“No, the father,” retorts Emet, “a nicer man never walked the banks of that river, remembered kindly even now for the factory he built there, the employment he gave, they were the good days, of course, before all the trouble happened.”
“If he’s remembered that kindly,” counters Brid, “how come they burnt
it
down?”
“Blackguards,” mutters Granny, now and then.
“It was the times that was in
it,”
Emer returns, “they would have burnt a pigsty if they could have, burnt everything from England, except their coal. His only crime, after all, was being from there and living here, but then no-one in this house ever had a flitter of luck.”
And on that they’re both agreed, and Granny most of all. Luck was never at a premium here, and the thought must be a gossip stopper, since Granny quietly blesses herself as she begins on the piano, and Brid and Emer move in blessed silence from the Moreaus to the pictures lining the walls.
But the house doesn’t know it’s cursed or haunted or that it never had any luck. The house knows nothing. The house simply endures, accepts the clouds of frenetic dust Granny Moynihan is raising with her dutiful daughters. The brick is lifeless and comforting for that too, the wallpaper merely hangs, grown bubbled, yellow, mildewed, and accepts being brushed to some semblance of its former glory as readily as it departed from that glory. The silver on the mirrors, mottled with time, reflects dutifully the shapes of the living who brush it clean and even gaze at it fitfully, tucking the mousebrown hair behind the reddened ear as Emer does now, having moved from the dustfree picture frame.
I could grow fond of this quality, this absence of being, this sense of objects quite denuded of association, as in a random photograph. This placid emptiness of things. The blue satin curtains don’t resist when Granny Moynihan beats them with her duster, the greying paint on the woodwork doesn’t complain when washed back to its former cream.
And had I even wanted to buttress the Moynihans’ sense of the house as cursed or haunted, to topple that Japanese vase so it shattered on the marble fireplace, hear the silence descend, the questioning hushed and hurried—did you do that? I swear I didn’t, you must have brushed ofif it surely, I was over by the window Mammy, how could I have brushed off it, mother of God between us and all harm, didn’t I tell you—even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. My being is as still, as unmanifest as the old oak hunting table, shining now, like the crystal that sits on top of
it.
But I can take something like pleasure in this semblance of newness, this restoration of the things I placed here to the cleanliness that was their former state.
And the thought strikes me,
if
thoughts can strike something such as me, that that old oak table, bought at auction in the Grange Estate after old Mr. Huntingdon died, oval in shape, pitted with indentations of grain under the coats of varnish, that table has more substance than I have. It can gather dust and be swept free of dust, it can accept the weight of Emer’s rear upon it, as she sits on it for a rest, wipes her forehead and says, “Fag-break Mammy.”
“So what’s the story?” Emer asks, igniting a Sweet Afton with a match, inhaling deeply, words emerging with the smoke from her capacious lungs. “It’ll go to Gregory, won’t it, lock, stock and barrel? They were as thick as thieves always, the two of them, no room for third parties. Forget Janie, forget poor mad George who would have lain down and brayed among the hayricks to the full moon for her and probably did. Was there ever anyone else but her or him? There could be though, and now that I think about it, probably, is, a child somewhere.”
“What,” says Emer, “you mean his?”
“No,” says Brid, “hers. Like father like daughter. I mean no offence now, Mammy, but they don’t live like you or I.”
“Actresses?” asks Granny Moynihan.
“No,” says Emer, “Protestants.”
“She made her first communion with the lot of you,” says Granny.
“She may have worn the white dress and swallowed the host the body of Christ and all that, but that doesn’t make her Catholic. Only showed she didn’t care. All I’m saying is there may be a child in England, France, even America with some actor or producer boyo of a father. And if there is, that child’ll give Gregory a run for his money.”
“How?” yelps Brid, breathing smoke if not fire.
“On the inheritance front.”
“Well, if there is a child swimming round somewhere,” says Granny, “there’s nothing like an inheritance to bring them up for air. But if you ask me, they’d all be well shot of this place, child or no.”
My only child, though, was him.
~
“Don’t look now,” she told him, one afternoon in the piano room while he was practising his scales. “But she’s there.”
“Who?”
“Hester.”
And I am there, of course, always there, can see them both against the dark hulk of the instrument, the grey light of the window fleshing out their young figures. Gregory, dressed in trousers already too short for him. Nina, in a yellow cardigan and a green plaid skirt.
“The mirror.”
“Don’t tell fibs.”
“I’m not telling fibs. Never about her. Just do what you’re doing.”
“I’m doing scales.”
“Then keep doing scales. No. Come down here.” She squatted on all fours, crept beneath the piano legs. He seemed alone in the room for a moment, and terrified.
“Stop doing this.”
“Ill stop when you come down here.”
And he obeyed, of course, as he always did. Crept down, so close to her she could hear his heart beating.
“There,” she said, “watch. Her feet.”
And the wind blew the dust on the floor, a silken sheen of it, from the mirror to the piano stool. The pitifully fair hairs on his arms stood up.
“Don’t be frightened,” she says. “She’s a friend.”
“She’s nobody.”
“How could anybody be nobody?”
“You’re making this up.”
“Why would I make it up?”
“To frighten me. But I won’t be frightened.”
She felt the hairs on his thin arms, like sticklebacks. She clasped her hand around his.
“Shall I shut up about her then?”
“Please.”
“But wouldn’t you rather know what’s there?”
“There’s no-one there.”
“All right. There’s no-one there. Get out from under the piano then.”
“No.”
“Why not if there’s no-one there?”
“I like it here.” And his hand stayed in hers.
“All right,” he says, “I give up. She is there.”
“So?”
“So? Tell me about her.”
“Her name’s Hester.”
“You told me that. Tell me something different.”
“She wears a fur coat and a black hat.”
“So? It’s cold wherever she is.”
“Is it cold here?”
“Not particularly.”
“So, she’s here and she’s not here . . .”
“Where would she be if she’s not here?”
“I don’t know. Home.”
“But surely this is her home?”
“Yes. Ghosts stay around when they die.”
“Where did she die?”
“Here. It has to be here. And there has to be a reason.”
“A reason for what?”
“A reason she’s a ghost. Why does one stay around and not the others?”
“Which others?”
“All the others who died.”
“It’d be too crowded.”
“Ha ha. No, she stays because she has something to tell us.”
“What?”
“I don’t know yet.”
His hand grew warmer in hers. “Can we stop this now?”
“No,” she said. “Not yet. Hester has a secret message to give you.”
“What message?”
“This one,” she said, and kissed him.
Under the piano, her lips touching his, I remember the boyish tautness of the mouth and the smell of surprise. The hairs on his arms all stood to attention. Like soldiers, like sheaves of wheat released from wind, like new-mown grass.
“Now,” she said, “we have the same ghost.”
So he agreed to Hester, he admitted her, came to acknowledge her, and once having done so, being the studious, bookish English boy he was, he had to find a history for her. From the Empire period he imagined, given her description of the waisted coat and the hat that was shaped like a bonnet, but not quite. And they played together, with histories of their ghost, the inevitably sad and tragic circumstances of its untimely demise. When one ran out of details, the other gladly filled in.
The ghost was young, of course, young enough to be beautiful, thin of waist and delicate in complexion, always on the run from some unwarranted doom. Running from what, he wondered. From the forces of the Crown, she said, triumphantly, relishing the burr of history in the phrase she didn’t fully understand. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, he decided, was the ghost’s sweetheart, if Regency indeed was the period. They had been disturbed, of course, in the love-seat below the curved window, doing sweetheart things, and she had run downstairs to distract their attention while out of the window and over the valleyed roofs he made his valiant escape. And many months later, after he had died of suspected suicide, an unwilling disembowelment with a rusty knife, she herself had leapt to join him from the window through which he had made his escape so valiant.
But if the period was Empire, he concluded, she needed a different history entirely. The ghost was an actress, he decided, who had travelled up from Smock Alley in Dublin for the Michaelmas festivities and was wandering round the corridors in preparation for her entry on to the small ballroom stage. As what, Nina wondered. And that was simple for Gregory. As a ghost.
Hester. The name itself suggested more urgent histories, like illustrated pages flicking over in a storybook. She had drowned crossing the Boyne when it was frozen over, the spider-cracks spreading in the ice beneath her high-heeled boots. She had died in childbirth, out of wedlock, was buried in a pauper’s grave, had walled herself in behind the bricks of the coal-cellar . . . He invented litanies of deaths for her, none approaching the grotesque reality. And in school he drew wraithlike images of her on his slate during prayers, from which he was, being C of E, excused. Prayers to the Virgin, with which he is unfamiliar, to that tiny statue in the niche above the blackboard with her stiff plaster arms and her stiff blue cloak, pray for us who have recourse to thee. He confused them both, understandably, in his musings, his daydreams, two ghosts, both of them female, undemanding and both, apparently, everywhere.
But this was a new Hester, theirs alone, not George’s, not Jamie’s, not anyone’s in the whole breathing world. A Hester that belonged to the mist curling round the morning haystacks, to the pigeon’s chuckle in the haybarn, to the owl’s hoot at night, echoing round the house and the river. They attributed random events to her, unexplained events: a hen’s
egg
floating in the well, a badger’s pawprints on the front drive, milk turned sour on the kitchen steps, those rapid showers that swept across those flat fields, caught them unawares, drenching them only to vanish again. She became the cause and the repository of all lost things, socks, combs, pennies, stamps, laces, picture books, balls of all kinds—beach, cricket, golf and tennis, lawn and table, hurley and bat. She became the symbol, the embodiment of their uniqueness, their fraternity and sorority, their secret language.
The silences that fell over dinner, father lost in his glass of milk, mother sniffing distastefully at the whiff of dried fish, the gap that had grown between them with his arrival became a vast chasm that only Hester could fill. The space between the chink of cutlery and chomp of chewing became hers, they wedged eyes across the table and smiled complicitly at the unseen presence there. Her, me, or Hester. She would have approved, they felt, of the hours they spent in the barn, faces down in the prickly pile, her legs kicking his above. She was their game. Hester says, do this, do that, Hester says touch your toes, stamp your feet, Hester says hide and kiss me.
T
HE CATHOLIC CHURCH
on the crest of the hill can be seen from the curved window on the upper hallway, with the graveyard beside
it
meandering towards the estuary wall, its granite spire tapering towards the grey March sky. Gregory walks up the grassed road towards it, his tan gaberdine flapping open on his shoulders, the buttons undone. The church door opens as he reaches the wrought-iron gate and a priest emerges, his small shape bent in a curve of vicarious sorrow. Gregory shakes his hand; he has made an appointment, he has been expected.
“Mr. Hardy,” he murmurs, “my condolences, a dreadful business even in these dreadful days. No, I didn’t know her, she never graced St. Agnes’s with her presence as far as I recall, and ours is a small parish, a small congregation, I would have remembered. Perhaps she worshipped St. Peter’s in Drogheda or worshipped alone, no harm in that, no harm at all, who among us can cast the first stone. As to the issue of a service, a funeral mass, we would be delighted of course, privileged even, given her notoriety—no, wrong word that—given her stature, her reputation, her fame. What we need is her baptismal certificate and the issue of remains, now how can I put it, the issue of remains remains to be clarified, the Archbishop of course could guide us in this, there must be precedents,
requiem sans corpus,
an empty coffin need cause no offence, no scandal. No, the only scandal would actually reside in no mass, no service, no funeral rites, so of course, given the appropriate clearances, the baptismal certificate, the permissions, we will be happy to oblige . . .”
Stones in my coffin to give it weight, he wants a service to remember me, never religious my Gregory, C of E, how could he be, but afflicted with an almost Roman sense of duty, a pagan perception of the wastelands beyond this aching world.
Et in arcadio ego,
and I remember, of course, I posed for it once, the shepherdess by the massive gravestone, the skull peeping from the tangled, dying grasses round my sandalled feet and the muscled rustic below me gorging on a bunch of grapes. He wants to send me to that paradise but he doesn’t know—how could he, his whole life spent in the pursuit of the quotidian—where or what that paradise is.