The Leaves on Grey Read online

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  DUBLIN

  The abyss has swallowed my loved ones,

  and my parents’ home has been pillaged.

  —Marina Tsvetaeva

  BOOK ONE

  This is a strange story. As I’ve just returned from seeing Liam I must go back to the beginning to tell where I think it all started, to try to shape events in a way you might understand.

  When I speak of Liam I am speaking of a boy, beautiful, of a young man beloved by the women of Dublin, of a middle-aged man with a triad of expressions, adolescent, sage, nomad.

  To seek the beginning is to go back a long time ago, when the town in which I am writing was a little different and trees hung at the end of the town, trees hung obsessively, many trees, much green at the end of the street come summer, come the arrival of leaves and sun and buttercup blaze.

  I lived up the street from Liam, in a house equally big and composed of limestone. Next door was a cinema. Hedy Lamarr or Rita Hayworth prostrating themselves unduly there in the mornings when I was very small and made my first tentative strides up the street towards Liam’s house.

  He had a flock of rabbits, a flock of geese, dogs, cats, a rainbow of birds and animals. He led them like a young Francis of Assisi across a big green lawn, chiding them, reading them poetry. Sometimes even birds or animals died and when the war was waging in the outside world we buried them, he and I, a boy in a white sleeveless jersey, and me, a chubby child in a blue coat. There was one great oak in that garden, over the patch of earth in which peas grew, and there animals and birds were consigned. As he grew older Liam wore cloaks for this procedure, a druid against the grey skies.

  Nearby was an orphanage. We were the privileged children of town, the extremely privileged, and we encountered the orphans sadly. They had nothing that we had: the food, the clothes, the homes, the parents; but they possessed the convent ground, marsh and grey sky and river always rushing, always tempting, a wild river that took the lives of farmers or farmers’ wives who wandered with rosary beads in the hinterland of the town into the river.

  Let me speak of the town, a grand old town built by an English landlord and possessed of fine streets and a mindfulness of the empire. In the men’s club at the very end of our street, a little black hut, there were photographs of earnest young soldiers with riveting eyes and high cheekbones. This town sacrificed many of its working-class men to the Great War and, verging on adolescence, I recall reading Thomas Kettle – ‘If I live I intend to spend the rest of my life working for perpetual peace. I have seen war and faced artillery and know what an outrage it is against simple men.’

  Thomas Kettle was a young Irish poet killed in the First World War, a distant relative of Dr Kenneally, Liam’s father. I found the quotation in a book in Liam’s house and it changed life for me, I realized that day there was right and wrong, good and bad, that the world was subdivided into levels of opinion and in realizing this I began to notice Mrs Kenneally.

  Mrs Kenneally was the Russian wife of Dr Kenneally; a lady beautiful, near middle age, with hair of gold. She had a firm body, a most statuesque figure and there at the end of the street standing, standing against the leaves, she was to one and all the most attractive person in town, something fallen from heaven, her chiffon scarf blurting out against the trees.

  There was a maid in the house who was from Cork and she in her little kitchen hoarded herbs, hoarded parsley and paprika, and baked huge current cakes or loaves of brown bread. While lounging in the garden on summer days Dr and Mrs Kenneally were served home-made orange juice by her. They’d have light refreshments instead of the wine they consumed in bucketfuls, drinking and celebrating and having parties.

  More than anything the Kenneallys’ was a house of parties. There beside the convent they entertained actors, writers, artists, famous surgeons and little-known nuns. Always nuns seemed to sneak into the picture, nuns from the nearby convent or nuns from far away; nuns like spectators, keeping check.

  As I grew older I touched upon these parties, touched upon the sight of them. They were held in the drawing room. Earlier in childhood Liam built paper castles there for hamsters. Now music played, wine flowed, rosé wine, and a large painting over the fireplace, scarlet and black and skull white, edified an Aran woman. To these parties came the cream of the Irish artistic set, travelling in old cars like hearses or more elegant and recent vehicles. Once an artist journeyed from Dublin on a bicycle, the midland breezes whipping her hair.

  Art, literature, politics were discussed.

  Once an actor from a Shakespearian travelling company, at the time resident in the fair green, arrived in his Othello costume, complete with polish on his face, got drunk, then went into De Profundis by Oscar Wilde, standing on the table, taking off some of his clothes, not all of them. Eventually he was led away crying.

  A frequent visitor was a famous Irish soprano who charmed visitors with songs like ‘I Have Seen the Lark Soar High at Morn’, or ‘Down by the Sally Gardens’.

  The turf seemed to come specially from Connemara, roaring and spitting.

  In autumn 1948 Liam and I started going to secondary school in the east of Ireland. At Christmas both of us, young males now, stood at a party while an old man from Connemara told ghost stories, the fire blazing, and a woman imperceptibly stood by, a woman dressed in black, a stained-glass maker from Dublin come to design a window for the local church.

  The whole cast of a recent production of The White-headed Boy by Lennox Robinson was there, a cleric came over from Rome, the lead singer in the local operettas who sang ‘Golden Days in Heidelberg’. Mrs Kenneally got quite drunk, drunk in a nice way, speaking Russian, saying a prayer in Russian, as doctors, actors, politicians murmured.

  There was a new coalition government in power in Ireland that year and a secretary to the more radical of these parties was present, standing in the background.

  Liam left the party when his mother got drunk. I later found him in an upstairs room, thumbing through beautifully illustrated books of Irish and Russian fairy stories.

  Back at school Liam kept saying, ‘My mother is upset. My mother is upset.’

  The school we were attending was situated near Dublin, nearer to the Curragh of Kildare, blackened now by winter it was where the young of the haute bourgeoisie of Ireland were sent, the sons of doctors and lawyers, namely the class to which Liam and I belonged. As rain beat against it Liam spoke about his mother, fearful for her, wandering over fields radiant with green, invoking her in this male and, for all its effeteness, urine-smelling place.

  She was born in Moscow, grew up in the centre of the city, her father a university lecturer in ancient history. Their family was reasonably wealthy, their mother the youngest daughter of a landowner. She had two brothers, a cat, and lived in an apartment overlooking the church of St Saviour. Her mother played the piano and educated her children in books and music. Their house was full of books, books of glowing colour, books displaying ogres and Cossacks, princes and bears in purples and golds. It was the snow in Moscow Elizabeth Kenneally recalled though. She often spoke of it, standing at a window, the first flakes of winter coming, arbitrarily almost, telling her of the winter to come, a winter of thunderous fires, études by Chopin, books devoured beside a plate of steaming English buns.

  When I first began noticing Mrs Kenneally I began listening to her, and in listening to her I pieced her life together like postage stamps. At these parties at the beginning of my adolescence she wore many dresses and it was perhaps these dresses that I recall more than her memories of Moscow – because she filled them so perfectly. Black dresses, dresses almost like crêpe. Sometimes there were purple or white spots on them. She wore little jewellery, perhaps an inkling o
f necklace sometimes. But it was the dresses which made her and there in a room lined by mahogany floorboards, glass in her hand, expounding on some aspect of the Russian Revolution she enthralled Irish people who had disowned all conflict, who wanted more than anything to be told they were right in disowning the human race.

  When the Revolution came her family moved into the backstreets of Moscow. Typhoid raged and men wandered like smoke, ashen faces, ashen eyes. A priest fell dead outside their apartment one day and Elizabeth would never forget a faithful dog standing by him.

  Even in war, she said, there is loyalty.

  People in town adored her. She was better than the light opera, she told tales better than the Catholic press. Nuns more than anything admired her. She affirmed a world of pain, a world of persecution. They brought her jars of honey from the convent garden, gladioli, sweet peas, and cakes wrapped in neat boxes.

  They didn’t realize she supported the Revolution, that she said over and over again that Russia had had to change and in changing it had altered one’s way of thinking somewhat, that it changed one’s attitude, that one realized there are no rules, nothing to obey, a chaos within.

  Some ancient streak of aristocracy emerged in Elizabeth’s mother – her family could be traced to the court of Catherine I she claimed – and when the lights went out in Moscow and men wandered like ghosts she asked for meringues, whereas most men were in want of bread. It was the terrible winter of 1916. A preacher stood at the corner saying that the world had come to an end. To all intent and purpose it had. The trams stood frozen, the Czar had gone. There was neither warmth nor bread and only fires lit the night, fires all over Moscow, a low moaning beginning like the stuttering of an elderly man near death.

  They were brought to the country. Their father was left behind. There was a river, berries, birches, alder trees and in spring Elizabeth’s mother went to the local hotel to play music. Her brother had grown somewhat and brought young women home. The Whites came to town, then the Reds. Elizabeth’s mother entertained the Bolsheviks. One officer brought Elizabeth a doll. A doll with a black face and scarlet lips.

  One day Elizabeth’s mother disappeared.

  A shot was heard that day at the local station where a young thief was killed by the Bolsheviks for stealing a rouble.

  They were years of big men, men in long coats, moustaches, balaclavas. They came and assessed Elizabeth, a child, and let her be. Her father came from Moscow. She heard him speak of her mother, that it had run in her family, that she’d been a beautiful woman and an excellent pianist but like many Russian women her nerves were bad and forced to crack up she’d sounded a shrill note.

  A peasant woman recalled having seen her wander in the woods collecting berries and a wood-cutter told how she’d spoken to him, having said she was like Mother Bear, fending for her children.

  They were left in the country, Elizabeth and her brothers, a woman left in charge of them, and their father came and went, wearing a beautiful tie. It was said their mother was sighted in a far-off place and to Elizabeth she would always be as a woman in a fairy story, gone into a distance of snow and rainbow sunsets and soldiers riding butter-milk mares. Her father, she said looking back, was a man of great authority. Even in those times he always bore the appearance of one who understood, who held things together. He came and went. His hair suddenly went white when the Revolution came. Somehow as prices soared he always had money to keep his children, guard them from hunger. Afterwards Elizabeth said she suspected he was a Menshevik. A woman who looked after them, cooked for them, sang songs to herself as snow whisked outside. She missed her mother, missed the études, the books, the foreign recipes, especially the French meringues.

  Her mother had had hair of almond colour, shot through with waves of honey and gold. She’d worn white, often with a suggestion, a bodice, a frail border, of emerald or lilac. Her mother had mothered a piano like a friend. Finally her mother had cracked up, gone.

  The peasant woman made hot beetroot soup in the evenings and one day when Elizabeth was eleven a young man, her cousin, came, took her to Moscow where huge crowds were rallying about a small fire-fly-looking man. He took her on a train across Europe.

  She had her doll. She lost her doll – at a border. It could have been any border. Her father was dead. The past was dead. Her brothers were gone.

  They arrived in Vienna. She stayed there three months in a convent, was then sent to Ireland when the sound of machine guns was dying and she boarded at a convent on a street where a leader had just been killed emerging from mass. The order was a wealthy one and they sent her to college in time. She met Dermot Kenneally at a ball in 1933. He’d been a qualified doctor for over ten years, studying at a college from which a fellow student had been hanged. He began driving from his country practice to see her.

  In 1934 she gave up her medical studies, married him, bore him a child. But living in a town bordered by woods there was always the memory of something undone, a doll left behind, marigolds not tended to, wine from Crimea not drunk.

  ‘I have two brothers,’ she said one evening, ‘somewhere in the world. Peter and Ivan. They are beautiful men. They were beautiful boys.’

  And I couldn’t help associating them with a huge Airedale Liam had when small who escaped one evening out the gate, wandered about town all night, was found dead beside a dustbin in the morning.

  Talking about his mother at school Liam wished her happiness. ‘We are all bound into one, boys in Russia in 1918, boys in Ireland in 1949.’

  St Patrick’s day that year, the window by the stained-glass maker was unveiled and a party was held to celebrate this fact in Liam’s home. It had been a day of beating rain and we were briefly home, Liam and I, and so attended. The Bishop was there, a host of clerics, the maker of windows – in black as usual.

  She was sipping rosé wine and in a voice that rose above the crowds quoted Teresa of Avila whom she had depicted.

  See that the lamp that you will bear

  Is filled with oil of virtuous deeds

  And since the soul great merit needs

  There must be this and more to spare

  For should your lamp go out while there

  Your tears will be of no avail

  So you must watch and never fail.

  The Bishop, a hilariously fat man, guffawed and quoted an Italian proverb to the effect that women are great talkers but always hide a double motive.

  The artist said, ‘Women, men, we are artists. The artist needs to create, needs freedom. I have put your window together, piece by piece, tinted glass on lead against light. Now you men of Ireland let us, the artists, put our truths together, our lives, our search.’

  Afterwards I learnt that this lady was actually a devotee of St Teresa and had travelled many times to Avila.

  ‘In a search for privacy,’ Liam’s mother said, ‘in a search for a cell in which one can hide away for one moment and bring forth one’s soul.’

  The Bishop turned in conversation to a government minister that evening, and the secretary of the radical party then in power conversed with Mrs Kenneally.

  He’d been a friend of Dr Kenneally at college. He’d taken to arms and in the civil war defended the Four Courts. He’d qualified as a lawyer, in the 1930s pursued a career in the ira, still fighting for an integrated Ireland. He’d travelled extensively, been to Russia and to the States. Now he worked both as a lawyer and as a party spokesman, unflinching in his support for a united Ireland and a radical reorganization of wealth. He was a tall man, his brown hair was turning gold and white. He held a glass of wine as though it was his due. He spoke to Mrs Kenneally about Mayo in winter where he rented a small cottage, going sometimes to light fires and walk and think on beaches devouring the huge Atlantic drifts of cloud.

  It was like a winter’s day, the rain still beating and men and women hurried into cars.

  Eventually only Liam, Dr and Mrs Kenneally, the artist, the political secretary and myself were left. The m
aid came in with steaming coffee. We sat about the fire. Mrs Kenneally said that she must visit the extreme west of Ireland in the summer and the artist reminded her she was renting a house in Connemara and invited her. The flames died out, people waited. They waited as though for some remark which would fence them against the night. No such remark was forthcoming. The secretary rose. He said goodnight. He kissed Elizabeth on the cheek. ‘Your skin smacks of wine,’ he told her. Everyone laughed.

  The remaining party of people streamed to the door.

  The political man’s mother lived in the neighbouring countryside. He was staying there that night. Farewells were said. The door closed. The artist who was staying the night turned before going to bed.

  She said, ‘I wonder what we’ve accomplished. Celebrating in a land of hunger and pain.’

  Dr Kenneally replied, ‘We’ve celebrated art, your art, your contribution to our national identity.’

  The woman said, ‘I have made a window so the light can come in a little better.’

  She retired up the stairway. Dr Kenneally and Mrs Kenneally linked arms and went to bed. The maid, Liam and I cleared up.

  I became fascinated, fascinated at being almost alone in a room where a chandelier sprayed the ceiling with trinkets of shadow, where a bookshelf ordered books, mainly brown or mustard colour. I chose one. It could have been like choosing anything in the house, a leaf of mint, a tin of paprika, a piece of Dresden china. The book was an old college book of Dr Kenneally by the founder of the college he had attended, Cardinal Newman.

  I opened it and read: ‘This then is the plain reason why able or again why learned men are so often defective Christians, because there is no necessary connection between faith and ability, because faith is one thing and ability is another, because ability of the mind is a gift, and faith is a grace.’

  Liam touched me on the shoulder. I turned and saw a boy in a white sleeveless jersey, a radiantly white shirt, a tie of browns and yellows, thickly woven and thickly knitted under his chin, blond hair falling over his forehead. ‘I’m tired. I’m going now,’ he said. I wanted to ask him about faith, about the oak tree at the back of his house. I wanted to ask him why he had these things and I hadn’t. I wanted to know something about purity. I supposed I reckoned that night that Liam was pure. What most people would lay down their mortal possessions for, Liam had; a gift, a quality of seeing, of erasing mediocrity and putting himself only where there was a high point.