The Past (31 page)

OUR BUS HEADS for a cloud of vapour that's like an embryo of the fields that generated it and passes through it, leaving its own cloud of dust and diesel. I can see the hay is falling off the fields now and the fingers of rock are showing through, a kind of crystal greyness that makes one think at first it is a trick of light, a refraction of the blue above.

We turned a corner, Lili tells me, or rather lurched round a corner, and she was thrown against me or rather sucked against me as if by a wind, and I was pressed in turn to the door. I could feel the pressure of something more than her body though, was it the heat or that cloying autumn smell, for a kind of September heat did fill the car along with everything else. But it was more than just heat, it was a pressure which could have been her weight, for as I told you her figure was adaptable and I had—we had—no idea of how far gone she was. But it was more than that too because for once James Vance seemed to sit upright behind me and had discarded his stoop and for once the driver's cap low down over his eyes didn't irritate me. It was—I hardly dare to say it, is there such a thing—the pressure of our happiness. Or hers. On me. Then the car lurched the other way and she fell away.

THE WINDOWS IN Dev's car are tight though as he is forced gently against the door and then forced away again with the car's movement. His face is abstract and expressionless, though somewhat kindly, eternally fixed in that gaze with which it met photographers, as if now it is anticipating a photograph. It never changes. The mouth is turned downwards without a hint of sourness, but in a contemplative moral curve, hardly departing from a straight line that is sad if anything, conscious of its need for consistency. His eyes are grey-blue, echoing the rocks that are filling the fields now as the hay falls off and the strict, wire-rimmed glasses shine with a hint of that blue that is embedded in every transparency. His glasses are misting now with the vapour which, despite the closed windows, seems to seep through every crevice of the bodywork. Or is it just the heat he generates? Does his body steam with its own logic, embodying as it does generations of effort, the doctrines of eight centuries? This steam has the smell of hay, that musty, incongruously feminine smell as if, nourished on the peat of generations of the fallen, its inherited heat rubs, steams and oxidises. He is considering a scheme for turf-fuelled power stations. The steam on his glasses gathers, forms two separate tears which drop to his cheeks, as if his eyes had shed them. The car lurches once more and approaches the town.

WE TURN A last corner and travel upwards for a small hill, and the unmistakable sensation that we have arrived fills the bus. The air tells us, all of us, that we are here, where some moments ago we were not, though the bus is lurching one last time. The sense of water in the air
when the bus exhales to what is surely a halt in a small square ringed with hotels led to by streets which are sprinkled with hotels as I help Lili down. The bus coughs and moves on, leaves the square to the two of us. But the porous quality of the air, the patient facades of the hotels, every leaded pane of which seems to anticipate a sea where in fact there is none. Where do these winds come from, I wonder, this invisible vapour, that sense of mild bluster redolent of hay instead of brine? Every house is an informant, every shop-front seems built for a beach, and the gaunt metal frames yawning from each window, some of which hold that loose striped canvas, seem to demand a placid stretch of canvas deckchairs, their wooden struts sunk in the yellow sand. Was there a sea here once, I wonder, that rolled back, the texture of which this town wants to re-create, remembering an impossible golden age? The hotels face each other in mute pathos, the expectations of each belied by the others' presence, in mutual pretence that the others aren't there. Which one did they stay in? I am overcome by the multiplicity of choices and the porous air. All four of us sit on the white metal seats.

WE WALKED TOWARDS a patch of green and a white metal seat. There was a black, bowed figure on it. I recognised the folds of fat round the neck and the collar flecked with dandruff. I tapped him on the shoulder and raised a small cloud of dandruff like pollen from heather. It was indeed Father Beausang. He rose and stretched his hand towards Lili, his head bending forwards, a little too eagerly. Forgive me for following, he whispered after I'd introduced them,
but I couldn't help myself. He squeezed my arm, as before. I took Lili's, and we walked around the square.

I PICTURE HER wearing a bulky, shapeless fawn-coloured coat. They all spill out from the cars into the empty square. She has her hands in her pockets and so drags the coat downwards, pear-shaped from her narrow shoulders. She loses James and then Luke walking past the hotel fronts. They see her among the faces and lose her again. She walks past the awnings and the leaded windows wondering will one of these roads bring her to the sea that all the facades seem to promise. She comes to the square and sees the grey shoulders of the mountains beyond it. Luke quickens his step and comes up behind her but then stops when his hand could touch her hair to call her back. He lets her walk from him. There is a patina of dust in the air and from somewhere the cries of children. A hotel door bangs. Every shop is closed. She sits on the white metal seat. Jack swings the car round one last corner and into the square. The proxy tears have vaporised again on his master's cheeks as the car circles once round her seat. There will be stuffed trout on the walls of his master's hotel and a large plaster statue in all three bedrooms, grey walls that are saved by the poignancy of the window's vista, the quiet graveness of this square and the yellowing landscape broken only by the grey mound of hills beyond. He will drive him to the spa under different conditions than in 1919 and watch him drink his yellowed sulphur water from the brass chained cup without any sense of urgency. Then drive to Spanish Point, perhaps, Quilty, Milltown Malbay and beyond.
Each town square will have only the surprise of recognition for him, notable only in so far as it is so much the same. Before he hears the disyllable Home, Jack. He stops the car and helps his master out and they walk towards their chosen hotel.

OLD AGE BRINGS a certain sweetness, said Father Beausang. What a pity James didn't experience it. I would get postcards from him from the places he went through. Knock, Strand Hill, Ballina, Quilty. I knew hardly any of them, Salthill was the West Coast to me, so you can imagine how they loomed in my imagination. Lisdoonvarna I pictured as a town of gazebos, white metal bandstands . . .

IT WAS TO be the climax of the tour, said Lili, but I must admit I can still remember our sense of anti-climax when we drove in. Other towns had been bustling, crowds lining the seawalk and the posters flapping for two weeks beforehand. Well the posters were here all right, but no crowds. Morris Minors lining the outsides of every hotel all right, but to all outward appearances, a sleepy inland town. That was what threw us, you see, the fact that it was inland. I had to remember all over again. These aren't seaside hotels, I had to remind myself, though they looked like it. These are spa hotels. So we pulled up and opened the doors and that heady vegetable scent of fullness exhaled and seemed to fill the streets. I could almost see it, like the yellow dust that rises with haymaking, drifting towards each open window saying,
We are here. That it would get to them I had no doubt, on reflection. I had to remember, you see, that here it all happens indoors.