The Leaves on Grey

by Desmond Hogan

  ‘Vous cherchez Frère Antoine. Il est parti. Il a fondé une succursale de notre ordre sur une petite île en Irelande du Nord. Avec des autres il prie pour la paix.’

  He had gone. With some others he’d founded a branch of the order in Northern Ireland, on a little island situated in a lake surrounded, I later found out, by the densest area of tribulation in Ireland. North or South. With the others, true to the patience and availability of the group, he asked God for peace. It was as though something had got him before me, madness, that odd visitor, fate or decision, call it what you like. Had Liam become a total clown, dressing in white, covering the earth in nasturtiums, red and gold, praying in silence? The answer I would not know until I saw him.

  I packed up in London. I was going back to Ireland. I intended to live again with my wife and children, to focus on my career again, some two years of research and investigation achieved in London. My children welcomed me as though I’d never gone. They addressed Laura by her Christian name now. Her eyes were very tender when she first met me at Dublin Airport. ‘You’ve changed so much, she said, ‘arches, lines, gone from your forehead.’

  I returned with her to Galway but something agitated me throughout the spring and early one morning I took off, driving north. The morning was fresh and gay with spring; each time I stopped I smelt peat, the aftermath of tinkers’ fires and the ridiculous scent of burnt gorse. Bogs smouldered, black. I was scared. I inveigled garages, coffee shops, anything for distraction and curiosity. Old women dwelt on coffees in Monaghan town. The border I was crossing was now a different kind of frontier. Liam told me too much about myself. I recalled the fair-haired undisciplined man I encountered in Derry some years before, the multi-coloured jersey, the eyes, smashed blue. Those eyes had perilously haunted me, drawing me back. I was settling into marriage, children again. There were a few qualms. I resisted those qualms. I knew it was over, trucking ghosts around the globe, but one thing I had to know, had Liam’s’ eyes changed, had their pain become less definite?

  British soldiers abused me. I abused them back. I was not in the mood for these divisions. Little men from Liverpool or Birmingham stood back; rarely they met anyone who reacted to their bullying. They eyed me, eyes that were sonorous, wondering, taken aback. I drove on. A mist lifted. Even in Ulster hills were emerald.

  My nervousness, my preoccupation with nervousness increased, a clean-shaven table, paprika, parsley, the serious items of childhood, they were before me. I could feel the ridges on Liam’s face, they were already encountering me.

  As in song a boat brought me there; the natives knew of these foolish men in white, half-monks, half-harlequins. A boatman waited. I went to an old cowshed already being converted. A hazel tree stood outside. Big dwarf windows looked at me. A monk answered, he looked no more than fifteen. Rain stood on the distant water, a column, a rainbow jumped like a fish. I asked for Brother Anthony.

  Let me tell you about this place, soft hills, manifold hills, creamy skies, troubled water, a flash, a thunder of rain. Surrounding all this tranquillity a countryside of butchery, of levelled humanity, of farmyard murder, cottage-door shootings, outrage piled upon outrage. Here monks from a remote medieval order, young turned in from colleges, old men from the pursuit of learning, took the first steps towards building a base. They dressed in white, were not so much Roman Catholic as medieval Catholic; an order of the Middle Ages whose symbols were haunted by a reverence for a Godhead of peace.

  I was led along a passage into a room. Young men had blue eyes that stood out like Mediterranean plants.

  Liam encountered me in a rough room, smelling of newly hewn wood. I perceived a gilt-edged book somewhere behind him, a clock. His eyes looked out, the blue of a Greek sky, the blue that defied gods and blood and time and war, Liam’s eyes, his mother’s eyes, eyes that knew only an endless traipsing after uncertain truths and wilful lovers, eyes that somehow seemed to unite two people now, Liam and Liam’s mother. I wanted to run back to the safe things, the ordinary things but quietness held me here, Liam sitting, engaging in an account of the place.

  ‘We grow flowers, plant roses, hope somewhere that a vibration of our existence will reach this land, change something. Waging war, inner as well as outer, is like banging one’s head against the wall of a cell. We have come here following an ancient mandate to convince ourselves, the earth, that peace will come, that it is worth silencing ourselves for, worth waiting for.’

  The simple things collapsed, the things about which I built my life, Laura, the children. I wanted to hide like a baby thrush. I coveted some posture of withdrawal now but there was no means I could shake him off; looking at Liam was like looking at the garden, at Elizabeth, at the rabbits, the mice, the tree. You saw yourself. That was it. That was what brought me here. I saw myself as I had been once, shouldering innocence, weighing each choice, watchful, discerning importance in everything. Having children, feeding them, clothing them wasn’t enough. There was more, some continual pageant demanded of one, sacrifice, alacrity, knowingness.

  If I could I’d have gossiped, told Liam about Sarah, living again in Ireland, but he went on, the sun shining in now.

  ‘For years I ran. I didn’t know what I was running from. I searched, switched on areas of myself. There were people, colours, ideologies; I wanted to create, shape, if only a mask to hide myself from myself. Coming here is an attempt to live without betrayal. We betrayed, Sean, us, our people, we betrayed ourselves, we were the privileged few, privileged even with love. We gazed at the universe from a rampart, saw the other faces, didn’t pity them. They were part of a Greek drama.’

  I recalled faces, young soldiers imprisoned in photographs, their iron stares, their knowledge of death.

  ‘And the leaves,’ Liam said, ‘the leaves on grey, all that was embodied in those leaves, an inner plentifulness, I have come upon again. Within myself. I’ll tend to hives. Grow flowers. Shape again. With my hands. A sculpture. A recognition, a divining of that area where one registers peace, from which peace flows, a temperature, to instil itself and linger in the areas in most need of patience, those of anguish, death, death by blood, death by the killing and maiming of the spirit.’

  I still wasn’t convinced. Was this another of Liam’s archetypal poses? He’d doffed a multi-coloured jersey for a cassock, white as early morning bread.

  At least though my eyes permitted themselves to look at Liam, not as he had been but as he was now, one who had temporarily found peace, one who prayed to a God disowned by most, one who believed in life over death, in the armament of the sun over the wedges of dark in the human spirit. For that revelation, albeit only momentary, I would be grateful to him forever.

  We went outside. He introduced me to others, those with American accents, those with European accents. He showed me a rose bush that would flower in summer, a ‘revelation’, he said, and suddenly, just suddenly against the lake there was something in Liam’s face, a stillness like stone, one of those faces on ancient stone in Ireland weathered by rain, lightning, by decay in the face of Cromwellian slaughter and penal persecution. But whereas those faces, monastic faces on ancient crosses, were hammered in by the elements, Liam’s was smashed by a different kind of weather, the weather of the spirit in pursuit of something, a clause, a cataract of mystery that would not diffuse, or perhaps merely the weather of the soul which assailed a young man in a white sleeveless jersey, rimmed by a sky-blue stripe, who cycled animatedly on an ancient faltering bicycle through the streets of Dublin, splashing through pools, looking decidedly for hot cross buns in Bewley’s on a wet and windy day.

  We said goodbye. Rain was falling.

  Crossing by boat I wondered had it all been an illusion, this meeting on an island, peopled by poets and academics in monks’ gowns?

  My journey tapered south.

  I could still see him, his face, his eyes, inveigled by rain against hills that had known the enslavement and death of birds and men but other things came now, Elizabeth’s fac
e, her eyes when a fire blazed in her home and a soprano sang gifted songs about bogs and early morning larks and Irish trains always askew. Christine’s eyes, always pained, always fearful of catastrophe. Jamesy’s eyes, our college friend, the roses in his lapel, the roses always moulting from a smart college blazer. Sarah’s eyes, her masquerade, her dance, and I saw them dancing again, Liam and Sarah in a Dublin hotel, perceived and watched over by Elizabeth, the ghost who’d always harkened to music, melancholy or urgent.

  Before I left Liam had told me, ‘One thing haunted me all these years, not just faces of First World War soldiers in a dark County Galway men’s club or the stares of young school-going boys in posh Irish schools but something else, a lady, the artist who made the glass.

  ‘She has the ultimate triumph, her words, her recognition that light can come through stained glass. I recall one window she made, depicting the story of the Children of Lir, swans rising from human bodies.

  ‘I stood in front of it once in a dark Irish church, with my mother, conscious of how the damp of the church affected her, conscious of her unease in this atmosphere but still aware of the beauty of the window, light smashing through blues and greens, standing out, a renaissance.

  ‘And those swans will always represent to me the grief of Ireland, the human spirit freeing itself from human form, the pain of a nation distilling itself into tenderness. That’s why I came here, to wait, watch for that moment, augment its coming because we conspired towards the pain, you and I, the faceless privileged, those with all, those ignorant of all but beauty. Now I can turn that beauty, the beauty of my mother’s fireside parties into a different kind of beauty, that of reverence, the knowledge that shackles once contested can be shaken off.’

  I drove through towns, limp and grey. As it was evening neon lights dashed on. Pubs opened. People rushed into them. Country and Western music urged me on my way, a bar here, a note there, the beating heart of thrifty commercial Ireland. Bog stretched, sky implored, a countryside somehow I stopped, parked my car, walked inside.

  It was dark and tomb-like, unnourished by any work of art. I didn’t pray. I desisted from prayer, just stood a moment, realizing it was over now, my search, and I could give in to the things of life, leaving Liam and his mother behind forever. But before I left the church I thought of her, my wife, Laura, motioned to her image with the thoughts in my mind, to her hair, nose, eyes, wanting again to hold her, to tell her it was over, this running about. I walked to the porch. Rain had come, sliming through the sky.

  I waited before entering the car, already whole patches closing in me, areas which registered the colours of a girl’s scarf or the patterns on a boy’s tie, areas which dwelt and lingered on sun and speed, walking then to my car, saying goodbye to Liam and Sarah, lighting a cigarette before starting the car, including Jamesy and Christine and all the Jamesys and Christines, all the vulnerable children of the fifties or whatever age they were begotten, into my farewell, starting home, her face somehow disappearing too, that already jaded ghost Elizabeth Kenneally, and a new face greeting me, that of my wife, when I arrived home, a woman of the country, hazel hair on her shoulders and a laughter in her eyes, coaxed part from peace, part from understanding.

  Afterword

  Because, fresh and clean, you took me

  out by the hand, to freedom and brought spring leaves

  in hand into my house I shall not

  let you be grown over with weeds and forgotten.

  —Marina Tsvetaeva, ‘Epitaph’ (trans. Elaine Feinstein)

  I found the epigram from Tsvetaeva I use at the beginning of The Leaves on Grey in a khaki paperback of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Abandoned, which I picked up on a Liffey bookstall in early summer 1977. I’d just started a version of The Leaves on Grey. One of her translators said that there was ‘no feeling of a comfortable armchair’ from which the writing of Tsvetaeva, who took Nadezhda Mandelstam’s husband once to the square that ‘witnessed adolescent Tsars’, might have originated.

  The epigram became not just the book, but the life, for I left Ireland as an unlicensed exile that October with a Brother typewriter my parents had given me for my twenty-first birthday.

  First a room in a squat in Battersea near a butcher shop, J. Kelly Daughters, which also sold Jacob’s Mikado and Jacob’s Coconut Creams, and a health store run by Divine Light boys from Dublin in a kind of Taekwondo gear, as smooth-skinned as the boys the Winchester Chronicle during Richard the Lionheart’s reign complained about.

  Then early the following year a glory hole in Shepherd’s Bush with curtained bunk bed, accessed by a ladder.

  Here I had a poster of Botticelli’s Young Man with a Medal – skullcap, honey-coloured medallion – which I’d coaxed out of the Italian tourist office in Regent Street, replacing Patrick Pearse from the previous tenant, a woman who perpetually wore a Kinsale cloak.

  The first version of The Leaves on Grey proved too elephantine and I abandoned it for a journey to California during which I visited Yosemite National Park.

  I sequestered myself in Mariposa Grove among giant sequoias thousands of years old.

  I slept out under the small and multi-layered mountain hemlocks and the lodgepole pines (or twisted pines) with the small, bushy-tailed, orange-breasted Douglas squirrel, fond of the yellow warbler’s greenish-white eggs with constellations or cirrus of mouse-grey, raw umber, metal bronze, lemon drab, mummy, greenish-black, blood-red.

  ‘I will have to make words of my tears,’ said Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, great-grandson of the Hasidic Baal Shem Tov – Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, Master of Gads, 1700–60.

  Martin Buber put down the Hasidic Legends in Jerusalem during the Second World War.

  ‘I stand … a link between links: I tell once again the old stories.’

  In the Fall in London I started a new condensed version of my earlier manuscript of The Leaves on Grey, frequently browsing through the vintage magazine stacks in High Holborn – Picture Goer, Life, The New Musical Express, Mirabella, Weekend, Valentine, Vanity Fair.

  About the opening of a New York ice-cream parlour, winter 1955–6, Anaïs Nin wrote:

  ‘Marilyn arrived without makeup, looking fresh and glowing, and instead of posing to be admired, she looked at everyone there with genuine interest, and when I was introduced she turned her full warm attention on me.’

  In this time of computers and mobile phones, a person’s full attention is rarely obtained. But I wanted to write about a time when it was customary to turn one’s full attention on others.

  When Isak Dinesen visited the United States at the end of the fifties. it was Marilyn Monroe she wanted to meet above all others. At a dinner party arranged by Carson McCullers, Marilyn had her own story.

  Once she was cooking pasta for visitors. The pasta wasn’t ready and the visitors were due to arrive. She tried a hairdryer on it.

  I found a dead drug addict in an Afghan coat with sheep trimming in the Shepherd’s Bush house and I moved to a stucco squat in Maida Vale.

  I scribbled in Holland Park Comprehensive where as a supply teacher I taught Edward Burne-Jones boys from Holland Park villas and Gassenjungen – street arab – boys from the estates of White City, and I finished The Leaves on Grey at the spring Feria in Sevilla, with men in sombreros and women in Flamenco dresses going by in carriages in the spring rain.

  In a recent story, which I had to write on a haemorrhaging calculator ribbon as there were no typewriter ribbons available in Tralee that week, I returned to the town.

  ‘The beauty of the town I came from: a row of town houses of kingfisher orange.

  The trees that were at the end of the street: oak trees, the sweet chestnut, the horse chestnut.’

  He could not die when trees were green

  For he loved the time too well.

  —John Clare, ‘The Dying Child’

  Desmond Hogan, 2014

  Acknowledgments

  I should like to thank Daniel J. Rooney of Pitt
sburg and the Arts Council of Ireland who encouraged me towards the passage of this novel. I am grateful to Martin Brian & O’Keeffe for permission to quote from two poems by Patrick Kavanagh.

  Published in 2014 by

  The Lilliput Press

  62–63 Sitric Road

  Arbour Hill, Dublin 7

  Ireland

  www.lilliputpress.ie

  Copyright © Desmond Hogan, 1980, 2014

  Cover photograph © Estate of Jerry Bauer

  Print ISBN 978 1 84351 620 0

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 84351 626 2

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication

  may be reproduced in any form or by any means

  without the prior permission of the publisher.

  A CIP record for this title is available

  from The British Library.