The Past Read online

  11

  IT MUST BE soon after this that you reach the age of reason which, like the age of the earlier maxims, makes the undifferentiated flow of your experience manifest and outward, placing it neatly in language and time, allowing others to say to you that you are different now from what you were then. And though you wonder how such a change could creep on you unawares, yet when you hear Sister Paul explain the metaphysics of reason to the class (though she seems to be speaking only to you) you accept that you must be different if only because you are being told so. You accept that your days and memories up to this moment are one thing and after that moment will be another. You suspect a cruelty behind this knowledge though and wonder whether if you hadn’t been given it would the same be true? She tells you how up to that moment you could not sin because you were not aware of sin but how after that moment the awareness of sin that she is handing you like a gift will make it possible for you to sin. And you accept a further slice of knowledge which defines this sense of difference in you, the fact that now every action will have to be balanced and passed between the twin primaries of sin and virtue, and that between them there will be an expanse of medial tones and that, no matter how fragile this difference in tone, there will always come a point where white swings imperceptibly into black, beyond which you will be able to say, Now I have sinned. You wonder whether this sense of sin is a gift to be developed, whether you must learn to sin as you once learnt to walk. You sense that these words she is imposing on the flow of your days are somewhat arbitrary, like the words she underlines, for obscure reasons, on the hymns she chalks on the blackboard. And yet there is comfort in the language and Sister Paul has after all impressed on you that knowledge can never be useless. You toy with this new knowledge, imagining some use for it while Sister Paul continues with an image of the soul as a droplet of pure water coming from God into the world, tarnished only by the fact of its birth. And you imagine God then to be a sea, remembering the water that splashed you from the falling basin, for a droplet must come from some larger expanse and a sea is the largest expanse you can imagine; you suspect that this sea is not the sea you know, always the lowest point in the landscape, but a sea that is placed somewhere above your experience, mirroring the sea that you know, permeating you with its backwards waves. But, Sister Paul continues, as our days multiply and as we progress from the age of innocence to the age of reason (and here she pauses, implying a multitude of ages, the texture of which you cannot imagine) this droplet becomes tarnished by the grains of hours and experience and only our own efforts can wash it back to something like its original purity. And you accept this image but fortify it with your own one, of that ocean in reverse washing over every hour of your days. And there is a slanting pencil of light coming through the window, falling on your hands, which are to yourself and from yourself, shaking slightly because of the wind on the umbrella of buds outside, because between your hands and the sunlight there is the tree. And Sister Paul has continued to describe to you the sacraments that belong to the age of reason, those of Confession and Communion. She asks you to rehearse the reality. Each of you is to confess to her seat-mate the actions which, in the light of reason, can be seen to be sinful. Lili confesses to you a series of misdemeanours but the air of secrecy and confidence generated by your bowed heads is such that she ends with the confession that she loves you. And you confess to her another series and end with the confession that you love her. And thus you suspect a mystery in reason, sin and in the droplet of water far more bountiful than that which Sister Paul has explained; though watching her distribute the tiny pieces of wafer which are to substitute for Communion bread, you suspect she knows more than she has explained. And feeling Lili’s hand curl round yours on the wooden desk you sense that reason, far from having tarnished your droplet of water, has washed it even purer and even more, has magnified it to a point beyond which it can no longer be considered a droplet, for such is the feeling welling inside you, you suspect it would fill a whole glass. All the other details of the age of reason seem ancillary to this: the Act of Contrition which Sister Paul writes on the blackboard, the pennies of bread which she distributes, which you place on Lili’s tongue and she places on yours. And when the big day comes and you wear your white dress that comes nowhere near the brilliance of the yellow irises, when the events you have rehearsed take place, your real Confession seems to you a pale imitation of your first, rehearsed one. And perhaps you realise that the form of our public acts is only a shadow of that of our private ones, that their landscapes are just reflections and like that real sea below that imaginary sea, with its piers and palms and beaches, reflections in reverse.

  IT’S SOON AFTER that that your father collects you, dressed in civvies for once, in a tweed suit and a hat like any middle-class man, a reticent figure in the doorway whom the nuns don’t recognise, whose daughter runs to him, whom he holds on his hip in the old way, where she can sit comfortably for once. He carries her through the school to the yard, her blonde hair almost matching the white flecks in his tweed and there’s a car there, a young soldier at the wheel. You notice the soldier’s ridiculously large cap, you stretch out and tilt it to one side. He doesn’t react so you stretch out your hand again but your father stops you, lifts you over the door and places you in the front seat. Then he opens the door and steps in himself, sits you on his knee. The canvas roof of the car is rolled back. The young man drives, but instead of turning right towards home he follows the coast road, past the tall houses of Monkstown, through the sedate sea-walks of Kingstown, up towards Killiney and the large mansions with their shutters barred. Your father says little on the drive. He asks you what you did at school and like most children, you tell him nothing. There is a slight pressure from his large hand round your waist which increases as you enter the wide sweep of the Vico Road, which he remembers from the train he took with his six-month wife and his three-month daughter, the Italianate sweep of which told him more than all the brown fields and woodlands that he was home. He holds his daughter closer as the blanket of sea disappears among hedges. Her limbs have filled out and her eyes stare up at him with a knowing that is independent of him but that must have come from him. He comes to realise as the car speeds towards Bray how much she has grown, between himself and the woman he rarely sees now, miraculously filling the absence between them, garnering her own life from the chaos between theirs. And the suspicion rears in his mind again with an elusive truth, with perhaps the last truth, the suspicion in Hyde Park, in the London railway hotels, in the figure of Casement being escorted from the club between a phalanx of policemen that the events which would take hold of him, whose pattern he thought he had divined at the time, were weaving quite a different pattern, that the great hatred and passion, the stuff of politics and the movements of men, were leading him merely to this child on his jaded knee, and that without this child on his knee those movements would have been nothing and would not, he almost suspects, have taken place.

  This is Bray, he tells her, you have been here before, and she accepts this information and stares, as the driver turns left off Main Street at the promenade. There is a tiled walk and railings to one side and below the railings, a beach. There is a line of hotels to the right with a striped canvas canopy over each porch. He motions the car to a halt and tells the driver, whom he calls Jack, to wait. He takes his daughter’s hand and walks along the prom and the clasp of their hands is tight and warm as if they both feel, in their different ways, at home. He leads her to an ice cream stand, outside which there is a board, arrayed with postcards for sale, each postcard bearing a picture of the sea front. She shakes her head when offered an ice cream, and so they walk on, her hand bouncing off the railings as if trying to grasp the beach. He misses the canvas huts lining the sea’s edge but realises they are out of fashion now, their usefulness outlived, since the stray bathers are undressing in full view of the promenade. He considers the same question as he walks, remembering the sweetness of his bathing hut, of the
woman to whom he has long stopped sending postal orders. He wonders which is the greater event, his encounter with her or the war of that year, this walk along the promenade or the Treaty bother. They have reached a line of sad Edwardian facades which sweep from the town to make a right angle with the prom and on the patch of green in front there is an old man painting. Rene stands behind the man and stares at his dabbing brush. Michael stands behind Rene. He can tell even though the picture is half-finished, even though he rarely looks at paintings, that this one won’t be good. But the picture still moves him. It is of a shoreline and sea, but not the sea towards which the man is looking; his sea is a brilliant blue while the real one is dull metal, grey, and it is lit by a dazzling, garish light that could belong to Italy or Greece, but not to Bray. The naive sheen of those colours seems to come from a sea the old man carries with him. He has a shock of white hair, a high stiff collar and a grey-black suit baggy round the knees, that balance between fine cloth and shabbiness which could be termed Bohemian. His concentration on the canvas has a slight pose about it, as if he is conscious of the figure he cuts and of them watching. And sure enough, he turns to them suddenly without halting the dabbing brush and tells them in a gruff, Protestant voice that they are blocking the light. Look by all means, the painter says, but leave me my light.

  The beach has finished now and the promenade has tapered into a small stony walk between the hulk of Bray Head and a rocky sea-line. They veer from the walk and go up through a field to the terminal point of the chair-lift. Will we go up? he asks her while a yellow chair bears down on them, swinging on its metal rope. She nods, as any child would. We went up before, he tells her, climbing up the metal stairs and into the chair, you, your mother and I. I don’t remember, she tells him, settling in beside him. You were asleep, he answers, in a straw basket. The chair lurches into motion and bears them up, the wind whistling more as it rises. He points out Greystones, the Sugarloaf, Dublin and the road of her school. She stares at the painter below on the prom. I would like to stay here, she says. But you can’t, he tells her, the car must go down. I could fly, she replies, if I wished hard enough. She stands in the swaying chair, her arms stretched out. Maybe you could, he tells her, looking up. And it is there, when the chair is at its highest point and the cables begin to sag again, that he stands and holds her, he is overcome, he lifts her to his chest and gasps over and over again the same few words. You are my child, he says, the chair swaying with him standing, and her. And you feel yourself lifted, you feel his sharp bristle at your cheek, the trunk of his chest against yours and his words that seem weeping and ageless course through you like that melody and like a child too you are embarrassed, you are even stiff, you feel his ribcage crushing you and you understand, when you find your cheek wet with what must be his tears, you understand how much of the age of reason you have reached. And the chair-lift lurches to a halt and he lifts you down and stands you on the bare Head, the grass scoured by so many sightseers, and he lifts you again on to his shoulders, your bare legs round his neck and begins to walk downwards. Always, he tells you, love your mother. And you promise you will, looking over his bobbing shoulders at the paddle-boats below.

  12

  THE GRANITE WALL was still there, too big really, leaving only the lip of a path along which I could walk. I came to the new gates and passed into the yard, which was covered in tarmac. The tree was sprinkled with green, it being May again, and was leaning backwards towards me, having years ago lost its battle with the wall. There were prefab huts to my right where the shrubbery should have been. There was the old building still though, and the classroom, the window glinting towards the sycamore. I rubbed my cheek against the bark. Rene climbed it on her First Communion day, for obscure reasons. She couldn’t have scaled the trunk so she must have walked along the wall and stepped on to the higher branches. There is still the problem, though, of her scaling the wall. A good six feet. Did she ascend into the heaven of the branches? Upwards through the air, turning reason on its head? Her dress would have been white enough. My cheek, as hairless as hers must have been, I scraped it on the bark, moved away and knocked on the heavy wooden door. I explained who I was to the young novice who answered. She had pale skin with a red flush in each cheek, dark hair and pale blue eyes. She could well have grown into a tender, iron-willed innocent of seventy and her adopted name, when she came to take her vows, could well have been Paul. She brought me down a small corridor, talking technicalities. I told her I wanted to observe, nothing more. She opened a door on the left and led me to a classroom. It was indeed the classroom. Twenty young girls turned their faces towards me. There was a dappled green light coming through the window. I placed my back to it, stood there and observed. The novice didn’t teach and the girls didn’t sit in their desks. They moved around on impulse, took out boxes of equipment, quite bland with freedom and self-possession. We use an open day, the novice whispered. Behind me there was a statue, wedged between two iris-filled jam jars. I tried to observe, but couldn’t resist the temptation. I took one, sniffed it, placed it blandly between my leaves. The beads of water clinging to the stem smudged the ink of my notes. Take more, the novice whispered, we renew them daily. But one was enough.

  YOUR ARMS AROUND the bark and your white front stained with that green pollen. Sister Paul paces the gravel six feet below asking how you got up there. You say nothing, immune to reason. She tells you the priest is here, the other girls are assembled. The tree holds you more than you hold it, your feet wedged in its umbrella. Come down Rene, she says softly. You have your head turned, looking towards the blanket of water. She walks away across the gravel and comes back with your father. He is in his tweed suit, immaculate. He holds his hands up to you, open, waiting to receive. You don’t so much fly as float down. Your white dress balloons upwards. His hands grip your waist and ease you to the gravel. Sister Paul strides towards the chapel, billowing black. Inside the girls are white, lining the oak benches. All the lace is stiff and the bonnets are tied. Their breath rises like steam, to the high coloured windows. You walk down the aisle with him, your dress smudged with the green hand. The chapel is so intimate the statues could be real. You walk past the group of adults towards the priest on the altar, knowing your mother is somewhere on your left-hand side.

  HE CAME DOWN the Head carrying her on his shoulders, down by the rocks and grass to the promenade, where he found his driver waiting. ‘Home, Jack,’ he said and they drove past the bandstand and the hotels and away again. Within the month he would be dead, shot on his way down Trimelston Road to what the newspapers said was early morning Mass but to what I suspect was the Booterstown seafront. The last she would see of him would be at her Communion, and for her Communion breakfast they returned to Bray, to the Seaview Hotel. Lili accompanied them. There, on a veranda which opened out on to a garden which led to a private beach, they ate grapefruit and cocktail sausages. Lili remembers the atmosphere as ‘formal’. Rene’s father was disconcerting in his impulse to please.

  THE SCRAPES OF butter on your plate, yellow and whorled, beaded with drops of water. You shake the drops into your palm before spreading.

  IT WOULD HAVE been a quiet breakfast. Her parents sit and watch the sea and let its sound be the only speech between them. And this is enough, strangely, for all four. For the girls the sense of occasion and the cocktail sausages are pleasure enough. And her parents had long allowed other facts to compensate for what was missing. Separately, each would have chatted blithely to their daughter. Together, they must make do with silence, and the waves.

  THE WAITERS WOULD have recognised them. The scattering of other couples with their children in Communion white would have recognised them too. For Una was at her peak in her thirtieth year on the Bray veranda, enjoying, with the fame that had long been familiar to her, a sense of lithe aristocracy. An aristocracy all the more sweet in that it was an ad hoc one, its precedents changed daily, it combined the tone of ascendancy with the moral comfort of nationalist convicti
on and it was unburdened, as yet, by any sense of lineage. Una’s mastery was total, though her glory would be shortlived. She was an actress after all. Her husband was known to have refused several portfolios. She was Republican too, wedded to the Free State. But this, Lili tells me, only gave her the added lustre of uncertainty, allowed her to carry through the days of stolidity the romance of the days of ferment.