Shadowplay

by Joseph O'Connor

  She love the odours of the stable, their earthiness and plain truth. Daybreak around horses is moving. Leather, saddle soap, straw, the grassy smell of dung. The stern dignity of the massive anvil, cast when Cromwell was a boy, the pincers and horseshoes mounted above the stalls like the icons of some long-forgotten cult. The groom has prepared her pony and trap. She tells him to come along with her, but she’ll drive.

  ‘Certain sure, Miss Terry?’

  ‘Certain sure, John, thank you.’

  Ordinarily she would take out the motor car but the morning is still a little gloomy, and the servants fret when she takes out the motor, even on a journey as short as this one. Anyhow, the clop of the pony on the lanes is comforting as they set out from Smallhythe House.

  The lock bridge over the canal, the green mild water; behind the dawn-lit mountain a gold and red sky.

  The groom is a little sleepy and smells faintly of cider and feet, but that doesn’t bother her, he’s a loyal old man, been with her many years. She likes his country silences, his keeping to himself. In the mornings there’s a lot to be silent about.

  Painted barges sleeping. The long-necked swan in the rushes. The bridge coyly admiring itself in the water. Chaucer’s pilgrims walked these rutted lanes on their progress down to Canterbury, whose spire can be seen from that hilltop beyond Amos Blake’s Farm when the day is less hazy. Sometimes, late at night, she fancies she hears them from her window, the slow, wry scarves of their tales in the breeze, their mockery of the passing world. So lovely. Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote. Would have made a spiffing play. Why did no one ever do that? Bit naughty here and there. Things that can’t be said in a theatre. Go gently, good ghosts, down the towpath.

  Nearing the village, the sleepy dairymaids hurry with yokes and churns. A pipsqueak of a farmer’s lad hefts a wonky wheelbarrow piled high with turnips, cursing at them to dissuade them from toppling. Market day is come, the first after Easter. The gypsies will be trading strong horses and hare-hounds, slapping spitty palms, shouting, boasting, their women quiet and serious, bosoms full of banknotes. The dowser will come from Biddenden with his switch of white hazel, the signboard around his neck, WELLS FOUND. A potion man will be hawking his bottles near the troughs – ‘unguents and ointments, elixirs of love’ – a fiddler by the gates of the church. In this part of the countryside, Lent is still observed. The weeks afterwards seem to burst with release.

  Ahead of her, walking, the bonny new schoolmaster but she can’t remember his name despite having met him several times. The purple-green of sycamores, the chartreuse of Dog’s Mercury, the sneezy tang of forget-me-not pollen. The horse snorts and whinnies at the mayflies. Bright, blowsy buttercups in the ditches, on the banks, flirting with the gloomy weeds. She stops to offer the young schoolmaster the high seat beside her in the trap but he’s too shy to accept, says he’s on an errand that will take him in the other direction, towards Woodchurch. His pimples shining brighter with every innocent untruth.

  Everyone is acting, almost all of the time.

  A sweet-faced sow peers from behind a thicket, her many children still asleep in the side-turned old bathtub that does duty as their sty. The blacksmith’s blind daughter in the doorway of the forge idly plays ‘Sally Racket’ on her melodeon. She will never see how pretty she is, how all the boys in from the country stare long at her with such serious, lovable foolishness, like Englishmen on the verge of saying something in another language. In the middle distance, from below the mill meadow, she hears the shush-and-chug of the London train, which now utters its tootling hoot as though excited by the dew.

  Still too early for church bells, they won’t ring before nine. But who would need them on a morning like this?

  The day spills its light into the heart of itself.

  Clicking at the pony, she moves on.

  Little Sally Racket

  Haul her away.

  Earlie in the morning.

  A NURSING HOME IN LONDON

  7.14 a.m.

  In the top floor window of the derelict townhouse across the terrace, the lamp is lighted every night.

  This morning, he wheels himself to his window and looks.

  The coming day purples the rooftops and chimneypots and lattices. He wonders what can be the story of that tall, ghostly townhouse with its long-shuttered windows and bricked-up front doorway, its weed-wreathed pillars and half-collapsed architraves. Who lights the lamp? A street person? A runaway?

  Even the ragmen don’t come to ransack any more. Anything of value long gone. The gracious dwellings on either side, freshly whitewashed every springtime, their doorknobs and polished windows shining like stars, stare resolutely ahead, refusing a sidelong glance of pity, embarrassed by this shabby squatter in the ranks.

  He has asked the nurses, the cheery servants, the cleaning women. They change the subject. The dead house has been empty for decades, they assure him. The owner died abroad – on his slave plantation in Jamaica – there was a long dispute about the will, every last shilling of the fortune was swallowed up by the lawyers, like something out of that Dickens novel, you know the one, Mr Stoker, which starts with the awfully long court case? Bleak House.

  The lamplight is only a reflection, they tell him, an optical illusion. A trick of the eye, nothing more.

  Some years since a fellow resident, a likeable, religiously disturbed Irishwoman, confided her own theory. That’s the ghost of a broken-hearted actor. He called to the door during an elegant dinner hosted by his lover and her husband, Lord Cashel, persuaded the maid that he was on the invitation list, mounted the staircase, entered the dining room, recited a couplet from Dante and shot himself in the mouth with a revolver she had given him. What was his name again? Memory fickle.

  Maybe there is a play or a novella in the house. Perhaps that’s what the light means. Fanciful thought.

  Today will bring difficulties but they must be borne. He has determined to bear them alone.

  On the table near his narrow bed sits the manuscript of a play he has been trying to write, some thousand handwritten pages. The piece needs the kind of savage cutting he hasn’t been able to face, and despite its horrible bulk it contains so little – too many things left unsaid, dropped hints, slippy assertions. He has a strange sense of the play’s author being some other man, of having to break the bad news to him; he’s not sure how he will take the verdict. Perhaps best for the play not to be published or performed at all. But he can’t bring himself to burn it. Not yet.

  Through the walls, from the house next door, where a young piano teacher has her flat, comes the blessing of a Chopin polonaise. He listens to the fragility, the melancholic grace. It seems to sanctify the windows of his room, the street below, the policeman on his round, the children making for school, the servants leaving the basement areas and hurrying off to do their marketing. Even the old drayhorse pulling the milk-cart looks nobler. An April morning in London with Chopin.

  The music eases itself into a turning point of spangling chords. Somewhere in his room is a book about Chopin and his lover George Sand – at one point their love story had seemed to him another possibility for a play – but those times are over and he is glad to be rid of them. He is too old to look on the world and everything in it as grist. So exhausting, so wasteful of experience. The world is as it is, as it is ever going to be. Raw material rarely improves with the cooking.

  He reads for an hour, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, so consoling (‘I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are’), as the piano teacher’s music drifts like a rumour through the wall. Beethoven’s sonata in G, Rachmaninov’s 2, Schumann’s Kinderszenen, Liszt’s B minor. He wonders about her, the young teacher; what is her life like?

  Sometimes he has seen her leaving the house in the evenings; she looks sad for a young woman, always wears dark clothes. One night it was raining hard and she walked hatless in the rain, down the street to the lamp post, where she appeared to wait for
someone. But the person never came. After a while she returned to the house, her black clothes drenched. There was no music for a couple of days.

  He has the idea that she needs a friend, perhaps comes from some place far from London, maybe even another country, as so many Londoners do. She might be Hungarian or Russian, her particular sort of beauty is dark. Something Baltic, mournful, in the downturn of her mouth. Should he try to speak with her, offer a kindly word – perhaps sign up for a course of lessons? Ridiculous notion at this stage of the innings.

  At eight o’clock the breakfast gong sounds in the hall below, and as usual he ignores it, while wishing the sounder well. He has nothing against his fellow residents individually or collectively, indeed many of them he likes, but, as with almost any human situation, the addition of communal food makes things worse.

  One has to wait for it, or one gets too much of it, or not quite enough, or the wrong sort, or someone else’s, and then there is the business of having to talk to people or being talked to or having to watch them eat. The recitation of what is wrong with them, the adjusting of false teeth, the spilling of sugar, the mistaking of sugar for salt, the frowning at the pepper-pot as though it were some relic retrieved from a Pyramid, the scrutinising of every tine of the fork for dirt. Some behave as though they own the place, others are silent and seem afraid of the cutlery. Old age is wasted on the old. They’re too old to enjoy it.

  He puts a hunk of bread saved from last night’s supper on the stove to warm up, brews tea in a little metal teapot he borrowed from the kitchens a few weeks ago and which they seem to have forgotten. Soon it will be nine o’clock. He begins a letter to his wife but can’t settle.

  At nine he rings the bell for the orderly, a gently affable young cockney, a black man in his middle twenties, who comes up in the mornings to help him use the lavatory, then shave and get ready.

  By the time he is dressed and out of the bath chair today, the Chopin has become a Field nocturne before melding into the Moonlight Sonata, the steady, placating sombreness of the descending left hand. Soon the piano teacher’s students will start to arrive and it will be time to go out. There is a limit to the number of times one can face Für Elise played by a child.

  ‘That’s a chilly one, Mr Stoker, you ain’t going roving? I’ve a fire lit down in the dayroom, proper strong tea on the go. Cuppa you could trot a mouse on.’

  ‘Indeed and I am, Tom. Don’t fuss.’

  ‘Seen the papers this morning, sir? Lumme, that’s a mighty ship.’

  ‘Built in Ireland, you know.’

  ‘Like yourself, sir.’

  ‘They launched me a good many years ago, dear lad.’

  ‘Still sailing proud, sir.’

  ‘Don’t know about that. Still chugging along at least.’

  ‘So what you at today, sir? Up to no good I expect?’

  ‘Oh a terribly old friend of mine, the writer Hall Caine, is giving me lunch at the Garrick Club in town.’

  ‘There’s fancy.’

  ‘Yes, I’m advising him on his autobiography. Couple of small points here and there. Know his work at all?’

  ‘Can’t say as I do, sir.’

  ‘Gifted writer, old Caine, but he will go on. And then he doesn’t tell us things we want to ruddy know. I shall be advising him to slow down, take his time.’

  ‘You’ll enjoy that, sir.’

  ‘Family all well at home, Tom?’

  ‘The best, sir. Sit still for me a tick, I’ll just comb your barnet.’

  He enjoys listening to Tom tell funny stories about his parents, the mimicries and gesturings, the affectionate mockery. It has become a sort of serial for him, a Dickens novel writ small, and he finds himself looking forward to the daily instalment, perhaps more than he ought – but today no stories are forthcoming.

  He wonders if everything is quite well, in Tom’s life away from this place. There is never any mention of a girl.

  ‘Now then, sir, you’ll pass muster. You’ve had a bit of breakfast brung up to you, I expect?’

  ‘I did, Tom, thanks, a nice bowl of stirabout.’

  ‘That’s the stuff to put lead in your pencil, sir. Starter’s orders, so?’

  ‘Starter’s orders. Thank you.’

  Tom picks him up pietà-style, nudges open the door with a knee, and carries him down the two flights of rickety staircase. In the hallway, the wheelchair is waiting.

  ‘Certain you’ll manage, sir?’

  ‘Right as the mail, Tom. If you’d just open the door.’

  ‘Very good, sir. Here’s your brolly. Have a lovely morning. Chin-chin.’

  A TRAIN FROM RURAL KENT TO LONDON

  9.11 a.m.

  As the 8.02 from Ashford chunters towards New Cross Gate it slows, and she stirs awake.

  A blowy, bright morning. Men on their allotments. A murmuration of starlings, wheeling through a cloud over the gasworks.

  She notices that she is gripping her walking-cane tightly, across her knees. For a moment the dream won’t let her surface.

  Irving on Warnemünder beach in northern Germany, beckoning through the shimmer, the wispy plumes of sand, clusters of wild rhododendrons, his evening suit white – but the lowing of the whistle drives the spectre away, back into the clacking truckle of steel on track. Suddenly she is thirsty and hot.

  A gust of wind buffets up to look at her through the windows. Oh, says the wind. Look who it is. Old girl used to be famous.

  From her carpet-bag she takes a flask of Italian tisane and two of her orchard’s apples, greenly crisp and cold. The taste brings the house to her, its gracious rooms and mullioned windows, the long, shaded gardens, the conservatories, the library; the rope-swing beneath the sycamores where her grandchildren play.

  To have Smallhythe, still, to have held onto it all these years. Rare for an elderly actress to be blessed with a comfortable home, to have anything to bequeath when she goes. A silly thought occurs to her. My gracious, I own three staircases. How in the name of glory did that happen?

  Today she will collect the typescript for her forthcoming lecture series, her tour to the United States. The girl at the typewriting service in Covent Garden will smile. Pretty thing, good figure, came to London to be an opera singer, speaks in that lovely Welsh way, so lilting. Angharad?

  The April meadows beyond the windows, neat and pleasing to see, the ditches full of wildflowers as Ophelia’s dreams. The steeples of the villages, the slow-turning mills, the still and lovely greenness of canal water. Cows bow their heavy heads or shake them at the midges. A foal staggers towards the hedgerow where he stops and gapes at the lambs.

  It is like looking at a Constable come somehow to life, the mellowness a retaliation to Turner’s passion. Drovers at a campfire, sweethearts canoodling on a stile, a milkman collecting eggs from a coop built on stilts, farm boys and their fathers heading out with mattocks and sickles. Something joyful-sad floods her blood, why is there no English word for that? It is not ‘bittersweet’ but something heavier, more substantial, like claret. Her spectacles mist as she watches.

  An image presses at her consciousness, black horses in water, surf in their manes, sea froth all around them, the joy of their whinnying above the surge of pebbled waves. Suddenly the horses are gone, as extinguished lamplight, but pulsing on some retina of the mind.

  He tries to come to her again, she feels him hover close. Oh my darling, she thinks, please not now, I’m not able. Why today, after so long? The day is so busy; another time if we must?

  He is waiting in the wings of the morning, wants to come on, steal the scene. To prevent it, she opens her bag, takes out a copy of Les Modes, but now she hears his shy smile, which isn’t possible, she knows. Nobody can hear a smile.

  But I hear yours.

  For some minutes she tries to read, but the words bring no quietness. She wishes she had brought something denser, more substantial and demanding, one of those Russian novels as well sprung as an old sofa. This fluff about hats and fash
ions – mon dieu, look at those shorter skirts. Had I dared to go out with my ankles on plain view like that, Mummie would have reddened my behind!

  But the young must have their way, it’s the nature of things to change. If they didn’t, wherever should we be? A pity people become old trouts and forget their nights of fun. But maybe that’s nature, too.

  The carriage is empty but she knows she is being watched. She feels herself blush like a schoolgirl.

  All right then, she thinks. Come in for a moment. Only don’t make a habit of it, don’t go stirring things up. You nuisance.

  She feels him drift into her, out of some place of interstellar coldness. Silly old darling. Come closer. The breath of his sigh, his gratefulness. Feels him peering out through her eyes at the mild fields unrolling, at the turrets of frothy cloud, at her reflection in the window. His loneliness receding like a tide.

  This is what I look like now, she says. Beauty fades, if ever it were there.

  There is no conversation, only a stillness together. As though they are watching a play. That is all he asks this morning, which truly is just as well, because it is all she is able to give. And there is nothing she wants to have out with him any more. Hasn’t wanted that for years, no point. Most things between a woman and a man cannot be understood, it’s why people invented love poems, a way of filling in the silence.

  She listens to his heartbeat as it melds with her own, hears the pulses of his body, its rhythms. Would you like to read Les Modes with me, of course you wouldn’t, I shan’t. It is nice to tease him, a little lovegame, there is gentleness in that. The quiet music of his bloodstream, the aftertaste of his tears. So lonesome wherever he is.

  They sit on a train together, and the train approaches a great city, crosses meadows and bridges, passes grey little suburbs, and she wonders if everyone, on every journey, anywhere in the world this morning, is carrying someone else or the wound that person left.