Letters From Constance

by MARY HOCKING

  I don’t know what to make of this man, but as I see that towards the beginning of this letter I have referred to shared experiences I shall always remember, he must have a point.

  All through the day people arrived at the shebeen, eager to be in the film. In a few years’ time they will have convinced themselves they were in a film. This, it seems to me, is a people to whom a good story is more important than the recounting of facts, with the result that they have become confused between myth and reality.

  As you see, I myself am affected by this strange atmosphere. A great conflict is drawing to a close in Europe and here am I totally absorbed in events in Connemara. Please write and put me to shame by recounting your thoughts at this momentous time.

  Your impenitent

  Constance

  Belfast

  April, 1945

  My dear Sheila,

  I am to write to you urgently about this Fergus Byrne and whether it is serious between us.

  Very well. I can only say that when he comes into the Met. Office I am immediately aware of my part in a chemical reaction. Rapid changes take place in my body; the heart rate increases, the pulse quickens, blood races through the veins, oxygen is pumped into the brain. All this, while he actually attends to the route forecast he is being given, noting such mundane matters as cloud height and visibility. How it comes about that after bending over me to examine the chart more carefully, he is then able to climb into his kite and avoid contact with the first cloud-covered hill he encounters, I am unable to understand. I suspect there are moments, hours, half-days even, when I am out of his mind. It seems inconceivable, yet when I look at him, when our eyes meet, I cannot be entirely sure that for him the world has ceased to exist. I sometimes think he has our love differently paced, that he is building up more slowly to some more distant consummation.

  Does this answer any of your questions?

  Love,

  Constance

  Belfast

  May, 1945

  My dear Sheila,

  How I relished your poem about victory celebrations in Harwich, contrasting the grandeur of the speeches with the sailors’ failure to comport themselves as war heroes. I like the thought that one of us danced the whole night through. As far as I’m concerned, this war has demonstrated my inability to arrive on time, mentally and spiritually as well as physically, to take part in great occasions. There I stand, always on the outside, wick unlighted, while the wise virgins reap the reward of all that hoarding of oil. I believe there was some celebratory fighting in the centre of the town, but I was on watch. I had a generous portion of our messenger’s rum ration and ended up with bad thoughts and a headache.

  Fergus and I went to see one of those films about occupied France. You know the sort of thing - the café scene with the man playing the fiddle and a message passed, a door opens and closes, a bent figure scurries down cobbled streets in that misty rain which seems always to be falling in the best French films (though this was actually made in America). It set me thinking about how little I have been tested in this war. What can it have been like to have to act on one’s own, instead of in the company of other service people, to make one’s own decisions instead of obeying orders? And always alone, unsure of the affiliations of neighbours, or how far the loyalty of friends could be expected to stretch, to say nothing of their discretion.

  ‘What,’ I asked Fergus, ‘would you do if someone knocked on your door one dark night and said, “Help me”, and you knew the penalty was death?’

  He said this happened all the time in his youth. ‘Sometimes we would have a dozen people hidden around the house.’

  ‘I’m serious about this,’ I told him. ‘I have dreams of standing at the door of my home in Ealing, peering into the darkness of the Common, wondering if I had really heard a tapping on the door. Then a shadow moves and there is a whispered entreaty. I go cold, thinking of Wormwood Scrubs. If it really happened, I don’t know how I would answer.’

  Fergus tells me I always act first and ask questions afterwards, so I would let them in. I can’t be sure of that. I might just as well slam the door and spend the rest of my life asking why I hadn’t opened it. I shall never know. People in the occupied countries have been forced to make this kind of decision, ordinary people like Mummy, unused to letting acquaintances across the threshold, let alone strangers bearing problems.

  To you, of course, terrible things have happened. You have lost a brother and your parents a son. But I, bar a few upsets, have had a good time, never staying anywhere long enough to get bored. Heigh-ho, the roving life. People have died screaming with pain in small rooms while I climbed into my bunk full of self-pity because no one had noticed me at the camp dance. Something puritan in me says, ‘You will pay for this, ‘Constance,’

  So much for dark thoughts. You mentioned Miles casually, tossing him aside in a few well-chosen words. And that, such is my perverse nature, makes me more interested than if you had devoted a brisk little paragraph to his reappearance. Perhaps I react in this way because I know I first mentioned Fergus casually. No such tricks for you. You toss Miles aside and mean him to stay tossed. So we will say no more until and if you mention him again.

  In August I shall be due for long leave and hope I shall get to Harwich to see you and Harpo.

  My love,

  Constance

  Control Tower, night watch

  May, 1945

  Sheila, my unpredictable friend,

  This will have to be very brief because we have a tele-printer fault and I must shortly get the 0100 chart over the phone from that grudging maiden at Maydown.

  I hadn’t expected the subject of Miles to come up this quickly. How have your parents reacted to this whirlwind affair? Have they, in fact, met him? And have you met his parents? By comparison Fergus and I are as formal and sedate as characters out of Jane Austen.

  Can it be that there is something about you I haven’t noticed all this time? You are supposed to be, the steadfast one, ardent, yes, but not rash; resolutely in charge of yourself and events. It is I who am the flibbertigibbet, liable to make ill-advised decisions on the spur of the moment.

  Whatever the answer, tell me you are wildly happy and I will set myself to being happy for you.

  Your loving, if slightly bewildered,

  Constance

  Belfast

  July, 1945

  My dear Sheila Druce,

  You said that in spite of your being a married lady, you wanted our correspondence to continue as before, so I am taking you at your word and hope Miles won’t object.

  I grieve that I shall never know how you looked as you walked up the aisle. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t in white, it’s the face that counts. Did you walk with modestly lowered eyes or gaze eagerly ahead, were you nervous or too radiant for nerves, or did you go forward to meet Miles with grave composure?

  Miles doesn’t believe in God, you say, only in you, so anywhere he can worship you is acceptable to him. It has the virtue of simplicity. Just now, my conception of the Trinity is not God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, but God the Catholic, God the Protestant and God the Holy Spirit off on business elsewhere.

  I hope you will like Fergus. Quite apart from his Catholicism, I’m not sure he will measure up to your standards. As I understand it, your love for Miles exploded with all the force of a revelation while you were watching him teasing out a phrase on the piano. Gone was the capricious student always out of step with his contemporaries and in his place, not so much a person as a coil of wire through which energy flowed intermittently; only the wire was sentient and agonisingly aware of the gaps in transmission. You understood - am I right? - that his fractiousness was occasioned by constant pain. Our imperfectibility is something which most of us accept as a condition of being human, but he, it seems, rages against it. Music dances through his brain and when the rhythm falters, the steps stumble and it is as if he were paralysed. The need to impose order on the da
ncing notes dominates his life. You have found what you need in Miles - a person who uses his energy to the full while others squander their resources on the small change of life.

  Things are somewhat different with me. When Fergus and I went for a walk in the Mournes last week we missed the last bus. I looked at him, as we lazed beside a stream, and I could see energy leaking from every pore. I am afraid he does a lot of squandering.

  I look forward to seeing your attic residence in Shepherd’s Bush when I come on leave next month.

  My love to you both,

  Constance

  Belfast

  August, 1945

  My dear Sheila,

  It was so good to see you and Miles last week. On previous occasions Miles has seemed a rather forbidding person, so it was a joy to see that hitherto glowering face full of light and mischief. I had no idea he was such a splendid mime - a touch of malice there, perhaps, but who am I to complain of that! And he laughed at himself when he played the piano with mock seriousness; that was unexpected. A quick, dancing wit. You will find him an exhilarating companion. I came away elated.

  As I promised, I called on your parents the next day. I know you’re troubled about your father and he does indeed seem saddened that you are not making use of your gifts. Your mother said to me, ‘He had such hopes for John and now that disappointment has become focused on Sheila.’ But I am sure you are wrong in thinking your mother has reservations about Miles. It is just that she fears musicians are not easy to live with. I said, ‘She wasn’t brought up to want an easy life above all else, was she?’ She laughed. It is always possible to tease your dear mother into a good humour. Things will work out well eventually.

  Your problems are as nothing compared with those which await me when - and if - I introduce my mother to a Catholic boyfriend. Do you remember Dr Murphy whose surgery was in Elm Avenue? My mother always lowered her voice whenever she referred to him as if the value of our property would go down were it to be widely known there was an Irish Catholic living in the neighbourhood.

  I must stop now as I have to go on watch. A good thing, since otherwise I might well bore you with my trepidation. I wish the world were so organised that one could be sure of pleasing everyone.

  My love to you and Miles,

  Constance

  P.S. I can’t believe Winnie has gone, can you? And Attlee such a dreary little man.

  The shores of Dublin Bay

  November, 1945

  My dear Sheila,

  Fergus and I are staying here after having spent four days at his home in County Wicklow. It is early morning and I have come down to the sea in the hope of recovering my equilibrium, though I don’t know why I should expect to find it since it wasn’t here I lost it. Perhaps sharing all that has happened with you will have its usual steadying effect. You must excuse the scribbling-pad paper and the bad writing. It is cold sitting here.

  A grey morning. The tide is so far out that a fishing boat on the horizon seems moored in sand. I did not know that a landscape composed of the more sombre colours could so charm the eye. The villages scattered around the bay are dark charcoal blocks. The sand is silver save for little pits and hollows which retain the blue of yesterday’s sea. Birds, black and motionless, cluster around a rock. A chunky boat out of Dun Laoghaire sends a plume of smoke in its wake. Today, dawn and low tide have come together. Nothing stirs. There is peace without expectancy.

  The rim of the sky is beginning to separate from the sea and now, with such haste the sky blushes pink with effort, a bobbly crochet of burnt rose underlines cumulus clouds, while pools of crimson and turquoise appear in the sand. Around me where I sit the grass is vibrant green. Across the bay the lighthouse light has become sickly, ill suited to day.

  Fergus is not an early riser, so I shall have the dawn watch to myself and I am not sorry. Things have moved quickly. I had always thought of myself as impatient for new experience, but now I have a strong desire for there to be a moratorium on all change for the foreseeable future.

  The sky is aquamarine now, bounded with shirred salmon stratus. It seems the moment to tell you that Fergus has asked me to marry him. I feel a surprising reluctance to become Mrs Fergus Byrne when as yet so little is known about Miss Constance Wicks. All my life I have found it necessary to call attention to my existence by contradicting what other people say because it is reassuring to distinguish my own voice in the general babble of sound. It is not that I want to assert that I am me, but rather to demonstrate what I am not. You, on the other hand, have always been so definitely a person you haven’t needed to raise your voice. I have noticed that you can listen and be yourself while other people try to incorporate you in their own person. They never succeed.

  When Fergus asked me to marry him I said I couldn’t possibly marry a Catholic because I didn’t intend to have any children, besides which I was attracted to Hinduism, all those laughing, dancing gods. I hadn’t, I said, any time for a god who didn’t laugh and dance. Fergus listened as though my words were ripples barely disturbing the surface of some great enterprise upon which we were already engaged. Beneath his steadfast gaze lies a secret merriment. I suspect he does not take me as seriously as I take him.

  When I had run out of reasons why I couldn’t marry him, I found we were engaged to be married in a Catholic church and the children were to be brought up in the Catholic faith. I am to receive instruction, a procedure which I view with foreboding, as does Fergus. ‘And speaking of foreboding,’ I said. ‘What will your parents think of this?’

  In my nervousness, I had sketched several mental pictures of Fergus’s mother and father to ensure that I wouldn’t be caught unawares. She was dark-haired and milky-skinned, with eyes like water that take up the colour of whatever it is they gaze upon; a lovely, impenetrable woman only to be understood by such as Yeats and him she would lead a cruel dance. Or she was one of O’Casey’s tenement dwellers, red of hair and raucous, ready to take on all comers and such a talker she would relieve me of any necessity to open my mouth. His father was a plumped-up little man with a face like a brick and blue eyes as round and hard as buttons; his jacket would strain across his chest and the cloth would smell of Murphy’s Bar. Then again, he was pointed as a terrier, dark and merry, paying me compliments which made me feel I was being mocked. I had picked out these types as being the ones with which I would find it most difficult to deal. They had one thing in common: they were hostile.

  And so to the evening of my arrival and the discovery that Fergus’s mother, a one-time red-head, is a strong-boned woman with shrewd, kind eyes and a manner which suggests she is at ease with life and means to stay so, accepting everything that comes her way and finding space for it with the least possible fuss and bother, me included. I can see Fergus in her.

  His father is beyond anything I could have imagined. A tall, gaunt man with huge shoulders and sticklike limbs, he resembles a flightless bird. He has a great beak of a nose which is so in the way of his mouth he is constantly in danger of eating it. He it is who has the eyes which take up the colour of whatever they rest upon. In my case, a Protestant. Did I say I feared hostility? There was no hostility, unless one imagines a flightless bird is hostile when it comes upon some delectable crustacean washed up by the tide. That evening he sat watching me like a Red Indian having his first look at a white woman, savouring the torments he will inflict on this strange creature. Torments of a strictly theological nature, you understand.

  Did I mention' we were sitting by candlelight? I think not. I have put people first and now must tell you about the house. James Byrne, Fergus’s father, is a farmer. He is also gentry, which means that his long-suffering family lives in the lap of poverty. Fergus tells me that when they were children (six in all) they only had shoes when their father sold a bull. I do not believe this, but I accept that they didn’t know comfort as I understand it. The house is large and draughty and every window frame, door and floorboard complains of ill use. Signs of decay there may be
, but not all grandeur is departed. There is a lodge at the entrance to the drive and whenever a member of the family arrives an old crone comes out and with difficulty shifts the one-hinged gate. They have cattle and farm-hands, two maids and a cook. What they do not have are electricity, gas, oil (it being in short supply thanks to a war which was none of their making) and a hot-water system. There are a few candles, and a meagre measure of cold water can be coaxed from the taps by kicking the pipes. What warmth there is comes from wood fires which give out more smoke than flame.

  These are not the conditions under which my brain functions most adequately. By the time I went to bed that first night I had been unable to cap the joke about the Englishman who asked for the Protestant church and was told ‘Them’s the papists and them over there’s the apists.’ I had been bested in discussion on such matters as venal and mortal sin, the potato famine, papal infallibility; I had admitted to labouring under a misconception as to who was immaculately conceived, had confused Thomas with Oliver Cromwell, and revealed to my eternal chagrin that I was unware that the Plough and the Stars was a flag, not O’Casey’s attempt at an Irish Shropshire Lad. Most dismal of all, I was unable to play bridge - auction or contract.

  I went up the stairs to my room by no means assured there is not enough darkness in the whole world to put out the light of one small candle. The leaping shadows which I had always found so entrancing at children’s parties were no longer friendly. In an alcove at the turn of the stairs there is a small statue of the Virgin with a nightlight burning beneath it. I never passed it without feeling that some influence was being brought to bear on me. Even now that I have left the house that light still burns in my mind.

  The next day there was no time for fanciful notions. People had been invited. Fergus showed me round the farm and when we returned they were there, apprised of the situation, waiting. When I walked into the big sitting-room they looked like people in shock. Certainly they were too shocked to look at me directly, though one or two may have caught a glimpse of my right ear.