Ghost Light: A Novel

by Joseph O'Connor

Giant masks of Comedy and Tragedy by the entrances to the lavatories. But the leer of poor old Comedy is distastefully licentious, and the frenzied glumness of Tragedy looks like a clown’s, put on. There is a counter where sweets and orangeade are sold, but nobody is attending it now.

  Why no pockets in a shroud? Could that not be arranged? If one specified it, for example, in one’s Last Will and Testament? Might it not be a comfort, having some little keepsake in there with you? Or perhaps it would be merely an irritant. Your relatives would be loading you down you with photographs and trinkets, letters they should have sent you, curls they snipped off themselves, probably unpaid bills. No, it doesn’t bear thinking about. You’d end up like a pack mule. Better to face eternity pocketless.

  You pay your threepence to the girl in the booth and are directed towards the shadowy passageway, along which are hung posters for films you are not certain you have heard of. Musicals, possibly, for the actors appear so happy, the women smiling manically, their lips redder than a jazzman’s socks, and the men sculpturally handsome with wide mauve eyes and necks slightly thicker than their heads. The auditorium smells of damp, the picture has already started, but you pick up the story easily for you once saw it as a play. A Streetcar Named Desire. You murmur the title to yourself. A beautiful title is half the battle.

  As you adjust to the darkness, you realise you are almost alone, that there is nobody except yourself in the row. With what you hope is a restrained and deftly executed half-turn, as someone seeking out a friend with whom an appointment has been agreed, you see that there is only one man in all the rows behind you, a codger in a raincoat, with an umbrella in the seat beside him fully and inappropriately extended. He is sitting with his hat on, which irks you slightly. It is not done for a gentleman to be wearing a hat when indoors. And one would think they would know that, after all this time. Do they not have wives? Is etiquette quite dead? It matters not that he is alone, that is in no sense the point, for if we all behaved exactly as we pleased while alone, it would be a very fine pancake indeed. But what is to be done? These days, one can say nothing. London is becoming a slum.

  You try to enter the story but the star is too distractingly handsome. You slip the bottle from your carpetbag, a couple of long sips. The boy is not only beautiful; he is an admirable actor, far too luminously skilful for the pictures. He would make a dazzling Hamlet or an American Christy Mahon come home to break the hearts of Mayo. He pouts. He smoulders. He stares. He exudes. He has the eyes of a panther wondering if killing you would be worth the effort. Despite the critics saying he is good, he actually is good, in the subtle ways only a fellow professional would notice or understand: in his turns, in his glances, in the conscientiousness of his diction, every plosive sound audible, every vowel made distinct. We must efface ourselves as we play; one can see that he knows this. The words are everything; we serve them. And Hollywood, with its baubles and faked grandiosities, its vulgarisation of everything tautly fine in the drama (something poor deluded Sara could never quite see), its awards for this, its mansions for that, will probably destroy him before long. Because he is a sensitive man; one can discern it in his sullen mien. A man who would rather be away, who was not made for others, but whose gift will condemn him to the public dungeon of admiration. And it’s well you know the sufferings of a man who becomes admired when to be hated is all he’s been raised for.

  Your tears spring hotly. Ridiculous. Ludicrous. He was not handsome or confident. There is no resemblance at all. The unspeakable embarrassment, if anyone saw. Having no handkerchief in your sleeve, you wipe your eyes with your thumbs. Lord, what is the matter with me today?

  Do you mind that mortifying night when he came to the house? Dear Lord, the humiliation of having relatives. Mammy bowing and scraping, and Georgie in his uniform, and Grannie giving him dagger-eyes all evening. A pig’s head, we had. Sweet Merciful Jesus. And the poor devil doing his best to be everyone’s friend instead of just being himself. It would make a funny play, like in Juno and the Paycock, where the posh suitor, Bentham, visits his girl’s parents in the tenement. Sean O’Casey would be the boyo for the Allgoods, right enough, only nobody would believe the fucking madness for a minute. Sure maybe I’ll have a crack at the writing of it myself. Why not? Couldn’t I do it as good as anyone else? Be thinking up the lines as I’m walking about later? It would pass the time nicely. Never know.

  Honestly, that reprobate in his hat. It is how Germany went wrong. People said nothing about the small things, were afraid to interfere. Really, you should march right up to that blithering ignoramus, up the carpeted rake, it would take you but a moment, and announce with all the indignation only an artist of your powers can summon that there happens to be a lady present. You wonder what he would say. Nothing, probably. A lout the like of that would not even understand your objection.

  The auditorium is warm and dark. Your coat is drying out. That sense, as you walked with him, that he felt freer away from Dublin. His bearing was less heavy, almost kingly. He spoke rarely, cautiously, as you hiked the long knolls. It was as though the air he was inhaling was rationed out by the wood-gods and might be withdrawn if they were offended by loudness. His voice soft as cinders drifting under a bed. In the city it had seemed to you that he was dragging an invisible anchor. He feared fogs as a vampire dreads light.

  Drowsiness seeps up at you from the velveteen seats. You come out of Crone Forest and see him at a distance. He is standing by the wall of a bent stone bridge, dropping fern fronds into the river like a child. You judder back to the picture house, its shaft of bluish light. Now Molly, do not doze. It is not done to sleep in public. A long yawn makes your ears click; you cover your mouth. You try to settle into the picture but it is difficult, difficult. The brandy is dissolving the threads.

  Days and nights pass. Lakes turn a mild blue. A woman is talking about him quietly; you cannot see her through her veil. The words of that silly old letter he wrote after Killiney are bubbling up now, wanting remembrance. They know that you know them. They are buried in you, Changeling, and they want to come back from the dead. You make yourself resurface. Certain dreams are stoppable. Your fingertips so cold, as though emitting a colour. On a sudden the picture stops and the house lights fade up; the projectionist is changing the reels. A slide reading INTERVAL appears on the screen. Pearls of sweat on his forehead, smudging his scribble as they dripped on the paper. And one night you awoke, thinking the cottage was on fire, to see the hearth silhouetting him, roaring and hissing, and he shovelling handfuls of his work into the flames.

  He went swimming in the mornings or when he suffered from headaches, which were brought on by a surfeit of work. And he hunching over the table five hours without respite, the fingertips of his left hand massaging his temple furiously while his right blackened endless pages. When he exhausted his supply of paper he wrote on anything he could find: in margins, on sugar bags, on the frontispieces of books, on flyleaves, in the corners of newspapers. It was a compulsion, a kind of madness, a country to which none would ever be permitted entry, and its flag was his sweat-soaked handkerchief. One could come up to its borders, was permitted to peer in, but would never be granted citizenship.

  The thinness of his wrists. His wren-like appetite; result, so he told you, of his student days in Paris, when money had been so scarce and friends so few that often he had gone to his bed hungry. He had fainted one evening in the rue de l’Université – ‘the world swam up at me, the shadows were so beautiful’. Once, for a fortnight, he had eaten only bread. What would that be like? Only bread. The house lights are darkened and the picture resumes. But it is like watching water. You nod again.

  A cart trundles down Foley Street, drawn by a shabby quarter horse piebald whose lugubrious clop draws children from the yards. His sticks of ramshackle furniture roped on the back – unwanted lampstands, a wrecked armchair, a hatstand with no pegs – like the cargo of the ragman arriving outside your mother’s shop having scavenged the ruins of a mansion
. Dusty old paintings recently de-lofted. The coffin of an oaken wardrobe with its backboards missing. A potted geranium like a kidnapped contessa. A single mattress smirched with cloudlike stains.

  The horse shakes its halter and looks up at the sky. The children approach it tentatively, silent. There is a boy with him – you assume a servant but actually his sister’s child. From a velvetgloved hand he feeds an apple core to the horse. Its munching teeth, skeletal; the gyration of its jaw.

  The carter hefts the bits of lumber down to the pavement with the aid of two men of the slums who have approached the little street drama in search of a sixpence. One of them has only one hand but he is willing to work, his companion says. He’d do as much as a three-handed man, sir. No word of a lie. You come forward attempting to help them and the healthy man looks relieved; it is the maimed one who says he resents the pity of a woman. He served with the Dublin Fusiliers, received his wound at Pretoria. He wants none of your assistance, never will.

  The narrow, bare staircase smells of mildew and stale piss. The wallpaper over the fireplace is peeling. He is standing in the window embrasure, rubbing at the glass with his glove.

  A canework chair. A broken ottoman. Two sundering cardboard suitcases.

  Mouse droppings in the empty cupboards; spiderweb in the chamber pot, a pyramid of empty porter bottles in the corner nearest the door. It occurs to you that it must have taken someone much effort to construct and you feel bad as you take it down. A sheaf of brochures and handbills about emigration to America, their pages rotted together by time and sticky mould. An illustration of Abraham Lincoln regards you from a frontispiece. Someone had altered it obscenely.

  The boy is jumping on the mattress but it doesn’t have much bounce. The carter produces a hammer; his mouth is full of nails. You go about the two rooms hanging the couple of paintings over the burgundy-coloured rectangles left on the wallpaper.

  A mangle. His typewriter. A bockety hatstand. A rug his older brother brought back from China, its colours too vivid for their mother to find it acceptable. Another rug, much smaller, rolled and bound like a scroll, tautened by a man’s belt and two threadbare Trinity College neckties.

  It is already growing dark. He fills and lights a lamp. The beautiful amber glow on his face.

  —Things always look better in lamplight. Don’t you find?

  —Yes, John.

  —I can offer you nothing to eat. I am sorry.

  From your carpetbag you produce the little packets your mother has prepared: sandwiches, a couple of apples, three bottles of porter.

  —Oh how kind you are, Molly. What a supper of delights. Shall we picnic on the floor like Frenchmen in a picture?

  He lolls lengthwise on the Chinese rug, slipping off his walking boots. There are holes in his stockings and his toenails are long. The night is coming colder. There is nothing to burn. He rummages in a tea chest and finds a sod of black turf he once picked up in Connemara.

  He is kissing you tenderly, sometimes whispering your name. He lies back and looks at the ceiling as though regarding a starlit sky. The flames refracted on the overpainted plaster cornucopias; the writhing, happy putti and harps-twined-in-shamrock.

  Someone in a room above you is scraping on a fiddle, a slow air of Thomas Moore’s, ‘Forget Not the Field’, but the player is not skilled and so the higher notes come shriekingly. There is a public house on the corner. You hear the dockers on the street, the whistles and shouts, the blasphemous greetings and summonings.

  —We should go out and find you a hackney. Are you ready, Molly? Your hat?

  —It is late now, John. And very wet.

  —Nevertheless, it would not be proper for you to stay with me here.

  You try to speak gently. It is hard to find the words.

  —We are engaged, after all. And no one would know.

  —Word has a way of going around the town.

  —But when we were in Wicklow – on our holiday – you remember what I mean …

  —It was different in Wicklow, love. I don’t know why. Things are always different in Wicklow.

  —As you wish. Of course. You will be all right on your own?

  —I have been in worse places on my own. I shall be fine. I shall miss you.

  —I shall miss you too, John. I shall think of you all night.

  He touches your face, caresses your cheek with his thumb.

  —What joy when we will be married. We shall never be without each other again. It will be a place of our own. No invaders or nuisances.

  —We can make it pretty and neat. I will ask Mother about a dresser. And curtains.

  —There is no need to do that.

  —She would like to help us, John. She would be offended if I didn’t ask.

  —You deserve so much better, my love. What I would give you if I could. A good house, pretty furnishings, some little place with a garden. I often think of it. I picture it. You rehearsing your lines in a garden. Walking a little orchard with a script in your hand. And a table near a rose bush where I could work when it was fine. And yet you tolerate your old tramper and he little better than a tinker. How did I ever deserve my changeling?

  —I shall be very content being here with you. There will be no happier girl in Ireland …

  You awaken in the picture house, muttering, thirsty. The film is over – you don’t know when it ended. The house lights are excruciatingly bright and there is no sound at all. It is difficult to move. For a moment, you wonder if you are dead. After-images pulsing and fading.

  Fuddled, shaken, you sit there a long time. Is the afterlife a deserted cinema and a bottle in a bag? Is London outside, its October streets and storefronts, its hurryings and worryings and appointments to be kept? Or has everything vanished into whiteout and mist? Is Wicklow outside? Your mother? Your playboy? A room in lower Foley Street you used to imagine, that you never once saw, except in your fantasies? A strange morning indeed. Another sip of the brandy. And the queerest sensation of the many besetting you now is that someone else is composing the day and everything in it. A faraway sentiency has been shaping and sifting, trying somehow to atone and to put matters right. For you. For itself. To edit away its failures. Does everyone feel this sometimes, an opening into space? As a character in a life whose author is invisible but nevertheless laying out our fate.

  You stand painfully, unsteadily, and gather closed your coat. Your mouth is viciously hot and tastes sour. To lie down a long while in some dark, deep room. To hear women singing quietly. To feel nothing. But if God feeds the birds, Moll, they have to dig the worms. And eternity does not begin today.

  ‘Quiet morning for you now,’ you remark to the ticket girl in the foyer.

  ‘Beg pardon, Miss?’ she smiles amiably, glancing up from her True Romance.

  ‘I say myself and that man, dear. Your only two customers. A wonder your employer can keep going. But it is a marvellous picture. I enjoyed it very much. Many thanks.’

  ‘There wasn’t any gentleman, Miss. You were the only ticket I sold.’

  ‘But – I distinctly saw a gentleman behind me. He was carrying an umbrella.’

  ‘No, Miss. There was only yourself.’

  9

  SCENE FROM A HALF-IMAGINED STAGE PLAY

  Curtain-up on a humble room in a tenement house in Mary Street, Dublin, 1908. Shabby furniture and fittings, probably leftover stock from the junkshop. In a corner near a sideboard is a day-bed covered in rags. A dog at its foot, a shabby, bedraggled wolfhound. A ruined middle-aged woman uneasily arranging a table; her son in his twenties, in British Army uniform, drinking porter and playing cards with his shadow.

  MOLLY [entering, nervous]: Mother … Georgie … This is my friend, Mr Synge.

  [He follows her into the room in a miasma of painful optimism, right hand outstretched, hat crushed beneath his elbow, in his left hand a bouquet of wildflowers in a fold of old newspaper, in his right hand a bottle of wine. Her mother comes away from fussing at the table and smil
es at him fretfully, accepting the offerings; her eyes lividly wild with the particular anxiety of those being visited by perceived superiors.]

  MOTHER: You shouldn’t have bothered yourself, Misther Synge. Those are lovely. You shouldn’t have.

  [The lilies might wilt in the wither of her blush.]

  SYNGE [extremely apprehensive]: I am pleased to meet you, Mrs Allgood. Thank you for inviting me to your home.

  MOTHER [equally on edge]: I’m sure you’re welcome, Misther Synge. Will you not stand in to the fire there? There’s a terrible catchin’ cold goin’ the town so I believe. Georgie, quit your gawkin’ and take Misther Synge’s coat. That’s a beautiful coat, Misther Synge.

  [Her brother, with kiss-curl and dirty smirk, accepts the hat and heavy cloak of the interloper while never looking away from his eyes.]

  MOTHER: There we are now. There we are now. That bit of sunshine the last few weeks was the making of us, wasn’t it, Misther Synge? Shure we didn’t know where we were at all.

  SYNGE: Most agreeable, yes.

  MOTHER: And had you a good travel itself out from Kingstown?

  SYNGE: Yes, thank you. I bicycled. The evening is pleasant.

  MOTHER: But you’re not after layvin’ it unlocked? Your bicycle? Outside?

  SYNGE: I … ?

  MOTHER: You wouldn’t leave anythin’ unlocked in this quarter, Misther Synge. They’d rob the spit of an orphan’s mouth and sell it back to him.

  MOLLY [mortified]: Mother, for the love of God – it’s in the hall below.

  MOTHER: I’m only sayin’, with the gougers and gutties does be goin’ the street –