by Tim Buckley
I nodded. So much of the abrasive, aggressive outward appearance that she put on for the world was a cover for the soft Caitríona, the Caitríona that couldn’t bear sadness or hurt, the Caitríona who only wanted to protect. It was the same in her private life, she used a devil-may-care toughness to mask what she perceived to be weakness. It served her well, but it also did her an injustice. It presented to the world a harder, colder Caitríona, and hid from everyone the girl that they would surely have loved.
Pearse’s phone chimed, and he checked the message.
“I really have to go, sorry, Aengus.” He stood and gathered his things. “It’s been really good to see you. Listen, I’ll get to work on Oran’s case, and I’ll give him a call in a couple of days.”
He shook my hand, and left.
I got back to Howth late in the afternoon and went to the Gallery to see how final preparations were progressing for the exhibition’s opening night, which was only a couple of days away. In only a week or so the Gallery had undergone a metamorphosis. The four chambers, as Lochlann had taken to calling them, that would house the four sections of the show had been erected and were in the final stages of decoration and completion. Entrance and exit archways had been cut in the chamber walls to guide visitors in and point them out in the direction of the next chamber. Along the floor, coloured carpet tiles marked the path from chamber to chamber and through the chambers themselves. The welcome desk was in place by the entrance door, with its refreshment counter and coat-stands.
And at the heart of the vast room, the central gathering area was marked out by ornate roping and a hedge of small potted trees and shrubs. There were sofas and armchairs around its perimeter, and high tables and bar stools at its centre. At one end, a small dais and lectern had been put in place, raised on a small platform, a gantry of lights and speakers above it.
The finishing touches were intricate and elaborate. Each of the eight huge windows in the Gallery walls had been decked with flowing curtains, tied back by silk bands, and closed to the world outside by discreet sheer blinds. Every light had been fitted with an identical, simple shade, and every flower box bound with identical cream ribbon. The effect was simple and dignified, considered and complete.
As I arrived, Oran was marching deliberately through the Gallery checking every minute detail from one end to the other, his face set in its customary growl. He went through each of the chambers, shaking the archway entrances to ensure they were sturdy, kicking at the carpet tiles on the floor to make sure they were properly stuck down, pulling gently at the satin wall coverings that draped the hardboard walls on which the paintings would hang.
Then he made his way to the centre of the auditorium, and stopped. He stared at the dais and the lectern and his hand went to his forehead.
“Stephen!” he shouted, impatiently. “Stephen, where are you?”
O’Leary appeared from wherever he had been nervously surveying Oran’s progress through the Gallery.
“Oran,” he said, with hollow bonhomie, “how are you doing? Listen, I was just—”
“What are you going to do with those cables?” Oran cut him off, pointing to a mass of electrical wiring that ran from the floor behind the lectern up to the gantry, hanging in a chaotic tangle.
“Ah, don’t worry about that, Oran, that’ll be fine,” O’Leary said. “There’s no more we can do with it. They’d usually run the cables through piping across the floor, up the walls and across the gantry. But it’s too far from the walls, you’d need a mile of cable. Trust me, there’s no other way – they have to go straight up. I don’t think it’s a problem.”
“I don’t trust you, and it is a problem.” Oran stared at him, his patience with the exhibition manager and with the world dangerously frayed and nearing its end as the opening approached. “Those wires cannot be visible from the floor. They will not be visible. Do you hear me? Now sort it out.”
He stalked off shaking his head in frustration, the air thick with his mumbled oaths, leaving a wincing, grimacing O’Leary scratching his head.
“How high is that gantry?” I said to O’Leary, walking into the centre of the communal area, looking up at the wires.
He was no more pleased to see me than he had been to see Oran.
“About fifteen feet,” he said gruffly, without greeting.
“And how wide?”
“About twenty feet.”
“Well here’s what you’re going to do…” I raised my hand to stop the interruption he was about to make. “Just listen, will you?”
He stared sulkily at me.
“Measure the height and width exactly. Then get two black crepe sheets, two sets of curtain rings – enough to put a ring every fifteen centimetres – and two strong curtain poles. We’re going to fix a pole to each side of the gantry and drape a curtain from each pole. If you can’t move the wires, then we’ll just hide them.”
He opened his mouth to argue, then stopped and nodded grudgingly.
“Just make sure the curtains are the right size, and heavy enough to hang straight without moving, even if there’s a breeze.”
He sloped off without another word to me and barked at a young workman to fetch him a measuring tape.
“Is there a problem?”
I turned around and Lochlann walked over from the welcome desk.
“No problem,” I said, “Oran just noticed the mess of wires up there on the gantry, and we’re trying to figure a way to make them less of an eye-sore. I think we have it now. It’ll be fine.”
He nodded, clearly weary with the perhaps unexpected effort it had all taken, and with nervous anticipation of what lay ahead. He looked somehow a little older than when I had arrived back in Howth.
“It looks fantastic,” I said, looking around, and seeking perhaps to reassure him a little if I could. “You must be really pleased.”
He nodded again, and allowed himself the merest of smiles.
“It is indeed a splendid setting,” he said. “But there is so little time. And we have still to position, hang and light the pieces. Fifty of them. That will take time. Always more than one imagines.”
“The workmen will be done tomorrow,” I said, with more confidence than I felt, “and that leaves us a whole day to hang them. Even if it takes us all of tomorrow night, sure we’ll get there.”
He nodded, but with little conviction.
The Gallery door opened behind us, and I looked around to see Hélène, flanked by two other girls whom I did not know. She walked over and kissed both of my cheeks in Gallic greeting, then Lochlann’s.
“Hello,” she said, looking around the Gallery. “Wow, this place looks amazing. It all seems to have happened so quickly.”
She gestured to her companions.
“This is Eimear, she is Gerry’s sister, and this is her friend Nuala,” she said, then introduced us to them. “This is Lochlann and Aengus, that I told you about.”
She turned to Lochlann amid the flurry of hand-shakes and greetings.
“We were thinking about the music you asked us to play, and we would like to talk to you about it. Do you have some time, now?”
“Yes, yes of course,” he said, ever the gallant despite the pressure he felt with the approach of opening night.
“Well,” Hélène began her well-rehearsed words to the nodded support of her two accomplices, “you suggested some violin concertos – Vivaldi, Mendelssohn, perhaps – and we agree they would be very beautiful. But we thought that perhaps some traditional Irish airs would be more appropriate, given the theme of your show? With perhaps a female vocal from time to time? Gerry cannot make it, unfortunately, but maybe it is better – three women playing Irish music? It is in a way what your show is all about, no?” She looked at the others, standing nervously almost behind her, and they nodded again their mute agreement. Then her honesty got the better of her. “
We also thought that, well, we would really need to practise, to prepare the others, they are quite challenging. But the Irish airs we know well and it would be easier. Eimear and I will play violin, and Nuala plays flute.”
He was quiet for a moment, then he began to nod slowly.
“You make a very good point, Hélène,” he said, and I could sense that it was more than mere chivalry, he was convinced, and impressed at the thought they had given it. “The right Irish melodies would make a fitting accompaniment. What do you think, Aengus?”
“I think it’s a great idea,” I nodded, and my eyes widened to make clear my approval. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before. And maybe we could pick tunes to go with each of the four sections of the show? I wouldn’t overdo the vocals – I think it’s important that the music accompanies, doesn’t dominate – but one or two, particularly towards the end of the evening, would be nice. And I think slow, haunting airs would really create an atmosphere – especially with the flute.”
Lochlann nodded slowly like a teacher assessing a child’s answer, and the three girls drew a collective sigh of relief.
“Thanks for understanding,” Nuala said to Lochlann, “we won’t let you down. We promise.”
“I have no doubt,” Lochlann said. “Now, if you will excuse me…”
With his customary faint bow, he turned and left.
Hélène and her two friends excused themselves and hurried away, amid excited whispers and waving arms, to prepare their repertoire.
The people we are “under pressure” are strangers to our everyday selves. We probably wouldn’t recognise them in the street, nor recognise their description from the mouths of friends. We might have met these alter egos, in fraught moments, but until we do, we can never know whom to expect. We might be ashamed of them, like the rogue cousin never mentioned at family gatherings. Or proud of their noble strength in the face of what we could never resolve nor retrieve.
We go through so much of our lives without needing them, with neither drama nor crisis from which to be rescued. So we have invented our own mean, pointless pressures to satisfy some need to overcome. In our world, pressure in that guise has become a way of life. We don’t make life and death choices, but we make their banal equivalents every day. And we clutch and barge and grasp and hoard and snatch because we’re afraid not to, afraid of losing, no matter if others have a keener need or a greater right. The artificial stress of our everyday and the pressure of normal life have conditioned us not to think or to consider or to judge, but to act lest somebody else acts first. We have grown mean under a siege of our own making and our everyday selves are poorer for it, unworthy versions of the people we would like to be.
Our under pressure selves are the selves we would have been in the Somme’s fetid trenches or on Titanic’s icy decks. With decorum and social propriety stripped away, they are our selves when instinct takes over. We either shield our comrade on the muddy charge or linger in his lee. We either help him into the lifeboat or push him out of the way.
Oran’s under pressure self, I have no doubt, would raise the drawbridge and defend the innocent and fight side-by-side with the virtuous. Quietly, without ostentation, he would simply get the job done.
And that is the Oran that strode around the Gallery the following morning. Oran’s everyday self had no truck with the self-inflicted stresses of modern Dublin. He had neither patience nor sympathy for those who fretted over decisions that would change nothing at all save an imagined reality that he would gruffly dismiss. But when faced with a threat to something he held dear, his under pressure self would bid him step aside and calmly take over.
I don’t think it was the art that had sparked his determination, though he saw its value, had come to feel its energy. No. I think it was the realisation of a good man’s dream and his right to tell a story that deserved to be heard. Lochlann wanted to stoke a passion and give the world some beauty, and Oran wasn’t going to let incompetence or laziness or apathy derail that ambition.
O’Leary knew all too well, and had suffered at the hands of, every day Oran. He knew what to expect and had built his defences. But as his judgment day drew near, the colder alter ego that stalked the Gallery unnerved him, and he oscillated between moodily shuffling and nervously scuttling around. In truth, and perhaps no thanks to O’Leary, the Gallery was as good as done. Oran’s bad tempered badgering and berating had done its work and what had been an empty shell when I arrived in Howth was now a temple worthy of art and debate. Oran’s consistent and persistent belittling of O’Leary, and of the workmen’s craftsmanship, had perhaps achieved its end, but in truth the beleaguered exhibition manager had delivered a beautiful home for Lochlann’s work. And given a moment to reflect, I think O’Leary might well have been proud of his own work.
Such a moment still denied him, he laboured under Oran’s whip until, early in the afternoon, there was nothing outstanding, no obvious faults or failures, no last minute corrections or repairs. A weary and beaten O’Leary emerged from behind the curtains and walked reluctantly over to Oran.
“The fusebox is ok now,” he said, having addressed the latest of Oran’s interminable complaints. “It was the hoover – the hoover, can you believe it?”
“Good,” said Oran.
“Can I let the lads go, so?” O’Leary asked.
Oran looked around. His vision was, to all intents and purposes, complete. He might have kept them there to handle any unforeseen problems, but instead he nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Is there someone on call?”
“I have their numbers,” O’Leary answered, “just call me if you need anything.”
“OK,” Oran nodded.
O’Leary nodded back and turned to discharge the troops.
“Stephen,” Oran called after him.
O’Leary stopped and turned in weary anticipation of another tirade.
“Oran?”
“Tell the lads. Good job. This place is a credit to them.” He looked down and scratched the floor with his toe. “And to you. Thanks, man.”
O’Leary stopped and looked hard at Oran. He grew a little taller in front of my eyes, and a smile gently broke his features. Not the dishonest, sycophantic simper that had so irked me, but a thin, crooked smile of genuine, exhausted relief and no little pride.
“I will, Oran,” he said, “See you tomorrow.”
“Good luck, Stephen,” Oran said.
All that had gone before was past and so the deal was done.
CHAPTER 32
“We’d better make a start hanging the paintings,” I said to Oran, “Lochlann reckons it’ll take ages, we don’t want leave it too late.”
“You’re probably right,” he said.
He went over to the folder that he carried everywhere with him and pulled out a sheet of paper.
“This is the list of paintings, by section,” he said.
“How many?” I asked.
“Fifty-two.”
“Do you have the order within the sections?”
He shook his head.
“No, don’t think so. We’ll have to check with himself.”
“Where are they?”
He nodded towards a small store room at the end of the Gallery.
“All wrapped in cellophane and stacked in there. They’re numbered, I think. Best to start by putting them in the right room, I suppose.”
And so we started the painstaking process of taking the paintings from the storeroom, one at a time, checking them against Oran’s list, unwrapping them and putting them in the appropriate chamber. When we had finished, I gathered up the piles of torn and crumpled cellophane and I took them to the skip outside while Oran went to the house to find Lochlann. Back inside, I stood at the centre of the Gallery, darkness nearly complete outside. There was no sound, and although I couldn’t see them, I could feel the a
ccusing eyes of a hundred or more of Lochlann’s Irish women burning into me from within the four hushed chambers. Determined eyes, lost eyes, resigned eyes, ambitious eyes – women with little in common except a fruitless search for their place and for peace. I shivered a little under the weight of their wordless angry stares.
I heard the voices approach with a pang of relief, and Oran and Lochlann walked into the Gallery. Oran waved yet another list at me from the door.
“Our instructions,” he called out to me.
He walked over and put the list on the lectern, and the three of us pored over it. The blueprint for the completion of everything that Oran and Lochlann had worked so hard to deliver. Lochlann had, of course, given great thought to the sequencing of the paintings within the rooms, and had carefully and precisely listed the order, the spacing between them and the respective heights at which we should hang neighbouring pieces. Each piece would have to be hung on two specially designed hooks, and then its individual spotlight, all of which had been already wired, had to be centred and fixed to the wall four inches above it. No more. No less.
Oran nodded approvingly. A doer not a thinker, his world was built on clear instruction and logical, mechanical process.
“Right so,” he said, “I think it goes like this. Aengus, you put in the hooks and hang the painting, I’ll follow you round and put up the lights.” He looked at his watch. “If we get cracking, we can have this done tonight.”
“That is a little ambitious,” Lochlann said.
“Sure we’ve hours,” Oran quipped. “You go on back to what you were doing, Lochlann. Come on, Aengus, let’s make a start. If we hurry, we’ll be in McGrath’s for last orders.”
Last orders were long over and the closing bell had long been rung as we set to work on the last of the fifty-two paintings in the fourth chamber. It was almost five o’clock in the morning and, fuelled by regular coffees and sandwiches cobbled together on raids of Pauline’s fridge, we fought the tiredness and the cold of pre-dawn to hang the final frame. We had dared not leave anything until the following day – the day of the opening night – lest any last minute disaster should derail our best-laid plans. And so we had persevered, getting undoubtedly slower as the night progressed. And now Oran was fixing the last light. We stood back and looked around the chamber, bold images of young women challenging us with defiant eyes.