Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  James had stayed overnight in the house of a well-known farmer.

  “This family,” he told me, “have stories oozing out of them.”

  We sat in their parlor, conducted thence, with tea and cake, by the farmer’s wife, a small live wire of a woman who spoke so quickly that I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

  James, seeing my bemusement, said when she’d gone, “She’s not from around here”—which is Ireland’s catchall excuse for every human frailty.

  He had long set the ways of his life. I later came to know and navigate them. If I broached a topic with him, I had to wait until he had narrated some other, seemingly unconnected tale. As I got to know him better, I understood that he was buying space to think before he gave an answer to my question.

  After my first sip of tea, I told him what had happened. I delivered it like news headlines and sat back.

  James said, “They have a brick of silver in this family, an ingot, that they say was mined in the hills you saw on the way in.”

  “Well, they’re called the ‘Silvermines,’” I said.

  “This man’s aunt,” said James, opening another topic, “she was famous around here for having a baby at the age of sixty. And the child was healthy.”

  I’m a good eater—and always have been. But I’ve never been anything like James Clare. He could put away food like an eating machine, and he remained as slender as a plank. That morning we finished half a large fruitcake between us, and would have eaten more. Then James sat back.

  “D’you recall what I did in Fermoy?”

  How could I not? He’d told me the story of the recent events in my life as though he had found an old tale.

  “I think of it often,” I said.

  “Can you do it now?”

  He knew I couldn’t, but in kindness wanted to give me the opportunity. I shook my head, and he began.

  “The Queen knew from an early moment that the man had a son. And the wicked King knew that the man had left his son and his son’s mother unprotected. But when the Princess—not the Queen—when the Princess saw the man’s son, she knew what the gods had decided. And when the wicked King saw the man’s son, he grew afraid. He tried to get the son to join him, to lead his army—”

  James broke off and said, “How is this sounding?”

  “What I need to know is—what do I do next?”

  “In something as important as this,” he said, “you first of all have to establish what you know, how much you know. Telling it as a story should make it clearer.”

  I didn’t want to hear more because I felt uncomfortable; I should have known to take this as a sign of the story’s accuracy.

  “But—”

  “I know, Ben, I know. What do you do next?” His advice surprised me. “I’d say—do nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Leave it alone. Live day to day. Meet me in the west; I want to show you the ocean. Your strength is in the power of others.”

  For the few weeks following that meeting, I reordered my life. I wrote to my parents and said that I’d be away for some time. In the note, I told my father where I’d left the car—in Cashel. He must have known that now I had the big, high-ceremonial Daimler; I wonder whether it hurt him. My actions, to an outsider, would have suggested that my life had been altered permanently—which it had been, but the greater change was internal, a maturing at top speed. At that moment, I assumed a new role in life—that of partner to Venetia in every waking moment of her existence.

  We had peace. And a surprising amount of it. The members of the company intruded not at all. Apart from the nightly—and sometimes afternoon—involvement with the show on the road, we saw only Mrs. Haas.

  Sarah had gone to New York, and from there to Los Angeles. Of King Kelly—not a sign; his new parliamentary life had taken him to Dublin.

  Mrs. Haas behaved as lady-in-waiting to a bridegroom and his bride. She ostentatiously put herself at our disposal—handmaid and housekeeper, cook and controller of our home. She changed bed linen and towels every few days, created special mealtime atmospheres with candles and perfumed air—plus sumptuous food.

  I look back on that time now as I recall some dreams, and indeed it all had the texture of dreams, the vague and airy sensations, the basic peace.

  Real life intruded rarely. We went to Limerick because I had no clothes; Venetia bought wardrobes for me. She found a doctor for my badly affected knuckles where I had struck my father. How was it that I hadn’t killed him? The thought still makes me shudder. We saw a lawyer in the city of Cork, because Venetia wanted to make a will, and she insisted that I overhear it because I was to be the sole beneficiary. And she took me to a garden that she loved, the garden of a great house whose owners were away.

  This mansion sat on the same river, Blackwater, that flowed through Fermoy. In the car Venetia carried letters from a number of owners who had such houses and gardens. She knew these people from Dublin, from her days in the Abbey Theatre, and had been given introductions by letter.

  We walked between rows of trees.

  “Planted,” she said, “to commemorate the British victory at Waterloo.”

  And I said to her, “Did you know that the schools on both sides, British and French, teach Waterloo as a victory?”

  Her method of talking still intrigues me. She managed to give the impression that she said little, yet she talked all the time. I was the silent one—because I wanted to listen. I had no wish to speak, especially if it was going to curtail the time in which she might have something to say.

  And she had plenty. She loved gardens and showed wide knowledge of trees, flowers, and especially flowering shrubs.

  “If I could,” she said, “I would do all my rehearsing in a garden. A large garden, with bowers, and a lake and fountain—not too noisy a fountain, because I wouldn’t be able to hear my lines. And it would make me want to pee all the time.”

  I often walked behind her as she high-stepped through the gardens we visited. She always walked with respect, never straying off the paths, not even when a tree intrigued her. That afternoon she stopped by a hedge of honeysuckle, which we had growing at home.

  “You’ve got this at your house, haven’t you? I saw it when we came up from the woods.” Then she stopped and narrowed her eyes. “D’you know what I’m doing, Ben? I’m trying to imagine what it’s going to be like here when May comes. We’ll come back and see.”

  She collected things—tiny pebbles from the gravel; odd shapes of fallen leaves or little sticks; feathers, the tinier the better. From one bare shrub she took a bird’s nest from last year.

  I asked her questions. She told me that she had no friends, not even in the theater, that all her time had been spent with her mother.

  “If I talk to you too much it’s because I’ve never been able to talk to anybody like this. All my companions have been older—my mother’s friends.”

  We’d reached a pocket of tall hedges, where the sun made strong heat. She felt the stone of a bench with her hands and we sat down.

  “Do you want to marry me?” she said, grabbing my arm.

  I didn’t have to think, but I wasn’t quick enough to reply.

  “You will, won’t you? You will marry me? You’re the only person I’ve ever known whose company works for me; I’m safe with you. You’ll let me be what I am. It’s right for me—is it right for you?”

  “Completely,” I said.

  “I’ll be no good without you. My mother will be furious.”

  “When,” I asked, “will we do it?”

  “Do you have to be twenty-one?”

  Neither of us knew—but we walked from that garden as married in our minds as most people ever get at their weddings.

  The pleasure of being with Venetia surpassed anything that I had ever known or imagined. It still does. I hadn’t been a dreamy boy, at least not the romantic sort, but I’d had my share of fantasies—I’ve mentioned it already, the usual stuff about heroi
sm and conquering the world.

  But I’d never daydreamed about being in the company of someone lovely, appealing, interesting, and calm, someone thoughtful, entertaining, talkative, and warm.

  When I lay it out like that for you now, you can see that my parents, each of them, supplied quite a few of those qualities, and from both sides. To find, at the beginning of my adult life, the same—and more—in one person, and that person a beautiful and talented woman, and somebody who felt close to me in age despite the calendar’s evidence—I could have reached for the word “miracle”—if I’d known enough to think like that.

  All I knew is that I was having feelings that I’d never known existed, and I wanted them to go on and on, and it seemed very much the case that they would.

  We shared everything. I came into her world as though it had always been my intended place. Without comment, without feeling unusual, we settled down in Charleville through the last days of February and all through March, and as Venetia prepared a new repertoire for the show, I observed and interjected and contributed. It was a paradise. The world left us alone.

  Sometimes one or two of the other actors came to discuss her choices. Of these, Peter, who never acted, made the best contribution, had the best taste. When Venetia wanted to try something, she gave readings from the play or poem. If we were alone she asked what I thought; and I gave my opinion on how it affected me. When others gave their views, she always turned to me in the end.

  In the long term I came to think—especially after it had all ended—that I had been flattered by Venetia and the others, until I found Peter in his old folks’ home. He changed my opinion.

  “You know,” he said, “we couldn’t grasp one thing. We couldn’t understand how a country lad—which is what you were to us, a bumpkin, a farmhand—how a rural lout could have formed such taste. We used to get so annoyed. When I got blind drunk, as I often did, I could hear myself swearing your name out loud. What was it, old boy? Instinct? Wish I’d had it. My taste was all acquired. Winchester School and Oxford.”

  I avoided going home—too much, too much. By the middle of May, Venetia had a whole new show. We took to the road in the first week of June, playing the west coast from Dingle up to Donegal, and on the first of July she went to a doctor in Castleisland and was told that she was “carrying a child.”

  Time for an Important Digression: Throughout that spring and summer, the new Irish government was coming into being. The first assembly of those elected in February didn’t happen until March. Anybody interested in politics at any level would have paid good money to get behind the scenes before they all met in Dublin; in fact Mr. de Valera could have sold tickets.

  He had such horse-trading to do. The election had involved four distinct and registered parties, and fourteen independent members. To get anything passed, to make sure that he outnumbered them all, Dev needed ten clear votes. He’d won a total of seventy-two seats, an increase of fifteen on the previous Parliament. Mr. Cosgrave had fifty-six, the Labour party had seven, and the Farmers’ party three. Add up the smaller parties, and the Independents, and the Speaker (always returned unopposed), and they came to eighty-one.

  You can probably tell that I had now taken to reading the morning newspaper like my father, who was after all the only husband I had ever seen. I scanned every day in deep detail, and that is how I ascertained that King Kelly was making a lot of noise and was indeed going to sit on the Parliament’s Finance Committee. He might even become a major player on the Opposition benches, challenging de Valera’s policies.

  My heart sank; how could one ever challenge that power? End of Digression—but there will be more.

  Venetia touched the clouds in her joy. Everything about her became dual—at times she could barely speak in excitement, and at times she chattered nonstop, to everything around her, including me; she wanted to dance and she stood still as a statue; she laughed and she wept.

  And I, who hadn’t known the word virgin except in a religious context, who knew nothing of procreation except in the animal world, I took to my new status as a duck to a stream. My protective instincts doubled, of course, and I didn’t even know why; I did no more than respond to my feelings.

  The night that we knew, Venetia gave performances far beyond anything I had yet seen. She even thought so herself. She was building this new repertoire gradually. Already she had expanded her range, and had put together a “medley”—her word—of Shakespeare’s speeches, mostly heroines, although she did include two of the soliloquies from Hamlet, and continued to follow the requirements of the nationwide school curriculum.

  I loved the fact that some of these words echoed in the shabbiest buildings I had ever seen—to people who sat packed shoulder to shoulder, some of them following the words of every speech with their lips.

  She’d also chosen what she called “tougher stuff”—she gave them glimpses of Antigone and Medea, setting up the chosen speech with some plot narration, either her own introduction or something very orotund spoken by Peter (now back onstage) or Graham.

  The company loved the changes, and admired the skill with which they were being phased in. Few of them missed the “funnies,” as they called them, and they relished being given the chance to do what they called “true” acting.

  Cwawfod, in particular, found his reward. Far from not being allowed to speak lines, he was converted into true character acting. Where a role needed to be exaggerated on account of its brevity in an excerpt, Cwawfod was used to considerable effect. He was comic, touching, sinister, hopeless—whatever was needed—and Venetia brought out of him depths that nobody had even suspected.

  He gave up drinking, and when eventually the show folded, he became a not inconsiderable minor character in films, and made money.

  Ireland had always loved a traveling show. With so little transport available, the world had to come to the people, who repaid with attendance and appreciation. Strolling players had long been a part of countryside life and tradition. Venetia’s forerunners had brought to the villages the melodramas of the nineteenth century, and the classics, and the specially written local dramas, often based on famous tragedies or mysteries.

  In the years after Venetia, other distinctive companies toured with troupes of experienced actors—and they also bred actors who went on to great fame. Harold Pinter, for instance, before he made his name writing plays, appeared with companies that toured Ireland.

  As with Venetia, a basic economic principle underpinned them all—the opportunity for students to hear the play they were studying, and now, in her revamped repertoire, Venetia included longer and longer excerpts. It was her intention, I knew, to build up to entire plays.

  The current season of engagements arranged from the Charleville base still had to be played out. Our life on the road became much more delightful—nothing nearly as grim as those weeks when I was pursuing my father.

  Sarah and King Kelly, I was learning, had had strong fingers in the traveling-show pie. With them out of the way, Venetia also changed the way she conducted business.

  The audiences for this more serious material grew larger than anything she had known. Priests and teachers began to approve, and in most towns she had to do two shows a day. In effect the income more than doubled, and she plowed it back into the show. She bought an extra car for the others; she hired carpenters and painters to make new scenery flats; she spent money on costumes.

  The players responded by working harder than ever, and showing her an increasing devotion. On those occasions when we played a town for a week, Venetia found fresh flowers in her dressing room, such as it was, on opening night (I think the actors raided local gardens). They brought her little gifts; they gave her performance notes; they found new material for her.

  For instance, Peter and Graham persuaded her to perform the Tennyson poem “The Lady of Shalott;” it had also been on many curricula. They wrote an introductory script for her, in which she connected the poem and its origins in an Italian folktal
e with the legend of the River Shannon’s name, where the princess Shannon, also dead and in a white robe, flows mystically down the stream like Ophelia. Venetia brought the house down with the story and the poem.

  Now and then events might have delayed a performance, such as the election rally in Kilmallock did, but being shrewd, she simply held back the opening of the show and attracted a huge overflow from the other event. The money poured in.

  She looked after her company even better than before. Every player saw a doctor; if the town had a hotel, they stayed there, booked in advance by writing; all of these arrangements were looked after by silent Martha, who, by all accounts, wrote in a beautiful copperplate hand and an elegant letter.

  Where a town had no hotels, advance research revealed good bed-and-breakfast places or pubs with rooms overhead, although Venetia favored those less than any kind of other accommodation. “We have enough problems with pubs,” was her dark reply when I asked.

  And so we went from town to village to little crossroads hall. We were becoming celebrities. The local newspapers wrote anticipatory notices and gave us departing reviews—always praise, never a negative word. If those notices happened while there was still time for people to see the show, we had to put on extra performances.

  None of this bothered Venetia; the more she performed, the more she bloomed. She even gave some free performances in schools, and from the faces of the teachers and the students, it looked as though a comet had decided to come to earth and light up their lives for that hour or so.

  I watched everything she did; I was near her all the time; I saw every bit of material. There was a sense in which I was deliberately “learning” her—after all, I scarcely knew her, conventionally speaking. Nothing ever grew less; in everything we did, we increased and intensified.

  The watching, the constant observation of her onstage, led me to analyze her art, her skill, her craft—I still don’t know the appropriate word, perhaps all three. My abiding impression has to do with how little she did, not how much. Silence governed everything, stillness, often a motionlessness; time after time I watched her walk onstage and for an astonishing number of seconds do nothing. Maybe a small move of the head, maybe a folding of the hands—and then, before she spoke, a slight shift of posture, perhaps a foot forward, especially in the classical pieces.