‘Yes, I suppose they do.’
Laura takes down the chopping block and starts work on a pile of potatoes. I wonder whether there was more she wanted to say about Kate. She is angry about the whole thing, that was clear in the way she spoke; she disapproves of how it has been handled. She wishes Kate could have been compelled to keep speaking to everyone, rather than sealing herself off in the way she has. Perhaps she is right. Today, in the light of what has happened, putting mother and daughter back together again seems so much more difficult. I must keep Laura away from the sherry and the wine today, if that is at all possible. It would be awful for there to be any kind of confrontation. I remember having to practically prise her and one of my nieces apart five or six years ago, both of them slurring their words, having fallen out about car parking. She can be a belligerent drunk.
‘You’re chewing up the whole of this field. You don’t have to drive so far down, there are spaces left here at the top of it!’ Laura had been clearly audible thirty feet away, and I hurried out to find her when I heard the argument start.
‘I can’t fit in there, that’s not enough space.’
‘It is enough space. The problem is whether you know how to park a car or not.’ I came round the stables and saw Laura standing at the top of the field, red-faced, glass in hand, haranguing some poor distant relative I barely recognised, whom she could hardly have known at all.
‘Laura,’ I called to her from a distance, still making my way across the yard.
‘But your side of the family never were up to much, were you, so why am I surprised that you can’t manage this?’
‘Excuse me?’
By now I had reached the scene of the altercation, so I poured oil on the waters, and led Laura away, and gave her a talking-to in the kitchen. She refused to apologise with a twinkle in her eye, knowing she was in the wrong, but determined all the same to enjoy the feeling of having got righteously, riotously drunk. At least until the following morning, anyway. While the party lasted, she was going to have her fun.
The secret of these days is that they aren’t for me at all, really, even though it is my birthday we all say we are celebrating. They are days above all for the visitors. A few years ago, it became clear to me that I was now occupying a role as de facto head of my family in its diaspora, as the generation that had come before me fell slowly and finally silent. People started looking to me to make the speeches at special occasions. In part, this was an acknowledgement of the position I occupied during my professional life. The respect I gained among my relations was recognition of how I had risen to do something that I suppose you could say was important, depending on the way you looked at things. But in actual fact I suspect that it had a lot to do with the fact I owned the biggest house, and little else. People like a party. Perhaps the disparate, far-flung members of any tribe never have very much in common in the end, but I think people like to feel connected to where they came from, and all those who have come before them. It’s nice to get together now and then and talk about grandparents, and call to mind people who are loved and missed. These parties are a chance to remember the departed, as much as they are for catching up with the living. For the younger people, I think perhaps the whole thing is frustrating, and seems like a hiatus in the year, but for my own generation it is good to keep in touch, and see what the nieces and nephews are doing with their one and only lives.
At least, it was like that once. But, increasingly, I find it all very sad. The rhythm of my meetings with the people who spend these days here with me, being kind to me, being polite and deferential, affords me a terrible clarity. When you see people day in and day out, the way their rhythms and ambitions change and fall away becomes somehow indiscernible – you find yourself too close to see the course they’re taking. Like the collapse of a cliff path, which happens one stone at a time, you can get used to the gradual and ineluctable disappearance of the ground beneath your feet if it is simply a part of life. But to see someone once a year and every year, as I do with some of my more distant cousins, is to have nothing at all to talk about except what is happening to their dreams, whether they have hauled them any closer, whether they have fallen away for good. It is my fate to observe every diminution in the mobility and mental faculties of my oldest acquaintances; to hear about every job their children never got. It makes me feel far too mortal.
‘Gorgeous day, isn’t it?’ I say.
‘Oh, yes. Spring has sprung,’ Laura says.
‘And the sap is rising.’
‘Yes, well. I read the most awful story in the local paper.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘About a woman who was trampled to death by cows. She walked her dog through a field, and they panicked, and ran right over her. The awful thing was, this other walker found her while she was still alive. The dog was dead, I think it was a golden retriever, poor stupid thing – they’re such stupid dogs, aren’t they? – and the woman was lying there next to it. She couldn’t move. I think her back was broken – I think that’s what they said. She asked the woman who found her to call for help, but there was no signal on her mobile, so she had to walk half a mile to make the phone call. Then she walked back, and the woman had died while she was away.’
‘That’s terrible.’
‘That’s what comes of the rising sap. All those frisky cattle.’
‘I think it’s more likely because they were scared of the dog.’
‘Yes, probably. Still, all the same.’
‘Quite.’ I look around for something to do. That is the great lesson of life; always to look busy, lest someone should give you a job. ‘I must just check something. Won’t be a second.’
‘All right.’
I leave the kitchen and head for the door under the stairs, descending quickly into the cellar. The memory comes of how Hattie used to worry I’d hit my head going down here, and used to call after me, her voice echoing through to where I stooped along. I try to stop the thought before the sadness of hoping to hear her voice takes over.
I am inordinately proud of the cellar beneath my house. The building itself is relatively new, dating almost entirely from the nineteenth century, but there is a section of the cellar that has been dated conclusively as having been built in the fourteenth, and that seems like grandeur to me. It feels extraordinary to walk hunchbacked into a room where men have probably been banging their heads on the low beams for seven hundred years. The greater part of the history of these islands had flowed over this place, the whole world has reinvented itself more times than anyone can count, yet here it is, the heart of the house, damp, murky, unaffected by any of it.
The house became the heart of my family as the passage of years built up memory on memory rooted in this building and the grounds around, life like a coastal shelf sedimented all around us, fastening us ever more firmly to the home we chose. Our child grew into the world here before setting out into it. We had hoped for more children to bring up here as well, both of us coming from big families, but that path wasn’t open to us. After Hannah was born there were two miscarriages, and then Hattie never conceived again. Sometimes the world has plans for you other than the ones you thought you had embarked on.
I hope that when the time comes, another generation of my family will live here after me, and they might perhaps go on living here for a long time; that people born years from now whom I will never meet, all somehow linked to me by the long chain of the family tree I keep upstairs in the spare bedroom, will share the same hallways, bang their heads in the cellar. It gives me great pleasure to imagine so much life flowing out from the one place, all linked by the constant presence of the house, the backdrop to scene after scene, life after life. That’s what I wanted to achieve when I bought this place, something that might be passed down through the family, give us a centre, give us roots. Perhaps it won’t happen. Perhaps no one will want to live here when I’m gone and Hannah will sell it. But I like the dream, all the same.
I pick out the bes
t whiskey I have to offer. I think Frank will appreciate this. I am certainly glad of an excuse to drink it.
I am pleased that Frank is coming to visit me, no matter how difficult the timing. I had begun to fear, in the few days that have passed since the story of the Boston Tapes broke in the press, while the phone did not ring, that the moment of my total irrelevance had finally arrived. A crisis had arisen, and no one had asked for me. I had started wondering whether I might at last have been consigned to history.
But even if the government no longer seeks me out, it seems the IRA still value my assistance. Frank will be coming to see me because someone within the IRA wishes to stress the risk to peace in Northern Ireland these subpoenas represent. Frank will tell me that the dredging of the river of history is a dangerous thing. He has asked to keep things among the old heads because his contact in the IRA has stressed that only those who have lived through the times recalled in these taped interviews now lying in wait in the dark of the library at Boston College can fully comprehend the buried violence that might be about to be unearthed, if things are not handled with the necessary delicacy. I can well understand the position; a politician in his forties now can talk with all the sincerity they like of the scars of the past, but I visited Enniskillen on the day the bomb went off. No briefing will convey what it was like to live in Ireland in the depths of the Troubles. It seems perfectly reasonable to me to mistrust the capacity of the younger generation to handle these old issues with the tact they require. The current lot have proved more or less incapable of handling any of the simpler tasks of government, after all; it’s terrible to imagine what they might make of something genuinely challenging.
In the deep heart of the house, I drink in the smell of old damp, old silence, and wonder what it is like for a man who has killed other men to go back over the violences of his life, and lay them down on record. Do they feel proud when they remember, or are they desperate, and clinging to whatever was left of the memory of their lives, willing to tell any story at all, if someone would only listen to them? I think perhaps I know that feeling, that emptiness. I live with it myself; I cradle it more nights than I care to remember. In the dark of the small hours I find myself willing to recall any night, any story at all, so long as it will brimfill my consciousness so the memories spill over and flood me into a drugged-seeming sleep. Anything to shut out the silence that waits at the end of every sentence, the knowledge that my death is coming one day like Hattie’s came to her. I remember the day she got her diagnosis, the doctor’s appointment in the diary she wouldn’t talk about when she got back to the house that afternoon.
‘Everything all right, darling?’
‘Nothing to worry about. Just a check-up, that’s all.’
I didn’t realise it was a lie for weeks. She kept on trying to hoard what was happening, keep any upset away from me. She bought flowers, filled the vases in the house. Daffodils and roses and tulips. She made a point of cooking my favourite meals, going through recipes like a singer through their repertoire, and I often walked into a room to find her furiously tidying, or dusting, or reorganising bookshelves. Letters started arriving from the hospital. She’d turn away from me to read them, then fold the letters up and put them into a pocket, hidden from me. I still don’t know whether she was trying to protect me, or protect herself. Perhaps she just couldn’t say it all out loud.
If I could only believe we’ll see each other again. But I think that’s just a child’s illusion. All I can save of her from the fire now is memory. The two of us side by side in bed, both reading our books till we were ready to sleep, the pages turning like birds flitting over the coverlet. The sound of her breathing growing slower and deeper as she fell asleep by my side. Now she isn’t there to lie beside me and save me from the things I fear, I feel mocked by the absence.
I want to believe life is about love. That was how we lived, Hattie and me. But that’s such a difficult faith to hold to. What the world I have known really seems to be in love with, when I look back across the span of it, is death. So when these old, battered murderers speak into their microphones, what’s driving them? I wonder. Do they believe their lives have been worth living? Do they love what they’ve done? Or are they really trying to kill themselves?
What story would I tell if they put the microphone in front of me? In some ways I am the least qualified person imaginable to answer that. I know I was a grammar-school boy. That was the engine that propelled me away from the lines of work the rest of my family always fell into before me. My father ended up as a chauffeur, if that wasn’t too grand a word for what he did. He had travelled from north Wales to London as a young man, at a time when people were starving on the hills where he was born. He briefly found employment as a bus driver, until the first war broke out. Then he was chauffeur to a captain in Iran – it was still Persia at the time, of course – for the duration of that conflict. When he left the army, he moved to Rochester to try his hand as a taxi driver, but he was hopeless at timekeeping and always missed meeting the trains, the lifeblood of the taxi trade in a place like that. After a year or so he gave the cab up and moved to Wiltshire, where a man whose father had known his father in Wales had bought a farm and become wealthy when the army bought his land out in the war.
The Welsh connection between my father and his new employer was worth a job driving the farmer’s Daimler on the rare occasions when he wanted to go anywhere in style. This car became the glory of my father’s life, his great love. He would polish it till it shone, lavishing the thing with all his attention. To make up the rest of the income he needed to feed all our family, he farmed, much as his predecessors in among the roots of the family tree had always done before him. As a child, I loved seeing my father setting off down the road at a stately pace in the Daimler, or sometimes cadging a lift with him, because, back then, to be a driver always seemed to me like a holiday from the endlessness of the land, like a little escape.
Later, when I got into the grammar school and then went away to university, I came to see my father’s work differently. Once I was out of the narrow context of the village I came from, I saw the social order I’d been part of differently, and realised my father hadn’t been grand at all, he’d been a sort of servant. I became almost ashamed of him then, such was the shock of that discovery. And I suppose I was filled up with the snobbishness of youth, newly aware of the wealth in the world and the people who found their way in among it and never would have spoken to the kind of people who made up my family, my neighbours, my world. A long time passed before I brought Hattie to meet my parents. I thought she’d never speak to me again. Of course, when they did meet they got on wonderfully, and when I told her about my fears she laughed at me. She was never as paranoid and hung up as I was. But those are quite good qualities for working in the civil service, paranoia and an obsessive regard for propriety, so I can’t regret them too much.
Now I am old, and older than my father ever lived to be, I am remorseful about the way he was diminished in my eyes back then, once I saw the reality of my family’s station. I have tried to make up for lost time. I have made pilgrimages back to the childhood home, and on to where my parents are buried, time and again, to try and recapture the pride I once felt, when I used to see the shining Daimler eating the street as it shimmered past the house. And Hattie and I took an interest in family history, and she made the family tree and framed it, and hung it in the bedroom where it is today. I went to visit the poor scrap of field Dad and his own father once farmed, the steepness of the hillside my ancestors died on, and the cottage my father grew up in, still without running water even now, in the torrent-boiling flood of the twenty-first century. A poor life, that. Still, I am unable to resist the urge to romanticise it. Because things are undoubtedly beautiful in that country. Perhaps that’s only the way I see things, of course. Perhaps I am in love with the idea of my father passing that way years before me, really the same man that I am, because he must have lived with the same heart beating i
n him that has driven me on. Our two journeys separated by the passage of years. That’s a thought to cradle, to make you feel less alone.
I thought, as a younger man, that I might be starting something important when we settled into this house. I thought of all the children who would surely come after, the people who were going to inherit this place, the paintings on the wall that would steadily grow in number. Looking around me down here in the cellar I catch glimpses of the ambitions I burnished back then. There is a rack of bottles, dust-covered bottles of port, against the far wall, that a connoisseur would recognise as having some modest value. They were a little vanity of mine, a little extravagance: I laid them down at intervals to mark significant occasions. There are bottles there to mark the purchase of this house, the year Hannah was born, the year I took my job in Belfast, the year of my retirement, the year that Hannah married Michael and the year she had Kate. I gathered this collection together slowly, an alcoholic autobiography, always imagining days to come when I would have people to drink these with. Now I look at the bottles gleaming dimly in the dark, and I think I was just setting myself up for heartbreak. I can’t imagine ever wanting to touch any of those bottles any more. It would be like drinking away the memories of the years they marked. And who would I ever drink them with, when I spend so much of the year on my own?
from Interview 38
My first gig for the IRA, I was a sort of messenger boy really, a runner. I just used to take messages through the streets. You can’t imagine how much of it there was. With a guerrilla organisation, logistics and communication, that’s most of the work, nearly all the activity that’s going on is just passing word around because it gets so fucking difficult to do. And maybe with any organisation, I don’t know. We must have been dozens of us out there every day, walking round Belfast, carrying our secrets, bumping into each other, never knowing. A lot of hidden currents like the sea.
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