by Neil Jordan
45
THE DRIVER OF the black Ford car heard the music and remarked to himself on the contrast between the elegant woman who had entered the ruined house and the childlike music that emerged from it. He had recognised her face of course, her profile was burned in his memory like a Victorian daguerreotype, but was discreet enough to pretend he didn’t. He knew the purpose of her visit too, remembering a column in the property section of the Irish Times with her photograph and a photograph from across the fields beyond, of the grey pile in the forecourt of which he was parked. And when the music stopped and she emerged again through the sagging kitchen door, he didn’t jump to attention and open the rear door, because something in her way of walking, in the slow scrape of those chunky heels across the gravel, told him her visit was far from over. He admired her figure in the rear-view mirror, the trim of fur round the shoulders, the neat-fitting black beret atop the blonde, elegantly greying hair. She was one of those, he concluded, whose lives are not like yours or mine, who exist between the lines of society columns and gossip magazines. He had seen her half-undressed in a film the title of which he could not now remember, but could remember how at the age of seventeen she had seemed the essence of womanliness to him. So he averted his eyes, with a slight, secret shame, when she tapped at the window and told him she would be thirty or so more minutes. And when she turned her back to him he allowed himself the luxury of a direct glance, through the breath-misted side window, at those hips whose full glory he had relished at the age of seventeen in the Fairview cinema in a film the name of which he could no longer remember. They travelled, with not a noticeable swagger, through a small group of outhouses, by a broken glasshouse, down long untidy lawns towards a chestnut tree, which bent over what he presumed must be a river.
The half-circle of once whitewashed outhouses bends or slopes into a passageway, and the gravel underfoot gives way to cobbles as the sunlight is shadowed for twelve footsteps or more, and the untidy slope of green comes into view with the glasshouse to the left, all of the panes broken, what else, how much to repair them but what matters, only money after all. The dangling stalks of long dead tomato plants, could they possibly be the same, the ones behind which she rehearsed her Rosalind, hart to the hind, full of leaf then, with a dead green mould that coloured her cheeks and fingers. The mud is hard underfoot now, caked by the summer’s sun, threads of grass trying vainly to cover it, shades of the mudflats she called Mozambique, and the chestnut comes into view, the bent umbrella of tangled branches first dark against the silver of the water. The lawn, or is it field, sloping down to meet it with the steep bit where she often tumbled, rolled, catching her skirt between her knees. The trunk rising from the dark cracked earth and the branch, thick enough to be the trunk’s extension, arching over the silver waters, so quiet now as to make that perfect reflection, blue or silver sky, black or brown branches. The ropes are gone of course, long rotted and gone, but the bark could never quite grow enough to cover the circular scours they left, scoured by the rope swing, forwards and back, up and down.
The driver of the black Ford took the licence, knowing there would be a thirty minutes’ wait, of stepping out of the car and smoking a cigarette. He could see her through the arch, down by the chestnut tree, silhouetted against what he now definitely saw to be a river. Why, he wondered, would anyone return to such a pile, most of all a single woman with no visible male support, no wedding ring, and come to think of it, from what he knew of the world of gossip, not even a rumour of a husband?
He was a practical, venal man with no particular imaginative interior, but as he smoked and allowed his eye to travel round the small world of that forecourt, he suddenly and inexplicably knew. He could see the glasshouse, each pane replaced, with the dark green shadows of lush tomato plants inside. He could see a fresh circle of gravel with no intrusion from grass, dandelion and plantain. He could see the walls and windows that soared above him with a fresh coat of pale-green paint. And through the arch, he could see the rough grass that sloped down towards the river now manicured into a lawn, and hanging from the overhanging branch of the chestnut tree, a child’s swing. Yes, he thought to himself, it could be a fine place, a very fine place.
She was walking towards him now, departing from the bank of light that was the sun’s reflection in the river. She became obscured for some moments by the mound of the field, then reappeared again, gradually, against the silver glare. She seemed to grow into shadow as she walked towards him, a trick of light he attributed to the halation of the afternoon rays of the setting sun. He smoked and averted his eyes, looked at the Mght bouncing off the broken glasshouse windows, then heard the soft shuffle of her boots on the grass changing to the clap of heels against cobble.
“Time to go then, Ma’am?” he asked, and when she nodded he stubbed out the butt of the cigarette on the dry-stone wall, ran to the car and opened the rear door.
The black Ford eased its way down the north side of the river Boyne where strings of bungalows dotted the road like fake jewellery, where the cement works trundled buckets overhead to the tankers and where, if she cared to remember, her father once told her the Graniauale had docked. She could see, through the flaring afternoon sun, the silhouetted figures of boys casting fishing lines into the brown waters. She could see the driver’s eyes flickering towards her and away as the bustle through the windscreen thickened and the cement works gave way to the Drogheda Quays.
She tapped him on the shoulder then and told him to swing left, towards the south side of the river, beneath the shadow of the margarine factory, back towards Mornington. The riverfront flattened there, became more gentle, as her memory of it was. She saw a kingfisher rise from the mud banks and flash electric blue across the water. She saw boys again, and the dark angled lines of fishing rods. Then trees obscured her view as the road left the riverbank, made its way through more dotted hulks of bungalows which seemed planned, or unplanned, to obliterate any memory she would have had of the village itself. She saw the Protestant church on a mound among leafy chestnuts where the road forked and the sad remnants of the village began. She saw a new triangular edifice of glass and concrete where the Catholic church used to be. And she saw the village melt then, as if under the influence of some strange new principle, as the necklace of bungalows began once more. She saw it all, and her eyes expressed nothing, at least nothing the driver could divine through the rear-view mirror, or the side mirror which he had angled to take in more than the retreating road behind.
The bungalows stopped then, as if the sad marshy wasteland through which the road travelled was deserving of them no longer. The black Ford bumped its way over a small canal, past a lighthouse perched among dunes, a keeper’s cottage separated by barbed wire from the twelfth hole of a golf-course. To the left of that, the knuckles of sand-dunes spiked with that tough reedy grass the name of which she could no longer remember. Then a tower came into view on a rocky escarpment where the road petered to its seemingly inevitable conclusion. There was a low limestone wall, and the great mouth of the river pushing its weight of water to the open sea. And in the centre of its path, as if placed there to define the boundary of sea and river, was a limestone pillar, which poked its way toward the horizon like a large finger made of stone.
The driver stopped, where the road lost its definition in a flatland of pebbles and broken seashell. He stopped and sat in silence until he heard her speak from the back seat, in voice that was at once strange and familiar. Or strange because familiar.
“I’m sorry, Ma’am?” he asked. “I didn’t hear.”
“It’s nothing,” she said. And then, as if continuing silence might seem rude, she pointed towards the horizon. “There,” she said. “The Lady’s Finger.”
The wire-mesh fence traced the boundary of the golf-course past the twelfth hole from the lighthouse to the Bettystown road, where it turned south at a neat angle and encased the greens, fairways and roughs to the eighteenth hole.
There the fence ende
d and a complex of clubhouses began. She allowed the car to drive on, through the sand-filled square of the tiny village, past it through the wooden houses and village beyond, told him to turn right along a smaller river where another kingfisher darted into the overhanging brambles; then back on to the Dublin road, and after a time a left turn to the village of Portrane and a final loop around the village to the sprawling edifice of St. Ita’s psychiatric hospital.
The black Ford pulled to a halt outside the redbrick facade with its barred windows, its lawns whitened by small dunes of blowing sand, sloping down to a nondescript beach with a round stone tower cutting through the horizon between scuffed waters and cloud-blown sky. The driver stepped out, opened the back door and used his hip to keep it wedged as he reached down to help her to her feet.
Her hair brushed off his cheek as she emerged and her perfume drifted past him like a thin veil. He watched her walk then, over the circle of broken cement and drifting sand, towards the large green doors set into the overpowering redbrick cathedral. She seemed too finished, too elegant for her drab surroundings. The driver tried to picture her again half-naked in the Fairview cinema of his youth, but the image stayed elusive. Then he remembered a phrase, uttered in a perfect Liverpool burr which had been some years ago part of common currency. “Sorry love but I’m off to Bradford.” Nina Hardy with hair of peroxide blonde, a lipstick-tipped cigarette in one hand, cases at the open door of a redbrick house, in a street of similar houses which retreated behind her to infinity.
“Gardening,” she said to the psychiatrist, “simple tasks that even George, in whatever state he’s in, could manage. Because,” she said, and forgot his name momentarily, but was saved by the rectangle of plastic clipped to his white collar, “Dr. Hannon, I knew George since the age of. . . well, since he was a child.”
“So, you know his condition then?” the doctor enquired. A large face, somehow feminine, underneath bouffant greying hair. He would have suited a magician’s act, she thought, in a music-hall, a false-bottomed box and a saw and a girl in the box with stiletto heels and fishnet tights.
“Yes,” she said, “well, I know roughly what happened. My brother was with him when it happened, helped him to safety and always wondered should he have. But George,” she said, “like a lot of people, was never suited to adulthood.”
“We have an outpatients’ work-scheme,” the doctor said. “They work in the fields, in the market-gardens round here, return at night.”
“Yes,” she said, “I know, I’ve seen them years ago in the fields around. Dummies, they called them, doctor, I don’t quite see the therapeutic value in that. I was thinking of something more permanent. He has green hands, doctor, always had, he could grow wallflowers on a sand-dune. I have a garden, I have a labourer’s cottage near the garden, I’m in desperate need of labour, so what could be wrong with . . .”
“George is institutionalised,” the doctor said. “He has been in and out of our care for the last twenty years, but always returns.”
“And can that be a good thing?” she asked.
“No,” he said, “but it is the reality. We are now the only home he knows.”
“Why not ask him then, doctor?”
“Ask him what?”
“Or let me ask him. Tell him Nina is here.”
And that is how she came to sit in the long waiting-room with the tall windows looking out on the round tower over the beach at Portrane, and came to hear the uncertain tread she remembered from her childhood, and turned to see the nurse lead the large-shouldered figure through the minuscule door.
“George,” she said, “it’s Nina.”
And how he came to turn the face to her that she barely recognised.
46
SHE STAYED IN the Neptune Hotel, Bettystown, for a week, an unlikely presence in the autumnal winds, travelling to the house each morning with an architect one day, a contractor the next. She talked to nobody, ate meals alone, walked the long beach to the river’s mouth in the evening, walked the opposite direction some evenings, crossed the wooden bridge over the Nanny river as the Dublin trains trundled overhead. At the end of that week, on the Friday morning, the driver of the black Ford collected her once more, placed the three bags in the empty boot and retraced his journey along the riverside, through the Drogheda traffic to the still-abandoned house. There he waited five interminable hours as car after car arrived and their drivers shuffled through the house to confer with her. The last of these was driven by a doctor in a white coat, who parked behind the black Ford and opened his own rear door to lead out a large hulking figure who sat hunched in the back seat.
He stood in the small dusty forecourt, blinking in the October sunlight, staring at the house and the outbuildings behind it with a great sense of recognition. His grey overcoat was too small for his bulk, the laces on his shoes were untied and the skin was like crumpled, tortured paper on his pale, enormous face. He didn’t move a muscle, stood like a statue that had been planted there twenty years before, until she emerged from the kitchen, followed by an architect who scribbled on an open sheaf of plans as he walked. And she left the architect standing and walked towards him.
“George,” she said, “I can tell by your attitude that you remember.”
He lowered his eyes to meet hers, with a movement of the head that was so slow the driver of the black Mercedes deduced he must be blind.
“Hart to the hind,” he said.
* * *
She led George by the hand down the long swathe of green towards the river. The psychiatrist followed, watching the large head stare, turn this way and that, as if entering into a remembered wonderland.
“We spent much of our childhood here, doctor,” she said, “didn’t we, George?”
“We did, Ma’am,” said George obediently.
“It’s Nina, George, not Ma’am,” she said, adding, as an afterthought, “if you please. George came from the cottages over there. The river divided us, right George?”
“Yes,” he said, “the river,” dealing with the problem posed by her given name by omitting it entirely.
“There was a swing there, wasn’t there George, on that branch of the chestnut.” George stared at the branch and reached his hand up to touch the decades-old scar on the bark. “And I thought,” she said, “all things being equal, if everything works out as planned, that George would use Dan Turnbull’s cottage. You remember Dan’s cottage, George?”
“Do I ever,” said George.
“Well, maybe you can take us to it.”
He walked, like a child again, along the barely etched path in the grass above the riverbank. There was a tangle of blackberry bushes then, at the bend in the river, and the copse of ash and elder behind it. The woods seemed impassable, but like a child still, he found his old way through it, pushing aside overgrown brambles, breaking off a stick to beat them back, a Hernando Cortez in an imagined Mexican jungle scything his way to an El Dorado, which, when the brambles gave way to clearance with empty cider cans underfoot, turned out to be the peeling, once-whitewashed front of a two-roomed cottage.
“Dan’s,” said George.
“Yes,” said Nina, “this was Dan’s. Could be yours George, if you want it.”
“Let us not be hasty,” murmured the psychiatrist.
“No,” said Nina, “we will by no means rush. I thought he could start by getting it in shape, three or four hours a day maybe, someone could drive him here, doctor, maybe even you, take him home again at night. And if he makes progress he could begin on the garden, and if the miracle happens, make this cottage his home. There’ll be works here, an architect, a building supervisor, he’ll never be alone. And when the house is ready, if I can be as bold as to look forward that far, I will have a gardener and George will have, what is the phrase? A life. Yes that’s it, George will have a life.” She turned to him and took his hand again. “Would you like a life, George?”
And George smiled, his huge hand closing around hers, and whispe
red, using, she happily noted, her name for the first time.
“Nina,” he said, “what larks.”
They emerged into the driver’s view again as they had left it, she first, her right arm angled behind her, the hand lost in George’s enormous fist, who followed like a child. They stopped by the bonnet of the black Ford.
“Please give it some thought,” she said to the doctor in the white coat, her hand still engaged by the hulk the driver of the black Ford had deduced to be his patient. He noted that the skin of the hand matched the skin of the face and was missing one finger. The pinky.
“My first impressions,” the doctor replied, “are more than favourable.”
“I shall await then,” she said, “your second.” She withdrew her hand from the patient, shook the doctor’s. And she raised her pert body on the soles of her black bootees, placed a kiss on the patient’s left cheek.
“Goodbye, George.”
She moved towards the car. The driver leapt from his seat, almost hit her with the opening door. And as he opened the rear door he thought he saw a tear in the hulk’s cornflower-blue eyes.
47
SHE THREW MONEY at the house and the house, as if anxious to assume the shape that pleased her most, responded. The interior was stripped bare within a month, the wiring replaced, the forecourt filled itself with bathroom fittings, tongue-and-groove pine, floorboards, kitchen sinks, window-sashes. A Portakabin for the architect and foreman was trundled on to the front lawn, the copse of trees around Dan Turnbull’s cottage was tidied, the rhododendron and the ash cut back. The cottage itself was clean within a month, new-painted, a radio installed in the corner opposite the fireplace, a sofa improvised from the rear seat of an old Cortina car placed next to it. She came again in January; a different driver, waiting for her by the arrivals desk in Dublin airport, led her towards an identical black Ford car. She stayed another week in the Neptune Hotel, greeted George each morning on his arrival from Portrane, said goodbye to him each evening as the doctor took him home. But the word home was inadmissible to him, since his real home, now, seemed to be here.