Portobello Notebook (5 page)

SOON LETTIE THE MAID
was chatting with him as she cleaned his room. He walked the fields with Roy, the steward, searching for a flat place to play cricket when summer came. George’s fiancée, Joy, a big young woman in a knitted brown dress, came to visit, bringing a bottle of elderberry wine, which they shared in the staff room, a glass each, when Mr Porter wasn’t there. Tom began a debating society, where on Saturday nights the boys argued uneasily, as if they were being set against each other. Justin
understood
their fear, and as he did his own clouds cleared and the Pole star shone through again. Why tire his neck looking up for that balloon? He was in this small place, beginning a life of his own. He began to write letters to his old friends in Dublin, describing it all.

ONE SUNDAY
his parents came down to visit, and he showed them around the school. His father looked at the broad rich fields and shook his head in wonder. ‘We were only crofters,’ he said. They were country people who had prospered in the city, but never been at ease with their wealth. They were private people, upset by
intrusion. They were silent as the headmaster’s wife placed them socially and was able to patronize them. As his father shifted from foot to foot like a shy boy, Justin realized that homesick was a poor word for what he had felt in his year abroad; amputated was more accurate. When they were alone again, his mother asked where the Catholic church was, and suddenly angry he told her that he no longer went to Mass. She began to cry. His father’s face went grey; he turned aside and whispered hoarsely, ‘Why did you have to tell her?’ His mother was still crying when she left. But as he stood on the gravel and watched them drive away, he felt relieved. Then the lost feeling returned. His old home was no longer his home. This school was all he had now. When the summer term came and the headmaster asked if he would return in the autumn, he said a helpless Yes.

WHEN HE HEARD
that he would be paid every month of the holidays, he decided to go to France, to improve his French. The shock of being alone abroad was still there, but when he saw an Irish nun smile helplessly on the platform at Calais, then scowl as the porter walked past, he was driven to new courage. He took a train to a seaport and found lodgings by the harbour. He bought a thick English novel,
Sinister Street
, which he rationed to fifty pages a day; then he walked the town. When he visited an old prison and found an Irish name carved on the floorboards, he was encouraged again; walking the beach and looking at beautiful distant girls until it was time to go to the restaurant, the big event of his day. As the waitress served his meal one evening her bare shoulder brushed his hair, and she said, ‘
Pardon
.’

New extremes of loneliness passed over and turned into new confidence. On his way back he spent a night in Paris, where he was so proud of his achievement that the pavements felt like springy
grass. In the Gare du Nord, waiting for the boat train, he met someone he knew from home, and the few words they exchanged brought him down to earth, which made him realize that this was his world too, if he wanted it, if he was able for it – and he was!

IT MADE THE SCHOOL
and countryside around seem less confining. When he gave Lettie his French cigarettes, which he didn’t like, she sat on his bed and smoked one as they talked. When he went down to the pub in the evening, the countrymen remembered his name. The only other countryside he had known was the poor west of Ireland, which his parents had left, where everyone had equally small holdings. It was different here. There were farm labourers without any land, small farmers with twenty or thirty acres, strong farmers who kept hunting horses, and gentry who had somehow held onto most of their estates. It was a stratified society, as cut and sliced as the bog by class and religion.

From the pub he knew the Catholics, and from Sunday church with the boys he knew the Protestants. The Troubles had begun in Northern Ireland, and now he was pressed to take sides. When Mike Reilly got drunk one night and shouted that Bill Galloway was a bloody Orangeman and should be burned out, Justin nodded, shook his head and said, ‘Who?’ It felt easier when Colonel Browne, the very fat, old man who sat in the front bench of the church, asked him to tea one afternoon. As he walked up a long avenue to a mansion looking over a lake, he felt a glow of snobbish pleasure, but of adventure too: his small safe world was widening. When he recognized the woman who carried the tea tray into the drawing room, he smiled and said, ‘Hello, Rose.’

Colonel Browne laughed and said, ‘I’d no idea you were on such terms!’ Mrs Browne stroked a Siamese cat on her lap and talked of the local people. The girls threw their illegitimate babies
into the lake, she said: that was why they never drank the lake water. Colonel Browne talked of a local man who had been their butler, who after a row one day had said he could make life very unpleasant for them. That led straight to politics. When Colonel Browne spoke of IRA assassins, Justin sweated as he tried to explain why the Troubles were inevitable. He was afraid they would throw him out of that big safe house, but Mrs Browne just reached for her cup of China tea – her sun-tanned chest wrinkling like the lake when the wind blew over it; and Colonel Browne just smiled, showing the shining silver fillings in his teeth – and listened, which made Justin talk more. Despite himself, he was growing up.

One night he walked home from the pub with Mike Reilly, and as they drank whiskey from teacups in a ruined kitchen he learned that Mike’s wife had gone. Mike pointed to a faded newspaper photo pinned to the wall, of himself as a long-legged, handsome young jockey winning a race. That was all he remembered, though they talked until almost dawn; and though he was drunk he made his way back to the school over fields white with frost and
moonlight
. He was finding his feet.

JANE
, one of his old university friends, answered his letter with an invitation to a party. The embossed card said At Home. He had been away for so long that he felt like the schoolboys as he drove up to the city, and through the suburban roads where he had been reared. He didn’t call to his parents: he was starting a new life of his own. Jane told the others what an amusing life he led, but when he didn’t amuse them, they went back to talking among themselves. Most of them were lawyers, they all wore suits; he counted five sets of cuff links as he stood alone. Jane introduced him to a shy fat girl with goose-pimpled legs, then joined the others’ conversation. The girl looked at him in silence, as if at her reflection in a mirror.
Then he walked over to Jane and said, ‘I have to drive back to the country. I’d better go.’

‘Of course. I understand.’ As she saw him to the door, she squeezed his arm and said, ‘Keep in touch.’

He squeezed her arm and said, ‘We must go out together some night.’

‘Of course.’ She shook his hand firmly, to make things clear.

It made something clear. As he drove back to the school, he said suddenly aloud, ‘Jesus Christ, never again.’

THE OTHER SIDE
of his old life had been in the west, where as a boy he had spent holidays. Now, when an uncle died suddenly, he drove there to the funeral. After a year in his new home this
countryside
of memories seemed threadbare. He had half-forgotten the flattened tar-barrels and old bedframes used as gates, the poor small fields, the friendly Lancashire accents of the women who had married local emigrants. His uncle had been one of those emigrants, but had never married; nor had his aunt. She cried and put her arms about him and asked why had God taken her brother? She had asked for so little, she said: someone to watch TV with in the evenings, to have sitting across the hearth. But as he watched TV with her in the evenings, as she sat the teapot on his Penguin book, talked of her sister’s drinking, took the tongs irritably to rearrange the fire he had laid, his anger returned. It was from that cramped home as much as from his Dublin one that he had fled abroad, and failed. He was glad to return to the middle ground he had found for himself, where he could start again, alone.

AS ANOTHER
spring came he went for walks along the back roads, exploring. One day at a signpost he met an old man on a bicycle, with a bundle on the back-carrier, who asked him the way to
Ballinasloe
. Justin showed him down to the main road. It stayed with him all night. Sitting at the head of the big classroom, supervising the boys’ study, he pictured the old man pushing through the dark to that country his mother had come from; and for a wonderful few hours he understood, and felt freed from her fierce nostalgia. Slowly, he was waking up.

The headmaster had his own nostalgia for an imagined world, and as spring turned into summer he spoke of cricket again. He showed Justin a few stumps and a cracked bat in a tea chest, then directed him to Bill Galloway who might have something more. Following another back road, Justin found that it became the avenue to a big house. Wind was blowing through old beech trees; wood pigeons with puffed-out pink breast feathers looked down at him with small bright black eyes. It was a place where he would have expected to find another Anglo-Irish gentleman, but Bill Galloway was plain.

He had been to the school where Justin was teaching, and his accent was as local as Mike Reilly’s, though with a firm tone. He said he played some local cricket and would gladly lend his equipment when the school had a proper field. He was up in his tractor, setting out to plough, but he sat there chatting of his life. His father had been born on a farm in England, but a remote relation had left him this Irish farm. Not sure what to do, he and his workman had cycled to Liverpool every Friday evening, taken the boat to Dublin and cycled down to maintain this place; then on Monday returned to England for another week. In the end, Bill said, his father had settled in this better, Irish place. Justin asked if he had ever seen the English farm. Bill shook his head and said that he had never been to England.

A man crossed the yard to join them. Justin remarked on his voice, and he said that he had come from Mayo to work there twenty years ago. When he had gone, Bill said that he had come with only the clothes he stood up in and a kettle. The random way each had settled there, the way Bill spoke of the west of Ireland in the same easy incurious voice he spoke of England made this small safe place seem open to the wide world. Justin’s walks took him further week by week.

Bob was another of the Protestant neighbours, a tall, lean, serious man with black curly hair, silver-streaked. He wore an old long coat of brown herringbone tweed to church on Sunday, and afterwards crossed the road to the pub for a single glass of whiskey. Bachelors tend to be very tidy or very untidy. Bob was very tidy. He was whitewashing the gateway to his farm when Justin wandered by one day. Bob finished a slow brushstroke, set the brush across the pail, then stood to talk. His brown hands were spotless. His great-grandfather had come from Yorkshire, he said, and arrived in this place only because it was as far as the fare allowed. The coach had set him down; he had found a bed for the night, and soon after found a job as what Bob called an ‘usher’ in the school where Justin taught. He had married, and in time his son had bought a few dozen acres, which Bob inherited. Justin learned that Bob had no time for parsons, or Anglo-Irish landowners; that he had refused Colonel Browne permission to shoot over his land, and refused the hunt, too. Then Bob picked up his brush and went back to whitewashing his gateway.

EACH OF THOSE
meetings gave Justin a root in that small place, and he felt himself growing with its nourishment. He was always hungry at dinnertime, and so tired after the day’s work that he slept without pills. One Sunday afternoon a pack of beagles met at
the crossroads, and he recognized the master as a man he had seen working in the National Library in a khaki coat. Seeing him here in a green velvet coat, up to his knees in wet rushes, drew the city from the smothering past into Justin’s own present experience, and another root went down into that land. His aunt who drank phoned late one night, to ask what he had been saying about her to his other aunt; she cried, then asked for her car back, and put down the phone. His other aunt wrote to say her sister was drinking again, and asked him to visit soon. He said that he couldn’t, as he had no car. He was relieved. Now he was alone in this middle place with his new friends.

MIKE REILLY
saddled an old hunter, showed him how his legs should grip and the stirrups take his weight, so he balanced on the rhythm of the horse. As another summer came he rode in the evenings up and down Mike’s sloping fields, walled by wild hawthorn on the hilltop and at the bottom by a double ditch, a dyke of deep water between huge earthen banks where old trees grew. Walking to Mike’s stable one evening, he stopped at the main road and – as anxious, as eager as if he were jumping the dyke – thumbed a lift into town, where he stood at the canal bridge until another car pulled alongside.

The man chatted about local news and asked what the lads were up to, all so casually that it was a while before Justin realized he was being pumped for information about the IRA. Seeing that he knew nothing, the man said he was on his way to a night’s duty in Dublin, that he was a guard in the Special Branch. He spent the journey talking of his hard upbringing, of his days in the army, of
masturbating
competitions that the soldiers held at night, with sixpence as a prize. He left Justin at the arch of Christ Church Cathedral, and said he would be there again at midnight on his way back. 

Now that he no longer visited his parents or old friends each time he went there, the city didn’t seem his smothering home. He walked the crowded streets, stood and looked up at pigeons roosting in the Bank of Ireland portico, like any other stranger. He saw a gallery where an exhibition was opening, and when he went inside and someone talked to him, he felt the same excitement he’d had in the Paris railway station when he met an old friend. All this was his, if he wanted it. Afterwards the stranger asked him to a party, in a flat on the quays. The windows looked over the black shining river; there was a scent of dope smoke in the tall old rooms. Someone sat on the floor with a block of Chinese ink, brushing letters on a sheet of paper; some people were dancing, the song of the year was playing on a gramophone: