“Yes to the first question,” he says and hands her a tin.
“And the second?”
“I don’t remember embarrassment,” he says, “but then I don’t remember much.”
The kettle begins its slow hiss and Janie fills a teapot with the dusty leaves.
“The purpose of the Irish funeral, my dear, you know what it is?”
“To bury the dead,” he says.
“No,” she says, and laughs bleakly, “anyway, aren’t we lacking a corpse? No,” she repeats, “it’s a social ritual of Byzantine complexity with embarrassment at its core. A time for endless handshakes, whispered condolences, intimations of impropriety, extremes of emotion valiantly kept at bay that release themselves as the day progresses. Building to an evening of raw conviviality where too much drink is taken as a matter of course, old sores are reopened, new ones found, enmities and intimacies erupt like water through a broken pipe and the dead one is gradually forgotten in a welter of new and unwarranted emotions.” And she smiles wryly. “It will make you melancholy, Monsieur Jacques.”
He answers with another smile. “I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs.”
She leans on the table and touches his hand, lays her head achingly on his shoulder. “Let me help you with it, Jacques,” she whispers.
“Orlando,” he says, “I was her Orlando.”
“But,” she insists, “you were always Jacques to me. So let me help you, with the melancholy, the food, the drink, the service. Let me help you choose the readings.”
“And what would you read, Janie?” he asks, in his voice already saying yes.
“Something of Rosalind’s,” she says. “How did it go?”
But these are all lies: men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
~
She was surprised by sentiment, that evening before the last Christmas break in the hall of the Siena Convent as the parents gathered in the corridors outside, as the scrape of hooves arriving and departing sounded from the forecourts. Janie and she had made each other’s dresses, their version of Elizabethan, stitched and scissored from one of her mother’s voluminous ball–gowns. She heard the shuffling of feet behind the stage curtain and drew back the gap to see George walking in, almost first in the hall, dressed in a suit he had bought with his farmhand’s wages. He had memorised every word, she knew, sitting behind the dead tomato plants during their glasshouse rehearsals. And as the hall gradually filled, with those families from the town and hinterland whose daughters merited the attentions of the nuns of the Siena Convent, George sat apart, alone without family, quiet, preternaturally alert.
The red curtains bulged with the shape of youthful bodies, moving like a slow wind from left to right. A symphony of coughs and creaking bootstraps, the rhythmic scraping of chair-legs on parquet floor, the rustle of the cheap printed programme all merged with the gentle rattle of beads, as the bonneted nuns moved up and down the aisles, seating the latecomers, before sitting themselves. The lights were extinguished then, and an embarrassed hush fluttered through the hall and the curtains drew back to reveal Gregory on-stage in a pair of black stockings and a Robin Hood skirt, standing still and simple with that heron-like concentration of his, and speaking without any embarrassment at all.
She stood watching from the wings, saw the lights flaring from behind his knees, saw the upturned faces vanishing into a deep, delicious darkness. She saw they were no longer that uncertain, embarrassed group of midlands burghers, they were an audience.
I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry.
She was surprised by sentiment, a sentiment as yet unknown to her. And, as when her new-found brother stood on the kitchen steps, she wondered where that sentiment had been till then. Janie smiled cheekily while delivering her first lines, as if it were a private game between them, and seemed as surprised as she when it was not Nina, but Rosalind who answered. Rosalind, who was not quite her, but more than her, who existed for two brief hours in the glower of the footlights, the whorls of dust raised by their buckled feet, in the smell of stale sweat and greasepaint. But she did not so much exist in those two hours, as become illumined, her existence was a prior fact, endless, and for two brief hours Nina was privileged to give it being. She acted, that is to say she pretended, and as she pretended, she became. The rush of feeling Rosalind gave rise to in her moved her at points to tears, yet to her surprise, to her delight, they were tears she could turn on and ofif at will, weep with and enjoy the act, the principle of weeping.
“Love is merely a madness,” she told her brother, “deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish’d and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.”
Not so much feeling as sentiment, sentiment informed, cultured, refined by the expression of it, one is at feeling’s mercy, she realised, but one becomes sentiment’s partner; and she spent two hours as Rosalind in a state of illuminated partnership, of ecstatic surprise.
~
“I’ll always remember her,” says Janie, her head still perched precipitously on Gregory’s shoulder, “in the costume we cut from the purple gown her mother wore to the Meath Hunt Ball, when she turned and said to me, what was it— dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of. I was startled, even shocked, fully prepared to giggle my way through the whole thing like a bad school recitation, knock over a cardboard tree or get my hair caught in the paper leaves of the forest of Arden and laugh at it all on the journey home. But the speed of her reply almost floored me, the certainty of it, the poise in her movements as she said it, and there was someone else, I realised, on the stage beside me. Not Nina, not Rosalind either, nothing as novelettish as that, no, the spectacle I was witness to was that of her becoming, but becoming what? Help me here Gregory, you were there too in your Robin Hood outfit— becoming this thing, this other that stopped you in your tracks, made you laugh one minute, cry the next, as if the Nina we had known was just a ghost of the real one. And here it was, the real, it had been dormant all along, sleeping, like Snow White, or like in one of those vampire films she did, sleeping in the coffin of herself.”
“It was the character she loved,” Gregory says, “Rosalind and then Viola. I saw her as Viola in
Twelfth Night,
some theatre in the West End I can’t remember which, and she said to me afterwards in that bar by the Seven Dials, that they were both cousins, Rosalind, Viola, half-sisters maybe. And I remember thinking, what a beautiful idea, the same family that populates the plays. Touchstone by that logic would be Falstaffs illegitimate son, Edmund would be the darker twin of Jacques.”
“Family,” says Janie dreamily, “what happened to it? Never remembered to have mine.”
And Gregory takes that as cue perhaps that their reveries have ended, lifts her head gently from his shoulder. “Are you perfectly sure you want to help, Janie?”
“It would help me,” she says, “if I could help you. We could wake her, together.”
~
If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleas’d me, complexions that lik’d me, and breaths that I defied not.
But she was a girl, not yet a woman, a girl-woman perhaps, and could see Gregory behind the wings and could imagine George somewhere in that ocean of dark faces when she made curtsey and bade herself farewell. The curtain came down, or more exactly jerked across in incremental movements, behind it the spectral shape of a white nun’s bonnet, and the applause began before it had fully closed. She heard applause, but to be more exact again, she heard an outpouring of whoops, boots hammered off the parquet floor with a strong undertone of handclapping beneath it all. And the nuns drew the curtains back again the minute they had touched to reveal her in mid-curtsey, the rest of the cast lumbering into a phalanx behind her. She felt a sudden crush of emptiness, as if whatever had filled her for two hours had left, like air escaping from a deflated balloon.
The curtain came across bringing dark and then a different kind of light, and that was the beginning of my envelopment in light itself and the darkness that surrounds it: footlights, arc-lights, toplights, keylights, each of them blazing out from their own cone of darkness, sculpting a cheek, filigreeing a hair, caressing a lip, piercing an eye, generally mine.
We blundered round in the darkness behind the heavy curtains until they pulled back, and where there had been a pit of gloom, an unseen audience was a group of clamouring parents and beaming nuns, among them my own, but no George. And the character was gone, quite suddenly, lifted from me by invisible hands with no sense of release; it was hovering somewhere, in the wings, maybe, like a ghost itself, awaiting another manifestation, another embodiment, another performance.
And maybe they are the most enduring spectres, the ones who survive without any particular life, wait patiently in a kind of death to be inhabited by the next actor who comes along. I remember Rosalind as a series of colours, a riot of smells, a host of stratagems, an intelligence I could never have matched, but once inside her I was glad to be that luminous mind, that well of kindness, that ironic, affectionate muse. Then she went, and that was that.
There was tea and scones afterwards in the beeswax-odoured refectory. My parents were there, my mother florid in a bowed hat talking to Sisters Assumpta, Bonaventura, Catherine, Camille, and I could see among the sea of faces Janie’s parents with her and Gregory, but again, no George. And when we made our way home in my father’s motor which proceeded with all the delicacy of a herd of buffalo down the Baltray Road, and we passed Mabel Hatch’s haybarn, I saw a figure standing inside among the hayricks which I knew had to be him. The motor stalled and started again and before it resumed its journey I asked to be let out, to have the benefit of the fresh air and the walk home along the river. I kissed them both, and Gregory, and they drew away from me with a lot of engine noise and steam, and I turned to the haybarn and walked inside.
“Is that Touchstone?” I asked, hoping there was humour in my question, but finding none.
“No,” the answer came from the upper hayricks, “this is George, the hayrickmaker, the turnipsnagger, the walking scarecrow, who earns what he eats, gets what he wears, owes no man hate, envies no man’s happiness.”
“Did George enjoy the evening?” I asked, climbing up the hayricks towards him. There was a broken panel in the barn behind him through which the moonlight showed. I could see his head, utterly still against it. And I realised, with a sudden twist inside my stomach, that he was my only real, my only pertinent audience.
“Yes,” he said, “George found it mighty altogether. And the kiss was mightiest of all.”
“So,” I said, sitting beside him, “we solved the problems of the kiss.”
“You did,” he said, “because you were someone altogether different. Gregory now, he was still Gregory, but Nina was no longer Nina.”
“So Rosalind kissed Gregory?” I asked him.
“As it should be,” he said.
“And can Rosalind kiss George?” I saw his large head, inscrutable in the moonlight, the broken wooden wall of the barn behind him.
“She cannot,” he said softly, “but maybe Nina can.”
So I leaned over and up and kissed him and his lips were above me now, the reverse of the way they had been as children, always below, and they were broad with the skin peeling and the breath that came from behind them was shocking in its adulthood, its immediacy, because in other ways, particularly in the trembling of one lip against the other even as I closed them with mine, they were still, more than anything, a child’s. I remembered the lipstick I had smudged upon them so wantonly, and raised my arms up to feel what had become of the blond curls, but there were none, there was the rough feel of the shaven nape of a neck which pulled away, and he looked at me directly, and then above my head.
“Look,” he said, “at what’s looking at us.” I turned and saw a brown owl perched on the beams below the wooden cathedral of a ceiling, and there was a low owly hoot and the wings flapped open and the owl flew over us, out through the broken wooden wall towards the moonlight.
“She’ll remind me of you,” he said, “when I go.”
“Where are you going?” 1 asked him.
“To the war,” he said. “There’s a war in Europe that pays better than Keiling’s farm.”
T
HERE WAS A
calm,” says Janie, “before the storm, wasn’t there, Gregory? The lengthened evenings as the last school year ended and the longest of them all, the dress dance in the tennis-club, when we could think of no-one to invite but each other. I decided, after endless reflection, to invite none other than you. Nina had options, she always had, but Buttsy Flanagan’s breath smelt, she told me, and Albert Tafife, she was certain, would step on her toes. So she decided to ask my dear brother George, whose breath didn’t smell, but who was equally certain to step on the toes of the red shoes she had bought from Quirk’s on Church Street.
“His preparations for the evening were careful, and immense. He scrubbed himself for days in the copper tub in the kitchen, as if multiple baths were necessary to clean off the grime of Keiling’s pea and potato fields. He used whatever earnings he had saved to rent a suit from Quirk’s. If there was to be a perfect evening, as perfect as the long lost ones in Mozambique, he wanted this to be it.
“He came home around six on his bike, took one final bath and presented himself to me in his rented suit, his shoulders almost bursting the seams. I was amazed to hear him ask me what I thought and I noticed one small detail amiss. His face scrubbed clean and raw, his hair slicked back with oil, his sleeves too short of course, but what ruined it were his nails, long, thick and uncut, coatings of earth underneath them that successive bathing hadn’t removed. I got out my scissors and clipped them and cleaned beneath the cuticles as much as I could, and he set ofif on his bike.
“ ‘Don’t be too early, Georgie,’ I pleaded, ‘there’s nothing worse than that,’ but he assured me he wanted to take the long road round.