The Past (2 page)

The palms flap and the water waits for them. They would have pronounced the name roundly, presuming its importance. The cabbie grunts, hearing it, knowing their status. Or would they have walked, unsure of cabbies, unsure of what to tip; Irish, intimidated by the parasols, carrying their cases, their clothes too heavy for the hot day and just the palms intimating a welcome, flapping in their still boxes, whispering the confidence that they too are transplants to this imperial soil.

‘UNA WAS AN actress, of the worst kind, the kind that insists on you calling them by their first name. Oonagh, Oona, Una, I stumbled over it so much at first, I didn't want to be on first name terms, damn her, I was a girl of nine or ten and hardly knew her, Mrs O'Shaughnessy struck me as much much safer. I was a wily child you see, suspicious of this mother of my friend with her large blowsy kisses and her first names. Children read adults, don't they? An atrocious voice with a loud, melodramatic presence, Una never acted anyone but herself but she had the luck to be an Irish speaker and so to meet Messrs Yeats and Fay and then gradually to be thought of as the Irish woman resplendent, though her hair was mousy and her eyes
pale and her face totally devoid of those high cheekbones that were meant to be typical of the Celt. Though she had plenty of Matthew Arnold's refusal to submit to the tyranny of fact, the fact being that her stage presence was embarrassing and her refusal to submit to this being quite remarkable and, in the end, a triumph. But then to be fair I only saw her later, years later, when her figure had bloomed and when Rene and me were ten or twelve. When she met him I myself was just a blush on my mother's cheek and Una O'Shaughnessy was by all accounts, sorry to repeat myself, quite a renowned beauty. But then those were the early days of the Gaelic League and as you know yourself a certain kind of passion and what they called “nobility” and in particular an ability to speak Irish, more particularly among those who couldn't, was regarded as an adequate substitute for beauty, not to mention talent. And the kind of acting she relished when her husband met her didn't take place in theatres on legitimate stages, no, nothing as vulgar as that, it found its place in drawing-rooms before select groups of thoughtful people who would gather to look at representations or friezes from their imaginary history of Ireland. You would have the “Rape of Drogheda”, say, and after hours of fuss with everyone finally seated and the whispering behind the drawing-room curtain finally stilled the same curtain would draw back to reveal, if you can picture it, a few painted flats to represent Drogheda's walls and a group of ardent young Gaelic Leaguers dressed as Cromwell's Roundheads with whatever pikes and muskets they could drum up for the occasion, all standing to one side in a balletic group, pointing their pikes and things towards a group of just as ardent young girls who represented the Maidens of Drogheda. And between them both, dead-centre of course, raised on a platform, a
dais, would stand Una O'Shaughnessy, who else, dressed as Kathleen in a coat of flowing green with a petticoat of red and a symbolic chain maybe round her wrists, her face contorted into an expression of frozen pain, horror or melancholy, whichever was most appropriate. They engrossed my mother's generation, those idiotic affairs. Una, by all accounts, made quite a name from it and it's quite probable, if probability is what you're looking for, that he met her there and that her Kathleen ni Houlihan began the liaison that would lead to Rene's birth in that English town you want me to talk about and which I can't, of course, having never been there. But these idiotic affairs died a death, of course, as soon as the quite amazing discovery was made that the Roundhead youths don't really have to remain like limestone statues but can actually move and fortify their expressions of hate with violent gestures. And from there it was only one step into words, blessed words. “O my dark Rosaleen, do not sigh, do not weep, the priests are on the ocean green . . .” And thus Una became an actress. But she could never play O'Casey, despite her lineage. And why not? Because O'Casey demanded more than a green costume and a
blas,
he was music-hall and melodrama, farce and real tragedy and only a real actress could have done it. And she knew this, of course, and when
The Plough
came on she shouted her guts out from the pits with the rest of them, even though Mr Yeats shouted his apotheosis from his private box. And I know, I know, all this is beside the point, but what do I know of her pregnancy and that English town except for the fact that the child inside her would partake in none of her faults and would be called Rene—'

SO HEARTENED BY the flapping palms they would have walked under the canvas awning, Una's heels striking the tiles, dragging the tufts of carpet in the hallway with her and striking again the hard oak stairs; and into a clean bedroom, with the walls cream-white, the ceiling done in necklaces of plaster; with a bed which they would find to be warm, with a film of damp.

There must have been a table with an oval scoop for an enamel basin. And the table would hold an enamel jug. All three of them white, echoing the walls and the slight curve at the pit of the jug echoing her form. The guest-book below reading ‘Michael and Una O'Shaughnessy' in a young, perhaps a bold hand.

‘
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.