Several months before that Saturday I had wandered into the church for the first time. It was different from the Church of the Holy Assumption. It had a different smell, a smell that might have come from mothballs or from the tidy stacks of hymn-books and prayer-books, whereas the Church of the Holy Assumption smelt of people and candles. It was cosier, much smaller, with dark-coloured panelling and pews, and stained-glass windows that seemed old, and no cross on the altar. There were flags and banners that were covered with dust, all faded and in shreds, and a Bible spread out on the wings of an eagle.
The old sexton came back. I could feel him watching me as I read the tablets on the walls, moving from one to the next, pretending that each of them interested me. I might have asked him: I might have smiled at him and timidly inquired about Elvira Tremlett because I knew he was old enough to remember. But I didn’t. I walked slowly up a side-aisle, away from the altar, to the back of the church. I wanted to linger there in the shadows, but I could feel his rheumy eyes on my back, wondering about me. As I slipped away from the church, down the short path that led through black iron gates to the street at the top of the hill, I knew that I would never return to the place.
‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to go back. There’s nothing to go back for.’
I knew that was true. It was silly to keep on calling in at the Protestant church.
‘It’s curiosity that sends you there,’ she said. ‘You’re much too curious.’
I knew I was: she had made me understand that. I was curious and my family weren’t.
She smiled her slow smile, and her eyes filled with it. Her eyes were brown, the same colour as her long hair. I loved it when she smiled. I loved watching her fingers playing with the daisies in her lap, I loved her old-fashioned clothes, and her shoes and her two elaborate earrings. She laughed once when I asked her if they were gold. She’d never been rich, she said.
There was a place, a small field with boulders in it, hidden on the edge of a wood. I had gone there the first time, after I’d been in the Protestant church. What had happened was that in the church I had noticed the tablet on the wall, the left wall as you faced the altar, the last tablet on it, in dull grey marble.
Near by this Stone
Lies Interred the Body
of Miss Elvira Tremlett
Daughter of Wm. Tremlett
of Tremlett Hall
in the County of Dorset.
She Departed this Life
30 August 1873
Aged 18.
Why should an English girl die in our town? Had she been passing through? Had she died of poisoning? Had someone shot her? Eighteen was young to die.
On that day, the first day I read her tablet, I had walked from the Protestant church to the field beside the wood, I often went there because it was a lonely place, away from the town and from people. I sat on a boulder and felt hot sun on my face and head, and on my heck and the backs of my hands. I began to imagine her, Elvira Tremlett of Tremlett Hall in the county of Dorset, England. I gave her her long hair and her smile and her elaborate earrings, and I felt I was giving her gifts. I gave her her clothes, wondering if I had got them right. Her fingers were delicate as straws, lacing together the first of her daisy-chains. Her voice hadn’t the edge that Myrna Loy’s had, her neck was more elegant.
‘Oh, love,’ she said on the Saturday after the sexton had spoken to me. ‘The tablet’s only a stone. It’s silly to go gazing at it.’
I knew it was and yet it was hard to prevent myself. The more I gazed at it the more I felt I might learn about her: I didn’t know if I was getting her right. I was afraid even to begin to imagine her death because I thought I might be doing wrong to have her dying from some cause that wasn’t the correct one. It seemed insulting to her memory not to get that perfectly correct.
‘You mustn’t want too much,’ she said to me on that Saturday afternoon. ‘It’s as well you’ve finished with the tablet on the wall. Death doesn’t matter, you know.’
I never went back to the Protestant church. I remember what my mother had said about the quality of English goods, and how cars assembled in England were twice the ones assembled in Dublin. I looked at the map of England in my atlas and there was Dorset. She’d been travelling, maybe staying in a house near by, and had died somehow: she was right, it didn’t matter.
Tremlett Hall was by a river in the country, with Virginia creeper all over it, with long corridors and suits of armour in the hall, and a fireplace in the hall also. In David Copperfield, which I had seen in the Vista, there might have been a house like Tremlett Hall, or in A Yank at Oxford: I couldn’t quite remember. The gardens were beautiful: you walked from one garden to another, to a special rose-garden with a sundial, to a vegetable garden with high walls around it. In the house someone was always playing a piano. ‘Me,’ Elvira said.
My brothers went to work in the garage, first Brian and then Liam. Effie went to Cork, to the commercial college. The boys at the Christian Brothers’ began to whistle at Kitty and sometimes would give me notes to pass on to her. Even when other people were there I could feel Elvira’s nearness, even her breath sometimes, and certainly the warmth of her hands. When Brother Cahey hit me one day she cheered me up. When my father came back from Macklin’s in time for his Saturday tea her presence made it easier. The garage I hated, where I was certain now I would one day lift paraffin cans from one corner to another, was lightened by her. She was in Mrs Driscoll’s vegetable shop when I bought cabbage and potatoes for my mother. She was there while I waited for the Vista to open, and when I walked through the animals on a fair-day. In the stony field the sunshine made her earrings glitter. It danced over a brooch she had not had when first I imagined her, a brooch with a scarlet jewel, in the shape of a spider. Mist caught in her hair, wind ruffled the skirts of her old-fashioned dress. She wore gloves when it was cold, and a green cloak that wrapped itself all around her. In spring she often carried daffodils, and once – one Sunday in June – she carried a little dog, a grey cairn that afterwards became part of her, like her earrings and her brooch.
I grew up but she was always eighteen, as petrified as her tablet on the wall. In the bedroom which I shared with Brian and Liam I came, in time, to take her dragon’s brooch from her throat and to take her earrings from her pale ears and to lift her dress from her body. Her limbs were warm, and her smile was always there. Her slender fingers traced caresses on my cheeks. I told her that I loved her, as the people told one another in the Vista.
‘You know why they’re afraid of you?’ she said one day in the field by the wood. ‘You know why they hope that God will look after you?’
I had to think about it but I could come to no conclusion on my own, without her prompting. I think I wouldn’t have dared; I’d have been frightened of whatever there was.
‘You know what happens,’ she said, ‘when your uncle stays in Cork on a Saturday night? You know what happened once when your father came back from Macklin’s too late for his meal, in the middle of the night?’
I knew before she told me. I guessed, but I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been there. I made her tell me, listening to her quiet voice. My Uncle Jack went after women as well as greyhounds in Cork. It was his weakness, like going to Macklin’s was my father’s. And the two weaknesses had once combined, one Saturday night a long time ago, when my uncle hadn’t gone to Cork and my father was a long time in Macklin’s. I was the child of my Uncle Jack and my mother, born of his weakness and my mother’s anger as she waited for the red bleariness of my father to return, footless in the middle of the night. It was why my father called my uncle a hypocrite. It was maybe why my uncle was always looking at the ground, and why he assisted Father Kiberd in the rectory and in the Church of the Holy Assumption. I was their sin, growing in front of them, for God to look after.
‘They have made you,’ Elvira said. ‘The three of them have made you what you are.’
I imagined my fa
ther returning that night from Macklin’s, stumbling on the stairs, and haste being made by my uncle to hide himself. In these images it was always my uncle who was anxious and in a hurry: my mother kept saying it didn’t matter, pressing him back on to the pillows, wanting him to be found there.
My father was like a madman in the bedroom then, wild in his crumpled Saturday clothes. He struck at both of them, his befuddled eyes tormented while my mother screamed. She went back through all the years of their marriage, accusing him of cruelty and neglect. My uncle wept. ‘I’m no more than an animal to you,’ my mother screamed, half-naked between the two of them. ‘I cook and clean and have children for you. You give me thanks by going out to Macklin’s.’ Brian was in the room, attracted by the noise. He stood by the open door, five years old, telling them to be quiet because they were waking the others.
‘Don’t ever tell a soul,’ Brian would have said, years afterwards, retailing that scene for Liam and Effie and Kitty, letting them guess the truth. He had been sent back to bed, and my uncle had gone to his own bed, and in the morning there had begun the pretending that none of it had happened. There was confession and penance, and extra hours spent in Macklin’s. There were my mother’s prayers that I would not be born, and my uncle’s prayers, and my father’s bitterness when the prayers weren’t answered.
On the evening of the day that Elvira shared all that with me I watched them as we ate in the kitchen, my father’s hands still smeared with oil, his fingernails in mourning, my uncle’s eyes bent over his fried eggs. My brothers and sisters talked about events that had taken place in the town; my mother listened without interest, her large round face seeming stupid to me now. It was a cause for celebration that I was outside the family circle. I was glad not to be part of the house and the garage, and not to be part of the town with its statue and its shops and its twenty-nine public houses. I belonged with a figment of my imagination: an English ghost who had acquired a dog, whose lips were soft, whose limbs were warm, Elvira Tremlett, who lay beneath the Protestant church.
‘Oh, love,’ I said in the kitchen, ‘thank you.’
The conversation ceased, my father’s head turned sharply. Brian and Liam looked at me, so did Effie and Kitty. My mother had a piece of fried bread on a fork, on the way to her mouth. She returned it to her plate. There was grease at the corner of her lips, a little shiny stream from some previous mouthful, running down to her chin. My uncle pushed his knife and fork together and stared at them.
I felt them believing with finality now, with proof, that I was not sane. I was fifteen years old, a boy who was backward in his ways, who was all of a sudden addressing someone who wasn’t in the room.
My father cut himself a slice of bread, moving the bread-saw slowly through the loaf. My brothers were as valuable in the garage now as he or my uncle; Effie kept the books and sent out bills. My father took things easy, spending more time talking to his older customers. My uncle pursued the racing pages; my mother had had an operation for varicose veins, which she should have had years ago.
I could disgrace them in the town, in all the shops and public houses, in Bolger’s Medical Hall, in the convent and the Christian Brothers’ and the Church of the Holy Assumption. How could Brian and Liam carry on the business if they couldn’t hold their heads up? How could Effie help with the petrol pumps at a busy time, standing in her Wellington boots on a wet day, for all the town to see? Who would marry Kitty now?
I had spoken by mistake, and I didn’t speak again. It was the first time I had said anything at a meal in the kitchen for as long as I could remember, for years and years. I had suddenly felt that she might grow tired of coming into my mind and want to be left alone, buried beneath the Protestant church. I had wanted to reassure her.
‘They’re afraid of you,’ she said that night. ‘All of them.’
She said it again when I walked in the sunshine to our field. She kept on saying it, as if to warn me, as if to tell me to be on the look-out. ‘They have made you,’ she repeated. ‘You’re the child of all of them.’
I wanted to go away, to escape from the truth we had both instinctively felt and had shared. I walked with her through the house called Tremlett Hall, haunting other people with our footsteps. We stood and watched while guests at a party laughed among the suits of armour in the hall, while there was waltzing in a ballroom. In the gardens dahlias bloomed, and sweet-pea clung to wires against a high stone wall. Low hedges of fuchsia bounded the paths among the flower-beds, the little dog ran on in front of us. She held my hand and said she loved me; she smiled at me in the sunshine. And then, just for a moment, she seemed to be different; she wasn’t wearing the right clothes; she was wearing a tennis dress and had a racquet in her hand. She was standing in a conservatory, one foot on a cane chair. She looked like another girl, Susan Peters in Random Harvest.
I didn’t like that. It was the same kind of thing as feeling I had to speak to her even though other people were in the kitchen. It was a muddle, and somewhere in it I could sense an unhappiness I didn’t understand. I couldn’t tell if it was hers or mine. I tried to say I was sorry, but I didn’t know what I was sorry for.
In the middle of one night I woke up screaming. Brian and Liam were standing by my bed, cross with me for waking them. My mother came, and then my father. I was still screaming, unable to stop. ‘He’s had some type of nightmare,’ Brian said.
It wasn’t a nightmare because it continued when 1 was awake. She was there, Elvira Tremlett, born 1855. She didn’t talk or smile: I couldn’t make her. Something was failing in me: it was the same as Susan Peters suddenly appearing with a tennis racquet, the same as my desperation in wanting to show gratitude when we weren’t in private.
My mother sat beside my bed. My brothers returned to theirs. The light remained on. I must have whispered, I must have talked about her because I remember my mother’s nodding head and her voice assuring me that it was all a dream. I slept, and when I woke up it was light in the room and my mother had gone; my brothers were getting up. Elvira Tremlett was still there, one eye half-closed in blindness, the fingers that had been delicate misshapen now. When my brothers left the room she was more vivid, a figure by the window, turning her head to look at me, a gleam of fury in her face. She did not speak but I knew what she was saying. I had used her for purposes of my own, to bring solace. What right, for God’s sake, had I to blow life into her decaying bones? Born 1855, eighty-nine years of age.
I closed my eyes, trying to imagine her as I had before, willing her young girl’s voice and her face and hair. But even with my eyes closed the old woman moved about the room, from the window to the foot of Liam’s bed, to the wardrobe, into a corner, where she stood still.
She was on the landing with me, and on the stairs and in the kitchen. She was in the stony field by the wood, accusing me of disturbing her and yet still not speaking. She was in pain from her eye and her arthritic hands: I had brought about that. Yet she was no ghost, I knew she was no ghost. She was a figment of my imagination, drawn from her dull grey tablet by my interest. She existed within me, I told myself, but it wasn’t a help.
Every night I woke up screaming. The sheets of my bed were sodden with my sweat. I would shout at my brothers and my mother, begging them to take her away from me. It wasn’t I who had committed the sin, I shouted, it wasn’t I who deserved the punishment. All I had done was to talk to a figment. All I’d done was to pretend, as they had.
Father Kiberd talked to me in the kitchen. His voice came and went, and my mother’s voice spoke of the sodden sheets every morning, and my father’s voice said there was terror in my eyes. All I wanted to say was that I hadn’t meant any harm in raising Elvira Tremlett from the dead in order to have an imaginary friend, or in travelling with her to the house with Virginia creeper on it. She hadn’t been real, she’d been no more than a flicker on the screen of the Vista cinema: I wanted to say all that. I wanted to be listened to, to be released of the shame that I felt like a shro
ud around me. I knew that if I could speak my imagination would be free of the woman who haunted it now. I tried, but they were afraid of me. They were afraid of what I was going to say and between them they somehow stopped me. ‘Our Father,’ said Father Kiberd, ‘Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name…’
Dr Garvey came and looked at me: in Cork another man looked at me. The man in Cork tried to talk to me, telling me to lie down, to take my shoes off if I wanted to. It wasn’t any good, and it wasn’t fair on them, having me there in the house, a person in some kind of nightmare. I quite see now that it wasn’t fair on them, I quite see that.
Because of the unfairness I was brought, one Friday morning in a Ford car my father borrowed from a customer, to this brown-brick mansion, once the property of a local family. I have been here for thirty-four years. The clothes I wear are rough, but I have ceased to. be visited by the woman who Elvira Tremlett became in my failing imagination. I ceased to be visited by her the moment I arrived here, for when that moment came I knew that this was the house she had been staying in when she died. She brought me here so that I could live in peace, even in the room that had been hers. I had disturbed her own peace so that we might come here together.
I have not told this story myself. It has been told by my weekly visitor, who has placed me at the centre of it because that, of course, is where I belong. Here, in the brown-red mansion, I have spoken without difficulty. I have spoken in the garden where I work in the daytime; I have spoken at all meals; I have spoken to my weekly visitor. I am different here. I do not need an imaginary friend, I could never again feel curious about a girl who died.
I have asked my visitor what they say in the town, and what the family say. He replies that in the bar of Corrigan’s Hotel commercial travellers are told of a boy who was haunted, as a place or a house is. They are drawn across the bar to a window: Devlin Bros., the garage across the street, is pointed out to them. They listen in pleasurable astonishment to the story of nightmares, and hear the name of an English girl who died in the town in 1873, whose tablet is on the wall of the Protestant church. They are told of the final madness of the boy, which came about through his visions of this girl, Elvira Tremlett.
The Collected Stories Page 89