The Truth About Love (13 page)

If my father believed the book unwise, the bishop considered it more than unwise. He considered it “dangerous” and the chess games ceased for quite some time. Anyway, the book came and went. Perhaps, since Thomas Middlehoff wanted to stay in the country with which “he’d fallen in love,” in Bridget’s triumphant phrase, the book was luckily unsuccessful. There was a short interview on Radio Éireann, not a huge audience as he went out just before midnight, according to my father. No, Thomas Middlehoff wasn’t headed for the
Late Late Show
. In the end it all settled down as it always does. And, as they always do, in time people forgot, though forgetting is an elective process.

Mr. Middlehoff “did a bit of travelling”—not a concept we understood then, when our “travelling” was mostly limited to emigration leavened by visits home. He returned after some time but was little seen in the town. He was, according to Bridget, who told Sally, who told my mother, “in hibernation out in Lake House. That woman comes. That Mrs. Calder. Just arrives, not very often, just a day’s notice, here and gone so to say. He’s like a Trappist monk after she leaves. Walking round in contemplation no doubt, but not of God I think. And Mrs. Calder, she’s very abrupt. No charm at all. None. And not that good-looking either. Married I’d say.” As to where “that woman” slept when she stayed, which was rarely, no one wanted to be witness to mortal sin. Which Mr. Middlehoff seemed to understand because Bridget always had the day off when Mrs. Calder came and “only saw her for a few minutes, usually accidentally.” Though it was my opinion that Bridget engineered these accidents, fascinated as we all are by those who break the rules. And seem to survive. And, of course, he was German, “they do things differently there.” And she was? English? “Sounds English, anyway,” according to Bridget.

Yes, his book was forgotten or ignored, which is how we get on in time, how we get over things—nations and individuals—by forgetting to remember. Even when I first read it, all those years ago, I remember wondering, was he trying to warn us? Or is that just what I wonder now? Yes, now I wonder, was he trying to warn us? Or give us absolution? Then I remembered that he probably didn’t believe in absolution. We did, and absolution would become more and more essential. Though as time went on
“te absolvo”
had to be almost choked out of us.

        SIXTEEN

Although I’d left Ireland, Ireland hadn’t left me. For three decades you couldn’t get away from us: decades that came rushing at us in their violent reality, tumbling out of centuries of dreams. Rage grew at the savage injustice of an administration in Northern Ireland of such adamantine stupidity they knocked themselves out with it. And the rage mingled with that low mist of frustrated nationalism that, even after the riot and the arrival of the British soldiers, we’d all believed would drift into some new arrangement. What had become a lazy-hazy love dream of a United Ireland, surely it would not trap us again in the prison of conviction, in the icy palace of obsession? No, the dream would come to us. It would all come true. Over the rainbow. Over the border. Someday. We couldn’t wait. We didn’t.

So in those decades I came from a famous country, and when you achieve fame it’s hard to give it up. The narrative was too compelling. The story of Ireland had everything. History and heroism, spectacular violence and violent spectaculars, an ever-growing cast and a chorus, as classical tragedy demands. It was a chorus of victims. We could name them, for about a week, or at least number the dead. But there were so many, so many, that eventually they all just rolled themselves up into one word, plural, “victims,” of bombs and bullets. But it was the bombs, I believe, that tore into our soul and most certainly into mine as each bomb left me feeling ill for days.

Sometimes I felt I’d turn to stone as the litany for the dead continued … “Let us pray,” or not, for the three men and a bomb in Creggan in 1970, which went off too early and took the two daughters of one of them to oblivion or heaven, depending on your point of view, and for the two boys, suspects, shot dead shortly afterwards by the British Army. Suspected wrongly, as it turned out. And “let us remember in our prayers” the three young soldiers from Ayr in Scotland—two of them brothers, seventeen and eighteen, hopelessly young, possibly drunk—who were stolen out of their bar-room trap and shot in the head on a beautiful mountain road outside Belfast, the lights of which maybe glimmered that night as they grasped in one surprised second that life, for them, was over. Amen. Was there a moon? Was there some light before they joined “the wronged ones in the darkness,” a line from
Oedipus at Colonus
that made me weep with recognition when I first heard it. Someone must know. Maybe one of the thousands of Protestants who marched to the memorial service led by the Reverend Ian Paisley, enraged and frightened and calling for internment. “Now! Now! Before these men can commit any more atrocities.” No one had much patience with the idea of building a case. “Wasn’t it as clear as ditch-water,” a fascinating phrase, “that
only
internment would work?” And the Provos, newly created in the dawn of the seventies, the Provisional IRA, “a nomenclature of almost oriental obfuscation,” as Bogus said, sensing that they had a very short time indeed before evidence in a real court of law might rob them of their leaders, bombed on, provocatively. Banking on the oft-proved stupidity of their enemy, the cast-iron stupidity that did indeed sleep-walk a government into the trap of internment as the number of bombings and casualties increased. April 1971, thirty-seven dead; May, forty-seven; July, ninety-one. It worked! On 9 August 1971 internment was introduced. And we watched in despair as the great recruiting officer as they call him, whose image alone as he tore a man from his family and locked him up without trial, concentrated hearts and minds all right. But whose? “How could they be so stupid?” Bogus, in a fury when I was back for a few days. And he was right. Even moderates walked out of assemblies. “A moderate after all is not always entitled to moderation, Olivia.” And within a month the number of bombings rose to nearly two hundred. We would, in a sense, “make Northern Ireland ungovernable as a first step to achieving a United Ireland.” It’s a technique. One which we would teach the world. After all, we’re natural teachers.

And a man who for a time had only ever come out at night, and even then, bearded, would soon become our headmaster—a long tenure.

I was with English friends in Chichester in Sussex, in rehearsals for
Six Characters in Search of an Author
, when, in truth, our thirty-year war began, at a peace march. Sunday 30 January 1972, that Bloody Sunday when thirteen men were massacred, seventeen wounded—one, it turned out later, fatally—by the British Army. And the image of a priest tending the dying and the dead and whispering to them last-minute hopes of forgiveness and eternal salvation wrapped its way around the world and around hearts that had perhaps grown a trifle weary of the weight of that long-awaited dream, United Ireland. Now the world wept with us and that priest’s handkerchief waving in the wind became as fierce a symbol as Delacroix’s torch. It seemed that the cause came to triumphant life as sympathy and outrage at our suffering swept over us and “the captive voice,”
an glon gafa
, soared and would never be drowned again. Stormont, that “Protestant parliament for a Protestant state,” fell. And quickly. In March 1972. The dream was within our grasp. It was ours for the taking. How could we lose it now? Bloody Friday, 21 July 1972, when the Provisional detonated twenty car bombs in Belfast, killing nine and injuring 130. Bodies and parts of bodies were gathered up sometimes in the hope of identification and, sometimes, in the hope of resurrection.

Is there resurrection without identification? It’s a question of faith. Which itself became shaky as the horrors continued. “Oh God, Olivia … twenty-one killed in Birmingham, bombs in bars!” “The Miami Showband! A band, for God’s sake. A band!” Bayardo Bar on the Shankhill Road, five dead. La Mon restaurant—twelve burned alive. “We need no sermons any more on the flames of hell.” I was in a bar with Bogus on 27 August 1979 when Lord Mountbatten, his teenage grandson and a local boy were murdered in their boat, which was “blown to smithereens.” We said nothing. No one said anything. We were about to go home when news of Warrenpoint came in. Eighteen soldiers killed in a double bombing. The ones who escaped the first got the second. “The sheer expertise of it,” said Bogus. Expertise? Well up to a point. Because it was accidentally that the IRA discovered the car bomb, though it lost its Quartermaster General, accidentally. “Since ‘the black stuff,’ an essential, is based on fertiliser, of which you could say we have plenty, Olivia, the stuff could travel anywhere. We were further rewarded by the land mine.”

So we hauled ourselves in agony through the eighties: Hyde Park. Cavalry, bandsmen and horses, and the mangling and mingling of bodies; the Droppin’ Well Bar in Ballykelly where seventeen dropped into oblivion. Two children included in the list of the dead, “Shouldn’t have been there, I suppose.” Bogus, bitter again. Then Brighton, followed by the IRA statement of disappointment that only five died and that the Prime Minister survived. Remembrance Sunday, eleven civilians buried in rubble in the Poppy Day Massacre. “Wrong memory, clearly, Olivia.” The next year, 1988, six soldiers killed by a bomb on a minibus, Lisburn, and eight killed in Ballygawley. To bring the decade to a close, eleven soldiers killed in Deal in Kent. And the nineties? Warrington, 1993, when three-year-old Johnathan Ball and twelve-year-old Tim Parry “took the blast, as they say, Olivia—a Saturday afternoon shopping trip!” Then, Omagh, 1998. Saturday again, twenty-nine killed by the Real IRA, which, as Bogus said, was “a reality check for us all.” As indeed it was.

And I began to wonder, were we breeding aristocrats of terror and teaching the world that the age of deference is not dead? Though fear is a great leveller of the populace a noble cause raises the perpetrator above the common fray. And we had a noble cause. We had that lovely history dripping in heroes. But “our boys” were now giving a hideous twist to that story. The UVF and the British Army, of course their atrocities shocked us but they were capable, “that tribe,” of anything. Oh yes, you could expect anything, any horror from them. But our saintly ghosts, were their names now called out in benediction for deeds they’d never dreamed of? Named as heroic precursors of this? Of bombing civilians? Sarsfield, Wolfe Tone, precursors of this? Patrick Pearse, who when he marched out of the GPO in order to spare civilians must have known what awaited him. Was he also a precursor? My first love? The way you love purity and sacrifice in a hero, when you’re about twelve, when being a nun and being a soldier for Ireland got somehow mixed up with being a religious martyr, preserving purity of body and purity of soul for love of God and for love of country, dreaming once of being laid out in my confirmation dress and veil in my coffin, the whole town in awe of my heroism. And I began to ask myself why that lovely country of mine, which had preached such reverence for the body, such passionate belief that it should be sent back whole, such determination that its sexual power be used for procreation, not just for pleasure; how could such a country have found the destruction of the body in such a savage way, not exactly acceptable, perhaps, but a way of understanding it? Is there, I began to wonder, a connection? That those who see in the body the source of all sin might find it more acceptable to blow it to kingdom come? Which of course never comes. Or does it?

And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? “Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.” But that’s all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough. Was it the roll-call of the heroic dead that gave the impression we’d granted absolution to those fighting for the great old cause, though not quite in the manner we’d imagined? Did the dead stop us from bringing the South to a total standstill? To say, as they say nowadays, “not in my name.” Maybe it’s hard to reject such a determined suitor, hard to reject someone who wants to be united with you so much in holy conjunction that they’ll kill their way to get to you. And as Bogus said to my mother, and it made her laugh, “Shotgun marriages have their own romance.” Yes, sometimes we laughed at the black bitterness that lay beneath his vanity, which remained strong. Because even in those dark days Bogus would boast of the success of his collection of witticisms, poetry and stories,
How to Be Irish
, subtitle: “The Lessons Are Easy—It’s the Homework That’s Hard.”

It was. It took thirty years for us to learn our lessons. No one thought it would last that long. Why not? We’d been preparing our minds for it, but above all our hearts. And if it doesn’t start there, in the heart, it doesn’t start anywhere.

        SEVENTEEN

As I remember in those early years of atrocities, when I talked to my mother I was careful with language. Was she all right? And each time, though sad, very sad, she was also calm. Completely calm. Is it an act? Yes? No? and I’d concentrate on every movement of her voice up and down the scale, listening, alert and fearful of hearing a note that was too low or one that might soar too swiftly and too quickly and fall again, and me not there to catch it. She was, however, utterly calm. She was utterly cold. And she was utterly contemptuous. Which was not her style. “Who are these people?” she’d ask. “Did we make them? How?” And once, when she handed the phone to him, and I remember this, “There’ll be more. There always has been, to make up to the dead,” he said. He was right about that.

Sometimes, however, we didn’t strike the right note with each other. But we did well enough. We developed a technique and taught ourselves to briefly acknowledge the fact of the latest “brutality, terrible, terrible” and then to talk about the universe. Our universe, a backwash to the life I lived. We’d talk through the years of Mrs. Brannigan’s boys, who’d joined the bank as she’d hoped, and of her certainty that Adrian would someday be made an assistant bank manager and of how May Garvey’s longed-for son, now a teenager, had told his mother he might have a vocation, might go to Maynooth to study for the priesthood, “back to where he came from, my miracle boy.” And we had many more than the three or four families to whom Miss Austen bore witness but our background noise was more, much more fierce. Miss Austen kept the sound of battle off-stage. We couldn’t quite do that. But we did OK. And of course we talked of the life I lived, of the life I do not talk of here and of how grateful I was, of how I was more than grateful. And she’d sometimes remind me that she always knew that the years she felt I’d sacrificed, which was not how I ever saw it, would come back to me. And we agreed that they had. “You are,” she’d say to me, “living now that great blessing, a private life of love.” And I liked the phrase then and I still do.

So maybe I’d relaxed about them and began to feel confident that their souls and hearts were mended. That they had been darned up by the invisible thread of love, by minute-by-minute stitching through the hours of days. But perhaps the mending process had been too exhausting because though they had many years together he died younger than we’d all expected and long before her. His dying took a few weeks. I came home, of course. Sat by his side. With her. And once, when he knew there was no chance, I thought that he seemed to be trying to speed things up a bit to save her the anguish. But maybe I’m wrong. Still, there was a note in his voice one day when he whispered to me, after I said she looked tired, “I’m doing my best,” and later I wondered, doing your best at what? And I’m still not certain. That man would have hurried up his dying if he thought it might have helped her.

And though I sat there in the first week or so they didn’t need me, perhaps didn’t really want me. So I’d go for long walks knowing they had private work to do. Especially him. He was setting her up for life without him. No one thought she could live it but he set her up for the journey. And, this will be no surprise, they talked non-stop in those last weeks. I’d leave them in the hospital to give them some more time together, which amazingly was all they wanted, more time together. After a lifetime together they wanted more time. And that’s love, I suppose. The nurse told me that one night he’d called out in panic, “My God, I’m dying. I’m dying!” She shouldn’t have told me. I still can’t bear to think about it. But he rallied past the fear because the next day he greeted us with smiles and little jokes, they set about their whispering again and because it was raining I sat in the corridor reading Eliot and Henry James. The constriction of language and its expansion, a rhythm, like that of the heart. But his was weak and getting weaker. Then, about a week after that night-time outburst, at four in the afternoon, one Thursday afternoon, when he’d insisted we pop out for a walk, he left us. He left us with the silence of his heart and his heart had been a most beautiful thing. He left us, as you would expect, before we got back from that last walk of ours with the still-living dream of him. Perhaps he was trying to save her. Not to make her witness to his last moments. And that’s love, I suppose. But up until that day the conversation, that long love-poem, two people talking through life, that continued. And that’s love, I suppose.

Everyone came to the funeral. Everyone. Including Thomas Middlehoff, which was nice of him though some people were uneasy to see him there. He was more than the German now. He was a German with an Irish history. He was writing about us still and at a delicate time. Theft. The German, Wittgenstein, might indeed have visited us and written about us but that was different. “Didn’t Dev invite him to Ireland? Dev was mad about sums and didn’t we offer him nationality when he was in trouble, being a Jew? But we’re not a nation of mathematicians. Saints and scholars, yes, but no good at sums. Though we will get better in time.” Bogus, another letter. And though Heinrich Böll’s
Irish Journal
had been noted decades before, we’re a well-read nation and words obsess us, whether on the page or on the wind. We also knew Böll was a Catholic and
The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum
had had quite a bit of success in a country where such a title would resonate. Böll told us things we had wanted to hear, though there is an under-note. But Thomas Middlehoff! No prizes for him. Still, he’d “done no real harm” so they “let it go,” that day at the funeral.

I was really touched that he came. Afterwards he shook hands with my mother, bowed, talked about how he’d felt there’d been a deep bond with my father and that he would “greatly miss him.” She made no response to that. Then he turned to me, “Olivia,” a handshake and bow and suddenly he bent down and gave me a little kiss. My mother looked away. It probably seemed inappropriate but it wasn’t. Not at all. I nearly put my arms out to hold him or maybe hold on to him because I felt he understood things better than most. But I didn’t. Still, the moment lodged with me and I felt I had to see him again before I left. So a few days later, when my mother sat with her sisters talking over old times, times I didn’t know, when they were young, I drove out to see him. Patricia, Bridget’s daughter, who for three days a week worked as his secretary, said he’d be alone. It was a Sunday. He wasn’t. I should have rung. A tall, thin woman opened the door.

“Who is it, Harriet?”

“I’ve no idea,” she called back to him and before I had a chance to introduce myself to her he was standing before me. He looked shocked, not embarrassed exactly but perhaps a little angry. I stumbled over myself, apologies falling from my lips, a veritable confetti of “I’m sorry.”

“Please stop apologising. Come in. We’re not in flagrante, you know.”

And he almost hooted his laughter and I never saw a man who looked at a woman with such adoration, except one, or two.

“Olivia … O’Hara. I’m sorry, Olivia, I do not know your married name. May I introduce Mrs. Calder, Harriet Calder.”

He seemed preoccupied and clearly unhappy I was there. I apologised again and again. She stopped me.

“Come in,” she said.

He looked angrily at her. But she was insistent. As though she needed my presence for some reason. She had what they call natural authority. I followed this woman, Mrs. Calder, as she strode down the hall so fast I cursed the stupid shoes I was wearing and felt inelegant and irritated and all out-of-kilter in that house.

“Drink?” asked Harriet Calder and then she yawned slightly. And a shadow of deep exhaustion passed over her face. And then I noticed that her face was very thin and bony. Maybe more than just thin and bony. And then I saw that she was pale. And maybe more than pale. And I looked away and I told myself, don’t react. Compose yourself. Compose your face.

“Harriet! It’s not yet midday! What will Olivia think of us?” As if she gave a damn.

“Yes please,” I said. “Whiskey.”

And Harriet Calder smiled. A strange, crooked smile. But I knew enough about a slight distortion of features to know they have the power to trap a man. The things you learn!

“That settles it Thomas. Scotch all right? Thomas prefers Irish whiskey. Are you patriotic?”

“Scotch is fine,” I said.

“Not patriotic then? Thank God.”

I looked around the dark wood-panelled room, smoky velvet curtains and in the corner a deep winged chair in which you could almost hide. He motioned me to a low sofa with colours of old gold and dark green stitched into a pat tern I couldn’t decipher and awkwardly I sat down and tried to balance my drink, too tense to stretch out to the small side table. All in all, I did not feel at home, and neither of them would ever have issued that old invitation, “come in and make yourself at home.” But after a while I realised I wanted to be there. Very much. Yes, I wanted to be in the darkened room that smelled of old velvets and of old books—no paperbacks, I noted—and of old wood. Because in all the heaviness in the darkened room I could feel the energy, the restless, thrilling energy. Sexual. Impossible to miss. Then they started speaking again. And though they spoke perfect English I felt I was listening to foreigners, that the rhythms were different. I knew I was almost out of my depth but I believe in hanging on, and I hung on to the words that day.

“Olivia came home for her father’s funeral—Tom O’Hara.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” she asked. He looked away. She was not the kind of woman you could apologise for. And he didn’t.

“Mr. O’Hara? Wasn’t he the man who returned the gate?”

“Yes.”

“And the father, therefore, of the boy? You gave them the gate.”

“Yes.”

She looked at me and said, “Thomas liked your father. Never liked his own. You live in London?”

“Yes.”

“With your husband?”

“Harriet!”

She laughed. “It’s a perfectly natural question.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Children?”

I nodded. She was not interested in pursuing the question further.

“Thomas’s son died. Frederick. And another child. Did he tell you that?”

“No.”

“Indeed! Thomas is a very careful man and I am a careless woman.”

“Not true, Harriet. Not true.”

And she silenced him with a look. Power. She had power. Then she smiled again.

“However I have some caring instincts and I must now leave Thomas at a moment when I have given him bad news. I am pleased you are here with him. An unexpected but welcome visitor. Stay a little, while he bids me goodbye in private.”

I nodded. And she motioned to him to follow her. And he did. I would guess he always obeyed and anyway, I thought it was clearly too late for rebellion. Perhaps she’s right and he needs me. I owe him from long ago. I picked up a book, a copy of which was open on the desk, lines about goodness. How rare it is. Hardly an insight. Had he been reading it to her? When he came back he poured himself another drink. He looked at me as though he trusted me and I felt peculiarly proud.

“She’s dying!” he said. “Harriet Calder is dying!” and he laughed, that strange violent laugh I’d heard earlier. “Incredible! Incredible! She is the love of my life and she’s dying. She’s dying.” He was almost shouting as he paced the room. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry.” But he couldn’t stop. It was unstoppable this drumming out of rage at this outrage by the gods. Carry on, I thought. We both know it will make no difference. And he did continue, the fast, staccato drumming, drumming it all out of himself with useless words.

“Do you know what that means? Do you really know what it means? What I am facing? She is finally leaving me, the love of my life.”

“I do,” I whispered.

He leaned for a moment on the back of that winged chair as if to draw breath, and then more words, faster, which did not suit the rhythm of his voice, which was designed for slower, more controlled speech. I wished he’d stop. I realised I had held him in such high regard that I wanted him to be someone who suffered silently. Who could imply the things he knew, not spell them out for me. I had allocated a part to him. He wasn’t playing it. I didn’t want passionate incoherence from this man. That was something I could do for myself. No, I wanted dignified silence with a hint of some thing underneath, something that implied there was an answer. That was the kind of silence I wanted. Then I wondered, what have I come for? What am I looking for here? Away from my own life and back in the one I left? Back for a funeral. And I looked hard at him, willing him to think of me and what I’d just been through. But he seemed lost in his own recollections. We all have our favourite scene. No, not favourite, essential. He was lost in something, gazing at something or somewhere he’d been once and, as “that man, Yeats” told us, if you get to know that scene, that one life-scene, you will know the man. Where was he? What was he looking at? Who was he looking at? Then he took a deep breath, as though that whispered affirmation of a few moments ago convinced him he was not mad.

“Good. Good. Yes. You know, of course you know what I’m going through. Harriet Calder is dying. Incredible. I know that woman. I know her. Can you say that about anyone and be certain?”

“Yes.”

“The first time I made love to Harriet Calder was the first time I made love.”

I gasped. I was being attacked. I was being invaded by this uninvited intimacy. How dare he! I looked around as though looking for escape. How dare he do this to me. But there was no possibility of stopping him … of stopping this … this what? This savagery. Not now. And though he said, “Forgive me,” it was contemptible special pleading.

“Forgive me. Forgive me, Olivia. Unpardonable. Obsession. The universe reduced to one—the universe lit by one. Madness. Is that the perversion of love? Hearts with one purpose alone … seem enchanted to a stone … Is that not the line?”

“Yes,” I said, “but Yeats was speaking of love of country.”

And I wondered as I said it, does all love spring from the same source? Can all loves be diverted or twisted? What is it that makes a love flow kindly on? Who or what decides?