The Leaves on Grey Page 5

  The leaves were coming at the end of our town, true to form; old men stood outside the men’s club and the odd donkey and cart went by, heading to bogland.

  I stood again outside Liam’s home, a child, expecting Liam’s mother to re-emerge and say it had all been a fantasy and that she’d never really gone mad or killed herself but was back and speaking again of Moscow and the ikon in a certain church which frightened her, an ikon displaying a virgin who seemed to have a fungus growing underneath her nose.

  Back at college people lazed over books.

  Liam and Sarah slept openly with one another or at least admitted it to me – and summer came early, a zenith of blue days whereupon we boys, Liam and I, cycled to town, motioning through space and time on three-speed bicycles.

  We parked them in Johnson’s Court and indulged in bacon and eggs in the mornings in Bewley’s – flying first past the gates of Trinity – and as days became warmer we journeyed first to the Forty Foot and swam early in the morning before the gulls rose like white streamers into the blue air. We swam naked, after encountering an ancient Dublin Neptune, belly below him like a cave and balls like saplings.

  In Bewley’s under a stained-glass window, hair grazed with sunshine that had succeeded in entering the glass, Liam told me, ‘To be in love is like ironing a white shirt. You take something of yourself off, wash it, then iron it to perfection.’

  Oddly enough he was wearing an open-necked white shirt that morning.

  Sarah, on the other hand, belied nothing in her manner, talking still about Camus and the war, looking into the Dublin sky and saying things like, ‘It’s got to change.’ What had to change one wasn’t sure, the sky, the clouds, the universe? Her meanings were troubled, succinct, often without irony. Sarah Thompson was going to alter the course of civilization.

  Christine came to see us once or twice early in May. The sun was shining, the sea a gorgeous blue and she, a girl in a pink dress, recognized change, couldn’t account for it, didn’t know whether it lay with the picture of the wilted Lady of Shalott or the Japanese watercolours or elsewhere. She looked about, picking up napkins, paper flowers, antique spoons, watching a pattern in the carpet suspiciously. Then suddenly she turned from the window, her hair lit by sun, looked towards Liam, and I in my innocence knew her for what she was, a girl in love.

  Sarah came and cleaned cups, saucers for tea. Always cups were shining when she served. There were just the three of us in the evenings, Liam, Sarah, me, a window open, the sea calm and conversation lapping like tides of the Irish Sea.

  They slept with one another as I read. I read Tennyson and Rupert Brooke in those weeks, never my law books. There was always music. It didn’t matter to them that I knew. The realm of the flesh was as every other realm. One – to be safe – guarded yet not over-protected. The knowledge of their intimacy was easy to me. I accepted it – at first.

  May 17th was Liam’s birthday and the anniversary of the funeral of Christine’s friend. To celebrate Liam’s birthday we all trooped off to a nightclub. Young men in tuxedos wearing carnations, women variously dressed, Sarah in a hamster-white outfit, dress and cape, and emerald earrings in her ears that were well shown off with her hair tied up.

  The nightclub was a tiny, secretive place, known to diplomats and actors. Tonight we were to have a spree, Liam having been handsomely funded by his father for the evening and Jamesy, Jamesy as always with money. He had a red car now and we drove up to this place, situated as it was near the river Liffey, bodies squelching bodies and dresses erasing the neat folds on dresses. Christine had on a dress with an apple-blossom sheen and reeked of lilac perfume. She looked pretty, dandy that evening.

  An old negress was dancing with an old negro. ‘Red Roses for a Blue Lady’ was playing. An orchestra who looked like overgrown boy-scouts in tuxedos belching away into saxophones. Beside us a British millionaire sat with his wife. They were having a row and the row seemed to spread as the old negro and negress, diplomats from an African country, became involved in the argument in the course of the evening, and the negro lady began singing out loudly ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ whereupon the orchestra picked up the tune and we all danced, Liam with Sarah, Sarah with Jamesy, Jamesy with Christine, me with Sarah.

  French cigarettes were consumed. French wine.

  ‘It smells of the Camargue,’ Liam said, though he’d never been there, ‘fires left after the gypsies.’

  He was staring intently into a glass of wine. I wondered what he’d do if a time came when there was no money, no Sarah, no white starched collar, no black dicky bow.

  Jamesy was dancing with a Dublin senator’s wife and the music eased to blows and whispers about Paris, Berlin, New Orleans while we became excessively drunk and Irish people argued in the background about politics and the African woman broke a glass of wine on the floor before marching off, weeping about her husband’s decision to come to this hellhole, her bottom rising with indignation and hurt like a turkey’s.

  An Irish senator was reciting the Proclamation of 1916 into his whiskey while his wife danced with Jamesy.

  I sat with Liam.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I asked him.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Well.’

  ‘Are you having a happy birthday?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  He seemed so still, so silent, like a waterlily just opened on the river behind his home when we were children.

  ‘Do you hear it?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Music,’ he said. ‘Music from another planet.’

  I couldn’t, I said. ‘Let’s dance,’ he said.

  He led me to the floor and danced with me, and I, humiliated, turned to Christine, grabbed her from a conversation with an ageing, but elegant, poet, danced with her while Liam took Sarah from Jamesy, bowed his head on her shoulder, kissed her neck, squeezed her thighs and waltzed to an American civil war song.

  I often wondered about Jamesy’s real feeling towards us. He’d been drawn into our forces by an invitation from Sarah. He followed her, never sure of his relationship with her. Now he stood, watching a rite. Christine too stopped, watched, was suddenly aware they were lovers. I could feel the hurt in her, quick as a sting of a wasp when one was a child halting one, disturbing her. She reached for me not knowing what she was reaching for, knowing she’d been rejected, not wanting to believe it, realizing that it was over, this dream of communion and simplicity between the sexes, that here in a Dublin nightclub Liam Kenneally and Sarah Thompson were bonded in the kind of relationship that had driven his mother to the bottom of a bottomless river.

  Christine pulled at my shoulders. ‘Let’s go,’ she said. She knew in those moments the essence of the last weeks, their signs, their foreboding. She realized she’d been deceived by this lack of physical intimacy and like an eagle wounded against the sun, wanted to scream until her outcry was heard and her body was assuaged and melted into another.

  I was safeguarding the keys of Jamesy’s car and so we made to it, opening it, driving off into the dawn. I made love to Christine that night. Beside the sea at the Forty Foot in Sandycove, my first time, hers, in the back of a petroleum-red car under a petroleum dawn. She came like a bird, wounded, frigid from pain, screamed a little. I pained her. I was the rugby player, the young athlete, Pan. She was the female, the object. I wanted to hurt her very much and she wanted the tenderness of hurt. She lay afterwards.

  I walked to the sea. An old man no longer ashamed of his belly was emerging from his early-morning swim. Dawn was coming over the Irish Sea, a boat emerged into sight. I addressed the mermaids, the ocean, the neglected and forgotten anchors, took out a French cigarette and sucked it until I thought of the aftermath of gypsy fires in Camargue.

  Jamesy had had to walk home alone that evening. Sarah and Liam had taken a taxi home and Jamesy without his car, without his keys, with his shirt open against the ocean, had had to walk past the flat, the place where Liam and Sarah were united in love.

&
nbsp; Relationships were clearer in the next few weeks. Liam and Sarah held hands. Christine linked my arm and Jamesy, Jamesy uncomplainingly drove us in his red car, a chauffeur now who’d lost his direction. They were weeks to be driven too, weeks of sun, of painlessness. In Iveagh Gardens in Earlsfort Terrace we perched under a larch tree while someone distantly whistled ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me’ and Christine and Sarah looked like country maidens, stored up in summer dresses.

  Her sexuality was strange to me, Christine’s, its images, its phrases, its language. She spoke of the war, the school she boarded at as a child though her parents only lived a stone’s throw from this place, storms ruffling the Shannon, nuns going hysterical in the night, whining like sirens and all the time bombs falling abroad and she a young girl of an upper-middle-class Limerick family in a neat brown uniform, a neat brown suit on days off, with a medallion of Maria Goretti, Italian child martyr, about her neck.

  Her parents were of an old merchant family and in childhood, despite the fact she lived in a big house in Limerick, she had endless crazy aunts and uncles to visit in County Clare during school holidays. Her parents would bring her in a horse and trap to old crumbling houses where the apple trees never prevailed beyond crab apples and spinsters and bachelors waited like the eyes in old stone dragons, never moving, never acknowledging anything, never realizing anything.

  Christine and Sarah both had lovers now. Unusual among Irish girls for the time – I suppose they too were unusual, two girls in summer dresses occasionally wearing huge Ava Gardner-type hats to keep the sun away and to establish the time, the place, the reality of Maytime and student days and the odd quotation from Horace.

  Christine had all but abandoned her studies; love was enough. This carnality among the grass, the thistledown, the odd patterns of sun. I wanted to tell her it was temporary but she would not have believed it; it was the beginning and the end for her, a time, head back on the grass, when my body or for that matter any other body would have sufficed.

  We travelled to the Hell Fire Club one evening, Sarah, Liam, Christine and I, all in Jamesy’s car. It was late May and mild and we looked at the city from the seat where young Dublin bucks had once celebrated with Satan and diced their lives, loves and estates on a game of baccarat. The city glowered a little below us, neon merged into white glow and the sea coming close to the city, frightening it.

  Christine said, ‘I’m glad I’m here, not elsewhere. Glad I’m alive, not dead. Glad that I have my life before me, that’s all that matters, that I’m alive and it’s only starting.’

  Sarah spoke about Eric Satie, about creativity, the forces of the fingers behind a piano.

  Liam said, ‘It’s a shame the whole world is not with us.’

  I said that life was like cards, one wins, one loses and Jamesy, only Jamesy, spoke of the devil who’d once been known to frequent this place, Hollywood, Dalkey, his heritage, Anglo-Irish merged into the mores of the film world.

  ‘I was born into a heritage I had no right to,’ he said, ‘One can only fail having been given lies or succeed totally, break away from it, create anew.’

  Figures walked away, Liam with Sarah, Christine with me and only Jamesy stood at the highest point, hair blowing and the petals of a rose freeing themselves from his lapel. It was drawing towards the close of the school year and one boat from Trinity set up the Liffey seeking some lost Parnassus, young men in white rowing away.

  Jamesy’s father had a small dinner party one evening to celebrate the visit of an American film director. Afterwards we arrived, Liam, Sarah, Christine, myself, on Jamesy’s invitation. We danced. We drank. Again there was a moon over the ocean and white caterpillars of surf outside.

  The American film director spoke of Tennessee Williams. ‘A modern Orpheus,’ he said, ‘singing of man’s lost love.’

  Django Reinhardt played ‘Roses in Picardy’ on the gramophone and we young people drank the best wine, indulged in the most elaborate liqueurs, drinking and feasting as though we were the rightful heirs to this place and these delightful moments. Gradually directors, actors, parents sidled off and we were left there, dancing couples, Sarah, Liam, Christine, me, when a boy came to the top of the marble stairs, drunk, dishevelled. Jamesy. He had a drink in his fist, his shirt open, and suddenly, all of us, like butterflies in winter, froze, realizing something was wrong.

  Slowly the boy walked down the stairs, picking each step. We knew him to have been crying by the tears in his eyes and it suddenly occurred to us that one of us arch Catholic children had noticed that this Protestant boy had been missing from our company, albeit for an hour. When he came to the final step he stopped, raised his glass high as it would go and suddenly, just suddenly, threw it until it smashed against a sparrow’s-egg-blue wall.

  ‘You’ve used me,’ he said simply. ‘You’ve used me.’

  That was the end of Jamesy. He effectively dropped out of the cabal that evening late in May and it made things easier, romance and all that, the undisturbed violin tune of a blind musician on Aston Quay, the humming of a charwoman in a Georgian house filled by light, the astral simplicity of birds perched on an electric wire in a Georgian square in Rathgar.

  A few days before going home after examinations I walked into the bedroom to find Liam lying naked on a bed and I wondered if this was what it had come to, the fine schools, the sleeveless jerseys, the photographs of laconic young First World War soldiers and the leaves, the leaves on grey. I told Liam that I was going to cycle by the sea but he just muttered something and I cycled off alone, leaving a sensual youth on a brown eiderdown, sun pouring in on top of him and his blond head on a sparkling pillow, thinking, thinking of his lover, his life, his youth and the boundless days ahead when one could link the arm of a blonde girl in a black satin dress and escort her into a world of bright lights and grateful eyes.

  Liam stayed in Dublin for the summer. I went home.

  Christine came to stay with cousins in a neighbouring village and I joined her, sitting with her by the river Shannon, eating brown bread and honey, basking under the gaze of country aunts who reckoned we were a proper combination and that I was heading in the right direction, to the legal profession. Ireland was a place where law was one thing and actuality another and those who could disentangle the connection in their virgin nation reckoned to be brilliant, hallowed even. So a variety of Christine’s aunts festooned the way to the altar for us that summer.

  She stayed three weeks, weeks in which she even became dignified. The fields were full of corn by the Shannon when she left, an odd poppy embroidered into the riot of harvest yellows and golds and at the station she looked at me with a beseeching look which said, ‘Please don’t forget these days, the solemn afternoon teas on the big oak tables out of doors, the flies in the larch trees and the gleaming golden knockers on country houses.’

  The train pulled off.

  I knew I no longer loved her. Who or what I loved now I wasn’t sure but not the Limerick girl forever uncertain, forever beseeching, forever, despite carnality or kisses, lonely as she had been as a child, relinquished by her parents and left to have nightmares about bombs falling abroad and nuns wheezing with virginal complaints.

  A funny thing happened that summer which I learnt about later on.

  In early June, fed up, leftover, Jamesy encountered a young Dublin girl while sitting on the steps of Trinity. She was working in a factory but had ambitions to become a model and talking to Jamesy she discovered he had a rich, upper-class accent, touched by the Pacific coast of America, that he was good-looking and dressed well and furthermore that he had a lovely laugh which that day reverberated throughout the courtyard of Trinity College, lit as it was by June sunlight.

  She’d wandered into Trinity seeking the legendary Book of Kells which nuns at her school had always exhorted her to see. Instead she discovered a boy with a scarlet shirt, a dapper moustache, who looked as though he was out of an advertisement for toothpaste. They talk
ed, but talk didn’t come to much until Jamesy encountered her later in the summer, she magically transformed into a model, explosive in maroon and purple scarves.

  They dated. Unlike Sarah she responded to his approach. They drank wine, lazed by Sandycove pier on striped deckchairs, she losing her Dublin working-class accent, he losing his élite one. On 23 August they decided to marry. Broached, his parents nearly died, but being Anglo-Irish were accustomed to ogres, gnomes and happenings of a disturbed and illicit nature. So they accepted it. Her family being of simple Dublin working-class stock, the class who had elevated James Larkin as mini-Christ in the early part of the century, now rejoiced that their daughter was marrying into another tribe, the rich. They festooned her properly, admired the petite female with the virtually crimson hair, watched her walk to the altar in a dress made by the bevy of nuns who’d educated her in a concentration camp-type Dublin convent.

  We were all invited, Sarah, Liam, Christine, me, and we journeyed from the country or from Dublin to attend the wedding in a Dalkey hotel. I had my father’s car which I drove from the country and I collected beatified versions of Sarah and Christine that morning, driving them first to a church, then to the reception.

  The date of the wedding was 8 September. As it was autumn light had left the sky by the time the festivities had reached a zenith. There were the odd in-gathering lights on Dublin Bay, a colour as though in a bad technicolour film on the water and a band of silver on the skyline as though over the skyline there began a different world from ours, out of reach of this country, this insanity, this place where aristocrat and worker could meet in a dazzling reception in a Dalkey hotel.

  The Dublin working-class family was mainly assembled on one side and the Anglo-Irish people, gaunt, suspicious, on another, women who looked lean like greyhounds holding glasses of sherry. A priest was drunk among the working-class revellers – the wedding had taken place in a Catholic church – and a young man in a positively luminous white shirt sang, bewitching fat women, ‘Love is a Many Splendoured Thing’ while one particular fat woman wept. The bride was dressed in green come evening, the groom in white. Film people were there, theatre people, casual by-standers from the newspaper world. The girl, Maria, could be seen on the front of Irish fashion magazines and already she was commissioned for photographs abroad. Jamesy was going to work in the BBC in London as a junior cameraman, giving up his studies.