The Past Read online

  Table of Contents

  ALSO BY NEIL JORDAN

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ONE - CORNWALL, 1914

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  TWO - DUBLIN, 1921

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  THREE - BRAY, 1922

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  FOUR - SANDYMOUNT, 1928

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  FIVE - BRAY, 1933

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  SIX - THE PROVINCES, 1934

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  SEVEN - LISDOONVARNA

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  NEIL JORDAN

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY NEIL JORDAN

  Night in Tunisia

  The Dream of a Beast

  Sunrise with Sea Monster

  Shade

  Mistaken

  TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER

  ONE

  CORNWALL, 1914

  1

  TWO POSTCARDS OF the holiday town in the south-west of England. They show the same scene which makes me think they were chosen thoughtlessly, bought together maybe in the same shop without caring a whit what the picture showed. Or bought separately, two months between them. She had forgotten, of course, what the first one displayed by the time she came round to needing the second. Both are yellow and with serrated edges, yellowest at the edges as if singed by a match. But the flame is time and the smell, far from the smell of burning, is the smell of years.

  THEY DON’T SHOW the sea or the town, just the esplanade. But from the look of it, even across years, one can’t doubt that this row of dowdy four-storey houses faced the sea. And from the look of them too one can surmise a town behind this esplanade that lives off this esplanade and all year waits for the time when the canvas awnings are stretched out and the canvas deckchairs are placed in the front porches. For the houses are obviously hotels and the angular porches are so obviously looking at what in the brochures must have been a sparkling blue sea, one can be sure that the esplanade was wide and elegantly paved, that there were railings on which to lean and maybe even white iron chairs on which to sit and watch that sea, perpetually blue and be cooled by its salt breezes. And there were rows of primitive paddle-boats (they had them then?) rocking, listing on the edge of the tide, and along the strand itself a row of canvas bathing huts. Canvas! Yards and yards of it are implied, painted in those circus stripes, those warm blues, fawns and yellows, stretched over windbreakers, tautened umbrellas and Punch and Judy stands and even barrel-organs. Was it the age of canvas? For the esplanade is full, there must have been attractions galore with which to fill it—and a spa too, behind the town, backed on by the houses, with the heavy lead taps and the metal baths. Was it the age of spas? For of the people who fill the esplanade, immobile and thronging, the women are most obvious, carrying sun-umbrellas. Was there devotion to water, a suspicion of sunlight? In the postcards they look like white, straight brushstrokes, their umbrellas like brighter dabs. And behind each woman, in her shadow almost, is always the predatory form of a man. They arouse my jealousy these men, suspicious themselves of sunlight, at times each man could be each woman’s shadow, so much in her shadow he is. But then the whole image is drenched in sunlight as if the shot had been over-exposed or the card bleached by its years on some green felt desk near a window, through which the sun shone. But despite the bleaching of years, the blaze of sunlight could only have come from the day itself, a hot ‘salad’ day, and there were more of them then for the handwritten date on the back is June the First 1914. The message scrawled underneath is peremptory, almost irrelevant. Back in two weeks, Una. This though she knew, she must have known, her stay would last more than seven months. Which brings us to the main fact the card can speak of, besides sunlight and years—that she was a compulsive liar. The second card bears the same scene, the women still encased in sunlight though the sky must have leadened in those seven months since season, even then, must have followed season. And the message too promises a two-week return. But the signature is different—Una, Michael, Rene—and behind that last name there is a coy mark of exclamation (!). Which brings us to the prime fact that this card proclaims—the birth of her child. And one third fact, perhaps subsidiary, proclaimed by the months that intervened—between the first card and the second the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo.

  2

  LILI’S HOUSE RISES four storeys, like those hotels. Lili lives on the fourth. There’s a door which I put my shoulder to, then a dim staircase. There’s the smell of moist brickwork, of the canal outside. Memory, she told me once, is mother to the Muses. But what do I know of all those years, of Dev and the Clare election and the Custom House fire? The ashes rose over the city, she told me, of the burnt files of each birth, marriage and death. Then they fell like summer snow, for three days. Lili walked through them, maybe held out her palms, caught the down of her birth-cert on the rim of her schoolgirl bonnet. I would petition her for memories like these. I felt a sharp angle in the banister’s curve. I saw the landing then, and Lili’s room. I saw Lili, by far the oldest thing in that room. When I entered, she turned in her perpetual cane chair. She smiled.

  ‘UNA WENT THERE,’ she told me, ‘to have the child you want to know all about. She went there because she was pregnant, had got married because she was pregnant, one of those sublime mistakes they made then as well as now. He did the dutiful thing, though I’m sure he loved her. I can’t imagine him not loving anyone and by all accounts she was a beauty then, not the blousy Republican I got to know later. They married and chose that place for their honeymoon. He was from a Redmondite family, a lawyer with that blend of innocence and relentless idealism that was admirable then, really admirable, and that took the Free State to sully it. He was the best of them, by far the best of them, he was marked out for what would happen to him later, I’ve heard that said, having no way of knowing, my only memories of him are in the kindergarten school out near Mount Merrion, he’d come to visit us in his Free State uniform, the darling of the nuns with those glazed eyes that told you precisely how much he hated it, the heavy ridiculous belts and the shoulder pistols, he must have hated it even more than de Valera hated him, he would walk through the classroom in his wide boots, stammer while refusing the nuns’ offer of tea and lift Rene on to his hip. I remember her crying once, with joy at first, and then pain at the buckle of the belt against her backside, his large hands lifting her higher to nuzzle against the shoulder pistol. Then there would be a few words of affection that only demonstrated how little they knew each other when there would be a respectful knock on the school door, the shadow of an N.C.O. outside, and he would have to leave. I learned later it had always been like that, ever since she was old enough to know him, which is the trouble with public men I suppose, especially th
e kind of public men we had then. But those few brief meetings were enough to convince anyone of his innate goodness, the quiet enigma of him, which I suppose she inherited. And you could see how marriage to Una, who was supposed to be a beauty then, who was pregnant by him, would have been natural to him, an extension of that undifferentiated love with which I imagine he first made her pregnant. But then I could be wrong, we could be all be wrong.

  ‘All I can really tell you is that they went there, that she was pregnant when they went there and that they stayed nine months. The war had broken out, which would have afforded him an excuse to stay. They would come back, a married couple with a child with a respectable if somewhat fine interval between ceremony and birth. And though I would lay such duplicity at her doorstep, he must have been party to it. The only point behind all this information being the fact that Rene was a love-child—’

  3

  SO I EXTEND the picture on the postcard beyond the serrated edge with a line, say, of unobtrusive shrubs, not quite trees, between the esplanade and the road proper. These shrubs are in wooden boxes, bound by metal hoops, smaller than those ladies and their parasols and so invisible in that miniature scene; yet stretching down that esplanade far beyond the confines of the postcard to where the esplanade must end, to where steps must run down to the strand leading to a wharf, the upright stakes of which reflect in the water beneath, the scene most perfect, most symmetrical when the water is calm. These shrubs will grow, of course, into the palms I imagine them to be with their aching stems and stunted foliage, redolent of a more torrid climate since they are transplants, burgeoning their way into later postcards, ones that I shall never see. Though they stand now in their temperate soil and their hoop-bound boxes with just their palms flapping in the breeze for their trunks are resistant. Facing the esplanade, the wharf, the water. And behind them the road proper, the line of houses. Not just that row of regular Edwardian facades behind the postcard parasols, but a row differentiated into houses and hotels. More hotels than houses, if the town is as I imagine it, and these hotels in turn differentiated into those which drew attention to themselves and those which didn’t. Among those which didn’t, one moderately anonymous, intimating solid comfort on a small budget. With a canvas awning like the others and a tiled porch, the walls on either side painted blue and cream, the windows white. The paint was three summers old perhaps, bubbling under the brick. And its name, Excelsior, painted of course in gold above the first row of windows, rich between the blue below, the cream above.

  The palms flap and the water waits for them. They would have pronounced the name roundly, presuming its importance. The cabbie grunts, hearing it, knowing their status. Or would they have walked, unsure of cabbies, unsure of what to tip; Irish, intimidated by the parasols, carrying their cases, their clothes too heavy for the hot day and just the palms intimating a welcome, flapping in their still boxes, whispering the confidence that they too are transplants to this imperial soil.

  ‘UNA WAS AN actress, of the worst kind, the kind that insists on you calling them by their first name. Oonagh, Oona, Una, I stumbled over it so much at first, I didn’t want to be on first name terms, damn her, I was a girl of nine or ten and hardly knew her, Mrs O’Shaughnessy struck me as much much safer. I was a wily child you see, suspicious of this mother of my friend with her large blowsy kisses and her first names. Children read adults, don’t they? An atrocious voice with a loud, melodramatic presence, Una never acted anyone but herself but she had the luck to be an Irish speaker and so to meet Messrs Yeats and Fay and then gradually to be thought of as the Irish woman resplendent, though her hair was mousy and her eyes pale and her face totally devoid of those high cheekbones that were meant to be typical of the Celt. Though she had plenty of Matthew Arnold’s refusal to submit to the tyranny of fact, the fact being that her stage presence was embarrassing and her refusal to submit to this being quite remarkable and, in the end, a triumph. But then to be fair I only saw her later, years later, when her figure had bloomed and when Rene and me were ten or twelve. When she met him I myself was just a blush on my mother’s cheek and Una O’Shaughnessy was by all accounts, sorry to repeat myself, quite a renowned beauty. But then those were the early days of the Gaelic League and as you know yourself a certain kind of passion and what they called “nobility” and in particular an ability to speak Irish, more particularly among those who couldn’t, was regarded as an adequate substitute for beauty, not to mention talent. And the kind of acting she relished when her husband met her didn’t take place in theatres on legitimate stages, no, nothing as vulgar as that, it found its place in drawing-rooms before select groups of thoughtful people who would gather to look at representations or friezes from their imaginary history of Ireland. You would have the “Rape of Drogheda”, say, and after hours of fuss with everyone finally seated and the whispering behind the drawing-room curtain finally stilled the same curtain would draw back to reveal, if you can picture it, a few painted flats to represent Drogheda’s walls and a group of ardent young Gaelic Leaguers dressed as Cromwell’s Roundheads with whatever pikes and muskets they could drum up for the occasion, all standing to one side in a balletic group, pointing their pikes and things towards a group of just as ardent young girls who represented the Maidens of Drogheda. And between them both, dead-centre of course, raised on a platform, a dais, would stand Una O’Shaughnessy, who else, dressed as Kathleen in a coat of flowing green with a petticoat of red and a symbolic chain maybe round her wrists, her face contorted into an expression of frozen pain, horror or melancholy, whichever was most appropriate. They engrossed my mother’s generation, those idiotic affairs. Una, by all accounts, made quite a name from it and it’s quite probable, if probability is what you’re looking for, that he met her there and that her Kathleen ni Houlihan began the liaison that would lead to Rene’s birth in that English town you want me to talk about and which I can’t, of course, having never been there. But these idiotic affairs died a death, of course, as soon as the quite amazing discovery was made that the Roundhead youths don’t really have to remain like limestone statues but can actually move and fortify their expressions of hate with violent gestures. And from there it was only one step into words, blessed words. “O my dark Rosaleen, do not sigh, do not weep, the priests are on the ocean green . . .” And thus Una became an actress. But she could never play O’Casey, despite her lineage. And why not? Because O’Casey demanded more than a green costume and a blas, he was music-hall and melodrama, farce and real tragedy and only a real actress could have done it. And she knew this, of course, and when The Plough came on she shouted her guts out from the pits with the rest of them, even though Mr Yeats shouted his apotheosis from his private box. And I know, I know, all this is beside the point, but what do I know of her pregnancy and that English town except for the fact that the child inside her would partake in none of her faults and would be called Rene—’

  SO HEARTENED BY the flapping palms they would have walked under the canvas awning, Una’s heels striking the tiles, dragging the tufts of carpet in the hallway with her and striking again the hard oak stairs; and into a clean bedroom, with the walls cream-white, the ceiling done in necklaces of plaster; with a bed which they would find to be warm, with a film of damp.

  There must have been a table with an oval scoop for an enamel basin. And the table would hold an enamel jug. All three of them white, echoing the walls and the slight curve at the pit of the jug echoing her form. The guest-book below reading ‘Michael and Una O’Shaughnessy’ in a young, perhaps a bold hand.

  4

  ‘I DO KNOW THERE was a spa there. With those sulphur waters that she claimed gave Rene her complexion—’

  SO I EXTEND the rim of the postcard even more, down the esplanade, past the steps and the wooden pier, where the palms and hotels ended, where the watering-place was, with maybe a sulphur bath. And Michael O’Shaughnessy, as young and admirable as you said Lili, reading The Times in the oak-panelled lounge of the hotel room, the browns
mixing finely with his light tweed suit, English in its cut, sitting only a little awkwardly on his frame, set against the strength of his cheekbones and the tousled mop of his hair. He is thinking of Redmond and Home Rule while the thin light on the oak panels slowly becomes a blaze. Later he will think of Arthur Griffith and conscription, later again of de Valera and parades. But always as an afterthought, to the sweeps of light on the oak panels as he rises and goes to the window and sees the sun and the sea making a flat mirror beneath it. And his wife meanwhile is on the promenade, for the time being without that fiery quality you saw in her, just pregnant now, her belly like a swollen pod proud before her, meeting the Cornish breezes. Una hides nothing of her shape nor of the flush of her cheeks. Her dress is bulky and white and she walks like a billowing flag of a new nation down to the wrought-iron chairs to drink three cups of that mineral water and pray that it will bring the same flush to her daughter’s cheeks. She prays quietly, watching the sea, hoping as everyone does for a magic child. She rises then, her stomach swollen more with the gaseous liquid and walks back, or if the breeze is too strong, takes a hansom cab to her husband who is still by the window, watching the same sea.

  Because that was the first month and it would have still been a honeymoon month and the war hadn’t yet broken out or the Parliamentary party been split and their bodies just might have made those shapes on the dampish bed like those maps in which the larger island envelops the smaller one, backwards admittedly, but expressive of an act of union rather than one of buggery or rape. The play of their bodies, warranted by that honeymoon under the ceiling with the plaster necklace would have been a gift to them, would have made their differences opaque. They would have lain, counting the plaster pearls which would have led, maybe, to a plaster dimpled Cupid in the centre, they would have kept smiling at its white penis and perhaps even made jokes. It would have taken two months for their differences to emerge, the repetitive whisper of an old word that slowly becomes a roar, for her swelling stomach to take its toll with its moods, its impatience with things physical, its ancient irrationality that he feels he has met before in different guises, perplexing to him at first, then deeply disturbing, a disturbance he would have kept private, however, that would merely have given to his mouth a tight, perplexed line. His face that later became a mask, unrevealing and yet somehow like glass, transparent and still hidden from her as it would later be to masses of others. And his eyes that don’t want to speak for fear of what they might say would have risen further moods in her, loud silences and even louder words. For she has taken to sitting up late, Lili, smoking cigarettes, filling the enamel basin with them while he sleeps. And from sitting up late she rises even later. He leaves the bed and dresses under the plaster boy while she sleeps, each breath like the exhalation of centuries. And the flush of a month ago is rocked in that sleep so he dresses alone, dines alone and soon can’t imagine things otherwise. And the later she sits up the later she rises until she is hardly awake for two hours of daylight. Is it the fear, he wonders, that as her stomach grows larger until even her billowing skirt can’t hide it she might meet someone from home who will take back news of her advanced condition? A remote possibility, since they are now well past autumn and fine weather and the resort is empty but for the old, the invalid and the local. But he suspects it, hearing her talk of that ‘bunch of jackals back home’. He asks her is she afraid of the prying eye, the rumour carried across water to that country where there is only rumour and everybody is related. But she hears this slur on her native country and her voice grows shrill in its defence, her nationalism growing with her belly. His is beginning to wane. He sees a war on at last, to end all wars. He travels to London to hear Redmond speak, meets friends of his student days in khaki, thinks of signing with the Irish Guards. From a bench in Hyde Park he hears an anti-Redmondite called Bulmer Hobson and the name reminds him of seabirds and kelp and he sees the flushed, hard faces he knew back home surrounded by the black plumage of the constabulary. He hears the words Home Rule used as a taunt and the names McDonagh, Plunkett, Pearse and the words flutter like fledglings in the wind around him, a renewed attempt at the age-old flight. He spends the night in a boarding-house near St Pancras and can’t sleep on the damp mattress. He sits upright on a hard chair the way he knows his wife is sitting, remembering the beat of those words against the wind, they smacked of Parnell and separatist passion, of the strident lyrics of Young Ireland, the dense labyrinths of Fenianism and gradually the war drifts from his mind and with it the thoughts of volunteering and his mind reverts to the fulcrum it has never really left. He sits through the night with the image of the hotel, the sea and his wife’s two hours of daylight, static, placid and somehow irreparable. And when the day comes up again and he can see again through the window the chaotic shapes of St Pancras he rises, takes his case and leaves, having decided nothing, knowing there is no decision, what is is and what must be will be. And as he travels back he thinks of history, sees something old, tarnished and achingly human rising out of the chaos of the present with all the splendid, ancient unpredictability of a new birth. He reaches the station and the last guests from the hotel are waiting to leave by the train he has arrived on. Only the perennial eccentrics are left now, Lili, and the summer prostitutes. He walks the promenade and feels one with these eccentrics. He feels outside time, events pass round him, he is in another time, an older time, his mind, once so energetic, so logical becomes a glaze through which he sees the world scream on a distant, opaque horizon. Only the tiles of the promenade have substance, and the vertical supports of the pier, their shadows in the water. He repeats the word ‘soul’, he feels his fabulous bicep and wonders is it real. The sea falls away beneath him and the flapping palms and holds the sky in reverse, and does it contain, he wonders, the proper order? He sits with Una until his eyes grow heavy, then sleeps before she does. Awake at nine, slipping out from beside her unmoving body, having breakfast in the lounge downstairs, he leaves orders for the same to be brought for her whenever she wakes. He stands by the window watching the sun change the oak from brown to tan, leafing through The Times, Manchester Guardian and Telegraph, reading every inch of the small print, the tiny ads, anything that would keep his mind from the main headlines. And then he walks, Lili, to the now empty sulphur baths and drinks a ritual glass. He has become superstitious about the yellowish liquid. He looks in its swirling for a shape or a sign, a hint of the future, for the whorls of their lovemaking, a map of a world, of the past few months that are changing perhaps not only his life. Then he walks back, a little hurried, afraid to give himself more than half an hour lest she has awoken. He finds her half-awake, then slipping into sleep again. So he walks again, returns again, talks with her sporadically until she wakes fully around seven, dresses and they go downstairs to dine.