The Past Read online

  ‘SHE HID HER pregnancy so well, you see, that no one noticed, my mother didn’t anyway, I’m sure of that and Una must have blessed herself in thanks when the war to end all wars broke out, it could have happened for her benefit, it gave her nine months’ grace. And what was more natural than that he, coming as he did from a good family of Home Rulers, Redmondite in the best sense my mother always said, what could have been more natural than that he would think of enlisting and would spend months thinking about it? And so she must have blessed the Archduke Ferdinand for getting himself shot and the Kaiser Wilhelm for taking it to heart and the flower of Britain’s manhood for rallying to the cause of Life, Liberty and the Rights of Small Nations. But there were rumours all the same. I heard years later from people that hardly knew Rene at all that in fact she wasn’t her mother’s child but was born of a liaison between her hero of a father, dead years by then, and a south of England music-hall artiste or some such figure and was being kept in trust. But take it from me, that’s all nonsense, she was born of Una in your postcard paradise, she was her father’s child.’

  SOMETHING HAPPENS TO him. He loses his will and gains it. He discovers that part of himself later to become the whole of himself, the self of indomitable will, of odd humanity and gentleness that we know, Lili, from the history books. His mind becomes glazed, he interprets this as weakness. Certain thoughts obsess him, not in the logical, forward manner in which he had been schooled, but they recur eternally, come to no conclusion, seep through his perceptions to disturb him and then vanish before he can order them. He thinks of death and the soul, of a mystical order that seems to have begun with him, that will end with him. He longs to resume his studies again, the world of books, legislature and ordered reading, a longing that he feels in his stomach at times like a knot of physical pain. But the other element saps his will, seduces him. He orders books from London and leaves the packets unopened behind the desk downstairs. He wakes one night well past midnight and is unsure whether he is awake or dreaming because instead of sitting in her chair and smoking beside him she is asleep, her six-months’ stomach curving upwards, her eyelids slightly open. Her eyes are like needles underneath the lids. He raises his head and stares at the slivers of light, barely revealed under her drawn lids, the source of which is somewhere beyond her dilating nostrils and her closed mouth. With each breath she takes her head moves slightly on the pillow and the lights move too until he stares at her, hypnotised by them and the rainbows round his own lashes. Her breath rises with the sadness of death and with each wave he is carried further from those points of her eyes until he is seeing them across aeons of distance, two barely visible specks of light. It is his own death he is swimming in and the feeling of unearthly ease, of buoyancy, lulls him like a massaging hand, irresistibly. He thinks, I can return or stay here. And his will expands then like a rearing horse, mighty, more than irresistible and bears him back. She is sleeping still, with her eyes now fully closed.

  Meanwhile the winter is beginning, the dry cold wind from the Azores whipping spray along the promenade, dispersing hillocks and ripples of sand over the austere tiled pathway. He leaves her around twelve, ignoring the wind. The sun is shining independently of it and but for the cold biting into the cheekbones, eyelids and fingers one could imagine the promenade crowded with its quota of summer strollers. It is empty though, as if the weak sun shines only for him. He grips his overcoat tightly around him and imagines that he feels neither wind nor cold but that just what he sees is real—the bright sunshine, like a blessing, clear and even sharper than in heat, over the pier, the iron chairs, the strand and sea, the canvas whipping round the few remaining bathing shelters. He thinks sunshine and emptiness are his element and so familiar seems the scene that he almost misses the one obtrusive shape—the girl standing in the shadow the bathing hut throws towards the sea.

  He saw her from behind and then she vanished, or seemed to. He walked by the tottering structure of painted canvas and saw her again, in a discoloured fawn coat, looking at the sea. From her stillness and her pose, the way her fawn coat merged with the sand and then her head and shoulders glowed against the lime-grey sea, he knew that she had seen him. He stopped and heard the silence of his absent footsteps against the tiles. He looked at the sea with her, its washing exhausted, spent. She was in the damp part of the sand and her boots were sunk. Her hands were in the pockets of her coat and there were threads hanging from them and round the calves of her boots the stitching was split. The canvas flapped, and the palm leaves. He knew that she would turn, that her face would not surprise him. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were resentful and hopeless. They were blue. Could he have known at that distance or could the sea have suggested the colour to him? But then even the sea was lime-grey. He knows she is one of the last of the summer prostitutes, perhaps even the last. She looks as redundant as the bathing hut or the hotel signs. He decides immediately to give her money, if not warmth.

  ‘They’ve all gone, have they?’ His voice surprises him in the silence.

  ‘Who’ve all gone?’

  Her accent is local. Perhaps he has been wrong. He stumbles for words. ‘The starlings.’

  She is shifting her feet in the damp sand as if she wants it to flurry, to be dry, to call the summer back.

  ‘That sand is damp. Come up.’

  ‘No, you come down.’ And a humorous flicker crosses her face. ‘The gentleman always does.’

  He must climb over the railings and leap. She smiles, waiting for it. Does she notice his honeymoon shoes, scuffed after months of walking, his tweed suit now shapeless round his knees? Has she seen him walking, his aimlessness not too different from hers? She must have. He jumps and sinks to his laces in the sand. She walks to him, faintly smiling, takes his arm and leads him down the beach without a word.

  5

  ‘WOULD UNA HAVE talked to him incessantly about the Hungarian policy and Arthur Griffith, about Sinn Fein and shoneenism, telling him that if he enlisted he was just as guilty as any Protestant on a horse? I don’t think so. She would have embodied the nation aggrieved, reclining on the bed, pillows propped around her, every long dramatic pause saying more than any tirade could have; theatrical pose and political history were inseparable for her. He would be by the window, listening. I espied them both in that pose years later, in a different room. By then he was in uniform, a dull smoky khaki, the colour of gorse. Her colour. He showed no extraordinary intelligence, not in the normal sense anyway, while she had a fast, quick mind that always outdid itself. He would have let her words seep through him, like old wine through a muslin cloth which comes out slowly, but purely, all the sediment removed. So when he later took his part among the minor heroes, she could claim he was her creation, she could put the point of his conversion in that hotel of yours. There was more, she would tell us, than Rene being born—’

  She shifted in her cane chair and smiled.

  ‘Irish, now, there’s what I mean, Una could half speak it, a ridiculous blas she had when I remember her, but by then maybe she had forgotten most of it. Her father being an early Gaelic Leaguer, who knows she could even have gone to the school of the unruly stammerer, what was it called, St Enda’s, and read the motto daily, I Care Not Though I Were to Live But One Day and One Night if Only My Fame and My Deeds Live After Me. And he though he couldn’t speak a word then yet he knew it later, became dutifully impeccable, sent dispatches in both languages on the back of cigarette packets and devised a code in it which Eoin MacNeill even couldn’t crack. Now why? He didn’t love her, couldn’t have, later anyway from what I remember of them, he saw her only on flying visits from his flying column and maybe at Christmas, holy days. So why did he take those parts of her, reproduce them so meticulously, make his own mirror of them, graft them on to his own person so perfectly that when the end came she could claim he was her creation? And if you want an answer and if you want the music of things in their proper place all you can look to is the story. She made those claims o
f hers in retrospect, when he was already being embalmed in the oil and the scent of the great losers, and she put the point of his conversion there, in that hotel of yours. But then she was part of the story too, she was his entry to it, both of them making it as they were telling and Rene being born—’

  BUT MICHAEL HAS pulled his boots out of the sand and has walked along the beach with the girl whose name, he discovers, is June. She is an alert and a nervous talker, she reveals large tracts of herself to him immediately and yet leaves him with the impression that beyond these tracts it would be indelicate to probe. Her teeth are small, her face is small, somewhat drawn, with large brown eyes and sallow cheeks leading to a dimpled chin. Her face has none of the definition that would give it beauty but can in certain lights be beautiful, depending on its mood and pallor. When not beautiful it could best be described as drawn and he will find, in fact, that her face is in continual motion between one aspect and the other. They walk along the strand between the dunlins and oyster-catchers and they talk about their lives. She talks of her boarding house, not along the promenade like his hotel, but in the smaller streets where the promenade becomes a road and the line of the palms ends and the spa has not yet begun. She spills out tracts of herself as if to put him at ease, punctuated now and then by a light laugh and a dry cough. She has been six months in the town, she tells him, and her sojourn in it seems as disembodied as his. But she knows more about it, she mentions names and streets and places he has never heard of, and leaves him feeling even more foreign, only native to the palms, the promenade, the pier. She talks of the war and the sea and of what she calls her ‘present state’. The phrase leaves him wondering about her past one and since her accent is good and her words are redolent of governesses, a somehow childish innocence with an adult pretension towards exactitude, he wonders whether before her ‘present state’ she was a teacher of some kind. He feels there is something Quaker about her, in the plainness of her clothes and her air of Protestant rigour. And yet walking beside him she is as disembodied as he, as will-less, and he is given the impression of limitless time waiting to be spent. An air of decided sensuality emanates from the fawn coat, from the body it covers, which seems a little forlorn, like a boat stranded and waiting for the tide it knows will come and seep round its hull. He walks with her, wondering could he carry his own needs as honestly as she does hers. He talks of the war, the sea, the town, of everything but those private areas of his life which he knows, glancing at her whimsical brown eyes, he must never touch. He laughs at one of his own expressions—having compared the jowls of a dead dogfish that lay across their path to those of Kitchener—and finds himself surprised at the person who made the observation and the person who subsequently laughed. He can see in himself a new and lighter personality emerging, which seems to be his own creation. He cocks his mental eye askance at it, walking down the strand. They come to the pier and climb up the steps. She peels bark from the stem of a palm, he rests on the wedge of the barrel. A cold gust of wind blows up and so they move into the foyer of an old hotel and then into the lounge. It is an even less respectable hotel than his and he wonders if he had come here months ago, would it all have been quite different. They drink a pot of steaming coffee. Then they leave and walk back along the strand, she insisting that they retrace their steps in the sand, placing her feet in the prints his have made the way a child does. There is silence between them now and this silence acts on them like an inevitable suggestion, leads them up to the flapping, gaudy canvas of the hut where she saw him first. She leads him inside with her Quaker matter-of-factness to the forefront. He sees there are deckchairs stacked against one canvas wall and a bundle of straw mats. She smooths one out on the sand and with practised hands, and barely lifting her skirt, she gives herself to him.

  IT BECOMES HIS pattern, and not one that’s to be measured in days or hours, but one that has its own rhythm. Every day he walks down the promenade and the sun is as clear as when he came there first, the sky as clear, the only difference being the gathering coldness of its light. And some days he meets her there, an average of one day out of four, but never with regularity. There would be three days in a row at times, and then not one day for a week. He comes to think of these days as ‘the day’ and every day he thinks, ‘Today will be the day.’ And yet on the days on which he doesn’t meet her he is never disappointed and on the days on which he sees her from above the canvas bathing hut he is pleased but not surprised. He is coming to accept the arbitrary nature of events as if the events themselves are objects of fate, dictated by a rhythm of which he is not master but servant. He surrenders his will to the accidental with the certainty that the pattern it will reveal to him will be greater than any he can impose. He thinks of Bulmer Hobson in Hyde Park, of Lord Kitchener, the Archduke Ferdinand, and of his sleeping pregnant spouse, curled like an esker in the room he has left, and walking along the promenade, anticipating June’s fawn coat behind the gaudy canvas, anticipating the texture of sand and of the bark of palms, anticipating the same canvas flapping emptily without her, he feels a remarkable freedom in his total acceptance of whatever chance dictates. And when she is there they will walk, repeat the first day’s pattern, reveal no more of themselves than they did then, building instead on the tracts they have discovered, creating new selves daily, as their feet create fresh prints in the same sand. They choose their personalities whimsically, act out small lives while walking. A changed inflexion, a weighted word, an ‘I remember’ said with a grimace, a sigh or a smile evokes a type of face, of person and of past. He tells her he is a doctor, that he has studied in the Royal University and has fled from a burdensome practice in Dublin. He tells her he is a cattle exporter from a family of Dublin merchants, the eldest in the firm, he will feed England on Irish beef for the war’s duration. She tells him she is an actress, left here by a repertory company at the end of a bad summer. She tells him she is a governess, sacked by her titled employers because of an affair of the heart. He prefers the second to the first, but he accepts both, just as he accepts the quick movements of her features from liveliness to pallor. There is something blessed he suspects, in the very poverty, the elusiveness of each encounter and of their knowledge of each other. And the only measure of their permanency, of their perhaps having met in some yesterday is the straw mat in the canvas hut which from the first day she has left on the floor of the bathing hut and which no one has yet disturbed. It is like an arrow pointing to their one reality, their lovemaking. And yet it is a mat, the repository of his bliss, his belonging with her to a realm of feeling, beyond which they can never belong. Through that they meet on a plane that is as far removed from the persons they chose as are they from the sand that clings to that mat that hinders their movements. They move and are covered in sand, remove little clothing; it is cold. And each time money changes hands, money, the coinage that makes the exit from the hut more bearable, that leaves them both locked in an embrace, among just sand, sea and canvas, until their next meeting. How will I not die when it ends, they both wonder, and yet when he peels the ritual three notes from his pocketbook and when she crumples them into the pocket of her fawn coat the wonder vanishes.