The Past (22 page)

And because the last mile of the journey is over land that's falling gently the train seems to slide towards Bray where the last few schoolgirls get off. The sea disappears behind the backs of houses and then appears again. I get out of the metal carriage to where Luke used to wait on the granite platform and pass through the curved awning under which they both walked to the sun, the square and Bray.

LUKE TAKES HER elbow and leads her outside the station down a small road and past the bowling green. They turn right, through a narrow tunnel over which the same train runs farther down the coast. The curved avenue of light widens as they pass through and
spills on to the beach where the light becomes fawn, blue and silver. Luke is tall now, almost as tall as his father, but with what characteristics? He neither paints nor photographs, as if the law of resistance between successive fathers and sons has come to rest in him. He has a disturbing restfulness of gesture that illuminates him in any drawing-room, never belonging to it, yet rooted to it. His father's unwillingness to open doors has given way in him to this stasis, never demanding to be more than where he is, yet disturbing whole companies with this seeming passivity. He stares from corners, fearful and self-possessed. An agoraphobic child, he has learnt to control this tendency by walking down each street with an extreme slowness, as if it were a room. And so he walks down this room that is a beach, holding her elbow for support, leading her towards the water, yet tightening his grip on her elbow as they draw near. That luminous child Lili has called him, and his eyes do stand out against the grey texture of his skin, metal-blue, like mirrors. This effeminate boy, grown tall in the way of some hothouse plants, could he have been different, I wonder, as James must have done. Could his hair have been thicker, his shoulders broader? James stares at him across the familiar gulf, all his words turn to questions, held in mid-air. Those planes of distance surround them, all angles, unbridgeable expanse.

But Luke is thin and has come to the largest expanse of all, the sea, and so holds her elbow even more tightly for support. Soon her elbow will be indistinguishable from his, his father's. There are the voices of the Scottish holiday-makers behind them and of the Jewish girls whom his grandfather loved to paint. A small paddle-boat that has gone too far out inches its way across the ribbon of blue. A man swings a leather bag beside them, calls at it to return.

S
OME BRAY BUSINESSMAN had revitalised the lift. Will we ascend? asked Father Beausang and sprang up the metal steps with a vitality that amazed me. You are old, I began, but he was already in the yellow chair, patting the seat beside him. I was left to pay the man with the leather bag, who pulled the lever that sent us off, swaying.

‘I lied to you,' he said, ‘when I said I hadn't seen her. It was the house that made me melancholy and melancholy leads me to white lies. I had seen her, of course. How could I have lived in Bray and not seen her? I passed her on the prom and I see now that it must have been her first day here. But it was more a fiction than a lie and there's a kind of truth in fiction isn't there? I was hot on the prom, wearing that ridiculous black suit that always made me feel, in summer, like Descartes sweltering inside his stove. It helped him to think, he claimed. But my black suit and the sweat that ran from my collar down my shirt never helped me to think. I always walked quickly through the heat, racing to be inside once more. Though I'm sure it was her that seemed to bounce through the crowd of Scotsmen in open-necked shirts and even gesture towards me as if wanting me to stop. But of course I didn't stop, the last thing I wanted to do was stop. It had been Descartes, I remember, with James that day and
the cucumber sandwiches had upset my stomach and I had notes to write on our discussions, all of this besides being hot, so of course I couldn't stop. But if you were to ask me had I seen her, I couldn't truthfully say no. But the verb to see conjures up more than mere vision. I walked the Head too, you see, every weekend, Saturdays and Sundays, and never a weekend passed but one or other of the Vances would sway over me in the yellow chair, almost always with her. I would hear the voices from below, the words carried off on the wind of course, so I couldn't eavesdrop. If I walked nearer the cliff, I could see them in profile. She never had much hair, I could make out that, if it was her. Nothing like the great bush of hair I always associate with beauty. All I could make out was that it was a woman and James, Luke or the painter with her in the chair. And sometimes all four. What attraction this chair had for them I couldn't make out. I mean the seaside inhabitants are never the ones to use the paddle-boats—'

WE HAD CLIMBED higher and the yellow chair was swaying like a train going at high speed. A gust of wind carried off his words for an instant and so I couldn't hear. Rather than stare at his mouth, opening and closing silently, I leant over the side and saw the great pylons with their feet in the earth, the clumps of purple heather and the small track along the cliffs, bordering the sea, along which he must have walked. I looked up to the right of his shoulder and saw the town flowing out from it, something like a neckscarf, and beyond it the city. I turned and saw the thin finger of the Sugarloaf and beyond
it Djouce, the Three-Rock, Tunduff. The attraction of course must have been analagous to the attraction of trains. Of course none of them would have bothered to ride it but her, being a visitor, and if she associated trains with roses, what would this airborne carriage with its iron seats, its cogs and its cable clicking with dark grease mean to her? The flower that would have sprung from this would have been unimaginable. It was too high to have earth in the chair, its petals would have been silk and black, perhaps. An eminently human flower which springs from thought, the swaying chair, the wind cleansing the brow and the sensation of flight. James Vance looks at her and sees it sprouting from her mouth, her opened lips, saying something he can't hear, containing it like a pot. She sees it in Luke, in James, in the grandfather, sprouting through their stiff collars in place of their faces and its stem hidden, but threading its way, she knows, to the base of their spine. The old man's mane dips and waves with it thorny, irascible but with his barely hidden delight oozing from him like perfume. And James Vance thinks he can capture this texture of flowers as he raises his camera once more and snaps. But in the print, when it emerges, the yellow chair on which her hand rests is nothing more than metal and she just a young woman, as my priest friend says, without much hair but with an extraordinary texture to what hair she has—

‘And when I think of it, there is no one in the town that wouldn't have seen her. The word even reached my Superior that the agnostics—Protestants—no one was ever quite sure how to categorise poor James—in the Villas had a young lady staying with them. Governess, the more discreet gossipers called her. Fancy-woman, said the local wits. And the mothers of the sodality claimed the old man had got
himself another model. And I suppose the truth is she was a little of all three. A fiction there, with more than half a truth.'

I lied. There is the unmistakable scent of flowers from those prints. Or is it the dust that gathered in the album? Dried flowers?

‘Whatever was the truth, it had all the makings of a scandal. Only if she was Catholic, of course. There had been a fuss some years before. About a model who turned out to be Jewish . . .'

The yellow chair bumped to a halt and I was thrown forward into his lap. He held me for a moment by the shoulders and smiled. I could see the moisture gathering at the corner of each eye. He turned my face towards the turf and heather, now just six feet below us.

‘See,' he said, ‘we've come down. And I think those two small tickets of yours entitle us to a cup of tea . . .'

He gestured towards the metal stairs. I stood up and helped him to his feet and would have helped him down the stairs, but he insisted I go first. We clambered down then, one after the other, and walked across the heather to the Eagle's Nest and two cups of tea.

I
S IT ON the close wet texture of the sand it happens, just after high tide, or between tides when the glare is an aching yellow and the sand is hot under their bare feet? If it's Luke, he's with her in the early morning. Instead of lessons under the bay window they have walked out here; James has spent the night in Dublin, and the old man is still sleeping in his sick-bed. Luke stands in the water in his shoes. She calls him back, Luke, Luke, he is her charge after all. He walks back across the ridges, all the miniature pools, to where the sand is dry again and clings like fawn paper to his shoes. He leads her by the hand to beneath the promenade wall. The sun is hottest there, it catches the glare, sand and stone, and there is a lip to hide whoever's below from the strollers above. The sun seems moderately low over the seascape, it is morning as yet, the vapour hasn't gathered to a haze, the paddle-boats are beached, awaiting their owner's leather bag. Each line is as sharp as it could be. But lying down, the sun seems high and so lying down they make it suddenly mid-afternoon, the glare pulses in an almost clear blue and the mackerel clouds disperse. The tide from a broad board becomes a flat ribbon, the sands become hillocks of fawn, all perspectives reversed. Luke covers his body in a down of blonde sand.

AND FOR JAMES perhaps the canvas hut. Mid-afternoon, when the boatman's calling the paddle-boats to shore seems to fade into the haze. He is old, his face is as creased as his leather, his hands are hard and coin-coloured. The boats circle to his cries. James pushes aside the flapping door and walks into the world of canvas, conical, its light filtering through the blue and yellow in alternate stripes. Rene stands in the lit cone and his mind, as tendentious as ever, registers the colours, blue and yellow, echoes of the colours outside. James makes love with words, perhaps, he uses the unique syllable with tongue, lips and teeth, he manages her first name only with difficulty, Miss O'Shaughnessy he seems happier with since he pays her, after all, to teach Luke. But what coinage could allow him to approach her, none but her own, which could hardly be named as she gives it to father or son or father and son. James's voice is muffled by the canvas there and the sand beneath his feet. The cries from the beach outside are almost louder than his, but his cries are words. The skin across her back is ridged by the imprint of her shoulder blades. There are canvas deckchairs, folded in a heap. Somewhere above him a train rumbles.