Brotherhood of the Tomb (3 page)

Trinity College Dublin October 1968

Her name was Francesca. His friend Liam had told him during Commons one evening. Francesca Contarini, an Italian. Her family lived in Venice, in a golden palace, so Liam said. With servants and painted rooms and a private gondola to go to Mass in. She had been sent to Dublin to improve her English, which was already fluent, and to study English and Italian literature. He had been madly in love with her for over two weeks now.

Patrick Canavan had arrived in Dublin five months earlier. He was eighteen, American, and in search of a heritage. Twenty years before, almost to the day, in the summer of 1948, his parents had said goodbye to the city and set off for a new life in America. They had sent him back alone, a sort of ambassador to the past.

He had found its frontiers and outposts everywhere: in the names of streets and theatres; in the river by night, ripening and spreading like a long, thin stain through the heart of the sleeping city; in the voices of beggars on O’Connell Bridge, young pale-faced women with paler babies wrapped in shawls, selling their poverty for the price of a wheaten farl.

The summer had passed like a dream. He had stayed and got drunk on Guinness and cheap red wine, and late one night in August found himself on the beach at Dalkey, kissing his first girl and

dreaming that he had found his roots. At eighteen, the Celtic twilight seemed full of promise.

The girl had left two weeks later. Kissing on a beach and holding hands while the moon swept over a white sea had been fine enough for the time of year, she said. But those other things he was suggesting would only lead them both as sure as crikey to the fires of hell. He had yet to learn that virgins are Ireland’s oldest, largest and best-organized professional group.

In spite of his disappointment - and perhaps even because of it - he decided to stay. The city spoke to him in whispers of things he barely understood. It revealed itself to him slowly, nervously, in quiet, distracted gestures, in unexpected moments of intimacy. Suddenly, Brooklyn seemed a universe away, a noisy place full of noisy people.

Once, on a long afternoon as summer drew to its close, he lay on the cricket pitch at the back of Trinity and watched a student fly a red kite against a pale blue sky. The moment entranced him: at eighteen, a kite in the wind can seem as substantial as a kiss. At the beginning of September, he enrolled at the College to study Semitic languages.

Autumn was turning to winter now, and an elaborate stillness lay across the grey expanse of Trinity’s inner courts. Inside the 1937 Reading Room, a dim, academic light fell across endless rows of books. He sat two tables away from her, glancing up from time to time to catch a furtive glimpse of her face. Even when he looked away again, pretending to read, her image swam across the page: long, dark hair falling in a stream against her shoulder, grey eyes opening in the book-warm half-light, small white teeth pressed against her lower lip, the slope of tiny breasts against thin fabric.

Strictly speaking, he should not have been here but

in the main library. The Reading Room was reserved for literature students, and it had no books on his own subject. But a large part of Ireland’s attraction for him lay in the country’s literature, which he had begun to discover. He had already become a regular theatregoer, attending performances at the Abbey, the Peacock and the Gate. On one occasion, he’d travelled up to Belfast to see a trilogy of plays by Yeats, directed by Mary O’Malley at the tiny Lyric Theatre.

Now he was reading Yeats’s collected poems, partly because they matched his romantic mood, but mainly because they gave him an excuse to sit in the 1937 Reading Room stealing glances at a girl he might never meet. He looked at the page.

O cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes The poets labouring all their days To build a perfect beauty in rhyme Are overthrown by a woman’s gaze.

There was a play at the Abbey tonight, Yeats’s Deirdre. He had bought two tickets with the intention of asking her if she would like to come; but the longer he sat and watched her, intently reading in the pale green light, the more his resolution faltered.

Suddenly she closed her book and stood up. She had not been in the library more than half an hour, surely she could not be leaving already. He watched her guardedly, knowing he could never summon the courage to ask her out. She went upstairs to the balcony and began looking along the shelves. Five minutes later, she came down another set of stairs and began to make her way back to her table.

As she passed behind him, she glanced down at the book he was reading.

‘Scusi. Excuse me.’

She was standing beside him, speaking in a whisper. He looked up. His heart was beating disagreeably fast and his tongue had turned to lead. Cloud-pale eyelids, dream-dimmed eyes...

‘You are reading Yeats. Yes?’

‘I... I... Yes. Yes, Yeats. W.B. Yeats.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I was looking for a copy. I have one, but not with me. When you are finish, maybe I can borrow this one.’

What? Oh, no, it’s okay, you can have it. Really. I was just... sort of filling in time. I really should be reading something else.’

She hesitated, but he closed the volume and pressed it into her hand. She smiled and thanked him, then returned to her seat. For what seemed an age, he did not move. She had spoken to him. She had let him lend her a book. Not his own book, admittedly, but a book of poems he loved.

For the next hour he tried to concentrate on Deirdre, as though reading it might make it possible she would go with him tonight. But the mournful stanzas only saddened and distressed him.

What’s the merit in love-play, In the tumult of the limbs That dies out before ‘tis day, Heart on heart, or mouth on mouth, All that mingling of our breath, When love-longing is but drouth For the things come after death?

‘Thank you.’

She was standing beside him again, holding out

the book, smiling. He took a deep breath. His mind had filled with palaces and gondolas and sheer, blind terror.

‘I ... I was going to go across to the buttery for a coffee. Would you like to come?’

She put the book down.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I have an essay to finish. They take me a long time.’

He saw her turn to go and thought it was all over. But she hesitated and turned back.

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she said. ‘If I finish my essay on time.’

She finished it and they went for coffee to Bewley’s instead, which was nicer anyway. By that evening, he had two fresh tickets for Deirdre. She met him outside the College gate and they walked down to Lower Abbey Street together. She was wearing a loose coat over a black cashmere dress, and in her ears were tiny jewels that he thought must be diamonds. He had never seen anything so lovely or so perfect.

He sat through the play like someone in a trance. He remembered only Deirdre’s words to Naoise, as they wait for Ring Conchubar to come for them:

Bend and kiss me now, For it may be the last before our death. And when that’s over, we’ll be different; Imperishable things, a cloud or a fire. And I know nothing but this body, nothing But that old vehement, bewildering kiss.

He walked her home that night through autumn-weary streets, thinking of vehement kisses, of breath

on clouded breath, yet afraid even to hold her hand. They talked about the play, which she had found hard to follow, about Yeats, about their studies. She lived in Rathmines with an Italian family who thought she was at a girlfriend’s rooms at Trinity Hall.

‘Shall I see you again?’ he asked when they arrived.

‘Of course. You don’t think I borrowed that book just to read some old poetry?’

“You mean ...’

She smiled and reached up to kiss him. Not vehemently, but enough to bewilder him thoroughly.

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I know.’ She smiled.

Was I that obvious?’

She shrugged.

‘Kiss me again, Patrick. And this time close your eyes.’

Autumn turned to winter, the sky over Trinity grew silent and heavy with snow. They were lovers now, both liberated and enslaved by the unexpected emotions that had come to rule their lives. Snow came, and rain, and days of bright, limpid sunshine when they walked for miles along Sandymount Strand or across the frosted solitudes of the Phoenix Park.

She did not live in a golden palace, though she admitted that ancestors of hers had indeed built the famous Ca’ d’Oro, the House of Gold, whose exquisitely gilded exterior had once made it the most famous of the many palazzi on the Grand Canal. He found a book on Venice in the library and discovered that the Contarinis had been the noblest of the city’s noble families. Eight of them had been Doges. They had owned palaces everywhere.

Her family now lived in what was, certainly, a palazzo, but not so grand as the Ca’ d’Oro. She

promised to take him to Venice that summer, to meet her parents and the rest of the Contarinis. He wondered what she would make of Brooklyn or his uncle Seamus.

He wrote poems for her, atrocious things that filled him later with acute embarrassment and aching sadness. One commemorated a walk they had taken early one morning on a bright day in winter, along the beach at Sandymount. That had been the scene of their first quarrel, an event that had left him hurt and puzzled long afterwards.

Light lay on the sea like lozenges of silver. Far in the distance, beyond Dun Laoghaire, the Wicklow Mountains were veiled and elegant in an early morning haze. He held her hand. Above them, a seagull stooped through a world of violet and gold.

They sat side by side on the sand, looking out to sea.

When the summer comes,’ she said, ‘we’ll spend every day on the Lido, just gazing at the Adriatic. And in the evenings we’ll find somewhere to make love.’

‘It sounds perfect,’ he replied. ‘But not every day. I want to see St Mark’s. And Santa Maria della Salute. And...’

She put her finger over his lips, then bent and kissed him gently. He drew her to him, his right hand cupping one breast. As she lay against him, he unbuttoned her shirt, then bent down to kiss her skin. As he did so, he noticed a small pendant on a fine chain round her neck. Taking it between finger and thumb, he lifted it closer.

The pendant was made of gold. It was circular. One side was engraved with her name, ‘Francesca Contarini’, the other with a curious device: a seven-branched candlestick with a cross for the central column.

‘I haven’t noticed this before,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

Without warning, she snatched the pendant away from him and pulled it over her head. Angrily, she took it in her fist, then drew back her hand and flung it hard, into the sea.

‘Francesca! What’s wrong? What is it?’

She stood, trembling, buttoning her shirt with a shaking hand. He got up and tried to hold her, but she pulled away from him and started walking quickly along the beach. Bewildered, he ran after her, but she pushed him off. He could hear her crying.

He walked behind her until she tired. Her sobbing had grown softer. Behind them, their footprints were already being eaten by the encroaching waves. Finally she stopped and let him put his arm round her shoulders.

‘What is it, darling? I didn’t mean to upset you.’

She turned a tear-stained face to him.

‘Please, Patrick. Never ask me about this again. Promise me. Swear you will never mention it.’

‘I only ...’

‘Swear!’

He did as she asked and she seemed to grow calmer at once. She put her arms round his neck and kissed him on the forehead.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be angry with you. Don’t ask me to explain. It has nothing to do with us. Nothing.’

For a long time afterwards, he thought the pendant must have been the gift of another man, a lover left behind in Italy; though she had sworn to him that there had been no one serious before him, and he had believed her. The pendant tormented him from time to time in the years to come. But he never asked her about it again.

The Living

FOUR

And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon.

Exodus 12:29

Dalkey, Co. Dublin January, 1992

Three in the morning. The darkness inexplicably charged, the silence heavy and drugged. There would be another storm. It lay in his bones, like electricity, moving in a slow current. Outside, the cold chattered briskly, saying things he did not want to hear.

Light fell on light: across his desk, a tiny pool of yellow shining on ancient paper; through the window, a street lamp etching shadows out of the dim room. He could hear the sea in the distance, the tide coming in, small waves taking possession of the land. Or a single wave, repeating and repeating ceaselessly, until there was no more land, only water.

He had chosen the house for its view. It looked straight out onto Dublin Bay, and all last summer he had watched the sea perform its endless, slow ballet, as though it danced for him and him alone. Now, in mid-winter, he was no longer sure he had chosen wisely. The sound of waves made him restless, filling him with a terrible loneliness and a sense of foreboding. It was at moments such as this that he wondered if he had done the right thing in coming back to Ireland.

He rubbed his eyes. The crabbed and faded script was a strain to read, even with the help of a magnifying glass. Yellow light and ochre paper blurred. Fragmented letters ran across the page like frightened ants.

‘C’mon, Patrick. You hadn’t killed him, somebody else would’ve had to do it.’

Voices snagged at him, like branches sharp with thorns. The past was still angry and unforgiving.

‘He was coming in. He’d had enough. There was a signal: Damascus station intercepted it. Why wasn’t I told?’

‘There was a slip-up. It happens. You know it happens. What’s it matter? Wasn’t like he didn’t have it coming. Somebody would have done it sooner or later. Not you, then somebody else.’

In the distance, waves possessed the shore.

He stood and went to the window. At forty-two, Patrick Canavan possessed very little. He paid rent on a house overlooking the Irish Sea: what little there was of his CIA pension took care of that. No wife, no children, no memories he could share with friends, no friends to share them with.