by Neil Jordan
“ ‘Leprosy,’ he said, ‘and don’t ask me why I’m here, I’m here because only here it’s possible to think of myself as fortunate.’ He ducked into a tiny room with a barred window, hardly big enough to hold him; there was a mat on the floor and everywhere the smell of excrement. I bent and entered, and he removed the scarf, and I could see then the skin pulled like a chicken’s neck across what had been his face. I could see the skin of the hands like the discarded coat of a lizard, almost transparent, with the bones showing through.
“ ‘They tried to put me on a boat back to England with the others,’ he said, ‘but I wouldn’t go. I stayed on in the hospital till they needed the bed, and then I wandered the markets until I found my way here. Here I can be Touchstone, and envy no man’s happiness. But sometimes I think, Greg, if you don’t mind me saying, that maybe you should have left me by that burning bush. I could have died there, not happily, but dead would be better than this. And sometimes I think, no, I should be alive because at least alive I might see your sister Nina’s face again. But then if I saw her she would have to see me, and I can’t countenance that thought, and I go back to thinking you should have left me on that hill to burn with the bushes. All those bushes are dead now and so should I be. And I go through both thoughts, from one to the other, and then I go through that doorway and down the stairs, and I see that among these at least I am fortunate. And I think of something else which is a rare relief, a blessing of kinds, the only blessing I get these days. So I stay on here and think I might end my days here. What do you think, Greg?’”
~
There was light day and night in the Bush Studios, great arc-lamps of it, no escape from it and I could see hints of the memories of what I used to be in the sparks that crackled round those carbon rods, I could see the succubus that had left me somewhere in the dark behind those lamps, the wheeling dust and the black studio wall. I came to understand those primitive peoples who believed the camera ate the soul, and I wanted it to eat mine whole and entire, and give me back another one, an artificial one that could be eaten in turn by whoever came to view me of an afternoon in a darkened hall when the projector whirred and the image flickered on the white sheet that was the screen. I wanted it to take my set of memories, of the river, the house, the swing beneath the chestnut tree, of Gregory’s arrival with his twine-wrapped case, of George playing Touchstone behind the dead tomato plants, Janie thrusting out of the river water with the wet dress clinging to her tiny breasts, of the ghost that thrilled all four of us, Hester crushed to powder by the threshing machine, of the owl that hooted in Mabel Hatch’s barn and the pearl, most of all the pearl. And the camera took them gladly, drew them into its plane of vision and demanded other memories of me, memories that left me quite unburdened, like a marionette twirling in an artificial clock, free but for the mechanism that moved her, and quite, quite empty.
He would smoke his pipe behind the cranking camera, with his stick and his Norfolk jacket, and when the roll had ended would walk forwards and place his hand too low about my waist; in time I got used to that too. I got used to all sorts of things: to the carnal round a motion picture demanded, pulling my stockings back on in the dressing room while the lover of sorts dressed with his face to the wall, watching the way the silk curled round my thin knees and thinking, One more time, and I was wrong about that one too. I was far from home and would stay far from home, and if anything of me returned it would be that other version, the one the roll retained on its acetate. So there, Mozambique.
~
“I received your letter,” says Gregory, “and you told me how Nina had made her debut in moving pictures of all things. How you wondered was your brother dead or alive, and if alive he should know his father had died while piloting the Kathleen Mavourneeen in the September storms. His boat had gone down beyond the Lady’s Finger; he had misjudged the point of entry. The seas were so high, and the spray so obscured his vision, that he hadn’t seen the Maiden’s Tower to get his co-ordinates right. There was to be a funeral, and if George was still alive they would delay it until his return. And that letter did the trick.
“So I led him from that lazar house in Alexandria and brought him back once more into a kind of life, on to the last of the shipments returning home, from Salonika this time, the remains of the Tenth Division heading towards home leave and dispersal to another front. He wore an Arab djellabah with a hood and kept the scarf wrapped round his face, but the skin was growing again, returning him to some recognisable semblance of what he used to be. And on the boat there were so many like him that he came to feel at home, let the scarf fall, let his oddly touching visage be viewed by others, meet the sunlight on the long days steaming through the Mediterranean, round Gibraltar towards the Bay of Biscay.
“I received your last letter when we berthed, with the scrap of an announcement from the London Times, an advertisement for the Scala Cinematograph, announcing ten showings daily of the seven-reel motion picture entitled Sherlock Holmes and the Scarlet Lady, starring Adrian Penrose (Magician) and Nina Hardy. He kept the cutting in his damaged hand on the train journey to London. I walked with him from the train through the vast, windowed station interior, where the light pushed through stacks of smoke that seemed to have acquired the permanence of pillars, barely glimmering on the sea of khaki caps that shifted and jostled and pitched a head-height below him. And there, as the red-bricked sooty cathedral of St Pancras spread out before him, I realised he would never be right.
“ ‘Is this the city, London?’ he asked me.
“ ‘No, George,’ I said, ‘this is the station, St. Pancras. London is outside.’ And I took his hand with the scrap of yellowing newspaper advertising my sister’s cinematic debut and led him out of the turreted exit into the sprawling mayhem of King’s Cross, where he seemed to realise the word city didn’t have enough dimension for the vastness that he was encountering. He had seen the tops of smoking houses, acres and acres of them, on the journey from Dover, but as he would see a moving picture-book unravelling past the carriage window. This was real, this was moving, this was noisy, this pushed him out of its way, steamed, spewed smoke, this held more terror for him than the burning hillside in the Dardanelles. He pulled the scarf back over his face and told me he felt a pain like the drip of molten metal against his temple, he was unsure whether the roar was emanating from his own ear-drums or from the tempest of directionless life around him. He seemed to long for a hint of nature he could recognise, and stared through the railings at the sooted tufts of grass between the tracks below. He heard a starling twitter from a leafless plane tree and saw a policeman raise his hand beneath it, saw the traffic stop as if by magic, and saw the vast crowd begin to shuffle from his pavement to the one opposite. He followed, knowing nothing else to do, and I followed him. And then, above the slowly bobbing heads, through the window of a stalled omnibus, he glimpsed Nina’s face. Fixed to a curving wall, with the word HOLMES emblazoned on her forehead. I took his hand and led him towards her, revealing more and more as her image came clear of the omnibus. Eventually she loomed above us, the whole of her, bent into a half-loop around the curve of the building, the steps and the Italianate entrance of the Scala Cinematograph beneath her.
“I remember little of the performance, but I do remember George, sitting beside an Egyptian column, his face happily shrouded in darkness, staring at her face on the screen, flickering, appealing, leaning down towards him in an attitude of benediction.
“ ‘I can see her,’ I remember him saying, ‘and she can’t see me.’
But why now? Why now? the caption said. A gentleman in a top coat and glistening hat twirled his stick, contemptuously, it seemed to George, because he asked me why didn’t he seem to like her.
“ ‘He is the villain, George,’ I said, ‘he’s not allowed to like her.’
“Then she was walking away, down a shadowy street. She turned a corner, walked into a fog and emerged by a river. It was a large river, George whispered to me, three
times the size of the river at home. It had barges and sailing skiffs and a crescent moon in an unaccountably bright sky. Then she was there again, terrifyingly large, her eyes and mouth downcast, her face framed by a mass of black curls. She tumbled forwards towards us, so close that George reached out his hands to catch her. But his hands were singularly useless, as she was already in the river, floating towards one of the barges, the crescent moon reflected in the water beside her.
“ ‘Is she dead now, Greg?’ George asked me in a kind of storybook terror.
“ ‘No,’ I told him, ‘she’s not dead, George, it’s only an illusion.’
“And afterwards I walked him into the daylight again towards another train station, Euston, this time.
“ ‘I can see her then,’ he said, ‘and she need not see me.’
“ ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘any time this film plays you can see her and sit happy in the dark in the knowledge that she cannot see you.’
“ ‘But do they have such films at home, Greg?’ he asked me.
“ ‘They will,’ I assured him, ‘they most certainly will.’
“And I bought his ticket and led him through another cathedral of smoke and grime and placed him on the train and asked the khaki-clad squaddies beside him to make sure he made it with them through Liverpool to Dublin where I told them his sister Janie would be waiting. And the last I saw of him was as the train drew off, his large head turning backwards in the window, the steam obscuring it in progressive bursts, and the steam was kind to his damaged face, softening it into something like what it used to be.”
~
They had finished my make-up, a solid cake of white with a thin pencil of purple for my lips, they had brought me into the huge swathe of light the sun poured through that wall of glass when the camera whirred, and I was pushed into the miniature of Harley Street and the magician pulled me this way and I pulled myself that. And I realised I was always aware of the surrounding crowds; no matter how blinding the light, how loud the noise, I could have counted the observers without a second thought and spotted an intruder across a score of them. Eyes, that was what it was about, eyes: I was being watched, and a new pair of eyes had joined the familiars. I looked out for this new pair of eyes as I pulled away and was pulled back, as my hand went to my forehead and away again, and at last I saw the outline of the khaki cap against the bare brick studio wall.
I knew it was him, though demobbed officers often passed through—we were the fairground attraction, the mechanical wonder, an invitation to the Bush was prized by government ministers, for God’s sake. I knew it was him immediately though I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see anyone’s face, I was blinded by light as usual, and my grief and terror reached biblical proportions until the gathering was happy and the cranking arm on the camera box stopped.
I walked forwards then, in my costume of the last century, a ghost in everything but physique, and I passed the lights and my eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom behind. I was told a costume change was needed by the wardrobe mistress, but I walked on by her to the thin figure in uniform, smoking by the studio door.
“Gregory,” I said, “it is you, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, “who else?”
And I ran and he caught me by the open door and twirled me and said, so familiar, so unnecessary that it seemed redundant, “What larks, sis.”
V
38
Dear father, I am never coming back. This is not because I don’t love you, which I do, or mother, which I suppose I must. It is a daughter’s duty to love a mother, so I will continue to do so, or try. No, I am never coming back because that was what was requested of me. My brother came to me too late for me to see him as my brother. So I will change myself, my home, my life, I will become someone other than your little Nina, become Rosalind, become Cordelia, become Lady Macbeth, who knows. I have left the best part of myself there and so, in some way, will always be yours, Nina.
How can I imagine another’s pain? One’s own is all there is. But there it is, in front of me now. He stands with Janie among the tomato plants in the glasshouse and folds my letter neatly, places it with his glasses in his top pocket and says, “Thank you Janie,” and turns back to the tomato plants, “I’ve lost them both.”
There is a green mould which clings to the green leaves of the tomato plants and it covers him gradually during that afternoon. After Janie leaves, he moves among them slowly, painfully tying every sprig with burgeoning fruit, and when he has covered the whole glasshouse he begins again, retying them, changing their position on the wooden lattice. The summer’s sun beats down and is exaggerated through the panes, his frayed jacket and collarless shirt amplify the heat in turn, and rivers of sweat run down his face but do nothing to stem the coating of green that gathers on his skin. And he emerges when the sun goes down, into a late sunset, a pink mackerel sky covering the townland from the river’s mouth. His face is covered in that dusky green like a death mask, and he meets her by the entrance to the house, she had been cutting roses, she has her arms full of them.
“We have lost our daughter,” he says.
“No,” she says, “we have no daughter. Nor son either.”
He goes upstairs and pours himself a bath and I can see him in it, lying in the old lead receptacle with the lukewarm water flowing from the taps, naked as I have never seen him, the jagged shoulders and the sodden line of hair in the centre of his sunken ribcage, the veins around and above his knees standing blue, almost clear of the skin. And perhaps this is the story I have to tell, the one without me in it. He lowers his head under the greenish water for what seems an age, longer than a living being could stand it, and then raises it again and breathes out my name.
“Nina.”
~
“Did I exploit her?” asks Gregory rhetorically, and then gives himself the answer: “I don’t think so, I hope not, but we were like two orphans alone in that huge metropolis. I was unemployed and unemployable, one among half a million demobbed soldiers. I had a grandfather in Surrey, I wrote hoping for some recognition or assistance, but got no reply. We were walking through the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and I saw our reflection in the glass window of a huge canvas, I forget which one, and I saw her for the first time as others must see her: willowy, with that natural elegance, a true Irish rose. I saw me beside her in my tattered military greatcoat and saw immediately what others must think of me. And that’s when I asked her to lend me money, enough to take me to a bespoke tailor’s to make myself presentable and present myself as, of all things, her manager.
“Those early pictures were made out of chaos and paid for in chaos. I began to put some order in her business. I became her shadow, a shadow as elegantly constructed as possible, the interpreter of her deepest desires. I took to referring to her in the third person: Miss Hardy requests, Miss Hardy doesn’t do, Miss Hardy would like. It allowed me the illusion there was some distance between us and created in others the illusion of inaccessibility, and it was all illusion after all, let’s face it, one I could make sure we both profited from.”
~
And so Gregory became my manager and confidant. We constructed a unit that was unbreakable, unshakable, uncomfortable, unsound. He exchanged his uniform for a Savile Row suit and found it distressingly simple to forget the mayhem he had experienced. We thought of changing my name—I was changing everything else, why not that too?—and would have done it but for the moderate fame the Colleen Bawn brought me. So the name stayed, Nina Hardy.
Studios were glasshouses then, whole walls and roofs of glass designed to let the sun illuminate the hothouse plant inside, chief among them being me, the Irish Rose. There was one they’d set up in Shoreham, near Brighton, and we made picture after picture there, in a purpose-built glasshouse ten times bigger than the glasshouse at home. And we played Orlando and Rosalind, again, no George, no Janie, no tomato plants, just the sun pouring in through that cathedral of glass when it shone, and when it didn
’t, we supplemented it with lamps to get an exposure. By the sea a row of cottages or bungalows, some things had changed immeasurably and others not at all. We could travel down on the train from Brighton or London to our new glasshouse, and we constructed around us different versions of what we had left, we replaced you both with a succession of others. I would introduce my paramours to him for approval, he would introduce his to me. We held each other’s lives in erotic suspension, a pattern that stayed with us like a smoking habit. I could gauge the time each young thing from the provinces would preoccupy him as accurately as a doctor would a fever, I could tell when the temperature would rise and fall, the virus depart and leave us back where we started. I supervised his love-affairs as he did mine.
“Does she stir you?” I would ask about a young ingenue actress.
“How long would you give her, sis?” he would ask.
“Two months,” I would reply, and deal with her tears in exactly two months’ time.
39
TO SAY THE house grows quiet in my absence would be to humanise it, and houses, as we know, aren’t human. They may, though, have human qualities, and this one does have me. So, it grows quiet, there is no escaping the presumption. The war has ended and another kind of war begun. The shellfish business loses its impetus and my father keeps the sullen workforce going till the pretence at business seems pointless any more, but he can’t quite bring himself to close down the factory. He is spared his agonies of indecision by the sight of flames one night from the upper bedroom and knows instantly their source. They had burnt the RIC station, most of Balbriggan and half of the big houses round. He rides round there with Dan Turnbull and sees a figure, face wrapped in a scarf against the flames, vainly trying to quench them with water from the river. “Let it burn, Georgie,” he says, and all three of them stand ankle deep in the water as they watch the walls fall in, the ice-machine melt in the heat.