The Leaves on Grey Page 2

  ‘Goodnight,’ I said.

  The maid sat down with a cat white as a polar bear and put on a John McCormack record and I sneaked away into the night.

  Ireland was officially declared a republic that Easter. Little boys in white shirts and long white trousers banged triangles as they marched about the town and Mrs Kenneally said, looking out a window, ‘Vive la République. Long live a bloody eyesore.’

  The tree in their garden flourished and that summer when the holidays came we returned to town.

  One Sunday Dr Kenneally and Mrs Kenneally drove Liam and me to the country to visit the secretary of the political party who was residing with his mother.

  The house was surrounded by yellow tulips. We drank tea on the lawn from white, blue-rimmed cups. The mother was old and frail, knit together by a series of cardigans and stockings. Mrs Kenneally for once was in white, albeit white patterned by crystalline spots.

  ‘Now that we’re a republic,’ the political secretary said, ‘we can send waves of reverberation into the universe.’

  Mrs Kenneally said, ‘This country is as a house divided. It is bound to fall.’

  True to her promise to her artist friend she went west later in the summer. It was only for a day however but that day I’ll never forget. Liam and I went too. We journeyed through some of the most beautiful countryside the world must know, where red-petticoated girls stood with donkeys against a dust of purple and brown mountains. The car arrived, after refusing to travel certain roads. The house overlooked the ocean. The artist approached in a blouse of white and a skirt of grey. Her face was fat and her eyes huge like a generous cow’s.

  ‘Welcome,’ she said.

  It was a summer of lounging and lazing.

  Drinking orange juice against a sea of evanescent blue the woman – looking in the direction of Tír na nÓg, the legendary land of youth – said, ‘I have felt this pain in my right breast for a long time. Who knows but that my time as an artist is up.’

  Later Liam said, ‘We were privileged to know these people.’

  I was.

  There are always certain people whom you trust blindly and she was one, that woman. Her face, her eyes, her anguish. Towards the end of the summer we approached her, this time in a Dublin hospital where she was dying of cancer. Raised in the bed, indisputably ill, she said, ‘I had two real relationships in my life. One with the sea. The other with Spain.’ I thought of the dust roads in Castile and the house by the ocean and wondered about her art, stained-glass windows in churches all over Ireland depicting the apostles, Christ, St Brigid, wondered why she didn’t mention them, thought to myself that the real artist is an anonymous person whose art is unbeknownst to him.

  She died in August.

  She was buried on a grey day. Elizabeth read an oration. Her blonde hair frizzed at the hem of a black hat.

  She quoted St Teresa.

  Not a friend was by his side

  When his cross he did embrace

  And to us came light and grace

  Through our Lord the crucified.

  She wept a little, turned away.

  I was in love with Mrs Kenneally from that day forth.

  How do you know a winter is going to be bad? Winter 1949 to 1950 was terrible. It was like the war again but this time a war within. We were at school, aged fifteen. There was a need for something. We weren’t sure what. And that winter Mrs Kenneally began having an affair.

  The first wind we heard of this was at Christmas. Apparently Mrs Kenneally had taken leave of her senses and had begun taking short trips to Dublin to see the secretary of the political party.

  She didn’t come home once or twice. Her husband drove looking for her and found her with his college friend.

  We were treated only to rumours. There were lemon boxes about in which Mrs Kenneally had brought home cakes from Bewley’s.

  The maid made magnificent Christmas cakes that year. The pantry flourished. But one was aware of discord. It shot through the household like forked lightening. There was Mrs Kenneally still beautiful, still awesomely beautiful. But her life had changed. She’d fallen in love. She had lost touch with something, an element of chance that bound her to a town of limestone houses, flourishing trees and languorous golf courses. She had seen it again, through a keyhole, a way of life, Russia, her childhood, a place hurriedly left and always lingering.

  ‘Think that a quietness of spirit hath a certain reward, that still thou art in the care of God, in the condition of a son, working out thy salvation with labour and pain, with fear and trembling, that now the sun is under a cloud but it still sends forth the same influence.’

  Back at school we encountered a new prayer and Liam worried now, fears of last winter confirmed, left me often to walk over earth subsiding with rain.

  It was those weeks, weeks of early January 1950, that I recognized that there was an area of psychic response in Liam to his mother, that her life was like a letter sealed in the white envelope of his, that he knew her and loved her, that now he waited as though expecting a calamity.

  The man Mrs Kenneally was in love with was well respected. He’d never actually partaken in violence since the civil war but he had aided the violent revolutionaries of the thirties, men sneaking to England, leaving bombs like baskets of eggs in rubbish dumps. Though there was a streak of the Welsh ascendency in his blood he was anti-British.

  How come I knew how they made love? But I did. I did because I wanted to. My father was a pre-eminently respectable lawyer. I came from a pre-eminently respectable class but I wanted to be different, yes, I really did. She made love to a man with whom she found physical intercourse revived something: snow, a boy’s head of golden hair in Russia hallowed by a New Year’s candle.

  Dr Kenneally was a man of immense calm. Even at the school the world shook with the scandal. It was known in Irish political circles. It grew like a rare and rather irresistible gladiolus. One perceived it, the hand of God, a man and a woman in a small hotel in Dublin making love. Dr Kenneally treated this remonstration of passion like he would a covertly ill patient. He spoke to his male friend. The affair was disbanded. His wife was fished from the adultery. Life went on.

  Nuns could have killed themselves. Their heroine had confused them. What about the train of gifts from convent to Kenneally home, the honey, the marmalade, the cakes, had they led to sin? The town reverberated with chuckles. Dr Kenneally, partially of Northern Protestant stock, held his head high. One could have given him a silver cup for bravery.

  At Easter when we were at home it had gone. Primroses flooded the garden, a turtle trekked over the green.

  Mrs Kenneally entertained an actor from a travelling theatre company and spoke with him about the plays of Middleton and Rowley.

  We returned to school. The ground blazed with bluebells. A boy, alone, in white walked among them. I knew now that Liam would have to walk a long, long time before he encountered peace.

  Her breakdown came gradually. She went to London in May, to shop, was found crying in Selfridges by a Catholic priest. He put her on board a plane. She stayed in Dublin two days. He wouldn’t see her.

  She returned home.

  The river was cool and placid. May became June. Boys in white in the convent clashed triangles.

  Madness too was like stained glass, inch by inch, colour by colour, crossing the sky. She cried out in the night but there was no one there to hear her. She’d known the softness, the regeneration of flesh for a while. Now it came, a chaos, a knowledge that a certain path could never be retraced, that loss was total and that chaos once known, was impossible to hold back. It came, it spread in her like a troop of military horses. It gathered. Sometimes in June when we were home she spoke of flowers, many flowers, a sky of flowers, flowers yellow like her hair, buttercups, yellow irises, primroses. She looked towards the river as though to a release.

  There was no release. Dr Kenneally’s friend was issuing press statements for his party. Dr Kenneally was trying to hope
, holding back a world of madness. She spoke of a doll with scarlet lips.

  I found the maid weeping in her pantry once.

  Towards the end of summer, deformed mushrooms in the woods, they led her away. I became sixteen in December.

  At Christmas there was no sign of her. She was in the mental hospital. No parties, no wine, no lips like petals falling from poppies at the height of summer. I didn’t go to see her that Christmas. I couldn’t bring myself to.

  Liam read Tolstoy at school, he read Balzac, Flaubert, Zola. Sometimes it was as though he’d forgotten about it.

  Before Easter we heard the news. Liam’s father arrived and took him away.

  They were still searching for her body when I arrived home for the Easter holidays. She’d walked into the waters of the river. People sat about the riverbank, women from the poorer quarters of the town. The middle-class women of town said rosaries. The poor were silent. It was this river that gave them trout and pike and now they waited, knowing the worst, realizing that death is inevitable and that the death of one beautiful and rich in life is a death to be mourned more than most.

  It was odd how I noticed signs of the spring, small children playing, primroses urging upwards beside an Elizabethan ruin.

  It was approaching Easter Sunday when they found her. I couldn’t bear to watch, but inadvertently turning to seek my own mother in the crowd I saw her body. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.

  She was very pale, washed up in a black dress that clung to her like a possession. Her hair had become paler with death but no less gold. I wanted to touch her, her earlobe, a curl of her hair. I wanted to tell her it was all right, but a boy got there before me. He took off his black school jacket and not weeping, not wondering even, covered her in his black jacket, leaving himself clad in white.

  BOOK TWO

  ‘Whatever be my age, whatever the number of my years, I am ever narrowing the interval between time and eternity.’

  The words of John Henry Newman could not have been further from the ears of young men beginning at University College Dublin in autumn of 1953. The world was full of trees and young women, young women sporting scarves, young women eager to absorb life, love and creativity.

  We boarded in Haddington Road before being ejected for drunkenness. We then moved into an apartment in Monkstown, Dublin, from which we could view the mailboat slipping out to sea. Liam read a lot of Whitman, he was studying literature. I was studying law. Young men up from the country, not knowing about life but certain of one thing, privileged backgrounds.

  Somehow the image of glass clings when I think of those years, still clings, the fashioning of a stained-glass window, piece by piece across the sky. There were many images, each an iota of this window, each a colour, a hue, a variation, each making a journey towards a total truth. Although always bordered by the ramshackle, the city centre was chaotically beautiful and often you could spy an old man adept at astrology outside a flower shop, or a painter, gone in years, strolling by Stephen’s Green, his mind a whirl of colours.

  To this city came the virgin young of Ireland, bank clerks, civil servants, seamstresses. The tricolour lazed over all, gis sped through the town, in pursuit of uncertain goals and red sports cars flared by Grafton Street, reminding us that there was an élite, not us, the Anglo-Irish.

  Boys going to college, we spent most of our time in Bewley’s, mellowed by altars of buns, looking at the other occupants, old men, nuns, elegant women, under the aura of a certain stained-glass window. One noticed the gis with roses in their military lapels.

  One noticed the Americans, the Germans, the Dutch, the English. It was a city in which one had aperitifs in the Shelbourne lounge and waited, waited for what, I don’t know.

  Liam in 1953 was a youth in a long coat, slapped about him like a nightgown, a loose strap on it, a fall of blond hair on his forehead, eyes like the eyes of one partaking in espionage, and lips that understood the smoking of cigarettes, shattering clouds of smoke into the air.

  I accompanied him in his search, a search that disowned college and trampled the city streets. We ducked in and out of cinemas. Greta Garbo was Liam’s favourite, but there were fewer of her films out and he had to content himself with the best of Hollywood, All about Eve, The Maltese Falcon. Once in a pub he told me, ‘I’m excited by this place. This city is like a handkerchief put together from bits of dirt. There’s something to discover here.’

  Our apartment was always a place to retire to, a languorous apartment holding a huge brown picture of Wales.

  Liam wore white shirts in the evenings, he engaged himself in a rather off-hand manner, reading poetry, tracing the last movements of the mailboat before it left the skyline, tipping over to Wales. He quoted Whitman often and left my ears singing with verses.

  I heard what was said of the universe

  Heard it and heard it of several thousand years,

  It is middling well as far as it goes – but is that all?

  I don’t know why Whitman. I’ll never know, another languorous male in a white shirt. I wanted to ask Liam then, before the charade began, why, why him, why the spontaneity, why the ultimate sense of grief and vulnerability?

  Close following on Whitman were Irish names. Joyce was out of favour. He was too punctual, too ordinary. Liam loved Yeats, Synge and O’Casey. Each was romantic in his own way. Each told a story about the country in which we were now living, each aspired to Liam’s sense of the universe. I couldn’t exactly describe that attitude. All I know it was encapsulated by Liam, hands in his pockets, outside a sky-blue Georgian door as leaves rustled like a piano concerto in Dublin, autumn 1953.

  On 25 November we bought two big old bicycles and cycled into town each day, past Guinness carts and nuns with their gowns spraying in the wind. We careered past Trinity College, stopped in Bewley’s. Breakfasts were generous, bacon and eggs, and we waited.

  Soon fatigued of waiting, of casting poses, Liam dated some girls, young women like ripe tomatoes just released from Ireland’s most prestigious convent schools.

  We both dressed in black suits and dicky bows to escort a pair of Marys to a convent dress dance but soon discovered that it wasn’t like that, we were drawn as the mailboat seemed drawn in the evenings to another world.

  Our first encounters with that world were through Christine Canavan, a girl just up from Limerick. She stayed with her grandmother up the road from where we lived and she was studying Greek and Latin at college. I chanced to speak to her one day on the corridor of Earlsfort Terrace. She was bearing a parasol, a big floppy lilac one bordered by moulded lace that her great-grandmother had borne, she claimed. She quoted Horace at me, hit me on the head with her parasol and walked off.

  A strange girl I thought and then we encountered her again – in Bewley’s. She’d come to feast her eyes, she declared, on the cakes and the parish priests. The priests here had all the variations of the rock buns, soft or mellow, hard or disgruntled. She was from a town of grey spires and grey pavements. It was occupied by priests, a myriad of them and a laity as hard as metal. Her family were wealthy. They’d imported wine from Spain and France for many years; she’d been educated in a convent where almond trees stood alongside benches where ancient nuns rested in the sun. She was certain of her history, certain of her background. But there was something less than certain about her, her hair auburn turning to brown, sometimes wildly red when light caught it, her freckles, her eyes that watered into green and even on a bright November morning in Bewley’s beseeched one.

  Liam took to her, the aura of her childish laugh, and she gladly played games for him. Sometimes she’d arrive in the evenings at our flat and we dipped over the gramophone playing Billie Holiday, lights swimming on the record, a voice serenely speaking of death, drugs and love.

  Liam cooked a Russian meal one evening and we ate by candlelight, hot beetroot soup, Russian salad – potatoes, peas and chicory creamed in mayonnaise, floured with paprika – and shashlyk, and she loved that.
He’d bought the wine – we others hadn’t thought of it – and he began speaking of his mother. Christine was enthralled. The curtains juggled a bit. The sea was calm, he spoke of her blonde hair and her dresses and how she’d fallen in love, why he’d never know. Afterwards quite drunk, immersed in his own melancholy he quoted Whitman.

  There was a child went forth every day

  And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;

  And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day,

  Or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

  There was a silence after the music. The curtains were positively in tune with the mood, waved a bit, collapsed into silence. Liam led Christine home, leaving me to clean up the dishes.

  Christine had one friend called Sarah Thompson, a Dublin girl whom Liam and I had noticed for the elegance of her movement and the richness of her blonde hair. We’d noticed her long skirts, lemon and white, her blouses, the way her shoulders seemed to arch. Somehow we were never with Christine when she was about so we were not yet introduced to her. It was Liam who first pointed her out. He had an eye for the unusual and Sarah was unusual. Among awkward adolescents she had the certainty of a society queen but we perceived her only with nuns and priests.

  There was a lecturer in college who more than anything epitomized our first encounter with this new universe. She was about thirty-five, still wore her hair in a ponytail, generally wore black or long heavy purple coats. It was said of her that she’d once been summoned to Paris to discuss some point of philosophy with Sartre but we only saw her, always alone, walking a dachshund down the backstreets of Dublin where prostitutes rose like wraiths. Despite Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, the people she spoke about at philosophy lectures, she was inevitably and faithfully alone.