys through passages in American history. We encountered her at a stage in which she waltzed with the ghost of a Confederate soldier. He recited a poem to her before waltzing and my erudite ear recognized the verse, Walt Whitman.
All over bouquets of roses,
O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you and the coffins all of you O death.
Ireland was changing, even in the abstract and most remote part of its youth. I looked at Laura. We left the youth dressed in Confederate costume, the girl in Victorian lace and walked on, past streams of honey-coloured leaves.
In San Francisco I met many people concerned with jails. I curiously fulfilled every detail of my work. Then I went to see Liam. It was already November, winter in abeyance, the days light and blue. I’d put it off as long as possible. I was staying in San Rafael and one evening I crossed Golden Gate Bridge, the bridge zooming on top of me, to see Liam. I presumed he’d be at the address from which he last wrote me: 2248 Clay Street. Living there with Marie.
I knocked on the bottom door.
Marie answered. She looked considerably changed, dressed impeccably – in colours that would have done a rare and luxurious chocolate box proud. Her eyes were enveloped by a kind of soaked blue. She had on dark stockings, a blue dress. Her eyes were different too, no longer hard and guilty but soft, sweetened and touched by life. She bid me enter a regulated apartment. There was no question of her not recognizing me. It was all part of a drama now or a modern movie, each movement touched by ultimate psychological significance. She put on coffee. The place was warm and Californian paintings were redolent on the wall, sending off waves of good feeling.
‘Funny you should catch me here,’ she said, ‘I’m leaving next week.’ I did not ask about Liam. All I knew was that he wasn’t there, that his presence was long gone, unfelt now, a pressure vacated for want of fulfilment. Marie asked about home, with little urgency. The dangerous revolutionary had become mistress to a San Francisco nightclub owner. She’d lost her Derry accent, was now possessed of a fledgling Californian one. But she was not at all apologetic; hardened to the fact she’d changed and glowing under it even. He’d gone under such strange circumstances one could only account for it by some kind of crusade of madness, taking his things one evening, driving north to a monastery they’d once viewed together from the outside, leaving behind his clothes in a bundle in a rural hotel and joining an order of medieval Roman Catholic monks, their gowns white as wheaten bread. She’d gone to collect his clothes, antique check shirts, having a Bloody Mary in a country hotel built in New England fashion, driving off again.
‘Since he left Ireland he was not to be calmed,’ Marie stated. ‘Fraught, fidgety, talking in his sleep. Talking as though asleep. Speaking of violence, a violence done to human beings, talking of war, grief, yes, he spoke of grief a lot, spoke about it as though it were a parent. I loved that guy, loved him with an animal desire. He’s gone now, gone from you, me, all of us.’
Her last words were like a child’s conclusive mantra, something she’d ordered for herself over and over again.
Liam gone, yes, Liam gone north.
‘Can I see him?’ I asked.
‘Not unless you go back to Europe. He’s in the mother house of his order now. In southern Switzerland. They are a small order founded during some imperial war in the Middle Ages to ask for peace.’
I spent a lot of time after that with Marie. I went to the nightclub owned by her lover. It was fraught with the attractive people of planet Earth, women who looked like expensive parrots and men always searching the eyes of men.
Marie was moving in with her lover, leaving thoughts of Derry and confusion and vengeance. Her hair was controlled by a fine comb and she always observed things like one who had touched some grievous worry, something that continually preyed upon her brain. ‘I’ve lost my past,’ she said at last one evening, ‘lost my war, lost any amendment that can be made for it.’
At Christmas I stopped in Ireland. I’d discovered virtually nothing, yet my odyssey had brought its own rewards. Fire blazed. Laura cooked triumphantly. Patrick, aged sixteen, helped her, his own version of Adonis. Annabelle played David Bowie and Mozart and Jason looked through the window, a mystic whose eyes penetrated stained glass.
I went back to London but I knew now that my years of exile were drawing to a halt, that I was going to return, reassume public responsibility. I knew too I had a journey to complete, that I was going to see Liam. His eyes, his hair came back now, all he had that I hadn’t, natural gaiety, mysticism, a driving impetus towards the most truthful point. I wanted to tell hi
m I’d envied him and perhaps killed his relationship with Sarah. I wanted to tell him that I understood if no one else did, why a young man’s eyes should be fixated with a point of pain. I wanted to tell him simple things too, like how beautiful Laura looked and how full of life my children were. But something haunted, the tree in the back garden, a monument to the life of the Kenneallys, the loveliest family in town, father a brilliant doctor, mother from the abyss of the Russian Revolution, son warmed by the golden light of his mother and the pervasive intellect of his father.
In London I remembered simple things, like Liam naked, bathing, dipping with the self-consciousness of a statue over a dock leaf. I knew now that Sarah had deserted us both with all the cruelty of womankind, that it was no use impeaching her. She’d played her role. It could not have been otherwise.
It was January and cold. Rain fell and red buses rushed about with a sense of urgency. Many art exhibitions were held and the public was seduced by Blake and Turner. One weekend I flew to Lugano. There it was already spring and mountains enfolded would-be blossoms. I drove to the monastery Marie had told me of.
I knew now it wasn’t Sarah’s fault or mine but guilt had come from the past, unrelated to Sarah or me. It was willed upon Liam by his mother. She’d been a woman climbing out of a pain, who failed to make the light. Always in her eyes she ensnared a journey from her past, from all known and loved, from father and mother, photographs, brothers, a doll with smitten lips. Once you leave security you can’t return. Neither can you name the abyss you travel into unless you are possessed of genius or humility. What Liam was adopting now was a stance of humility whereby he could call the darkness he’d inherited from his mother a name.
I arrived at the monastery. It was situated on a mountainside, overlooking a village and in turn a lake. I was so possessed by her I expected Elizabeth Kenneally to answer the door but a monk not unlike Friar Tuck, fat and bald, opened the door and led me into a yard where last year’s nasturtiums still existed and then into a waiting room where I was left until the head monk arrived. He spoke in French.
The Leaves on Grey Page 11