Читать книгу The Past - Neil Jordan - Страница 10

4

‘I DO KNOW THERE was a spa there. With those sulphur waters that she claimed gave Rene her complexion—’

SO I EXTEND the rim of the postcard even more, down the esplanade, past the steps and the wooden pier, where the palms and hotels ended, where the watering-place was, with maybe a sulphur bath. And Michael O’Shaughnessy, as young and admirable as you said Lili, reading The Times in the oak-panelled lounge of the hotel room, the browns mixing finely with his light tweed suit, English in its cut, sitting only a little awkwardly on his frame, set against the strength of his cheekbones and the tousled mop of his hair. He is thinking of Redmond and Home Rule while the thin light on the oak panels slowly becomes a blaze. Later he will think of Arthur Griffith and conscription, later again of de Valera and parades. But always as an afterthought, to the sweeps of light on the oak panels as he rises and goes to the window and sees the sun and the sea making a flat mirror beneath it. And his wife meanwhile is on the promenade, for the time being without that fiery quality you saw in her, just pregnant now, her belly like a swollen pod proud before her, meeting the Cornish breezes. Una hides nothing of her shape nor of the flush of her cheeks. Her dress is bulky and white and she walks like a billowing flag of a new nation down to the wrought-iron chairs to drink three cups of that mineral water and pray that it will bring the same flush to her daughter’s cheeks. She prays quietly, watching the sea, hoping as everyone does for a magic child. She rises then, her stomach swollen more with the gaseous liquid and walks back, or if the breeze is too strong, takes a hansom cab to her husband who is still by the window, watching the same sea.

Because that was the first month and it would have still been a honeymoon month and the war hadn’t yet broken out or the Parliamentary party been split and their bodies just might have made those shapes on the dampish bed like those maps in which the larger island envelops the smaller one, backwards admittedly, but expressive of an act of union rather than one of buggery or rape. The play of their bodies, warranted by that honeymoon under the ceiling with the plaster necklace would have been a gift to them, would have made their differences opaque. They would have lain, counting the plaster pearls which would have led, maybe, to a plaster dimpled Cupid in the centre, they would have kept smiling at its white penis and perhaps even made jokes. It would have taken two months for their differences to emerge, the repetitive whisper of an old word that slowly becomes a roar, for her swelling stomach to take its toll with its moods, its impatience with things physical, its ancient irrationality that he feels he has met before in different guises, perplexing to him at first, then deeply disturbing, a disturbance he would have kept private, however, that would merely have given to his mouth a tight, perplexed line. His face that later became a mask, unrevealing and yet somehow like glass, transparent and still hidden from her as it would later be to masses of others. And his eyes that don’t want to speak for fear of what they might say would have risen further moods in her, loud silences and even louder words. For she has taken to sitting up late, Lili, smoking cigarettes, filling the enamel basin with them while he sleeps. And from sitting up late she rises even later. He leaves the bed and dresses under the plaster boy while she sleeps, each breath like the exhalation of centuries. And the flush of a month ago is rocked in that sleep so he dresses alone, dines alone and soon can’t imagine things otherwise. And the later she sits up the later she rises until she is hardly awake for two hours of daylight. Is it the fear, he wonders, that as her stomach grows larger until even her billowing skirt can’t hide it she might meet someone from home who will take back news of her advanced condition? A remote possibility, since they are now well past autumn and fine weather and the resort is empty but for the old, the invalid and the local. But he suspects it, hearing her talk of that ‘bunch of jackals back home’. He asks her is she afraid of the prying eye, the rumour carried across water to that country where there is only rumour and everybody is related. But she hears this slur on her native country and her voice grows shrill in its defence, her nationalism growing with her belly. His is beginning to wane. He sees a war on at last, to end all wars. He travels to London to hear Redmond speak, meets friends of his student days in khaki, thinks of signing with the Irish Guards. From a bench in Hyde Park he hears an anti-Redmondite called Bulmer Hobson and the name reminds him of seabirds and kelp and he sees the flushed, hard faces he knew back home surrounded by the black plumage of the constabulary. He hears the words Home Rule used as a taunt and the names McDonagh, Plunkett, Pearse and the words flutter like fledglings in the wind around him, a renewed attempt at the age-old flight. He spends the night in a boarding-house near St Pancras and can’t sleep on the damp mattress. He sits upright on a hard chair the way he knows his wife is sitting, remembering the beat of those words against the wind, they smacked of Parnell and separatist passion, of the strident lyrics of Young Ireland, the dense labyrinths of Fenianism and gradually the war drifts from his mind and with it the thoughts of volunteering and his mind reverts to the fulcrum it has never really left. He sits through the night with the image of the hotel, the sea and his wife’s two hours of daylight, static, placid and somehow irreparable. And when the day comes up again and he can see again through the window the chaotic shapes of St Pancras he rises, takes his case and leaves, having decided nothing, knowing there is no decision, what is is and what must be will be. And as he travels back he thinks of history, sees something old, tarnished and achingly human rising out of the chaos of the present with all the splendid, ancient unpredictability of a new birth. He reaches the station and the last guests from the hotel are waiting to leave by the train he has arrived on. Only the perennial eccentrics are left now, Lili, and the summer prostitutes. He walks the promenade and feels one with these eccentrics. He feels outside time, events pass round him, he is in another time, an older time, his mind, once so energetic, so logical becomes a glaze through which he sees the world scream on a distant, opaque horizon. Only the tiles of the promenade have substance, and the vertical supports of the pier, their shadows in the water. He repeats the word ‘soul’, he feels his fabulous bicep and wonders is it real. The sea falls away beneath him and the flapping palms and holds the sky in reverse, and does it contain, he wonders, the proper order? He sits with Una until his eyes grow heavy, then sleeps before she does. Awake at nine, slipping out from beside her unmoving body, having breakfast in the lounge downstairs, he leaves orders for the same to be brought for her whenever she wakes. He stands by the window watching the sun change the oak from brown to tan, leafing through The Times, Manchester Guardian and Telegraph, reading every inch of the small print, the tiny ads, anything that would keep his mind from the main headlines. And then he walks, Lili, to the now empty sulphur baths and drinks a ritual glass. He has become superstitious about the yellowish liquid. He looks in its swirling for a shape or a sign, a hint of the future, for the whorls of their lovemaking, a map of a world, of the past few months that are changing perhaps not only his life. Then he walks back, a little hurried, afraid to give himself more than half an hour lest she has awoken. He finds her half-awake, then slipping into sleep again. So he walks again, returns again, talks with her sporadically until she wakes fully around seven, dresses and they go downstairs to dine.

‘SHE HID HER pregnancy so well, you see, that no one noticed, my mother didn’t anyway, I’m sure of that and Una must have blessed herself in thanks when the war to end all wars broke out, it could have happened for her benefit, it gave her nine months’ grace. And what was more natural than that he, coming as he did from a good family of Home Rulers, Redmondite in the best sense my mother always said, what could have been more natural than that he would think of enlisting and would spend months thinking about it? And so she must have blessed the Archduke Ferdinand for getting himself shot and the Kaiser Wilhelm for taking it to heart and the flower of Britain’s manhood for rallying to the cause of Life, Liberty and the Rights of Small Nations. But there were rumours all the same. I heard years later from people that hardly knew Rene at all that in fact she wasn’t her mother’s child but was born of a liaison between her hero of a father, dead years by then, and a south of England music-hall artiste or some such figure and was being kept in trust. But take it from me, that’s all nonsense, she was born of Una in your postcard paradise, she was her father’s child.’

SOMETHING HAPPENS TO him. He loses his will and gains it. He discovers that part of himself later to become the whole of himself, the self of indomitable will, of odd humanity and gentleness that we know, Lili, from the history books. His mind becomes glazed, he interprets this as weakness. Certain thoughts obsess him, not in the logical, forward manner in which he had been schooled, but they recur eternally, come to no conclusion, seep through his perceptions to disturb him and then vanish before he can order them. He thinks of death and the soul, of a mystical order that seems to have begun with him, that will end with him. He longs to resume his studies again, the world of books, legislature and ordered reading, a longing that he feels in his stomach at times like a knot of physical pain. But the other element saps his will, seduces him. He orders books from London and leaves the packets unopened behind the desk downstairs. He wakes one night well past midnight and is unsure whether he is awake or dreaming because instead of sitting in her chair and smoking beside him she is asleep, her six-months’ stomach curving upwards, her eyelids slightly open. Her eyes are like needles underneath the lids. He raises his head and stares at the slivers of light, barely revealed under her drawn lids, the source of which is somewhere beyond her dilating nostrils and her closed mouth. With each breath she takes her head moves slightly on the pillow and the lights move too until he stares at her, hypnotised by them and the rainbows round his own lashes. Her breath rises with the sadness of death and with each wave he is carried further from those points of her eyes until he is seeing them across aeons of distance, two barely visible specks of light. It is his own death he is swimming in and the feeling of unearthly ease, of buoyancy, lulls him like a massaging hand, irresistibly. He thinks, I can return or stay here. And his will expands then like a rearing horse, mighty, more than irresistible and bears him back. She is sleeping still, with her eyes now fully closed.

Meanwhile the winter is beginning, the dry cold wind from the Azores whipping spray along the promenade, dispersing hillocks and ripples of sand over the austere tiled pathway. He leaves her around twelve, ignoring the wind. The sun is shining independently of it and but for the cold biting into the cheekbones, eyelids and fingers one could imagine the promenade crowded with its quota of summer strollers. It is empty though, as if the weak sun shines only for him. He grips his overcoat tightly around him and imagines that he feels neither wind nor cold but that just what he sees is real—the bright sunshine, like a blessing, clear and even sharper than in heat, over the pier, the iron chairs, the strand and sea, the canvas whipping round the few remaining bathing shelters. He thinks sunshine and emptiness are his element and so familiar seems the scene that he almost misses the one obtrusive shape—the girl standing in the shadow the bathing hut throws towards the sea.

He saw her from behind and then she vanished, or seemed to. He walked by the tottering structure of painted canvas and saw her again, in a discoloured fawn coat, looking at the sea. From her stillness and her pose, the way her fawn coat merged with the sand and then her head and shoulders glowed against the lime-grey sea, he knew that she had seen him. He stopped and heard the silence of his absent footsteps against the tiles. He looked at the sea with her, its washing exhausted, spent. She was in the damp part of the sand and her boots were sunk. Her hands were in the pockets of her coat and there were threads hanging from them and round the calves of her boots the stitching was split. The canvas flapped, and the palm leaves. He knew that she would turn, that her face would not surprise him. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were resentful and hopeless. They were blue. Could he have known at that distance or could the sea have suggested the colour to him? But then even the sea was lime-grey. He knows she is one of the last of the summer prostitutes, perhaps even the last. She looks as redundant as the bathing hut or the hotel signs. He decides immediately to give her money, if not warmth.

‘They’ve all gone, have they?’ His voice surprises him in the silence.

‘Who’ve all gone?’

Her accent is local. Perhaps he has been wrong. He stumbles for words. ‘The starlings.’

She is shifting her feet in the damp sand as if she wants it to flurry, to be dry, to call the summer back.

‘That sand is damp. Come up.’

‘No, you come down.’ And a humorous flicker crosses her face. ‘The gentleman always does.’

He must climb over the railings and leap. She smiles, waiting for it. Does she notice his honeymoon shoes, scuffed after months of walking, his tweed suit now shapeless round his knees? Has she seen him walking, his aimlessness not too different from hers? She must have. He jumps and sinks to his laces in the sand. She walks to him, faintly smiling, takes his arm and leads him down the beach without a word.