The clatter and blare of Dame Street died away as I emerged from the darkness of Front Arch onto the broad cobbled expanse of the quad. It was an impressive vista. Front Square and its environs possessed the tranquil air of a monastic cloister – an unsettling trait, depending on how you felt about ghosts. Trinity was built on lands confiscated from the suppressed Augustinian Monastery of All Hallows which had occupied the grounds since the twelfth century. The newest construction, the Graduates Memorial Building, was almost a hundred years old, and the oldest (not one of the original Elizabethan structures had survived) was The Rubrics, dating from 1700. The sole evidence of the twentieth century was the student body itself, and even they seemed relics of a time past, so aloof, so reserved was their demeanour. I was half an hour early.
I knocked on the front door of House Eight and pushed it open when I got no response. A notice was taped to the wall. ‘Writing workshop top floor,’ it read. Not Glynn’s handwriting. Each door I passed on the way up the wooden stairs was shut, no trace of activity audible on the other side.
The workshop was not at all as anticipated. I’d expected floor-to-ceiling bookcases, as if books would propagate more books, words might self-seed. I’d hoped to step into that photograph of Glynn in his study, I suppose, but there were no bookcases, not even a shelf. The walls were bare as an egg. Plastic chairs and melamine tables were set out on the floor, no better than a staff canteen. A heavier table with side drawers was situated at the top. I placed my foolscap pad on a desk in the middle and glanced up at the clock on the wall. Thirty-three minutes to twelve. The clock was running late.
At six minutes to noon by the faulty clock, the group entered the building. Aisling, Faye, Guinevere, and Antonia. They were cutting it fine. The other three students had already turned up by then; one girl sat by the radiator under the window, the other next to the door. The guy with the ponytail and army fatigues had established a little dugout in the corner. We’d been sitting in silence for maybe five minutes when the door on ground level was thrown open. The sound of female laughter came drifting up the stairs, ascending the building as steadily as fire. Not Glynn then. My disappointment didn’t last long. The group crowded through the door in boisterous pairs, talking, the whole time talking, all at once so as to confuse me. Four women. Two of them girls.
The presence of four silent strangers in the workshop ahead of them did not disrupt the flow of their conversation. The impact of Beckett’s Protestantism and Joyce’s Catholicism upon their respective writing styles was the discussion heading. Their cohesion, their bantering familiarity, was such that I assumed they’d known each other from before. What a surprise it was to learn some weeks later that they’d met on the way in the door. They gave such an impression of an organic whole that perhaps I never saw one without the spectrum of the other three. Even Guinevere. It proved a tricky process extracting her from their chrysalis, to the extent that in our private moments I sometimes sensed them listening in, waiting for me to put a foot wrong, poised to dive in and snatch her back.
A hush fell as the hands of the schoolhouse clock approached noon. All of us by then were seated. You would think Glynn was scheduled to appear with a puff of smoke when the big and little hands connected, never mind that the clock was slow.
‘Jesus, I hate this kind of weather,’ one of them murmured, the eldest. West Brit accent. Hard to miss it. ‘For heaven’s sake, just look at it.’
We turned our heads to the window, synchronised swimmers. A soft rain was falling on the shining slate rooftops. It was almost, but not quite, mist. An avenging angel in the distance brandished a sword before a verdigris dome. There was something immensely restful about this scene. The lack of living souls in it, probably.
‘I knew it,’ said the same woman when noon by the slow clock had come and gone. Antonia. Her standards were unattainably high. ‘Glynn’s not coming. I knew he wouldn’t come. I just bloody knew it.’
The air seemed to go out of the room at this declaration. We had managed to fool ourselves until then, but Antonia was right. The chances of Glynn fulfilling a contractual obligation with an academic institution were laughable at best. His errant behaviour had been fussily documented over the years. He had made a name for himself by defaulting on contracts, ignoring writs, laughing off threats and generally bowling along with apparent impunity, capitalising on the extenuating circumstances allegedly occasioned by the artistic personality. There was nothing to be gained from suing a man with a print run of just a few thousand. Antonia dropped her head into her hands.
‘I cannot believe I’ve been so effing stupid,’ she said, ‘coughing up good money for this.’ Her words were met with rueful assent.
There was a discussion then, at least there must’ve been, though my recollection is that the four, my four, simply stood up and left. They filed out in pairs as before, and the workshop resumed its silence. I stood up and crossed over to the window to observe their exit. They reappeared below on Front Square and headed off in the direction of the Buttery, forming geometrical shapes as they moved along the cobbles – a parallelogram, a trapezoid, a diamond.
A lone seagull wheeled in a circle above the Examination Hall, its cries as distant as a star. I watched until the group had disappeared from sight, and then I watched the empty space that had opened in their wake, obscurely disappointed that they hadn’t taken me with them. But why would they? They did not know me from Adam. Behind me, after a respectable period of time had elapsed, the other three students stole back down the stairs as discreetly as they were able, as if slipping away early from a funeral.
*
Glynn stood us up again the second week. Antonia maintained her position that she knew it, just bloody knew it, always had known it, that Glynn wasn’t going to show up at all, ever, that we’d flushed our money down the jacks and landed ourselves with a pig in a poke. I didn’t question how she could be so adamant, how it was possible to know in advance what Glynn – a capricious man at the best of times – would and would not do. It seemed natural that those around me should know more about Glynn than I knew. Everybody in Trinity was an authority on him.
‘We should report him,’ Antonia said. ‘We should go this minute to the Dean of Studies, all of us.’ She picked up her handbag.
‘But we can’t do that!’ the one with the auburn hair protested. Faye. ‘We’ll get Professor Glynn into trouble.’
‘Yeah,’ the one with the black hair and white face agreed. ‘Then we’ll never see him.’ Antonia hadn’t thought of that. He’d outwitted her already. She reluctantly returned her handbag to the floor.
In the terrible absence of Glynn, I took to the library. Days on end I spent in the English section that October, arriving at opening time, staying put until the lights flashed last orders. On Saturday mornings, while normal students slept, I was in there on the off chance that the muse might creep up when no one was looking, as if inspiration were not a mental process but a ghost. If I could’ve slipped into that library in the dead of night, I would have, those early weeks, searching for a portal through which to access the metaphysical world of letters. I felt it as a constant alongside me, that world; fecund, poetical, but out of reach.
*
Week three. Glynn stood us up a third time. The group turned and left the workshop almost as soon as they’d arrived; a flock of swallows switching direction mid-flight.
The humanities library was located in the basement of the Arts Block. It had bare cement walls and orange carpet tiles. Figures wandered through the forest of bookcases; visible, occluded, visible, occluded. I saw Guinevere there from time to time, twirling a corkscrew curl around her finger as she read. Sometimes her lips pouted to form a particularly intriguing word, I couldn’t help but notice. She had doubtlessly entered that serene state which so deftly eluded me. I didn’t dare approach her. I didn’t dare interrupt. At night, after they’d herded us out of the library to lock up, I crossed back over to the other side of the city, having failed o
nce again to break through to that yearned-for condition, the contemplation of which had sustained me through those long quiet years in England.
One night I happened upon Aisling, sitting alone facing the wall in the Anglo-Saxon corner. It was her chemical hair that caught my attention as I passed, blacker than anything that occurred in the natural world and as magnetic to the eye as a car crash. On the edge of her desk stood a tower of books, stacked carelessly to the verge of collapse.
I padded back to my desk and sat there for a few indecisive minutes. The air conditioning exhaled down the back of my neck, too actual, too pulmonary. I couldn’t shake the image of Aisling’s precarious tower of books. A minor adjustment was all it would take to put right. I could fix it. I could sort it out. It was a simple problem.
I stood up and headed in Aisling’s direction, no notion of what I would say to her, but full of resolution. Would she recognise my face from the workshop? When I rounded the corner, the Anglo-Saxon section was empty. Spanning the length of Aisling’s desk: a scattered fan of books. I don’t know what precisely this scene reflected back to me, but panic ballooned in my throat at the sight of it. The deadened atmosphere of the basement was suddenly intolerable. I packed up my belongings and left.
New Square was deserted, not a soul in sight. The cobbles glistened in the lamplight and drizzle. I was nothing but a black shadow crossing the stones. I veered off the path and pressed my forehead against the façade of the Colonnades. It was as clammy as the wall of a cave. I would describe my state at that moment as borderline murderous. I had left it too late, you see; I saw. The years spent cherishing the aspiration to be a writer had wrapped it up and sealed it off, rendering it as discrete and inaccessible to the substance of my being as a pearl was to an oyster.
It was Glynn I blamed. He had lured me there, after all. He had enticed me to that bleak place only to abandon me to it. Had he materialised at that point, had he just happened to stray past, God forgive me, I’d have taken a run at him. The man wouldn’t even have known who I was.
*
We met in House Eight for the fourth week. Guinevere drummed her fingers, Aisling inscribed the desk with the ornamental dagger hanging from her neck.
‘How long can this go on?’ Antonia wondered out loud.
Faye did her best to put a brave face on things so that the rest of us wouldn’t lose heart. ‘I’m sure Professor Glynn has a very good reason,’ she offered. Antonia wanted to hear it.
The chairs we had assumed that first day had become set fixtures. The group sat up front in a row of four like the school debating team. I was stationed a few rows behind, by no means a jolly presence. One of the other girls was wedged against the radiator, but the second girl, the one who used to sit by the door, hadn’t shown up that week. We never saw her again. The guy with the ponytail was still dug into his corner, the army-surplus jacket on his desk demarking his territory.
Antonia was complaining about Glynn; the usual drill. I wasn’t paying attention to the specifics. I was thinking that I hadn’t known loneliness like it before, despite my years in England. It was the loneliness of being in the company of the group, but not part of it. I gazed at them, at their baffling closed circuit of four. Aisling’s hair was as black and blank as a hole in the universe, a rip in the fabric of reality.
Guinevere must have sensed me staring. I hadn’t made a sound, but she turned around and met my eye and smiled. This was a smile of considerable sweetness. I smiled back and was still smiling long after she’d looked away. The group then packed up and left the workshop in that abrupt, symbiotic manner of theirs. The atmosphere in the workshop sagged. I was almost used to it.
And then, out of nowhere, seconds after their departure, the guy with the ponytail got to his feet. His name was Mike and he spoke without removing his eyes from the window. ‘Lads,’ said Mike, ‘he’s coming.’
6
Melmoth the Wanderer
We each had a favourite photograph of Glynn. Mine was the aforementioned Irish Times shot taken in his study, or ‘The great writer at work,’ as I had mentally subtitled it. Faye nominated the one taken in the early 1970s by the Observer, which was subsequently reprinted in the British broadsheets every time Glynn won a prize, and he was on a roll that decade, go on you good thing. What a rush of fondness that particular portrait generated. He could be a real charmer when it suited him, P. J. Glynn. The photographer must have been a woman. We were as familiar with his face in that shot as we were with the faces of our grandparents. You would swear that the man was not a complete stranger to us all. The jaunty go-heck of him caught by the lens appealed to Faye enormously. This was how she liked to think of him – relaxed, good-humoured, congenial, on the brink of astonishing literary achievement but making no great fuss of it.
He was pictured on what the caption printed beneath described simply as ‘a Dublin street’, leaning at an angle of around sixty degrees against the wooden jamb of what we decided was the door to Bartley Dunne’s. By ‘we’, I mean, of course, ‘they’: the women. The women declared it the door to Bartley’s, and so it became the door to Bartley’s – the fiction-making process in action. I just went along with their reasoning. How they were so positive it was the door to Bartley’s, I have no idea. No definitive means of identification were in shot. Just another of those arbitrary decisions the group arrived at which went on to enter the realm of fact. For all I know, they were right.
The composition of the image was immensely attractive. Faye kept a folded copy in an envelope as a bookmark, delicate as a pressed flower. The interior of the pub, what could be seen of it, formed a narrow column of black ink running the full length of the left-hand side of the frame. In the space between Glynn’s tilted body, the door and the pavement stood a brilliant triangle of morning light, solid and true as an object in its own right. Glynn somehow always contrived to lure the eye toward the unseen. The triangle is just one example.
He had more hair then, and less flesh, and was dressed in old jeans and a plain white shirt. The shirt was open at the collar and rolled up at the sleeves, for all the world a man who’d logged a hard day’s graft. Against the white cotton, his skin looked darker than we knew it to be, and his eyes looked black, not blue. ‘Byronic’ was the word Faye employed. His gaze was candid in the image, amenable even, lacking the customary scowl that appeared when photographers did. In fact, in that picture he almost looked pleased. I would go so far as to say happy.
What is not immediately apparent to the casual observer is that Glynn is dressed for a different season. You have to look at the photograph for a long time, and still there is no guarantee that you will notice this for yourself. I for one did not. Faye had to point it out. It was the telltale plume of white breath escaping from his mouth that had alerted her keen eye. ‘See how cold it is?’ she asked me, tapping the ghostly vapour with her fingernail. I dismissed it as an exhalation from his cigarette. Faye seemed prepared for this response – to have anticipated it, in fact, as if already she had learned to expect no better from me. ‘What cigarette?’ she countered, searching not the photograph, but my face. ‘Show me where you see the cigarette, Declan.’ It was unlike her to be so assertive.
I examined the petal-frail newspaper cutting again. Faye was right. There was no cigarette in Glynn’s hand, though I could have sworn I’d seen one a second before. The other three had remained attentive throughout this exchange. If they’d been darting knowing looks around the table at my expense, these too had escaped my notice.
‘Look at the background figures,’ Faye continued in the manner of a tour guide discoursing upon a great painting, now broadening her frame of reference to encompass the pedestrians on the street. She had given her subject much consideration. ‘Look at the way they’re huddled up, Declan. They’re absolutely perished.’
I could not confute her. The passers-by did indeed look frozen, buttoned into winter coats and wrapped up in scarves, some of them moving at such a clip that all the camera had
captured was a blur of limbs. Glynn’s nonchalant deportment betrayed no vulnerability to the cold against which the ordinary mortals around him struggled. How easeful he looked, the still centre of the image, as if it were perpetually summer in his domain. Antonia, of course, could well have had the measure of him when she pronounced him too effing plastered to register the elements.
This immunity to his surroundings seemed proof of something. It distinguished Glynn as fundamentally, intrinsically different to the rest of us. So entirely preoccupied was that great forehead with matters cerebral there simply wasn’t room left in it to bother with minor details such as the weather. Transported is the word. This appealed to our notions of what a writer was. It was the condition to which we aspired. Glynn was everything in that photograph that an artist at the height of his powers should be, from the ink stains on his fingertips to the dishevelment of his hair. That was the Glynn we had signed up to see, and that was the Glynn we got.
The group backed up into the workshop when they heard the door on the ground floor slam. They resumed their seats with lowered eyes, their defection foiled. Glynn had put a halt to their gallop. I will not say I wasn’t pleased to see them chastened. I threw a triumphant glance back at your man in the corner, suddenly my ally, but Mike didn’t register my smirk. He couldn’t take his eyes off the workshop door. The footsteps were getting louder.
We froze when Glynn at last appeared – you would think he had pulled a gun on us. He paused in the doorway to consider the room and its occupants. Glynn was never a big enough name for him. Hieronymus Bosch, he should have been called. Lucas Cranach the Elder. I was transfixed, as bad as the rest of them. His sheer tangibility was more than I’d bargained for.
He walked to the top of the room and pulled out the chair from the large desk, frowning at it as if it fell far short of his expectations. Still he hadn’t spoken a word. Finally he threw down his bulk and faced us. The silence at that point was absolute. It was not a formal silence, but a stricken one. We agreed later how alarming it had been the way he’d just sat there glaring at us like that, with such forthright disdain, such open contempt, and for such a protracted period of time too. The lot of us were in a rush to discuss him, to blurt our first impressions the second his back was turned, but while the man himself sat entrenched before us, we couldn’t have opened our mouths if we’d tried to.
All Names Have Been Changed Page 4