The Leaves on Grey Read online

  This was more than a wedding, it was an exile’s farewell for them. Jamesy’s mother danced with a foreign diplomat and a fat working-class lady fell on the floor. Someone somewhere in the course of the evening was heard to whisper, ‘And the fire and the rose are one', and a band played regular Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman numbers, and young and old paraded their bodies, their souls, in their handkerchiefs, in dance.

  Jamesy was cool to us, a lost friend, but now he and his wife already formed a spurious offspring of the show-business world. He was quickly retreating into his father’s theatrics.

  Jamesy’s father sat in a corner, bow tie open and he reminiscing about Synge and Lady Gregory and Yeats. He claimed to have a tinge of Synge’s blood in his family and that would not surprise me, given Jamesy’s dashing features.

  We danced together, Sarah, Liam, Christine, me. I realized more than ever that Christine was not my requisition, more fated to me as a coincidence. It was like buying one brand of tea because another was not available. In the last days of August I’d visited Dublin, Liam absent, stayed in the flat, met Sarah often, had afternoon tea with her in the Shelbourne. This evening, my fingers tipping her shoulders in a waltz I realized she was my real lover, her curls, her hair, her jewellery like trinkets on a Waterford-glass chandelier. I didn’t know how to phrase the next section of my life. I knew what it was going to be.

  I was going to have an affair with Sarah.

  Liam danced with Sarah, athletic boy, blond-haired, quiff falling like late summer leaves, eyes intense, shoulders hunched. He was hunched like a young academic, broad-shouldered like a military man. He had a black blazer, white shirt, his back in dancing like an instrument in motion. He swayed like a Benny Goodman trombone. I noticed the intensity of his pose, forehead autographed not just by the past but by the future, furrowed a little, the daring of his mother there, her beauty, the day she put on dark glasses in the garden and read a poem by John Clare from a book like a child’s missal. I recognized the continuity of these moments that night, that the dead don’t die but linger, that Mrs Kenneally was with us, woman in a purple summer dress with polka dots, haunches hunched into a deck chair and she expostulating about Stalin or the river Volga or the local priest’s abomination of whiskey and preference for vodka.

  I left Christine and stared, stared at the dancing couple as though at the hurt and brilliance of history, knew that moment that these people were destined to be hurt, Liam, Sarah, hurt terribly, that the good always die a multitude of deaths and I was reminded of the words of an artist long ago, a maker of stained glass, who quoted from St Teresa of Avila.

  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.

  There were gay songs and abandoned songs that night, none more beautiful than a young Dublin girl’s rendition, at the close of the party, of ‘Ave Maria’. I stumbled to the lavatory afterwards, urinating as I watched myself in a mirror, stumbled out, found Sarah and Liam embracing in a corridor, held them, they holding me, all three of us there, a pagoda of love for these moments until I saw Christine come to a corner, spy us, run away.

  Liam made to look for her and I said, ‘Don’t bother,’ and later, Christine nowhere to be found, I drove Sarah home first, then Liam and myself back to the flat, thinking all the time about leaves, the leaves on grey beside Liam’s home and the photographs in the men’s club of intense First World War men, their ladies and a letter from the war front, framed, from a young man to his sweetheart, recounting the day they’d bought a spiral of balloons at the fair and freed them into the air about the October sunlit town.

  I still went out with Christine that autumn. She’d given up college and was learning to type, having moved out of her aunt’s, staying in a flat with girls from the country. We went to films, watched plays, a matter of course, as Sarah and Liam cycled about together or feasted on honey-brown cakes in the Monument Café. Dublin that autumn was full of cyclists on daunting metallic bicycles, rain, queer brands of nuns. It was as though there was an invasion of nuns, nuns from Mars, nuns from Saturn. And all the time – in the unrelenting rain – people queued to see Pier Angeli or Robert Donat, technicolour smiles in a city of forfeited jobs, forfeited birthright.

  But the times Christine and I encountered Liam and Sarah directly were fewer. They were more a couple, Christine and I playing out the last airs and graces of our romance. Eventually that autumn, I can’t remember how or where, maybe over a bleeding ice-cream in the Metropole or over a Bloody Mary in the Shelbourne lounge, the cord snapped with Christine. I abandoned her to the Dublin night.

  Then we were a threesome, almost by accident, Sarah, Liam, I. We went places together. No Jamesy, no Christine, just the survivors, unshackled by crowds.

  There was the flat, less sex between Sarah and Liam, more conversation, meals, boats going to England and evenings with night growing like a New York jazz musician’s version of blue. One returned to a radical simplicity in those weeks. One began again, the complications of sex and crowds less, more an opportunity again to reassess, to weigh up with the mind and the soul, rather than with instant infatuation.

  Liam went to see Christine once, an aside. He told me about it. She was living in a flat with other girls from the country. The flat was big and cold, an odd decimated picture of Roy Rogers on the wall. The girls were like dormice and looked at Liam as though he was a Russian count visiting Ahascragh or Athlone. They’d gone to the pictures, Christine and Liam, sat through The Naked Jungle, a middle-aged Dublin urchin playing with himself and the ice-cream woman, a fat lady, eating her own ice-creams. It was late and raining when they returned to Christine’s flat so Liam stayed the evening there, sleeping alongside her in a bed as big as a country bed which accommodated old farmers and their wives.

  ‘She looked odd,’ Liam said, ‘drained. A look in her eyes like life gone from them and a worry there, a pain that hadn’t been there before.’

  I didn’t really want to listen. I harkened to the chorus of cries rising from a rugby pitch or to the sound of storm over the Irish Sea but not to news of Christine. She was a dead letter, first love, in a literal sense, but really just a person I’d bided my time with, waiting for Sarah.

  In a winter of desecration Sarah spoke of those who’d resisted Hitler. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Legion of Mary, the few voices of resistance rising above a nation consumed by an orgy of evil. ‘There are always those,’ she said, ‘who light candles of faith,’ while macabre Dublin women trailed the streets of Dublin with lighted candles singing ‘The Bells of the Angelus’, in mindfulness of cardinals, priests and prelates stuck behind the Iron Curtain of their imaginations. Liam and I strained to catch Sarah’s words, boats dipping over the Dublin horizon, lights going out.

  We went to a school dance at Sarah’s former school, both had turns dancing with Sarah, spoke to an old teacher of Sarah’s who told us about the Spanish Civil War, a time as head of a convent, leading her community from place to place about an indecisive battlefront.

  ‘There was no clear cause,’ the nun said, ‘just atrocities. War breeds monsters in all camps.’

  Just before Christmas we were invited to Sarah’s home for the first time. Her parents were throwing a dinner party and Liam and I, bearing bottles of paraffin-coloured wine wrapped in frail brown paper, journeyed to Rathgar, becoming wet by virtue of rain edging from the nearby mountains.

  A fire blazed triumphantly. Old men, old women stood around. As in Liam’s home the area over the fireplace was preoccupied by a painting of Aran, women in scarlet, the sea, currachs, men with caps and plaintiveness in their eyes.

  We were introduced to a woman, a niece of Sarah’s father, shortly to journey to the United Nations to join the first Irish delegation there. A middle-aged priest spoke loudly about the evening light falling in autumn on the Blasket Islands, rabbits racing, marigold beds still ablaze and the Atlantic wint
er imminent, huge drifts of cloud over the sun. Sarah’s father spoke to a painter, seated. Sarah’s mother, standing, a raven-haired woman, addressed an old lady about the possibility of starting a polio clinic. Ireland’s entry into the United Nations was much discussed.

  ‘We now have a place among nations,’ a wizened old lawyer said.

  But I recognized something in Sarah’s father that night, a kind of inarticulate disappointment those moments he just sat and took things in. He was a man, sixty, who’d trailed with English aristocrats wearing buttercup-type flowers in their bonnets to Connemara cottages early in the century to learn Irish. A young man, he’d accompanied arch socialists and romantics to fight on the streets of Dublin in 1916. A young doctor, he’d quickly risen to the height of his profession, now a surgeon famed among the poor. But he’d seen bridges crash, ignorant men take over and smother a nation in the abuse of privilege, learning and moral code. He’d seen a country worse than it had been before, grinding to a halt, more than anything a kind of speechlessness about the poor. His work brought him close to these people and as such he was respected, someone who gave his genius to women burdened by too many pregnancies, those who hailed from hideous red-brick flats bearing wounds, varicose veins, faces varicose and painted with generations of suppression and deprivation.

  In the course of the evening a lady sang ‘The Lark in the Morning’ as whiskeys trembled in abeyance, and immediately afterwards Sarah’s mother announced that she hoped to set up a polio clinic in the near future.

  Guests were shown to the door.

  The rain had eased off and as Liam and I left I thought I heard the priest say in Irish: ‘Is spré é an óige.’ ‘Youth is wealth.’

  Christmas at home was brief that year. We were anxious to get back to Dublin to be with Sarah. Liam left his father, a man ageing quickly, and took an early morning train back to Dublin with me.

  Another party was held in Sarah’s house to mark the New Year. We were invited, formally Sarah’s friends. We arrived in sleeveless white jerseys, banded by blue, ties thick, well-groomed young men. It was more crowded than the last time, searching faces in evidence everywhere, the Aran Islands, the women in scarlet all but blocked out. Conversation was more inspired by drink than by intellectual awareness. The ageing social princesses of Dublin pranced about. Surgeons issued disclosures about their existences, ‘Well I’m not really a man of genius, merely a doctor,’ while painters drummed up sympathy for the arts, ‘No one’s buying our paintings except Tory MPs in Britain.’

  A gentle civil servant who’d had his book banned by the government started to cry in the course of the evening while Sarah’s father argued with a man who accused him of betrayal, betrayal of the ideals of the men of 1916, allying himself with the Free State government. ‘I’m a worker,’ Sarah’s father said, ‘a doctor.’

  ‘Joining the queue to Arbour Hill every year. Honouring the dead. Betraying the living.’

  ‘I have no part in this government. I heal casualties. I tend to those in need.’

  ‘And you indulge in this charade, each year the tricolour, the wreaths, the brass band, the military salute.’

  ‘I honour the dead.’

  The man was referring to the yearly commemoration of the 1916 martyrs, a pagan feast of women in black, wreaths, and tricolours with an extra dash of gold.

  Sarah had taken part in these as a child, a doll in black.

  The music ceased as the journalists, the writers, the artists watched, delighted with the fracas, and Sarah’s father calmly, nobly left his enemy, walked with the stride of a Prussian officer to the piano and commenced Mendelssohn’s ‘Dance of the Clowns’ at which point the party began again, the smoke signals of conversation rose again, the priests spoke about Gaelic Elysium and the poets gabbled to one another about acquaintances long dead who had never walked the length of Stephen’s Green without stopping in conversation over a bunch of hydrangeas, discussing art, politics or bygone prelates.

  The new year sent bouquets of frost, frost over Dublin, frost on the mountains, frost on the streets.

  Sarah, an emissary, went to the Catholic workers’ association, to Trade Union meetings. She wanted to know all, to figure out the hieroglyphics of what it was like to be poor.

  Her father worked harder, washing his hands in the blood of Dublin working women, in their wounds, delivering their babies, tending to their gynaecological deficiencies, returning home, albeit rarely, to a wife who had her hair the colour of Connemara crows, and to a daughter who was adept at preparing beautiful meals, nursing a cooking chicken until it emerged shimmering with gold, to be devoured to the sound of Bach and the fizz of French wine.

  I knew by Liam that he felt he was intruding, that Sarah had become closer to her family. One had to handle her more gently, a shell by the sea, a fragment of ancient parchment. One had to wait one’s due. Liam became impatient, thrown back in my company. He began buying a lot of wine, reading Victorian pornography, lying in lewd poses in bed.

  One evening I found him asleep – naked – on an eiderdown and covered him. A foghorn sounded.

  I’d just dated a girl called Laura, bringing her to the pictures. My nostrils were full of the rose lining of Dublin cinema seats and the smoky, cigarette-fumed air. I went to the window. For the first time, looking at the sea, I perceived direction, all the possible paths people could take, the infinite aura of self-made choice. I sat down, read The Irish Times, saw that a cardinal had been impeached by an East European government and that an American housewife had been accused of storing Das Kapital under her bed.

  The three of us travelled a bit, to cinema, opera, theatre, and to little places in Wicklow. Liam, Sarah slept together on Saturday nights. With Sarah moods changed quick as the drift of cigarette smoke in open cafés. After withdrawal she was again the Whore of Babylon, sheathed in damson or black. Her lover made her moan in the night, made her grieve. I often felt an unutterable desire to touch them, these lovers, before they evaporated, and one night, the three of us having gone to see Carmen Jones, afterwards having drunk liquorice wine, I waited until Liam and Sarah lay soundless in their big bed, then left my own, politely putting back the sheets, climbed in beside them, my underpants slipping down, lay there knowing them to be awake, receiving my presence, conniving with it, though never mentioning it in the weeks afterwards when spring returned bearing men with bowler hats in Stephen’s Green and a new silence emerged, the silence of knowledge never taught, learnt.

  Sarah in a vanilla dress, handbag in her fist, spoke to old men about the weather, roused flagging interest in nuns in St Teresa of Avila, caused unbeknownst arousal of sex in young clerics. She drifted, a cataclysm in people’s lives, her beauty that of a Botticelli Venus, her clothes were always considered, informed with a private passion for things beautiful but not too beautiful, exact.

  It was 23 March 1956 when I returned from an outing with the mountaineering club, found Liam and Sarah in bed together, this time without any qualms undressed to my underpants, got in beside them, covered myself and some time in the night woke to find Liam and Sarah making love.

  That done I touched Sarah, her nipples, her furze of pubic hair. I pulled towards her, roused into her, making love to someone who after all was just a nineteen- or twenty-year-old girl.

  The postage stamps that time in Ireland were terrible, were tasteless, the weather generally disgusting, the kind of art being produced unimaginative, the artistic elders arthritic, the fine books banned, the Fitzgeralds, the Hemingways. There was nothing, but nothing, to recommend this retarded island and yet we, Liam Kenneally, Sarah Thompson, me Sean McMahon, danced a fine dance, wore bow-ties, cravats to advertise a vice. It should have been Paris, should have been Berlin but being Dublin the experience was none the worse for that, just that the ensemble of lavatories smelled worse, and the sky implored just too much rain.

  Let me tell you about Liam’s body, fine, supple like hurling sticks. Sarah’s was neat as new roses and mine, min
e was the conventional one, the one that exercised calm, control. But we made love often, Sarah, Liam, I. We bought bottles of wine that had strayed from Algeria. We got to know one another, a biblical phrase, body and soul.

  One never realizes later how long these affairs last, days, months, years. There’s no real chronology, a few hours maybe, but later those hours prevail like years, a time untouched until Greek gods send telegrams and an island, peaceful, baleful, in the Aegean is disturbed by death.

  Our telegram arrived on a wet, almost wintry day when the cherry blossom had emerged in Earlsfort Terrace. A young cleric approached me, a bedraggled late arrival from bed, to tell me, ‘You know your friend Sarah Thompson. Her father’s just died.’

  It couldn’t have been more appropriate. I’d just been reading the story of Telemachus in bed.

  I stopped. My head bowed. Somehow life had stumbled on its own truth.

  She held daffodils at the funeral. She was dressed in black alongside her mother. Her curls fused from beneath a cap, a bonnet of gold. A priest read an oration. Wizened Dublin charwomen held back tears against the rain.

  The funeral over, words were few. There was a reception in Sarah’s home, salad, wine, as though this was not the aftermath of a funeral but the celebration of art, life, conquest. Sarah, unprompted, reached for the piano keys and played, silence drifting and heads turning, Mendelssohn’s ‘Dance of the Clowns’.

  The bereaved daughter visited Liam’s home after Easter. She stayed in a big room looking towards the convent, the tiny sanctuaries for birds and nuns, the episcopal river. The wail of orphans called her from her bed, little boys and girls still without parents, the air rebounding with their pain.