Wheels Within Wheels (24 page)

Godfrey turned away and got into the car. ‘Never would be best’, he said. Then he switched on the engine and added, ‘Tomorrow, by the river.’

Free-wheeling home, I felt indifferent to Godfrey’s unhappy remorse. A woman’s love can be as ruthless as a man’s.

Now I had exchanged innocence for understanding and that night my own aroused body told me what a marathon of self-control had ended for Godfrey by Bayl Lough. My respect for him increased accordingly – and I felt gratitude, too. Any earlier would have been too soon. As it was, that day had not been marred by any confusion, uncertainty, regret or doubt. I vaguely wished we could marry, but it mattered little that we could not. The formality of marriage seemed a mere dusty document beside the fiery jewel of our love. Godfrey of course would feel otherwise and already I was prepared to be sacrificed on the altar of his scruples. But now I felt capable of coping with any number of complex Godfrey reactions. And intuitively he must have known that at last I was ready to take the hardships as well as the joys of an adult liaison.

The following evening he first said ‘I love you’ as we stood, towards sunset, on the river bank. Then my armour of selfishness was penetrated by the sadness behind those words. He added that really we should discuss things sensibly; but there was nothing to discuss. He meant, I knew, that we should face up to the impracticality of the situation, say goodbye and get on with life separately and rationally. Yet the idea was too preposterous even to be mentioned. To my relief he never
questioned the durability of our love. This had been my only fear – that he might retreat behind a barrier of cynicism and dismiss my feelings as transient youthful emotionalism. Predictably he condemned himself, at length and bitterly, for having cultivated a friendship that was bound at some stage to complicate my future. I replied that as a woman of nearly twenty-one I could look after my own future. Godfrey well knew my views on marriage and though he disagreed with them they were now conveniently reassuring. However, he did dutifully point out that it was too soon for me to withdraw from the matrimonial stakes – if I could ever have been described as an entry – and that if I detached from him I might eventually fall for some eligible man of an appropriate age. But his tone lacked conviction; we were both conscious of an inexorability about our relationship. It didn’t make sense yet it seemed to exist almost as an outside force, independent of our decisions.

Because of Godfrey’s scruples about extra-marital sex I now had to exercise my share of self-control – admittedly a less difficult task for a woman, yet not easy when one’s passions have just been awakened. To me these scruples were absurd, but recognising their sincerity I loyally deferred to them. It often seemed a black joke that in this relationship with a Protestant Englishman I was up against precisely the sort of inhibitions that are chiefly associated with Catholic Irishmen. Fortunately Godfrey’s scruples ceased to be effective at fairly regular intervals, but my primitive delight in love-making was always overshadowed by an uneasy and faintly unflattering awareness of Godfrey’s sense of sin. Had the physical bond been our strongest, this relationship would have rapidly disintegrated.

On the surface it looks like very hard luck when a woman always falls in love with ‘the wrong man’. Yet in my case this apparent hard luck may be linked to that strong adolescent premonition about never marrying. Perhaps we unconsciously avoid situations for which we are ill-equipped, even if avoiding them entails an amount of immediate suffering.

Had Godfrey been free to marry, it would still have been difficult for me to leave home; so his being unfree spared me a major crisis of conscience. As things were, I took care to conceal our relationship from my parents, knowing that it would have needlessly upset them even to 
suspect that I was involved with a man who was still married, both by his own and their reckoning. Looking back, I doubt if my mother can have remained blind to my in-love bliss. But she never tried to pry.

Neither of my parents ever questioned me about how I spent my free time; they must have speculated, but their tact was supreme. Outwardly they got no reward for this, only an increasingly uncommunicative daughter. But indirectly they were repaid. Having been allowed, from the age of fourteen, to follow as independent a path as circumstances permitted, I carefully shielded them from all unnecessary worry on my behalf. Never once, during this period, did I even consider adding to their difficulties by staking my claim to a normal life. But to write thus gives a false impression of an heroically self-sacrificing daughter. It was not like that. I did not consider and choose and put my parents first; to do so was not in my nature. Indeed, by temperament I was peculiarly incapable of being a comfort to them. But always I was conscious of our three lives being in one sense a unit on the scales of Fate and at least I could refrain from deliberately adding to their misfortunes. I had youth and health and hope and love and an enormous capacity for enjoyment – even against the odds. To break them, in quest of further advantages, was, literally, unthinkable.

Yet there was a certain remorseless brutality in the way I went about constructing my aloof adult relationship with both parents. However useful I may have been as a daughter around the house (and I wasn’t very), my failure to grow into a friend must have grieved them deeply. But I had to isolate myself mentally if I were to continue to live at home. At the time I did not weigh and calculate in this fashion; my withdrawal was instinctive though I knew what I was doing and that I was being cruel. Now I realise that by turning away from my parents at an age when exchanges of opinions could have been most rewarding, and by assuming that they would react to a given situation in a certain way, without ever testing them, I was both impoverishing myself and doing an injustice to two remarkable people. But I cannot have regrets. It was as it had to be.

One result of my new relationship with Godfrey was a return to ‘marathon’ writing, which I had sensibly abandoned for a few years to devote more time to reading. During the winter of 1952-53 I attempted my first novel. The heroine only slightly resembled myself because this was not the semi-autobiographical first effort of many aspiring novelists. Instead, it had a curiously prophetic theme – the growing-up of an illegitimate girl in a small Irish town.

It will be remembered that illegitimacy and its problems had come early to my notice. As a child I had often heard my mother arguing that the socially crippling effects of unmarried motherhood constituted an altogether disproportionate punishment for a momentary loss of
self-control
. At the same time it was emphasised – for my benefit – that only the ‘less fortunate’ sort of girl lost her self-control in this context. ‘Less fortunate’ was my mother’s favourite euphemism when she wished to make class distinctions. Although perhaps euphemism is unfair; she was a practical Christian who used that phrase with compassion.

The illegitimate birthrate has always been high in Ireland, among the ‘less fortunate’, yet until very recently the conventions demanded elaborate pretences that deceived nobody but maintained a façade of ‘decent Catholic living’. Many much-loved bastards were brought up as their mother’s youngest sibling (as in Brid’s case) or, if this seemed biologically unconvincing, as her nephew or niece. Among the more fortunate, however, things were different – always far less civilised and frequently inhumane. A Co Cork case shocked my parents and me in 1952. The only daughter of a middle-class family – my exact
contemporary
– became pregnant by a married man while a student at University College Cork and was banished ‘for ever’ from her parents’ home. Her father even discontinued her allowance and forbade her mother to contact her. In due course we heard that the wretched girl had had a nervous breakdown as a result of being forced to give up her son for adoption. And this was the too familiar tragedy behind my novel.

Despite having my own study at home, I usually worked, during my
evening off-duty hours, in my father’s office in the empty County Library Headquarters. Then, as now, I preferred while writing to be completely alone and beyond reach of any interruption. Besides, the domestic atmosphere was gradually becoming less conducive to concentration. Often my mother and I quarrelled during the day about some trivial point of household management and by six o’clock I was longing to escape from the very unpleasant vibes we had created between us.

I wrote this novel only because it was kicking to get out – but Godfrey, to my gratified surprise, urged me to have it typed. It was sent to some half-dozen publishers and one cautiously hinted that if I made the tragic ending a happy one they might reconsider it. But this I was not prepared to do. Although I knew that it was mediocre and mawkish it had a certain integrity and the ending, however crudely melodramatic, was – to me – inevitable and right and so could not be changed to suit the market. This failure to get into print between hard covers did not at all depress me. I had expected it and – as on my first excursion into the literary world – I considered the ‘try again’ remarks of various publishers a fair reward for my labours. During the following winter I wrote another novel – just for fun – but this time had enough sense not to listen to Godfrey and waste more money on typing fees.

In 1952 my father had spent his annual month’s holiday at home, while I was abroad, because he no longer felt able to cope simultaneously with library and domestic duties. My mother therefore decided that in 1953 I must do a month on solo duty while my father deep-sea-fished. To this equitable arrangement I could scarcely object. Yet incipient panic threatened if I allowed myself to think about spending two years in Lismore without even an occasional day off.

When the time came I found that month an almost intolerable strain. For me my mother would make none of those concessions which she gladly made to spare my father. On his departure for West Cork in June 1953 I was condemned to a month’s virtual imprisonment. My mother insisted on never being left alone in the house for more than an hour a day, which just gave me time to rush down to the Blackwater for a swim, doing the shopping on the way home. I could not go far enough afield to meet Godfrey in the sort of seclusion he demanded and Mark’s daily
visits to our house afforded me my only safety-valve. He always brought a bottle of dry sherry to cheer me up and we would sit drinking in the kitchen while he told me the latest dirty jokes about the Vatican. But even his visits were a qualified form of relaxation; although my mother never commented on them I knew how much she resented Mark and after each visit she obliquely punished me. Fortunately I was still very resilient and the day my father returned I recovered my equilibrium.

Soon I was eagerly planning and reading in preparation for a Spanish tour in the following spring and it was on this journey that I first fell in love with a country. My earlier tours had been immensely enjoyable and rewarding, but none of the countries visited had had the particular ingredients needed to spark me off as a travel writer. In Spain, at that time, there was an exciting sense of remoteness, both spatial and temporal. I pedalled as far off the beaten track as possible – encountering no hostility anywhere – and never before had I experienced anything like the Spanish quality of solitude and silence. The landscape, too, was dramatic – as was the climate, for in April blizzards were still blowing over the vastness of the Castilian plateau. Burgos was snowbound and glittering under an ice-blue sky and a northerly gale made it unnecessary to pedal on the way to Salamanca.

Significantly, perhaps, two of my mother’s favourite heroines were Isabella of Castile and Teresa of Avila; I had been reared on their
life-stories
, with Ferdinand and John of the Cross standing slightly in the background. Many small-town names therefore sounded both cosily familiar and gloriously romantic. Again, Pappa had been a Cervantes addict – not surprisingly, given the resemblance between himself and the man from La Mancha – and his special children’s copy of
Don Quixote
, from which he often read to us on those summer days in Lismore, had been edited by himself with a pencil to avert juvenile boredom. (His other, 1796 four-volume edition, published in Dublin by John Chambers ‘As an Endeavour to Improve the art of Printing in Ireland’, and with ‘Some Account of the Author’s Life by T. Smollett, MD’, was among his most cherished possessions – and is now among mine.) However, George Borrow’s
The Bible in Spain
and Walter Starkie’s
Spanish Raggle-Taggle
were the books which directly inspired me to cycle around Spain. And the fact that I had done my homework so
thoroughly – reading volumes of history, biography and travel, balanced by novels, plays and poems in translation – perhaps partly explains my feeling of instant affinity with the Spaniards. They seemed at once more comprehensible and more ‘foreign’ than the Germans or the French and I even found myself speaking a version of Spanish despite my notorious inability to learn foreign languages.

My independence of Youth Hostels also contributed to the success of this journey. None then existed in Spain, but the village
posadas
were even cheaper and got me involved with the sort of Spaniards I most wanted to meet. Occasionally, as the weather improved, I slept out in my flea-bag – once unwittingly in a graveyard which was the only level spot I could find on a pitch black night in the mountains of Aragon; I got quite a shock on waking next morning. At twenty-two I had reached my physical peak and could effortlessly cycle 120 miles a day through mountainous country on a heavy roadster laden with large panniers which were quite unnecessary for such a short trip. (It takes time to learn that a medium-sized rucksack can hold all one needs for six months.)

In Spain I kept a detailed diary for the first time, writing it up every evening, however tired I felt, and posting it to Godfrey once a week. On my return home he encouraged me to use this material and I sold a series of twelve articles to the
Irish Independent
, Irelands’ most popular daily newspaper. Heartened by this success – I had for the first time earned a considerable sum of money, by Murphy standards – I began work on a travel book, writing into the small hours every night for five months. Most of my earnings were willingly spent on the typing of those 100,000 words. This book seemed to me no worse than many recently published volumes of a similar type – and better than some – so I felt very hard-done-by when four publishers rejected it. All the skill, knowledge, energy and concentration I then possessed had gone into it and I suspected that its failure was due to the subject matter rather than to technical deficiencies. An equally well-or ill-written book on
somewhere
more exotic would probably have proved acceptable. To write successfully on Spain, I reckoned, one would need the ability of a V. S. Pritchett or an Arland Ussher – authors with whom I knew I could never compete. Recently I skimmed through this typescript and could
find no reason to change my earlier opinion. In some ways it is more polished than my first published book and its chief defect – verbosity – could have been remedied by any competent publisher’s editor.

By the beginning of May 1955 I had decided to waste no more postage on my Spanish typescript. And it was at about this time that I experienced my first mood of desperation. It was only a mood – a sunny evening of agony – but its intensity frightened me. I remember lying on smooth turf near the river, beneath the new leaves of a beech tree, and looking up at the blue sky between the leaves, and feeling the torture of my seething discontent and resentment being accentuated – instead of soothed, as always before – by the beauty of the evening. The immediate cause of this desperation was my being unable to get back to Spain until the following year. At twenty-three I felt increasingly conscious of the passage of time, of my own thwarted potentialities and of being trapped in a situation from which there could be no possible escape in the foreseeable future. My ambition to cycle to India now came more often to the surface of my mind and I tormented myself with thoughts of Afghanistan and the Himalayas. It had been established that I was physically equal to such a journey; all I needed was freedom. Yet had my mother permitted another Spanish holiday that year I would have philosophically forgotten India. I was not craving the unattainable – complete freedom. My demands were reasonable and my willingness to compromise was always there had my mother chosen to take advantage of it.

However, this obvious grievance was but one of the causes of my new unhappiness. No less important was my recent literary disappointment – the first of my career, since I had never before seriously expected a typescript to be accepted. Had I been asked to choose between returning at once to Spain for three months and having my book published there is no doubt what my choice would have been. And having proved to my own satisfaction that I could write a moderately good travel book, the circumstances that prevented me from gathering saleable raw material chafed all the more.

Loyalty to Godfrey inhibited me from acknowledging – even to myself, at the time – another factor that was compounding the tension in my
life. For me the constraint which he struggled to impose on our physical relationship was becoming more and more trying as the novelty of being loved wore off and the flesh ached for its due. This constraint was prompted not only by his personal code of sexual morality but by an absurd theory that the more celibate we were the more likely I would be to detach from him, emotionally. Such an attitude says a lot for his nobility of mind but very little for his perspicacity. Even had we been entirely celibate I would have loved him no less. Faithfulness is not a virtue but a trait natural to some people. Its semblance may be cultivated – and this no doubt often is a virtue – but the converse is not true. Faithfulness cannot be quenched, except by the total and final disappearance from one person’s life of another.

Godfrey’s notion that sexual deprivation might eventually wither my love could be misinterpreted as a measure of how little he understood me. Yet he never really doubted my constancy; at intervals, when his constraint-system broke down, he admitted this. And then he would explain that to placate his convoluted conscience he sometimes had to pretend to himself that our bond was fragile enough to be easily snapped should my future happiness seem to require this. During such
introspections
I used to reflect privately that a greater concern for my present happiness would be more to the point. Yet despite my no-holds-barred approach when Godfrey did let us off his moral leash, pride would never allow me deliberately to provoke him to make love. Also, his guilty aftermath was so grim, and so unnaturally prolonged, that I could not have all that mental suffering on my conscience.

During that summer Mark realised how close I was to crisis-point and how much I needed moral support of the astringent sort that does not encourage brooding. In June he urged me to confront my mother, announce that I must have a break and request her to go away to a nursing home for a month, or employ a private nurse to look after her at home in my absence. But both those ploys had been considered and rejected two years earlier. My mother argued that we could not afford either alternative; no nursing home would accept her unless she engaged special day and night nurses and no nurse would look after her at home unless we could provide someone to dance attendance on the nurse.
This I knew to be true: hence my trapped feeling. I could not yet see that my mother had become alarmingly over-dependent on my father and myself and that she would have resisted such an arrangement however much money was available.