The Past Read online

  8

  SHE IS SEEN in frieze, as it were, on an impromptu stage in what looks like a drawing-room with elegant French windows. She is holding a spear and she has her head thrown back, her marvellous hair bound by what seems to be a leather cord. There are two youths on either side of her, dressed in pleated skirts which could be Grecian but for the elaborate Celtic signs emblazoned on them. And all three are staring towards what must be the cowled head of a photographer.

  SHE IS IN a peasant shawl, with a flat behind her depicting the gable end of a thatched cottage. The drawing-room is larger and more sumptuous and the flats are bounded by a heavy brocade curtain, covering, I have no doubt, a set of even more splendid French windows. Her head is raised and her eyes are blazing with a kind of posed defiance. To her left is a figure with a grotesque false paunch and a large top hat bearing the legend ‘John Bull’. This figure is glowering, over her shoulders, towards an equally caricaturish figure on her right who can be taken, from his goatee beard and his spiked Prussian helmet, to represent the Kaiser Wilhelm. And between them Una’s fleshy arm is raised to point to a banner stiffly fluttering from the cottage’s thatched gable. And the banner reads: ENGLAND’S DIFFICULTY?

  AND IN THE last photo the drawing-room has given way to the interior of a theatre and the flats and the setting are more elaborate, though the scene they depict is even more decrepit. The scene is a room in a Dublin tenement in which a young man is sitting by a typewriter, his mouth open wide, obviously declaiming something to an unseen audience, his hand ruffling his unruly hair. I have no doubt that the play is O’Casey’s first, The Shadow of a Gunman, and that the stage is the early Abbey; that the youth is Domnall Davoren and that the line he is declaiming is Shelley’s ‘Ah me alas, pain, pain, ever, for ever’, with which O’Casey for some reason peppered the dialogue. Behind him, peeping over his shoulder at his typewritten sheet, holding a bowl of sugar, is Una. And I have no doubt that she is meant to represent the most ideal and fragile of all of O’Casey’s heroines, Minnie Powell; and that her Minnie Powell was on the plump side and definitely too old. She was thirty-three by then, and looked it.

  9

  THEY ARRIVED ON the Second of June 1915. In the Easter of the next year there was a revolution. A Gaelic League colleague of hers named Eamon de Valera held Boland’s Mills and was lucky enough to survive the subsequent rash of executions. His pallid face, his gangling, unlikely bearing, his tenderness for mathematics and his strict academic air had, Lili tells me, been the butt of many of her private, rather caustic jokes. But when the revolution (which surprised her, Lili tells me, as much as anyone, though she later pretended of course, that she was in on it all along) extended itself into first months and then years of gradually accelerating chaos, then open rebellion, she lent to it her sense of melodrama and backstage intrigue, discovered a sudden liking for the gaunt schoolmaster.

  ‘And rumour had its heyday here, I mean that man who would stamp his unlikely profile on the history of this place as surely as South American dictators stick theirs on coins and postage stamps, the mathematical rigour of his speech, his actions, and her, who was fast becoming the grande dame of Irish Republicanism—not that there weren’t others jostling for her place, but none of them had her advantage, she was an actress after all, a bad one maybe, but she knew how to upstage with all the cunning of her limited talent.’

  How Michael became implicated is uncertain. Taking briefs at first, Lili tells me, in Republican cases and later assuming a full and active role in what would become known as the I.R.A. Una claimed it was at her behest, Lili tells me. I would like to imagine it was in remembrance of that promenade, remembering the affair of the bathing shelter, with the sense of holocaust, like the sea, all around them. His involvement gradually took its own momentum until by 1919 he had donned the cap and trenchcoat that characterised activists in the upper echelons of the guerrilla effort.

  ‘Never got his name on a street. That must be to his credit. It’d sound odd, anyway. O’Shaughnessy Street—’

  He took at one stage to writing verse, a practice that seemed obligatory for activists in those days. He never mastered Irish. His verse is somewhat painful to read, only memorable for the number of instances in which he refers to Kathleen, the daughter of Houlihan, as blonde-haired.

  TWO

  DUBLIN, 1921

  10

  I HAVE TO IMAGINE you, Rene, since he took no photographs.

  Una did, but only after he had died. You were three when you went to the convent on Sion Hill Road. You had a broad face for a child, eyes that could be seen as too small, but those who knew you didn’t care. You were an ordinary child in every respect and what greater blessing can one ask for, than to have an ordinary childhood?

  It’s just your hair that is distinctive. Curls hanging all around your forehead. Your hair is thin but has a creaminess of texture that gives each strand its own way of falling. Flat near the crown but falling all around it to a fringe of spirals, like those clumps of flowers, the stems of which droop from the centre and the petals fall to make the rim of a bell. Blonde is a shade that catches the tints of the colours around it. Your hair is cream blonde and catches most lights and the outer strands make a halo of them. To have extraordinary hair is almost as good a thing as to have an ordinary childhood.

  You sat with Lili on the small benches and the Cross and Passion nuns moved among the benches like beings from another world. Their heads were framed by those great serge and linen bonnets that nodded like boxes when they spoke. It is you at the time that Lili described, when your father would walk in in his Free State uniform and lift you on to one hip and then the other, trying to avoid paining you with his shoulder strap or his shoulder pistol while the gun-carriage rattled outside and the nuns whispered like a litany their offers of tea. You would have been near six then. And your clearest memory could have been mine. Of the beech tree in the gravelled yard across from the windows of the classroom. The trunk is huge and pushes straight out of the earth and the gravel is thick around it, revealing no earth or roots to prepare one for its intrusion. It backs in its magnificence against an old granite wall. The branches nearest the wall have been sawn off to stop them crushing through the granite. So all growth of branch and foliage is towards the school, towards the window at which you would have sat, staring. It is really for you, the severed half-umbrella, the monstrous segment of tangled growth that shades half the yard. Across from it again is a small shrubbery, half-bald with grass, smoothed by generations of feet. A bell would have rung, a fragile shiver of brass notes filling the classroom around you, the nun’s bonnet would have nodded towards the door and you and the class would have walked jerkily towards it and once outside you would have expended yourself in that circular burst of energy that erupts from nowhere and ends nowhere, scouring the gravel with your feet, the air filled with a patina of cries that seemed to hover above your head. Only when you had exhausted yourself would you lie by the tree. But the tree would renew spent energies, would gather a ring of small bodies around it, each newcomer jostling to rest her back against the bark. You would have won Rene, continually won, by reason of that quiet ignorance of the turmoil of others which would always have found its few square feet of bark. The bark moulded in scallops, rougher than skin is.

  Your name would have brought you some attention among the Eileens, Maureens, Marys and Brids. Two thin white vowels, strangely unIrish and yet so easily pronounced, as if more Irish than the Irish names. Your father’s visits would have brought you more. Most of the nuns would have baulked at the excesses of the Troubles but would have supported the Free State side and have been overcome by the mystique of your father’s name. He looks a little like a statue, standing in the doorway. Two of them, though, would have refused to be impressed. One from Clare, with Republican connections, whose tight mouth whenever she passed you in the corridor would have said enough. And one old, quite beautiful creature, an avid reader of Tolstoy, who would have regarded the pre
sence of gun-carriages in a school yard as an immoral intrusion. She is old and tall, like a long translucent insect underneath her habit. The thin bones on her hands and the shining white skin on them and her cheeks, which is all you can see of her beneath the black, seem to contain more reserves of energy than any of the younger novices. Her hands are hardly warm, they hardly linger on your hair for more than a moment; each of her movements is as brief as it can possibly be, as if her body is reserving itself for a boundless, ultimate movement. And the reserve, the iron quiet that she imposed on her life has had its recompense in the cheeks that face you at the top of the class, as smooth and pallid as those of a young, inactive boy, in the grey eyes under the black and white bonnet which reflect the impersonal rewards of a lifetime’s confinement. Her presence is hypnotic, as are her maxims. ‘Keep your hands,’ she tells you, ‘to yourself. Keep your hands from yourself.’ You cannot understand the contradictions of this dictum, but through your efforts to understand them it assumes a sense of truth that is, for you, greater than words. It hints at the mystery behind movement and gesture. You say the maxim to yourself in situations that have nothing to do with hands. You know the ideal is hands folded and demure on the lap of your unfolded legs, neither to nor from yourself, and you know too that this is not the final answer which, you suspect, has nothing to do with the dimpled, fleshy hands before you. Are there other hands, you wonder, unseen ones which these real hands must train to lie at rest, ready to suddenly bloom into a gesture of giving? The hands of the soul, you think, and stare at the nun who has repeated her maxim once more and is sitting, hands unseen, at the top of the classroom. Her name is Sister Paul and it expresses that maleness which must be the ultimate goal of her sisterhood.

  Lili is your seat-mate. She is pert and alive, master of the social graces of that classroom. If anyone is the favourite it is she, catching the glances of nuns with the downward flickering of her eyelids. And even now I can see the small alert girl who would have arbitrated the loves and hatreds of that class, whose clothes would have been imitated, cut of hair, colour of ribbon, style of bow. She had a lisp and the lisp becomes in her an enviable possession. She is enthralled by you and your cream-blonde hair and yet can dominate you with her quickness and her tongue, for yours was more than anything an ordinary childhood.

  You sit by the window and stare at the trunk of the beech. Sister Paul’s voice wavers, like a thread held in air. Lili, to see the trunk, has to lean past you. You watch the shadow of its severed umbrella blacken less and less of the yard as the morning progresses. The first break passes and the second break, until the final bell rings and you run into the yard once more and find your space against the bark and if the armoured carrier is there, you are carried off in that and if it isn’t, you begin the long walk down the Trimelston Road home.

  THE WIND SWEEPS down the long avenue, at one end of which there is a half-built church in a new kind of granite and cement which make the half-walls rise sheer and inhuman. How large it will be and what a God it will hold. There is a group of boys playing near nettles chanting ‘Up Dev’. One of them is standing in the nettles, crying and leaping to retrieve his cap which either the wind or the other boys have flung away. You stagger with Lili through the wind. It is a spring wind and pulls the green of all the sycamores in the one way, towards the sea. There is a line of coast houses behind you and the sea, which seems hardly disturbed. You walk a few steps and turn to the sea and then face the wind again and walk. Lili is laughing and clutching her gymslip. The wind makes another sweep, you close your eyes against it and a melody suddenly courses through you like a long pendulum sweeping the tips of the sycamores in a heavenly arc. It runs its course and finishes, and just when it seems past recall it comes again, its long brass tones fortified by another one and you listen and walk while the two melodies boom through you. There is a rhythm of which each tree seems a distinct beat and the bass song, too deep for any human voice. It recurs and recurs with each sweep of the wind which pulls your slip against you, gripping your knees and thighs as if it were wet. Then it leaves you finally and the wind dies down and you are relieved. You turn once more to the coast houses and the unruffled line of blue and then walk on with Lili, not saying a word. The boy has retrieved his cap and is standing near the nettles, smearing his legs with dock leaves, crying softly. Lili stops, looks at him as if she might console him, but then walks on. ‘Crybaby!’ she whispers.

  You walk past him, looking at his green-smeared knees. You have little that is defined or personal about you. You have not yet reached the age of reason. The melody flies and your soul waits for its return. You are like a mirror that catches other people’s breath. One nun refers to you as that plump, blonde-haired girl, another talks of your slender, almost nervous quietness. You willingly become each, as if answering the demands every gaze makes on you. The most persistent attitude towards you is one of pity, touched by a warm, moral, faintly patriotic glow. You are the child whose father must rarely see her, immersed as he is in the affairs of the Free State, whose mother is busy, abstracted. Through you they see your heritage, the glow of newspring and newspaper reports, the profusion of rumours and heated discussions beside which you must seem something of an afterthought. You grow through the very stuff of those frustrated politics. You are Lili’s most treasured possession, the prize that all her classroom graces have won her; though you are most at ease when unnoticed.

  Are you already choosing between these images as to which of them you will eventually become? A choice that must be unconscious, but within which must lie the birth of real decision, as those glances we throw as a child are the breeding ground for the tone of gaze as an adult. Or are you, behind the screen of your ordinary childhood, holding each of them in balance, nurturing each to take part in the eventual you? For you did become all of them. You hold your hands folded, a modest distance from your body on the classroom desk. Your knuckles are still only dimples, but from those particular dimples a particular knuckle will eventually emerge. As you walk down the Trimelston Road the sea is always in front of you, a broad flat ribbon at first and then, as the road falls, a thinner strip of blue serge until eventually, when the coast houses rise to your eyes, it finds itself a thin, irregular grey thread.

  ONE DAY THERE is a statue in the window with fresh yellow irises arranged around it in jam jars half-full of water. The statue seems frozen in an attitude of giving. The silver nun teaches you the austere beauty of its observance, tells you that this is the First of May, the beginning of summer, Mary’s month. And all those girls, more than half the class, whose first name is Mary or some Gaelicisation of it, Maureen, Maire, Mairead, bow their heads and smile.

  You look at the yellow irises, flapping in their jam jars on the sill of the window, behind which the beech tree can be seen studded with green now as if the month of May has hastily flecked it with a stiff green paintbrush. You can hardly isolate any one spot of green from the tentative mass but you still try, with your young girl’s eyes, their imperfection of focus, their totality of concentration. The points which are in fact small buds and which in autumn will become broader leaves with the texture of beech nuts and bark resist all your attempts to isolate them, merge and separate and finally through the tiredness of your eyes become what seems to be a pulsating mist, forming a halo, the limits of which you can’t define around that unlikely trunk, much like your own hair, which you also must be able to see reflected in the window-glass, and the image of your own blonde halo becomes merged with the first green pulsating of the month of May. You look from the confusion of yellow, blonde and green to the black and white frame of Sister Paul’s face, who is explaining in her silver voice the intricacies of May devotions; how the name was filtered through to light on half the female population of this small nation, the class. You cannot know that your first name should have been Brigit, Mary of the Gael. Sister Paul tells you that the class will replace those flowers daily.

  The narcissism that allows you to confuse the
glowing strands of hair round your face with the mass of half-formed leaves on the beech tree, the yellow flags of the irises, is an innocent one and more than that, an honest one, and perhaps even more than that, a happy one; an unlooked-for gift that in later life will be the one thing friends will agree is yours, that must have shown its first contours in childhood. Later that night your nurse bathes you. Her name is Madge. She must have minded you since your mother’s nights were divided between performance, rehearsal and political meeting. She takes you into your mother’s room to dry you, wrapped in a towel, to the centre of that soft carpet, surrounded by the mirrors of that open wardrobe, the dressing-table and the oval, quite mysterious mirror on the wash-table with its enamel basin and swollen jug. The towel is draped around you as Madge massages your hair. Then your neck and your shoulders, and it gradually slips down as she rubs your stomach, your calves and your small feet, until you can see yourself, naked and dry in the three mirrors. Your stare has the concentration of a dream. Your body is all dimples, the dimples of your breasts, your navel, your vagina, knuckles and knees. These will grow like the pinpoints of green round the umbrella of the beech, way beyond Mary’s month, into the shapes of womanhood and you suspect this and your suspicion has the texture and emotional presence of the colours green, blonde and yellow that filled you earlier, but if it is a colour its hue is unearthly since you cannot picture it, merely feel it in the emotional centre where colours move you. Madge leaves the room to get your clothes. You are most attracted towards the mirror that is out of your reach, the oval one above the wash-basin. You drag over a chair and stand on it and try to see your flesh behind the reflections of the swollen jug and the basin. Your look is scientific in its innocence. You lean forward to see yourself better behind the white curves of the jug but you can’t and so you stare into the water in the basin. You are reflected there, from above. Your face looms over your own cream expanse, shimmering in the water, your blonde curls sticking to your crown. You hear a gasp behind you and turn to see Madge aghast in the doorway. The chair totters and you fall, bringing basin, jug and water with you. You land in the wet pool and your elbow scrapes on the enamel curve and spurts blood. It runs down your belly and thighs, turning pink with the water. Madge runs forward with a stream of prayers and admonitions and grabs a towel and wrings it in the water and wipes your thighs and wrings it continually. She blesses herself with her other hand.