Time Present and Time Past (7 page)

Just before Lucy started national school, Colette had presented her to Fintan and the boys one night after dinner, the little girl shy but pleased in her new grey gymslip, white blouse and navy tie. Colette had seen Fintan's eyes fill up with tears, the big softie, and Rob cried, ‘Who's this big girl? Where's Lucy gone? Who's this?' which made Lucy blush, and pleased her immensely. Niall said nothing.

But he said plenty ten minutes later, when he cornered Colette in the kitchen. ‘A tie, Mum? A fucking tie? She's five, for Christ's sake. She shouldn't be wearing shit like this. She should be wearing crazy stuff at her age. That pinafore thing is gross.' And then Fintan had got stuck in, ‘Don't you speak to your mother like that,' and suddenly they were in the middle of a full-blown family row, a rare thing for the Buckleys, particularly so when Niall was at the centre of it, Niall who, as Rob puts it, ‘would make the Dalai Lama look aggressive'.

But allowing for moments like that, things have worked out well with Lucy, Colette thinks, picking a first Smartie off the cookie, a red one, and eating it. Two children would have been enough for her but three is good, and the older Lucy grows, the more Colette appreciates having a daughter. As for Fintan, she realises now that his life wouldn't have been complete without Lucy, whom he adores.

Sometimes Colette thinks he is overprotective of her. He is still bothered about arrangements for the sleepover with Emma, which is beginning to irritate Colette a bit. It's not the child's fault that her parents split up. Colette hasn't met Emma's father; and would admit that she finds Emma's mother a flighty woman, overly concerned with material things, but she has always been responsible in any dealings Lucy and Colette have had with her. Fintan is trying to come up with something other than a sleepover that will keep everyone happy.
Good luck to him
, Colette says to herself.

She had been a bit taken aback by the way Martina had dealt with the woman and the baby just now. It had struck Colette as a slightly chilling illustration of how her sister-in-law had changed over the years, something Martina herself had alluded to in a recent conversation, with more than a touch of bitterness, although Colette can no longer remember the context. ‘You start out here in life,' Martina had said, holding her hand out to the right, as though giving directions, ‘and you end up here,' indicating then in exactly the opposite direction. ‘And this is how you get from here to here.' She moved her hand back to its original position, and then swept it slowly through a complete arc of one hundred and eighty degrees, all the time making infinitesimal chopping gestures to indicate the many compromises, accommodations and changes of opinion that led one eventually to a complete volte-face.

Oh maybe this was unfair. In many ways she was still the same old Martina, funny and generous and beautiful. She was still the same person who had been a bewitching presence at Colette's own wedding, when everyone had asked, ‘Who is that girl? Who's the looker in the hat?'
For she'd worn with aplomb a huge tilted disc which she'd defined politely when asked as being made of polished straw. She'd gone off to live in London not long after that, and got out of the cosmetics business; started working in the fashion trade, something which she'd often said she'd like to do. Joan had been impressed with neither the career move, nor the change of location, but then, little that Martina did seemed to please Joan. Colette herself is something of a favourite with her mother-in-law, which embarrasses her, given how hard Joan is on her own daughter, and for no reason that Colette can see.

Things had worked out well in London, at least to begin with. Martina clearly loved her new life, and on her trips home, which developed into a regular twice-a-year pattern over the ten years or so that she was there, she always came across as happy and relaxed. When the boys came along she was a better aunt at a distance than most would be as a constant presence. She sent home baby clothes that even Colette could see were of exceptional quality and charm, and as Rob and Niall grew she showered them with gifts: stuffed animals, bears and rabbits and cats; a wooden Noah's Ark; a perfect little toy farm. Martina spoke to the boys on the phone every week so that when she came home she didn't seem a stranger to them; and at Christmas they looked forward to her arrival as much as Santa's.

Colette indicates with a raised finger that she would like another coffee. The woman at the next table is still talking, her companion still listening and nodding, throwing in the occasional quiet comment; and Colette wonders, Do I do that? Do I dominate conversations in this way? Do I talk over Martina or Beth when I'm in their company? Most everyone who knows Colette would find this an absurd worry, but she resolves to be alert to it in the future. The waitress brings a fresh cappuccino to her table.

But by the time Lucy arrived, something had changed. Martina had been living back in Ireland about three years by then. She had come home unexpectedly, for a holiday, she said, in what turned out to be that fateful summer; and so it happened that she was there for Beth when Beth needed her. And then, almost immediately, Martina decided to stay. She insisted that she had already been thinking about it, that it had never been her plan to remain in London for the rest of her life. It was a lonely old city when it came down to it, she said; exhausting and expensive. It was all very well when you were really young, but she was in her mid-thirties now and she'd had enough. She wanted to be nearer her family.

All of this had sounded plausible to Colette at the time. She can remember noticing that Martina was unhappy; that her face in repose had a look of sadness that hadn't been there before, but she put that down to what had happened to Christy. Why, they'd all been sad about that; they'd all been vexed on Beth's account. But Martina had looked after her, and moved in with Beth at Beth's invitation. She started to look for work, and then she had a great stroke of luck: she found a backer in Dublin to help her open her own boutique. She sold the apartment she had in London and put the money into her new business. Within a year or two she was well established in a life which was, in its own way, stable and contented, but which was also, when you thought about it, far removed from the life Colette would have predicted all those years ago for the beautiful young woman in the polished-straw hat as she entered middle age: unattached, childless, living with her elderly aunt in her aunt's house.

When Lucy was born, Colette had been surprised, and rather hurt, at how little interest Martina showed. Certainly there were gifts, and occasionally visits to the house rather than phone calls; but it all felt perfunctory, had an air of duty always, rather than of love. She tolerated having Lucy on her knee if Colette or Fintan placed her there, but it was not an experience she sought out, and she would hand the baby back as soon as it was feasible to do so. Something had clearly changed since Rob and Niall had been small, and for a long time Colette was puzzled as to what it might be.

But when she did finally think of a reason she backed off immediately. She did not want to believe that she might be correct. For all that, it is highly plausible, given Martina's unease around Lucy, and her sudden flight from her life in England. Sitting now in the cafe, Colette cautiously revisits this idea in her mind.

Why should it not be true? It was reality for thousands of women every year but it was almost never spoken about, as least not to Colette. Pretty well every other trauma or misfortune she can name she can link to a personal circumstance: the woman who lived three doors up who had killed herself; the hairdresser's brother who had been murdered; the father of Rob's best friend in primary school who had been jailed for embezzlement. She cannot bear to think of Martina in those circumstances, feeling checkmated by life and having no-one to turn to – if what she imagines is indeed the case. The loneliness of it appals her. Time and again Colette has asked herself why she feels so strongly that what she believes about Martina must be true. She has no proof. If asked to justify her thoughts she could claim only an intuitive sense of Martina having been
profoundly
wounded as a woman. She sees this manifested in flashes of bitterness; in sudden cold or sharp remarks. Sometimes Colette even thinks that the way Martina dresses has something to do with it. Certainly she had always been interested in style, and had chosen her clothes with attention and flair. But Colette has on occasion a sense now of Martina
armouring
herself against the world; of constructing a carapace to protect herself, to console her body for whatever affront it has suffered, to negate it, and perhaps even to deny that such an affront has taken place. There is something about the way she presents herself that amounts almost to a scrupulosity.

Two years ago, Fintan and Colette had hosted a barbecue for Joan's birthday, and invited the whole family. Early on, Colette and Martina had withdrawn from proceedings, taking with them glasses of wine and a bowl of olives, to a bench halfway down the garden, from where they watched as the meal was prepared: Niall on salad duty with Lucy; Fintan lost in a haze of scented blue smoke, grilling sausages and steaks; Rob busy with crockery and drinks. Joan and Beth sat together under a dark-green parasol. As Colette and Martina chatted, Colette could see her sister-in-law studying everyone in turn with almost forensic attention. At last she took a sip from her glass, and said to Colette, ‘A family is quite something when you think about it, isn't it?'

‘I suppose so,' Colette had replied. ‘It all depends on the family.' Colette had always found extraordinary in the Buckleys the remarkable intensity of their feelings, and the strength of their attachment to one another: Fintan and Lucy, Niall and Rob, Martina and Beth. Colette likes this slightly overheated quality, having herself grown up in a cool and detached household, with two brothers whom she now almost never sees and with whom she struggles to find common ground when they do chance to meet. When she married Fintan she was at first astonished by the degree to which the Buckleys were all constantly on each other's case, meeting, ringing each other up, circulating family news; but she has grown to like it and she now shares this trait.

‘Sometimes I find it strange,' she said to Martina, ‘when I look at the family – I mean the five of us – sometimes I can hardly believe that we've made this little team between us, Fintan and me. And the kids are great but each in their own way; they're all very different, and yet it all holds together as a unit. The boys are pretty well adults now. I don't always agree with things they say or do, but I trust them. They'll move away into their own lives before long. Empty nest, and all that, though of course we'll still have Lucy with us for ages.'

‘This will sound selfish', Martina said, ‘but I dread losing Beth. I know I lived on my own for years in England, but now I hate the prospect of it.'

Colette had tried to console her then with the example of Beth herself, and her late happy marriage to Christy, but Martina would have none of it.

‘Never,' she said, and repeated it for emphasis, ‘never. That side of my life is over. I want nothing more to do with men. I want to be left in peace.'

Colette had been taken aback by the vehemence with which she spoke, but it gave her an opening and she took it.

‘Martina,' she said very softly, ‘what happened to you in England? That time just before you came home? Do you want to talk about it?'

And Martina had turned to her, shocked, with a look in her eyes such as Colette thought she had
never
seen in anyone before. Martina hadn't answered Colette, but had put her wine glass down and stood up. She walked across the garden to where Rob was and started to talk to him, took a corkscrew from his hands and opened another bottle of wine.

Colette had been miserable for the rest of that day, thinking that she had annoyed and upset
Martina
, but when everyone was leaving Martina had whispered in her ear, ‘It's very kind that you noticed, but I really don't want to talk about it.' She had then embraced Colette, who had hugged her back.

But it had troubled Colette ever since then to think of Martina going about with this great knot of unhappiness in her life, and there being seemingly nothing to be done about it. It troubles her yet, sitting here in the cafe, with the remains of her cappuccino cold in the cup before her. She looks at her watch. Time is moving on.

Before leaving, she buys another cookie studded with Smarties to take home for Lucy.  

To a casual observer, Fintan's life throughout that spring would appear to be progressing in its habitual, unremarkable fashion. He takes the train into the city every day, and goes to the office, where he spars with Imelda and does his job with his usual indolent brilliance. He eats bigger lunches than he will willingly admit to when quizzed about it, by his concerned wife and teasing sons, over his substantial dinners at home in the evening. He ponders a suitable treat for Lucy and her little friend Emma, to compensate for the sleepover which he is still reluctant to sanction, and finally decides that the zoo might be a possibility; an outing so
déclassé
in these affluent and sophisticated times that it would have the added value of irony, were seven-year-olds able to appreciate such a quality. From time to time Colette nags him gently about paying a visit to his mother, something he knows is long overdue but which he can never quite bring himself to do.

And yet while all of this is happening, another reality has overtaken his life. Fintan has become obsessed with early colour photographs. Niall is complicit in this and feeds his habit, with books from the library, and links to websites which Fintan consults compulsively when he should be busy with his job, furtively minimising the screen should Imelda happen to put her head around the door for any reason.

He quickly grows technically proficient, and can easily distinguish the different processes; can distinguish an Autochrome from a Colourchrome with a casual glance. He is familiar with the names and works of pioneers in the field: the Lumière brothers, with their photographs of subjects more usually found in Impressionist paintings, such as bourgeois Belle Époque lunches in the open air; Lionel de Rothschild, with his family portraits and flowerbeds; and Albert Kahn, with his meticulous record of countries worldwide when their national stereotypes, long since homogenised and deconstructed by globalisation, had been the real thing. Perhaps most astonishing of all is the work of the Russian Gotkin, whose system of using three coloured filters gave results of almost alarming vividness and accuracy: it seems impossible that they can be so old.

Looking at the photographs makes Fintan feel
vertiginous
. They offer him a weird portal back into the past, into another world; as in the books he reads to Lucy at night, so that he feels as if he is tumbling slowly down a rabbit-hole lined with shelves, or that he has been shut into an open-ended wardrobe, pushing his way through furs and cool silks to a snowy landscape. On the day he first chanced to see the old photographs in the cafe, while eating his carrot cake, he had found it impossible to imagine himself back to that world. But now when he looks at the coloured photographs, which are sometimes barely a decade older than those black-and-white ones, he thinks – he, Fintan Buckley, hitherto a strong contender for the title of Most Unimaginative Man In Ireland – why, he feels that he might look up from his book and find himself back in the distant past.

‘You wouldn't like it,' Niall says bluntly, when his father shyly confides this to him.

‘Why not?'

‘It wouldn't be the way you think.'

They're in the kitchen at home, on an overcast Sunday afternoon. Fintan is looking through one of his photography books while drinking tea and Niall has just wandered in, wearing jeans and a black tee shirt that says on it in tiny white letters, ‘This is what I'm wearing today.'

‘It would smell different, for a start,' Niall says, putting his hand to the flank of the teapot to gauge the heat of the tea, lifting the lid and peering in to judge the quantity. ‘It would smell of horse piss and horse shit. I bet everything stank back then. Can I have some of this? Drains, people's teeth, you name it,' he continues, taking a mug from the cupboard and serving himself. ‘But I'll tell you what I really can't stand,' he says, sitting down opposite Fintan. ‘It's that sort of Heritage sense of the past. This girl I know in college, last summer she worked in one of those big houses that's open to the public. She had to dress up as a parlour maid and talk to all the visitors, tell them all this made-up crap. She said the room they liked best was always the laundry. But can you imagine what life really must have been like back then, doing the dirty work in a house like that? Can you imagine nursing someone with diarrhoea in a house with no bathroom?' From the alarmed looked on his father's face, Niall knows that he's got the point he's making. ‘They want people always to identify with the ruling classes,' he goes on. ‘They want you to think as if it was always a summer
afternoon
back then, all croquet on the lawn and kids in white smocks and girls in big hats, all that kind of stuff.'

‘There was such a reality,' Fintan says, gesturing to the open book on the table.

‘Yeah, but come on, for how many people? It's not the whole story.' They sit in silence for a few moments, drinking their tea, and then Niall remarks, ‘It's kind of interesting, though, to think about the past in this way, I mean the really distant past, 'cos photography is one of the things that makes the biggest difference.' He says to Fintan that the visual impact of visiting a new place must have been infinitely powerful if one had not seen in advance sharp colour photographs of it, ‘and of course you couldn't see photographs like that at the time, 'cos there was no such thing.' He cites Goethe's nigh-on ecstatic account of visiting Rome at the start of the nineteenth century: the shock of the beauty of it; the strangeness.

Fintan doesn't agree. He says that no amount of documentary evidence had prepared him for the reality of seeing Venice for the first time. He says that Granny Buckley had described to him the arrival of the American soldiers in Northern Ireland during the Second World War, and how their second-hand familiarity – ‘They were like people in the films' – had only made them seem the more exotic.

‘What I'm saying', Niall argues, ‘is that we tend to think that the past was more interesting than it really was, and my point is that it was more banal than we give it credit for, but also more complicated. And anyway, we're talking about “The Past” ' – he makes inverted commas in the air around the words as he speaks them – ‘as if it was a discrete period of time, which is just stupid. I mean, if it comes to that, you can actually remember “The Past” ' – he does the thing with his fingers again – ‘can't you, Dad?'

‘Not a time before colour photography, no,' Fintan deadpans, and they both then laugh.

‘But seriously, Dad, you must be able to remember things from ages ago, from when you were a kid?'

‘It's very strange when I look at newsreels from the Troubles,' he says, ‘because it does look familiar to me, and yet it also looks quaint: all the boxy little cars, the women in headscarves. But it wasn't quaint at all, it was bloody awful. I knew that, even when I was little. I remember being in Armagh with Granny Buckley one day, shopping, and we walked round a corner. There was a soldier coming the other way, holding a rifle, and he bumped into her. That is, the butt of his rifle hit her right in the solar plexus. The soldier swore – I think he said something like “Fucking hell!” – I don't exactly remember, but it was strong, whatever it was, because I was almost as shocked at someone swearing like that in front of Granny as I was at them nearly shooting her.'

‘And how did she react?'

Fintan laughs. ‘You have to hand it to Granny, she played a blinder. She said to him, “You mind your language, mister, and mind what you're doing with that thing.” And then she swept on round the corner. But as soon as she was out of sight of the soldier she stopped and she leant against a wall and closed her eyes and she said over and over again, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” She was really shook, and it took a lot to rattle Granny. I mean when you think back on it, in one way it's kind of funny, and in another way it's horrific. And I'll tell you this,' he went on, ‘I really do remember that as if it happened yesterday.'

‘It's a strange thing, how memory works,' Niall remarks. ‘I can remember you and Mum from the whole way through my childhood, from when I was small; and it seems to me in those memories that you don't look any different to how you do now. But if I look at photographs from that time, you look quite different. You both look much younger.'  

Niall has finished his tea. He rinses his mug and leaves it on the drainer, then crosses to the window. ‘Is it raining? I was thinking of going for a walk.' Fintan looks out into the garden, at Lucy's swing and the wooden bench.

‘I don't think it's raining. It's hard to tell; it's a soft kind of day. I'd take a chance on it, if I were you.'

 Niall drifts out of the room again, and Fintan continues to leaf through his book. He comes across a group of photographs from the First World War, of trenches and field hospitals, which are disconcerting because they look like stills from a film, even to him, who has always found historical movies unconvincing; the combination of period costume and the kind of teeth that only modern dentistry can provide striking him as particularly risible. He turns the page, and now he regrets that Niall has gone, because he has found a photograph which he would have liked to show him.

It is a picture of a red apple sitting on a mirror. There are other studies of fruit alongside, including a bowl of rather gnarled pears that look very much of their era, of a time before pesticides.

But the apple is perfect. It is one of those deep red, round apples, its skin so highly polished that the light reflects off it in a white spot. Apples have always been a potent fruit for Fintan, and not just because he loves eating them. They remind him of his childhood in the North, where his granny had a little orchard. The caption on the photograph states that it was taken in 1907, which Fintan can scarcely credit, so exactly does it look like something he might buy and eat with his lunch.

He glances up from his book and looks out of the window. It is definitely raining now, but it is a fine, soft misty rain, the sort you have to narrow your eyes and look closely at to be able to see it at all. The swing and the bench have disappeared, and the garden is full of apple trees. They are witchy and stiff; gnarled and sculptural; their branches ascending at first before inverting and pointing resolutely downwards. The colours are all drab, greys and shades of olive green. Fintan is aware now that he is actually sitting on the windowsill, which has become wider than it was before, as the window itself has become smaller and more deep-set; and Martina is sitting beside him, only she is a little girl. She is looking out into the orchard. ‘Look,' she says. ‘Look, Fintan. The trees are moving.'

She's right. Some of the trees at the back of the orchard have begun to move forward. Fintan and Martina watch without speaking. The moving trees continue to approach through the dankness of the day, and then Fintan says, ‘They're not trees. They're soldiers.'

It's a foot patrol, in camouflage fatigues, and as soon as Fintan and Martina realise this, the illusion of trees vanishes. As the soldiers draw nearer they can see them clearly: the metal helmets covered in net and all stuck with leaves; the blocky flak-jackets like perverse buoyancy aids, designed to make you sink; the long dark guns in their hands. They are moving closer, still somehow fitting in with the trees, in harmony with them, and yet also distinct now, as soldiers, as people. They are advancing inexorably towards the house. The sound of their voices is audible, the crackle of walkie-talkies. Fintan is afraid.

‘Down! Down! Quick, before they see us,' Martina says, and she slides off the windowsill. As she goes, she grabs Fintan by the ankle and pulls him after her, so that he falls clumsily, and hits his head off the edge of the table with a tremendous bang, knocking himself out.

He opens his eyes. He is a middle-aged man, sitting at the kitchen table, not under it. There is a book, a mug and a teapot before him. In the wet garden there is a swing and a bench. Dizzy and unmanned, he is stunned, as if someone had closed the heavy book of photographs and brought it down hard on his skull.