The House of Pure Being

by Michael Murphy

  People were filing into the pews to the right-hand side of the door, and the open coffin was on trestles in an alcove to our left: I could glimpse Steve’s waxy face pushing up above the parting in the white, lacy covering. It felt icy cold in the funeral home, even though people were crowding in together. When eventually we were all packed inside, the undertaker called for our attention, and he invited any person who wanted to say anything, to do so. A tall man then stood up beside the coffin, and he began to talk in a strong, clacking Belfast accent. Because there was no microphone, it was difficult to follow what he said, and the eclectic gathering of locals and hippie blow-ins, and the visitors who’d come down from Dublin, were carrying on snatched, murmuring conversations all around me. It was Gerry Adams who gave the oration. He spoke for about twenty minutes, and he talked about his friendship with Steve, which I hadn’t known about, and how he always stayed with Steve in his house outside Dingle whenever he was in the Kerry area. Adams resumed his seat at the foot of the coffin.

  As we were about to pass him by on our way to sympathize with the relatives, ‘What are you going to say to Adams?’ I whispered to Terry.

  ‘I’m going to say, I’m sorry for the loss of your friend.’

  Steve’s relatives sat uncomfortably on straight-backed chairs all along the wall behind the coffin in a sombre line of black, silently observing the happenings in the room. His brother was also called Terry (which must have accounted for the fact that Steve always took Terry’s phone-calls) and his sister Deirdre was there, and sitting out at the end in a corner by the exit door was his ninety-two-year-old, sprightly mother. They were all English people, and they replied animatedly and warmly in very middle-class accents to our expressions of sorrow. Steve’s Moroccan wife had spoken to me in French as I sympathised with her. I wondered what the evident, refined politeness of their background had made of the bleak, humanist proceedings in that icy funeral home. I missed the traditional ceremony of a blessing, and hoped that Steve’s relatives would have their own, more personal leave-taking in private, elsewhere. Everything grated on the senses, even a woman’s thin voice that had pierced the chill with ‘The Parting Glass’ some moments before. We met Máire for the first time, who’d worked with Steve in the office, and we embraced her warmly. She appeared marooned by the tragedy that had overtaken her. Suddenly outside in the wan glow of the evening sunlight, I was approached by the undertaker, who welcomed me to Dingle, and apologised that he hadn’t realised he’d have need of a microphone. I met the designer for the first time, Brendan Lyons, who said that it was he who’d typeset my book, and I was delighted to congratulate him on his wonderful achievement. We chatted together about Steve’s reticence, not only about everything to do with his private life, but also about how uncommunicative he’d been surrounding the success of my book, a lacking which had frustrated me, but which his underlying ill-health had now made comprehensible, if that was indeed the reason.

  One morning very early the previous March, I’d woken up distressed, knowing that I’d wet the bed. Since the prostatectomy operation, I don’t have the same control over my bladder, and this sometimes happens. Terry was sleeping, so I left my soaked mattress as it was, exited the bedroom and went in to the computer. I wrote a bad-tempered email to Steve, pointing out that I was staying in Ireland travelling the length and breadth of the country promoting the book, while he was going to Morocco on his holidays, and sent it off. When Terry saw it, he was very angry, and said, ‘You’re going to have to apologise. The last line is unconscionable. It’s unprincipled and immoderate: unworthy of you.’ Terry sees my behaviour in relation to others forensically. Like the good analyst that he is, he’d spotted something that I hadn’t seen, and I’ve always respected the keenness of his insight. He dialled Steve on the mobile, and when he answered, held out the phone to me. ‘Steve, I need to apologise to you unreservedly.’ Later on that day, I ordered a case of French wine from Mitchell’s to be sent to him, to underline my repentance. Terry then took the phone when I left the room. He told me later that he’d explained to Steve about the wetting of the bed, and how it had thrown me into a paranoid place; in truth, I hadn’t recognised the ongoing physical and emotional impact that cancer continues to have on my life. Steve rarely replied to any of my emails again.

  Terry had a difficulty about wearing a dress suit to the National Book Awards. Primarily, it derived from his republican background. His father was a member of the Old IRA, who’d been on the first hunger strike in Tralee jail at the time of Ireland’s fight for independence. Terry talks about the time he accompanied his father to a Fianna Fáil cumann meeting, at which the disgraced former Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, was speaking. As his father aged and his deafness increased, his dad used to wear a hearing aid, which he’d turn up loud so that it squealed. In the sudden silence that followed the interruption in the room, Terry’s father said at the top of his voice, ‘You see that man up there on the podium, you mark my words, he’s going to be the ruination of this party!’ Terry belonged within the pure stream of republicanism espoused by those founding fathers. So he had a dark suit made at Artesanos Camiseros in Marbella, which looked the part from a distance, but which in a practical advantage, could be used again for everyday occasions.

  I’d often watched the Oscars ceremony on television, with the camera focussing in on the various nominees for an award, and I’d wondered what was going through their minds as the presenter opened the envelope to announce the winner. At the Book Awards, I found that managing to smile during the nomination process was easy, because I was relaxed in the knowledge that I’d been shortlisted by the Academy of booksellers, librarians and book-lovers, and for safety’s sake, I’d also my two acceptance speeches hidden in a leather folder down by the side of my chair in case I won. I’d heard the six reviews of the various books on radio, and I was gratified that mine had been favoured over the others for its literary quality, so Terry and I held out the highest of hopes. Holding that smile to mask my disappointment, which was a physical reaction flooding my body like being hit by a giant tidal wave when I wasn’t announced the winner, took me by complete surprise, and it proved impossibly difficult to feign the untruth.

  Emma, my literary agent, who was sitting beside me whispered comfortingly in my ear, ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m feeling gutted,’ I smiled back through gritted teeth, like a ventriloquist, with my generously applauding hands masking my face as I watched someone else walk across the floor and up onto the stage to accept his award. When I was on the RTÉ John Murray morning radio show to talk about my book before the Listeners’ Choice competition, and I said that voting for books wasn’t the same as voting for your favourite act in the television talent show X Factor, John had contradicted me, ‘Oh, yes it is!’ And he was proved right. Being thrust into that level of public competition turned out to be another unforeseen step on the torturous climbing route over the mountains of not only writing books, but having to publicise them by every possible means as well.

  When I was talking about Steve’s death to a thoughtful, well-read young American woman, Sarah Bannan, who said that she’d liked my book, and was seated to my right-hand side at the Book Awards dinner, she volunteered she too had been there in Dingle at the funeral. It emerged that she was the Head of Literature with the Arts Council, and that she’d had dealings with Steve in the past. Nevertheless, she too found the funeral to be revelatory. Sarah said she’d played with Steve’s little daughter, Lilya, who took a shine to her watch. And the little girl was so fascinated by it, that Sarah felt she couldn’t take it from her when she was leaving. ‘It wasn’t that expensive,’ she assured me, gaily.

  We were relieved to regain the warmth of the car after those happenings in Dingle, and we headed out on the road back to Dublin, with the Gerry Adams massive Volvo estate driving immediately behind us. Terry was keeping an eye on it in the wing mirror. We barely spoke, lost in our thoughts about Steve’s secret life and the surprise of his fune
ral, until we abandoned the motorway for a bite to eat in Matt the Thresher’s public house, and the Gerry Adams Volvo had swished us by, disappearing into the silent blackness of the November night, with the rest of the holy souls.

  Part Nine

  Anna

  Bernard, the French hairdresser, says, ‘Anna a le coeur sur la main’: Anna wears her heart on her sleeve. When she deems a person her friend, she impulsively gives her all, whatever the cost to herself. Anna met her Scottish boyfriend, James, at a time when she was vulnerable, and recovering from breast cancer. He was twenty years her senior, and said he’d been attracted to her from when he first laid eyes on her as a young seventeen-year-old wearing hot pants, while he was staying with his friend, Richard, in Mijas.

  ‘I’ve never worn hot pants,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘Shorts, yes!’

  She took him in, changed his polyester shirts for cotton ones, bought him an expensive Rolex watch, and brought him to the best restaurants on the coast. While James helps out around the house (‘our house’ he calls it), most of his money goes towards supporting his family back in Glasgow, and his wife Linda, whom has talked of divorcing. As the relationship cooled, Anna complained effusively to Terry and me that James was tracking her comings and goings. She said he denounced her for supposed infidelities with men from her past, and she was finding these bitter condemnations debilitating. ‘Another unlovely quality,’ Anna said, ‘is that James is constantly accusing me of preferring others’ company to his.’ Whatever the sad truth of a relationship in trouble, a supportive tie which suddenly becomes imprisoning when examined with a disappointed eye, I knew that the suspicions regarding her friends were justified, because we could see that as Anna felt her freedoms being curtailed, she was becoming increasingly unhappy. A private conspiracy had developed around her, how best to get her away from this man, who apparently had captured her.

  Anna’s heart developed a serious problem. Sometimes it beat so violently, up to one hundred and forty beats per minute, that she became exhausted physically and emotionally. The doctors in Malaga diagnosed that two valves were faulty, the one at the back that took the blood in, and one at the front that let it out. Her friends worried for her that one day her heart would stop beating, and that they’d lose Anna. A star would be extinguished in the firmament, and her joy in life and the abiding affection that Anna’s beautiful soul brings to her friends, would vanish without further warning into the void. So they entreated her to take better care of herself, not to be so driven, to put limits on the long hours, seven days a week that she devoted herself to the restaurant and to the many people in her life, to take some time for herself and lead a more tranquil life for the sake of her health. Whenever we’re down in Spain, Terry and I have her to stay with us in our apartment for some relaxing overnights, and we look after her as best we can. But as Bernard, with a Gallic shrug, scissors in one hand comb in the other, concisely put it, ‘Anna is Anna!’

  When she arrived in through the door of La Mairena over an hour late for dinner, flushed in the August heat and still talking animatedly on the mobile phone, Terry planted a kiss on both her cheeks, and greeted Anna appreciatively with, ‘I don’t know anyone who can wear white as well as you!’ She had on a simple white top over a pair of well-cut dark navy slacks, which set off the expensive pair of Bally pumps she was wearing. Anna folded up the phone, and said, ‘There were three women in the restaurant for lunch today, who told me I needed to change my bra because my tits were sagging.’

  Anna’s first language is Danish, and she can sometimes take your breath away with her choice of colloquial words in English, and her manipulation of the overflow from many languages.

  She read my face as I kissed her. ‘Tits, yes? Breasts, my breasts are sagging.’

  Terry reassured her, ‘Your breasts look great. And I hope you told those biddies that after surviving breast cancer, their comments are wholly irrelevant. You’re above ground, and we love you: that’s all that matters.’

  Anna is wary of women, and well understands their potential for spite. She told us that her adoptive mother in Denmark used to say to her, at seven years of age, that she’d send her back to where she found her in Austria if she didn’t behave, which emphasised a fatal doubt about whether she was wanted and acceptable to others. Anna’s struggle ever since has been marked by fears of abandonment, a dilemma about security, which is an assured freedom that was robbed from her at that early age. It has prevented her from daring to speak up. ‘One of the women knew that I underwent chemo to save my breast.’ And she added, ‘She was the one who told me they were sagging.’

  About a year ago, there was a fish promotion on at El Corte Inglés in Puerto Banus, and dorada, gilt-head bream, which is a flat white fish, delicious when fried in the stable oil from the hojiblanca olives which are grown to the north of Malaga, was selling for one euro apiece. Anna got all excited and she rang Fernando with the news. Sometimes she lends him a hand with his catering business during the summer months.

  He told her, ‘Buy three hundred!’ He cautioned, ‘But make sure that they’re cleaned.’

  Anna was waiting at the store when it opened at ten o’clock the following morning, and she ordered all her fish. The staff behind the fishmonger’s counter were taken aback: they’d expected each customer to order a few fish, a number they were geared to handle. But for such a big order to be processed and cleaned, they told her she’d have to come back to collect it at two o’clock. When she returned in the afternoon, the fish were in several crates on a large trolley, and sure enough, they’d been topped and tailed. So with the help of some muscular young assistants from the store, she loaded the containers into the back of her Range Rover, piling them high one on top of the other, and set out for her home in Elviria, where Anna would store the fish in her walk-in, industrial freezers, until they were required.

  She got an urgent phone call from Fernando: ‘I’ve been let down by a chef and three waiting staff at a wedding I’m in the middle of catering for here on the outskirts of Marbella.’ He pleaded, ‘Anna, could you come at once and help me out? And bring the crates!’ He sounded desperate.

  So Anna packed up the jeep, and at high speed drove off up into the narrow winding laneways of the countryside in the Marbella hills. She arrived amidst the chaos of a makeshift kitchen, which had been set up in the stables, as a sous chef overturned a large container of pepper sauce for the entrecôtes onto the floor.

  ‘That’s all there is!’ yelled Fernando in shock, and Anna grabbed two square plates and started scooping up the spreading mess into the plastic container. She warned us later, ‘If there’s outside catering for more than fifty people, never, under any circumstances, attend the event!’

  Anna began manhandling the crates of fish into the kitchen.

  ‘Where’s the meat?’ asked Fernando. ‘The crates of meat, Anna, from our store in Malaga …’

  Anna got back into the jeep, and the smell of fish was very strong as she headed down into Marbella, before taking the autovia home to Elviria. The jeep had been baking under the hot summer sun for over an hour, but she didn’t worry unduly: the fish were fresh, they’d been encased in cubes of ice, so she knew they’d be fine. When Anna arrived at her house, she manhandled the crates into her freezers again, drove to the store in Malaga, collected all the crates of meat, and went back up to the catered wedding. It was after four in the morning when Anna got to bed, utterly exhausted. The next morning she had to go into Malaga early to collect a watch from her supplier for a friend, but she smelled fish even before she arrived at the jeep. When she opened the passenger door, liquor from the fish that must have sloshed out of the crates as she travelled at speed over the hills, spilled out onto the gravel: the stink was stomach-churningly pungent.

  There was nothing for it but to strip the carpeting out of the jeep, and to scrub down the interior, which she and her boyfriend, James, did together. Anna was chuckling. ‘People passing by in the street could smell the ba
d fish!’ And she turned towards us, suddenly serious, ‘Isn’t it amazing how an action you take that that you fully intend will be a good one, like me getting the fish for Fernando, can revert in some way, and cause something unintended that is really distressing?’

  When Anna collected us from Malaga airport a month later, there was still the lingering odour of fish in the cabin. It was roasting hot from the heat of the engine, and we had to shout above the din of the driving: we were surprised to realise by how much the carpeting in a car dampens down the noise. She and James scrubbed the carpets with washing powder day after day, laying them out on the lawn to dry. They soaked the material in huge industrial basins, they stamped on it as if they were pressing grapes, they went over it by hand with a scrubbing brush centimetre by centimetre, but they didn’t manage to get rid of the smell entirely. It was fully six months after the mishap before the carpets went back into the jeep, and although the after-effect can still be detected, over time the odour of rotting fish which assaulted the senses has lessened in intensity.

  Anna is a superb organiser. She’s designed the look of the most elegant restaurants in the south of Spain, and nurtured the emerging talents of several of the top chefs there. The Madrid businessman, Vicente García, has brought her in to manage his Restaurante Alborán in Elviria, bombarding her with emails and telephone calls until she’d agreed to his entreaties. Despite the inevitable personality clashes, she worked with the existing staff from early morning until late at night every single day for the twelve weeks over the Christmas and New Year period, and turned the restaurant around. Carlos, the accountant, showed her that for the whole month of January last year, the restaurant had taken in very little, with few bookings: this January under her stewardship, Alborán had on average thirty covers for lunch each day, and the place was fully booked for dinner at the weekends; this was in addition to the considerable savings she’d been making on food and drink through introducing the new bistro menus, and buying wine in bulk. For the first time ever, the Restaurante Alborán has been turning a small profit, and Vicente sounded really pleased. At the relaunch in December, he singled out Anna for unstinting praise: ‘She’s like a sister to me,’ he declared, ‘family on whom I can rely!’ But for Anna, it came at a cost.