Tight-collared, with ties all neat, in staid colours, my fellow candidates sit.
‘And what,’ says the professor, ‘was the most important contribution that Great Britain made to world history?’
‘Her navy sir.’ A Mr Jenkins.
The professor is not impressed.
‘Her parliament sir,’ says another.
The professor’s eyes open a little wider under their hoods.
‘Ah yes, Mr Wesley isn’t it?
‘No sir, Mr Stanley from Wesley.’
‘Yes. You mean how the greatness of the empire lay in its ability to contain revolution within its hallowed halls of parliament. That it invented parliamentary democracy, a system emulated in most democratic countries today. Yes, very perspicacious.’
I’m not sure if the professor is praising Stanley or himself.
He looks at me, or rather looks over me.
‘And you Mr….?’
‘Foley, sir.
‘Well, Mr Foley, what do you think was the most significant contribution that Great Britain made to the world?’
‘Her downgrading of peoples, sir.’
***
I wanted to have added more (Oh, how we always think more fully after the event). I wanted to say that he was exaggerating the importance of the British parliament as a democratic institution. I wanted to say that its rhetoric does not stop bombs from falling, or that its hallowed halls insulate themselves to the cry of injustice or the sound of the snipers’ bullets. I wanted to say that the printing press was more important as a democratiser than parliament. But then that was not British.
Anyway, as regards scholarships, I always felt they were elitist and, besides, history was never ‘pure’.
***
All this talk of nationalism is of little help to me personally. I don’t fit into any of the three categories. I am a subparagraph clinging to the underbelly of some great theory. Silence is no answer. My mother went silent for half of her life. She tried to eradicate half of herself. She extracted her tongue. She blocked her memory. All she kept flexible were her lachrymal glands.
I visit my mother every day, commuting either from the Rathfarnham house or from the university where I have enrolled, despite the lack of a scholarship. She never sold the house, despite all her posturing. She manages on her pension. The house is left to me presumably, but there were never any words between us on the matter. Or does she think it’s gone, like her mind, almost? Daily visits help to keep her compos mentis. Perhaps that’s why she had deteriorated on my return from Spain. I keep repeating to myself that I must be calm in my relationship with my mother, that I must follow doctor Mullins’ instructions and treat the great lady of the past with kindness. But she is stable now and has been for quite some time and, besides, the doctor does not know my mother as I know her. I have proof now that she had not been trusting towards me. Perhaps in her dishonesty she thought she was acting for my good and her own. But had she the right to sever the emotional cord that links a mother to a child? (And that is the way my feelings fluctuate towards her. One minute I want to help her, sensing her helplessness, and other moments I feel like tearing her hair out for all her dissembling towards me).
To call my mother a hypochondriac is unfair – she is genuinely unwell, especially with emphysema (I’m forever peeling oranges for her to help her to breathe) – but she also suffers from minor irritations – a pain in the back which I have to massage with Wintergreen, swollen veins in her legs which I have to bathe, and sundry, vague ailments. It is the right of an ageing mother to milk her offspring for any drops of human kindness which she can collect in her dry bucket. She isn’t that old. She tries to appear older that what she is, which is a basic ploy on the part of someone who is seeking sympathy. But where was her sympathy for my childhood, for all the lonely nights spent in a faraway dormitory, wondering why my mother did not want me?
***
One of the first things I do when I start university is to supplement my knowledge of my mother’s era by reading in the library. Countess Markievicz separated from her Polish husband and settled in Ireland with her daughter Maeve. Maud Gonne had an affair in France with a Lucien Millevoye which led to the birth of a child. And Martha Foley (yes, I can’t avoid it, the personal keeps coming back all the time), Martha Foley, member of Cumann na mBan, had a son adulterously. Martha Foley, my mother. Whether she was forced to or not, the fact remains.
And in the evenings, like a moth to lamplight, I am drawn back again and again to the primary sources – the diaries and letters.
Patrick Foley never openly expressed his jealousy of Gearóid to my mother, but he was clearly fearful. On first hearing of Mam’s correspondence with Gearóid, he wrote: ‘The snail bites off its penis after copulation and uses it to plug the hole of his mate to keep her monogamous.’
In all her correspondences, my mother was quite reticent as regards her personal relationship with Gearóid. Obviously, she had to be in her letters to Patrick. He was already rather touchy about the revolutionary, although this feeling was somewhat assuaged on hearing about the Peg incident. Patrick, evidently, disliked my aunt. He records: ‘Love has transformed a cantankerous misandrist into a humanitarian. Long may it last.’ Apart from this snippet, however, I have been unable to find any source, either primary or secondary, which could throw clear light on Gearóid’s relationship with the two sisters.
In the light of day Gearóid is not Gerry, and his revolver is solid metal.
But what of the nights he spent alone (presumably) with my mother, when her husband was abroad? Would the fact that the diplomat had saved his life prevent Gearóid from cuckolding him in his own home? Or was my mother’s fondness for the gunman no more than a platonic friendship rooted in the innocence of childhood? And if that were the case, who, with my mother, was the other illicit party in the conceiving of me?
I peruse old newspapers. The winter of nineteen forty seven was one of the coldest recorded. Heavy snowfalls, blizzards, lasting till spring. It was a tough time for mammals (monogamous or not) carrying the embryos of future generations. And perhaps a tougher time for the embryos themselves to grow strong and prepare to leave the warmth of a womb for the purpose of being born.
***
At university I find myself – almost unwittingly – being drawn into Irish societies. I like the language, but not all the paraphernalia that goes along with it. However, in such societies one has to buy the whole package: the céilí music, the narrow nationalism, the anglophobia, the insular arrogance.
I try to upset the package a little bit – the boarding school cussedness in me overcoming shyness. I start hops and act as a DJ for a while in an attempt to introduce pop songs into an Irish setting. Pop songs are global. I mean in Spain they don’t spend all their time listening only to sardana or flamenco. My plan is to win more devotees by making Irish appear open and modern. It lasts for a while, but it is not taken seriously and I myself soon tire of pop songs with their inane repetitions and hyperbolic exclamations of undying love. Words always wear themselves out in the end.
But then of course there was Sinéad.
‘You must put on céilímusic to speak Irish,’ Sinéad says.
According to the philosopher, Santayana, a fanatic is one who redoubles his or her efforts after losing sight of his or her goal. Sinéad Ní Shúileabháin is one of the most fanatical of the Gaeilgeoirí and quite beautiful now. She is no longer the skinny breastless kid I knew from the Liberties. She has emerged from that chrysalis fully endowed with the wonderful curves and bumps of womanhood. How had I missed that transformation? Where had she been hiding? But she wasn’t hiding anywhere. She was there all the time under my nose, visiting my mother regularly, chatting in Irish, and I didn’t even see her.
She is attending the same university as myself, so I sometimes accompany her home on the bus, but talk between us now is always of an ideological nature.
This evening Sinéad is on her favourite hobby
horse decrying the incursions of Anglo-Saxon into Irish.
‘No language is complete in itself,’ I counter.
‘What are you saying?’
‘We’re not complete. None of us is complete.’
‘Your head is all mixed up since you came back from Spain, Derek. You’re corrupted. What would Pearse have made of you?’
I think not of Pearse but of Picasso, of the contorted face of his three dimensional woman trying to look different ways all at once.
I wonder about Sinéad as we get off the bus and she walks beside me with her arts scarf up to her chin. I wonder does she see me physically. Does she see my hair blowing in the wind? Does she see the colour of my eyes? Or am I just a floating concept?
Her lips have turned blue with the cold. How easy it would be to kiss the pink back into them.
It is growing dark as we walk through Saint Enda’s park. Suddenly she grabs my arm.
‘Phew. I got a fright,’ she says in English.
‘What?’
‘Did you ever see a bush in a shadow and think it was a man?’
‘In the Liberties there were no shadows.’
‘Just bushes.’
We laugh. The wind blows up, ruffling the trees.
‘Did you ever see a leaf shiver in the cold?’ I say.
Her smile disappears. ‘We should be talking in Irish.’
***
I am given a part in a play by An Cumann Dramaíochta. I have no inhibitions about acting publicly in Irish. I feel, perhaps somewhat like Mam in her letters, that the language itself acts as a disguise to shelter me. (Could it also have some little thing to do with the fact that my newly discovered Sinéad is involved in the production?). We rehearse in the Damer Hall near Saint Stephen’s Green. In such circles I am known as Deiric Ó Foghlú, the only son of Pádraig Ó Foghlú, the deceased diplomat.
One becomes a different person in a different language. In Spain I was called tranquilo, but I am not reticent in English. And in Irish my name conjures up a person who dances céilí and likes the sound of thebodhrán. But my preferences are pop, jazz, and increasingly, classical music. In England my Irish name conjures up other names: Paddies, navvies, papists, and images of drunkenness, or of terror and the IRA.
Why did my mother christen me Derek when she was such a strong Gaeilgeoir? I mean whatever happened to good solid Irish names like Fiachra or Rónán? Gaelic names could conceal identities to prevent victimisation by West Brit employers or entrapment by the British army. By calling me Derek, was my mother trying to expose me in some way? Was she trying to say I only half belonged?
***
Sinéad is in charge of the lights for the play. She has spent her summer in the Gaeltacht and delights in showing off her blas. ‘Goidé mar ataoi’’ she says, instead of the usual ‘Conas atá tú?’
I can’t discover who Sinéad really is under her masks of Gaeltacht accent and rhetoric and republicanism (the only time she goes to a pub is to sell the IRA organ, An Phoblacht). I don’t know what food she likes to eat, or whether she ever thinks about sex. I would like to ask her out, to go to the cinema perhaps, just to get away for a while from the claustrophobia of this pure Gaelic world. But there is no point in asking her to go to the movies with me. The foreign cultures represented by films would contaminate the purity of Pearse’s vision (echoing Gearóid’s outcry to my mother).
‘Pearse was too good to be true,’ I say.
She gives me a disapproving look. ‘You only think about yourself.’
‘Perhaps, but in an objective way.’
‘There are needs in this country. The North for example.’
‘That’s just something else – one of many things trying to possess a person. I want to possess myself. Do you know who you are Sinéad? Do you really know?’
She doesn’t answer. She just gives me that look again and darts into the theatre.
I play the part of a young man with a vocation for the priesthood but tormented by the love of a girl. It is a common enough theme in Irish drama. After the first night’s performance I am told by the director that theduine ar na soilse(the person on the lights) failed to direct the light on me, and that I had spoken my entire part in darkness. Afterwards, Sinéad tells me that she couldn’t get the lights to work properly, but I know she is lying.
***
Another day she has to call to a drapery shop in Thomas Street – an errand for her tailor father. We pass by Saint Catherine’s church near which Robert Emmet was executed.
She blesses herself as she passes.
‘Roibeárd bocht.’
‘Hanged drawn and quartered,’ I say.
‘British justice.’
‘Imagine watching your own guts being cut out.’
‘Stop é sin.’
She walks ahead of me and turns down Cromwell’s steps.
There are ghosts everywhere she goes.
***
Some weeks later I am sitting in the Rathfarnham garden (I still can’t call it home), resting in a deck chair. It is not a warm day, but sweat is trickling down my face. I have just tidied up the glasshouse and thrown out Patrick’s old seed trays, weedy now and mildewed. I’ve started on the old tree stump too; dug around it. I’ll work on it bit by bit. I feel good, a physical wellbeing, like I’m banishing ghosts.
I’m listening to a phone-in programme on my transistor radio. The presenter is being praised by lots of people, not only for using the Irish version of his name – Tadhg Rua – but also for promoting the Irish language on the national airways. He says ‘Dia duit’ at the beginning of each interview and ‘Slán leat’ at the end, and even sometimes throws in ‘Go raibh maith agat’ between an English sentence. I hear a voice phoning in, ‘Goidé mar ataoi?’ and then committing a broadcasting sin: it continues on in Irish. It is using the language for purposes other than the phatic. The voice is Sinéad’s. I wasn’t concentrating on what she was propounding (she came upon me so suddenly), something about Irish or the North. Tadhg Rua interrupts her fine flow of speech and tells her to speak in English. There is a slight hesitation on Sinéad’s part. She complies and finishes her points in English. Then the presenter says, ‘Slán leat agus go raibh maith agat.’
I meet her afterwards and she is very upset. Why hadn’t she asserted her constitutional right to speak the national language on the national medium? That presenter had no right to prevent her from speaking it. I try to empathise with her, tell her that she was a victim of linguistic tyranny. The presenter was only giving lip service to the language. Tadhg two sides. It was all an act, like what happens on Saint Patrick’s day. ‘How could I have been caught so much off guard?’ she says. ‘What will everyone think? Did your mother hear it?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say, ‘I wasn’t with her.’
***
It’s a sultry summer’s day when Sinéad gets the motor car. Her father bought it for her. She uses it to deliver pants and suits to draperies throughout the suburbs.
‘More and more made to order, less and less made to measure,’ Jack says about the suits as if all human frames are gradually being homogenised.
When I see the car, I laugh. It is a black Morris Minor, 1957 model.
‘You’re the first person under fifty that I’ve seen drive one of those. I bet it doesn’t go more than twenty miles an hour.’
‘Jump in and I’ll show you.’
‘How about going for a swim?’
‘We can collect our swimsuits on the way.’
We speak in Irish for a while. But the sun is shining, forcing a levity in us. Eventually she tires of trying to win me over.
‘If Tadhg Ruasaw me now,’ she says in English, ‘he’d be laughing at me.’
‘Why should he? Your point was about freedom. You have the right to choose. There are two national languages.’
When we get onto the open road, she puts her foot down on the accelerator and the motorcar shakes like a sack of bones.
‘There’s a hole in the floo
r,’ I say.
‘That’s the emergency brake.’ She laughs and revs up the engine some more.
‘Sinéad, take it easy.’
‘Not till you take back what you said.’
‘What did I say?’
‘About Morris Minors.’
‘I take it back. Watch out.’
She swerves suddenly, but is unable to avoid hitting a dog which was nonchalantly stepping off a kerb. The dog scurries for a bit, whining, and then lies down panting on the road, blood oozing from his head. We spread a newspaper on the back seat of the car and bring him to a vet.
Sinéad drives slowly for the rest of the journey. She’s upset about the dog. ‘Will it be all right?’ ‘They’ll look after it,’ I say. When we reach the sea, her humour improves, and we park the car and walk along the beach looking for a sheltered spot.
She slides out of her figurehugging jeans in a sanddune.
‘Don’t look,’ she says, and we both laugh out of the well of memory. And I wonder is it possible she may have left her ideological baggage in some faraway terminal to be collected later?
We run what seems like a half mile to catch the sea. I look at the wide, virtual emptiness of an Irish beach, and I think of the congestion of sprawling flesh frying under a Spanish sun. And I think of space and the lack of it, and single rooms with families and rent collectors knocking down doors, and it is easy to know why Liberties’ children love the seaside.
An extremely fat woman is the only person sitting on the beach. She sits on the hard, wet part of the sand that carries the marks of the waves’ undulations. She is wriggling under an enormous bathtowel. But there is no one looking. No one to give her even a cursory glance, except for me and some gulls.
An elderly man – someone’s father? – stands at the water’s edge. He wears a tweed overcoat and a cap – no respecter of seasons – and looks out to sea.
Sinéad submerges first – women are more courageous than men in a purely physical world. Goosepimples, which I thought were banished atavisms like chilblains, resurface on my arms.
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