by Neil Jordan
“Are you all right my dear, are you ill?”
“But no,” I told her, “it will pass, it seems to.” On the train back I felt weak and light-headed, supine and giddy at the same time. It was Mary Dagge who noticed first, the breakfast I expelled on to the kitchen floor. By her sudden stillness I could tell something was wrong, terribly, irredeemably wrong. She stared at me in her maid’s bonnet for one interminable moment. Then a swallow flew through the open door from the courtyard outside and she took it as a blessed release from the issue at hand, grabbed a mop and whirled it round the kitchen like a dervish, at the swallow, or was it sparrow, until she caught it a full-force blow and it bounced against the range and fell on the flagstones beside the vomit. Let me clean that up, she muttered, grabbed the pail, doused the mop in the greasy water and swept the regurgitated breakfast and the stunned swallow-sparrow out the kitchen door on to the gravel outside.
“How are you, Nina?” she said, her face turned away, and it was odd, she’d never called me Nina. Miss, girl or child were her particular terms of endearment.
“I’m fine,” I said, “never better.”
“No,” she said, “Nina, I’ve known you since you were born, I’ve nursed you through influenza, measles and scarlet fever, and I know enough to know this is not what anyone could call fine. Has someone been at you, child?”
And her head was cocked sideways as she said this, as if she couldn’t bear to take the answer, and my mother came in at that moment, saved me for once, or saved me for the moment. Her nose was twitching like a King Charles spaniel. “I get a whiff,” she said, “whiffy in here, Mary, has the dog been sick?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” said Mary, “that hound has been chewing grass again.” And I knew the subterranean awfulness of whatever was at issue then, if Mary Dagge could blame a dog for my vomit.
“Do the crossword with me, Nina?” she asked, mother that is, and I sat beside her as she chewed her pencil and Mary poured her tea. “Strung, around a barrel,” she asked.
“Hooped,” I answered.
~
“Poetry,” says Gregory, and he sips at the lip of the china, feels the scald on his mouth and blows it cold. “I took it down as plain poetry, and I can remember him now on the deck at evening in Mudros Harbour rocking back and forwards as he dictated, Dear Dada, dear Janie. But they were all poets then, before the thing began, subalterns thumbing through their school Iliads at dawn, wondering where on that broken line of pink mountains in the distance was Thermopylae, banishing the dust, the heat, the steaming turds in the Aegean sea with their scented imaginings.”
“And you,” says Janie, “didn’t you write?”
“No,” he says, “I didn’t, I wrote through him maybe, and that was enough for me, besides, who would I write to?”
“Nina,” she says. “Or, God help us, me?”
“I was back to where I’d started,” he says, “before I walked over the gravelled back yard with my case tied up with twine in my hand. Among a mass of men, one among many, there was a comfort in knowing this is as individual as it ever gets, and the years in Baltray I realised were an aberration. This isolation, this me, this lone consciousness among a crowd, this was the norm. Besides, you get closer, and I don’t know how to put this, you get closer to them than you’ve ever been, and it’s a closeness that demands nothing of you, demands no other contact than the knowledge that the condition is shared, of being one among a mass of rubbing shoulders—yes, how are you mate, don’t have to tell me, I know, I know. Most of them would die and something in me sensed that, suspected perhaps that he would die too, but for some reason I never thought of myself among the chosen, though the irony is that I would have died in the end, if not for him. So I had left, absolutely and definitively, and if wasn’t for what happened, Janie, I would have never come back.”
“She had changed too,” says Janie, “and maybe that was why. She changed when you both left. I couldn’t understand it, but it was that odd feeling of one world having finished and another having not yet begun. I had thought it would bring us closer—there was so much we could share now, you know, the world of girls about to be women, women saying goodbye to girls. But she went alone to Dublin to see that actress Ida Lennox who reminded her of her drowned nanny. I felt hurt I remember, the trip to Dublin would have been more than grand and would have implied we might have shared a similar future, or at least talk about our dissimilar ones. What future was there for me? My father, bless his heart, had petitioned the Harbourmaster for an apprentice clerkship, no opening for a girl, although my fine copperplate handwriting was as fine as any boy’s. Marriage maybe, or some post in one of the houses? I could have been Mary Dagge, Gregory, or my version of Mary Dagge. But we had that summer, I had hoped and longed for that summer between us, me and Nina, and I had imagined the murmurings about our mutual futures we would have shared, hoped for the talk about shared hopes. But she had withdrawn into a distant shell like the oyster George had opened with his teeth, and there was no opening for me, I wasn’t let in. So I lost your sister in a sense, that summer.”
~
I walked along the shore, the other shore, down along the carpet of dead shells by the water’s edge to the factory. It was almost empty now. The market had dried up, most of the young men enlisted, and my father was downwind of the smell of rotting shellfish with paints and an easel before him, in a corduroy jacket, smoking a pipe. He was standing as he daubed, the brown river in front of him, the few boats, the Dutch landscape on the other side. He seemed not to have a care in the world.
“I know I am an indifferent painter,” he said, “and I know I can never capture precisely what the landscape before my eyes means inside my eyes, so to speak. But the question is, Nina dear, why doesn’t my lack of talent impinge more on my enjoyment of the activity?”
“Maybe it distracts,” I said, and curled myself beside his feet on the warm round stones. “Besides, it’s beautiful to me.”
“Distracts from what?” he asked.
“From thoughts of war,” I said, “of Gregory out there, wherever he is.”
“And George,” he said, “not forgetting George. There have been wars since this river invented itself, but the river flows on regardless.”
“So,” I said, “that’s what the river did, it invented itself.” And a tug passed by creating its own wake like a knife through the placid waters and Janie’s father waved from the wheel.
“That’s the question,” he said, “did Boinn invent the river or did the river invent Boinn?”
“If one was there before the other,” I said, “there’s no question about who invented whom.”
“But the spring was there before the girl looked at her reflection,” he said.
“But the spring was not yet a river,” I replied.
“Aha,” he said, “there you are, we have a conundrum.” He daubed in the brown ribs of seaweed beneath the surface of the water which looked like lady’s hair.
“Have you something to tell me, Nina?” he asked.
• “No,” I lied. “What could I have to tell you?”
“Something about your life, now that your brother is gone.”
“My half-brother,” I corrected him. “But if I ever had something to tell you, would you punish me for it?”
“No,” he said, “but I would certainly listen.”
“Is the factory finished?” I asked him.
“It’s in abeyance,” he said, “the King pays better wages than your father.”
“And how will we live then?”
“The way we have always lived,” he said. “The factory made its money long ago, its continuance is more a matter of charity than anything else. So if they want to fight, let them fight, I will paint.”
“Talk to your mother,” he said as I turned to go.
“Why,” I asked him, “why do you say that?”
“Because,” he said, “you talk to me but less often to her.” And as I walked off over the carpet
of dried shells, I wonder, did he sense something, did he sense the tiny seed the river had deposited in me that would grow to be a woman herself. All this growth, birth and death, I thought, why can’t things just be frozen in the moments we perceive them, like a perfect picture, understandable and unchangeable? And I walked on away from him over the centuries of oyster-shells and cockle-shells and mussel-shells and scallop-shells that had made his fortune and grown pearls of their own, pearls forgotten now, growing somewhere still, underneath the surface of the brown water. Dan took me back in the trap and Garibaldi, who alone of all creatures should have stayed Garibaldi, brown and unchangeable, was coated I noticed with a fine sprinkling of grey hairs I’d never seen as a child. So she was changing too, I thought as he walked then trotted, slowly, with a laboured wheeze.
“She’s not much left in her, this beast,” said Dan.
“Has she not, Dan?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “almost time for the knacker’s yard.”
“If she died,” I said to Dan, “my world would be quite dead, do you know that, Dan?”
“No,” said Dan, “you only think that, Nina girl. Another horse would take her place and you’d get used to it.”
29
THEY CALLED IT musketry, though the guns we fired were now machines. They called us fusiliers, though the fusillades came from the ships behind us. They called us infantry and sent us to a beach where walking was an impossible dream, where movement was measured in inches. But they conspired,” says Gregory, “to make it glorious on the morning we assembled in the old Scottish collier, and listened to the marching bands, their anthems growing distant under the slow chug of engines as we drew away. There were ocean liners for the brass and battleships, destroyers, more coal-ships than I could count. We dragged tows behind us and had gangplanks trussed to the collier’s sides, like spiders’ legs caught in a web. A storm seemed to threaten and then died away as the sun went down and the moon came out and we made our way through the quietening sea. It was impossible not to believe that something glorious, whatever glory meant, could not emerge from so much effort in concert, such a massive movement of men, of ships and of arms. But what glory meant, we would come to realise later. It meant death for somebody other than oneself. But at that time it seemed an abstract, as the coastline we were bound for defined itself glumly in the moonlight, a thin pencil of darkness, of suspect promise, the shattered hulk of the fort on the promontory, above the beach.
“The tides were hard, of course, it was more than a river and less, far less than a sea, Asia looming from the cliffs on one side, Europe on the other, and this runnel of water, this massive, dark and turbulent Boyne running in between. We could hear the gunfire from the other beaches now, the flashes of naval artillery were lighting the sky, but that only served to augment the quietness here. We were in a cocoon of the strangest kind of silence, the distant clatter and boom seemed to isolate and flashes looked like a red faraway thunderstorm. We clambered into the smaller boats and were separated, George was across the water from me now, dragged in the wake by a metal hawser. I could see his head illuminated with a score or so others against the rippled moonlight on the surface which signalled the turbulence below. Then the gap-toothed outline of the fort of Sedd el Bahr loomed behind him and all recognition was gone. I watched the dark lip of the shore, when I could see it behind the coal-ship towing us, and the ship killed its engines and the sailors rowed us towards the beach and I don’t think I have ever heard or felt such unnatural stillness.”
~
My mother was walking down the avenue with two sticks in her hand. “Come Dan,” she said, “and you too Nina, there’s a new game we must learn, it’s called golf.”
“Isn’t golf for men, Ma’am?” Dan said gently, drawing Garibaldi to what seemed a welcome halt.
“It’s Saturday,” she said, “which I’ve been reliably informed is ladies’ day.” She took Dan’s hand and climbed, or clambered up. “This is a putter,” she told me, holding up one of the sticks, “and this, I’ve been told, is called a niblick.”
Dan left us at the first hole and she inserted a wooden spike in the ground and placed a white ball on top of it.
“One addresses the ball, Nina,” she said, “and one draws back and swings.”
And she swung, with a rustle of skirts and a dangerous rush of air from the metal club and a dull twonk sounded. I saw the tiny spot of white rise in the air and bounce along the green sward, which, she told me, was called a fairway. I took my place and swung, and saw my own ball sail beyond hers into an outcrop of longer grass, which, she told me, was called the rough.
“We walk now, follow the balls,” she said, “which is the point of the exercise.”
“And the point of the exercise is?” I asked.
“Exercise,” she said, “the ballast of fresh air, the movement of the limbs, the quickening of the blood, the pulse. You are too pale, Nina, and since he left you have been pining, avoiding the sunlight, moulting in your room. You have a whole future before you, my dear.”
“And can you see it?” I asked her.
“See what?” she answered as she reached her own ball and addressed it again. Three swipes this time and a mess of earth clods around her before the small white thing bounced on its awkward way.
“My future,” I said.
“No,” she said, “I can’t see your future any more than I can see my own. At your age I went to Italy to study and met the man I would one day marry. And maybe you will marry one day, but until that day you have a life to live.”
“So, that life stops with marriage?” I asked her.
“Mine did,” she said, “which doesn’t mean yours has to, all the more reason to think about it now.”
I had reached my ball in the long grass and cut the grass around it with swipes of the niblick, as if it was a scythe. Then I swung and the ball sailed into the air and bounced delicately up a small incline on to a plateau of mown grass she called a green.
“Good girl, Nina,” she said, “you have a talent for this. So have you thought,” she continued as she walked forwards after her own white ball, “of further education, the professions, medicine, nursing, a spell in the college of art?”
“Acting,” I said. “I have thought of acting.”
“Acting what?” she asked.
“Acting,” I repeated, “on the stage.”
“No, Nina, no,” and she was peremptory and certain, “acting is for mountebanks and fallen women. No daughter of mine could ever act.”
Well, I thought, but I held my counsel and watched her chop her ball on to what she called the green.
“We aren’t without means, of course,” she said, “so it’s not as if you have to survive by the sweat of your brow. I would have recommended a tour of Italy in the company of one of the Siena nuns if it weren’t so hazardous to travel.”
“Now,” she said, “here is where we relinquish the niblick and rely on the putter. Place it between your hands,” she said, “like this,” and she stood behind me, placed both arms around me and I could feel her full breasts against the small of my back, I could hear the rustle of her skirts, her breath on the small hairs of my neck. “A gentle swing,” she said, “on the same plane as the grass itself,” and she swung my arms back and the club touched the ball, which rolled forwards, hesitantly, towards the hole.
“I feel faint, mother,” I said, and I turned and the retching came again which I tried to stop and I swayed to the left. And she held me and a stream of liquid gushed from my mouth towards her surprised face, and then darkness came.
~
“I kept looking at the transports ahead of us as they reached the beaches, wondering when the fusillade would start and wondering which of them was George’s. But there was nothing except the dull trump of the hulls hitting the shingle below, the plash of boots into the water and the sound of a thousand feet wading. And so I thought, against all logic, that we would land unhindered, all the firepower had be
en drawn towards the unseen flashes and the distant thunder a long way to our left. I saw them wade towards the shore, their arms in an upstretched V, their rifles parallel to the water between them. I couldn’t make out which was him.
“There was a crush of transports now, an impatient queue anxious to reach that nondescript shore, and suddenly those who had reached it fell as if they had tripped across an invisible wire and the water churned as if hailstones were raining across the surface to the lines of men wading with their guns above their heads in their arms like a V, and the guns went flying as the men went down and the transport ahead of us, whose gangplank had just descended, dipped backwards in the water with the weight of dying men. Then the sound came and I heard the fusillade and knew why we were called the Dublin Fusiliers. We were protected by the transport in front, but it wheeled to starboard to protect itself and exposed us to the streams of hot metal from the dunes and the fort above.
“A wall of men staggered backwards, with no sound other than a gasp of surprise, and the tonnage of dead bodies pushed me to the floor and slewed the bloody vessel to one side. I tried to crawl free and felt others crawling over me as those who could clambered over the falling bodies and threw themselves in the water. The floor of the transport was wet then and I staggered in the liquid, thought it had taken water, then realised it was blood, and I did the same, I clambered over that steppe of groaning flesh and threw myself seawards.
“My pack pulled me down of course, I had been told it would, and as it took water it dragged me down further. I struggled to free myself from it, I panicked as I had been told I would, and then I found, to my surprise, that my feet were on a bed of shale and broken seashell not unlike the one below my father’s factory on the Boyne. This fact amazed me for some strange reason, how familiar and how strange, but of course, any shore will be like any other shore. But the shock of the familiar made me stand, made me rise slowly, and my head broke the water, which I realised couldn’t have been deeper than four feet.