No, by the term ‘childlike’, another meaning altogether is here intended. Glynn’s writerly imagination was childlike in its intensity, rendering its surroundings as fresh as if experienced for the first time. He was never found wanting when it came to the profound. When personages of national importance passed away, it was Glynn whom the press canvassed for a quote, Glynn who appeared on the RTE News, his patrician hair nodding compassionately. He was the closest we had to a poet laureate. The urbane jadedness endemic in the work of the next generation got short shrift from him. It was true that his work had gone out of fashion lately. He would have been the first to admit that.
Glynn had spoken eloquently about the nature of the imagination when we first came together as a group without knowing it that filthy wet night in ’81. He evoked it as unknowable and majestic as a star and went on to rue its woeful undervaluation in our society. A number of audience members nodded their agreement at this assertion. The imagination was a faculty shed by most children once they hit double numbers, Glynn continued. It evaporated with exponential momentum until nothing was left by adulthood but a silty tidemark outlining what once had been. It was a sad irony of the human condition, the great writer pointed out, that the taller we grew in feet and inches, the smaller we shrank in scope. It wasn’t an irony at all, of course, we knew that; it was a paradox.
Glynn proposed the theory that same evening that future generations would evolve the imagination out of their genetic make-up altogether. It would come to be regarded as freakish as an atavistic limb – people would pay an admission charge to squirm at its workings. He lambasted the pre-eminence accorded the so-called ‘real world’. No parent would encourage their child to become an artist in the real world. Money didn’t grow on trees in the real world. But what were we without our sense of wonder? he asked the audience. Take the childlike imagination away, and what was left? What was the point? Why should we bother? Did anyone know? Anyone at all? His questions were met with silence.
The theories propounded by the great man that night provide insight into his refusal to grow up. ‘I don’t want to be an old man,’ he had complained midway through his bender the previous week, speaking as if this fate was peculiar to him alone. It’s quite possible his staggering solipsism allowed him to believe it was. It can be appreciated how an artist might feel constricted by the quotidian world with its emphasis on pounds and pence. ‘Banal’ is a word they reach for often, and never with reference to themselves, employing it instead as shorthand for the rest of the world. Western society had been infected by what Glynn called ‘blandular fever’. It was the artist’s duty to swim against that current, he informed us during a workshop. Was he talking about us though, or yet again about himself, when he used that loaded term ‘artist’? We never knew where we stood.
What cannot be as readily appreciated is the artists’ persistence in perceiving themselves as alone in their persecution by the quotidian. This is a monumental failure of the imagination on their part. Spouses and children, specifically, could not possibly comprehend their predicament. Spouses and children, they appear to think, do not suffer like they suffer. No one, they think, suffers like an artist suffers. They believe themselves not made for this world, but worse than that: they believe that others are. The question is, why do they marry, why do they procreate, why do they inflict themselves on the human beings around them if they harbour such low opinions of them? Making certain that someone’s around to take care of them? Securing a captive audience?
A young woman was making a terrible scene in the middle of Front Square, oblivious to the looks she was attracting. She’d have drawn curious glances even had she kept her counsel, so out of place did she look on the college grounds – an ungainly figure dressed in ungainly clothes, like something got from the nuns. Her floral skirt kept inflating in the breeze, revealing solid, mottled legs. A sudden gust blew the hem up as far as her thighs.
So visibly distressed was the young woman by then that she didn’t appear to notice the exposure. Glynn did though. He noticed the girl’s thighs, and he noticed those around him noticing, his colleagues and students, the odd tourist. He couldn’t screen the girl from their prying eyes, although you could tell he dearly wanted to. Nothing he said or did placated her. She didn’t seem to hear him.
‘Do you think she’s maybe deaf?’ Faye asked.
Antonia shook her head. ‘No, she isn’t deaf.’
Glynn gestured towards Front Arch and made to place a guiding hand on the woman’s shoulder, seeking to escort her off the premises. The woman shied as if she thought he was about to hit her. ‘Oh no,’ Aisling whispered, chewing at her cuticles, peeling them off in strips with her teeth. A fazed Glynn retracted his hand. That was a first: Glynn looking embarrassed. We didn’t think him capable. Odd, that he didn’t storm off, his standard cop-out. What hold did this person have on him?
The woman’s skirt blew up to her thighs again, and again she failed to notice. Her white nurses’ shoes were yellowing at the soles like geriatric feet. Ankle socks, at her age, white cotton ankle socks folded over at the hem – the woman had strayed out of her depth with Glynn. She was too young for him, apart from anything else, far too young and gauche. The five of us watched closely from the workshop window. What had he gone and brought upon himself now?
Glynn’s voice, though raised, unfortunately wasn’t raised enough to make out what he was telling the girl, even after we’d opened both windows. He had the courtesy to look sheepish, I’ll give him that. I would go so far as to say guilty. Good enough for him. Served him right. Might put manners on him in future.
‘She’s not exactly his type, is she?’ I observed.
Antonia turned from the window to regard me with withering disgust. Truly, she outdid herself. ‘You are obscene,’ she said. That isn’t his lover. That’s his daughter.’ She returned her attention to the sparring pair below. ‘Bet she’s the one sending the poison-pen letters.’
I looked down at the woman in the quad again, at her flowery dress, her fleshy knees, her permed hair, her sloppy dismay. She was crying now, big blotchy tears that didn’t hold a candle to Guinevere’s. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and Glynn produced a rancid hanky, which she declined. This was Sofia? This was Cassandra? No, I remember thinking. Not possible. She departed too radically from the image held aloft in my mind. Glynn had written about her with bewildered tenderness in The Common-place Book She was his strange fairy child, his troubled sprite, and I was half in love with her.
Glynn cupped his daughter’s shoulders. She submitted to being held in this manner, if not quite embraced – he tried to draw her to him but she cowered and he immediately desisted, knowing better for once in his life than to push his luck. She was almost as broad as him, the poor graceless girl. Those ridiculous, matronly, ill-fitting clothes. Where had she gotten them? Not from her mother, that was for sure. Gladys was a striking, statuesque New Yorker who wore her silver hair in an angular bob, hardly the drudge we made her out to be. We demonised her to suit our purpose, which was to lionise Glynn. We required a figure of grand proportions in whom to invest our faith and therefore glorified Glynn as a tragic hero, or tragic anti-hero at least.
The breeze plastered Sofia’s hair across her face. It stuck to her tears and snot. She permitted her father to disentangle it, and he carefully tucked it behind her ears. The wind whipped it straight back into her eyes again, and she lowered her head in defeat. How had Glynn engendered this shambling, big-boned creature? Nothing by his hand was this crude, this unworked. She was his only child.
The four women were hungry to construct a narrative, a family saga, out of every tiny gesture Glynn and his slovenly daughter exchanged. Their attention was almost predatory. It was a wonder the intensity of their combined gaze didn’t set the Glynns on fire. I, on the other hand, no longer wanted to know. It was a shattering disappointment that Glynn’s offspring wasn’t the match of him. Such a disappointment, in fact, that I felt cheated.
My overriding need to believe in some transcendent essence had been dealt another blow. There was no unquenchable spark of brilliance. It had petered out by the time it reached Sofia. She resembled her father only in stubbornness.
A strange thing started happening then: my disillusionment with Sofia began to infect my high opinion of Glynn, dismantling him before my eyes like a degenerative virus. Had his unquenchable spark of brilliance petered out by the time it reached Sofia, or had it petered out also in the man himself? Was it possible that Glynn was now every bit as ordinary as his daughter? Had we been hasty in our appraisal? He hadn’t written in so long. He hadn’t written in years.
Sofia’s shoulders sagged in capitulation as she conceded Glynn a little suppose-so nod. The fight had gone out of her by then. Conflict was not her natural disposition. She didn’t take after her father in that regard either. Glynn still held her upper arms and was speaking entreatingly to her slumped form. He wished she’d stand up straight for once in her life and kept rolling her shoulders back to try to straighten her frame, but she just slouched forward again. Twice he gently shook her, trying to rouse her, to no avail. Sofia kept her eyes on the cobbles.
His dishevelled girl swayed on her feet as if her father’s words had lulled her into a trance. She reminded me of Aisling at that moment, the way she lost herself. Glynn tipped a finger under her chin, attempting to raise her face. This level of intimacy proved a step too far. Sofia snapped out of the trance and shoved Glynn with both hands so violently in the chest that he staggered backwards. Her face was marbled red and white.
‘I hate you, you cow!’ she screamed. You cow; there was no mistaking it. The only words we’d caught from the entire exchange.
‘Deary me,’ said Antonia, folding her arms with satisfaction. Sofia’s outburst had hit the spot. Antonia loved that sort of thing – not other people’s distress, but their botched mismanagement of it. Made her feel better about her own life, I suppose. At least Antonia knew how to conduct herself during a dramatic crisis. So she liked to think.
Sofia turned and ran away like a walloping great child, flat-footed in her white nurse shoes, bumping into students along the way before disappearing under Front Arch. Glynn just stood there watching her recede, the rancid hanky still in his hand. Faye said it was enough to break your heart. Mmm, I murmured along with the others, but I was glad to see the back of her.
Suddenly the women crowded around Guinevere, who was standing with both palms pressed against the wall, leaning her weight against it. With her eyes shut like that, and her lips drained of blood, her face was as colourless as a death mask, as Aisling’s.
The other three elbowed me out of the way and lead her to the door. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked, but none of them answered. ‘It’s okay, chicken, we’ve got you,’ Faye was coaxing her. I followed them out to the landing. They were helping her down the stairs.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked their descending backs, as if Guinevere couldn’t speak for herself. ‘Is she going to be okay?’ I trailed down the stairs in their wake, yapping at their heels. They entered the women’s toilet. I grabbed Antonia’s wrist just before the door closed behind her. ‘What the hell’s going on? Tell me.’
‘It’s her period, fuckhead.’
The door slammed shut in my face, leaving me standing alone in the empty corridor. Quiet out there, after the commotion. It was as if they’d passed into the wall. That door was as good as a wall to me. I could not pass beyond it. A plate sticker of a matchstick woman warded me off like a skull and crossbones. The triangular skirt and spherical head seemed less a representation of womanhood than a delineation of man’s limited understanding of it.
I could hear them inside, murmuring, crooning, their voices pitched low to deliberately drive me mad. What rites and rituals were under way in there? It should have been a question mark depicted on that plate sticker, or a set of quotation marks containing nothing. A pair of mirrors adjusted to reflect infinity. A pentangle, a sprig of hemlock, twigs bound into a bundle. The circle and triangle didn’t begin to cover it. Fuckhead, Antonia had called me.
Glynn rounded the corner, catching me with my ear pressed to the door. I jumped back to find him at the far end of the corridor, battle-scarred from his skirmish with his obtuse, abstruse daughter who had just called him, of all things, and in front of everyone, a cow. You couldn’t make it up. On his face was the same expression I felt written all over my own, a combination of resentment and disbelief.
He angled a weary eye at the isosceles triangle on the plate sticker, then down at me hovering below it. Big white ovum, tiny wriggling sperm, whining for admittance to the female toilets. A no-win situation, if ever he saw one. He placed a heavy hand on the banister and a leaden foot on the stair. ‘Are you right?’ he asked me gruffly, but fondly enough all the same. I nodded and followed him up.
21
Woe was general all over Ireland
‘Here Comes Everybody,’ Glynn said glumly when the four women finally joined us upstairs, having taken their sweet time. Aisling had embarked on a novel. That was the day’s big news. She distributed a partial manuscript to each of us when her turn to read came.
It was like one of her poems, only more so. I had not the slightest notion what it meant. There were over thirty characters in it, as far as I could make out. It shuttled back and forth in time through major civilisations: Hellenic, Celtic, Mycenaean and one wholly imaginary one – at least, I think it was wholly imaginary. It was written in a compulsively rhythmic Dublin street argot which was part observed, part invented. The Peamount Tuberculosis Hospital functioned as some class of portal. Sickness was a major trope. ‘It’s part one of a trilogy,’ she told us after she’d read out the first five pages. Her reading was met with silence.
When queried by Glynn, Aisling described the novel as the application of the apparatus of string theory to the traditional murder-mystery genre with a view to elucidating the chaos rife in our daily environment, from which there is no escape.
‘I see,’ said Glynn, leafing through her manuscript, pausing to read paragraphs at random. He was frowning. ‘And you’ve been working on this all year, have you?’
‘Em, no,’ said Aisling. ‘I started it this week.
‘This week?’
‘Yes. Monday.’
Glynn flicked to the end of the manuscript. Two hundred and sixteen pages in length. In three days. Two days, actually – Aisling had been with us since half eleven. He raised his glasses to his artist’s eye to peer at the girl. How stark she looked in the vivid company of the others, a black and white photograph in a roomful of colour, a figure from a past century transplanted to the modern age. ‘Have you been sleeping, Aisling?’ Glynn asked with a kindness we didn’t know he had in him. Aisling smiled shyly and shrugged, as if she wasn’t really sure. Her eyes were dark and glossy.
Glynn invited her to read a little more, though I wished he hadn’t. I was rapidly losing my bearings, such as they were. How had the girl managed to write so much in two days? It wasn’t physically possible. Syncope, the novel was called. Even the title was a reproof. I had no idea what it meant. Had she made that word up too? I glanced at the faces of the others for guidance. They gave nothing away, as usual.
Aisling leafed through her manuscript and settled on a passage about halfway through. We opened our copies to the designated page as if it were a hymnbook. This extract was entirely different in character to the novel’s opening, consisting solely of dialogue. Dialogue was my terrain. It was the only thing I was good at, the only thing the girls ever praised me for. Even Antonia had assented, sort of. (‘Have you considered trying your hand at a screenplay instead?’ was how she phrased it, meaning she thought my descriptive prose was crap.) Turned out Aisling had a natural flair for voices which far outshone mine. This was a gift her poetry had kept firmly hidden under a bushel.
Her switch from poetry was both abrupt and wholesale. Her first prose endeavour did not even have the sa
fety net of being a short story. It was a shot at a novel and therefore possessed all the latent threat of a novel, all the danger, all the potential. A trilogy at that. Aisling had dived off at the deep end. I couldn’t get a handle on the words in front of me. The piece was so good that I was unable to quantify it. All I discerned from hearing her read was that I was no good, I should give up.
She read in her customary way, to which I was unable to grow accustomed: head lolling broken-necked over the page, arms dangling lamely by her side – what in the name of Jesus was wrong with her? The curtain of hair, blue-black as a magpie’s wing, concealed her face and the source of her voice, which was ventriloquial at the best of times but now seemed to be emanating a whole yard shy of her. I got it into my head that it was no longer Aisling under there. Were I to part that heavy curtain, I did not know who – or what – would look back at me.
Aisling’s second reading was met with another silence from us and an impressed nod from Glynn. The fictional space should never be cosy, he had recently warned us. Glynn didn’t rate Dickens for the same reason he didn’t rate Mozart. Not enough doubt. Didn’t reflect the world. That’s why he responded so positively to Aisling’s piece that day: it was doubt incarnate.
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