The Light of Evening (15 page)

Who’s going to look after me and the kid, Larry I hope, unless he does a bunk. We’ve a lovely house an’ all … I got the money after this truck hit me … took ages to get it … my granny put it away for me and soon as she knew there was a baby coming she hands me over three thousand pounds and says, ‘You’ll need this, Nolan, for baby things.’ Straightaway Larry and me go down to the furniture mart in Castleknock … got a pine bed and a chest of drawers … people ask me what I see in him, I know what I see in him … when we’re alone together, we have a right laugh … he’s no car now … a lunatic wrote off his car on a roundabout on the Naas Road … we’re in no hurry marrying, we’re free-thinkers. My mother dying to make up, to get pally with me … jealous because I’m having the baby … dumped me and my sister … put us into foster homes … I wrote her poems … if you ask me poems are instead of going straight up to a person and having it out … didn’t give a damn for us … only worried about her figure … you see me now … you see the size of me … well my clothes would fall off my mother … she’s all on her ownio since she lost the looks … I hung up on her … my child won’t hang up on me because I’ll know how to mind it … I’ll know how to love it we’re in no hurry marrying … it’s a mug’s game. The baby will be all right … I have this Sacred Heart lamp that’s always lit … day and night … that’ll do us” and for the first time she looks at the face on the pillow, wan and homesick.

“Could I have my cardigan?” Dilly asks.

Nolan takes the cardigan from the chair and eases the two arms through it, then buttons the lower buttons, her touch so soft and gentle in contrast with her tirade.

“Ah, missus, don’t mind me, I’m a blatherer,” she says and waits because Dilly has a question.

“What will happen to me?”

“What will happen to you is this … a nurse will wash you and then you’ll have a little stroll up and down the corridor …

Mary’s Lane they call it … you’ll meet others … most of them dopes … the gamey fellas … sex mad … but before that you’ll receive Holy Communion … everyone does … a nun coming ahead of the priest with a candle and bell, her head bowed … all the heads bowed … the priest following with the chalice and you’ll close your eyes and say Ah-men.”

Sister Consolata

“is it that we’re both countrywomen and from the west?” Sister Consolata says, clapping her hands in jubilance, her eyes ink-dark and shining.

A friendship has sprung up between Dilly and herself. She has taken on the task of bathing her in the private bathroom, of seeing to it that the shingles are retreating, and, against hospital rules, applying a putty-colored ointment that Dilly had secured from some quack down at home. She has lent courage on the mornings that Dilly went for her tests, linking her, saying how they would spring-clean all the sluggish cells and make her like new again. Dilly believed it, yet as the rubber strap was put on her upper arm for a blood test, her fears returned and her own blood in the little glass vial looked treacherous to her.

Then at night, the ritual of their little “conflabs” as the Sister has called them, the curtain drawn around the bed and oftener than not a slice of cake or a bun from the nuns’ pantry. Sister regales her new friend with the stories that she has gleaned from history
—
Cuchulainn of the shining delg, fated to slay his own son whom he did not recognize because of a mist that lay in the willows, killing his own son, deranged from it, then at the very end strapping himself to a pillar in order to die standing; Cuchulainn opening his tunic to allow the otters to come and drink from the flow of that proud blood. And poor Grace Gifford, as Sister says, given ten minutes in the dead of night to say good-

bye to Joseph Mary Plunkett, the man she had married only an hour previous, and writing some secret message on the timbers of his cell in Kilmainham jail. Joseph Mary with his paeans to Christ 
—
“I see His blood upon the rose and in the stars the glory of His being”
—
poets and martyrs all. They are her friends she says, as are the saints, especially her pets, Anthony and Jude and Padre Pio, and other astonishing beings ripe for beatitude: Iron Curtain Paul who risked the wrath of the Communists to live underground and preach the faith to thirsty Russian souls; Therese Neumann, with the wounds of Christ all over her body, her clothing bloodstained, abstaining from food and drink for thirty years, receiving only the Host, but happy, happy as Sister says, her full-throated birds chorusing all around her.

As the days unfold the friendship deepens, the little secrets and the bigger secrets made known. Sister getting to know Dilly’s house, the setting, the two avenues, the old and the new, the two sets of gates, the marvelous trees, the palm tree that wasn’t a palm tree, then the inside, going from room to room, curtains with pictures of peacocks, big mirrors, the box room where Dilly kept apples and crab apples that when ripened gave off a cidery smell, the flowering plant on the tallboy that shed its little husks that dropped like hay onto the carpet, the little plant possibly dying of thirst since neither Con nor Crotty would remember to water it.

But for Dilly the crux of her thinking is her family, her children, disentangling the hurts they have caused her. Take Terence, her son, once her white-haired boy, until he came under the influence of a grasping wife and became as hard and as grasping as she.

“It was like this,” she says, her voice dropping as she recalls the night the treachery commenced. Terence arrived late, overwrought because his wife, Cindy, had left him, his darling wife had vanished without even a note, had not got in touch with her own family or her one friend, Alice, the dressmaker. Five days

and five nights and for all Terence knew she could have gone to the cliffs, something she had previously threatened to do, the cliffs where unfortunate people, even young people, threw themselves off and Terence’s father sick of hearing this saga made some cutting remark about Cindy, a row ensuing, father and son almost coming to blows, Terence storming out, saying his own life was finished and he too would drive to the cliffs. Yet he returned in due course. His wife had got in touch with him from a hotel in Dublin and the couple were reconciled. But ever after, there were only flying visits from them and even at Christmastime his wife would not deign to spend a night under their roof. Eventually Terence broke it to them, that the reason for his wife’s unhappiness and her disappearance was on account of not being accepted with open arms by them, of being made to feel an outcast, and the only consolation would be for Rusheen and all the lands to be signed over to them. Eventually he wore them down. She describes the chicanery of his driving them to the solicitors, the stiffness in the office, a big desk laden with papers and ledgers, a canvas blind on which the firm’s name was indented in black lettering, her husband sitting next to her, her son and his wife on the seats behind, having to state her wishes, her enforced wishes, then the solicitor reading it back to her and even as she took up the pen to sign, regretting what she was doing and realizing that she had omitted her daughter completely, had not even willed her daughter the kitchen garden that she had been promised and that a surveyor had been enlisted to measure it up.

“And I’m still reeling from it,” she says tearfully, and Sister agrees that it was quite a hardhearted way to behave.

But her daughter, as she says, is trapped in a life of vice, beyond in England, her young sons in a Quaker school that Dilly was not consulted about, and her books that have scandalized the country, though as Sister is quick to say and a priest remarked to her, the nature sections so beautiful, so radiant, if only she

had excised the flagrant bits. Yes, Eleanora in peril, evidence of which she, Dilly, had on her one visit smelled a rat, as she put it, when Eleanora gave a party in her honor, though she did not know a single guest, wines and spirits galore, oysters, prawns, wild salmon, and a married man, her paramour, taking the pendant that had slipped inside her see-through blouse, lifting it out to kiss it, saying, “I’ve wanted to do this since I got here.” Dilly recounts the ingratitudes regarding gifts that she had sent over the years, the bawneen cushion covers that she had embroidered so painstakingly with ancient motifs that she found in a press, the mauve and indigo dyes having run into the white material, where they had been washed and only half dried, stuffed in there, not good enough for the illustrious guests and the married men. Holding the metal crucifix between them, Sister says they will pray, they will storm heaven, and just as hares become white by eating snow, so do the souls of humans by availing of the spiritual food meted out to them.

Later, Sister recalls having read about Eleanora, seen photographs of her, an unhappy divorce, and a husband most handsome but much older than she.

Dilly writhes at the mere mention of him, a man so odd, so godless, an autocrat, a man who to her knowledge never sat down to dinner with his own family and from whom his wife, her unfortunate daughter, had to borrow her own earnings back from him to buy shoes and clothing for her children.

“Why, oh why, oh why,” she asks, still angry, still grieving, still flabbergasted that such a marriage should ever have taken place.

Part IV

scenes from a

marriage

Scene One

eleanora’s husband, Hermann, would always contend that she had married him under the guise of love to better her ambitions. Her mother believed that by choosing this madman, this infidel, her daughter had wanted to drive a last nail in her mother’s coffin. Eleanora herself thought that perhaps literature had had its vertiginous effect upon her. Literature was either a route out of life or into life and she could never be certain which, except that she had succumbed to it. There was Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, with fastenings on doors and windows to bar the ruffiany Mr. Lovelace, who said he did not know whether her frost be real frost but who succeeded, much to her downfall, in making Clarissa yield and pass as his wife. Then there was Jane Eyre, in thrall to the inscrutable Mr. Rochester, and Jane Eyre’s creator, Charlotte Bronte, falling in love with Monsieur Heger, a married man, the iniquity discovered and she and her sister Emily dispatched from Brussels back to the moors, later on, their forlorn lives transmuted into visions of shattered love.

Then there was Charlotte’s unchristened daughter, who had died in her mother’s womb and whom Eleanora believed as haunting those selfsame moors, wailing her circumstances, neither fully dead nor fully alive, perpetually waiting to be.

She thought as well and often of John Clare in a lunatic asylum in Northampton, looking at the vowels and consonants that he was convinced the authorities had filched out of his head and

consequently the poem he had written about a Daisy was not to his liking. His last couplet on the inadequacy of the word to pierce the hidden soul of love filled her with both exultation and terror.

How could her future husband, Hermann, have guessed at such irrational ruminations, no more than her mother could or would. Her mother, abjuring the seaminess of the written word and once, in an outburst, declaring that “paper never refused ink.” Yet she was in bondage to both, doing her best to please both, dreading their strictures but smarting under them, an impostor carrying on her secret subversive life.

There was her night self who would come to sin with him, her morning self who would atone for it, her evening self when she laid the table, lit candles, the little geisha as he called her, and the child self, not fully dead, not fully alive, waiting, through the alchemy of words, to crystallize into life.

The first journey to his house had in it a host of enchantments. An avenue, the lines of beech trees, a rusted green wrought-iron gate, and daffodils, daffodils around the roots of the trees, stray ones forking out from the grayish boucled barks, huddles of them in the grassy glades, their brazen yellow muted by the high damp green grass and sheep that to his chagrin had broken in, rising clumsily, then thumping their haunches against the loose stone wall, being too hefty to scale it.

As the car came to a stop outside the long low house, plastered white and chinked with shards of blue glass and china, set down in a dip under a horseshoe of woodland, she half-expected to see a curtain be drawn apart and Mrs. Rochester appear and stick her tongue out at them, then retreat back into her ravings. He had been married before as Merlin, the friend who introduced them, had told her, to someone exotic and much traveled.

She wrote an account of the first day in her diary, which years later he would throw back at her as an example of her cretinous attempts at composition:
“A spring day with everything agog.

The birds cheeky and spry, swooping everywhere, clouds like great lazy liners roaming across the rinsed blue heavens, the gorse bushes flecked yellow and the spring trees with their immemorial flow ofsap.”

Hearing her recite
—
“Beside the lake, beneath the trees”
—
he smiled a slightly scornful yet indulgent smile. His friend Merlin, so he told her, had christened her a literary Bessie Bunter, on account of her spouting passages from poems and books. She smarted at the insult, her eyes brimming with scalded tears.

She had known him only a few days, had been in his company a few hours, this handsome austere man with carved features, a sallow complexion, deep-set eyes, and beautifully telling hands that moved as if they were about to deliver something unique into life, a child perhaps. It was a spontaneous meeting, a chance telephone call; Merlin had rung to ask if by any chance she was at a loose end. She was. She borrowed a red muff from a girl in their digs to disguise the shabbiness of her coat, which, though once a jet-black, was black-green and mottled with holes. Sitting in a pub in Henry Street, mesmerized by his urbane conversation and by the way the other men deferred to him, she felt that she had stepped into a book, breaking from her tedious life of working in a pharmacy and bicycling to lectures at night.