The Leaves on Grey Page 3

  Why she should stand out I don’t know. Both Liam and I were studying philosophy as a subsidiary subject and listened to the lady expound about Sartre and Camus.

  ‘Look at a constellation of stars tonight,’ she said during a lecture on Heidegger, ‘and ask yourselves what’s it all about, this makeshift journey between birth and death.’

  True to form both of us did, we gazed out the window at a formation of stars over the Irish Sea. ‘A child in the womb,’ Liam said. Afterwards he fell in love with the philosophy teacher, followed her about town once or twice, divined her presence in pubs in conversation with an old fat lady in black or a long stringy cleric. That was all. Afterwards he went back to his books, looked at the faces of Sartre or Camus, asked for an explanation from them, was given nothing.

  Because of Camus’ interest in soccer we both began playing rugby again for a short while, taking to a pitch on rainy Sundays, flying after a ball with pale, fat, fleshy legs. We hadn’t played the game since school. I had to relearn old tricks.

  Christine Canavan came to see us one day. When the game was over we saw that Sarah Thompson was present. She was standing in a heavy fur coat beside a boy in a white suit. We had been playing Trinity College that day.

  Christine made to speak to Sarah but by the time we emerged from the dressing room Sarah had gone. ‘That was Jamesy she was with,’ she said. ‘He’s from Trinity. His father is an actor.’ And she salaciously mentioned the actor’s name, an old man famous for playing Irish priests in Hollywood.

  We walked to the bus. The sun was going down over the Irish Sea, cutting the heavens like an amethyst. It was a cold day, early in December. Christine was dressed in black, with a balaclava, a Russian.

  ‘Soon I’ll be going home,’ she said, ‘back to Limerick.’

  ‘Aren’t you looking forward to it?’ Liam asked.

  ‘No,’ Christine said, ‘no.’

  Come Christmas we journeyed back to County Galway, the limestone town by the river that had spread out with floods. Something of the spirit of Christmas had revived itself in Liam’s house. Aunts filtered through, old ladies from big houses beside little ponds of dahlias or begonias. He was of civilized ancestry, Liam was. If Catholic his relatives possessed a sense of courtesy, of independence. If Protestant they boasted extreme characters, a Methodist minister who ended up pursuing butterflies in Madagascar, a suffragette who’d been killed in a protest in England in the early part of the century, run over by a cab, an earnest pacifist, follower of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, the Irish socialist murdered by the British during the 1916 uprising. These were but some, a scattering of an intelligent and highly regarded family. Crackers were pulled in his house. The spirit of Christmas was engendered. The maid emerged with buxom fruitcakes. But Liam’s father sat silently more than often, lamenting the dead and living with a nation constantly changing, constantly causing him anger.

  Back in Dublin we spied Sarah Thompson after watching a Jimmy O’Dea pantomime one evening. She was with an old man, more than likely her father. We followed her through the streets afterwards, but lost her. Instead we encountered a group of gay drunkards, women with scarves of red check on their heads, and we followed them to the Georgian house where they descended to a basement.

  They were after hailing from McDaids, home of the Irish literati. An old man with a goatee beard demonstrated that he had the biggest and finest bottle of whiskey. An equally ancient man, but one small and leprechaun-like, was urged to song and he sang ‘She is far from the Land’ in a voice that explored the destiny of the song and seemed to travel with it.

  ‘Maith an fear,’ a woman of forty said in Irish.

  She rose, danced a jig with the leprechaun of a man, as a boy, pale, anaemic, blond, played an accordion.

  The frail old man with the goatee beard reminisced about his friend Joyce. ‘I met him in Paris once – you know he preferred sherry to port – and I said to him over sherry, “Jimmy, what is your attraction to red silk handkerchiefs?”

  ‘James Joyce said to me’ – and the man breathed as though the whole world was listening –‘“They’re my red flag. My symbol of prurience, of resistance.”’

  The leprechaun of a man sang again, drowning out the literary reminiscences, ‘I Have Seen the Lark Soar High at Morn’ and a young woman wept.

  The woman of forty was overheard saying to Liam, ‘Leave her. She’s pregnant. Some poet left her with a kid in the womb. Took the boat. I’m only afraid she’ll put a bread knife through her stomach.’

  It was a shocking remark. Conversation was becoming lewd. Someone threatened to pull a woman’s knickers down just to see a little emblem of the Mona Lisa allegedly sewn onto them and we left, Liam and I, leaving literary Ireland for once and for all.

  In the first weeks of the year Liam acted strangely. He was quiet, simple, recalcitrant in his brown coat. He strolled about town, spent less time in cafés. Always there was that stretch by the Green he loved, trees, green grass inside, flower shops decking the other side of the street.

  Anglo-Irish ladies struggled about – literally on their last legs. They wore clothes like the clothes of a Victorian doll. Their hats always seemed more suited to scarecrows but they asked questions.

  One wondered about fallen empires.

  Liam’s father came to Dublin for a day. We had afternoon tea with him in the Shelbourne. The first of the spring sunlight splashed the great orange building. Liam was wearing a sports coat and a tie. His father seemed to understand him more than anyone else. There was a quietness there, an ease. They flicked away ashes.

  ‘I hope you’re enjoying college,’ Dr Kenneally said. ‘It’s a new university but not uninteresting for that. I think you can give a lot to it if you so wish.’

  ‘Children of the élite,’ Liam whispered one evening. ‘Children of the élite.’

  We were sitting in our flat, having finished a bottle of wine. There were plumes of red still in the glasses. Outside the evening showed signs of winter lifting. One thought of Galway at these moments, Liam’s house, the garden, the river. One thought of school, the breezes that blew in from the Curragh. Liam’s white shirt was open at the neck. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘children of the élite.’

  ‘We’re privileged,’ Liam said, ‘privileged. Privileged to money, class, more than anything manners.’

  I realized what he meant but I wouldn’t accept the difference. We had grown up on all the finest things this newly fledged society could give, good food, good schools, fine friends. What Liam was asking simply was: What are we going to make of it ourselves?

  He took to his books more, took to being alone more, left me so that I wondered where I’d been going all these years, hanging around Liam. Before I could answer this question we met Sarah.

  Christine was visiting us one evening. She had become friendlier with Sarah than she had hitherto been, so she’d arranged Sarah call for her. She called promptly. At 9 pm I answered the door. She was with her friend Jamesy. I asked them up. Outside was Jamesy’s car, a big sports car, white with a black top.

  Liam made coffee, introductions done. Sarah sat, admired the view. She didn’t say much. She sat like one used to being attended upon. We drank coffee. Liam said he was going to learn how to make buns. There were no buns that night, no cakes, silence almost. Sarah was the first to rise.

  I led her and Jamesy and Christine to the door. Liam was silent afterwards. I didn’t know whether in meeting Sarah he disapproved of her or liked her.

  The next time I met her I was without Liam. She was after emerging from an Italian lecture.

  ‘Someday I shall go to that country,’ she said, ‘it sounds lovely, Siena, Firenze. Yes I think I’d like Italy.’ It was as though by thinking she was going to like Italy she was giving something to that nation. She’d been used to being looked after, tended to, waited upon.

  I had coffee with her in the college canteen. She explained to me something about her background, or at least I picked it up, fragments
, side comments. Her father was a doctor, lived in the most élite and the most exquisite part of Dublin, a big Georgian house. It had a garden, a summer house, steps on which her father had once been photographed with William Butler Yeats and Countess Markievicz.

  I wondered then, was she playing a game? She was very good-looking and that day she was wearing a pink dress like a child’s. It had a border of lace about the neck. I checked the patterns, little blues and golds, for confirmation of an ultimate pattern. She was an only child, like Liam. I had brothers, albeit brothers gone, working for large firms in London. But she was out looking for something. Her home I was later to discover was one which reverberated with music, fine standards, high goals, but in a shabby canteen I wondered if Sarah had been neglected in some way, hadn’t been given something children usually are given, the right to childhood, the right to innocence.

  I bid goodbye to her on a long corridor. A nun passed us like a fat dolphin. I turned. I walked into an afternoon exhaling of spring.

  Jamesy, Sarah, Christine called off and on in the jaded sports car and brought us to exhilarating destinations like Lough Dan or Annamoe, places stuck in the Wicklow Mountains. Why they came so suddenly and so devotedly we’d never know. They arrived like a gust and did not easily depart. It was March and light breezes were blowing, turning the world to gold and emerald.

  Sarah was adept at wearing scarves, chiffon scarves and silk ones often held by an antique brooch. Once, just once, she polished her nails with varnish. I noticed how frail her face was, almost like an old woman’s, frail bones, a frail, dignified, arching nose.

  Jamesy’s car was a very suitable vehicle for these outings and later in the year we bedecked it with sprays of furze or heather. It was like a balloon in the wind, a mardi gras all on its own. It transported us and we transported it into a fantasy.

  Jamesy was the odd one among us, a boy given to dressing in scarlet shirts, a very good-looking boy with a thin edge of a moustache. He was studying in Trinity, his secondary education having been completed off Hollywood Boulevard. His father was well known and had acted alongside famous stars.

  Now his family had returned from Hollywood back to their home in Dalkey. His father, a Protestant, his mother from an Anglo-Irish family in Connemara, they were a different species. Hollywood stars regularly rested at Jamesy’s home. He was an oddity, a charm, a rare breed to be observed. He obviously wasn’t sure what his relationship with Sarah was, but for the moment he was quite content to transport her friends on Sunday outings.

  I confronted him in a café once. A rose was stuck in a wine bottle and he spoke about Hollywood, the time his father played Friar Tuck in a Robin Hood film and he started weeping when some English director called him an Irish slob. ‘I’m of the gentry,’ he’d told an uninterested Hollywood audience. ‘Hollywood,’ Jamesy said, ‘a series of garages, a series of make-believe Roy Rogers, horses, whores, male and female.’

  I’d never heard about male whores but I was open to finding out.

  ‘You must come to my house some day,’ Jamesy said as though addressing me alone but in fact he meant everybody, as I soon discovered, and we sprayed his house one day looking, looking at a portrait of an Irish soprano who’d once sung in Liam’s home, looking at a Buddha straight from China, looking at a swimming pool, a marble staircase, a collection of drink, liqueurs and brandy.

  ‘Have some brandy from Auvergne,’ Jamesy said waving a bottle. We succumbed, and Christine, presently a little tipsy, fell into the swimming pool.

  Oddly, Christine had taken a back seat since Sarah had arrived on the scene and if you looked you would have perceived a certain degree of imitation. Christine wore gloves, black or grey, when Sarah wore them. Christine wore purple when Sarah wore blue. Christine wore hair combs when Sarah wore ribbons. Sarah more than anything initiated hauteur. She looked at everything as though it was significant. She initiated an era in our lives, an era of probing, of significance. We were all more than prepared to seek the truth.

  Early in April we made off to a Catholic seminar being held in Meath about faith. The seminar was held in a Georgian mansion. Daffodils had already come. They greeted us, little hordes of them, a radiance of narcissi. Jamesy had gone along though he was a Protestant.

  A French priest spoke about the Resistance. He spoke about one Simone Weil, a French lecturer in philosophy who’d died, starving herself in England as a gesture to the Resistance. He told how he’d fought during the war, the moments of fear, the moments of doubt.

  ‘One waited for God,’ he said, ‘God never seemed to come. But one still hoped. One plunged oneself in the Christian virtue of hope.’

  An American priest spoke of the poverty of negro ghettos in the States, he criticized his government for waging cold war when its own poor were myriad. ‘Americans,’ he said, ‘in fact people nowadays, like to believe they’re saved from something. They call it the Iron Curtain. But they wear a belt of prejudice about them. What good are the suburban houses if we don’t have an understanding of ourselves and the society we live in?’

  Teilhard de Chardin was mentioned. Simone Weil was spoken of again, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Charles Péguy, Marx, President Eisenhower, the Archbishop of Dublin. More than anything Gandhi was spoken of. Faith in pacifism, faith in the power of the spirit over the order of violence. Sarah got up and asked, ‘What right have we to demand peace when violence is everywhere being thrown at people? Violence of the spirit, violence of the flesh?’

  A nun said she’d just decided to leave her convent because Catholicism was a pretext for the bourgeois world, and a Protestant pastor from Germany reminded everyone that in the not too distant past men had to die for what they believed in, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, members of the Legion of Mary in Germany.

  ‘All of us must pledge ourselves to something. A simple aspiration demanded of us by Christ. Never hide your light under a bushel.’ A candle was lit and a nun sang Psalm 23.

  There was an atmosphere as there might have been in France in Resistance camps. People slowly realized that there was a gathering of the aware. Slogans were being much abused. Capitalism, Communism, the Red Threat. Poverty was everywhere in Ireland while the Church handed out charity. A few people called together by a nun who lectured in theology affirmed the value of search.

  People retired to the living room.

  Jamesy was heard to ask, ‘I wonder did Jesus ever sleep with anyone?’ and someone played Glenn Miller on a gramophone. Sarah then rose, elicited silence while Canon de Pachelbel played.

  Afterwards nuns, priests and a Protestant pastor departed while Sarah, Christine, Liam, Jamesy, myself were left.

  Bach moved on the gramophone. Heat rose from the fire. Sarah said: ‘I wonder what has brought us here?’ And Liam said, life, at which time each of us spoke, a fragment about our lives. Liam said he’d had a mother who’d died in his adolescence and a garden. Christine said she’d acted as a clown in a school operetta once. Jamesy spoke about Hollywood, the long streets, the desert where pygmy snakes squirmed. Sarah spoke most wholesomely about certain music, certain cheeses, a certain way of life.

  ‘My father,’ she said, ‘has spent all his life tending to the poor of Dublin, a surgeon. He fought in 1916. He wrote poems in Irish. As a boy he built aspirations about the dream of a republic. Now we have our house, our garden, a republic, and a confused and devastated realm outside.’ The music stopped. I talked for want of something better about the leaves, the leaves at the end of our street at home and Liam ended off the evening with words from Whitman.

  Logic and sermons never convince.

  The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

  Afterwards there was a greater singularity about us. We seemed less a group, more driven by ideas.

  Liam wore white jackets about town as it was spring, and Sarah, Sarah, always elegant, was now motivated by a new austerity; she walked down Grafton Street as though being pursued by questions about faith and guilt and enlight
enment.

  After Easter we returned to a different Dublin, Dublin racked by pain for us of examinations. But it wasn’t demented enough not to celebrate Liam’s birthday on 17 May. Liam, Sarah, myself, made all the arrangements, certain cheeses, certain meats, certain bread but a strange and unexpedient thing occurred the week Liam turned twenty.

  A school friend of Christine was drowned while boating in Galway city. Sarah accompanied her to the funeral. They arrived back just when the candles were lit and the curtains were rustling. Liam had made bacon and cabbage, a huge leg of bacon. He was poised over wine when they walked in, Christine’s face tear-stained. The girls initially partook of the party. Then Christine wept. She wept because she did not understand why a girl of nineteen in far-off Galway should subside into a lake of blue on an early summer’s day. Yet I knew by looking at Liam’s face that he understood. He understood the inequality of life and that that girl by dying at nineteen pointed to a moment immemorial when innocence was captured, never to be let go. He took hold of Christine, comforting her, trespassing upon her sobs, sharing, though not himself grieving, knowing somewhere from a long time ago that life pulls these punches like a scarlet handkerchief from a white suit.

  I wanted to know more about these matters. But he resisted me, retiring that night when the celebrating crowd was gone, sleeping in a big bed, to be awakened early by the azure blowing in from the Irish Sea.

  We each tended to our individual examinations and departed from a city grey where poets prowled like hungry dogs. Before getting the train home I chanced on a poem by a leading Irish poet in a pub with a high roof and stained-glass windows. It read:

  Child, do not go

  Into the dark places of the soul

  For there the grey wolves whine.