Wheels Within Wheels (19 page)

It never occurred to me to speculate about the effects of this decision on myself at the age of eighteen, or twenty-five, or thirty. If I could have foreseen myself after the passing of another fourteen years, I would probably have refused to believe in the truth of my vision. Perhaps few fourteen-year-olds look far ahead, and even now, at forty-six, I feel foolish and futile if I try to do so. The present is enough. Attempts to control the future seem needlessly to limit its possibilities. If this view were general, anarchy would overtake the world. But one hopes there is room for a minority of non-planners.

That evening my immediate future, if far from ideal, looked quite tolerable. I would have ample time to read and write and cycle and swim. I would see Mark regularly – and he meant more to me than any number of school friends. Unlike most of my contemporaries, I had no interest in parties, clothes, films, dances, pop-stars (if such then existed) or boyfriends. In many ways, God had indeed fitted the back for the burden, in my case as well as my father’s.

I returned from that walk at ten o’clock, an hour past my usual bedtime, and announced that my original impulsive decision remained unchanged. I asserted again that, however favourable the domestic conditions, I would never have had either the ability or the will to distinguish myself as a scholar. And then my mother again dutifully went into details about the disadvantageous long-term implications of not at least having my Leaving Certificate, should the day ever come when I needed to earn my own living. But I knew that she was rejoicing in her heart and I hardly listened.

My father’s feelings concerned me much more. I believed that he, too, welcomed my decision; but in the course of explaining it I had ruthlessly demolished his cherished dreams for my academic future. To me those dreams had always seemed absurd, yet suddenly I found them the more
touching for that. During the past year he had proved how much they meant to him, how doggedly he was prepared to struggle to make them come true. But throughout that conference I was too constrained by the awkward adolescent barriers between my parents and myself, and too embarrassed by the emotional cross-currents in the atmosphere, to be anything other than belligerent and gruff. As usual, the very keenness of my appreciation of my father’s feelings prevented me from allowing my sympathy even to be glimpsed. Harshly, I told myself that his present disappointment was nothing to do with me, that if anyone should be blamed it was he himself for ever having allowed a possibility to play the part of a certainty in his life.

My mother was no dreamer and had always tried to hold her husband’s dreams in check, even if (or perhaps because) she recognised them for what they surely were – a reaching out towards compensation for a tragically imperfect marriage. Had they come true she would have been as pleased as he. But she argued that one should never have specific ambitions for any child before its potentialities can be gauged. As both my parents were reasonably intelligent, my father was justified in hoping for the best – but not, according to my mother’s view, in staking his happiness on my success as a scholar. By the date of our conference my mother had probably accepted the obvious fact that I was not a budding intellectual and the even more obvious fact that whatever I did with my life I was unlikely to follow an established route. She was also helped to resign herself to the situation by her old-fashioned views on women and education; she saw no reason why the average woman should not become sufficiently cultivated and informed without ever going near a university. She had never been greatly impressed by blue-stockings: to her there was no virtue in being unable to scramble an egg or patch a shirt, even if one could read Russian novelists in the original and discern Tantric influences on the Gnostics.

Lying in bed that evening, too tired to go at once to sleep, I knew as certainly as if he had told me that for my father one dream was already being replaced by another. From now on he would look forward to seeing me succeed as a writer. There had to be a dream. And it comforted me that this was one we shared.

Many years were to pass before I perceived the real conflict inherent in
that Good Friday situation. It should have been apparent at the time, but perhaps I dodged it, unconsciously/deliberately, because any attempt to cope with it would have torn me asunder.

How had my father
really
felt? Had he wholeheartedly welcomed my decision, as I then believed? Or would part of him have preferred me to choose schooling in Dublin, even at the cost of my mother and he being separated for years? Quite likely he himself did not know the answer to that question. And it never even crossed my mind. To me my parents were a unit and their mutual love and interdependence seemed sacred, something to which one instinctively – almost compulsively – made sacrifices. It would have been psychologically impossible for me to desecrate that love by wondering if my father just might half-wish to put his daughter’s welfare before his wife’s. Moreover, I would not have wished either of my parents to put me first; this would have forged between us the sort of bond I dreaded – a bond woven of obligation that might never honourably be broken. As it was, my adolescent urge to detach from them was uninhibited by any feeling that either needed me on more than the practical level. Outwardly I was tied to them, inwardly I was far freer than if my formal education had been continued because to one or both
I
was the most important person in the world.

A cataclysmic row, between my mother and my father’s family, followed on that momentous occasion. This devastated my father, who was devoted to his family but felt bound to oppose them in defence of his wife. They, of course, were acting for the best, reckoning that my father needed support against an autocratic woman who had always been too strong for him and was now proposing to blight an innocent child’s life to suit herself. This dramatic misinterpretation camouflaged certain complex truths that were not to become apparent to me for many years. At fourteen, I only saw my mother – whom I still adored, from behind the adolescent barriers – being unjustly attacked by people who disregarded all that she had recently gone through for my sake, misunderstood the intricacies of our family scene and had no knowledge of my personal inclinations. So I entered the arena armed with the armour of righteousness and attacked my affectionate, caring relatives in long, smug, stupid letters which my mother would never have allowed me to post had she read them.

As a result of our tribal warfare I never saw Pappa again. He and I had not quarrelled, but we were prevented from meeting by the animosity that persisted for years between the Dublin and Lismore Murphys. However, this sad and unnecessary ending to a lifetime (on my part) of love had one good effect. It taught me that quarrelling – with anybody about anything – is hideously wasteful. Argument, controversy and disagreement can be productive. But quarrelling in a bitter, negative, unforgiving way is a miserable admission of one’s failure to cope with other people’s viewpoints – and with oneself.

Mercifully the tie between Pappa and myself had in any case been gradually loosening. Essentially this was a
childhood
relationship and as I emerged from childhood Pappa’s magic waned. By the time I went away to school he had ceased to be a central figure in my life though my affection for him never lessened. His death, at the end of December 1947, was my first experience of bereavement and it shattered me. The whole town mourned with us and many were the expressions of dismay because none of us was able to attend the funeral. On Christmas Eve my father had been immobilised by another attack of sciatica and I was looking after two invalids. This circumstance may have been a kindly gesture on Fate’s part. My father, who had met none of his family since May 1946, would have been anguished by that reunion. He had no stomach for quarrels and only loyalty to his wife could ever have involved him in one.

Several years later I discovered that Mark, too, had opposed my parents at this time. He attached no great importance to formal schooling (for me) but felt that our domestic affairs could and should be arranged to suit my future as much as anyone else’s. Also, he foresaw how hopelessly I could become trapped in the domestic cage once my mother – whose health was slowly but inexorably deteriorating – grew accustomed to my style of nursing.

On that Easter Monday Mark confronted my parents, while I was out cycling, and criticised them bluntly. For such a man to interfere in another family’s affairs required enormous courage – generated, in this case, by powerful feelings of foreboding on my behalf. As I have already mentioned, there had never been any casual come-and-go between the 
Ryans and my parents, and Mark’s occasional visits to our home had been very brief. This particular visit was still briefer. My parents – rigidly polite – at once made it clear that they were unprepared to discuss their plans for my future with anyone, however well disposed. ‘I came away with two fleas in each ear,’ Mark recalled cheerfully, ten years later. He never again met my mother, and when he and my father chanced to pass in the street they acknowledged each other’s existence with a formality as pointed and cold as an icicle. However, this apparently uncomfortable situation suited me perfectly; to have had to share even a fraction of Mark’s friendship with my parents would have deeply upset me. Although not normally possessive about people, I had always felt compelled to try to insulate this relationship from parental influences. And, as I realised much later, Mark felt exactly the same about insulating it from his own family.

We may have had this protective attitude towards our bond because it was such a curious one – of a kind that makes some people believe in reincarnation. It is, after all, not quite usual, or even proper, for a Roman Catholic priest to have as his closest friend a female, twenty-seven years his junior, who visits him in his secluded home in the country at all hours of the day and night. (As happened eventually, during various Murphy crises.) Had either of us cared about what the neighbours – or the parish priest, or the bishop – said or thought, we would probably have allowed our friendship to fade gently when I reached young
womanhood
. But of course we didn’t care. And besides, such friendships have their own momentum and their own purpose, which is not always fully evident to the friends themselves.

Mark was a natural outsider; not for him the hearty greetings along the Main Street, the breezy first-name chatting-up of parishioners, the earnest discussions about hurling, coursing and the price of
store-cattle
. Some thought him too aloof, for he tried to hide an abnormal shyness behind a curt manner that could be disconcerting. Others, as the years passed, expressed surprise at the failure of so able a man to advance in his profession. But Mark’s idea of clerical advancement had nothing to do with rising in the ranks. He was so devoid of respect for any Establishment, clerical or lay, that he might almost be described as a Christian anarchist. The letter of the law meant nothing to him, the 
spirit everything. He stealthily gave away every surplus penny he possessed and his generosity became a legend among the poor of three counties. When he died, beggars and tinkers and cattle drovers and lonely old age pensioners crowded into a remote country graveyard for his burial service.

Yet he was no stern ascetic; he drank and smoked and enjoyed golf and bridge. Amongst his few friends he was excellent company, witty, well informed and frequently irreverent with an inimitable caustic flippancy that would not have amused the average bishop (and 99 per cent of Irish bishops are dreadfully average). He read widely and wrote (anonymously) with considerable force and skill. Unlike most Irish people he thought naturally in international terms; and unlike most Irish priests he was neither scornful nor suspicious of the great non-European religions.

The only vice despised by Mark was what he called ‘humbug’. Hypocrisy in any form he recognised at a glance and witheringly condemned. Otherwise, he was prepared to find endless excuses for human frailty; if he had had to choose a motto it would have been ‘Judge not …’ There was nothing lax or confused about his own standards – these were austerely high and uncompromisingly clear-cut – but his compassion was without limit. That virtue should be common enough among practising Christians, yet it is not. Too many of them are too sure that only
their
precise interpretation of God’s law has any validity. They see themselves as being on the right side of the fence, from where they may benevolently extend forgiveness or pity or help to wrong-doers on the other side without ever showing true compassion – a word that implies ‘
fellow-feeling
’. For Mark, however, there was no fence. And when I became familiar with Tibetan Buddhism I realised that the quality of his
compassion
was more Eastern than Western.

Mark and I were aged, respectively, thirty-two and five when our friendship was established – or, it may be, re-established. Yet it was from the beginning, in a very strange way, a friendship between equals. Of course I looked to Mark for advice – and even occasionally accepted it from him – and for the support and guidance and stability on older person could provide. But the essential nature of our relationship was not what might have been expected, given the disparity in our ages.

It is fashionable to take unusual relationships to bits, as though they were engines, and to explain and label their component parts. For instance – was Mark, to me, a father-figure, a man who made possible the sort of relationship I could not have with my own father? Or was he a hero to be worshipped because he was so kind and funny and cared so little for convention? Or was he a beloved guru, a priest whose concept of religion coincided, on the most fundamental issues, with my own? Was I, to him, a daughter-substitute? Or, later, a woman who might have become his mistress in any but an Irish context? Or, later still, a fascinating link with the wide world that was his natural habitat but from which he was isolated?