While my father worked I went off walking, moving down to the popular beach or into the holiday town where everything was hopeful and bright. There were families everywhere, loose loud chains of them wandering down the streets, in and out of shops, young children with rings of ice cream round their mouths and saddles of freckles across their noses. Sometimes I tailed along behind them, the unknown brother, the last of the family, for a while just on the edge of ordinary life.
When I got back my father would still be painting. The afternoon canvases were different from those of the morning. At first I thought it was his tiredness and the pressure into which he had stoked his brain that made the second paintings of every day seem so much more desperate and urgent. A flat grey ribboned into black in all of them, the tones of everything deepened, the yellows and blues that sparkled and raced into the morning works were here half-hidden, disappearing flickers of light into the churning swirl of darker shades. After he had painted four or five of them, I relaxed, realising that they were not the works of personal anger or grief but simply the pictures of what my father saw, God’s changing humour in the afternoons and early evenings, the sky in the sea like a face ageing.
Most days he painted through until eight o’clock. I watched him from a distance, looking up from whatever seashore we had stopped at to see his tall figure perched and stooping over a canvas that was buffeted like a sail in the sea breeze. There were stones around its base, anchoring him for the day at whatever site he had chosen, keeping him there under broad western skies whose swift majesty and change seemed to mock all effort to capture or tame it. Sometimes a car stopped on the road behind and tourists, Germans or Americans, made their way slowly down across the tufted grass to see. They approached uncertainly, not quite sure if this man with the long white hair was someone they ought to know or run from. When my father never turned or looked at them, mixing the colours and applying them without the slightest show of recognition, they walked away as uncertain as before, driving along the high road and out of my childish dream that they might see the paintings and be astonished, offer great sums of money, and herald my father a genius.
Our evenings were cold and quiet. Even the warmest day became a chill night. The sea wind forced us back into the sandhills. I had no books, no radio, and sat hunched on the sand staring out at the humped shape of the islands for hours at a time. Generally, my father fell asleep early. But sometimes after we ate and before he curled into his coat on the sand, he sang a piece of a song, or rather spoke the words in the verse rhythm. I had never heard him sing and felt ever more strongly the realisation that this was a different man from the one at home in the sitting room. Here everything about him seemed released, and I could only imagine how silently he had rattled for so long in the jails of his office career. On one of the first nights he asked me, offhandedly, what I knew to sing or say, and in a faltering half-whisper that mixed into the whoosh of the night waves, I said some school poems I had learned by heart, and then, without thinking, began the slow intricate fabulations of a learned passage of Ovid, then Virgil.
‘Dine hunc ardorem mentibus addunt, Euryale, an sua cuique deus fit dira cupido.’
They were sounds so soft and full in my mouth that the very saying of them was a kind of magic, a kind of disappearing, upwards and outwards beyond the breaking of the surf and the distant shining of the lights on the islands. I sounded the Latin and the words floated on the wind. I said a remembered line, and another. My father’s eyes were closed but he was listening too, as if it were a fine music that the wind played off the stars.
When I finished, he slept. The sea pounded on the ancient shore.
7
I said the Latin every night after that. He sang something poorly, stopped, and then I started, skipping the school poems and beginning, following a silent accord such as two lovers might share and conjuring magic with sounds of Latin. I was as surprised by it as he was, and found myself anticipating the nights as I wandered through the seaside towns. Looking back, I realise that I had found the beginnings of my own identity, the first quivering emergence of my own shape out of the great shadow cast by my father. In the Latin I had something. That it seemed at once absolutely foreign and at the same time strangely fitting to the wild open night spaces of the west made it all the better. We lay, holed up in the corner of a dune with the wind rushing over our heads, and I said words in Latin. Of course it didn’t strike me then that there was any other reason for my having turned to the Virgil or Ovid after the school poems ran out. I wasn’t thinking of anything other than the flash of panic I had felt to have something to say for my father as he had asked. I didn’t know then that the sounds seemed a symbol to him, that they came that first night like heraldic angels, trumpeting in his ears and through his own son’s mouth, the confirmation if any was needed that God had come to the west coast of Clare and that in the sudden sweetness of the holy language was the revelatory message that, yes, those paintings of the sea were the very things that He Himself had brought William Coughlan there to paint.
8
On the last day of the week we walked south and east again in the direction of the train station. Every canvas my father had brought with him had now been worked on. Seen all together they were remarkable, there was a style running through all of them, the same underlying vision of mornings and evenings, light struggling to spread out or stay against the onrush of dark, the shimmering and answering reflections of air and water that seemed in these paintings to have aspired to the condition of fire. The two latest pictures, not yet dry, I carried back-to-back and separate from the others in a kind of drawstring carrier that seemed readymade to fit them. They were, like all the others, slivers of the sea we were leaving behind.
There was a sadness in returning as well as a sense of victory. My father had done what he came to do and was eager now to be back in his studio. But, even as we tramped quietly along the road homeward, I could feel the memories of the summer sea already shifting and sighing inside both of us. There was something that was impossible to leave about that western coast, and moving as we were with our backs to the blue horizon and the stacked canvases flapping a little in the wind, every footstep was a triumph over the temptation to stop and go back.
In the pie cafe my father had said it wouldn’t rain for six days. It was the first time I had known him to make any prediction and had at first taken it only as some rash expression of hope not fact. It was the kind of thing you might say setting off, I told myself later, he meant nothing more by it. The skies we slept under were too uncertain for forecasts. They came and went on the moody gusts of the Atlantic, bringing half a dozen different weathers in an afternoon and playing all four movements of a wind symphony, allegro, andante, scherzo and adagio on the broken backs of the white waves. Clouds, thumping bass notes or brilliant wild arpeggios, were never long in coming. It had seemed it was going to rain all the time, but never did. My father did not look concerned, and on the fifth day as I woke and found myself instinctively searching the sky for the weather note, I realised that to him his prediction had not been hope but fact. It wasn’t going to rain for six days, it was as simple as that. Our trip, though, was seven; and on the morning of the day we were to walk back toward the station my father drew out of his bag sheets of clear plastic with which we carefully wrapped the paintings. The two in the drawstring carrier he handled separately. ‘When it rains, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘we’ll have to mind these two carefully. I’ll give you my coat for over them as well.’
The sky under which we set off that morning was pale and unremarkable. The air had a coolish lift to it, a freshness that was the forebreeze of another month, the quivering note of September. We marched out of the field, stepped over three lines of barbed wire, and headed up the softly rising hill away from the sea. Cars slipped past us. My father took no notice of them and kept his eyes straight ahead, slowing his stride sometimes to let me catch up or standing on a small crest to pause and look back, measuring in th
e long ribboning grey of the road how far we had come. The train was not until early the following morning, we had one more night to camp inland somewhere near the station, and it was to there we were heading, the pictures hung on our backs like the huge strange stamps of a far-off country and the rising wind pressing us forward. By noon we had left our last glimpse of the sea. By early afternoon in a place called Kilnamona it began to rain.
My father took off his coat for the two most recent paintings, bundling them tightly as the landscape all around us closed in, its colours fading into the drizzle. How quickly everything changed. The clouds sat down, the light left the day, and the pastoral greenness of all the stone-walled fields surrendered to a grey and desolate emptiness. For miles it was raining. At the edges of the sky you could see the fraying of clouds and the water spilling, like so many downstrokes of a sable brush. The lift and energy of the day were washed away. We tramped on without talking and the holiday cars swept by. My right shoe opened a hole and took in water, the legs of my trousers thickened and weighed, but after a while I grew used to it, for there was a kind of calmness and peace in walking through that rain. You imagined you were heading for the other side of it and moved one foot after the other in a kind of silent trance, the miles disappearing beneath you and the rain still falling into your face. My father didn’t say a word. He had a soft hat in his coat pocket and wore it as his only protection, the long strands of his hair gathering and releasing little streamlets down the back of his shirt. I could see the tips of his shoulder blades pressing out through the wet fabric, their high angles jutting into the air as if at any moment they might stretch and expand, feather into wings and take him flying off down the road ahead of me. Such things I imagined walking behind him in the rain. Everything about him had come to seem almost mythical to me, his long bent-forward figure, his great forehead, the eyes that blinked away the beating weather and gazed relentlessly forward down the road. I loved him now in a way I hadn’t before, and bore the increasing water-logged weight of the coated and wrapped paintings on my shoulders as evidence or proof. Whenever my father stopped for me to catch up and come alongside him was a moment of such satisfaction and happiness, a swelling instant of love and pride that I had come with him, that he had let me, that I had seen the other side of him and was now helping him bring home the greatest paintings he had ever done, that I wanted to laugh there on the roadside. He put his hand on my shoulder, straightened the straps of the bag.
‘Do you want to rest?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine.’
‘We’ll go beyond the next rise, all right?’
‘All right.’
And on again, the rain still falling, the road winding down through a closed village of quietness, my father pacing a few yards in front of me, unable to keep his stride short or his eyes off the horizon. By mid-afternoon he looked like he had gone swimming in the sky. The clouds had thickened and lowered. Potholes in the rough road filled into grey pools which cars plashed through on their way away, anywhere out of the rain. Under the dripping of a great green chestnut tree we stopped to eat. Our biscuits and bread were damp. The trunk of the tree had a thick sweet smell of autumn, and we sat upon the base of it looking out at the dark trail our footsteps had brushed out of the silvered grass. It was a thing I remembered, years later, going back to try and find the same tree. That brief marking of our joint trail off the road and under the chestnut, that place where everything was momentarily perfect, where we sat under the light pattering of the leaves, father and son, and ate quietly, where my father put his face down into the paint-stained cup of his two palms, rubbing away the rain before lifting those eyes free to look across the little space at me and say:
‘You’re a great help to me, Nicholas. I’m glad you came.’
As simple as that, that moment at the end of the trail through the grass and under the dripping boughs of the chestnut tree. If we could have been lifted up, gathered into cloud then, I would have been happy forever. If we could have lain down there or burrowed like animals into the sweet brown smell of the tree itself, screened from the world in veils of rain and the scents of autumn, everything would have stayed the way it was. There could have been peace.
9
When we finished eating we sat on for a while, saying nothing, listening, looking out. It was as if neither of us wanted to move out of that moment, its green and glistening haven, its drizzling serenity. Then, at last, my father shifted his legs and said: ‘I suppose we’ll get colds if we stay too long. Come on. We’ll have some hot tea somewhere along the way.’
We moved out of the field and left the tree behind, marching down the road once more, bringing only the memory. The rain felt colder and our progress was slower, but by evening we could see the rooftops of the town squatting under the clouds in the distance. We stopped on the last hill, then took a turn off the main road along a small boreen. Cows were grazing in the stubbled white fields where late hay had been cut. Blackbirds flew up and down, moving a little ahead of them.
‘There’s an old barn down this way,’ my father said, leading us forward between the hedgerows to a place where new hay was stacked high under a red corrugated roof. The old cottage next to it was a disused ruin, its thatch fallen in like a gaping mouth. The barn was used now by a neighbouring farmer, but with the hay in and the evening drawing on it would give us the night’s shelter and a sleep in out of the weather. Besides, there was nothing better than dreaming on a bed of hay, my father told me, swinging off the burden of his art and letting his long frame sigh back onto the harvest. I looked down at him. His eyes were closed. He lay so still that for a moment I thought he was already sleeping, that somewhere between his lying back and his landing on the hay dreams had already overtaken him and he was asleep. I took off the drawstring bag carefully and laid the paintings down still wrapped in his coat. A minute passed. My father didn’t move. Rain ran off the roof of the barn. Another minute. I looked down at him. He was asleep. As quietly as possible I moved to sit down and wait, when my father sat up.
‘Nicholas,’ he said, ‘come on, we have to go.’
‘What?’
‘Tea.’
He stood out of the two-minute dream with wide-awake eyes and stretched the wings of his arms before grabbing me by the shoulder and guiding me out into the rain once more. ‘Leave everything,’ he said. ‘There’s a place near here, we won’t be long.’
He swept me along with him at a quick pace. It was, I thought, as if we were fleeing the scene of a crime, almost running down the narrow road together to arrive wet and breathless in the door of a small pub and grocery shop. We stepped inside on to a stone floor and let ourselves drip in the brown light. There were no other customers. A round woman in a blue apron coat came through a curtain from the other side of the house.
‘Yahs,’ she said slowly.
‘We’d like a pot of tea,’ said my father, printing the wet shapes of his shoes across the floor to stand towering over the bar.
The woman looked up at him, and then quickly across at me. ‘Yahs,’ she said, and turned roundly out back through the curtain. My father and I sat down at the only table. He had woken from the dream with such a sense of urgency that at first I thought it was simply because he had almost forgotten his promise to me of tea. But now, sitting across from each other a week since our evening in the small café, I knew it was something more. I was beginning to be able to read the signs now, the messages coming through in the deepening wrinkles on his forehead, the look in his eyes. My father faced the door and when the tea came drank from a brown-stained mug the dusty-flavoured liquid without taking his eyes off the entrance. He tapped his fingers or twisted them into looping awkward knots that cracked and released into the empty air. He swallowed the tea in a gulp. It was too hot and he tilted back his head with his mouth open, blowing the burning away, and then staring across at the door once more. What or whom he expected I had no idea. I was used to my father’s abrupt moods, used to the surprise and
mystery that so informed and magnified his character that they seemed as much a part of him as his arms or legs. He had a reason of his own, I knew that, and sat there with his face gazing past my shoulder just waiting to find out what it was that he must do next.
He waited until I had finished. He was eager to be gone, I knew, he wanted to be on the other side of that door but controlled himself enough to ask me if I’d like more. Then he asked how much we owed, took the wet money from his trouser pocket, paid the woman and swept us out into the rain once again. I was expecting him to tell me something as I hurried along by his galloping legs, the skies opening and my heart thumping. What was it? What was happening? The water soaked the shoulders of my father’s shirt. I could see his skin showing through in a way that made it seem more exposed and vulnerable than if he were naked. The rain blew over the tops of the hedges. We were walking fast, then suddenly we were running, running so frantically fast with long slapping sploshing wet strides that I knew it was not the weather we were hurrying from now but back to the paintings.
Four Letters of Love Page 11