Brian Friel Plays 1

by Brian Friel

  Then suddenly a man called Donal who had scarcely spoken up to this thrust a bent finger in front of my face and challenged, ‘Straighten that, Mr Hardy.’ And the bar went still.

  I caught the finger between the palms of my hands and held it there and looked into his face. Already he was uneasy – he wanted to withdraw the challenge. He began to stammer how the accident happened – something about a tractor, a gearbox, a faulty setting. And as he spoke I massaged the finger. And when he stopped talking I opened my hands and released him. The finger was whole …

  Badrallach, Kilmore,

  Llanfaethlu, Llanfechell,

  Kincardine, Kinross,

  Loughcarron, Loughgelly …

  We caroused right through the night. Toasts to the landlord who claimed he met my father once and as the night went on that they were close friends. Toasts to Teddy and Gracie. Toasts to my return. To Donal’s finger. Toasts to the departed groom and his prowess. To the bride and her fertility. To the rich harvest – the corn, the wheat, the barley. Toasts to all Septembers and all harvests and to all things ripe and eager for the reaper. A Dionysian night. A Bacchanalian night. A frenzied, excessive Irish night when ritual was consciously and relentlessly debauched.

  Then sometime before dawn McGarvey was remembered. Their greatest, their closest friend McGarvey who in his time had danced with them and drunk with them and built roads with them and cut turf with them. McGarvey who ought to have been best man that day – my God, who else? – and who wasn’t even at the wedding reception. And as they created him I saw McGarvey in my mind, saw his strained face and his mauve hands and his burning eyes, crouched in his wheelchair and sick with bitterness. Saw him and knew him before Teddy in his English innocence asked why he wasn’t there; before Ned told us of the fall from the scaffolding and the paralysis. Saw him and recognized our meeting: an open place, a walled yard, trees, orange skies, warm wind. And knew, knew with cold certainty that nothing was going to happen. Nothing at all.

  I stood at the window and watched them set off to fetch McGarvey. Four of them getting into a battered car; now serious and busy with good deeds; now being polite to one another, holding doors open, you sit in front, no you, no you. Then they were gone, the car sluggish under their weight.

  Teddy lay slumped in a stupor in a corner. Gracie went round the tables, emptying ashtrays, gathering glasses and leaving them on the counter, straightening chairs. No intimation whatever of danger. I suggested she should go to bed and she went off. Why wouldn’t she? – the housework was finished.

  (He comes right down, walking very slowly, until he is as close as he can be to the audience. Pause.)

  The first Irish tour! The great home-coming! The new beginning! It was all going to be so fantastic! And there I am, pretending to subscribe to the charade. (He laughs.) Yes; the restoration of Francis Hardy. (Laughs again.)

  But we’ll come to that presently. Or as Teddy would have put it: Why don’t we leave that until later, dear ’eart? Why don’t we do that? Why not?

  Indeed.

  (He looks at the audience for about three seconds. Then quick black.)

  *Note: Stage directions have been kept to a minimum. In all four parts the director will decide when and where the monologist sits, walks, stands, etc.

  PART TWO

  GRACE

  We discover GRACE HARDY on stage, the same set as Part One, with the rows of seats removed. She is sitting on a wooden chair beside a small table on which are ashtrays, packets of cigarettes, the remains of a bottle of whiskey, a glass.

  She is in early middle-age. Indifferent to her appearance and barely concealing her distraught mental state. Smoking a lot – sometimes lighting one cigarette from the other.

  GRACE: (Eyes closed)

  Aberarder, Aberayron,

  Llangranog, Llangurig,

  Abergorlech, Abergynolwyn,

  Penllech, Pencader,

  Llandefeilog, Llanerchymedd …

  That most persistent of all the memories, (Eyes open) that most persistent and most agonizing –

  But I am getting stronger, I am becoming more controlled – I’m sure I am. I measure my progress – a silly index, I know, and he would certainly have scoffed at it – but I can almost measure my progress by the number of hours I sleep and the amount I drink and the number of cigarettes I smoke. And, as they say, I’ve a lot to be thankful for; I know I have. And I like living in London. And the bedsitter’s small but it’s warm and comfortable. And it’s a pleasant walk to the library in Paddington where I work four hours every morning. And on my way home, if the day’s fine, I usually go through the park. And at night I listen to the radio or I read – oh, I read a lot – fiction, romance, history, biography, whatever I take home with me, whatever’s handy; and I’ve begun to make a rug for the hearth – I’ll do a bit at that or maybe I’ll try a new recipe or read the paper or knit or – or – And on Thursday afternoons I go to the doctor to get my pills renewed. He said to me last week, he said to me, ‘Of course you’ve had a traumatic experience, Mrs Hardy; absolutely horrific. But it’s over – finished with. And you’ve really got to be stern with yourself. You were a solicitor once, weren’t you? Well, what you must do now is bring the same mental rigour, the same discipline to your recovery that you once brought to a legal case.’ And he looked so pleased with his analogy and so clean and so pleasant and so efficient and, yes, so innocent, sitting there behind his desk with his grey suit and his college tie and his clear eyes and his gold pen poised, and he meant so well and he was so patient and it was all so simple for him; and I found myself nodding yes, yes, yes to him, yes, yes; and I thought: That’s how you used to nod to Frank, too, especially in that last year – yes, yes, yes, Frank, you know you can, Frank, I swear you can – but he’s watching me warily – nothing was simple for him – he’s watching me and testing me with his sly questions and making his own devious deductions, probing my affirmations for the hair crack, tuned for the least hint of excess or uncertainty, but all the same, all the same drawing sustenance from me – oh, yes, I’m sure of that – finding some kind of sustenance in me – I’m absolutely sure of that, because finally he drained me, finally I was exhausted.

  But I am making progress. And I suppose what I really mean by that is that there are certain restricted memories that I can invite now, that I can open myself fully to, like a patient going back to solids. I can think about the night the old farmer outside Cardiff gave him £200 for curing his limp – just handed him his wallet – and we booked into the Royal Abercorn and for four nights we lived like kings. And the weekend we spent one Easter walking in the Grampian mountains. I can think about that; yes, memories like that I can receive and respond to them. Because they were part of our lives together. But then as soon as I begin to open under them, just as soon as it seems that I’m beginning to come together again –

  (Eyes closed tight) Abergorlech, Abergynolwyn,

  Llandefeilog, Llanerchymedd,

  Aberhosan, Aberporth …

  It’s winter, it’s night, it’s raining, the Welsh roads are narrow, we’re on our way to a performance. (Eyes open.) He always called it a performance, teasing the word with that mocking voice of his –‘Where do I perform tonight?’ ‘Do you expect a performance in a place like this?’ – as if it were a game he might take part in only if he felt like it, maybe because that was the only way he could talk about it. Anyhow Teddy’s driving as usual, and I’m in the passenger seat, and he’s immediately behind us, the Fantastic Francis Hardy, Faith Healer, with his back to us and the whiskey bottle between his legs, and he’s squatting on the floor of the van – no, not squatting – crouched, wound up, concentrated, and happy – no, not happy, certainly not happy, I don’t think he ever knew what happiness was – but always before a performance he’d be … in complete mastery – yes, that’s close to it – in such complete mastery that everything is harmonized for him, in such mastery that anything is possible. And when you speak to him he turns his h
ead and looks beyond you with those damn benign eyes of his, looking past you out of his completion, out of that private power, out of that certainty that was accessible only to him. God, how I resented that privacy! And he’s reciting the names of all those dying Welsh villages – Aberarder, Aberayron, Llangranog, Llangurig – releasing them from his mouth in that special voice he used only then, as if he were blessing them or consecrating himself. And then, for him’ I didn’t exist. Many, many, many times I didn’t exist for him. But before a performance this exclusion – no, it wasn’t an exclusion, it was an erasion – this erasion was absolute: he obliterated me. Me who tended him, humoured him, nursed him, sustained him – who debauched myself for him. Yes. That’s the most persistent memory. Yes. And when I remember him like that in the back of the van, God how I hate him again –

  Kinlochbervie, Inverbervie,

  Inverdruie, Invergordon,

  Badachroo, Kinlochewe,

  Ballantrae, Inverkeithing,

  Cawdor, Kirkconnel,

  Plaidy, Kirkinner …

  (Quietly, almost dreamily) Kinlochbervie’s where the baby’s buried, two miles south of the village, in a field on the left-hand side of the road as you go north. Funny, isn’t it, but I’ve never met anybody who’s been to Kinlochbervie, not even Scottish people. But it is a very small village and very remote, right away up in the north of Sutherland, about as far north as you can go in Scotland. And the people there told me that in good weather it is very beautiful and that you can see right across the sea to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. We just happened to be there and we were never back there again and the week that we were there it rained all the time, not really rained but a heavy wet mist so that you could scarcely see across the road. But I’m sure it is a beautiful place in good weather. Anyhow, that’s where the baby’s buried, in Kinlochbervie, in Sutherland, in the north of Scotland. Frank made a wooden cross to mark the grave and painted it white and wrote across it Infant Child of Francis and Grace Hardy – no name, of course, because it was still-born – just Infant Child. And I’m sure that cross is gone by now because it was a fragile thing and there were cows in the field and it wasn’t a real cemetery anyway. And I had the baby in the back of the van and there was no nurse or doctor so no one knew anything about it except Frank and Teddy and me. And there was no clergyman at the graveside – Frank just said a few prayers that he made up. So there is no record of any kind. And he never talked about it afterwards; never once mentioned it again; and because he didn’t, neither did I. So that was it. Over and done with. A finished thing. Yes. But I think it’s a nice name, Kinlochbervie – a complete sound – a name you wouldn’t forget easily … (Tense again) God, he was such a twisted man! With such a talent for hurting. One of his mean tricks was to humiliate me by always changing my surname. It became Dodsmith or Elliot or O’Connell or McPherson – whatever came into his head; and I came from Yorkshire or Kerry or London or Scarborough or Belfast; and he had cured me of a blood disease; and we weren’t married – I was his mistress – always that – that was the one constant: ‘You haven’t met Gracie McClure, have you? She’s my mistress‚’ knowing so well that that would wound me and it always did; it shouldn’t have; I should have become so used to it; but it always did. And Teddy – Teddy wasn’t just a fit-up man who was always in trouble with the police for pilfering but a devoted servant, dedicated acolyte to the holy man. It wasn’t that he was simply a liar – I never understood it – yes, I knew that he wanted to hurt me, but it was much more complex than that; it was some compulsion he had to adjust, to refashion, to re-create everything around him. Even the people who came to him – they weren’t just sick people who were confused and frightened and wanted to be cured; no, no; to him they were … yes, they were real enough, but not real as persons, real as fictions, his fictions, extensions of himself that came into being only because of him. And if he cured a man, that man became for him a successful fiction and therefore actually real, and he’d say to me afterwards, ‘Quite an interesting character that, wasn’t he? I knew that would work.’ But if he didn’t cure him, the man was forgotten immediately, allowed to dissolve and vanish as if he had never existed. Even his father, and if he loved anyone he loved his father, even he was constantly re-created, even after his death. He was in fact a storeman in a factory in Limerick – I met him once, a nice old man; but Frank wasn’t content with that – he made him a stonemason and a gardener and a bus-driver and a guard and a musician. It was as if – and I’m groping at this – but it seemed to me that he kept remaking people according to some private standard of excellence of his own, and as his standards changed, so did the person. But I’m sure it was always an excellence, a perfection, that was the cause of his restlessness and the focus of it.

  We were in Wales when he got word of his father’s death. He went home alone. And when he came back he spoke of the death as if it had been his mother’s. ‘She passed away quietly‚’ he said. ‘I don’t know how father’ll manage without her.’ And the point was his mother had been dead for years when I first met him. Oh, he was a convoluted man.

  The first day I went to the doctor, he was taking down all the particulars and he said to me, ‘And what was your late husband’s occupation, Mrs Hardy?’ ‘He was an artist,’ I said – quickly – casually – but with complete conviction – just the way he might have said it. Wasn’t that curious? Because the thought had never occurred to me before. And then because I said it and the doctor wrote it down, I knew it was true …

  I left him once. Yes; I left him! Up and left. God, when I think of it! We’d been married seven years at the time, and within that twelve months I’d had a pleurisy and then two miscarriages in quick succession and I suppose I was feeling very sorry for myself. And we’d been living that winter in a derelict cottage in Norfolk miles from anyone – it was really a converted byre. I remember kneeling before a tiny grate and crying because the timber was so wet the fire wouldn’t light, and trying to get to sleep on a damp mattress on the floor. Anyway we’d had a fight about something silly; and I must have been very depressed or suddenly worked myself up into a stupid panic because on some mad impulse I tore a page off an old calendar and wrote on the back of it, ‘Dear Frank I’m leaving you because I cannot endure the depravity of our lives any longer do not follow me I love you deeply Grace.’ Wasn’t it awful! ‘I love you deeply’– to a man like that. And ‘Do not follow me’– do not follow me! – God, I had some kind of innocence then!

  Anyhow I went home. For the first time and the last time. I got the night-crossing from Glasgow and then the bus to Omagh and walked the three miles out to Knockmoyle. I remember I stood at the gates for a while and looked up the long straight avenue flanked with tall straight poplars, across the lawn, beyond the formal Japanese garden and into the chaotic vegetable plot where my mother messed about and devoted her disturbed life to. It was Bridie, the housekeeper, who reared me; and mother in her headscarf and wellingtons was a strange woman who went in and out of the mental hospital.

  Father was in the breakfast-room, in a wicker chair beside a huge fire, with a rug around his knees and his head slightly forward and staring straight in front of him just as he did when he was on the bench and hectoring a defendant. The stroke had spared his features and he looked so distinguished with his patrician face and his white hair perfectly groomed and his immaculate grey suit.

  And I knocked on the table so that I wouldn’t startle him and I said, ‘It’s me, Father. It’s Grace.’

  ‘What’s that? Speak up!’

  And I could hear old Bridie moving about the kitchen and I was afraid she’d hear me and come up and throw her arms around me before I’d have a chance to kiss him over and over again and say sorry and tell him how often I thought about him.

  I moved round so that I was directly in front of him.

  ‘It’s Grace, Father.’

  ‘Yes? Yes?’

  ‘Grace – Gracie.’

  ‘Raise your voi
ce. You’re mumbling.’

  ‘Timmikins,’ I said – that’s what he used to call me when I was a child.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Timmikins,’ I said again.

  ‘I know who it is,’ he said.

  ‘I came home to see you‚’ I said.

  He gazed at me for a long, long time. And his mouth opened and shut but no sound came. And then finally and suddenly the words and the remembrance came together for him.

  ‘You ran off with the mountebank.’ And he wasn’t accusing – all he wanted was corroboration.

  ‘Frank and I got married‚’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you ran off with the mountebank just after you qualified. And you killed your mother – you know that. But I told her you’d be back. Six months, I said; give her six months and she’ll come crawling back.’

  I was crouching in front of him and holding his cold hands and our faces so close that I could smell his breath.

  ‘Father,’ I said, ‘Father, listen –’

  But words were now spilling out of him, not angry words but the tired formula words of the judge sentencing me to nine months in jail but suspending the sentence because he understood I came from a professional family with a long and worthy record of public service and hoping that I would soon regret and atone for the blemish I had brought on that family and on my own profession and threatening that if I ever appeared before him again he would have no option but to send me to jail and impose the maximum penalty et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.