Professor Fay leaned back and said to Sarah, “And of course Ben has met your esteemed father.”
“Oh, my goodness!” said Sarah, not unlike what I was thinking myself. “How did you get on with him?”
Professor Fay butted in. “Famously by all accounts. Famously. By all accounts. Your father loved him. Your father loved him.”
Sarah said, “At least he was born in this wonderful country.”
“But so were you, my dear, so were you.”
“My father and mother came back here so that I’d be born Irish,” Sarah said to me. “I wish I’d done that with Venetia”—and thus began my first instruction in the lives of the Kellys; that’s when I heard about the mythic New Year birth in the blizzards of New York; “She sprang from the womb and waved to the crowd.”
Whatever the subsequent awfulness, I look back on that meeting as magical. Sarah, with no self-consciousness that I could observe—and I was staggered by her lack of what Mother called “essential modesty”—said to Professor Fay, “I wish that you could have seen me when Venetia was born. D’you remember what Venetia looked like about ten years ago? I was even more beautiful.”
“Of course you were, of course you were.”
What does one do about a man with halitosis? Every time Professor Fay said anything I had to lean back in my chair. No wonder his sister sucked mints all day long.
We ate our food. Sarah and Professor Fay talked to me as though I were massively important. I remember thinking, They want to get me on their side, but I dismissed the thought. For what possible reason could they have needed me?
Oh, the naïveté of the young!
After almost an hour, their attentions were interrupted by the arrival of the show—or some of them. First came Michael the acrobat, thinner in real life than on the stage. I thought, There isn’t enough room for him to turn a cartwheel in here. When he spoke I understood why they gave him so few lines onstage; he had a girl’s voice.
“I detect vittles,” he said; I never heard him speak again.
Behind him came the neckless man. Dressed in aged corduroy, he held his waistband to his body by means of a striped necktie. He looked all around the room as he spoke—in other words, never off the stage; he had the voice of a grave and considered patrician.
“We are well met here, are we not?” he said. I didn’t have the faintest idea what he meant; I never would understand anything he said.
No sign of my father; would he be the next to arrive? Not that it mattered; at that moment Venetia appeared. I, as taught by Mother, stood up. This caused a delighted outcry from Sarah: “The manners—oh, my!”
Venetia again wore a scarf that day, but only around her neck, and in that first instant I saw every particle of her face. The light eyes held mine; I, naturally, caved in first and looked away—to where I can’t say. My mind froze.
To this day I never have met anybody who has looked at me in the same wonderful way.
“Ben,” she said. “Isn’t that your name?”
I stood there, nodding stupidly. We had collection boxes in pubs and churches where the saint bobbed his head in gratitude when you slipped in a coin; I nodded like that.
What happened next? I suddenly felt crowded out, and somewhat overwhelmed. Thanking Professor Fay for the food and offering to pay for mine, I left almost immediately—but not before Venetia had said to me, “I’m visiting your cottage on Sunday.”
The day had the texture of spring. I stumbled down the hotel stairs, sure that I’d made a graceless departure. My face was hot and I didn’t know why. In the great and unexpected sunshine I saw the river and a path beside it. For the next hour I walked that path, fighting with thoughts that flew at me from all directions.
So that’s what she’s like, my father’s obsession. She’s much older than me. Much younger than him. Tall. Eye level. She looked me in the eye. At eye level. Gray? Light blue? White? No, nobody has white eyes. Can’t see her eyes from the audience. Gray-white like the Daimler. No, light blue. Her hand—she didn’t take it away when she shook my hand.
The first birds of spring dipped and swooped in the bushes near the river, searching early for places to nest. I calmed down and remembered my quest. Back I went to the hall where I’d seen my father guard Blarney. At the door I took a deep breath. This time I would speak it plain: The election is over. Come home with me today.
It didn’t happen; I found that he’d gone. Damn! And worse—I met King Kelly, who strode the hall watching his votes being counted.
“It’ll be like the Battle of Waterloo, damn close-run thing,” he shouted at every person he met. Including me, at whom he boomed, “The very man! Come over here.”
Long tables beset by frowning people ran the length of the room. Piles of paper kept growing as the tin ballot boxes kept arriving.
“We’re counting every box,” he said. “Not just every vote, every box. Boxes have gone missing before, you know.” He added, “Politics attracts a lot of crooks.”
I wanted to know how the votes were for Blarney, but I had enough sense not to ask him. Mr. Kelly moved away to talk to somebody else and I whispered my question to a counter.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s elected,” the man said.
“How’s Mr. Kelly doing?”
“It’ll be between him and his grandson.”
“Who?”
“Blarney,” said the man and grinned.
I left the hall with the count still going on. Think of my problems. No nearer to persuading my father to come home, now I couldn’t find him. Worse than that, the object of his affections had disturbed me profoundly—and she was about to make an appearance on my family’s farm. How could I tell Mother? Should I say anything?
In what culture do we find the proverb “When the student is ready, the master appears?” Is it Buddhism? The Hindus possess wonderful sayings, as do the Tibetans. And I’ve heard an Eastern legend that I’ve been unable to trace—of a man, a magical teacher and guide, who emerged from a stone at the moment of the hero’s greatest need.
It was at that moment, on the stone bridge over the river in Fermoy, that I met James Clare.
As you might by now have come to expect of me, let me tell you the story of James Clare. He came from the County Clare, where he was born in 1872, making him sixty years old when I met him. But 160 in wisdom; he was as sage as a prophet in a cave. By the age of ten he could play with the musicians in the local pubs. His father had a special set of pipes made for him, with a smaller bag than the adult instrument—James didn’t grow fast physically until he reached fourteen, and even then his arms remained too thin to power a full bag under his elbow. It turned out that as a child he’d had tuberculosis (at that time the Irish national disease), hence the early puniness, hence the wheezing when he cycled up a hill.
He wanted to teach music—“so that I could learn it all the time, that’s what teaching is, teaching is learning.” Poor boys had no means of getting into a music academy, but at the age of twenty he did win a scholarship, and became a teacher at primary level. And that’s where and how he discovered his love of story. First came the effect—the rapt faces of the children. Then he expanded the cause; he went in search of tales.
He lived near the village of Doolin, in as magical a countryside as you’ll find in the world. To his west lay the sea, the Atlantic Ocean. To the east stretched the white moonscape of the Burren. North and south of him he could find megalithic tombs, castles, the ruins of ancient churches—every field, it seemed, had a legend attached.
At first he specialized—he talked to the fishermen, and the men who went out to the lobster pots. From them he heard stories of great tragedies, shipwrecks, drownings of handsome men and beautiful girls.
They told him of a woman north of there, who lived on an island in Galway Bay; they were no more specific than that. She’d lost seven men to the sea, her husband and six sons, and the seventh son had promised his mother that he’d never again go out in
a boat. But one day, the horse that he was leading along a cliff path reared up in fright at the force of a high breaker hitting the rocks just beneath them, and he dragged the young man off the cliff down into the waves.
“And that, as you know,” said James Clare, paying me the compliment of being well read—which I wasn’t at the time—“was where John Millington Synge got the plot for his play Riders to the Sea.” In which Sarah Kelly had once starred at the Abbey Theatre.
James Clare began to write down these stories, but he didn’t do so in front of the narrators. Instead of making them self-conscious or halting their flow, he went back to where he lived and wrote them down that same night, often working until four or five o’clock in the morning. At the end of a year or two, he had transcribed, he said, tales of mermaids, golden towers on the horizon, ghost ships.
He told me too the origin of the word mermaid—it had been “merry maid,” an ironic term, since their singing was designed to lure mortal men to their green, tendriled lands beneath the ocean.
I asked him the foolish question “D’you think there’s ever any truth in the stories you hear?”
He considered long and hard and said to me, “The first lesson I learned about a story was—there’s always some truth in it. A mermaid could have been a seal seen at a distance. Or a manatee that had strayed a long way from her native shore; a manatee can look very like a human. The golden towers of Atlantis—they could be icebergs, lit by the sun. Ghost ships? Well, we know they exist—because we’ve seen them. But don’t confuse the words truth and fact—they mean different things. A truth is the meaning the story can give you. A fact—like, did it happen? That can’t give you much, unless you make something of it with your own imagination. And that then becomes the truth of it. So, a fellow saw a seal or a manatee off in the distance—and his imagination turned it into a mermaid, because he needed a mermaid at that moment in his life.”
The man who spoke those words became my teacher, my adviser, my leader in life, and my closest friend. That morning in Fermoy he also became my guide in the immediate circumstances of the Catastrophe.
Paying no attention to the world around me, I had walked across the bridge intending to get to the car and drive to Mallow, the next show venue. I didn’t see the man in the black coat leaning back, watching the world, his elbows on the parapet. But he certainly saw me, and as I drew near, my head down, brisk and focused, I heard the broad voice that would become so dear and familiar.
“Stop for a minute and talk to me. The man who made time made plenty of it.”
That was James Clare’s opening gambit for everybody; that was how he got his stories. I stopped. His face, open and warm, the crinkles, the wrinkles, the great shock of snow-white hair—how could I not trust him at once?
“But would I know where to begin?” I said.
“Try the middle,” he said. “The beginning is often too daunting.”
“I’ve just met the girl my father has run off with, and I think we’re about to have a ventriloquist’s dummy in our government.”
He didn’t laugh; he nodded and said, “That sounds to me as if things are sitting about right in the world. Do you know this river at all? You can see why it’s called the Blackwater.”
We looked down at it together. And we saw our faces side by side, as we would many a year after that.
“There’s a place along the bank,” he said, “with a bit of a seat on it. We can get hold of the sun.”
I followed him down the path, not knowing what I was doing, watching the shiny wheels of his beautifully kept bicycle. On the back sat two elegant, polished black leather panniers; in another basket on the handlebars sat a similar black leather briefcase. Who was this man, dressed head to toe in black, with a white shirt and black tie?
As this story proceeds, James Clare will play an important part. For the moment, let me just tell you—that day, he extracted from me the entire story of what had been going on.
When I had finished, he did a most interesting thing—he told the story back to me, but as if he’d heard it in legendary or mythical form. This is how it sounded; I’ll remember it forever.
Once upon a time, there lived a man who loved the land that he worked. He was an anxious man, as all red-haired people tend to be. And he was a kind man, but he was prone to a little madness now and then. Usually this madness didn’t affect people much; he’d get up in the middle of a moonlit summer night and walk his fields in his nightshirt, looking to see whether his crops continued to grow in the dark. If he got cold he’d go over and lie down with his horses where they were sleeping under a tree.
Now this man had a wife and a son, and to them he looked for wisdom, because this man had one great fear in life—that he’d do something crazy one day, and never be able to recover. They, though, looked to him for wisdom, and in the back-and-forth they never stopped to think that he thought them wiser than himself.
One day, a Princess came by. She was an unusual young woman, different from the rest of the world, and she had wonderful gifts—gifts of speech and illusion, gifts of compassion and intrigue, gifts of excitement and praise, and she looked at this man and he looked back at the Princess. With no more than a few words, he put down his farming tools and followed the Princess across the country. When he met her mother, the Queen, and all the court, he stayed with them in their land of gifts.
The man’s wife and son, good people, didn’t know what to do. Eventually, after some days of debate and worry, the wife asked her son to be like the heroes of old—to undertake a quest. He—again like the heroes of old—did so unwillingly, and, as in all good legends, he failed and he failed and he failed.
One day, he met the Queen, and soon after that he met the Princess herself, and he began to understand why his father had so suddenly disappeared into this magic world. These were different people, these royal travelers; they were like the gaudy caravans that rode through the deserts, stopping at each and every oasis to dance and sing and playact.
The young man was disturbed by them, and was especially shaken to find that they had in their midst an old and wicked King, who threatened danger to everybody, while at the same time offering words sweeter than combs of honey.
On a sunny morning, however, the young man took the first step toward completing his quest. He stopped on a bridge to look down into a river, and he saw there a face, an ancient face, and he called to it. He called, “Tell me what to do, old face in the river.”
A man arose from the water; he floated up from the flowing current and walked up onto the bridge. He wore a long black coat and miraculously it was bone-dry—as was his hair and his skin and his shiny, shiny boots.
“Yes, I’ll tell you what to do,” he said. “Follow your own power.”
“Follow my own power,” said the young man. “What does that mean?”
“Only you can know that,” said the man from the river.
James Clare halted there and laughed in delight—probably at the bemused expression on my face.
“That, as you’ll gather, is the story so far. What do you make of it?” I was embarrassed to say what I felt, and he picked that up. “Go on—say what you feel.”
I said, “It’s—exciting. When you tell it like that.”
“It might make it easier to handle.”
And then I laughed, because I didn’t know what else to do.
Yet I had immediate and very difficult problems. The woman with whom Father had run away would be on our farm this coming Sunday, within a few hundred yards of Mother. I told this to James Clare.
He said, “Do you need advice?”
“Oh, God, I do!”
“See whether you can send your mother somewhere for the day. Go to the gathering. Then use your own power. Your father won’t be there.” I must have looked puzzled.
“Of course he won’t be there. He’s too much of a gentleman to do something like that.”
James Clare and I arranged to meet in Fermoy again on Monday
morning.
“By then,” he said, “we’ll know how the country is going.”
Symbolically, almost, the days became glorious as the voting results came through. My own story grew more dramatic. As the country changed direction, so did my life, and it too was lit by a sun that seemed to have leapt forward from May or June. That day, I acted upon James Clare’s advice to the letter—as I would do all my life. I went home, and, abominably, but powered by my own feelings for her, told Mother a lie—that my father had gone into the west, and nobody knew where he’d gone, but that he was expected back next week. I also told her that I needed a rest, a break from the incessant pressure—and that so did she.
With good maneuvering I arranged for Billy Moloney to take her to her sister’s house in Kilkenny, where she could stay for the weekend; I would collect her on Sunday night.
Such fortunate timing; almost as soon as they drove out of our yard, Mary Lewis appeared—inviting us on behalf of Mr. Kelly to come to the cottage on Sunday for a victory celebration.
I wanted to ask, “Is he that sure he’s won?” but I kept my powder dry.
Not yet had I revealed to Mother the identity of King Kelly. In the few days since the election, she’d shrunk a great deal, I thought, her spirits lower than ever. Years later she revealed to me that she had hoped the election and its results would bring my father back home.
“As if all the nonsense had now ended,” was how she put it to me.
I began to debate with myself the kind of equations Mother must have been making in her head. De Valera in office and my father home: politics as a securer of family stability. The turmoil of an election campaign: a disturber of the marriage bed. A predatory woman as an indicator of Fascism. Therefore I’ve judged accurately not to tell her yet of the King Kelly connection.
Luckily the glorious weather continued on Sunday. I finished all the chores on the farm early (how I loved being back in working clothes!) and I prepared for the luncheon party. From Christmas I had some gifts of shirts not yet worn, and a new necktie; I also had new shoes. I can see now that I was preparing like a bridegroom.
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