The Past Read online

  He is certain that he loves her. He is just as certain that outside the curve of this sea and the soft gloom of this bathing hut his love has no meaning. She is an event outside time and yet rooted in the most sordid of times, among the most precise objects.

  ‘Is the war going to end?’ she asks.

  ‘No,’ he says, and while beyond this sand the thought would disturb him immeasurably, here it fades like a whisper.

  ‘I love you,’ she says.

  ‘And I love you,’ he repeats. And yet both of them observe scrupulously the proprieties they have established for themselves. And neither feels regret since all regret, every sorrow, was implicit between them from the start.

  6

  ‘MY MOTHER SAID that seeing both of them again was like seeing ghosts of what they had been—’

  LOVE IS THE word Michael thinks of all the time, that unique syllable that takes in tongue, lips and teeth. He says it as he walks, like a hymn to the fall of his steps, he forms it silently with tongue, lips and teeth while taking newspapers from the hall stand, he hums it while reading them in the oak lounge. The syllable carries him off for hours, he sees the sun has leapt suddenly from the lintel of the window to the third pane and wonders what has happened in between. It hisses from a dentist’s gas mask, silences itself in the aching stems of the palm trees, laps in the waves coloured with oil that drift in at the farther end of the beach. He hears it in the rise of Una’s breathing, in the ‘Ta ra, love’ of the fruiterer to a housewife on the prom, on the headstones of the graves he finds where the town ends and the road limps into a stretch of moorland, In Loving Memory Of, on picture postcards, secondhand novels and the slogans of commercial companies. He watches her breathing and hums a popular ditty, ‘I left my love and leaving loved her more’, he sees people in their waking lives dominated by it, is amazed by the tyranny the syllable exercises and each utterance of it leads him to the one place where its utterance is unnecessary—the strand, the bathing hut.

  ‘STANDING UNDER THE long glass skylight of Pearse Station (it would have been Westland Row then) like ghosts of their former selves—’

  AND IT WAS through it that he could tolerate the pain of his wife’s pregnancy. He had known for some time that she didn’t love him and what was for him worse, that he might never love her. And so he repeated the syllable and garnered from somewhere the inescapable sense of loving that would never leave him and that now reached out to every facet of that holiday town from its slate valley roofs down to its elementary sewerage system that disgorged into the sea somewhere beyond the beach, beyond the spa and beyond the graveyard headstones.

  ‘WITH THE CHILD between them, the strange spotted light you get on the platform from that crazy corridor of glass, the train still steaming on the tracks, like ghosts of their former selves, come back to the country, to the multitudinous relations, the connections everywhere, the miniature intimate city where they knew every face and every face knew them, where those who have gone away are immediately judged on what seems to have happened to them. She walked forward, left him holding the Moses basket, kissed my mother and confided to her that she would not have another child—’

  THE WIND BELLOWS into the canvas hut and its stripes bloom suddenly, and sag. Una’s day is approaching and each of his meetings there lead him towards what seems to be a delusion but what he almost hopes might not be. She is lying flat on the hard sand and he sees his wife’s condition implicit in her. He imagines her slim, starved body blooming, he moves his hand over imaginary curves, begins to treat her with elaborate precautions. He insists that she never leap from the promenade to the sand and that she always walk slowly. He wills her sex, her features on to his unborn child; her blanched face, her ash-blonde hair, her peculiar childlike grace, each movement so contained and satisfying. He doesn’t doubt for an instant that he will have a daughter.

  ‘BUT IF MY mother didn’t notice, there were others that did. But as usual with people and with gossips in particular, they get the sense of something out of joint but the sense they make of that sense is even more out of joint. If you know what I mean. It was on him the blame was foisted—though maybe blame isn’t the right word—the mystique maybe, the question mark—it was raised over him and the child in the Moses basket he was carrying. A little back from them, by the train, coming out of the steam. They raised a question mark, but they asked the wrong question. Whose child, you see, was what they asked. They saw their Una O’Shaughnessy, already quite a minor celebrity, that kind of fame that thrives on absence and aura, and they saw this young man behind her, the intense awkwardness about him that would later become his hallmark, and their guessing centred round him. It would all later bear fruit in the rumours of Rene as the illegitimate spawn of some great lady, actress, society queen. But they didn’t see the real blight. People never do—’

  THE PALMS ARE absolutely still one day and the sea is crystal. Once inside the hut, she asks him for money, an extraordinary amount. What for? he asks. They are both standing and his head touches the wooden laths of the roof. I must see a doctor, she tells him. He tells her that he can only withdraw an amount like that from his bank in London. This pleases her. My doctor is in London, she tells him, smiling. Outside in the ice-cold sunlight she walks towards the sea. She staggers at the edge and then vomits in to the tide. It is nothing, she tells him, it will pass.

  He is going to hear Roger Casement speak, he tells his wife. The name echoes strangely round the walls, and seems to carry to the palms outside. And why do you want to know, she asks him, about rubber and blacks? Mr Casement is speaking about the war, he tells her, against the war. She can only assent.

  They meet in the empty station and travel up together, shocked by the sight of each other against a background of trains, dining cars and passing fields. They realise how used they are to sea, sand and deckchairs. As if it is not they who are travelling, their persons seem to leave them and each gesture and word is looked down on from above, by both of them, from that plane where their meetings began. They arrive in London and book a room in the least shabby of the hotels around St Pancras. His London is different to hers, he realises. She is a stranger like him, but a native stranger to her own capital. They walk together to his bank in Regent Street, where they withdraw the amount she needs. He wants to accompany her then but she is withdrawn and evasive. She arranges instead a time and place where she can meet him in the evening. He watches her fawn coat, barely visible in the crush of the upper deck of a tramcar. He walks from Regent Street through a succession of squares, streets and circuses towards the club in Bloomsbury where the Casement meeting is. The sunlight glances off the fringes of the lintels, bleaching all the roofs. He arrives there to find he is an hour early and so decides to dine. He orders all four courses to while away the hour but barely touches any of them. He has no appetite for food, the word love courses through his mind like a cold wind, he sees her fawn coat on the tramcar, he sees the jug and enamel bowl beside his wife’s bed. He is finishing his coffee when he hears a commotion outside and sees through the glass-panelled doors a group of men arguing with a police inspector. They have Irish accents and one of them, whom he thinks he recognises, could be the Member of Parliament for West Mayo. The commotion increases and blows are exchanged and suddenly there is a phalanx of policemen and between them is being escorted a thin man in a tweed suit with the air of a country gentleman but with a black beard, an incredibly ravaged face and burning, melancholy eyes. The man walks quietly, puts up no resistance and passes, with his escort, out of Michael’s sight. He finishes his coffee, watching the arguing groups, their anger subsiding gradually now that the cause of it has gone. Is that the Casement, he wonders, who toppled Leopold of Belgium? He feels he should join that group outside but he cannot summon up the energy. He sits and watches as they disappear one by one and as the last words trail off. Then he pays his bill and rises, walks through the glass door and sees in the hallway that the notice for the meeting has been written ove
r in a scrawled hand: ‘Cancelled’. He passes into the street.

  He spent the afternoon in a moving-picture palace. He remembered nothing of the story but the fact that it switched rapidly from dining-room to bedroom to garden and back. He thought of how depth and movement could be caught on a square of white. He thought of the canvas hut and the hotel bedroom, all pretence of distance between them abolished, and of the death of time.

  Some years later he would see an ingenious set constructed by an American on the Abbey stage for a play in which his wife would be performing. It would be the sole performance of hers he had attended since their marriage and the last he would ever attend. The set would be built on a circular rostrum, like a merry-go-round, with a representation of the interior of a peasant cottage on one side and the Lord Viceroy’s drawing-room on the other. He would watch from the back row during rehearsals, his wife standing in a shawl with a bunch of flowers by the door of the peasant cottage. And then, in a sudden transformation which always amazed him, the set would slowly slide, the cabin disappearing to be gradually replaced with the Viceroy’s room, the ball-and-claw tables, the sumptuous armchairs and the rattling cabinet of drinks. And there, behind the cabinet, a little in the shade, but coming more and more into the footlights as the set righted itself would be his wife, whom at that moment he loved, in a gown of lace and black satin, holding the stem of a wine glass. And he would be reminded of both his other rooms, how many years ago he can’t remember, of the two people who inhabited them, while he would watch his wife walk down from the set to discuss some obscure point of stage craft with the American designer, while he would look at his child who stood before the proscenium arch, passing her hand back and forwards in front of the footlights, disturbing the dust that gathered there like diamonds. He would wonder what had happened to his other room, the canvas room, to the girl who inhabited it. He would realise that both rooms were in the end his creation. Within several days he would be shot and these memories would die with him, he having left to his daughter just his love of blonde hair, his sense of the other side of things and sense of coincidence, the cumulative history of her conception and birth.

  But on the Thirty-First of January 1915 he walks back to the St Pancras hotel to find June lying on the small bed, a blanket pulled over her and her cardboard case on the ground beneath it. She is paler than he has ever seen her. She doesn’t look up when he comes in, her eyes are staring at the ceiling. Did you see the doctor? he asks her. Yes, she answers and he knows something is wrong by the sound of her voice. He sits on the bed beside her and he finds that the blanket is wet around her thighs. He pulls the blanket back and finds that it and the sheets are sodden with blood. Don’t worry, she tells him, there is always blood afterwards, less this time than the last. He goes to ring the maidservant but she stops him, tells him it will cause trouble, everything will be over by morning. What will be over? he asks her. Don’t you know what? she replies. He says nothing, but passes his hand over her face, her breasts, her stomach under the wet blanket until he sees she is asleep. Then he sits by the window looking at the dark square, turning to look at her whenever she breathes heavily. When morning comes and the shapes of the square have emerged from the mist he turns once more and sees she is awake and looking at him, but with sleep still behind her eyes. It’s over now, she says. You’d better go. And you? he asks. She shakes her head. I will stay here, she says. With friends. He goes to the bed and kisses her once and her mouth responds but her eyes close suddenly, as if their opening had been simply a dream.

  On the train back he thinks of nothing but the passing fields. At the station there is a maid, who tells him his wife is in labour. And the child is born with him watching, holding the curved jug above the enamel basin which is swimming with blood and water, from which the midwife wrings towels, continually.

  7

  SO RENE WAS born on the First of February 1915, St Brigit’s day, across from the promenade which would have been by then quite empty of umbrellas.

  ‘BUT WHY CALL her Brigit when the whole point of their stay there was to hide the fact? Una reached Dublin three months later and even then she claimed the child was premature. Which was how the myth grew up of Rene’s extraordinary eyes and hair, her miraculous maturity. The child they saw in that station, whom Una claimed was at the most two weeks old was in fact a three-month-old bundle of vitality. I would say she was quite a tender mite, a fragile copy of the father, with blue eyes and hair that even at that age showed its blondness. No wonder they were all amazed by this two-week-old marvel with a straight, intelligent stare and hair that didn’t stick to its crown like some black secretion but stood up, half-blonde, and even dared to curl. For her first few months she was a source of constant amazement among all those who saw her, a disjointed sense of awe and misapprehension was foisted on her which was fed of course by her mother, terrified that they would discover that this wonder of hers had been conceived out of wedlock, maybe in an Amiens Street hotel after a Conradh na Gaeilge meeting. I discovered this later through a First Communion form and a senile nun who didn’t notice any difference. I mean, beautiful as it is to be born on St Brigit’s day, the advantages are more than outweighed by the stain of illegitimacy. Which is why they stayed in England in the first place, why they took three months to travel home. And why they arrived in Westland Row Station carrying her in a Moses basket like a two-week-old.’

  STANDING IN THE corridor of glass with the escaping steam behind him, holding the head of the wickerwork basket and his wife still half-hidden in the steam, would he have shown the germ of the person he would later become and if he did would anyone have noticed? The knot of family, cousins, friends and half-friends, they stood beyond the steam waiting for it to clear. He watched their shapes emerge, moving to embrace him.

  The steam died round his boots and he carried the basket behind her. They seemed like any couple. There would have been a passing sweetness in being home, greater than their differences. He quickly ensconced himself in his father’s legal practice and helped to make it one of the leading firms in the city.

  And she, Lili, if I have heard you correctly, began again where she had left off and rose to become the star of a new style of theatre, peasant in emphasis, nationalist in theme. She resumed her Irish classes and acquired an enviable blas. Her hair, which was of that arresting blonde shade that people would later remark on in her daughter, she dyed black. The eulogies to her talents in the papers of the time (with the exception of the Irish Times, which was Unionist in politics) are so frequent that they are hardly worth quoting. Suffice it to say that the qualities critics found to praise in her were sociological rather than aesthetic. She was praised for her ‘modesty of bearing’, her ‘passion of utterance’, but most of all for an elusive quality which was referred to variously as her ‘Irishness’, her ‘Gaelic splendour’, her ‘purity of soul’, a quality which, the Freeman’s Journal claimed, was ‘representative of what is best in Irish Woman-hood’. And thus, in one of those qualitative confusions which are perhaps inevitable in an emergent drama, not to mention an emergent nation, her public praised her as if she were the part itself.