John finds it difficult to make much sense of his past life, and it is too late to create an alternative. He reads the New Testament in his room, attends the numerous and chaotic services when the wooden gong calls the monks to the central church from early in the morning until late at night. The services are sung or intoned; the Abbot and his deputy have fine, deep voices. On his previous visit John had been baptized, which enabled him to go to church. Now he feels it was an important step towards a destination that he cannot yet see clearly. He is seeking clarity about the world, forgiveness for his past violence in Spain and in Normandy, and an understanding of himself and his patchwork existence. He goes to confession in his first week, and although his confessor is different his sins are the same. He needs to refresh and confirm his earlier absolution.
This is John’s fourth visit to Mount Athos. His first trip was accidental. Kate had an assignment from the New York Times to write about the Greek monasteries and asked John to cover Mount Athos, where women were not allowed.
‘Even American women war correspondents, would you believe,’ she had said to John. ‘I tried to persuade them to make an exception and was told I was arguing with a thousand years of history. So I gave up.’
‘American women would make the monks especially nervous,’ said John. ‘It’s not aimed at you especially. They don’t allow anything female on the peninsula. No cows, no hens, no mares. I’d love to go. I haven’t been out of Ireland since the war; I don’t count Cheltenham.’
On his first visit he had been little more than a tourist, making copious notes, taking photographs and finishing up at the Stavronikita monastery on the north of the peninsula. After Kate’s death he went back a second and a third time to Stavronikita for a month’s retreat, drawing from his days there a comfort that stayed with him back in Ireland and made him eager to return.
He now spends every evening with Elder Daniel, who has been appointed his mentor by the Abbot. After he has been at the monastery for three weeks, the Elder says, ‘This time I think you will stay with us, enter fully into the life here, and the life hereafter,’ and John realizes he is not going to return to Ireland.
He drafts and redrafts a letter to James, knowing that sending it will be an irrevocable step.
Stavronikita,
Mount Athos,
19 July (by the Gregorian calendar)
My Dear James,
This is my third trip to Mount Athos (four, if you include my first visit as your mother’s surrogate reporter), and after weeks of contemplation and prayer I have decided not to return to Killowen. I have found a way of living here at Stavronikita that suits me.
They have encouraged me to stay and given me my own permanent room. Later this month I will formally become a novice; I am already baptized. I have made myself useful in the garden, and indispensable in the fishing boat. Perhaps the need for fresh fish explains their willingness to take me on! I have started to learn bookbinding, and I hope to be allowed to work on the wonderful manuscripts here, still not properly catalogued and many needing careful repair. Binding sacred texts, fishing and gardening seem a better way of ending my days than worrying about the two-thirty at Thurles.
Would you do me a great service and wind up the Killowen yard? Michael Molloy has been running things for two years now; I suggest he takes himself and as many of his owners as he can persuade (that will, I think, be most of them, as he’s patient and knowledgeable) to Dan Herlihy’s yard on the Curragh. Dan will welcome Michael if he comes with a dozen decent horses. You should decide what to do with the house. I think most of the mortgage is paid off. Once I am a monk I must give up all my worldly possessions, and I have made arrangements with our Dublin lawyers to transfer everything into your name.
What I have found here is, by definition, hard to explain; it is what St Paul calls in his Epistle to the Philippians, “the peace of God, which passeth all understanding”. I know this is the right way for me. I also know that I will see less of you as a result, and nothing of Linda, and I regret that. I have been at best a fitful father, although one who loves you and is proud of you, something I’ve never found easy to show. Please come and see me soon. We welcome visitors.
Your loving father,
John +
‘He’s gone mad,’ says Linda when James reads the letter aloud over breakfast. ‘A retreat for a month is eccentric enough. But living there as a monk? And we can’t keep Killowen going.’
‘I don’t think he’s mad at all. He’s had a turbulent life, father killed on the Somme, mother executed by the IRA, ten years of war in Spain and Europe. He killed nineteen Germans with a Sten gun when he won his MC.’
‘Goodness.’
‘He’s a curious mixture, my dad, you think he’s only interested in horses and then he surprises you. There’s more to him than your average Anglo-Irish racehorse trainer – Ma wouldn’t have stayed with him else. I realized that at Ma’s funeral. He believes. And now he’s decided to do what he believes in. I agree it’s odd, but I admire him for it.’
‘You should go out and see him.’
‘I will. But it won’t be a mission to change his mind. He’s about to become Brother John, he’s not Major Burke, MC, formerly of Derriquin Castle, any more.’
James makes the trip out to Mount Athos in early September. His father has arranged his permit and sent careful instructions on the route across the peninsula to Stavronikita. James needs a little more than the four hours he had been told to allow for the journey, and he is impressed that his sixty-nine-year-old father had made the trip on foot. John meets him on the hill above the monastery, and they embrace. Then James pushes his father away, looks at him and laughs.
‘I like the beard. I’m not sure they would approve in the Kildare Street Club. You’ve gone quite grey.’
‘It saves on razor blades, and I do trim it. Most of the monks let their beards run amok.’
They walk down to the monastery and James is shown to his room by his father and the guest master.
‘There’s supper at seven, bread, cheese and some fish I caught this afternoon. No meat here, but plenty of raki. It’s strong stuff; I find half a glass plenty. After supper there’s a service in the main church. I’ve told them you are orthodox, and so you are, at least without the capital O. That means you can come into the church.’
The church is small, much of it in shadow, as hanging oil lamps provide the only light. The air is heavy with incense. James watches, copies his father’s movements and listens as he joins in the prayers. Now and again John takes James’s hand in his. Tired after the journey, James finds it hard to concentrate, and the exotic surroundings, the ritual and the language emphasize how far his father has come from the simplicities of the Church of Ireland.
‘It’s very strange to me,’ says James as they walk back to their rooms. ‘I’ve been to Catholic services, but this is quite different, Byzantine.’
‘That makes it mysterious,’ says John. ‘I don’t think your great-grandfather would approve, although he’d understand the search for peace.’
The next day they go out together in the little boat, and James helps John put out and pull in the net. They catch half a dozen red mullet.
‘Quite good for this time of year. They’ll be kept for the feast day on Thursday. We’ve many saints to celebrate.’
That evening they sit and talk in John’s room, where James notices on the table beside the bed three pictures – one of Kate taken in Spain, one of James and Linda on their wedding day, and one of a young girl on horseback.
‘I don’t recognise that. Mum when she was young?’
‘No. The daughter of an old friend.’
‘Anyone I know?’
‘They live in Maryborough. Don’t think you’ve met.’
Later, fortified by a full glass of raki, James asks his father, ‘Dad, why are you staying here? It’s as if...’
‘I have to unburden myself. I’m sixty-nine, I’ve spent my working life with horses
, and that’s not a great preparation for the afterlife. Until I was in my twenties I was unformed, and what happened to Eileen and to me during The Troubles somehow froze me. Marrying your mother began a long thaw, but that’s still incomplete. Kate’s death was a great shock. She always seemed indestructible. And there’s been a lot of violence in my life, in Ireland, in Spain, in Normandy. All that presses heavily on me, and the load is lighter here.’
‘I’ve read the citation for your MC. You killed a lot of Germans.’
‘I feel worse about Spain. That was a vicious war.’
The next day James leaves the monastery to return to Ireland.
‘I’ll come with you up to the watershed,’ says John.
‘Dad, I can find my way back.’
‘I want to come. For the company, not as your guide.’
They reach the top of the pass, embrace, and James swallows hard as they part. John makes a sign of the cross on James’s forehead, kisses him again and walks down the hill. James watches him until the track curves out of sight through an olive grove. John doesn’t look back.
IV
Northumberland and Ireland
1993 and beyond
32
JAMES BURKE LOOKS into his grandfather’s leather-bound shaving mirror. It is big enough to frame his face. The silvering has gone in a couple of places, revealing the leather back; the stitching still holds on all but one side. The leather border is scalloped to conceal the jagged edges of the glass. On the back his grandfather has written in faded black ink, ‘Glass taken from a shelled estaminet, Rue des Puits, near Croix Barbe, Pas de Calais, Feby 1915,’ and his initials, HB.
The mirror had been put together by a regimental saddler with no horses left to saddle. Artillery, machine guns and Flanders mud turned the Royal Irish Dragoons from the flamboyant horsemen who charged alongside the Scots Greys at Waterloo into poor bloody infantry. It had been sent back to Derriquin, together with a few letters, photographs, four medal ribbons and a worn signet ring, all that survived of Henry Burke after the first day of the Somme.
The mirror is a talisman. It holds James, through years of daily use, within its frame; if it breaks, more than glass would break. It has watched him change from a pink-cheeked optimist, just beginning to shave, to his present lean, cautious reflection. He sometimes turns and looks as he leaves the bathroom to see whether his reflection is still caught, is watching him go.
As he shaves on the morning of his trip to Scotland, for the briefest of moments James seems to step sideways, away from and out of his body, while the world stops turning. And as he rejoins himself, and the world begins to move again, he is entering the body of a stranger. He knows the stranger’s history; he decides in that moment to leave it behind.
On the slow train to Edinburgh, James struggles with the Guardian, then sleeps, woken at irregular intervals at Peterborough, York, Darlington, Durham. His carriage is almost empty apart from a businessman tapping at his laptop two seats away. The slowness of the journey heightens his feeling of escape. He looks at his reflection in the carriage window. You’re the one I’m escaping, he says to himself.
Outside Durham the train stops altogether – in a field that stretches out to a housing estate James sees a young couple lying on the grass watching their small child kicking a red football with clumsy determination. It is a reminder of his own childhood, his early married years, his daughter, years of optimism and hope.
Disjointed images along the journey lodge in his half-awake memory – an angler under a green umbrella, a field with half a dozen piebald ponies, a giant yellow digger idle in a gravel pit, the great towers of Durham Cathedral, a wall of graffiti-ed initials in red, yellow and blue, all using the same bulging capitals.
He has brought his great-grandmother Burke’s diaries and letters with him, an archive of County Kerry in the middle of the nineteenth century, handed down by his great-aunt. A long train journey had seemed an ideal opportunity to sort through them, but he soon realizes that he needs a bigger table and a more settled mind for the task, and he puts them away.
Beyond Newcastle the train edges gradually towards the coast, the balance between land and sea shifting until the track is separated from the North Sea by less than a mile of well-cultivated fields. The train is behaving oddly, stopping at intervals for no apparent reason, waiting a few minutes, and then starting up again. James dozes off until a violent stop jerks him awake to a landscape that he has dreamed before. He is looking across ploughed fields to a narrow river estuary. On the far side a little town crouches under a castle- and tree-topped hill. Curving towards him is the enfolding arm of a harbour wall guarding the estuary mouth and twenty or thirty boats against the winds of the North Sea. The sun has come out; the water of the estuary gleams.
His waking dream is interrupted by the gloomy voice of the ticket collector.
‘Complete electrical failure. Next carriage doors opened, won’t close – can’t go on – relief train in half an hour from Newcastle.’
The businessman sighs.
James looks again at the town, the river, the estuary, the sunlit sea. He stands up with a sudden purpose, picks up his bag and walks into the next carriage. It has been cleared; the doors, as the ticket collector has warned, are open. After a moment’s hesitation James jumps down to the low embankment, climbs through the hedge and sets off across the fields towards the town. He has a feeling of escape, of shaking off pursuers.
There is no path. He skirts the ripening wheat and makes slow progress across the fields, damp clods of earth clinging to his black shoes. Gripped by a sudden feeling of childish folly, he looks back, turns and goes on.
Between the second field and the edge of the estuary the land merges into the water through a long reed-covered margin. A brace of teal rise up and circle inland, and as James watches their flight he sees what had been his train move cautiously across the viaduct spanning the river a mile upstream. There is no obvious alternative crossing. A rough path leads in two directions, inland between high hedges to the viaduct, outwards to the estuary mouth and the coastline. He turns inland, unhappy at the thought of clambering up to the viaduct.
‘Why couldn’t the train have given up the ghost on the other side of the river,’ he mutters, realizing as he speaks that it is the enfolding arm of the harbour wall that has pulled him out of the train and towards the town. Without that view he’d still be on his way to Edinburgh.
He walks slowly along and takes a right fork towards the river, which narrows in a final constriction before splaying out into the estuary. The river is spanned by a rickety footbridge, half a dozen railway sleepers resting end to end on wires suspended either side from two overhead cables. It has been built for fishermen and, judging by the rusting cables and weather-beaten sleepers, not very recently. The bridge sways with each step as he makes his way across.
At the halfway point he stops, looks upstream and sees a fisher in the final stages of playing a fish. The distant figure – it is hard to tell whether it is a man or a woman – beaches the salmon, bends to unhook it, and then nurses it gently in the shallows before letting it go.
On the other side he follows the path downstream; it curves away from the river to open up a full view of the town and its little harbour. His pace quickens, bringing him to a road flanked by houses on the landward side and on the right by the sprawl of the estuary.
A green bench gives him a chance to sit down and think about his surroundings and his erratic behaviour. His disengagement began in the morning in his shaving mirror; even so, leaving a train in mid-journey was out of keeping with his measured, rational approach to life. You’re a retired Permanent Secretary, he tells himself, due in Edinburgh for a Trust dinner tonight and a Trustees’ meeting tomorrow. Sitting there, he unrolls a mental list of memorial services, silver wedding anniversaries, regimental reunions, seminars on funding the arts, college Gaudies, godchildren’s twenty-firsts, farewell parties for barely remembered colleagues, all of which he
has converted into duties. The clubs need a separate list – the Garrick, the Other Club, the Saintsbury. He feels suddenly liberated from these self-imposed obligations. And without guilt.
He leaves a message on her mobile for his deputy (a brisk forty-year-old who calls James ‘Chair’ even over dinner, and is longing to display her chairperson talents). He blames family complications for his sudden absence, presses ‘Send’, and drops his phone into the litter bin. As he walks away, he imagines its ring-tone calling, calling in vain.
The path joins a small road leading into the town. ‘Welcome to Allenmouth’, the sign says, approving James’s decision to abandon the train. In smaller letters below it announces, ‘Twinned with Lippspringe (Germany) and Castéra (France)’. Passing an old-fashioned red telephone kiosk and postbox, James sees with pleasure that the latter is marked ‘G VI R’. Perhaps he is changing his decade as well as his destination.
His road is now flanked by shops and houses, an engaging mixture of the architecture of the last three hundred years, stone, brick, render, the tallest a half-timbered Edwardian/Elizabethan building with an unglazed gallery on the top floor. The street looks like the miniature rows of houses that accompanied his Hornby train set when he was eight. The saltings are tamed by a low wall that gradually increases in size to form the harbour. The tide is coming in; the wall’s granite blocks change from dark to light, marking high tide fifteen feet above low water. Twenty or thirty boats, mostly day-fishing boats with one bigger trawler and an incongruous fifty-foot ketch, bob at their fendered moorings or on buoys further out.
Ashes In the Wind Page 24