by Tim Buckley
“Not bad,” Oran said, almost to himself. “Not fuckin’ bad.”
He looked at me.
“Good job, man,” he nodded.
“Not bad yourself,” I grinned. I shook my head. “You know, I’m never letting anyone take these down. Ever.”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “It’s just beautiful, isn’t it? Magical.”
“Jesus, you’re not going to get all soft on me now, are you?” I joked.
“Feck off,” he said, with a grin, throwing a rolled up ball of rogue cellophane at my head. “You don’t have a monopoly on culture, you know?”
We put away our tools and the left-over hooks and screws and bulbs, and locked up the Gallery. Oran set the newly installed alarm system, and we walked to his car. The sun showed the first faint signs of rising over the distant Wales, and the first birds had started to sing. Oran started his car and pulled away towards the village and like Gray’s ploughman, I made my weary, plodding way to the house and to bed.
Lochlann’s calm demeanour usually betrayed little of what was happening under the surface. As a boy, I never knew when he was excited or disappointed, lonely or angry or scared. He greeted my successes and failures with the same moment of consideration, the same look of faint disapproval or the same formulaic words of encouragement or congratulation.
But the next morning, the nervous energy breached the dam and seeped out of him. Not that he became animated or gave any outward evidence of stress – but to those who knew him well, his nervousness was infectious. Except to Oran. The barely subdued explosive temper of the weeks before had given way to controlled activity, and he walked quietly through the Gallery tightening a screw here and buffing a rail there, a picture of barely recognisable serenity. O’Leary too seemed calmer and somehow, in this his moment of triumph, perversely less determined to impress and inveigle.
Lochlann walked over to where I was helplessly surveying the last minute preparations, even his movement a fraction faster as though the very cadence of his being had been turned up a notch.
“Aengus, we should hang your work,” he said, simply.
In the bustling urgency of the days gone by, I had, if not forgotten, then at least lost sight of the fact that my portrait would hang here. Having watched the Gallery’s evolution from empty shed to this quiet sanctuary of tribute to the ages of our women, that I was a part of this, that Hélène was a part of this, as she deserved to be, had been swamped in the crowd of activity and progress. Now our work of the weeks gone by would reach its final resting place.
I went into the studio and gingerly took the painting down from its easel where I had diligently resisted tampering with it while it dried. The canvas board remained frameless, simple, and even a little stark. It asked a question.
I carried it back out to the Gallery, where O’Leary was putting in place a two-metre high hardwood stand draped in dark satin. It stood on the carpeted trail that led from the fourth chamber to the meeting area at the centre of the Gallery. Once he was happy that it was secure and stable, we attached the hanging wire to the board and two hooks to the stand.
Lochlann picked up the board and handed it to me, and nodded with no word. The culmination of a profoundly personal labour, the realisation of a long-held ambition is not always accompanied by the fanfare nor set on the dramatic stage of our vain and wistful imaginings. More often, it emerges from the flow of the everyday. But when it does, it stops the flow for just a moment and becalms us. When we look up from the ordinary, we find that we have arrived without warning at the place of which we have dreamed for so long. And the suddenness of the arrival and the wonder of the place finds us unprepared, like a child at his surprise party. The feeling, though fleeting, is sometimes deeper and stronger than any we could have conjured in our minds.
I hung the board against the darkened stand, fussily straightened and centred it and lit the spotlight. I stood back, and just for a moment Caitríona’s eyes looked out from the frame with kindness and love and pride. This piece would be the show’s post-script, would perhaps snag in the memory of visitors still thinking about what they had seen, not prepared for the final question.
“You must of course decide on a title for the piece,” Lochlann said, “but I wonder if, for the purposes of the exhibition, we might call it ‘What will be…’. It is a statement that positions the piece as looking to the future, and yet asking a question that underlines the uncertainty that she feels, that you can see in her eyes.”
I nodded.
“That’s fine,” I whispered, then coughed hard to shake myself from the self-indulgence. “I mean, it works really well, it’s exactly what we talked about.”
And so he fixed a small plate that he had already prepared to the stand below the painting, and Hélène’s soulful eyes peered out among the hundred eyes of Lochlann’s mothers and workers and quiet revolutionaries. And she belonged.
Hélène, Nuala and Eimear arrived with their instruments and began to prepare for the sound-check. While the others adjusted microphones and fine-tuned a violin, and positioned and repositioned the high stools on which they would be perched, Hélène walked slowly over to where I stood, still staring at her image.
“I never expected that it would make me want to cry,” she said with a quiet smile. “But I do.”
I nodded without looking at her, still staring.
“I know.” It seemed irreverent to speak and so I echoed her hushed tone. “I know. I can’t quite make myself believe that it’s real, that we did this. It sounds so vain, so boastful. I don’t claim that it’s a wonder, it’s just a wonder that we created it.” I smiled at the unintended pun, and shook my head. “You know what I mean,” I said.
She smiled and nodded.
“I should go and get ready,” she said, touching my arm. “See you later.”
I nodded and she floated away.
As the Autumn sun lost its fight against sleep like a pyjama-clad child peering through the banisters at his parents’ party, the invitees began to arrive, the besuited cognoscenti of the Irish art world – dealers and professors and critics and artists. I stood, trying to fade into the background in an ill-fitting suit borrowed from Oran, while my father greeted his guests at the reception desk with a recovered, almost dispassionate, calmness that belied what I knew continued to churn below the surface. The catering staff hovered unobtrusively with trays of champagne and canapés, and from the sound system came the slow, unmistakably Celtic strains of the flute-accompanied violins.
Slowly and deliberately, they moved toward the first chamber, lingering with glasses of wine and champagne in front of the wizened old woman clad head-to-toe in sombre black, mending nets on the upturned currach. Or the young girl carrying water from the well, her young dog beside her, looking up at her with rapt attention. Her pretty lips suggesting that she was perhaps talking to him or singing some absent-minded tune.
Then they carried on to the second chamber, and stood in front of my mother. She was pruning a rose bush, and she was captured turning around as though someone had called out to her. Her face was bright, an almost-smile playing on her lips, and her eyes shone with a compassionate calmness, with a hint of concern lurking beneath as though she was nagged by a perpetual, constant worry. Or they considered the woman gazing out to sea from some west coast cliff, her back to the viewer and her skirt billowing in the breeze. Gazing out to where her sons had gone to seek, if not a fortune, then at least a future in Boston or New York or Chicago. From where their own sons now trickled home to a new Ireland. Or the young girl wheeling her baby in a decrepit old pram, with fearful eyes that searched for a lost life that had promised so much but had been so rudely taken away.
Then to the third chamber, and the smart young woman with a briefcase hanging from her shoulder, speaking intently into a mobile phone and glancing at her watch while hurrying toward an office building. She looke
d a little nervous, out of place like an interloper, but determined to belong. Or the portrait of the President borrowed for the occasion of the exhibition – not just a woman in Áras an Uachtaráin, but a woman from the North? A million Irish fathers spun simultaneously in their graves, while proud and powerful Irish women stood determined to make a difference and leave a mark.
And finally to the fourth, with its images of placard-wielding protestors with shaved heads. And of the young woman sitting behind her band, beating her drums in eyes-closed reverie, lost in the rhythm of their music. And the pierced and tattooed beauty of the girl, basking in the sunshine in St. Stephen’s Green. Anarchic images become normal, everyday.
And then to Hélène. And to the questions she asked.
“Well, gosso’n, what a triumph, eh?” said a beaming Master, appearing at my side. He was almost beside himself with excitement, grabbing my hand and shaking it vigorously. “What a remarkable triumph. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the like of it. And he’s a proud man today. He was so worried that he might fail, but sure there was never any chance of that. A triumph, and no mistake.”
He sipped from a glass of champagne, and prodded me with a stubby finger.
“And a triumph in which you play no small part, do you hear me? Your painting nearly took my breath away. And he’s put it in a great place.” He grinned in satisfied vindication. “‘What will be…’, eh? As much a reference to you as to the girl, there’s no doubt.”
“Thanks, Master,” I said. I drew a breath to argue, but let it lie. Because in truth, I felt a genuine part – albeit a small part – of the show, and that I had earned the right to be there. And whenever my confidence ebbed and uncertainty raised its head, I looked to Hélène’s haunting eyes peering out from the painting and it reset my self-belief.
“I’ll see you later, gosso’n.”
The Master squeezed my shoulder and winked at me, then hailed a friend across the room and marched away to talk with him.
I had spent so much time and energy in the search for meaning and for purpose. It is the curse of my generation, or at least of my Irish generation. We have never known peril, or hardship, or pain – not really, not in the context of what our forefathers suffered or what people in cursed, stricken lands still suffer every day. Without that focus on survival, we have grown terrified by aimlessness, by the drift through life with no destination and no measure of success. And so in the comfortable safety of our privilege, we have looked for our own context and for the new definitions of achievement and accomplishment.
Why then, given the unprecedented opportunity to set our own path without risk of ruin or wreckage, have we set our sights so low? Why have we compromised on the accumulation of meaningless, self-indulgent fripperies as the new definition of our lives? Our culture places the greatest value on celebrity, and not on how that celebrity is earned. And because it is not founded on merit, it has to be publicised by ostentation.
Is it naïve to think that success can only be defined by the value we add, however that value is denominated? Is it too innocent to think that the good we do is measured in lives enriched? Whatever we think we achieve, surely it counts as nothing if it fails to add something to the world’s pot, no matter how small or how apparently insignificant. If all we achieve is the reallocation of wealth or value to ourselves, then there is no glory.
Oh, it’s not about selfless sacrifice on some mass scale, nor hair-shirted self-denial, nor even about giving up the chance to build a better life. That would be truly naïve. But the rewards in the endless search for material self-betterment are hollow and short-lived. The pride and sense of achievement that goes with the even greater accumulation of chattels lasts only until the next target appears on the horizon, then are forgotten, like so many of Santa’s discarded presents on St. Stephen’s Day.
I watched the guests meander slowly through the Gallery, watched them stand in front a piece for ten or fifteen minutes, a finger to their lips in quiet contemplation. I watched them in intense conversation and vexed debate, stabbing a certain finger at a canvas then throwing up their arms in despairing resignation, or smiling in nodded epiphanous agreement.
Lochlann was enriching the life of every person there. Some might not have enjoyed his work, might have argued that it was an anachronism or a too-subjective version of the truth, but everybody there considered its aesthetics or its message or both and left richer for the experience.
And Lochlann was richer for it too, not materially, but emotionally and spiritually and personally. Because to strive for a better place filled with better people is not to ignore or subdue your own need to succeed and thrive. The satisfaction and pride that he felt, that he had earned, would be a lasting legacy that lived on beyond the life of any material gain.
What enriches the world enriches us. And yet we can’t see it for the mounting heaps of meaningless trinkets that clutter and swamp our lives. Maybe we can never see it in a world where profit is the motivation. The corporate masters to whom we dedicate so much of our time have misplaced and left behind the often pure ideals on which their own dreams were founded. They have become blinkered by the eternal and overpowering quest for gain. The virtue of what they had set out to do and the good it spawns is clouded, superseded even, by the cracking whip of greed and the pursuit of success exclusively for its own sake.
And at some point we stop, take a step back and survey our world from above. And we can see clearly for perhaps the first time that the end is no nirvana. That success just perpetuates the pursuit of success. And that failure is not tolerated. But the wheel is spinning and there is no way off. There is nothing else and no way to find it. Is that why we have children? To provide meaning where there is none? To provide a distraction from the monotony? How ironic then that we bring them into a world of our own creation and where they will, in all likelihood, make all our mistakes all over again.
I tore myself away from the vantage point from where I could stand and stare at what Lochlann had titled ‘What will be…’. I took a glass of wine from a tray, and made my way to the little stage where Hélène and her friends were playing. I nodded and smiled stupidly at those whose eyes met mine, and they looked back blankly at the lone, shabby, out-of-place figure whom they didn’t recognise, but about whom there was something familiar…
The gathering point was still quiet, the majority of the guests still making their way through the chambers. Hélène was perched on a high chair close to the lectern, on the platform below the gantry. Her eyes were closed as she swayed gently to the bewitching rhythm of Carrickfergus. Beside her, Eimear was equally lost in the moment, while Nuala’s flute punctuated the violins’ languid tones. They were all dressed much as Hélène had been in our painting, demure and shyly fading into the background.
Niamh broke the spell their music cast on me, gently touching my arm and kissing me on both cheeks. She looked a little ill-at-ease, perhaps feeling, too, like one who didn’t really belong in this company. I was glad to have found an ally, or grateful that an ally had found me.
“She is beautiful, isn’t she?” Niamh said, nodding towards Hélène and taking a sip from her glass of champagne.
I nodded.
“She’s a very beautiful girl.”
“You’ve done her proud. In the painting, I mean,” she said. “God, Aengus, you’re some dark horse. I had no idea you had that in you. You must be really delighted with it?”
I smiled and nodded again.
“To be honest, Niamh, I didn’t know myself. But yes, I am delighted with it. And I’m very grateful to Lochlann for giving me the chance.”
“So who is she anyway?” Niamh asked, carelessly.
I smiled.
“That, Niamh,” I said, for the last time, “is a very long story.” I looked at her, and she was again the Niamh that I had known for so long, as though we were still seventeen and none of the rest had happene
d. “But I’ll tell you soon.”
I could see her mind working, trying to solve the cryptic riddle, then giving up.
“You’ll find it hard to go back to an office job after this?” she said, and I was grateful that she didn’t persist.
The prospect of going back to my old life left me achingly cold. I shook my head.
“I don’t know that I can, Niamh,” I said. “I don’t think I can.”
“I can see you now,” she grinned, “flogging your paintings on Merrion Square on a Sunday morning!”
“Or doing caricatures on Grafton Street maybe?” I smiled. “There’s good money in caricatures, you know!”
“Your father would be very proud!” She sipped the champagne again and I sipped my wine.
“So what are you going to do?” she asked. “Any ideas?”
I exhaled through pursed lips and shook my head again.
“None whatsoever. And do you know what? It’s not a bad feeling.”
“Will you stay?”
“I have nowhere else to go. And this place has…” – I searched for the words – “has, I don’t know, it’s looked after me, it’s cossetted me somehow. Lochlann and Oran and the Master and Pauline – and you, Niamh – it’s like you’ve all given me a clip round the ear and told me to get a grip on things. Everybody’s got stuff to deal with, but they’re not sitting in a London pub having a good mope. I didn’t know I was leaving it behind, and now I don’t want to go back to it.”