The Catastrophist: A Novel (17 page)

I look for you everywhere, Inès, and know I will never find you. I should never have come to this awful place. I am out of my context, and it’s difficult to look well when you have no place. Each day that went by I felt less worthwhile. There was nothing for you to see in me, no way I could shine for you. The only friend I had you loathed.

I began to think you loathed me too. For my inability to take a side, for my refusal to take this thing seriously. But that’s how I am, you know that—it’s my work, my past, it’s who and what I am. Physically too I thought you despised me. Hair you don’t like, eyes that are always tired, a face that is too thin and a waist that is getting fat; and other things about myself I cannot bring myself to write down in words. You never wanted to touch me, and I desired you every day. I don’t understand, I don’t understand. Is politics so important? What about love? What about love? What about this love of ours?

Are you there, Orla? Are you reading this, my love? Don’t turn me away.

I deliver the letter by hand to the tiny office near the Marché Indigène. Some days later when I visit the apartment to pick up my mail I find it has been returned unopened. I knew of course it would be. Inès is strict. She keeps her word. She told me she would never speak to me again. She never will.

Is there something overdone about all of this? Something inflated? Am I trying to prove to myself that I am capable of love? Is that what all this is about?

Ireland and England

The storms come after lunch. The wind gets up, the lightning cracks in brilliant, branched arcs, and day changes in minutes to sullen false dawn. From Mont Stanley I can plot the rain’s approach some way off: it blows in from the west, where the ocean is, a slanting gray wall, whipped over the forests and the waterfalls, on to the city to hammer the tin roofs and lash the tarmac of the boulevards.

After all these months I should be used to the electric afternoons but I am mesmerized by them still. If I close my eyes they take me to a place at the edge of memory, where I cannot often go, where I am small and fevered and frightened. They take me to a long, white, high-ceilinged room. The polish of the dark wooden floor gleams with the discipline of a place where voices are always hushed. The wind gusts against the glass of the great windows on which reflections dance and ghouls shiver. Further up the ward a boy is crying in his sleep. Through the chaos of my fever I can hear my mother’s voice. The doctors and the nurses do not want her to come to me. She is a tiny and trepid woman, she goes in fear and trembling and dreads confrontation. But I am her son and she will not be diverted. At the bedside she holds my hand and keeps me safe from the long ghosts.

My father was the third and youngest son of a Derry draper, a lay preacher and Unionist councillor in that forlorn city. All three sons were clever but only William got as far as Queen’s, where he read English. He was an outstanding student—brilliant, in the opinion of some of his tutors, and he had a great career in front of him. After taking his degree in Belfast, he got a job teaching at an Oxford preparatory school. By then he had converted to marry my mother.

I last saw him in London just after the war when he showed up at my digs in Islington. I had been demobbed some weeks earlier and was arranging to resume my studies. I never thought I would see him again. He found me through his mother, a kindly woman with whom I kept in touch after our family was overthrown. He looked haggard and shabby. He had aged greatly in the twelve years since I had seen him last. Gone were the dark, suave looks, gone was the confidence, the easy charm.

It was about eleven in the morning and he was not drunk. But he reeked of booze. The sour smell came off his clothes, out of his mouth, from every pore. At first I did not want to have anything to do with him, but I found it hard to turn the wreck away. Mrs. Lemass made us tea and we drank it in my room with the windows open. It was late summer and warm. I could hear the traffic on Holloway Road.

He began his tales of woe. Nothing in the world had worked out for him, everything he had touched since leaving my mother had crumbled into dust. Everyone was against him and did I have a couple of pounds he could borrow? He poured whiskey from a hip flask into his teacup. I declined the offer of a nip. His Derry accent was still strong and he had the kind of Irishness that embarrasses me most—full of knowing sentimentality and exaggeration, anecdote and cunning and communication through performance. He was the kind of man for whom a well-told story, however preposterous, guaranteed escape: there was no predicament too tight, no shave too close, no allusion too uncomfortable but a story would save you. I loathed it.

The drink warmed him, made him worse. Before long his miseries were transformed into triumphs: the fortunes he had made, the beautiful women who had loved him, the places and things he had seen. He had just been offered a job with a leading City firm at a huge salary. He wasn’t going to be rushed though. He had other irons in the fire. He drank the flask dry. I managed to get him out of the room around two with a ten-shilling note and a promise that we’d meet for lunch the following week.

At the door, with Mrs. Lemass doing her genuine best not to eavesdrop, there was a single moment of truthfulness. William looked at me from the bloodshot globes of his old eyes and he said suddenly, quietly, “I’ve been a fool. I’m sorry.” I mumbled something about there being no need to apologize for anything. Then he gathered himself and said with a brave smile, “Things are going to change. I’m going to change, you’ll see.” He shook my hand, told me how wonderful it was to see his son, and said again, “I am going to change.” He said it firmly, with conviction, as if saying it were enough to make it true.

When he was gone I mulled over the visit. I wasn’t surprised that he hadn’t asked about my mother. Even William knew guilt. But neither had he asked a single question about me; not about my academic success or about my future or my plans. Not even about my war. He was too absorbed in disguising his own failure, from me, from himself. I picked a volume of Clarendon from the shelves, opened it at random and read about the intrigues at Charles I’s Oxford court.

On the day of our lunch date, as I was putting on my jacket and checking the change in my pocket for the bus fare, it suddenly struck me: what am I doing? Why should I see this man? I barely know him and I don’t like the little I know; we have nothing in common, nothing to say.

I left the house but I walked past the bus stop and down as far as the Angel, where I got on to the Regent’s Canal, heading east to Victoria Park. There I sat at the lock gates and watched the ducks and the barges on the water. Things were different now, I told myself, I was different. I was twenty-five years old and after nearly three years in uniform I was on the threshold of another life. My D.Phil. topic had been approved: “The political impact in England of the sixteenth-century price inflation.” I had made my first visits to the Public Record Office, I was finding my way round the Exchequer and Chancery archives, I was learning to decipher the Tudor script. Like the man who throws away his last packet of cigarettes to prove he is serious about giving up, I stood up my father to announce a final break with the pettiness and dreariness of a previous life. I would be free from Belfast. I would be free from the sadness and pain of my family.

I left Mrs. Lemass’s house at the end of the week, moving to new temporary digs in Clapham. I left no forwarding address and I do not know if William ever tried to find me. Somewhere in my head I can see him on the doorstep facing my old landlady, puzzled and frowning—perhaps even hurt. I can see him thanking her and apologizing for troubling her, and turning away. I do not feel guilty about this. I never saw him again.

I have seen the photographs. Nuala was a beautiful young woman. She was small and slim, with thick brown hair which she wore short in the style of the times. She was the eldest of nine children—there were two more who did not survive infancy—and she left school at twelve to work in the flax mill near Albert Street. Her own father had been born in County Antrim but had moved to Belfast in search of work; he was a quiet man who liked to play chess and smoke a pipe. Her mother died in the Fever Hospital aged forty-four, six weeks after giving birth to her last child, a clubfooted boy.

At the time of her marriage to the son of the Derry draper, Nuala had dreams of finer things. The grime could not quench her youthful illusions. She had a brain, she had a mind. She managed to get out of the mill and into the telephone exchange, and from there she had eyes on a career in nursing. Her reading did not stop at the mill gates. She always had her head in a book. She loved opera. She could sing the arias from
La Bohème.
She was awed by the idea of sophistication. Little touches of those early dreamy pretensions remain today, though really she has reverted to type. A Belfast woman, born on the Falls Road. That is what she is; but it is not what, in her heady courtship, she thought she would be.

She thought William would transport her to a different world, a world she caught hints of in novels and films. This man, whom she loved with a loyalty and intensity I find impossible to comprehend, would take her into this world. There would be a fine house, there would be smart friends, clever and amusing talk, wonderful parties.

What did he get from the marriage? A beautiful wife, yes. Devotion, yes, adoration. And other things. He was a Protestant at a time when it was beginning to be fashionable in the circles to which he craved admittance to be Catholic, or better, a convert. She had simple, rock-like faith, the kind seen by some as naive, by others as profound. To my father, faith gave his wife a captivating and unaffected loveliness, and also a kind of alluring mysticism. At Queen’s he had had a special interest in the Metaphysical poets.

What else did William get? She was gay and happy, she loved to dance and she had a voice which, her sisters later said, would have taken her to the concert hall had there been money for the training. Her house was all noise and bustle. His own was silent and fearful. William’s father was an angry bigot whose footfall was heavy. The councillor devoted his evenings in the Guildhall to the fight against Rome and its brainwashed slaves in the slums below the city walls. He achieved his apotheosis at Buckingham Palace years later when he received his MBE. I think of the photographs of the occasion—sent to me by his widow—and see a vain, self-loving man, elect, fanatically convinced of his own salvation. He condemned the marriage. He did not speak to William after his conversion, would not have his name spoken in the house. I have a vague memory of the visit he paid after my mother, my sister and I returned from England. We were living in her father’s house at the time. The councillor, who had business in Belfast that day, was shown into the parlor. He was stiff, his gaunt cheeks were red with choler and black with beard-shadow. His sideburns were shaved to the temples. The door closed, but his rebukes were not muffled. After he had gone, leaving a five-pound note, I saw my mother weeping in a chair. Her sisters gathered round her like a screen round a patient in a hospital bed.

They joined, my mother and my father. Man and wife, Catholic and convert. They came together. But not for long. In England, William came up against his first disappointments. He was a provincial, a yokel. His colleagues laughed at his accent (which he did his best to tone down), at the Derry words he used (which he tried hard to excise), and because he was an Irishman popularity was everything. Stung, bewildered, he tried ever harder to court acceptance. He bought the drinks, settled the restaurant bill, lent little sums which with the wave of a nonchalant hand he generously canceled when the debt fell due. He and my mother threw parties to which no one came.

He discovered that having a wife was not in itself a source of embarrassment, but this wife was. She was not brilliant and the thing that had commended her most—her simplicity—had been corrupted by consciousness of a sophistication she could never attain, and which she only ever got half right. She was bewildered by the clever epigrammatic wit and cowed by the competitive displays of learning. In the family album there is a photograph of Nuala at one of the school’s social occasions. In one hand she has a cigarette in a holder, in the other a wineglass. It almost made me cry the first time I saw it, though she looks happy enough. I can see the desperation for acceptance, and the insecurity. Men have fantasies of themselves as saviors; we can’t help it. Stories we hear turn into duties we imagine: a damsel in distress, a knight in armor. No matter our shortcomings in reality, we persist in seeing ourselves like this. My fantasy was to enter the photograph and snatch the cigarette holder out of my mother’s hand, then, defiantly, take her away from the people around her. And we would be heroic, because we had acted with integrity, with dignity, shunning their falseness; and we would be made more heroic because of the glares and hostility we provoked.

After that? It really is a fantasy. After that—nothing. I think that my father, when he first looked at my mother in Belfast, at the trusting and beautiful face, must have had a similar fantasy. Take her away, take her away . . . They married within six months of meeting.

But in the face of more disappointments the fantasy palled. Burdened now with a screaming, demanding child as well as a wife, William’s career went badly. His confidence failed. His colleagues whispered about him, the boys complained to their parents. The second child—my sister, Siobhan—was sickly; there were doctor’s calls, doctor’s bills.

To close on this new world he had to distance himself from the old: the old was my mother and her simple loyalties. William started an affair. He discovered he was good at it. He started another, another.

My father was not a brutal man. He was the baby of the family, spoiled by a doting mother. In his youth he had been quiet and bookish, and on the occasions when he was confronted by violence he was shaken and appalled. He avoided service during the Great War. But to show—to his new friends? to himself?—that he had sorted out his domestic life, that it was his to order and reorder, his calculated unkindnesses turned to violence. My mother went to hospital.

For some years—I believe four—they stayed together. He was a weak rather than a bad man and there were times when guilt overwhelmed him. There were days of tenderness and lovemaking.

The end came on my third birthday. It is my first memory.

We lived in a small house in Banbury, but for my birthday party we were invited to the larger home of my godparents, English Catholics in Oxford. They had a lawn, long and flat with neat borders that went down to a little pond, and my father—great joy!—played with me in the garden. We played football with balloons. I was deliriously, selfishly happy. Siobhan slept in her pram under the shade of a weeping willow. The sun was out and the sky was blue. My mouth was full of giggles. My father picked me up and put me on his shoulders. He held me there in the sun and threw the balloons into the air. We ran after them and I, from my perch, tried to trap the squeaky globes in my arms. My father put me down. He took his jacket from a garden chair, hoisted it to his shoulders, put on a pair of sunglasses and smiled at me. I watched him approach the french windows, behind which I saw my mother, and behind her my godparents. My father stood this side of the window, spread his fingers against the glass, and was gone. Tears streamed down my mother’s face. I can see her now in her summer dress and sandals, sobbing wretchedly. My godfather, a man for whom emotional display was never easy, put out a hand and touched her arm. His mouth worked, his lips moved in a stutter, but he couldn’t find words to say.