|
A fire burns in the grate. From time to time it spits sparks onto the hearthrug and I make a mental note to chastise the man with the horse and cart from whom I bought the neatly chopped logs of wood when next I see him. [1]
I am a writer.
I have been writing novels for the last fifteen years or so, with varying degrees of success. Well, let’s say I have a door and I keep the wolf from it.
It is important for the self-esteem not to have to beg, borrow or steal. [3]
One of the long windows behind my back is half open and the curtains tremble in the spring breeze. I always sit with my back to the window when I work. I like to have the light falling over my shoulder onto the page, almost green light, as today, or the pale grey of city light, which is the most usual and sometimes in the early morning a streak of gold will reach this room and will enliven my hands on the keyboard and paper in front of me. Also, I like to face the door as I work, so that I cannot be taken too much by surprise I have never really enjoyed surprises. [3]
Martyn couldn’t dance.
Perhaps he just didn’t want to dance.
He had such control, such flexibility of his limbs that I am sure he could have danced if he had wanted to.
Maybe in one of his other lives he dazzled on the dance floor.
Who knows! [4]
The daughter for whom I wait is called Robin. An odd name for a woman.
He chose the name.
He chose everything that happened in the life he spent with me.
[...]
Her real names, you know, the ones, for passports and other official purposes, are Emily Marion, chosen also by him [...] [5].
My mother on the other hand, saw through Martyn like a pane of glass.
[...]
She has a special way of eating toast [...] She still has her own snapping teeth and absolutely no fear of cholesterol, sugar, alcohol, cigarette smoke or any of those other {6}
horrors that keep all the rest of us uneasily on the tightrope. [6-7]
At that time I was preferring London to Dublin. It was to do with my mother.
I don’t mean to be unkind, but at that stage of my life I had to find things out for myself, discover courage, make mistakes. She always found it quite difficult to let me do any of these things. She believed in grammar; not just the grammar of language, but also that of behaviour. In both public and private living. She believed in God. {7}
She believed that woman’s power existed only as far as she could manipulate men.
I had trouble with all those beliefs, so I preferred my anonymity in London. [7-8]
I am attempting to tell a story. Starting at the tail end is part of my writer’s bag of tricks. I suppose I could call myself an illusionist also, except for the fact that he has already bagged that title.
It is a long, slithery sliver of a tale, that came to a sticky end the other day, a cold, windy spring day in London.
Perhaps it was the sort of end he would have wished, here one minute and gone the next. A sleight-of-hand ending to his invented life.
An IRA bomb in a London street and Martyn in his station wagon with a hundred and fifty white doves neatly caged in the back.
I think at this moment of the demolished doves, the feathers drifting down like snowflakes from the evening sky, falling on the wreckage of cars and shattered glass and the frightened injured and dead Martyn. Everyone at the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope they felt nothing at that last moment, no pain, no anxiety.
This morning he was buried in London and I am waiting for our daughter to arrive. I will console her if I can, though I doubt that she will reveal the extent of her pain to me. She will not stay long. She feels ill at ease in Dublin. She speaks with an alien voice, looks at the city with the critical eye of a stranger.
I love her, but I doubt whether she cares. [9]
When I read I become lost to this world. For moments {9} after I lift my eyes from the page I find it hard to refocus on reality. I see the landscape of fiction around me, hear in my head the voices of the writer’s imagination. So, when almost thirty years ago, the man sitting opposite to me in the train from Liverpool to Euston plucked the book from my hands, I was taken aback. [9-10]
Still slag hills, no green and pleasant land outside the windows. [10]
‘Your name? Names?’
‘Oh, yes!
For a moment I couldn’t remember I dipped my head towards the coffee cup and closed my eyes in the hope that a miracle would occur. The smell of the coffee did the trick.
‘Stella Macnamara’
I kept my eyes closed as I said my name.
I opened my eyes and looked at him.
‘You don’t sound Oirish.’
I didn’t bother to reply. [11]
I thought with a sudden panic of all the stories I had heard of naïve passengers in trains being lured into playing cards with innocent-seeming strangers.[13]
It could have been Camus, Sartre, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras. Could have been.
Cold, winter day 1961.
Could have been one of those.
Could, on the other hand, have been Agatha Christie. Whatever it was, I drew the words around me like a stockade. [14]
I thought of poor old Celia Johnson in that terrible hat. I thought of Anna Karenina. [15]
In the flickering light from the street lamps his face looked like a flickering character from an old movie. No emotion, flick, stony Jimmy Cagney flick flick, Herbert Lom, George Raft. Serious villains, every one. [17]
‘Fuck bloody Martyn,’ I think. {19}
I hand her the glass from the mantelpiece.
‘Thanks. You killed him, you know!
I open my mouth to speak but she holds up her hand.
‘You bloody Irish. Blew him to bits and those pathetic birds. Who gives a shit about a bird or two? Sitting at traffic lights minding his own business.’
‘Listen ...’
‘No. That’s all we ever do. Listen to you lot yapping about rights and wrongs. Listen to the gunshots and the sound of bombs going off and innocent people screaming in pain. I don’t know why I’m here. I felt I was betraying him as I walked down the ramp to the plane. Then I thought if I don’t go now, I’d never go, so I forced my feet to go on walking. You made him so unhappy and now this ...’ [28]
‘I think I should meet your family, Martyn. It seems so odd to have been married to you for six months and never ...’
‘Is it six months? Six weeks is what it seems like. Let’s go out and celebrate.’
Our flat was in a mansion block looking down towards Camden Town. In the daylight trains moved below us, slowly manoeuvring across the complexities of plaited tracks.
He hadn’t liked the notion of living underground as he called it, so we had moved into his flat when we returned from Jamaica.
‘I have no family You know that, Star. You are my family. I have no one else.’
‘Uncles? Aunts? Even a distant cousin? There must ...’
He came over and put his arms around me. He nuzzled his face into my neck.
‘Only you. You are all I have.’
He sang the words softly and I felt his warm breath on my neck and shoulder. I felt his words glowing on my skim
’Only you, beneath the moon and under the sun.’ [35]
I am a good cook, a caring cook.
I treat the ingredients with respect. I clean them well; I slice, peel, chop with attention and panache.
I make soups and patés and pies.
My kitchen smells slightly of garlic and Italian olive oil; small of herbs stand on my windowsill; I have three sharp knives of varying sizes, a huge jug full of wooden spoons and a garlic crusher that someone gave me once, but I never use. {40}
I taught myself to cook when we moved to the country and I had time on my hands; nothing to do but look after the child and worry about his bloody birds.
Now, I have soup to comfort her and thick fillet steaks rubbed with garlic and crushed pink peppercorns.
I usually listen to music while I cook, fairly fortissimo, as I prefer music to be foreground rather than backgound.
Elly Ameling singing Schubert, Mozart’s Great Mass or the sound of Callas fill the flat and my head at times to such an extent that I have to stop chopping or stirring and stand quite still in the middle of the room listening with my entire body. [40-41]
I went into the sitting-room and turned on the radio, someone was playing Elgar’s cello concerto. I turned it up fortissimo and opened the windows. [...] How strong you must have to be to play a cello, to command and control such resonances. [...]
The music stopped.
Nothing then but the humming of the streets. [45]
We headed east, our backs to the setting sun, what was left of it.
Green, amber, red. We stopped and started. Beacons flashed, men and women pushed their bones home to their other lives.
I knew nothing about Hore Belisha except that he invented flashing beacons. I wondered whether to ask Martyn about him, but decided against it. [...; 62] Fewer Hore Belishas [63]
In my head I can sing like the greatest, like Callas, Los Angeles, like Jessye Norman and Flagstadt. In my {62} head. In reality I have the voice of a crow. For heaven’s sake I wasn’t even allowed to sing in the choir in school.
‘No, no, no, Stella Macnamara, we can’t have you,’ the music teacher would say.
‘If you could sing quietly you could stay, but you will insist on shouting!’
Printemps qui commence,
A song for spring.
Portant I’espérance
Aux cœurs amoureux,
What a voice. [63]
The house he took me to see the next morning was a charming red-brick gentleman’s residence in good decor, alive condition with a gem of a mature garden and a large well-maintained barn.
A red-brick gentleman in good condition from a London house agency showed us round.
He flourished and jangled a bunch of keys with the expertise of a prison officer.
‘Drawing-room’ [65]
Along the narrow country roads with hedges just starting to green and wide East Anglia fields and a shimmer of sun in a hazy sky.
I longed for whin bushes and the lace of dry-stone walls with the light shining through.
I thought, you stupid cow, you left. You chose. You kept choosing and anyway in Dublin there are no whins and no lacy stone walls, so fuck it, stop calling up these sentimental icons. Have sense, woman. [72]
He gave me everything I ever needed.
My mother never came to our house, again, but Robin and I would spend two or three weeks each year in Dublin.
I became a stranger in my own country. This was something I hadn’t reckoned with. It was quite a painful estrangement.
I also was a stranger in the village.
I had acquaintances aright, people to whom I chatted in the street, people who invited us to dinner and who came to our house for meals. Decent enough people. Just not my people.
No man is an island, entire of itself.
There were times, Mr John Donne, when I would have shouted my disagreement at you.
Had you appeared.
Had you said those words to me in person. [102]
Martyn would stand and laugh as the birds hovered over her and then landed on her outstretched hands, on her shoulders, sometimes, even on her head where they would burrow with their beaks in her shining hair.
I would feel sick, feeling on my own skin the scraping of their claws and the soft flicker of feathers. I would move away from the window.
I would sing to myself.
Hold my hand, I’m a stranger in Paradise.
I would turn on the radio and dance.
Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, swooping and curving through the doors and round the furniture. {106}
Busby Berkeley up and down the stairs, Fred Astaire on the kitchen tiles. [106-07]
I don’t need saving.
I turned and began the walk back towards the car. Who is writing such messages on the wall of my brain? Who the fuck?
Why are you bothering me?
Despoiling my internal architecture? [115]
I wish I still had the typewriter. The black leather case would be somewhat the worse for the wear, but the hammers might still rise and fall with the ease they did on the day we ate the Jersey cream.
Bill is dead.
His death is irrelevant to this story, but I have to write it down.
I hate to write it down.
This is the first time I have written it down.
I hate those three words.
I have to write those three words.
Bill.
is.
Dead.
He didn’t even die as exotically as Martyn, in a shower of feathers.
Fast.
Martyn was here one minute and gone the next. Fast.
My fingers will not stop now on the qwertyuiup until they have had their little say.
This is not Bill’s story. I say that to them, but they stutter on.
Six months ago I sat beside him and Peter too, who is not yet dead, but may be soon, such is the viciousness of love.
I sat on his right side.
I held his right hand in my hand and the sun shone across my shoulder onto the foot of the bed. The bed {130}
cover was blue and it weighed on his tiny body, crushing him into the softness of the mattress.
So much for weighing sixteen stone, sport, I thought. There was almost nothing left of him.
Spirit and pain really, that was all.
Peter held his left hand gently between his two hands. I don’t think he had slept for days and his face was pale, his fingers trembled.
My fingers trembled.
Bill’s breath trembled in his throat.
There was so little of him left for us to love now, only the trembling breath and his cold hands.
I bent down and kissed his hand.
I felt as if my lips were burning a hole in his cold flesh.
‘Dear sport,’ l said.
Peter laughed gently.
‘I hope he can hear you.’
‘I’m sure he can.’
Peter bent down and as I had done kissed the hand that lay between his.
‘Go to God, sport.’
Bill sighed.
It sounded like a sigh
It was, in reality, death. [131]
Perhaps, I think, he has resurrected himself.
Perhaps God didn’t want him.
Perhaps the other lot didn’t want him either. Nothing for it old chap, but to come back to earth. Lots of the best illusionists have got themselves out
of coffins six feet deep before now.
I presume the Provos did a good job though. [151]
‘... Well, you know maybe I was wrong. But... oh Joy. Stella pulled the rabbit out of the hat. If you’ll excuse that allusion. Why don’t you say something?’
‘I don’t know what to say. I’m gobsmacked.
‘What’s that? It sounds great.’
‘Dumbfounded in English.’
He laughed.
‘Gobsmacked. I must remember that.’
‘Who are you talking to?’
‘Ssssh.’
‘What do you mean, sssh?’
‘I wasn’t talking to you. Robin is here ... I’m holding onto the wall.’
‘Are you happy, sport?’ [154-55]
Martyn had other notions.
He received glossy brochures from girls’ boarding-schools all over the country which he would pass on to me when he had read them himself, Banisulm St Leonard’s, St Mary’s Calne, Bedales, Cheltenham Ladiews College.
I barely glanced at them as it was becoming apparent that I wasn’t going to have much say in the matter anyway.
‘I want the best for her,’ Martyn would say. ‘The very best that money can buy.’
For once my mother agreed with him.
‘If it hadn’t been for the war, we would have sent you away to school, like the boys. It teaches you to work concentrates the mind. No one has ever taught you to concentrate your mind, dear.’
I couldn’t argue with that.
‘No harm meant. Anyway, an only child needs the {152}
company of other children. They grow up strange otherwise, don’t you think?
I presumed she was thinking of Martyn. [152-53]
It is strange the pieces of your life that float up to the surface of your mind, like the remnants of some ancient
shipwreck.
It was the macabre manner of his death that created the
whirlpool of memones in my head. He might have come to a sticky and sometime or other, but it is ironic that it was the virus of my country’s illness that felled him.
God forgive me.
God forgive us all.
I have to keep in check the pusillanimous notion that I should explain myself to her, make some sort of excuse.
I think though that she should be allowed to keep her dream of her father intact. The dream abandoned by his
flighty and ambitious wife. {163}
The loving father, his wings clipped by his responsibilities towards his child.
Generous, gift-bearing, concerned, heroic ... all done by mirrors.
She will go back to England and I will resume my normal life and we will meet at funerals, my father’s, my mother’s, and we will bell each other pleasantries and remember our pasts with them.
Cool. We will be cool.
I would love her to love me. [163-64]
My typewriter was no longer hidden. I had rearranged a corner of my bedroom as, a work place. A table by the window, held the machine, a stack of paper, notebooks, pencils, pens and a box with typewriter ribbons and Tippex. I also had a dictionary, the Oxford Book of Quotations and my old school Shakespeare.[164]
I used to wonder, after I had left him, if the bird performance was not really a front for something else. Something nefarious, guns or drugs perhaps, something that took him to the strange and dangerous parts of the world in which he and his birds and Dr Rhodes and Peter Magill travelled most; parts of the world where there were no kings and queens or American millionaires.
It was certainly a powerful act, but was one such act enough to make all that travelling worth while? Where did an his money come from? Did he move from the petty dealing in which I had often felt he might be involved to something altogether more dangerous?
Was, in fact, his death the terrible accident that it was thought to be?
Presumably Dr Rhodes and Peter Magill are the only people who know the answer to such questions? Or were they merely part of his illusionist’s bag of hicks; their minds too filled with lights, mirrors, birds, effects to see some other agenda?
I wonder will Robin let the birds fly free now that she has presumably inherited them.
Will she open the aviary and watch them take to the
sky?
Maybe they will be safer where they are. They might {167}
become instant prey to predators, those delicious corn fed doves.[166-67]
During dinner the four of them discussed Ireland,
Irish politics, Irish history, Irish literature. I half listened,
the smile from the launch still on my face and thought how splendid it was to come from a place that generates so much chat and I thought of Robin and hoped that she was all right staying with her friend Caroline, and I wondered if I should have brought her up with me. To hell with school, this was a momentous occasion! I thought about Martyn and wondered where he was, what part of Holland with the green van and Peter Magill’s lights and the white doves, wings folded, in their little cages. I wondered if doves got seasick, but presumed they probably didn’t. [172]
‘And you two nice boys, where have you hidden your wives this evening?’
‘No wives, Mrs Macmamara. God has not seen fit to send us wives.’
‘I don’t see what God has to do with it.’
‘Forgive me. I thought the Irish saw the hand of God in everything.’
She laughed.
‘Maybe we seem like that to the outside world, but really it’s the other way round you know, we tell God what to do. We are his major advisers ... so if it’s wives
you’re looking for let me know and I’ll get on to the man above about it.’
She looked at him for a long time in silence with a slight smile on her face.
‘But I don’t suppose you need anything apart from what you’ve already got.’
‘I like your mother,’ said Bill.
‘Isn’t this a happy evening? I do like a really happy evening.’ [174]
He paid the bills; kept me in the style to which I had grown accustomed, but he passed in and out of the house like a stranger. never told me where he was going or when he was coming back From time to time he telephoned to Robin from distant parts of the world. She was quite silent about his calls, only giving out monosyllabic answers to my questions. [179]
I wonder now about that grief, which then seemed profound. I suppose it was to do with the discovery of {293}
my own weakness. It certainly wasn’t the death of love that made me cry; but hope, perhaps, not that love would revive like the phoenix, but that the unit we had created might survive. I still wonder, even after all these years alone and with no reason for grief, why we continue to feel that terrible sense of failure if the glue holding the unit together melts and the separate pieces float on the wind, this way and that way, always drifting further and further apart.
What it came to was that I had loved the illusions, but not the illusionist ... not enough anyway. And what is enough anyway when it comes to love?
There is no enough.
None of this I realised at that moment. I just felt the enormous grief of failure. [193-94]
I knew that I was going to have to go.
Home.
Mother.
What would Mother have to say to me? [195]
‘I don’t believe in God.’
I said that to my mother, three or four days after Bill’s funeral.
I was sitting in her drawing-room drinking tea and the spring sun was shining across my shoulder as it had done at the moment of Bill’s death.
My mother stirred her tea and said nothing.
‘Do you?’ I asked. {131}
‘Of course, dear. And in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.’
‘How lucky you are.’
‘You have the option.’
‘I suppose so.’
She smiled for amoment
‘I don’t suppose it matters very much whether you do or not. He sees into your heart. He understands. I’m sure, your friend Bill is in His good hands.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. [131-32]
‘I feel reborn. Like I’m at the beginning of my life again, except I know how to walk and talk and ...’ ‘Write,’ said Peter.
‘I was going to say, dance a slow foxtrot.’
‘Very handy.’
‘And fuck,’ said Bill.
‘I will ignore that ... and I’ve had a child, so I’ve fulfilled that natural function. The decks are clear I feel fine.’ [161]
He began to stroke the side of my neck with his left thumb. Round and round rubbing the salt tears into my skin, Then he slipped his wet thumb down through the opening of my shirt. Down and down.
‘Leave me alone. Let me sit up. Let me breathe. I don’t want this.’
‘I don’t give a fuck what you want.’
His cold finger grazed my nipple and I shuddered. He didn’t win to notice. His fingers began to squeeze and pinch. [202]
He was there, running from my desk to the window, tearing paper into tiny shreds and hurling it out into the
darkness. The wind blew the flakes back in again and they rose and fell and lifted again before settling on the floor or the bed or the dressing-table, where they stirred and trembled as if they were alive.
I realised what he was up to.
‘Jesus Christ, you rotten bloody bastard!’
‘You’ll wake the child.’
‘Rotten, bloody ...’
As I rushed towards him he picked up QWERTYIOUP and slung it out of the window. I heard the thud as it hit the ground.
‘Fucker.’
I sat down on the bed among the scattered scraps of paper.
I picked up a handful and looked at the typewritten words. My words. Now useless scraps of disconnected thought.
A few scraps of paper landed on my knee.
‘Rotten fucker.’ [206]
Tomorrow, I am going home. I will take the child and go home. I don’t know why I didn’t do it years ago.’
He looked at me for amoment in silence and then began to laugh.
‘What a silly Star you are.’
He put his hand out to touch my head, but I jerked away and his hand for a moment stroked the air.
‘I love you.’ he said.
‘Go fuck yourself.’
‘I will make you happy again. We will ...’
‘Get out of this room. I hope you won’t be here when I get up. I never want to see you again.’[208]
‘I like fires,’ she says.
Mmmmm.
‘Sort of old-fashioned. No one in England has fires any longer. That was Dad’s solictor. Mr Warner. He always calls me Emily I never think he’s talking to me. It’s odd.’ [214]
Silly question, I think.
‘Daddy. It’s in the will ... Hazel Angela Brambell, known as Dove.’
He always was a fucker.
‘She is my sister’
‘Half,’ I say.
‘She is my sister. He is her father. We are his children.’
‘Well, ... I suppose after I left ...’
Here I go, making excuses for the fucker
‘She is six months younger than I am, Star.’
I have the most appalling desire to laugh, [...; 215]
|