The China Factory

by Mary Costello

  ‘They went out to visit Maud’s aunt, or some relative,’ I said. ‘They walked along the sea cliffs. Afterwards Yeats wrote a poem, “The White Birds”, about that day.’ I did not say that the poem held the wish that the two lovers be together forever, like the seagulls. I was not sure what I felt. I had nothing to pit the day against, no past loves. We walked around the city. In a pub, in a moment of joy and brief forgetfulness, she put a hand out to touch my arm and then, remembering herself, she shrank back swiftly, painfully, as if stung. It was this nervousness and her nearness that moved me. Nothing more. That day a huge Irish wolfhound had come towards us on the pier and in panic she’d crossed to my other side. I should have taken her hand. I saw how easily she was shaken—startled by the train’s sudden jolting or by car horns or cries on the streets. On the way home the train slowed and stopped in the middle of nowhere and in the eerie quiet of the carriage she looked out at a dark forest. I felt a wave of tenderness for her, for the part of her that so feared the world.

  What came to mind in that moment were afternoons at university with my head full of Homer, sitting next to a fellow student in Greek Studies, and being briefly, easily, understood.

  I wanted to want her that day in Howth, and other days. I wanted to charge our moments with romance. But as soon as she showed any sign of closeness or keenness or intimacy—even the mention of a next meeting—I withdrew in sullen silence.

  One February night she came to my aunt’s door. ‘I’m going away,’ she said. Her voice was strained. ‘I have a job offer in London.’ My heart gave a little flutter. I felt such relief. ‘Unless you want me to stay,’ she added.

  That evening last summer after meeting her on the road I came home and opened a bottle of wine and let The Köln Concert fill the house at high volume. When Jarrett began the climb in the first movement, I felt each pensive note brush my thoughts, I felt him pluck silence from inside me and put notes on it, put an act of faith in it. It was the same quiet collapse I’d felt on first hearing it thirty years ago. The notes rose and swelled and then fell away in that beautiful mesmeric descent. All my life music and books have been the refuge of my mind, the means of striving towards something pure and absolute and sublime. But how can I know what poets and musicians know? They suffer. They feel deeply. They weep for parched sparrows. And for some every angel is indeed terrible. Once I read a story about a woman whose job it was to care for an old bedridden man. The old guy still craved physical intimacy, and one day, moved with compassion, she locked the door and took off her top and let him fondle her breasts. There are some people for whom one will give almost anything and tolerate almost anything because of what they have suffered, because of the high order of their souls.

  Over the years, over long winters and occasional melancholic nights I would often think ‘How bad could it have been, marriage?’ Other men manage. It would have brought its comforts—a family in whom to hope, a wife to direct a man outwards. Then I would find myself behind a woman in a queue and my eyes would fasten on her heavy arms or on flesh bulging over a band of her clothing and I’d feel a small jab at the base of my spine. Or I’d see a local couple drive by on a Sunday afternoon, the back seat full of kids, a wife in the front, and in the man’s face a glimpse of the cloying nature of domesticity. I’d turn in my gate, open my door, enter my quiet sheltered life with astonishing relief. She sent me a card that first Christmas, her address on the left-hand side, and a PS underneath. If we’re good, we’ll keep. They did not sound like her words, but I knew what it took for her to write them.

  A year after she left, in springtime, my aunt suffered a stroke and was dead by the following autumn. She left me her house and it was the local builder whom I’d hired to do renovations over a year later who told me of Suzanne’s return. He was building a house for Tom Cleary, he said. ‘I believe the sister is back from England.’ He must have seen something in my face or known of my connection. ‘Did you not hear? Oh she’s back a while now but no one has laid eyes on her—she doesn’t go out or go to Mass or anything, and if you ever called up there there’d be all this shuffling and whispering and running around inside before they’d answer the door. The mother doesn’t let on that the daughter is back. In fairness, the brother is a nice fellow… She was a nurse in London, I believe.’

  That winter I saw something that knocked me sideways. One morning in the dark I was awoken by a strange prompting. Something drew me outside. The world was encased in frost. I walked along the road and up the hill and into a field. My breath came in little bursts of vapour. I walked deep into the fields and there, ahead of me, rose a colossal ghostly silhouette. Horses… seven, eight of them, standing still and silent. Even when I drew close they did not stir. They looked at me and I at them, in perfect accord. Then the sky lightened and a ray of sun broke through and blazed on the horizon and steam rose from the horses’ backs and their coats shone. Still they looked at me, with dark patient eyes. I have never felt such wholeness, such oneness.

  No, that is not correct. There was an afternoon long ago at university, with the sun slanting in through high windows and beside me, in the seat next to me, a pale youth from the west of Ireland, with fair to reddish hair and delicate cheekbones and tired misty eyes. Whenever he spoke he cast his eyes down, and his eyelids flickered. I would see him in the refectory among loud youths from the country, and I had an impulse to say, They are not your kind. His hand lay on the desk inches from mine that day. Something tender and unsayable lay there too. Perhaps it was the intensity of the Greek discourse, the tragic heroes and their reliance on the gods, and a wish on my part to inhale everything pure and radiant and divine then, but his presence and the still dreamy air of that afternoon filled me with a great upflow of joy, of benevolence for all of mankind.

  For a while, forty years ago, Suzanne’s return subverted my thoughts. I suspected a child, given up in England—or maybe even kept and concealed there in the house with the mother’s collusion. Such things happen. No one saw anything and gradually, over the years, people forgot and the story faded. I forgot too or doubted that she was ever inside that house. Years later when her mother died she still did not come out. Her brother delivered provisions to her door. Then, following a long illness, my own mother died in Dublin. Sometimes, feeling guilty that my grief was not greater, I would drive over by the lake at night and find myself approaching Suzanne’s house. What did I expect—that I would come upon her taking the night air too, or out walking a large odd-looking child on a lead under the stars? I remember the moon, its thin fragile crescent hanging delicately over her house. I walked down to the lake’s edge one night and let the water lap at my feet. I am not certain there was feeling in my heart for anyone—for my dead mother, for Suzanne, even for myself. I had my life, tight and contained, and few regrets. I drove to school every day, attended to my teaching duties, hoping—particularly in the early years—that my teaching duties, hoping—particularly in the early years—that something, Homer perhaps, might affect the boys and alter their lives. I came home in the evenings and listened to music and cooked and read late into the night. In summer I took trips—Athens, Vienna, Bayreuth. Little, apart from the odd metaphysical ache, ever caused a ripple on this composed life. Occasionally, moments in the classroom when I’d be pulled up by a line or an answer or an insight from a boy. Moved by a recitation of Socrates’ speech from the dock, or Achilles’ lament for great-hearted Patroclus. Such pitiable things. Once, after a morning considering Orpheus, I read aloud from Rilke’s sonnet and there, standing on the raised dais in my classroom, I came briefly undone. I was hearing the notes of Orpheus’s lyre, seeing his anxious head glance back and glimpse Eurydice, feeling his bereftness as he ascended the underworld without her. She’s dead, Hades said, You cannot have her back.

  Last year I retired. I do not know where the years have gone. I do not know, either, what difference, if any, I ever made to a boy’s life. There were, over the years, a few whose sensibilities, whose casts of m
ind, were similar to my own, yet I never felt compelled to follow their progress or career paths. Perhaps I was afraid I might see in these boys my own unborn sons. I must have known I would never engender life like other men. That the nearest sires I would have would be those boys in the desks before me, the only offspring the gods and goddesses pressing forth from the pages, needing delivery. On weekend visits to my mother in the early years I would occasionally run into old school and college friends in the city, with a child or two in tow, and I would smile and admire the children and enquire after their lives. One day in a bookshop a college classmate asked if I’d heard about Cóilín McDonagh. My eyes might have narrowed a little at the name, I might have had a brief intake of breath, bracing myself for news of me that somewhere on the west coast of America, Cóilín had crashed his motorcycle into a tree and been killed instantly. As he spoke I was staring at the spine of a book behind his head, and thinking of palm trees and ocean swells and open-topped cars on a Pacific highway. And fine cheekbones being smashed against a redwood. I think now that leaving university was my first real encounter with grief. A sickly unease in those final weeks, a paralysis, a constriction of the heart at the prospect of parting. But what could be done? What could be said? There was no call for farewells.

  I am determined to travel more. Last month I went to Berlin. The Middle East—Jerusalem—calls to me. I picture myself, a contrary old atheist, moving along the narrow alleys of the city, stopping to talk to old men in doorways—Jew, Christian and Muslim alike—curious to glean something ancient and abiding in their faith and catch a glimpse of the God gene that has bypassed me or lies inert within me. Lately I am intrigued by genes, by the randomness of genes, the randomness of any gene being switched on or off, and how that determines what we are, what makes us one thing or another.

  These were my thoughts driving home from the airport last month. As I neared the village I drew up at the T-junction and yielded. A slow-moving hearse drifted into view and passed before my eyes, heading towards the cemetery. Half a dozen cars crawled behind. I turned right into the village and stopped at the shop for milk and bread.

  ‘Whose is the funeral that just passed?’ I asked the woman behind the counter.

  ‘Oh, that Cleary woman—you know the odd one with the bike from over by the lake? The brother found her dead in the bed the other day.’

  *

  She had lasted just one summer. The thought struck me that she might have had a premonition, a foreshadow of her own death, and opened her front door in early summer and ventured out to confirm that this place—such a place as this—had really existed, and she was not mad after all. Or only a little mad—just enough to discern some dark knowledge, a latent memory in her cells that sensed the stirrings of a new omen.

  I went over there that evening, parked in the pub car park and walked along the road towards her house. Behind me I could hear the old Guinness sign swinging in the breeze. A bird flew low across my path, heading for the lake, its long scraggy neck almost level with my eyes. Then I was standing between the two pillars in front of her house, looking in. It was a long low bungalow with three small windows and a green door. I walked in the drive and around the back. Her bicycle was lying against the gable end of the house. A bag of turf sat outside the back door. I peered in the windows but could make out little through the dense net curtains. I tried the handle of the back door. A few fields away, a cow lowed. I sat on a low stone wall for a while. I did not like to think of her silence, like a dark mass enclosing her for years.

  I was gazing at the window, squinting at the lacy pattern on the net curtains. Then something compelled me to rise and step forward. Something guided my hand to the base of the window frame. It slid up easily on its sash. I parted the curtains and raised my leg and bent my back and stepped into her bedroom. The light was dim. A clock ticked loudly. There was an unmade bed, a wardrobe, a dressing table, a private feeling. I walked through the house. In the kitchen there were newspapers strewn on the floor. Dirty dishes in the sink and half-filled jars and tins and packets of soup on the table. I wandered back to her bedroom and opened the wardrobe. The sickly smell of unwashed jumpers, old shoes. I turned around. I wanted something—a prayer book, a photograph, a diary maybe. I opened a drawer of the dressing table. Two pairs a diary maybe. I opened a drawer of the dressing table. Two pairs of dark socks that might have belonged to a man or a woman. Rosary beads. In the bottom drawer a medical textbook for nurses. I picked it up. From inside the back cover I lifted out a yellow page from an old newspaper, unfolded it and moved to the window for light.

  It was pages three and four of the London Evening Standard, dated 22 November 1971. Six climbers dead in Scotland. Fighting in the Boyra peninsula in East Pakistan. The death of a famous footballer, aged forty-seven. Near the bottom of the page a court report. I began to read. The two defendants, aged nineteen and twenty-six, were convicted of robbery and aggravated sexual assault with intent of degradation on a 23-year-old Irish nurse in Dulwich. The victim was not named. They broke into her flat early one morning armed with a wheel brace and a hacksaw and subjected her to a terrifying ordeal lasting several hours. They cut off her nightdress and underwear with a Stanley knife, threatened to cut off her nipples unless she lay face down on the bed with her arms outstretched. With the Stanley knife they sliced her from neck to waist, slashed her buttocks, carved a vile word on her back. They sexually assaulted her with the wheel brace. Before they left they ransacked the flat and cut off the woman’s hair.

  In the dusk the corners of the room had disappeared. I stared at the unmade bed. I thought of an earthquake, a lateral shifting of the plates at her core. I pictured her waking in the mornings in that room, staring at the ceiling, then opening the window to a blue sky after night rain. And being caught for an instant, being taken down again by a memory, a dream, an aftershock. Don’t tell me she didn’t remember, don’t tell me she didn’t dream. And why did she not howl?

  She was in her coffin a mile away. I thought of the tiny drop of time, the second—the fraction of a second—when the spark of an idea is ignited in a criminal mind. The second that explodes into being and begets an act that changes everything. That changed her, and flattened her out, and spread her so thinly that the space between parts of her, the space between her head and her heart, between all her nerve endings, grew so vast that she became almost entirely empty and in no time at all, in a morning, she disappeared.

  And where was I that morning? Taking tea and toast with a novel propped, measuring out with exactitude a spoonful of sugar? Watching fog crawl over my back wall and tracking a thought with an intensity of being, as the blade pressed and pierced and punctured?

  Suddenly she was standing at my aunt’s door again, at my mercy. Would a nod have saved her, altered her fate? Or does fate defy alteration and play out as originally intended, a little later perhaps, a little differently? Would another calamity have lain in wait for her? For us? A tree crushing our car on a winter’s night, crushing the two of us and our children? I think of these things now. I see possibilities everywhere—I see the thin veil that separates us from disaster. I see it shimmering above bodies of water, and loose slates; I see it in lightning flashes and speeding motorbikes; even in the rafters of my own attic, I see it lifting. And what good is Homer now? And where have all the gods gone—will Zeus climb down and help me? And, when the time comes, who will pay Charon?

  Now I sit in the static of each day. I sit and wait for winter or for some hint of what to do next. I do not think of Suzanne as dead. I think of her in a dark room trying to recompose herself, rummaging for some remnant of memory, reaching out for an organ—an eye, a heart—and trying to fit it inside her. I dreamt of her the other night. I was walking along the road beyond by the lake. It was dusk and she was coming towards me again, her hair wild. As she drew near she looked at me and opened her mouth and began speaking in tongues.

  THE ASTRAL PLANE

  ‘I tried to give up God once,’
she said.

  It was morning and they were driving along the coast road at the edge of the Burren. On their left the Atlantic lay very still and beautiful and blue, and for a moment she found it almost impossible to think of it as merely sea.

  Her husband looked straight ahead. ‘You tried to give up God?’

  ‘Yes, years ago. Before I met you.’

  ‘And?’ he said, turning briefly to look at her, ‘How did that go?’

  She looked out the window. He had a way of making her smile. ‘Not very well, actually. He punished me—He took away my sleep.’

  For as long as she could remember, she had pondered God. It wasn’t so much fear of Him as gratitude for the particular life given, a good life, and a sense that at any moment, in her next breath, it might all end.

  They were silent then and she was grateful. She had thought that a week away from the city would reveal some truths, some answers, and fix her thoughts more firmly. Outside the car the sun washed everything in its pale light, giving the stone walls, the lunar rocks, even the morning itself, a feeling of fragility.

  Something came adrift in her that day. They drove to Spanish Point and sat on the rocks by the water. Adam took her hand and ran his fingers over hers. That evening they sat in the hotel lounge watching the other guests come and go—middle-aged Americans, young couples with children, businessmen down from the city for the golf at Lahinch. Outside, the light was fading. She got up and went to the window. Soon the moon would rise. There were rose bushes and fuchsias in the borders. There was no tree for miles around. Sometimes on their drives they came upon a lone bush on the roadside and she was stirred by its stark beauty, its forlornness.