by Neil Jordan
26
LIKE MOST EVENTS, though, their departure did not have a clear beginning and an end, a definable moment which they could isolate and say, that’s when it happened, that’s the way it was, the way I will remember. The summer days drifted, the heat-haze grew in the fields, the golfers plied their mashies and niblicks up and down the untamed course. Gregory and George arrived and departed, as if they both had grown into mechanical extensions of that motorcycle and sidecar. They sweated in their uniforms but kept them on, returned for day-long marches round Baldonnel, rifle practice on Richmond Hill, a two-month bivouac in the fields near Londonderry. Seven shillings each, with meals, bed, boots and clothing.
And one day on the Baltray side of the river, across from the fish factory, George picked out from a small rocky pool four oysters the swirling water had left behind like an afterthought. He prized the shells open with his army knife and offered one to each of them, Gregory, Nina and his sister Janie. When they declined on grounds of taste, of the dull, brackish water in which he found them, he ate them himself, tilting the open briny shell towards his lips and swallowing the contents.
“You are barely civilised,” Janie said.
“An asset to any battle for civilisation,” said Gregory.
“What could be wrong with them?” George asked. “They’re only oysters.” But on the fourth mouthful he gagged, coughed and began to choke. Nina slapped his back till his face turned blue, then Gregory took over, with harder, manly strokes across the broad expanse of khaki.
“Can’t lose you, George, Kitchener needs you,” he said, and George coughed one last time, spat up whatever inside the shell had choked him. It rolled in the dry sand, gathered a coating of fawn, wet as it was, with his spittle.
“Ugh,” said Janie, disgusted by the whole procedure. But Nina watched it roll across the sand, back into the pool from which it came. She saw it gleam there, beneath the water, reached down her hand and rippled it back and forwards and drew it up again.
It was small, imperfectly round, with glints of turquoise beneath its creamy surface, unmistakably a pearl.
“You’re full of surprises, George,” she said.
“Here,” he said. “Consider it yours.”
“You swallow shellfish and spit up pearls.”
“Shall I try it again,” he asked, “eat half of the riverbank and make you a necklace?”
“No, George. One is more than enough. To remember you by.” She inserted it in the stitching at the hem of her dress.
“You’ll lose it,” Gregory said.
“No,” she said, “I’ll stitch it in tonight.”
As she stitched it in, alone in her room, not in her dress but in the lace hem of her peacock-blue shawl, she noticed the chestnut tree bending, in the evening light, over the roof of the courtyard outhouses. The branch parallel to the river, dipping under a considerable weight. She finished her stitching, rolled it in her fingers under the lacy hem to see it was secure. Then she left the window-frame, and emerged minutes later, crossing the courtyard, her white dress itself pearly against the dying light. She walked underneath the archway, past the glasshouse, down the long field towards the hulking figure, rocking on the swing beneath the chestnut tree.
“You came to me tonight,” George said.
“I was in my room,” she said, “how could I?”
“I don’t know how, but you walked across the fields and you got your feet wet and you knocked on my window and I climbed out and we walked across to Mabel Hatch’s barn and listened to the rain falling on the roof.”
“It’s not raining, George.”
“I know. I fell asleep. And in my dream you came to me.”
“Is that the first time I came to you?”
“Yes,” he said, “but there will be others.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know, but something about the way you looked at’ me when you were bending over me and your hair fell on my face. An owl flew in one end of the haybarn and out the other. A brown owl. And I thought, if you come to me like that, on the odd night, it won’t matter. The brown owl will fly over us occasionally and the rain will drum off the roof and if I can’t have you, at least I’ll have this.”
“What will you have?” she asked him.
“I’ll have the other you. And nobody can do anything about the other you, it will always be there with the river and the mudflats and Mozambique.”
“And let us not forget Mabel Hatch’s haybarn,” she said.
“Did you stitch in the pearl?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I stitched in the pearl.”
And she held up the hem of her shawl for him to feel it, and he eased his swinging as his large fingers turned it round and round in its lace bedding, and she thought what a fine job Dan Turnbull had done on the swing all those years ago that it still could bear the weight of what he had become.
They left the next day.
~
“We came to the quays to wish you off,” says Janie, “having no idea there’d be so many, khaki uniforms twenty deep along the quayside and the band playing ‘God Save The King’ and that little politician, Redmond wasn’t it, giving a speech from the raised platform and the other crowd dropping their banners of protest from the upper window of the Seamen’s Union building. Her father, your father, held both of our hands and her mother said, My father built that ship, built the quay that holds that ship, what was its name, the Kathleen Mavourneen.”
“He was in love with her,” Gregory says, “I knew that when he walked up the gangplank with me and refused to look back. He said if he did look back he would never have gone. And he said he knew Touchstone can’t love Rosalind, knew it was a dramatic absurdity. And I know I treated his emotions with a frivolity that he must have found contemptible, because, to tell you the truth, I envied him for having any coherent emotions at all. I had none then, or none that I could understand. I was leaving a place that had given me a childhood, and given me whatever manhood I would ever have, and as I was standing there and the boat drew away I couldn’t help wondering what was it that had turned the stuttering boy I met into the kind of man he was now. All I knew was that he loved her in a way I wanted to love her, but I knew of course that I couldn’t. If Touchstone loving Rosalind was a dramatic absurdity, Orlando loving Rosalind would be a dramatic obscenity.”
~
Something curdled inside me, on the quays with the Kathleen Mavourneen pulling away and the band playing. I put it down to loss or grief, but it wasn’t them, it was simple nausea. I leant down and threw up in the water and no-one noticed, every eye on the ship heading out to the Lady’s Finger, and I remember thinking, does grief empty you out that much? It was a presence, this nausea, call it grief, an active presence I didn’t want to recognise, and when I knew what it was, it left a bloody shock I never wanted to know again. Like my mother that way I suppose, I had my unmentionables, among them pleasure, the swoon on that stone floor was so intense with the stone woman and her hands between her knees. And it was around that time I came to hate my mother, I knew obscurely there was that inside me which would cause me to hate her. I took his side in all of the silences, there were never arguments, only silences, arguments would at least have had some objective existence. I took his side, his retraction into the abstract gentleness with which he would confront even unexpressed unpleasantness. If there had been love there, and there must have been, in Florence, in Trafalgar Square, the arrival of my half-brother, his full son, had dealt with it with scientific, exact precision.
IV
27
LIVERPOOLTOBASINGSTOKE,” says Gregory, “where we marched for a month round the Hampshire fields, dressed in kit for the Western Front, dripping with sweat in the May sunshine, until one fine day we were given pith helmets and open-necked shirts and we knew we were going East. By train to Devonport then, where they packed us on a coal-steamer and set out into the Bay of Biscay. We watched the dolphins follow the coa
l-ship’s wake in the moonlight and knew our direction only by the gathering heat. The sun was too hot on deck and the air too thick in the hold, even the metal walls sweated. Everywhere men and the smell of men, stripped to their khaki shorts, playing twenty-one with the sweat-riddled cards, asking, where are we going?”
There is a sound like a distant train. Gregory’s eyes sink from Janie’s face, down the curve of her arm to the smoking cigarette and the kettle behind. He lays his fingers over the spout, feels the burgeoning steam.
“A woman called to visit,” says Janie, “a month or so after you’d left. Ida Lennox, sent by Sister Catherine from some Dublin dramatic society, with a prim straight back and more airs than the west wind. We had afternoon tea in the shadow of the chestnut tree, a hamper open on the grass. Mary Dagge bringing fresh tea down from the house, me buttering the warm scones and Ida Lennox talking about the theatre.
“ ‘I want to change the perception of the theatrical arts in the world at large,’ she said, ‘and get society to realise that, far from being a mere doorstep above streetwalking, acting is a noble aim for any young woman to aspire to. And you, my dear, with what I’ve been told are your obvious, even resplendent talents, should be placed in the care of His Majesty’s Prison Service if you consider anything else as a career . . .’
“I looked at Nina after she had left. ‘Who does she remind you of?’ she asked me.
“I was surprised, I remember, at the flatness of her voice. ‘Who?’ I asked and she said, ‘you won’t remember.’
“ ‘I might,’ I said, and saw her looking at the swing, gathering mould over the water.
“’Shawcross,’ she said. ‘Miss Isobel Shawcross.’
“And I knew something was wrong with her then, but I didn’t know what.”
“We steamed from Cyprus to Alexandria to fight the Turk in the Sinai desert,” says Gregory. “ ‘What’s wrong with the Turk,’ George asked, ‘what did he do to Poor Catholic Belgium, what have we got against him? I miss home, I miss Mozambique.’
“ ‘There’s a canal here too,’ I told him, ‘bigger than anything at home.’
“I wrote his letters for him. Dear Dada and Janie, I wrote for him, it is hot here and we are at dock in Alexandria waiting to fight the Turk in the Sinai desert, but mostly drinking sweet tea in the marketplaces, the tiny streets go on for ever and if it wasn’t for the woven thatch they string above them the sun would be unbearable. I have seen two hundred million flies and my body has been host to most if not all of them. We have been told today we are not to fight the Turk in the Sinai desert but in a place they call the Dardanelles.”
~
She was doing her crossword in the kitchen, sitting over a plate of Mary Dagge’s scrambled eggs, her heavily chewed pencil in her left hand.
“Colloquial stomach,” she said, as if nothing at all had happened, as if he had never been there, as if he never had left.
“Belly,” I said, as if nothing had happened too. Father was bending over her left shoulder, pouring a steaming stream of tea.
“The Laytown Races,” he said, “I thought we could pay them a visit, horses running on the strand at low tide.”
“When is low tide?” 1 asked.
“Four,” he said, “would you enjoy it, Nina?”
I nodded, and looked at her to divine what she knew, but saw that her face, if I watched it for a century, would reveal nothing. “Would you enjoy it, mother?” I asked her.
“I would enjoy,” she said, “whatever you both enjoy.”
He poured tea for me and kissed the top of my forehead with that abstract kindness of his. “So, let’s go.”
So the horses were arcing along the beach, raising spray, the jockeys’ colours bright like toy soldiers against the metal sea, the tick-tack men and the bookmakers’ stands all in a bunch by the hard sand. But that didn’t interest me. What interested me was the marquee on the green behind with the sign that read The Tragedy of the Colleen Bawn, Playing Nightly. And while they watched the horses, I walked to the tent and made my way inside to the smell of damp canvas and crushed grass.
There was a girl on a raised wooden stage, lamenting her undoing at the hands of a gentleman. There were painted flats behind her depicting a thatched Irish cottage in a landscape of bog. I watched the girl, and despite her stiff gestures and her mannered delivery was soon engrossed in her story, her impending death in the unseen lake behind the cottage. And I thought this was a use to which I could put this useless body of mine.
The girl was pale with a pimpled face and an English accent which she disguised in the thickest Irish brogue.
“You can’t be here,” she said, “I’m rehearsing, we don’t start till eight.”
I looked at her pale thin face with the pimpled forehead and liked her immediately. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I just wandered in, I’m not here for the horses, I’m a student of acting.” I liked the way that sounded, a student of acting, and the way it caught her attention. “How long are you here for?” I asked.
“Three nights,” she said, “then it’s over the river to Baltray and then back on the boat to England.”
“What’s the play about?” I asked her.
“An Irish girl who’s undone by an Irish gentleman,” she said. “The opposite of me. I’m an English girl undone by an English gentleman.”
~
“ ‘Hellespont,’ I told him, ‘Troy, the Aegean islands. Where Odysseus built the wooden horse and Achilles took the arrow in the heel. Gallipoli. There’s a narrow strip of water that leads all the way to Constantinople. They want to force it.’
“ ‘Penetrate it,’ he said.
“ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘into the womb of the Black Sea. Think of it in erotic terms. The thrust of the Royal Navy. Into the seraglio. The Ottoman Empire. Asia Minor. The Orient.’”
~
She sat among the odorous crowd on the unsteady benches and saw the rouged faces perform their little drama with a singular lack of intent, a laziness that she found strangely attractive. They seemed to take the drama as read, the death of the Colleen Bawn as a fact that they merely had to refer to, hardly emote, and no amount of histrionics could have enhanced the crowd’s rapture, the crowd’s engagement in the life, the death, of their sullied heroine. She realised she would love such an escape, into a life other than her own, nightly, any life, and she would love the anonymity the constant travel in those caravans would bring. Her face was pale enough, she realised now, not to need any greasepaint, and after the performance she walked amongst them, till she found the same girl, door open, illuminated by oillamp inside, struggling with the cords of her bustier.
“Let me help you with that,” she said.
“Why thank you love,” the girl muttered and then saw her in the mirror. “You again,” she said, and lifted a cigarette with her free hand from the butt-filled saucer in front of her.
She heard her father’s voice then, calling from outside, “Nina, Nina love,” and she stopped what she was doing, made her goodbyes, left and closed the door behind her. And she could see the trap among the caravans, the rancid moon behind it, Dan Turnbull in the front, her mother in the back, her father beside Dan.
“Nina,” he called again, in that sad worried voice, and she wondered what day it would be that she would break his heart.
28
I REMEMBER HIS letters,” says Janie as the kettle boils over and she scours the pot with the scalding water, then throws in the leaves, “in your handwriting with his syntax, an oddly comforting juxtaposition of elements if I may say so, you two had become the one creature at last, elegant yet unlettered, the occasional erudite word sitting like an awkward jewel among the plain and pithy sentences. I read your own letters with Nina, and no matter how well expressed I could never quite see what was at issue. But those of Gregory-George, if I can call your union that, had the simplicity of direct depiction, direct speech, that allowed me to visualise. I could see the blue Mediterranean, bluer as he said than
the cornflowers that grew round the turnip ridges in Keiling’s Farm. I could see the islands edging past the coal-ship the way the clouds edged past the Mourne Mountains or the chestnut tree when we lay in the dried mud at the trunk and looked up at them, sometimes for hours. I could see the coalrship then edge past the islands to reveal the isthmus surrounded by the floating pots and pans of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. Each battleship belching smoke, I think he wrote, or you wrote for him, like a primus stove.”
~
The pearl, the pearl, he seemed born to find glories under rocks, to pull fistfuls of Kerry Blues out of the wet earth, to find the mulch beneath a seashell, he chewed the flesh of that oyster and spat out that pearl, left me that pearl and I sewed it in my shawl as I promised I would. I thought of the speck of sand deposited by the river, growing slowly inside the horned shell, how long does it take pearls to grow I wondered, longer than whatever else was growing. We were lost, temporarily, without the two of them, the two of us, Janie and me, considering our futures.
Ida Lennox brought me to Dublin, asked me to consider acting as a future. I listened in the concert rooms to the girl reciting Hiawatha and curtseyed myself, did my own recitation, Francis Farrelly by Percy French. But of course it was impossible, my mother wouldn’t countenance it, and underneath the pig-iron bridge by the Customs House Ida Lennox kissed me and left me her card, please consider, and that was when I expurged again, into the brown waters of the river Liffey this time, I would have preferred it was the Boyne.