Country Girl: A Memoir (30 page)

It was three in the morning when the phone next to my bed rang: it was Magee, both lucid and furious, declaring love and hate in equal measure, upbraiding me, saying, “Woman, I bring you roses and the only gratitude I get is that you throw me out.”

My nearest neighbors in Carlyle Square were somewhat fastidious, and I realized that I would not be borrowing the proverbial “bowl of sugar” from over the clapboard fence. They objected to Ali’s rambunctious guests, and once, when Carlo, who was by now at Beaconsfield Film School, was loaned the school bus for the night, they complained by letter at having to sit in their drawing room and look out at something so vulgar. Others would take exception to the honeysuckle that I had brought from Drewsboro and that grew prodigiously on the front railings. Over the years many famous faces graced the place, including Robert and Beryl Graves, Robert bringing Jerome Robbins, who was led to believe that he was about to meet Edna Ferber, though he knew that she was long dead.

My play
A Pagan Place
opened at the Royal Court for six
weeks. I exulted in seeing my name in lights above the door. That was how I met Joan and Laurence Olivier, Laurence describing it as “graspingly human.” They were frequent visitors, and for one Christmas party Laurence could be seen through the window conducting the hymn singing.

One evening when Sasha got back unexpectedly from Cambridge, he saw that the front door was open and there was a policeman standing there who asked him his name. Inside, he found his mother dancing with Prime Minister Harold Wilson, while his wife, Mary, and Marcia Falkender looked on. I was not a natural dancer, but Harold Wilson was gallant, unlike Lawrence Durrell, whom I had met in Paris and to whom I had accidentally said that I was unable to dance. A postcard that followed that infelicitous meeting said that if he had read anything of mine before our meeting, he would have looked for my single breast—in other words, he saw me as an Amazon. Feminists and academics, on the other hand, were tearing into me for my supine, woebegone inclinations.

On the opening night of my play
Virginia,
in which Maggie Smith was both radiant and prismatic, Carlyle Square housed a great galaxy of people, including Ingrid Bergman, who came in looking like an Ibsen heroine in a coat with a high fur collar.

“Dark cold mantles the land.” Those were the unforgettable lines in a letter that Jay, the first of the two loves whom the Highland seer had sighted in the globe of her amber crystal ball, wrote to me. There had been a few breezy postcards that somehow conveyed the danger of the looming attraction. I met him by chance in Odin’s restaurant in Devonshire Street, run by Peter Langan, another incorrigible Irishman who, because he was also from County Clare, felt he had the license to berate me, saying, “You aul whore you, you can’t write,” reminding me
of how Anthony Burgess had slated me, had said that after Joyce and Yeats and Co., after the giants, came “the little people,” such as me. Then later he would come over to the table with a bottle of champagne, unwilling to budge, and Sean Kenny would challenge him for his boorishness, but Sean Kenny was now among the shades. An Icarus, golden-haired, who had flown too close to the light, he was dead at forty-four. In a way, he foresaw it. The previous New Year’s Eve, in Kevin McClory’s house in County Kildare, he wrote in the visitors’ book: “I have a habit of walking and talking. I have a habit of walking towards death.” So that night, when I met Jay, a shy man, an embryo poet with a soft spill of dark hair, it was as if the ghost of Sean Kenny had brought us together. He had seen me at Sean’s funeral in County Tipperary, had wanted, as he said, to cross the road and go into the pub where the wake was taking place, but instead he stayed with the men by the stone wall, holding their caps, paying their silent respects. One of Sean’s four beautiful sisters showed me the model of the magic theater that Sean had made at the age of nine or ten. It was of matchboxes painted green, with cutouts of sandpaper for the glitz. He named it Kincora, the seat of a famous king. I told her how much I had loved him, to which she replied, “He broke hearts, that’s what he did.”

Jay was an Englishman who had gone to live in Ireland, and in his letters he would describe the walks that he took by the big river, cold and blue, and how he would then go off the beaten track and find a hidden spot where the older trees had got entangled and made a sort of house, so as to be alone with his thoughts of me. He gave me back the landscape that I had left. Then one day I received a copy of
The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats,
with, on the flyleaf: “Suddenly I meet your face.” An invitation to a love affair.

He would come to England once or twice a month, but I had
this yen to meet with him somewhere in Ireland, to recapture the time in my life before I met him, thereby bridging the years between us.

Castle Martin. Castle Keep. Castle Martyr. Castle Mary. Castle Hen. These were just some of the names of castles in Ireland which would appear in the tourist brochures. I found an advertisement for one that was on the Shannon Estuary and could rightly be called Castle Bullock. As castles go, it was not expensive, but then again I had not viewed it.

It was in the middle of a field, the gable wall gaunt, crumbling, and tilting from the winds. I went with my sons to view it. True, it was on the Shannon Estuary and it did have lookout windows to ward off marauders, but cattle had made it their abode, wandering in and out of the open doorway, dung everywhere, dry dung and fresh dung, and the smell of the beasts off the straw that had been thrown down in various corners. The boys found timber posts to make a haphazard scaffold up to the top floor, and having climbed up, I indulged my brief dream of entertaining Jay in this salubrious gallery.

Not long after I met him in Tipperary, and as it was a warm day, unusually warm for March, we sat on the grass that was pickled with daisies and made unrealistic plans.

That night, as we lay in a four-poster bed entwined in sleep, a figure, half-clown, half-satyr, came in, dressed in a white nightshirt and knitted nightcap. He was both comic and malevolent as he walked around the bed. Jay sat up astonished, then shouted, “Get out, get out,” and the figure disappeared, smiling. But he was no spirit, rather he was someone sent to spy on us, and thenceforth we were shadowed. Yet we swore that nothing could come between us.

A few of his friends in England suspected that we were intimate. One woman, as I noticed from the one time I met her, by a needling in her pupils, resented it, and later on, lifting a rib of
reddish-brown hair from the collar of his coat, she said my name, guessing his infidelity. Another of his friends invited me to lunch, saying mischievously that Jay would be there, three men to myself. Jay avoided looking at me and somehow gave the impression that we were strangers. I left early and went to nearby Portobello Road, where perversely, since I do not like fur coats, I bought a cheap fur coat. It had seen better days. It was a pelt really, with grisly patches of fur. When I got back to my house, he was already in the sitting room, pensive and contrite, warming his hands at the fire. He had wanted to tell his friends, he had wanted to proclaim our being in love, but somehow he couldn’t. Seeing the coat, he said something unfortunate, how his wife might use it as a lining for a better coat, and I ran out of the room, appalled. How we must have chased and missed each other in so many of the back streets of Chelsea, because when we ended up meeting at World’s End, in front of a shop called Granny Takes a Trip, we were both shattered, but reconciled.

His letters from Ireland were what kept me buoyant, and I would read them over and over again. Letters replete with promise.

Then one morning, unannounced, he appeared carrying a small bag with a few possessions, and without any explanation, it was clear that he had moved in. We were living together. We cooked dinners together. He sang Billie Holiday’s “Here It Is Tomorrow Again” as he peeled potatoes. We read aloud to each other from Thomas Mann’s
Tristan,
and sometimes we played Scrabble. Most evenings he would go out to the public phone to ring his family, but when he got back in, it was not referred to. It would have been a few months later when one night he was struck speechless with pain. He could only mime it. His teeth chattered. The pain ran from his heart up into his mouth, and in the early hours I called a doctor. In the Heart Hospital,
where he spent two weeks, I would visit out of hours, and I came to realize that I was not the cornerstone of his existence. I did not bring calf’s-foot jelly or arrowroot biscuits, I was not the wife who would discuss with him his plans for going home and convalescing in the morning room and possibly reading Thomas Mann.

Yet he did not go home when he was discharged, but returned to my house, and so it was as before, except that it wasn’t.

June: the month that Virginia Woolf said mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. I wished that we would have a child and mentioned some women I knew who had had children in their forties. I wished for that. We were walking home from a party in Chelsea Embankment, discussing the guests and the humbug and the high-flown conversation, when I decided to get the key to the gate that led into the square, so that we might sit on a bench and talk, to prolong the night. One small thing had rankled. As we were leaving, a friend of his from his university days, who was now famous, asked for his phone number when in London, and pointing to me, he said, “I am with Madam for the moment,” which stung me.

A new moon, silverish, its shaven rim the color of sulphur, and the smell of the lilac heady from thundershowers that had gone on all evening. There, on that bench, I am hearing words that I never wanted to hear and had never expected to hear.

“I will telephone you every day of my life from now on,” he is saying. But this is an exit line, I say to myself, excusing it on the fact that he had had a drink too many and seeing his old friend, now famous, had revived his youthful days, his exuberant hopes and boat rides on the river Cam. Surely he was not serious. Yes, he was. He had decided earlier in the evening that it could not be. He was, he said, going home only briefly, and then to Germany, to places where the great poets that he had so admired had lived and that, when he was younger, had given him the rash idea
that he too could be a poet. We sat there and cried at the fact that we were so suited and yet were on the brink of parting.

I waken very early the next morning and decide on a walk. A walk would be a salutary thing. In the Fulham Road, idiotically, I look in the window of an antique shop, where I knew he had looked and seen the very same things, a silvered tapestry, a gun chest, a prayer chair, and a faded green velvet portière. I felt the longer I stayed out, the greater the likelihood that things would have righted themselves.

Coming back into my own sitting room, I saw it, the stone of the green ring that I had taken off the night before reflected in the metal of his latch key, which he had left on the mantelpiece. He was gone. Nevertheless, I ran upstairs, thinking he might still be there, but it was not so. His favorite tarnished cigarette lighter was on the bedside table, and since its flickers were a matter of chance, believing that, if the flame caught on, all was well, I struck it and took a cigarette from the packet that he had also left. I probably smoked that cigarette. I had to keep moving. Into the garden, where even the roses seemed aghast, back into the house, going to the hall door to open it, to look outside, then to shut it again. Then I sat down and maintained an almost catatonic calm for the first half of the day, until the savage truth asserted itself again.

I remembered that his was an evening flight to Ireland and that he would be still in London, probably gone to visit the woman friend who had found the rib of my hair on his lapel. I looked her number up in the telephone book, and when she answered and I spoke, I could hear her calling him affectionately. He did come to my house, as I had begged, but I realized what a violation it was. The engine of the taxi was throbbing, as he had obviously asked the driver to wait. He was another person altogether, cold and perfunctory. The married man on his way home.