The Night Stages (40 page)

“Of course she would have been sorry for your brother’s injury,” Tam said.

Niall was on his feet now, fully dressed and ready to leave her cottage. “You would think that,” he said, “but it was not so. She loved him, you see, and he her. I fully understood in that moment what had driven my brother throughout the race. It wasn’t rage that deadened the pain; it was this love between them, that sincerity and innocence. He must have believed that after winning, once he was a victor, she would come to him. But she hadn’t in her the courage for that. And I claimed her, I
claimed
her. I had no love at all, for anyone. All I had was this insistence on winning. She asked, only
once, if I thought it was the best thing, this marriage. But I insisted on it. And, afterwards, he left the country. He left the country and never came back. There’s no glory here, no quantity of newspaper stories – and there were plenty of those, you can be sure – that can save you from emigration. Not if you are a man like him, a man of the hills, a man from the mountains, a man full of sincerity and innocence. What else could he do?” Niall looked out the window for a moment and then turned back to Tam. “What else would he have wanted to do? I’d taken everything from him.”

Tam, naked in the sheet she had wrapped around herself, felt vulnerable and exposed in the presence of this man who was dressed for other rooms, other relationships. She wanted him to cross the room, place a hand on her bare shoulder. He had opened this whole disturbing chapter of his life to her, and yet they were still somehow apart. He would not permit her to console him. “She could have refused you,” she said softly.

Niall did not turn toward her. “What kind of a life could he have given her, this ‘Wild Wonder’? And,” he said again, “I insisted on it.”

Tam could barely speak. “You love her then.”

He looked at her for what seemed a long time. “Have you understood none of this?” he said. “I’m a waster, Tamara, I waste things. I waste people. I deplete them. I have never troubled myself to know the value of anyone, anything, not my own abilities, my own good fortune, my family, Susan. The small magical brother I was given was worth ten of me, and I utterly disregarded him.”

“But for me …” she said, looking away as if ashamed by what she was about to reveal, “you transform every room you walk into. It’s never been like this with anyone. It is impossible for me to let it go.”

He was silent, his face so disclosed and pained she found it difficult to hold the gaze. Then he lowered his eyes and shook his head. “No,” he said. “You’ve misunderstood. This – you and me – this is the only time I’ve come close to anything like that. And I cannot replicate the kind of sentiment I saw that day in Kieran. I don’t have it in me. Nothing about this is ever going to be redeemable, Tamara. And I can tell you now I want no part of it.”

“That can’t be true,” she began, “because we would never …”

But he was striding out of the room, through the kitchen. The sound of his footsteps ceased for a few seconds. Then she heard the front door opening, and she knew he had walked away.

T
he building had been finished around him as he worked. There had been a symphony of drills, hammers, electric saws, always in his ears, shrieking or staccato against the tiny brush strokes the tempera demanded. The workmen, joking with him, sometimes throwing eggs, or the shells of eggs that littered the floor beneath the scaffolding he stood on, were good men, and hard workers, as Kenneth had come to know. One of them had come up with the mock title
Flight and Its Allergies
, and he had joined in the hilarity that ensued among them. They had joked with him, and one or two, genuinely curious, had asked him questions while he painted one figure or another. They had also coaxed him into bars after work –had even, on occasion, invited him home for supper. As the weeks passed, Kenneth thought about his own family, his separation from them. It would be good to be back.

It had taken him three months to complete the thirty-six four-by-six-foot panels that would join together, like a huge
puzzle, to form the immense mural. The last thing he painted, on the final morning, was a third apple – airborne – tossed by a child juggler. The apples were like tiny planets, and the child, otherwise small and unexceptional, gained power through his manipulation of them. Kenneth had to break one last egg to paint this, and as he passed it from hand to hand, letting the white drain to the floor, and allowing the clean yolk to settle in his palm, he looked at this boy – his serene, confident expression, the three apples aloft, the face calm with the knowledge that they would be kept in the air indefinitely. While Kenneth mixed the yolk with the warm shades of ground pigment, he remembered the critic telling him to keep things on the picture plane flat, two-dimensional, and he smiled as the apple became spherical under his brush. When he could imagine the weight of it in his hand, he knew he was finished. Then he began to toss brushes, palettes, and pigments down to the floor below. There was a drill shrieking somewhere in the building. The clatter his tools made on landing must have been drowned out by its noise.

Kenneth figured he had broken five thousand eggs, more or less, in the making of the mural, and each time he broke the shell, he thought of the critic’s head, the smooth baldness of the top of it. Humpty-Dumpty, he thought, this wall, and the wall of cultural fashion that could keep you out, for a while, until the great fall. By now he knew that fashion always fell, it failed and fell. He was happy to be free of it. And as he used the shell to separate the white from the yolk, he thought about Harding, a man who had never made use of egg tempera. He
wondered what had become of him. And the woman Harding had loved, whether she had ever painted again, and whether or not he himself would ever come across a painting by Gentleman. The girl in Germany, the couple in Italy, floated by, a sense of them here and there in the mural. These narratives fought for space in his mind. But the mural itself, he knew, was divorced from narrative. As it should be, he whispered to himself, as it should be.
Flight and Its Allegories
.

Once he was on the ground, he rifled through a canvas sack until he found the camera he was looking for, a Brownie Starflex, with six exposures still available. He shot the mural from left to right. Then he walked across the full length of the half-tiled floor. This was the last exposure and it would make the mural look incredibly small, like a two-inch-long piece of ribbon with an unreadable pattern on it. But he wanted to show its proportions to a friend and, in any case, the more professional pictures would be taken later, after he was gone, when the mural had begun to live its own independent life in the presence of an audience.

For months now there had been noise, the workmen’s power tools and, in the odd moments when those were silent, the roar of the planes arriving and departing at the old, soon-to-be abandoned terminal. He had seen the passengers, through the plate glass of the windows, rivers of them, pouring down the steps that were pushed up to airliners, then flowing darkly across the tarmac. What would they make of
Flight and Its Allegories
? Would they be struck by it? Or would they simply pass it by, preoccupied by the mysteries of
their individual lives as they walked forward or waited in the lounge? He was not unaware that public art could be – and often was – ignored. Still, what pleasure he had taken in the making of it.

He hauled the canvas sack full of brushes and pigment out to the old grey car, a junker he had bought four months ago from a fisherman. He hoped this vehicle would be reliable for another couple of days, long enough to get him to Port aux Basques. He had not arrived, and would not be departing by air, and for the first time he became aware of the irony of this. There would be the drive across this huge, wild island, the ferry that would connect him with the mainland train, then days of train travel to the centre of his vast country. He would leave the car at the port, to be towed, stolen, or junked. He would step onto the ferry. Quite possibly, he would never return.

Five or six years later Kenneth would pick up a newspaper to discover that there were fewer and fewer planes landing at Gander Airport. Larger aircraft with jet engines were now over-flying the “Crossroads of the World” – and its beautiful new terminal – on most transatlantic flights, as there was no longer any need to stop and refuel. A picture of the empty passenger lounge would be placed beside the article. In it Kenneth would be able to see a corner of the mural, but the shot would be so grainy and unfocused, the figures would be unreadable.

But now, during the drive across Newfoundland, the Italian lakeside town of Orta was present in his mind, the ferry he had never taken, and the meeting that had not taken place. But he was finished with waiting now; he would leave that to the passengers, those who were adrift and pausing on their journey from one set of travels to another.

THERE HAD BEEN TIMES WHEN SHE HAD FELT THAT
Niall and his embraces had been forced upon her in some way. Not that he had forced his way into her world so much, but she had assumed that the person she had been when he walked through her door, the person she would be all through their long, sporadic, and fragile communion, had been all but powerless in the face of him and the way he filled a room. Lack of certainty, ambivalence, impossibility, and no hope whatsoever of resolution had all been sidestepped by her, sometimes completely ignored. It had been as if she had been running away from any reliable version of herself. And yet now she finds herself thoroughly caught in the most unreliable version of all.

She looks up and sees a small female figure placed in the far right of the mural’s picture frame, lost in the shadows of dense foliage, a bouquet of something that is not quite floral in her hands. Oddly bridal, Tam thinks, though there is no veil and the woman is painted in brunette colours, not just her hair and eyes, but also her brown clothing, her shoes. And yet, in spite of her entanglement in pale shadows, in spite of the stillness of her pose, she appears to be emerging. She seems about to step away from her partner, a diminutive male figure, more emphatically situated in dense vegetation and
shaded more intensely by greys and blacks. She would step forward, he would step back, or she would step back and he forward, whatever the dance they might be performing.

And now this sudden choice: two planes, two Constellations gleaming on the tarmac, one heading for New York, the other destined for Shannon.

She visualizes her small house, empty now of the life she has lived in it, with no lamps lit and a cold hearth. Sometimes a downdraft from the chimney might touch a curtain, but otherwise there would be no breath at all in the room. “Dark houses,” one of the neighbours had said about a clutch of stones that had once been four or five cottages at the end of the road. “Dark houses,” the old man had said. “We don’t like that kind of thing near us.”
Near us
, Tam thinks now.
Dark houses
.

Beyond the windows, there would be drenched fields and tarry bogs slowly succumbing to the bruise-coloured dusk of an autumn afternoon. So beautiful really, and so strangely gratifying. She herself has seen, has been moved by such things, moved by the muscular weather and the departing light. The day could start fair and by early afternoon a gale of increasing ferocity might be twisting the two trees in the yard. You never knew how the weather was going to present itself or what your own reaction would be in the face of it. And occasionally there had been a man with her, a man who had predicted this weather and who would be preparing to leave. But she had known, essentially, she has to admit she had known, that he would always come back. The phone would ring, and the dance would begin again. Then there
would be that heron, lifting out of the marsh, wind under its wings and the pull of a nest near the lake. “Desperate trouble,” Niall had said, “you could step into desperate trouble from something like this.” The dance. And then the lament.

She looks at the mural, moving her head from left to right, taking in the full brunt of it in the rich, low morning light. She allows its chaos and its odd calm to enter her mind. Some of the figures are so emplaced they seemed to be wholly defined by the act of absolute arrival. Others are caught in the process of moving away. And far back in the trees, rendered in shades of grey, one or two appear to be poised on the edge of full disappearance.

She thinks of Niall’s mother, her final desperate step. Had that walk into air and darkness been a comfort or a declaration of full despair? How had her face looked to her that last day in the oval that was her mirror? Did she waver, even for a moment, when her love for the two boys presented itself, as it must have done? She couldn’t have foreseen what would become of her youngest son, how he would collapse into the nightmare of rage. And she wouldn’t have known that the other, older boy would be unable to recognize his own fragility in the face of her defection. And yet in him, from then on, Tam now understands, there had always been hesitation and curtailment.