by Tim Buckley
“Yes. I’m putting together a play list of music at the moment and we will have a sound system in place.”
“What would you think of having live music, musicians playing in the central space? Not every day, just on special days, opening day for example. I was thinking of a string quartet, all women. Hélène is a violinist, and plays in Dublin. She might know some others. Irish women of the new generation.”
He rubbed his chin thoughtfully and considered it for a moment.
“Let me think about it,” he said.
“It would just be another feature, a talking point for the press maybe,” I offered. “And it might help Hélène too,” I added quietly, slowly.
“Let me think about it,” he said again, and left.
Oran turned to me when he was gone.
“Well aren’t you the golden bollocks all of a sudden, ha?” he said with a laugh.
His reaction seemed genuine, but I was conscious that Oran might be aggrieved that I had sauntered back in and taken over what he had built. He would have every right to be, but I didn’t think for a moment that I had suddenly become a prodigal son. My work was still a long way from hanging, and my observations on the exhibition flow were simply born of common sense that might save time and money. Lochlann hadn’t killed the fatted calf just yet.
“It’s not far from golden bollocks to just bollocks,” I said with a rueful smile. “If I don’t make this portrait work or if I screw up his precious ‘flow’, he’ll be quick to unleash his venom. I’ll be out on my arse and you’ll be left to fix it!”
“Well you better get to work then. I have enough to be doing without cleaning up after the likes of you!” He waved me away in mock dismissal. I gave him a solemn faux-military salute, and went back into the studio.
I sat down behind my desk and picked up the palette, turning it over and over absent-mindedly in my hands. Since I had arrived in Dublin, I felt like I was standing in the middle of a busy motorway at rush hour, fending off the unexpected, the uninvited, like I was avoiding speeding cars. Now, for the first time, I felt brave enough to peek out from behind the raised arms that shielded my face. Now I felt that I could maybe stop the traffic, or at least step clear.
I had somehow overcome Oran’s initial antipathy, and maybe I had arrived at an opportune moment to help him through what was going to be a difficult time, if I could. I had found and lost and refound my path to Aoife and my muse. I had perhaps softened Lochlann’s contempt, although I knew that to fail him, to let him down again, would serve only to plunge me even deeper into that hole. The complexity of life, of managing its twists and turns and surprises, had always been a little beyond my grasp. I had often wondered how Caitríona and I would have coped if we had chosen to have children, so difficult did I find managing a life with just two of us. I marvelled at my friends who negotiated a life irrevocably complicated by the educational and medical and developmental and emotional, never mind the quotidien logistical, responsibilities hurled at them by their children. Up to now, Dublin had thrown at me more questions than answers. Or maybe it was throwing me a lifebelt while behind me my ship went down.
CHAPTER 18
There will be a portrait of Claire at the show. I’ve never known what to call her. Some childish title of affection would sound like a denial that I never knew her, like a claim that I did and so have some right to familiarity. I started calling him Lochlann out of some sense of angst-filled teenage rebellion – to call her Claire suggests the same and that’s not true.
So I have always called her “my mother”. I say always, but I rarely speak of her. You tried to persuade me to learn more about her, to make her somehow a part of my life. But Lochlann and I never talked about her and where else would I learn about her without seeming to go behind his back?
We looked at pictures of her, you and I, and you said she was beautiful. And you said it not in that way girls have of only complimenting women who are not so beautiful as to cast a shadow over their own fairness. You said it as though you meant it and were a little surprised. We’re always surprised to find that older generations were beautiful in their prime.
A son’s relationship with his mother is the most natural, normal thing in the world, but I have no idea what it’s like or how it feels. I didn’t miss it because I never knew it. That which others could not countenance losing, to me was nothing more than a concept, no more tangible than the theorems we learned at school. I tried to make it painful, like a self-abuser tries to hurt himself as punishment or retaliation, just so that I could bridge the gulf between Lochlann and me, give us some common ground. But I could find no guilt, no cause for punishment. I could feel no pain, squeeze out no tears.
A mother’s relationship with her daughter is just as precious, just as natural, yet you denied it to yourself, denied yourself the right to be called a mother. In your heart, did you think we would have a child again some day? Did you pass it up because you were sure you would have another chance? Or did conception and pregnancy quench any curiosity, any desire that was in you to mother a child? I don’t think you ever thought of yourself as a mother. I think, in your mind, the physical experience of bearing a child was not enough to qualify you. You could never join in those exclusive conversations between girlfriends at parties about pregnancy or labour or birth. You could never offer advice over coffee to a newly pregnant friend. Even if they had known, even if you had shared that secret, I don’t think you would ever have presumed to join their club. Not, I think, that it would have upset you – in time you came to terms with that, as much as you could – but because you felt you had no right. The day they took her away, they also took away your entitlement to recall the experience and recount the story.
I see mothers every day with their children, with babies and toddlers and kids and teenagers. I try to imagine you in their shoes, but I never can. You don’t fit, you have no place in that picture. If every woman is a mother in waiting, then why is the impact so profound? Proud, powerful, capable women seem so often lost in the mothers that emerge from the maternity ward. Flustered, frightened and newly focused in a new reality. Or betrayed by a promise broken? Drawn in by the light and the comfortable certainty that it’s the right way. From where there is no retreat.
I nearly saw motherhood at first hand. Twice. I never knew my mother and never knew you as a mother. How different my life might have been. Lochlann would be different, would be Dad, maybe. We’d play golf or go for a pint or watch the football on television. I would be a different person, surely. You might still be here, the same but different. Our little girl would be all grown up and gone from home, probably. We might have another child, or two perhaps. Our life’s priorities would be incomparable.
I had never had a mother and so I never missed her, never felt that grief. Is it wrong to sometimes wish I had never had you?
CHAPTER 19
Hélène arrived promptly at eight o’clock the next morning and we made the mandatory pot of coffee before going to the studio to at last begin work. She seemed less anxious than when she had come back the day before, but she was not as entirely at ease as she had been when we talked in the coffee shop in Malahide. Whether it was down to the events of the days before or simply to nerves now that we were starting in earnest, I wanted to try to make her as comfortable as I could, for her own sake as much as for the sake of the work we were setting out to do.
She was dressed as we had agreed, in a simple yet formal white shirt, open at the neck to reveal the little silver cross, and a floor length black skirt. On her feet she wore simple black shoes with no heel. Her long hair was pulled back and tied in a pony-tail behind her head. She laid the violin case on the studio desk.
“How was the gig last night?” I asked.
“It was good, I think.”
“So, what kind of music do you play?”
“Everything, really, whatever I can. Last night I was with a
band that plays rock music, but in an Irish style. Trad rock, I think you call it. They are very good. The lead singer has a wonderful voice, deep and strong.”
“Where were you playing?”
“In a town called Carlow – that is how you say it?”
I nodded even though that was how nobody had ever said it – the small country town dominated by the sugar factory had never sounded so romantic.
“It was in a hotel, in the night club.”
“What time did you get home?”
“About three, I think.”
“Jesus, you must be shattered?”
She smiled.
“A little. But, this is ok?” she asked, looking down at her clothes and shoes.
“It’s perfect, Hélène. It’s exactly as I pictured you.”
She smiled briefly, then her face became again serious.
“One thing,” I said, hesitating to suggest that anything that might be construed as criticism. “Can we change your hair, just a little?”
She put a hand to her head.
“Yes. How? You would like it loose?” She frowned as though she didn’t quite understand.
“No, I like it tied up. But could we make it less tidy, less neat? Could you, like, pull a few strands loose and let them fall over your face and hang down by the sides of your cheeks? And just, maybe, loosen it a bit, without letting it fall free. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, I think so.” She looked around the studio. “Do you have a mirror that I can use?”
“No, I don’t,” I winced at the omission. “I should have though, you’re right. I’ll get one next time I’m in town. There’ll be one in the bathroom, at the back of the Gallery.” I pointed out through the studio door to the far wall of the big room.
“OK,” and she walked out into the Gallery. I took out a notebook and scribbled “mirror”, then busied myself with positioning the easel and stabilising the canvas board, and with arranging the charcoals and erasers for the umpteenth time.
When she came back in I was scrabbling about with the foot of one of the easel’s legs, but the transformation stopped me in my tracks. I stared at her, and the sad, dark eyes of a latter-day Cosette started back at me through tumbling locks, as though from behind the makeshift barricades.
“So,” she said. “This is ok?”
“This is…” I was momentarily lost for words. “Jesus, it’s fantastic. It’s just perfect. It really is perfect, Hélène.”
My concerns about appeasing and encouraging and reassuring were momentarily put to one side – the look she had created was at once disabling and inspiring. My reaction needed no embellishment, and this time the gratified smile played on her lips a little longer.
I moved the old wooden chair into the light that was streaming through the long window and offered her the seat. She went to the desk and took her violin and bow from the case. She sat down in the chair and leaned forward with her forearms resting on her knees. She held the violin by its neck in her left hand and the bow in her right so that they hung just off the floor between her feet. Her head was tipped back so that her eyes looked straight ahead, filled – whether by virtue of her nervous uncertainty or by design – with the lost look that had so captivated me the first time I met her.
“May I?” I asked, reaching for a strand of hair that had fallen across her eyes.
“Yes, of course.”
I brushed it back so that it fell down the side of her face.
“Perfect,” I said, almost to myself.
I went to the desk and took my camera from the drawer.
“Can I take a photograph?” I asked. “I just want to make sure we don’t ever lose this. It’s so right.”
She nodded her head and I had to brush back the hair that fell again across her eyes.
I took two or three shots from different angles, and then looked at them in the camera’s digital screen. I stepped over to her and handed her the camera so she could see.
“What do you think?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, but scrolled through the pictures once, twice, three times. Finally, she nodded.
“Yes, I think it is what you want.”
All that week, we began our days the same way. Hélène would arrive at eight, always on time, we would make a pot of coffee and make our way to the studio. The charcoal sketching began to slowly take shape and Hélène’s features began to emerge. The canvas board gave the charcoal a grainy texture that gave it an old look, as though it had been started years ago and only now rescued from some dusty box in the attic to be brought at last to its conclusion. And it gave Hélène’s face an elusive mystique, so that you couldn’t quite catch her eye, nor place the expression.
It was slow progress, painstaking almost. I knew that I should build the broad base first and worry later about minor corrections or refinements. But I couldn’t move on until it was right, and so I wasted hours on fine amendments that would make little difference to the final work. I was constantly surprised at what I found difficult and what came almost naturally. Her eyes were easier than I imagined, their dark lustre almost designed for charcoal. But her hands, her hands… How they frustrated me. The fingers were too long then too short, too thin then too stout. The nails were too big then almost disappeared then became claw-like, like a hawk’s talons.
Hélène’s coolness of early in the week gradually thawed and she became a little more animated. She was engrossed by the process and patient while I reworked and revised. Every so often she would come around to my side of the canvas to see what I had done. Her insights and suggestions belied her artistic inexperience, and her very naïveté was innocently eloquent. Still she remained a little distant, not entirely comfortable in my presence, I suppose, now that she knew who I was.
At two every day she left to prepare for that evening’s performance in Dublin or Kilkenny or Wexford or Navan… her itinerant band taking her to towns that I couldn’t even remember ever visiting. When she was gone, I would spend the rest of the day, often into the night, retouching or erasing, or often just staring in quiet awe at what I had done. Look, it was no master-piece, I knew that, I had no pretensions nor delusions nor aspirations to acclaim. But it was mine and it was better than anything I had ever done or even imagined doing.
It was later in the week and we were taking a late morning break over a coffee in the garden, looking out over the calm sea below. It had been a tough morning. With the sketching of Hélène’s body almost complete, I had struggled to get to grips with the backdrop that framed her, to represent in the base monochrome the colour of the sky outside and the sunlight coming through the window, and the rough-hewn Wicklow stone walls of the studio. I was still lost in my frustration, trying to find the stroke of genius that would capture the background to set-off her frame, when she asked the question.
“Why have you not asked me about Aoife?”
I didn’t know how to respond. All week I had been fighting the overwhelming urge to ask the questions that had been gnawing at me since we had first met. But conscious of the bumbling, crassly insensitive foray into that domain that had almost driven her away already, I resisted and forced myself to bide my time, literally biting my tongue until I could taste the blood.
I looked at her, trying to gauge where the question had come from, what reaction my answer would provoke. Eventually I shrugged.
“I nearly screwed up last time, I don’t want to risk losing you again. There are so many questions I’m desperate to ask you, but… I don’t want to make you angry again, I just don’t want to upset you, I suppose.”
“I’m sorry that I reacted badly,” she said, and I felt that she was finally saying what had been on her mind all week, perhaps at the root of her distance.
I shook my head.
“You have nothing to apologise for.”
“I do. It’s not m
y business. What is between you and Aoife is between you and Aoife. I should not judge, I should not hear only one side of the story. Aoife thought that you didn’t care, that you could not care to respond to her or to look for her. But maybe you had reasons. I do not know the story of your life and I do not have the right to judge.”
She spoke as though reciting a well-rehearsed speech, perhaps one she had been preparing since the day she stormed out of the Gallery. I looked down at the ground.
“Thanks, Hélène,” it came out as a hoarse whisper. “I’m going to make more coffee.”
I almost ran to the sanctuary of the kitchen. I stood at the window, and leaned on the counter and my head hanging. I realised that I was breathing heavily, as though I had just run back up the hill from the Baily to the house.
“Fucking hell,” I whispered to myself, shaking my head slowly. “Jesus.”
Absent-mindedly, I flicked the switch on the coffee machine. I had stored so many questions behind the dam I’d built, the dam she had now she had breached, and they cascaded through my head in a torrent I couldn’t control. All of the carefully orchestrated imaginary interviews that I had conducted in my head, the subtle, sensitive questioning, the calmly rational justifications, were smashed by the surge and lost in the foam, their wreckage bobbing and swirling in the eddying water.
The coffee machine coughed to an apologetic stop. I looked at it, then reached past it to take a bottle from the little wine rack on the counter that Lochlann used to hold his “every day” wine. I took two glasses from the shelf, pulled the cork and went back into the garden.
“I need more than coffee,” I said, pouring two generous glasses.
“Me too, I think,” she smiled uncertainly as she took the glass. “Thank you.”
She sipped the wine, and drew a deep breath.
“How did you find her, the address I mean?”
My eyebrows lifted involuntarily at the memory of the dark old bar buried in Paris’ core.