I ran upstairs to phone an ambulance, then came back outside to sit with him on the doorstep until it arrived, afraid to touch so much as his finger in case it hurt him more. He had a horror of being touched anyway, a phobia, sparked by God knows what in his childhood. Giz did not regain consciousness during this period. It struck me as inappropriate that I was the one stifling tears, not him. What had I to cry about, after all?
The tune of an ice-cream van lilted past, and, some time later, the ambulance appeared.
‘Name?’ a medic with a clipboard asked me before they took him away, as if he were a parcel to be signed for.
‘Giz,’ I said.
The medic sighed and redistributed his weight. It was all a great trial to him. He inserted his biro into his ear and scratched. ‘Name?’ he said again.
‘Dunno.’
‘Address?’
‘None.’
They rooted through Giz’s pockets for identification. A set of nickel holy medals attached by a nappy pin to the washing instructions of his ratty tracksuit top was all they found.
*
I said goodbye to Faye and Antonia on the same day, or, rather, they said goodbye to me.
Guinevere phoned one morning. Such a long time since we’d spoken. When I heard her voice on the other end of the line, it was Glynn who immediately sprang to mind. Declan, he’s gone, I thought she was going to tell me. I closed my eyes and swallowed, surprised at the force of my reaction. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take of all this. But all Guinevere wanted to know was whether I’d like to join the others in the workshop that afternoon. ‘Just the four of us,’ she said.
I hadn’t been back to House Eight since the night that Aisling fell, presuming it would already be locked up for the year. No one was using it, not any more, not after all that had happened. But the door was open, and up the stairs I went, listening to the sound of female voices floating down. I had to stop halfway up, gripping the banister to compose myself: for a moment, it had been like the old days.
The three of them were sitting by the windows, sunshine streaming through their hair. I had never seen them in summer clothes before. Faye stood up when she saw me. ‘Declan,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad to get a chance to say goodbye to you before I leave.’
‘You’re leaving?’
‘Yes, I’m going home to Clonmel early. My train is at four.’ I had noticed the large suitcase by the door downstairs. Faye put her hand on her abdomen. ‘Declan, I’m going to have a baby!’
‘A baby?’ I repeated stupidly. I could barely fathom it. It seemed such a bizarre undertaking. This was no time to be thinking of other human beings.
Tears sprang to Faye’s eyes, and she shook her head in wonderment as if she could barely fathom it either. ‘A baby, yes!’ She opened her arms and held me in her embrace, the joy radiating out of her.
‘God, I’m so happy for you, Faye.’
She paused in the doorway of the workshop to take one last look at us. ‘Write,’ she said before she left. And then she was gone. Just like that. It was over so quickly. Her husband was waiting below on Front Square. We sat in silence listening to her descending footsteps, then the front door clicked shut behind her.
The three of us watched as her husband carried her suitcase in one hand and placed the other on her shoulder. You know her husband beats her, don’t you? He was a big mucker type in a maroon jumper, a Tadhg or a Mossy or a Micky Joe, and seemed a few years older than his gentle, pretty wife, though it might have been just that he was a proper grown-up. Someone had to keep the country running. I hardly knew her, I realised as Faye disappeared under the Arch. And now I never would.
‘Well, that’s that then,’ said Antonia. ‘Back to the real world, I suppose.’
Guinevere walked slowly around the workshop. ‘Look at this place,’ she said. ‘It’s like an empty theatre set.’ She rested her hands on the back of Glynn’s chair, then stooped to open his side drawer, her train of thought momentarily arrested – all our trains of thought momentarily arrested – by simple curiosity. What was in the drawer? How had it never occurred to us to look? All the months we’d sat there.
Inside was a map of Dublin. Guinevere flicked through it before replacing it and pushing the drawer shut again. She moved on, trailing her fingertip along our old desks. ‘It’s so sad to think we’ll never sit in this room together again. I can barely believe it.’
‘I’m leaving Dublin too,’ I announced. Suddenly, everything seemed so final. It had been final for a long time, but it only hit me then.
Guinevere stopped walking and looked up. ‘Oh?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing for us in this country. It’s never going to change. It’s never going to get better. The sow that eats her farrow. I’m off in two weeks. Will you come, Guinevere?’
‘Listen to him!’ said Antonia, as if I’d lost my wits.
Guinevere laughed. ‘What, leave the country with you?’
‘It’s going to get worse here. Any fool can see that. There’ll never be any money, there’ll never be any jobs, there’ll never be any future. We have to get out fast if we want a chance at life. Come with me, Guinevere.’
‘Where to?’ she asked softly, ‘Leeds?’
It wasn’t an outright refusal. I crossed the room and clasped her hand. ‘We’ll go to Paris like Beckett and Joyce.’
Guinevere peeled my hands from hers to peer at the jagged purple scar where the metal pin had been inserted. ‘Iron Nails Ran In,’ she said.
‘I’m being serious. Say yes.’
She lowered her head to avoid my eye. ‘Declan, I have to go now. I only came to say goodbye to Faye.’
‘Be there in two weeks. Meet me outside Front Arch this time two weeks.’ I checked my watch. ‘Three p.m., Wednesday a fortnight. Please.’
She picked up her bag and smiled apologetically before leaving. ‘Goodbye, you two,’ she said.
‘You idiot,’ Antonia scoffed as soon as Guinevere was gone. Fuckhead, she had called me. ‘Don’t you realise that if there ever was money in this country, no writer could afford to live here? Glynn would’ve starved before he even got started. Our literary tradition would perish. You better pray it doesn’t change.’
‘With all due respect, Antonia, I didn’t invite you. I invited Guinevere.’
I instantly regretted the harshness of my tone. There was no call for it, not any more. Antonia dropped her chin onto her chest, where she kept it for some moments. ‘You’re right,’ she said eventually. ‘You’re absolutely right. Don’t let me spoil it for you. Don’t let anybody spoil it for you.’
I frowned at what I assumed was more sarcasm. Antonia reached up and cupped my head with her hands and tilted it down to kiss my forehead, allowing her lips to briefly rest there before angling my face to look into hers. She imparted something of great import and clearly meant every last word of it, the urgency with which her eyes searched mine. All I heard was seashell sounds. Her cool hands covered my ears. This I am sure was intentional. It permitted her the temporary freedom to say what she had to say. Antonia had no freedom in her life. She had never been carefree.
When she had finished speaking, she briskly and tightly embraced me, her brooch jabbing my chest. Then she released me and walked away, click-clack, down the wooden stairs in her high heels. She left the building, and I watched from the window until she disappeared through the passageway between the 1937 Reading Room and the Colonnades. She did not look back. I never saw Antonia again. I never saw Aisling again. I never saw Faye again. I sat down at the workshop desk in my old chair and remained in House Eight for the rest of the afternoon and much of the evening, thinking, thinking, furiously thinking, until it was almost dark.
There is so much that I have left out.
*
It was mid-May before I got around to saying goodbye to Glynn. I came upon him in a reflective mood.
It was one of those days that fills you with aching nostalgia for the summer tha
t has not yet been. Such days in the past would have found me paralysed with regret. Regret for what, exactly, it is difficult to put into words. Regret for all the things that should have been happening in my life, but never would. I felt no regret that day as I walked through the broad leafy squares of Trinity. The lawns were scattered with bare-armed girls lost in books. I was new to the sense of completion which engulfed me that afternoon, new to the awareness that a distinct period in my life had come to a close, an era so discrete that already I could see it as a finite entity, a car wreckage some yards back on the road behind me, from which I had escaped unscathed. This knowledge had been hard enough won all the same.
Glynn was in his office in the English Department. It smelled of books and sun-warmed carpet tiles.
‘It’s yourself,’ he said when he opened the door. ‘Come in, come in, sit down.’ He lifted a stack of books from the spare seat to make way for me. The black eye Aisling mentioned had faded without trace, as if that whole hellish night had been a figment of our imagination.
Glynn made a point of shutting his red notebook and removing it from my reach. He stationed his fountain pen on top of it like a sentry, though I had not the slightest interest in trying to steal a glimpse at whatever was written there. Those days were over. He raised his glasses and peered at me across the desk. ‘Your hand is out of the plaster, I see.’
I held it up and flexed my fingers. ‘It is. Good as new.’
‘The walls had better watch out!’ The amusement Glynn derived from this witticism revealed the gap where his front tooth had once been. We contemplated each other’s battle wounds for a moment.
‘So anyway,’ I said, ‘I’m moving to Paris.’
‘Go ‘way. When?’
‘Tonight.’ My rucksack was propped against the wall outside his door.
Glynn raised his eyebrows at this information and nodded thoughtfully for a long old time. It was good to speak to him like that, finally. Like adults, with restraint and without rancour, as if we were talking about people we had once known. Which, I suppose, we were.
‘Tell us: are you still writing about that Flynn fecker?’
‘I am and I amn’t.’
‘Arra.’ He tossed his head ruefully.
I forget most else of what passed between us as my head was suddenly crowded with fresh thoughts, thoughts which had nothing to do with Glynn but were instead a realisation of what it signified to inhabit the world as a man, to possess a past and a small degree of certainty. All new to me at the time, as I say, and a little previous as it turned out, but there it is, there you have it. One thing I clearly recall is Glynn’s announcement of his decision to quit teaching. He issued this statement then coyly examined my face for a reaction. I did not react. What did he want? What did he expect me to say, after everything?
He averted his face. ‘I’ve lost them,’ he suddenly admitted.
‘Who?’
‘My fairies.’
‘Your fairies?’
‘The women. The four girls. I’ve lost them.’
I paused. ‘Yes, I’m afraid you have lost them.’ There was no point in lying to the man any more.
‘They were so beautiful.’
‘They were.’
‘They are still in the world, I suppose.’
‘I suppose they are.’
‘Abroad in the world.’ He liked that idea. His hand described a curlicue in the air, ever the maestro.
‘Yes.’
‘But no longer in my world.’
‘At least you had them, Professor Glynn.’
‘There is that.’
‘And you’ll see them from time to time, here and there, in unexpected places.’
‘I dearly hope so.’
I didn’t tell him that he had driven his fairies away, that he had nobody to blame for the early and terminal disbandment of the group but himself. I didn’t need to tell him. Glynn knew. He was, after all, an artist of personal tragedy, not the noble, stoical kind but the self-inflicted variety. It was why the six of us understood each other so well.
I left him there, racked with remorse, shuddering in pain, already searching for the words to describe it, already groping for metaphors. He had lost the women and recovered his great subject – longing. They were his fairies, alright. Glynn was precisely where he wanted to be, in a paroxysm of torment approaching the condition of ecstasy. Suffering, whilst training a canny eye on that suffering, the artist’s eye, the eye of the imagination.
‘By the way,’ he asked as I was leaving, ‘what do you think of Conversations with a Blackbird as a title?’
Glynn took pleasure in teasing us this way, right to the bitter end. All year, he had led us on, flashing demure glimpses of his artistic self, a raised hem here, a lowered neckline there, taunting us with the notion that our opinions actually mattered to him.
‘It’s a beautiful title,’ I averred as vehemently as I was able. ‘It is absolutely stunning, Professor.’
I knew he would despise this response – the measure of a work of art’s beauty as the criterion by which it was assessed – but that was the whole point. I wanted Glynn to despise my judgement. I wanted him to feel that he knew more than the likes of me and to thereby regain the authority, the courage, the audacity required to proceed. I indulged him to facilitate the engendering of a mood conducive to composition. Nobody wrote about September like Glynn.
Some writers preferred platitudes to no response at all. I had presumed before I knew him not to count Glynn among their number, which shows how little I understood about the chaos of the writing life, the dreadful tumult that descends upon a man. No instructions, no manuals, no progress reports. Just the wanderings of your own imagination. The chaos had to be calibrated every now and then. It had to be shattered by matters of no importance to remind the artist why he had devoted his life to it in the first place. Once Glynn got his dose of platitudes, he could reject their mundanity and feel confirmed in the choices he had made. All the man needed was to feel he had choices. It wasn’t so much to ask. I hesitated before closing the door – the finality was momentarily unbearable – then I pulled it shut on him, gently, gently, so as not to in any way suggest it was a reproof.
He didn’t go with the blackbird title in the end. Electra Is Complex, his novel charting the doomed affair between a middle-aged professor and his young student, was published two years later. His doomed affair and subsequent redemption. Glynn was a new man in his author’s photograph. No longer meat-faced, liver-lipped, clown-haired, glowering. A big, unguarded smile for the female photographer, revealing a gaggle of mismatched teeth, at least one of which I knew to be fake.
*
Which left Guinevere. Guinevere Wren. The name became her. More so than Electra, but these are matters of taste and artistic difference. Would she be waiting for me at the gate?
The farewell to Glynn had taken less time than I’d allowed for, so I sat in the sun on the steps of the Reading Room to await the appointed hour, my rucksack at my feet. I put my head between my knees and contemplated Guinevere’s absence in terms of imagery, how stark the black railings beyond Front Arch would look without her. If this were a Glynn novel, she wouldn’t be there. I was under no illusions.
At one minute to three, the condemned rose and crossed the quad. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the cool darkness beneath Front Arch after the brilliant May sunshine. A pigeon beat its wings in the vaulted ceiling with the violence of something trying to break. I did not falter. I would face whatever was there, or not there. I would go alone. I would leave Dublin without her. I had done it before.
The sunlight, when I emerged on the other side, was blinding. It bleached the world bare of detail. There was nothing. Nobody was waiting. Well then, I said to myself. Okay so. Are you happy now? I stood there in the middle of the entrance, blocking everyone, all the tourists, the undergrads, I didn’t care. Then a hand touched my shoulder. I dropped my rucksack.
I stooped and gathered G
uinevere up, lifted her off the ground and buried my face in her hair. Thank you she says I chanted into her neck, and I take her word for it, I take her word. Around and around we went, revolving slowly, her feet dangling in the air. ‘Are you ready?’ I asked when I was able.
She nodded. ‘I’m ready.’
She accepted my hand and set her calm face to the street, as if joining me in a dance. Through the gates, onto Dame Street, uphill to Swift’s cathedral. I will call this moment the beginning.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to those who read and commented on drafts: Mia Kilroy, Simon Trewin, Simon McInerney, John Boyne and Liz O’Donnell. A very special thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland, An Chomhairle Ealaíon, for its generous financial support, and to Angus Cargill of Faber and Faber, esteemed editor.
About the Author
Claire Kilroy’s debut novel All Summer was described in The Times as ‘compelling … a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts’, and was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was followed, in 2009, by the highly acclaimed novel, All Names Have Been Changed. Educated at Trinity College, she lives in Dublin.
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2010
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Claire Kilroy, 2009
The right of Claire Kilroy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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