Trespassers (27 page)

This reminded me of one of his own short stories.

‘An Inside Outside Complex’ is about a man who, having fallen out with his wife, brings her a peace-offering. It is a mirror which proves too big to bring through her door, so is left leaning against the hedge outside her window. As the two look out of this and see themselves looking in, their conflicted need to be together and apart is briefly resolved. It is a perfect metaphor both for the way Seán’s yens did and did not work, and on how the mirror of narrative changes what it reflects.

Sometimes, standing with him at that gate, I too slipped back to a time when he used to exorcise the thrills and terrors which Eileen’s stories conjured up. These, being gleaned from the Gaelic, had come either directly from native speakers in West Cork or from tales collected by the Irish Folklore Commission, which she translated, retold in English, and sold to the Oxford University Press in the Fifties.

Once, she told me, she asked a woman from whom she had got some fairy tales whether she herself believed in fairies, but the woman was too proud to admit this.

‘Yerra no!’ she denied. ‘
I
don’t. But mind, they’re there all the same.’ This answer enchanted Eileen – and showed that belief in Ireland had often been dodgy.

Whenever I was back in LA, Helen Fahy sent me reports on Seán’s health, along with warnings that Maurice Harmon, a
UCD professor, who was writing his biography, would read any letter I sent.

‘So write nothing private,’ she warned.

This recalls another short story, one by Robbie McCauley, and is about a man writing about a writer he has not met – which makes him an unconvincing Boswell. When the story opens, though, the writer is to visit him and will, with luck, reveal something of himself.

Setbacks accumulate when the academic learns that he has been mispronouncing his guest’s name – which, when colleagues find out, will turn him into a laughing stock. Next, the guest has a stroke and dies.

Setback or bonus?

Bonus, of course. Now nobody need know about the
mispronounced
name, and the biographer can write what he likes and footnote it with the claim, ‘learned in a private interview’.

‘So,’ Helen repeated, ‘write nothing private.’

But nothing
was
private now for Seán, whose ability to read or think flickered unreliably. Worse: old letters to friends, most of these now dead, would be quoted in the biography. He had sold them to the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, where biographers could consult them whenever they chose. Gossip, in a town like Dublin, would lose nothing in the telling.

Recalling the reticence of Antonin Artaud’s sister when I, as a brash doctoral student, wanted access to facts about her brother’s life, I felt retrospective shame. And, on reading about the venom which James Joyce’s grandson displayed when scholars wanted
to make use of Joyce’s family papers, I realised that relations between relatives and biographers are bound to be fraught, with self-interest on both sides masquerading as
pietas.

Maybe it’s as well, I tell myself, that fewer people now write letters at all. Think of what happened to Joyce’s ‘dirty’ ones to his wife when they were left with Brandeis University on the understanding that nobody was to copy them. People did. They memorised, took furtive notes, and wrote down their unreliable recollections. So in the end it was thought safer for Dick Ellmann to publish the letters openly and officially, since this, at least, deprived poachers of the glee of the chase.

So now the ‘dirty letters’ display their ancient, salivating excitement on the Internet.

With considerable rue, then, I made my letters to Seán impersonal, knowing that the experience of slitting open the envelopes would probably bring him as much – or little – pleasure as an exchange of views about anything at all. Even before his breakdown, I had seen him puzzle for up to half an hour over a single page.

Eileen, who unlike him had stayed mentally sharp until she died, had concealed his mental deterioration from me, which was what made it impossible for him to join Lauro and me while we were still commuting between London and LA

However, once settled in Gloucester Crescent, I suggested that he pay us a visit, and offered to give a party for him and invite anyone still alive whom he would like to see. His old friends, V. S. Pritchett and his wife, Dorothy, were living just around the corner from us in Regent’s Park Terrace, so would surely come. I was hoping to replicate a dinner party we had given for him in the Seventies, which had been attended by Elizabeth Bowen, John Betjeman and some friends of my own. Cecil Day-Lewis and
Jill Balcon were to have come, too, but Day-Lewis died just days before that first party.

The second one never happened – or rather did not include Seán, although he had claimed to be looking forward to it. At first this was due to his doctors’ warning that he might have a fit when the plane took off and create a disturbance, which could oblige the pilot to return to the airport. They then got the idea that if a strong young man were to travel with him, to handle any trouble which might arise, he
could
come. Mrs Jones volunteered her son for the duty, but, for reasons which I was never told, Seán now backed out. VSP and Dorothy came to dinner anyway and we had a good, if slightly subdued, evening.

Seán had meanwhile developed a crush on Mrs Jones and sighed at his failure to make any impression on her. Why, he asked me, when confessing this, were some women standoffish? Was it to do with power? I mentioned age, which set him brooding.

‘How old
am
I?’ he asked after a while. ‘Am I a hundred?’

‘No, no,’ I reassured. ‘Only ninety-one.’ I was glad he had a woman to dream about. After he died, I gave Mrs Jones a watercolour by Norah McGuinness to thank her for the kindness, which must, I guessed, have won his heart. McGuinesses, I saw, some time later, were selling well, so with luck Mrs Jones got a good price for hers.

Seán died two and a half years after Eileen.

They had made their wills at a time when the Church was forbidding Catholics to leave their bodies – ‘temples of the Holy Ghost’ – for research, which meant that Irish medical schools were in urgent need of such legacies, but in defiance of ‘Holy Mum’, as some fitful convert – possibly Graham Greene? – used to call the institution we knew as ‘Mother Church’, both had done
so. This meant that once the research was done, the memorial services were over and I had scattered their ashes on similar grey days in Lake Gougane Barra, there was no place dedicated to their memory, so less reason for me to visit Ireland. I did so a few times, nonetheless, to judge literary prizes or see friends, although lively members of our diaspora were often easier to see elsewhere: Maura Teissier in Paris and Positano, Brian Moore in LA, and many more in London.

Then our LA connection ended too.

This happened during an economic dip, when UCLA invited senior professors to take early retirement in exchange for better pensions, since its pension fund was more solvent than the one for salaries.

Lauro accepted the offer, retired to London, and started to write livelier narratives, one of which was actually a novel and won a prize. Even when writing history, he now felt more free to vary his interests and topics. He also gave seminars at the École des Hautes Études, which meant that we needed to find somewhere to stay when in Paris. We did this by swapping a sojourn in Gloucester Crescent for one in the rue Saint Martin, where the American writer Edmund White then lived. We did this exchange several times and, in between house-swaps, did the same thing with the Italian theatre critic, Rita Cirio. She took our house for less time than we wanted to spend in her Paris flat, so, to make things fairer, she brought parties of friends with her. Her flat had a pleasant roof terrace, overlooking the Senate building, and both arrangements worked so well, that even when the connection with the Hautes Études ended, we went on spending time in Paris. The Eurostar has now brought it so close that we have almost as many friends there as in London.

April Blood,
Lauro’s book about the 1478 conspiracy to murder the Medici brothers Lorenzo il Magnifico and Giuliano in Florence cathedral did well both with his academic peers and with a popular readership. He followed it with
Scourge and Fire,
an account of the struggle between Florentine Republicans, animated by Savonarola, and Medici partisans, who, though banished from Florence during the years covered by the book, were doggedly plotting to get back. Reviewers were surprised by Lauro’s view of the Dominican friar, who is often presented as an unlikable puritan but emerges here as an idealist. His end – he was hanged and burned at the stake – darkens his story. Yet it strikes me that to see him as a forerunner of today’s Liberation theologians brightens it with the reminder that the Church has, repeatedly, found the ingenuity needed to sidestep its own dogmatism. I saw this in action when the canon lawyer Neri Capponi advised Maura Teissier that if she had any Irish friends who needed their marriages annulled, they should apply not to the bigoted Irish hierarchy, but directly to Rome. This advice was on a par with his way of dealing with Italian tax collectors who, assuming that everyone lied, allowed for this when calculating what people were likely to actually owe the state. This, Neri noted, obliged
all
citizens to lie, since those who did not risked being excessively penalised to the detriment of their families.

‘So,’ we asked him, ‘one reaches for truth through falsehood?’

‘Why not?’

Well, since religion is the realm of paradox, indeed why not? ‘
O
felix culpa!
’ goes the hymn celebrating the redemption necessitated by the Fall. The liking for happy endings may originate right there.

Scourge and Fire
was Lauro’s tenth book and, as I write, he is finishing his eleventh.

Once freed from our annual commuting to and from LA, we were able to visit, among other places, Egypt, Syria, Cambodia, Turkey, Russia, Sicily and different parts of Spain. This was more fun than toing and froing between the UK and US. Also, from time to time, we separately enjoyed ‘freebies’, such as my visits to Japan, to the Adelaide Festival, and an earlier one to the lavish Harbourfront festival in Toronto, where the Faber publisher Charles Monteith turned up with his star writer, William Golding, and his wife, and encouraged me to join their group.

This was generous of Charles, since I had by then left Faber and gone to Allen Lane with my novel
No Country for Young Men
, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980, when the prize itself was deservedly won by Golding’s
Rites of Passage.

Charles was not only generous in this. He had been stoical ten years earlier when my first novel,
Godded and Codded,
had to be withdrawn because of a libel threat. That taught me the cost of words – mine and the lawyer’s. His were so expensive that I hardly dared speak to him.

‘
Did
you commit libel?’ he asked.

I wasn’t sure. True, I had taken something from life: a bed so infested with termites that the bed had become termites and termites the bed, and this, claimed the woman who was suing Faber, tied her to the novel, which presented her, she said, as ‘a ludicrous and lecherous female’.

‘The story’s fictional,’ I told the lawyer hopefully. ‘And the characters are composite. The bed’s a metaphor really.’

‘That’s
worse
!’ he told me. ‘If you’d stuck to truth we could have pleaded “fair comment”.’

It was too expensive to argue. Besides that, the litigant was a woman who had once, at a party, loudly described Honor’s and Seán’s affair in terms quite close to ‘ludicrous and lecherous’. Had I, consciously, been taking revenge? Guilt hovered. I had, undeniably, turned one of her own comic turns against her, whose
lovers, she often joked, perhaps to forestall other people’s jokes, tended to be damaged. ‘My lot’, she liked to say, ‘are the halt and the blind. I seem to attract them.’ The words were hers! Could I claim that she had libelled herself? Better not try.

The question arises, why use reality at all? I can only say that, for me, it provides a ballast which allows the imagination to levitate. When grounded in everyday life, I feel able to write without too much planning, which is how I prefer to write. There is a fear of drying up, but there is also the hope of something unexpected happening on the page. I got the idea for
No Country for Young Men
from hearing of an old Dublin lady from a nationalist family who had gone astray in her mind and fancied the year to be permanently 1922. This scrap of gossip was a talisman. Explosive with parable to anyone who knew Ireland, it was also blessedly commonplace, as avatars ought to be.

The gossip used in
Godded and Codded,
in contrast, led to that novel’s being scuttled. Shaken by this, I eagerly agreed when Lauro suggested that we collaborate on a documentary history of women. Its title,
Not in God’s Image,
echoed St Augustine’s notion that ‘separately … woman alone is not the image of God; whereas man alone is …’ We spent a year and a half doing research in the British Museum, using law codes, court cases, wage scales, diaries and the like as criteria for judging ordinary women’s status. Our subtitle was
Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians.
As I educated myself in the history of domestic mores, the pleasure of seeing how societies work became a fillip to fantasy. I was learning a new trade, and the tricks of all trades are useful to novelists. I was interested too in the workings of the Church which has so often controlled society and more especially women.

Feminism was in the air, and animated my novel
Women in the
Wall,
which came out in 1975. Set in sixth-century Gaul, it focused on the role of convents in misogynist warrior-societies where they could sometimes provide women with a refuge from violence as well as scope for ambition, self-realisation, self-mortification and an aspiration to become deaconesses. Clearly my mind was partly on the quarrels of the Seventies. What drove the narrative, though, was a suspicion that violence like that described in the sixth-century chronicles was likely to be internalised by the women too. And, indeed, the particular story which I chose – that of Queen, later Saint, Radegunda – shows the nuns in her convent inviting in the very ferocity which their convent had been founded to repel.