by Tim Robinson
Two doors open off the hall, the living-room to the left and the kitchen to the right. The living-room has a little hearth, and a sash window at either end. When we moved in, it was papered in a curious pattern of seaweed-coloured bricks which undulated subliminally because the wallpaper was half detached from the damp plaster, and the yellowish net curtains had tattered hems because, as Mícheál explained, his dog Oscar had once been locked in here accidentally and had clawed at them in jumping up to the windows. But once we had scraped down and whitened the walls and filled an alcove with bookshelves, it became a charming room. Its front window faces into the lower boughs of the cypress; once during a sudden battering downpour I looked out to see a sparrowhawk perched within a few feet of me, as impatiently self-contained as a clenched fist. The back window faces onto the yard and the great crag beyond. I used to write up my diary at a table before this window. Some days rave on for pages, others expire in a phrase. One entry, I see, reads in its entirety:
September 24th, the Light Arches, dullest of moths, dead on the windowledge this morning.
I have no memory of this unmemorable September 24th, on which I must have alleviated my boredom by leafing through the pictures of dozens of species of dull, ochreous, brindled moths in my childhood copy of Richard South’s The Moths of the British Isles, and savouring the names of the Light Arches, the Reddish Light Arches, the Dark Arches, the Cloud-Bordered Brindle, the Clouded Brindle, the Brindled Ochre—a nomenclature which I take it was the great achievement of rural Anglicanism in its early nineteenth-century torpor, a state I thoroughly understand. Too many days I have sat at this table, staring vacantly at the view over the back wall of the dozen roofs of Gort na gCapall, which looked smaller than the cauliflowers of spray slowly burgeoning from the rim of the land behind them and apparently hanging above them for moments before subsiding. I was supposed to be writing, or researching, or thinking. Oscar would come rattling in and hop up to lie in the sunlight on the table-top; sometimes it hardly seemed worth disturbing him by lifting his paw aside to put another word on my paper. Or the chorus-line of M’s slips and nighties belly-dancing in the breeze on the rope outside would lure me from my withered plant specimens into erotic reveries. Later I made myself a study out of a room with only a tiny window, upstairs.
The kitchen, with its concrete floor, its ceiling of mahogany-painted board that Mícheál thought was real mahogany and would not let us repaint, its rudimentary furnishings that had suffered many a summer letting and winter mouldering, and the scullery and bathroom in the dank little back-extension opening off it, were the most intractable parts of the Residence. During our first brief summer visit to Aran, lodging at Gilbert Cottage, we had noted the engaging expression of the frontage of the house, but had not seen the interior. Mícheál, whom we happened to meet at its gate, had mentioned that he sometimes let the place to visitors “for seven pounds a week; that’s a hundred and forty shillings”; and later on in London, faced with a sudden bifurcation of life’s paths, we had recalled that modest and comfortable-sounding arithmetic, and wrote to book the house for an indefinite period from the middle of November. My diary of our arrival:
Mr. King was at home, by chance, as he hadn’t got our last card, so I collected the key and ran down from his gate to ours because I was too excited to get into the taxi again. The house was just what I had hoped for, bare and a little bleak inside, with potato ridges in the garden, and the wind blowing through the empty window-frames in the high walls round it. We were soon alone in it, and began making it liveable. I tried to make a fire in the living-room but it wouldn’t go. The kitchen stove, a little Jubilee range, burned well enough though. Mr. King ran down with a craggy lump of home-made soda bread and a whiskey bottle full of milk, though milk is scarce on the island at this time, he says. We had nothing to make tea with so we walked a mile back to the shop at Eochaill, which was shut, and then another couple of miles to Kilronan. A vicious hail driven into our faces by the wind forced us to hide behind a gatepost. I enquired at the post office about our trunk, but it hadn’t arrived. In the shop M learned that the hens weren’t laying in this weather, that no meat was to be had, that we could order bacon after tomorrow’s boat from Galway had delivered it, and that yesterday’s storm had cut the telephone link. When she said “I hope we survive the winter!,” the lady of the shop looked amazed, and said “With the help of God and His Blessed Mother, you’ll survive!” She gave her some salted rockfish. The shopkeeper’s van brought us back with our load, a few cans of stew and spaghetti etc. We had tea and arrowroot biscuits, and rearranged the furniture. We put the settee in front of the range, with a little form as a table. Through the kitchen is a scullery with a sink and a back door and a window giving onto the yard, a level area of shiny wet rock between the outhouses and their spouting gutters, and to the right out of that the bathroom, both damp and draughty, but Mr. King has pointed out the big keyholes we can stuff up in the back door, and the lump of stone for holding the sacking in place under the door, so no doubt we will get used to it. A short walk later; the sun had a halo round it, and we had to shelter from a couple of showers. We are fried cornbeef on toast and bread and marmalade, read by the range, then up the narrow staircase in procession with candlestick and chamberpot. Once the candle was out the darkness was perfect. I woke once or twice, almost terrified by the roaring of the wind and the rattling of hail in the fireplace, and this solid alien presence of darkness. “Tiefe schauervolle Nacht”—I don’t know where I got the phrase but it was in my mind all night. M had a bad night too, and was chilled at first, and apparently had a little cry later on.
But M is courageous and resourceful, and soon took the place in hand, gradually bearing down my feeling that every ridiculous derelict detail of it, such as the lump of stone holding the wet sacks in position against the gale under the back door (which Mícheál had pointed out with the air of a landlord showing a prospective tenant the controls of the central heating) was more respectable than all the comforts we had abandoned in London and should not be changed. We scraped the fungus from under the leaky stone sink in the scullery, we got tea-chests and covered them with plastic tablecloths from Evelyn’s shop to make working surfaces and storage places. We survived the winter. One morning I found that the sun, striking obliquely through a knot-hole in the back door, had left a golden guinea on the floor; I put my hand down to it, and called M to admire it glowing in my palm. As I lifted it towards the knot-hole it fluttered and dwindled, until I had it dancing like an angel on the tip of my finger. When I poked it back into the hole and took away my hand, it flitted instantly back to the same spot on the floor. Despite all our improvements the Residence, a jackdaw nest among the stars, never ceased to be subject to drips, draughts, cosmic conjurings, elemental percolations.
The stairs begin in the back right-hand corner of the kitchen, where a fan of three wedge-shaped, hollow-trodden, steps leads up to what looks like a cupboard door; inside, they turn left and climb the narrow stairwell unsteadily, creaking like an old man going off to bed. At the top is a small landing with three low doors of flimsy tongue-and-groove, an old wooden chest full of bedclothes and the smell of mothballs, and a knee-high window looking out to the rear of the house. With the door of my writing-room open I can look across the landing and out of this window at the great crag beyond the back wall of the yard; in fact An Chreig Mhór is for me an adjunct to that cramped little study and in some ways the most familiar room of the house. I have botanized so intensively on it that most of Aran’s extremest rarities have turned up there, and I watch over their welfare as if they were part of the family circle: for example, Calamagrostis (Praeger: “…that very rare Irish grass, the Wood Rush”), waving a fine foxy whisk out of a deep crevice; the unobtrusive Neotinea or dense-flowered orchid, rare in the Burren and practically unknown elsewhere (Praeger: “It is strange that it does not occur on the Aran Islands”); the common butterwort that catches flies on its sticky leaves and is so well adapted t
o life on the unnourishing bogs of Connemara that it is an ecological scandal here, where it clings to the bare sides of two or three tussocks of black bog rush in a watery little gully. Plant-hunting is a relief and distraction from writing, but that too happens on the crag. If I cannot lay my hand on the phrase I am searching for in my room, I stroll out, scramble over the back wall and go rooting for words among the crevices of the rock. The crag is my testing-ground for the aerodynamics of sentences, a rebounding-place to prance upon when a chapter comes to its own conclusions and sets me free. Since we look down into it every time we go up or down stairs, the crag, even in its most unhomely aspects—by moonlight for example, astir with rabbits like splatters of ink on a silver tray—is not impossibly remote from domesticity. I have even gone down there for reassurance when time seemed to have got lost in the darkness of the night. I remember one starless three-o’clock vigil, crouched in the lee of a granite boulder under steadily drifting drizzle, unable to make out anything of the world but a wavering layer of dim ellipses floating a foot above the ground, the flowers of hundreds of moon-daisies, forming a false bottom to all appearances.
Of the landing’s three doors the first, on the left, with a dented brass knob like an unripe fig, is the bedroom door. The room is small, an attic with sloping ceiling. The high ends of the black wrought-iron bedsteads we found there on our arrival seemed almost to bar entry; later we tackled the rusty bolts and dismantled the bedframes, and replaced them with floor-hugging bed-ends made out of planks from an old crate. M dispelled the morosity of the damp-stained walls and impending ceiling with avocado-green, flower-sprigged, wallpaper and billowing lace curtains that trawled the skies from the tiny dormer window and came back full of light and fragrance; there seemed no reason why we should not enjoy a Laura Ashley fantasy of nineteenth-century country living just because we were living in the country and indeed in the nineteenth century. The small tortoiseshell butterflies that besiege the house on hot days, looking for a dark corner that will become their winter quarters, come in at this window and congregate on the opposite corner of the ceiling, where they hang like the faded standards of their glorious summer campaigns. The bedroom has become our secret retreat too, from both nature and society. With the wooden shutters on the inside of the window closed and a blanket stuffed into the crack between them, our Tilly-lamp can tell no one we are at home, and even when the wind gets one fist down the chimney and the other somehow into the wall-cupboard, it cannot buffet us here, while the oil-heater toasts the dampness into a cosy fug and we lie on the floor examining with voluptuous lingerings a newly arrived parcel of books. Concerned friends now and then post us a few cassettes of music, which fall into our hands like messages whirled up by storms raging very far away, and which become through repeated hearings as spent as old pennies or else so overcharged with meaning as to be unbearable. Monteverdi’s Tancred and Clorinda mutually unrecognized in their armour, hacking at each other in the dark with the intimacy of lovers quarreling in bed—but I close the door on this. So much has happened in that room, of which I shall never write.
The next room, straight ahead at the top of the stairs, about eight feet square, with a hard chair by a postage-stamp of a window dedicated to bare rock, was at first a common boxroom and sulking-room. Then one day the ceiling collapsed because of the unstaunchable leaks in the roof, and some plaster fell off its interior walls, revealing that they were built of ancient sods of turf, grey and twisted like senile bricks, which came tumbling round our ankles when we tried to patch the holes. We had to get a local workman to help me wrestle bulging sheets of hardboard into position and nail them to the joists, and then, having the hammer in my hand, I went on to build a desk-like construction under the window out of plastic-coated chipboard delivered from Galway by the cargo boat, and proudly presented the room to M as her study or boudoir. Occasionally My Lady of Silent Reservations withdraws herself into it, leaving me nervously dislocated. What is she doing in there, hour after hour?—weeping herself to death?—writing that feminist thesis we used to joke about, entitled “Derrida, I married him”?—or is she savouring her solitude like a cat grooming its fur?
My own room, apart from its little window looking onto the front garden, was initially a void, the interior of some lopsidedly truncated Platonic polyhedron. I installed a peculiarly tall table made by Mícheál’s father, and a chair that to match it had to be supplemented by several cushions. The room is so small that from my perch I can reach almost all the shelves I have contrived around the walls. Over the years these have filled up with specimens of rocks and fossils, files of correspondence with the botanists, geologists and archaeologists from whom I extort knowledge, drafts of stories, volumes of diary, record-cards of place-names, and parcels of copies of my first map of Aran. One of the functions of a publisher is to protect the author from the physical reality of the book, its weight and volume multiplied by the print-run. Only the self-published know the sudden condensation of the ideal into inert mass, upon the printers’ delivering. By the time I had lugged the boxes of the Burren map upstairs, the joists of the ceiling below were sagging under the product of that initially empty room.
Stones of Aran was begun here too; the lumpy stuff of fact and feeling was excogitated through a machinery of emptiness and silence into something that would lie on a page. The pain of that process! How can it be, that a contrivance of “negative capability” is sometimes blocked for days or weeks at a time, jammed, seized up? Research is easy; however severely it taxes the eyes in libraries or the body in the field, it is a distraction and a relief. Remembering, noting, filing, identifying, querying, confirming—one has resources that can be squandered on such preliminaries. But for the finding of a form of words, there are no resources. Education, vocabulary, information, even wit, imagination, sensibility—these are teeth tensed to snap together, pressing out too-ready formulations; the mind aches with the stress of holding them apart, preserving the space in which words can think themselves into shape. Somehow this is not so bad on winter days, with the rain splattering on the window and the oil-heater singeing my shins, but on a still, hot afternoon it is sometimes unbearable. The intensely alert silence of the garden, the white emptiness of the road going by the gate, the wide amnesia of the world towards me—and then the sudden fidget of a blackbird in the shadow under a bush, exactly “the sound of the clapping of one hand.” Turns of words cunningly composed to disorientate the mind reveal their banality. A linguistic philosopher, I forget who, put together as a specimen of a meaningless sentence, “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.” Seeing the invisible flickering of the air above the hot stone of the garden path, I know exactly what he did not mean to mean. Hopelessly sensible nonsense! I give up. I go downstairs.
The house is empty; M must be sunbathing. I make two mugs of coffee, carry them through the silent inferno of Mrs. Callaghan in the hall and round to the back of the house. “Did you write a sentence?” asks M. who really believes that I can write sentences. “Bits of one,” I reply, eyes and voice uncertain, dazzled, after the deep shift in the word-mine. I strip off and lie beside her. The light is enprismed between the whitewashed south-facing wall of the house, the grey limestone so hot we have to lie on rugs, and the black shadow-side of Moloney’s back wall. Butterflies are dithering between the stone-hard sky and the chinks in the masonry of the outhouse, entering crouched like pot-holers, backing out, unfurling themselves again. The hour ripens for another heat of the undecidable beauty competition between left breast and right breast. There is no more than a grain of salt between them, but it soon becomes the centre of gravity of the cosmos. The garden sleeps furiously, the road passes by, the world is unmindful, as we mould each other’s bodies into their brief perfections.
Afterwards, lapsing back into ourselves, we drift into half-imagined conversations. “Did you notice how at that moment the Milky Way swung into alignment with my spine?” “In broad daylight? It was merely that we happened to be lying north-south,
as recommended by Marie Stopes.” “Well, did you hear the sun pounding the stone on either side of us with the flats of its hands?” “I did not. And you didn’t notice that the postman called, and left a parcel of books on your rump.”
Remembering such times, I am moved to a declaration: that making love with Máiréad has been the sustaining joy of my life. There’s a certainty! And where else but in the secret heart of my book could I dare such simplicity? From where, proclaim it to so wide a world?
III. WEST
ON THE BOUNDARY
But writing has no rights of residence; it is driven onwards from any achieved moment of symmetry. Unbalancing forces energize the westward progress of this book, for instance. I cannot name them, but for a few months of my first year in Aran they took on a form that, looking back on it, seems like a literary contrivance, and at the time was distressingly immediate, literally next door.
The school, as I have mentioned, is just east of the Residence. The first time I passed it when the children were out in the schoolyard, they all flocked to the roadside wall to look at me, with the sudden dense whirring rush of starlings; I found their faces unreadable, gnarled, dark, fist-like. They were too shy to say much, and when they did muster a few words “Where ye from?”—they could not understand my answer, and repeated unnervingly, “Where ye from?” Finding it increasingly difficult to pass the school, I began to know the times at which they would be playing in the yard or inside at their lessons or spilling out onto the road and scattering homewards. Time, in such places as London, is a disease of the wristbone; one sees sufferers glance anxiously at the glittering lump. I had come to Aran to escape the infection, and bitterly resented its outbreak here. The school became an obstacle dividing the island in two, a constant nagging presence like an aching tooth.