The Past (9 page)

IT WOULD HAVE been a quiet breakfast. Her parents sit and watch the sea and let its sound be the only speech between them. And this is enough, strangely, for all four. For the girls the sense of occasion and the cocktail sausages are pleasure enough. And her parents had long allowed other facts to compensate for what was missing. Separately, each would have chatted blithely to their daughter. Together, they must make do with silence, and the waves.

THE WAITERS WOULD have recognised them. The scattering of other couples with their children in Communion white would have recognised them too. For Una was at her peak in her thirtieth year on the Bray veranda, enjoying, with the fame that had long been familiar to her, a sense of lithe aristocracy. An aristocracy all the more sweet in that it was an ad hoc one, its precedents changed daily, it combined the tone of ascendancy with the moral comfort of nationalist conviction and it was unburdened, as yet, by any sense of lineage. Una's mastery was total, though her glory would be shortlived. She was an actress after all. Her husband was known to have refused several portfolios. She was Republican too, wedded to the Free State. But this, Lili tells me, only gave her the added lustre of uncertainty, allowed her to carry through the days of stolidity the romance of the days of ferment.

SO I SHALL see Una in a dress as white as her daughter's, with a wide-brimmed hat and veil. He is in a less flamboyant, though immaculate,
tweed suit. They eat quietly, listening to their daughter's chatter. And when the young waiter replenishes the grapefruit and the sausages he treats them with that mixture of deference and familiarity that their public selves project. He is Republican, this waiter, he is anti-clerical and left-wing. And yet, when back inside the kitchen he hears the old cook spit the term ‘Redmondite!' into the saucepan, he turns and raises his voice in defence of the family outside with a violence that surprises him.

LILI WOULD HAVE her use this term. And others like it. She'd have her glorying in her activism, reacting to the split like the Republican she claimed to be. ‘The one marital demand he ever made on her—that she keep her mouth shut in public.' Keeping her mouth shut, her presence felt. Swathing in her dark cape and pillbox hat through Republican functions, Gaelic League meetings, de Valera attending her opening nights. Having it both ways. Married to the one character on the Free State side with ‘an ounce of popular charisma', keeping up her old politics, her taste for intrigue. ‘And it is a taste, believe me, a habit; which is probably why, of all the Treaty figures, he was the least vilified.' Dropping dark hints everywhere about subtle, back-room influences on him, influences ‘not wholly political'. Fulfilling both her taste for intrigue and her taste for the public stage, having and eating her cake in this conflict turned increasingly vicious, from assassination to assassination, building a mystique round him that was in the end above politics. So when the end did come, she was in a unique position, having gathered about her that last element
necessary for nationalist sainthood—the odour of graveyards. And by means of a graveyard gesture, uniting her public and private self. ‘Mick,' she would proclaim to the handful of mourners, ‘was a Republican . . .'

SITTING WITH LILI, staring at the cascades of butter, piling them on to the steaming sausages and as was only natural for a girl of your age, quite uninterested in the grapefruit. The young waiter takes them away, ventures to touch your hair, glancing at your father. The old cook spits into the saucepan. Guests catch your eye and give you sixpences, much to your mother's disgust. The taste of the wafer is still in your mouth, the perspiration of the priest's finger which placed it on your tongue, and you eat maybe to forget it. Una looks at the green hand on your white where the tree stroked you.

‘Why did you smudge your dress, dear?'

M
ICHAEL WAS SHOT while walking down Trimelston Road, near to a church. He was not in uniform. He died quickly for, as was explained at the inquest, enough bullets were used to stop a running bull. Rene learnt of it when driver Jack came to the door without him. The wind sang the melody, beaten out by the separate trees. It is too much to believe that he died thinking of the promenade and the bathing huts.

‘FOR A YEAR she was the
grande dame
of them all. But who could live up to the memories she invented for him? As time went on she gradually relapsed into what she always should have been—a mediocre actress. But she had a year of grace as the nation's widow. And that was a part. Her black cape and her veil were obligatory at High Masses, state receptions, public funerals. And opening nights. Never forget them. Rene was often with her, dressed in black too. But she couldn't just play the part, she needed a sub-plot. She made ambiguous references in public about how he died. She started hinting at plots and counter plots and counter-counter plots. She gave herself the air of knowing “certain facts” not available to “the public
at large”. Facts, moreover, which implicated those “in power” at the “highest level”. She couldn't let it rest. I mean, everyone must have known there was a war on. She made it the done thing to give the air of being in on her secret. The ladies who copied her dress began to copy her way of standing at public functions with this removed, aggrieved, defiant air. The implication was of course that those functions had no constitutional validity, that
she
graced them with her presence, as her late husband had graced them with his life. She began to refer to him by the letter M. As M. used to say. Handy, I suppose, a bare letter is as anonymous and distant and mysterious as you want to make it, I suppose. I'd hear it in drawing-rooms, not knowing who it meant. You sense these things and you learn more of them. But it couldn't last, could it?'

THE TWO OF them in black, on the sofa that whorls like a shell behind them, that seems to have been green velvet. The edges of the print are faded again by time, like a flame. Their figures stand out in what is an oval of light, or focus, the mother's hands on her daughter's shoulders, the sofa whorling out of the frame. There seems to be dust around.

‘AFTER A YEAR they stopped listening, didn't they? The more strident her claims became for him, I mean, the more embarrassing a figure she became. And by that time even Dev was looking for a way
into the second Dail. And so she wheeled round towards the worst fate of all—that of not being taken seriously. And it often happens to public widows. It began in what she would have called the “highest circles”, where the bow of deference changed to the nod of indifference, and it spread gradually, like a mild disease. In the end it hit even her audience and real parts—by which I mean theatrical ones—began to pass her by. But she never lost the indefinable air of being a figure of consequence, and as theatrical circles are more loyal than most, she kept her camp followers. Still, she found herself slowly excluded from that magic circle of rumour, clandestine meetings and Chiefs of Staff until in the end Dev himself didn't turn up at the opening night of
The Moon on the Yellow River.
Needless to say, she reacted in turn, she learnt phrases like “betrayal of the cause”, “the true constitution” and when eventually Dev came to sign that book of allegiance to the King with his left hand over his eyes, she condemned him more vociferously than anyone. But by then people had almost forgotten who she was. Una who?'