The Past (32 page)

WE CROSS THE square towards the spa road. Dev strides ahead and Jack follows behind. They talk mathematics as they walk, a mutual love, even a necessity for all his personal staff. Jack's uniform becomes lined with sweat, inevitably; there is not a breath of wind and the green texture of his Free State jacket loses any semblance of freshness, that bright sycamore green conceived in the childhood of this state saturated with both dust and moisture seems aeons old now, dandruff-flecked as if seeking out and exhaling in its turn the odour of years of vegetation, falling, regeneration and decay. They discuss the combustible potential of peat turf in kilowatts, ohms and ergs. The miracles wrought by the historical Brigit occur to him, who created flames out of mud and sand in an empty grate, who transformed an arid bog into a field of yellowing hay. He makes a mental note to visit her well, Liscannor, on the heights beside Moher. He passes Rene who must have seemed the embodiment of this yellow, but of course he doesn't notice since his sight, bad at the best of times, has become clouded with her vapour, condensing into tears again on his rimless glasses.

THE ROAD CURVES from the town and the hotels fall away to be replaced by the borders of nodding fuschia. The scent is musk and
heady and there's the hum of wasps. Your first impact with Lisdoon, Lili told me, is deceptive for it is only when you have entered your hotel, signed the guestbook and settled down in some lounge for an afternoon snifter you realise the secret life of the place. Those bent shoulders in those wood-panelled snugs don't belong, as you might think, to the usual assortment of cattle-jobbers and afternoon chemists but to bachelors in search of unwed ladies, matchmakers, fathers, uncles, cousins once removed, all treating with beautifully embarrassed civility subjects of the utmost delicacy. There's no spitting on hands and hearty jokes. Instead there are everywhere deep blushes and sweating necks under stiff collars and stifling Sunday suits. Which might account for the extraordinary humidity of the place which I noticed had grown ever since we left Gort and went round and round those yellow September fields, but which once I entered the lounge of the Spa Hotel I found what possibly might be an explanation. Ah, I thought, it's the odour of embarrassment, the sweating pores of the rite known as courting, that vaporous sign emanating from the shy and gentle rural males of the snugs and lounges towards the spotless matron who sipped tea as a rule on the sun verandas facing the street. And morning and afternoon were just a preparation for night, during which the embarrassment and humidity reached their climax in foxtrots, quicksteps, halting conversations and even hurried kisses, in the midst of whatever entertainment the town could provide. It was with some trepidation that I realised then that we were to be the entertainment for the night, we were to provide the focus for this coughing, underspoken rite and MacAllister beside me, hands shaking as he poured his mixer into his gin, I could see he realised it too. Our last night, he said to the assembled company, and
then—Dublin. Would Dublin be able to hold us though, I wondered, seeing the clouds of expectation gathered round the bar and the air settling in the street outside, the opaque texture of which might, I imagined, have originated from the spa and the sulphur springs.

DEV WALKS TOWARDS the spa with both fists clasped tight and his thumbs rigid, a brisk walk, his long frame upright and his profile etched against the afternoon haze, tilted slightly upwards, looking forward. The line of his nose, strong and almost elegant, is what seems to pull his body forward, echoed by two deep lines falling downwards to the curve of each lip. Were there ever lines deeper than those and is it the sense of smell that pulls him forward with the profile of his nose, towards some distant future? There is something military in his clasped fists, more than military even, since his pace is easier than that of Jack who is now quite drenched in sweat and the former bright green of his uniform is stained to what is more like an earth-coloured muddy brown. Used to cars, armoured carriers and even horses, this soldier is quite unused to walking and feels himself slipping into the mists of his own perspiration, can hardly find the will to keep his eyes raised to the rapid, easy feet of his chief, whose light step straddles the past and whose profile points towards any number of possible futures. The road curves and leaves houses altogether for a moment, then rises a little and falls again and Dev can see the fields with their splashes of yellow in the distance and the circular road through which we all have come and below him, on this road, the chalet which houses the spa. I slow my pace coming
down towards it. Built of wood and raised on stilts, it is striped like a boating hat, rich cream and black, and between the stilts which raise the chalet like wary legs afraid of dampening the hem of a fine striped skirt there runs a river. A house over water. I think of how apt those hotels are with their beach-like fronts. But Dev is familiar, he is familiar with everything and he walks through the gates, down the avenue without losing a step.

LUKE, LILI TELLS me, despite the day's heat and excitement, had the sets up an hour early. Bless that boy, MacAllister said, and dragged us down an hour early to rehearse. We had come to the end, we knew, of Rene's costumes and I had managed to pucker the last one, her matron's smock, into something like a gown. The hall was wedged between decrepit hotels, and there was Luke when we entered illuminated by that cloud of smoke in the yellow footlights brushing down his canvas pillars, forests and his palace facades. We went through the scenes like sleepwalkers, the lines had so gripped us through repetition that they seemed not to exist anymore, what emerged was simply speech, undefined by words. How doth, sweet coz, said Rene and I saw how well my puckering had done its job; her figure, as adaptable as ever floated from shape to shape, caught by one footlight then by the next, and was like the words, indefinable. There was yellow gel over the footlights which gave her that ripened look. But this is September, I said when MacAllister wanted to change them, and yellow's right surely, and would you believe, I turned to James Vance for confirmation. I had forgotten his stoop, his apologetics, all
my irascibility. We are all persons, I simply thought, or even person. Isn't yellow right, James? I called down into the belly of the hall but he wasn't there. I turned to Rene and would have pinched her cheeks to highlight the yellow but she wasn't there either.

THE ROOF IS triangular. The water surges through the stilts and disappears. Then night was coming, says Lili. Amorous night. The humidity gathered and the chaff and the yellow had compounded the dark. It was a smell, that night, not a colour. All the sideways glances and the shy gazes and the throaty whispers. I was sent to find her. I found her down here by the pools.

WE WALK DOWN long halls beyond the depths of the chalet and doors lead on either side to the pools, the brass taps. The sound of dripping seems everywhere, or is it Dev's footsteps echoed by those of Jack, or James's memories, perhaps each one dripping into that pool, which now envelop everything? The yellow sulphur water he drinks from the brass cup smells almost resinous and the elegant curves which the waters make from the flowing taps streak themselves with yellow and cream like his eucalypti of years ago. Everything turns to everything else, he thinks, and every image he has slid from his acid bath reappears in the damp oozing from the limestone and the encrusted brass of the tap handles. I see those pools leading to the caverns below and
the large sea and every image this town implies reproduced in that darkness which intimates every form.