Time Present and Time Past

by Deirdre Madden

  She picks up the sleeping cat and settles it again on the chair where it had been earlier, the same chair where she had sat on that afternoon. It was bizarre, she thinks. Christy had been dead by the end of that week. All their lives had been in turmoil; Beth had been inconsolable. Martina’s own grief for what had happened to her merged with the shock of Christy’s passing; she had been able to conceal it from the family. In time Beth had started to piece her life together again; and part of that had been Martina’s decision to give up her job and apartment and relocate to Ireland. There was no point in thinking what if? That was what had happened, and this is the reality of her life now.

  The clock on the mantelpiece strikes three. Martina has to go to work in the morning. She places the empty glass beside the clock and goes upstairs, hoping for sleep.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Imelda has caught him out. Fintan minimises the image on his computer screen, but she’ll have none of it.

  ‘Pull that up again; let me see it.’ He does so, reluctantly, and they both look at the photograph that appears. It shows a woman in a blue dress of the style of the early twentieth century, standing by a white gate.

  ‘She’s not in costume,’ Fintan says. ‘It’s a real colour photograph, from a hundred years ago.’

  ‘Amazing,’ Imelda says, bending over the computer and staring at the picture. ‘I didn’t know you were interested in photography.’

  ‘I am a bit, yes,’ he says, trying to sound offhand.

  To his relief she straightens up and moves away. She’s wearing a grey trouser-suit today, with a cream blouse. She surprises him then by saying, ‘If my house was on fire, the first thing I would grab would be a photograph. Well, I mean after I’d grabbed the Jack Russell, of course.’

  ‘Not the kids?’ Fintan is aware that Imelda has two daughters, who are roughly the same age as his own sons.

  ‘The girls are big now. They’ve got legs. They know where the front door is,’ she says ironically.

  ‘And the Jack Russell doesn’t?’

  Imelda laughs. ‘If the house did go up in flames, it would probably be the dog that made sure we knew about it. The least I could do in return would be to carry the little mutt to safety.’

  ‘And the photograph?’

  ‘Oh it’s nothing special,’ she says, becoming evasive. ‘Just a snap, you know? But it means a lot to me. It’s a family thing.’ Fintan says nothing: not as a tactic, but because he can think of nothing to say. Imelda feels compelled to speak into the silence, adds hesitantly, ‘It’s just a picture of a birthday party from when the children were small. The four of us. There’s a cake on the table, all the little candles, and there’s a balloon tied to the back of a chair. We all look so happy. It’s like everything my family means to me is in that photograph.’

  ‘A picture like that would be very precious,’ Fintan says, to help her out, aware that she’s becoming uncomfortable. ‘I sometimes think photographs had more value when they weren’t so commonplace; when they took more effort. We’re drowning in images nowadays. All the phones with cameras on them; people must take more photos than they ever look at. I sometimes wonder what the point of it is.’

  Imelda smiles at him. ‘You’re getting old, Fintan.’

  ‘That’s what my kids say to me.’

  ‘Mine too. The unfortunate thing is that it’s true.’

  She remembers then the reason that brought her in to see Fintan in the first place: she wants to collect some documents relating to an important meeting which is to take place the following day. She says she’ll read over the papers and come back soon to discuss them with him; and with that she leaves the room. He should get back to work again once she’s gone, but he doesn’t. He stares at the woman in the blue dress and thinks about everything that has happened to him in recent weeks. The hallucinations and strange shifts of perception are still occurring, but they are becoming less frequent, and he is getting rather used to them. He is sensible these days to an immense pathos in life, and finds himself fervently hoping this awareness will never again leave him.

  Yesterday had been a day of particularly fine weather. In the evening when he was going home, everything had been bathed in a golden light with a tinge of pink to it, against which the grey stones of certain buildings and the bell tower of a church he passed stood out with an enhanced monumentality. He had found himself thinking, first: The sky today is an eighteenth-century sky, and then, immediately: Why am I thinking this? What do I mean? He teased it out in his mind on the DART as he went home. The sky had reminded him of how it looked in old prints of Dublin with which he was familiar, eighteenth-century prints where the main focus was on the architecture. This in turn made him think of what Niall had said to him some weeks ago, of not confusing the medium used to suggest a thing with the thing itself. And yet the sky he saw was the thing itself: this was how it looked today, but it was also how it would have looked on certain days in the eighteenth century. It pointed up again his tendency to think of the past as profoundly different to the present, which it was, but not in the ways he expected; so that he had been surprised by Rob’s remark of a week ago on a cold day of torrential rain, when Fintan had found him in the hall gloomily sluicing water off his leather jacket and flapping his black umbrella: ‘They would have had weather like this during the Famine. Do you ever think about that, Dad? Rain like this and rotten potatoes.’

  There’s a knock at the door. Imelda has returned, having read the documents. Fintan comes out from behind his desk and they both sit down to discuss the meeting the following day. He’s paying attention and is fully engaged to begin with, but the shift, when it comes, is irresistible and relentless.

  He finds himself watching the scene from a distance, as if he is an observer rather than a participant in what is happening. This has happened to him before, but never so completely. It doesn’t stop. It’s as if he’s sliding away not just from himself and from Imelda for a moment, but from his entire world, and forever. Now he feels that he is looking at the scene from another dimension, from a point beyond time itself. He realises that he is dead. So is Imelda. So are Colette, the children, his entire family, everyone he knows, the people he had seen on the DART this morning: everyone, indeed every creature now alive in the world, is dead. The civilisation, for want of a better word, in which he lives is over. This is how it is for the Babylonians, for the people of Ancient Greece. How had he thought he would ever escape? And he had thought that, he realises now, albeit in a most inchoate and confused way. Perhaps the strangest thing of all is that this sudden knowledge does not perturb him. Instead of being grief-stricken he feels a kind of cosmic gratitude: the life that he has been given!

  The grief comes when he realises that the sequence is now in reverse. He is going back through time and again it is relentless, so powerful that it feels as if he is also moving through space. The scene in the room – tiny, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope – of two people sitting in an office, papers in their hands, is getting bigger and bigger, so that he can see it in more detail all the time, until he is no longer looking at the scene, but is in it. He is sitting there looking at the documents before him, and Imelda is making exactly the point she was focused upon when he slipped away to experience immortality.

  He hasn’t missed a thing.

  SIXTEEN

  Fintan is in bed with the lights out, and Colette is already asleep beside him. He is wearing pyjamas so hopelessly uncool, such classic passion-killers that his sons, when they see him wearing them, or observe them pinned on the clothes-line, wonder mutely how it was that they themselves ever managed to come into being.

  Fintan is thinking about the strangeness of sleep, of the body’s need to sink below consciousness for around eight hours of each twenty-four that pass; a need so profound and imperative that there are special rooms and furniture in every home, special clothes devoted to this state. It is, Fintan thinks, wholly
at odds with the functional, rational nature of contemporary life. A great many people are in denial about the need for sleep, and make it a point of honour to get by on five or six hours, perhaps even less. He thinks of how exhausted Imelda often seems to him, and how annoyed she is if he comments upon this, even sympathetically; as though being tired were some kind of moral failing, some kind of vice. Everyone wants to have more time: time to work, to make money; time in which to be active and do things. There’s a general consensus in the modern world that the days are too short to fit in everything that needs to be done; and, given this, it seems counter-intuitive, perverse, even, to spend eight whole hours lying in the dark, sleeping and dreaming. The earth conspires with the body, sending the darkness of night to gently encourage and facilitate sleep.

  Tomorrow he will go north with Martina. When he had rung his sister after dinner to finalise plans for their journey, she had said something that had struck him as strange: ‘This isn’t about the past. You do understand? It’s very important.’

  ‘I know that,’ Fintan had replied. But it wasn’t true. He’d had no idea what Martina had been talking about; for what is the whole point of this trip, he thinks now, if not to find a way back into the past, into their childhood, to a lost world only half-remembered, but real? They are to meet again with Edward, who had been a part of it, and who can share in those memories as no-one else in the family can, either because they hadn’t been there, or because they hadn’t been born at the time. That is what delights Fintan about the prospect of tomorrow. That, surely, is the point of it, even though he had agreed with Martina that it wasn’t. He’s excited about the visit, but also slightly apprehensive.

  Eventually he drifts off. No-one in the family is having any trouble sleeping tonight: Fintan and Colette, Rob, Niall and Lucy, Martina, Beth and Joan.

  Some three months have passed since first we met Fintan, sitting gloomily in a restaurant, eating chocolate almonds. In the course of that time much consideration has been given to the past, and so we should, perhaps, give some thought to the future.

  What is going to happen in Ireland at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century has been so exhaustively reported upon elsewhere as to not need significant comment here: suffice it to say that the years of prosperity through which people have been living is followed now by a spectacular economic crash. It is perhaps interesting to note, in light of Fintan’s recent thoughts, that one of the first in a series of dramatic events, as everything begins to unravel, will take place in the middle of the night, namely the bank guarantee.

  All the citizens of Ireland will be asleep. Government ministers will have to be woken from their beds to go and take part in this historic event. The people of Ireland, including Fintan and Colette, will wake one morning some two years hence and, turning on their radios, will be stunned to discover that during the night the heads of all the major banks have gone to the government and obliged it to honour all of the banks’ considerable debts. People will think they must be imagining things; that they must be still asleep and dreaming, but no: it is a fact. It will soon become apparent that the banks were mendacious in their dealings with the government on that night, and that their debts are far greater than was then admitted to. Things get worse and worse, leading a couple of years later, at the end of the decade, to the intervention of the external agencies and the loss of economic sovereignty. This would be traumatic for any democracy, but is felt particularly keenly in Ireland, given its history.

  The fallout from these events will affect every family in the country, including the Buckleys. Although a great many of his co-workers, including Imelda, will be made redundant, Fintan will be spared. Rob, however, on graduating from university will be unable to find work, and will be one of the many people, both young and old, who will be obliged to go abroad. He will go to Australia, and will find a job with an insurance company in Sydney. Mags’s mother, whose health is poor, will be unable to face letting Mags, an only child, follow Rob. For a while they will try to maintain the relationship over the great distance that separates them; but a year after Rob’s departure for Australia they will decide, by mutual consent and with great sadness in the entire family circle, to go their separate ways in life.

  Apart from Rob and Mags themselves no-one is more upset about this than Colette. Her intuition that they were well matched was perfectly correct; and had circumstances been different they most certainly would have stayed together and formed a partnership as enduring, stable and harmonious as that of Fintan and Colette; would have produced in due course a few bright toffee-haired gap-toothed children, for both sets of grandparents to dote upon.

  Niall will finish his degree and then do an M.Phil. in Art History in Dublin, followed by a Ph.D. in London. Fintan will at times wonder if his younger son will be studying for the rest of his life: the idea of Niall with a job becomes worryingly unimaginable to him. Although he has longed to see the back of his sons, he will find that he misses them terribly, once they are gone. He will particularly miss Rob, whom, as is the case with all his children, he loves dearly, even though he had frequently found him to be a smart-alecky little know-all, a view not incompatible with love. The idea of Rob being on the other side of the world will make Fintan vertiginous with loneliness for him. He will not confide in Colette about this, as he will not want to add to her own sadness about Rob’s absence.

  Martina will have endless struggles to keep her shop open in the harsh new economic climate. She will share her worries with Fintan, who has a sharp business mind and a good head for figures, and who will give her valuable advice, so that she comes through in the end, and is not forced to close her doors as she will so often fear.

  And so the Buckleys will certainly have their problems in the future, but they will have much luck and happiness too. All of them will enjoy good health, in itself a great gift. Rob will return from Australia in his early thirties; he will find work, a partner, produce children. Niall, in spite of Fintan’s misgivings, will not just find a job, but will have an outstanding career as an art historian, working at various art institutes and universities in Europe and the States, before settling in London where he will be appointed to a Chair. He will also have a happy marriage and a family. The love and affection that is already there between Martina and Colette will deepen and strengthen. The passage of time will blunt the worst of the rough edge in the relationship between Joan and Martina. Death, when it comes for Joan, will be sudden and clean. Beth will drift towards the end in a slow, gentle decline, aware of what is happening to her, but peaceful because she feels sure that afterwards she will be reunited with the spirit of Christy.

  Of the three Buckley children, it is Lucy who will struggle most. It will be a shock to her to discover that the love of a man is not always unconditional, profound and disinterested. No-one will ever love her as much as her father. It will be hard for her to come to terms with this, and her emotional life will become a restless quest for something she will never find. The fate of Emma will be quite different. After an increasingly truculent and disruptive adolescence, during which even Colette will become uneasy with the idea of her as a friend for Lucy, Emma, in her early twenties, will meet someone whose family background is equally fractured and dysfunctional. They will have two children and set up home together, get married and have two more, creating for themselves a refuge from the past. Their home will be for them a haven, albeit a noisy and crowded one. They will be together for the rest of their lives; they will live to see their children’s children.

  But how can all of this be known, when it has not yet come to pass? We all of us look towards a personal future that is imaginary; although the absence of either tragedy or remarkable good luck may indeed deliver up to us, as though we were somewhat inept fortune-tellers, a rough approximation of what we think is going to happen. To engage too much with the future, in all its fragility and uncertainty, can make us feel dizzy with unease. Let us think, then, of the past, so that we may speak
of real things that have actually happened; conscious always that the past, like the future, also shimmers behind the veil of imagination.

  Let us think about the Buckley’s beautiful ancestor, whose studio portrait is in their possession, and to whom Martina bears a strong resemblance. Her name, although the Buckleys will never know this, was Agnes O’Donovan. She was born in Dublin on the fourth of December 1886 and at the age of eighteen she married a greengrocer in Rathmines, called Patsy McGrath. The following year she gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Grace. She died in childbirth with her fifth baby on the twenty-fourth of April 1916 which was Easter Monday, and therefore, by extraordinary coincidence, the very day of the Rising. Agnes remained as a luminous memory in the mind of Grace, who was eleven at the time of her mother’s passing.

  In due course Grace made what turned out to be an unhappy marriage with a man called Felim Ryan. They had two daughters, Joan and Elizabeth, known as Beth. The loss of Agnes was so great a sorrow to Grace that she never spoke of it to her children; and with Grace’s own passing in the early nineteen-sixties, Agnes slipped from memory to oblivion. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; and fact alone gives an inadequate sense of that being: of her kindness, her wit, her magisterial beauty. Let me show her to you.

  Here she is kneeling in a city church, before a bank of small, white candles with fluttering flames. She is conventionally religious in the manner of the day. Her head is bowed in prayer.