Lark's Eggs Page 20
Her children were Finn and Bríd. When eventually she moved in with Midge they might as well have been his children, judging by the ease of their appearance with him as they all sat around a table, joined in a meal. There was a conspiracy of pretences. But they all knew they were followed, by the sense of the children’s father, by the inchoate hurt of Joly’s friend. When she departed nothing in her mind had prepared her for Joly’s departure. She even thought that by making it easy for Joly to see Midge she’d further strengthen her bond with Joly. But Joly went when Midge bought a house for a cheap price and there was a cocoon for her, her children, her relationship with Midge and her own confusion about herself and her past.
Not a day went by when she didn’t try to unravel her relationship with Joly Ward, the multiple Joly Wards, the woman who had broken so many hearts and left so much patternless debris.
Ireland in Midge’s mind was the country of grandiose scenery that they’d both seen in Ryan’s Daughter in Dundee and Joly did not wish to disillusion him. For him she was haunted by the lofty tourist-brochure scenery that had something unexpectedly malevolent stuck in it. He did not realize and she never informed him that she came from flat land, nothing like the scenery of Ryan’s Daughter. To have betrayed this would have been to betray a secret. You always had to keep secrets from lovers. However safe you felt with them you were also, always, on the run and you couldn’t give too much away. In fact, even in love, you had to invent a pose rather than give your real self away. This was how Joly felt with Midge. Happy but incomplete. At worst an over-made-up character in a pantomime. A rather idiotic character, lots of lipstick on, her neck moving around in a kitchen, to the rhythm of a conversation, like a gander’s neck, a halfwit’s smile on her face.
The black, almost funereal doors of Edinburgh; mystery. Joly walked alone on winter nights when rain beat on these doors. She paused in front of these doors, staring at them in a nebulous gesture. What did they remind her of? Of the door of a vicarage, painted gleaming black. Of a brass knocker with a Cupid at its nub. Of a demure, dignified vicar’s wife. Of the choice of hers to love a strange man. Colin. She was still under the spell of love for him. There was still a romantic yearning in her for a young cleric in black, with a Teddyboy flop of hair on front of his forehead; there was still a belief in her that the purity of this young man still existed. It only had to come to the surface, through complex effort and through earnest search. The past, the black bits of it, could be dispelled. The black bits in Colin came from a general blindspot in his ancestry. He only had to go through it, walk through it to the other side. Easier said than done. But everything was possible. She knew then he was searching for her. She wondered would he catch up on her. There were two persons in her now, the person who wanted him to find her and the tart who, partly out of laziness, wished to be without him. These parts of her were at war.
There was a war going on in Ireland. The rain here waged a war in sympathy to the mood of the war in Ireland. People rebuffed Joly for this war, mainly women. Irish. Irish had a dirty ring these days. Bodies. Mutilations. The bomb that surprised you from under your restaurant seat. Joly had to undergo the ritual of demoralization, because of the race she was from, again and again. Made to do so by people who understood nothing of Ireland or nothing of history. The incessancy of this eventually caused the straight beauty queen figure to look pinched, to have a hint of middle age in it.
The year Joly came to look middle aged she went south with Midge in his truck, on one of his journeys, through Yugoslavia to Greece and back.
The oxen in the fields, the peasant women, the rain of sun on the readiness of corn; renewal. Marigolds in a vase in a café in Belgrade, oh so lucid white wine in carafes on the shelf. Outside a man sweeping up a searing dash of yellow ochre leaves. The smell from those leaves; what did it remind her of? A vicarage. The first time she’d ever really experienced autumn.
She’d been a gauche girl before knowing autumn, but autumn, the smell of the leaves, of the opaque-gold apples, of the rain-haggard dwarf dahlias opened her to many other things; a view of life that transcended anything she’d known before. Autumn, a vicarage in the autumn, was history. It was a symbol of the subjugation of the land she came from. Remorse in some people who’d subjugated that land turned to terror, terror on wife, son, terror on self. Colin’s father had committed suicide.
That floret of information was kept to the very end; squeezed tight in Colin’s pale hands all those years. Colin’s father had beaten him, tried to debilitate him in every way. The young man she’d encountered, who’d just come down from Trinity, was a temporarily escaped version of Colin, Colin after a few years of exuberance and oblivion. But there was the Colin tied to family. The demon Colin. History, family history, had not been worked through in Colin. And he took this inability to cope with what his father had tried to do with him out on Joly. In a kind of loyalty to his father he was crazed with his wife. There was a kind of metamorphosis that occurred late in the Lysaght night. Not only the suicide of Colin’s father was lived over and over again in Colin but the vicious instincts which led to the suicide. Something was alive in Colin. A family ogre, a bogey man, untrammelled evil itself. Joly was to have been the cure for the evil, her peroxide curls were the bait, but she too became a victim to the evil. She left. But there was something she’d done. She’d set an erratic process of redemption in motion in Colin. She’d initiated a humility in his eyes. They were eyes she nearly saw telepathically in moments of intensity in a kitchen in Edinburgh when the music was uncharacteristically evocative on Radio 2.
3
Colin Lysaght had had a favourite toy when he was a child. A horse, white, with a scarlet drape on it. The horse had lain in a garden behind the house, inanimate there, striking against the verdure, always reassuring in its subliminal inanimateness. This had been one of the few tokens of peace when he’d been a child. His father, Vicar Lysaght, outwardly a piece of genteel grey, his frame sometimes seeming to have been festooned in apple-tree lichen, had catatonic, totally transforming fits behind the doors and windows of the vicarage. He used to beat his wife, his son, lock his son in the nursery for hours with just a little, overfilled chamber pot for company, and a long-redundant playpen. Once Colin noticed apple blossom against a blue sky outside the nursery when he was locked in it and knew he’d escape some day.
Trinity College, Dublin; what fun. Colin was one of the brightest and the most popular of the students. Although following in his father’s footsteps to be a vicar he headed some of the wildest of forays from Trinity, to the mountains, the sea, to dungeons of flats where bodies eventually twinned, in a sort of inveterate way. Colin was the rock and rolling would-be vicar, he led a dance once in a marquee, in his black clerical clothes, his oiled and extravagant hair as black. The idea of being a vicar seemed a clever extension of and a foil to being a rock and roll dancer. But still Colin passed all examinations with distinction and was ordained a vicar. He came down to Barna Craugh, just in time to meet Joly in her hour of success. The marriage was perfect, between the rock and roll vicar and the Bin Lane Marilyn Monroe. A few months before Colin was ordained a vicar though, his father had committed suicide and the impact of this event was still subsumed in rock and roll music as was the death of Colin’s mother at the end of Colin’s first year at Trinity. These events took their toll—after the wedding photographs.
4
Shortly after Joly left Colin gave up the trappings of being a vicar and went away himself, to Dublin, where he got a job teaching divinity and English literature in a boys’ Protestant school. The black clerical clothes were exchanged for a characteristic chestnut sportscoat. The grey edges arbitrarily went from Colin’s hair and it all became a subdued black, more curls in it, more divides. The vicarage had in fact belonged to the Lysaght family. So had a house in Barna Craugh. There was a complicated deal made whereby if they were sold most of the money went to the diocese where Colin and his father had functioned as vicars. Colin sol
d both houses. He got a small part of the price but what, for the needs of his life now, was a substantial amount of money. He banked most of that money for a secret, long-term plan. In Dublin he rented a second-floor flat in Terenure, near the school where he taught. He merged into his environment, becoming a leading member in the local branch of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and of Amnesty International. He protested outside rugby pitches where South African teams played. He was photographed, looking distraught on these occasions, among the melée outside rugby pitches, by The Irish Times. He became a familiar protester on the front page of The Irish Times. Few people could have realized that this mellifluous-faced, rather autumnal-looking young man had been a wife-beater, in fact a wife-torturer. Colin shelved his secret on the neon-lit, late 1960s and early 1970s Dublin night. He bellowed protests at South Africans. He held a red flag against the sky outside the American embassy—the red was in fact part of a batik depicting Vietnamese blood, not the red of a communist flag. The October sun eddied through the batik in Ballsbridge. Flower children followed Colin, a line of Protestant, middle-class girls who had long, Pre-Raphaelite, blonde hair and who wore long, fussily floral dresses. Colin became a perfect child of his time and environment.
But he never stopped thinking of Joly and of his children: alone at night in a flat in Terenure, among the sheets soiled with haphazard, bachelor discharges, close to the socks that looked well during the day but smelt at night. In his bedroom the Dublin suburban night came in, the mountains—he kept the curtains always open—and excavated his mind. There were two Colin Lysaghts. The one he was running from. And the one he was now. But each time he imagined Joly both seemed to merge, in contrition. He knew he had to see her again. But he knew the risk of a journey to her. He had sanity in the covert-self he was now. Maybe he’d lose that sanity when he saw her. Anyway he didn’t know where she was other than that she was in Scotland. He couldn’t confront her family. So the years drifted until he had a letter from Joly. She wrote to say she needed to divorce him, to marry a Polish truck-driver.
5
Two people confronted in a kitchen in Edinburgh.
Colin said: ‘Don’t worry. I’m different.’
Joly said nothing.
Colin said: ‘It’s been hard. Being without you.’
Joly said nothing.
Colin said: ‘The children?’
Joly said: ‘They’ll be in later.’
Colin said: ‘Joly, I love you.’
Joly looked at him. She knew her face had become hard. She said nothing. She was the aged one. He was the younger one. There was almost a visible passage of bitterness, of sarcasm, through her face and then she knew that that wasn’t worthy of this encounter and she softened. ‘I’ll make tea.’
She meandered almost drunkenly towards the stove. Scarlet print on a calendar told her it was August 1979.
The children came in later, Finn, Bríd, teenagers. Bríd was in emerald. Idiotically Colin thought she looked like an overgrown child in an Irish dance costume. There was no ambiguity about Finn’s dress. He had metal earrings and his hair shot up in black, electric protest. Colin felt there should be a mediator, a talcum-haired priest from Ireland, a Reverend Mother from a local, prison-looking school, to negotiate them into some accord with one another; he made an erratic and abortive attempt to rise. But Finn saved the day. In heavy, working-class Scottish accent he said, ‘Da, you’ve nearly axed yourself shaving.’ Colin had badly cut his face shaving that morning.
Midge had gone. He’d left a month before. Having come to England in his early twenties he’d driven back to Poland. His mother was still in Warsaw and Warsaw, before his planned marriage in Edinburgh, got the better of him. He had to return there. He’d take it all, soldiers, police, everything for the sake of wholeness missing in his life for twenty-five years and for a kind of harvest-dream of Warsaw. He bade goodbye to Joly and the children and drove a company truck east to Warsaw, on an authorized errand, but this time he was going to stay. All that was left of Poland now were obsessive jars The Vicar’s and jars of paprika and a picture of a Polish Christ. That picture made Colin think his wife and children were fervent Catholics now.
A working-class Edinburgh woman looked at a daintily dressed Dublin teacher. The social chasm was even wider and more perplexing than when they’d married. Colin looked like a harmless, over-trained chimpanzee now, all bones and angles. A woman, standing, looked at him, amazed at the scene that was happening. The children stared at him with convoluted stares as if they’d been expecting him all their lives and now that he’d arrived the epiphany was a curiosity more than a major event. Each time Colin opened his mouth now he shut it very quickly again, without saying anything. Joly suddenly remembered the seas of flagrant furze in the fields around the vicarage in spring.
6
It was her family she’d had to fight more than Colin then. They’d never imagined she’d made any really fundamental decision without consulting them, without involving them—they saw her as irritating them, driving them into furies. But when the moment came when Joly parted from them and became a Protestant they became petrified in their speech. It was unheard of, an Irish Catholic girl becoming a Protestant. An Irish Catholic girl acting on her own volition. An Irish person breaking from the rules, the taboos of their family. An Irish person going it alone, without their tribe. You could have tiffs, yes, but fleeing your family … May God forgive her.
Joly had shaped a solitude inside herself in a society not made for solitude. She could hear their rancour in the vicarage gardens, their screams of bellicose outrage came to her ears. But she left these things some way outside her and resolved on going further on her own way, on plunging deeper into her perdition. Perdition took her to Scotland, to Edinburgh, to a kitchen where she’d tried to lock up all the pain of Ireland and throw it away. But she couldn’t help arguing with them, taking them on in a mental wrestling match during an afternoon women’s programme on radio, venting her opinions of them on them. They’d done everything in their power to destroy her, to strip her of her sensibility and make her one of them. This was what was left of the battle, this still outraged shell, this shell through which visible shivers of anger often went. They’d tried to divest her of everything that was her personality, besieging her in the vicarage. Yes she knew they were out there. And perhaps that sense of siege added unsteadiness to Colin’s unhinged state. The vibrations going between Joly and her family, the smoke signals of livid argument. Something of what had happened in the vicarage was Joly’s fault. There was a battle pressed inside her, a battle she couldn’t share with him because he was one of the main reasons for the battle. She couldn’t give them any success by having him drawn into the argument. They thought, ultimately, she was less than him. She couldn’t let him know she feared that also. She couldn’t let their stinking thoughts pollute her relationship with him. But in resisting them, in keeping them at bay, in the frozen stance she adopted any time she considered anything to do with them she offset something in Colin; whining choirs of his own hereditary demons. Their mutual demons met in the vicarage and created an abysmal furore, sometimes at the top of the stairs when, late at night, she and Colin looked in one another’s eyes. The aspect of her blame, blame for what she’d brought to the vicarage, was one she’d always ignored. She too had an insanity caused by family. There had been a hole in her head, too. A transfixed void in her eyes. Two mad people couldn’t have gone on living together and she left Colin, not without first having driven him to beat her, to flail his arms at her. She just hadn’t been capable of response to his demons. So preoccupied and, in a way, in love had she been with her own. She’d failed the trusting Teddyboy. She’d gone away, carrying a further retinue of self-righteous wounds, from Ireland, edified by her own sense of wounds. Now, the wounds had come full circle and encountered his wounds again. This time she knew she’d made the central wound in his life. She’d failed, totally, to drive away the dark in him. She’d been a bit of blonde mischi
ef that had failed to understand the trust he was putting in her. He’d totally surrendered himself to her and all she’d done was look over his shoulder, arguing with the spectres of her family. The arms, legs, torso of a Teddyboy vicar, naked then, had counted for nothing, this show of tenderness, as against confrontation with a tribe, drawn up in battle ranks by a bedroom door. Privacy had been impossible between Colin and Joly. History and family had not allowed them privacy. But at least they’d stolen one or two pages from an epoch and danced together, before marriage, at an October fair, a couple, a marriage of opposites, beauty queen and vicar, an ikon—the ikon warmed by browns and golds, taking a bronze light from a marquee floor, shelving an image in a village mind, in a perpetuity of images. Together, ironically, Colin and Joly enhanced history. They were, that night, dancing to Buddy Holly, an atavistic reference point to which people would always return, in spite of themselves. They were a source of mystery, something of history and yet that broke with history. They were initiators. What came after didn’t matter so much. They’d broken new ground together and as such would always have an odd craving for one another, be in default without one another. They were, in a strange way, one.