I can see myself in those eyes, my own reflection, retreating from me as she swings away, gaining on me as she swings back, and I realise the comfort lies in the fact that I am seen, I am seen and therefore am. I know it with a certainty I only came close to when he hacked the head from my body and was certain that death was coming, sweet easeful death, and the certainty is that I am, I exist, somehow, in those pools of luscious brown, swinging towards me and away, on the swing Dan Turnbull and her father built her, or was it me.
So her narrative begins, as it will end, with a ghost.
S
HE HAD BEEN
born in the house some time before the new century, three years exactly, but her awareness of the sad presence coincided with the new era. Three years old, in or around the year nineteen hundred, and her mother found her in the curve below the large stairwell, talking quietly and intimately to somebody who wasn’t there. The sunlight came through the bubbled glass of the tall convex window, and she sat below it in the darkness, her doll clutched to her tiny chest, talking to nothing in particular.
“Nina Hardy,” said her mother—for that was her name, Nina, and Elizabeth was the mother’s—“whatever are you doing, talking to yourself on the draughty stairs? Come down and have your breakfast.”
“Can she come too?” asked Nina, and when her mother asked who, Nina pointed to the nothing in particular she had been addressing.
“Of course she can,” said mother, who was a woman wise enough not to question the private world of children, and took Nina’s hand and led her down the stairs to the stone floor of the kitchen, where the flags were cold beneath her bare feet, where the whitewashed limestone arched above the deal table and the range where Mary Dagge prepared her eggs. “Now Nina,” said Mary Dagge, “here’s your egges.”
She pronounced eggs with two syllables because she came from the town nearby, Drogheda, where eggs were pronounced “egges.” And when she placed the cracked plate with its blue castellated pattern and its damp yellow pile of scrambled eggs beside Nina, Nina divided it neatly in two, one for herself and one for her unseen playmate. And over the years to come Mary Dagge would grow accustomed to this division of spoils, to the portions of meals left uneaten on the right-hand side of her plate, to the sugar-coated sweets carefully shared with nobody in particular and to the conversations with shadows in isolated corners of the draughty house. For Nina was an imaginative child, her large brown eyes were pools into which one could sink, gladly, and the house was large, too large for an only child like her.
The house was on a bend of the estuary of the river Boyne, close to where it entered the sea in a small delta of mudflats. There were unkempt gardens leading to the river’s tributary, over which a chestnut tree inclined, and her father attached two ropes to its sturdiest overhanging branch which he tied in turn to a small wooden swing. So Nina could swing, when the weather permitted, over the coal-black waters and glimpse the white caps of the waves on the ocean beyond, providing, that is, she swung high enough. There was a glasshouse to one side and a vegetable garden, the walls of which continued, along the roadside, to the banks of the river itself.
To be present at the beginning of a new century pleased her father, she could tell that instinctively, though she might not have known what the word century meant. But when she saw him supervise the riveting of the rope to the wooden chair of the swing, the rope spliced neatly round the piece of metal shaped like a tear-drop, the screw’s thread beneath it fitting neatly into the precut hole in the wood, she knew it was part of a process that was exact and industrial, it was to do with metal and measurement and that this swing would be a superior swing to those built long ago. And when her father lifted her at last, placed her on the finished swing, and Dan Turnbull, who had screwed the final bolts, pushed her from behind, it felt odd to be swinging on a seat so new and to be staring over the water, at the face of the sad and lovely presence who was part of a story she would never know, that must have happened long ago.
Her father was old too, but so much in love with newness that his oldness fitted in, somehow, with every new thing. She could never imagine loving anyone more than her father, except perhaps her secret friend, during her more secret moments, but because she was secret that didn’t count. No, her father was part of the world that declared itself as real and she loved him for it, as much as for his love of all things new.
And when he brought her to the shellfish factory he had built by the mouth of the Boyne river, on a late summer’s day when the salmon were already leaping, to show her the new ice-machine, she loved him most of all. He led her by the hand into the low, stinking interior, pierced by the rays of the summer sun from the windows on one side, where the shellfish workers stood and touched their caps as he passed towards the sound of rhythmic clunking in the back. There were clouds like steam, but it was a cold steam, and the clunking had two causes, that of the engine-belt which rattled as it moved, and that of the great ice-blocks which hit the wooden base with a thump, shattered in clouds of that cold steam and shattered again under the force of the sledgehammers which the shirtless men swung down. When he told her it would keep the shellfish alive and fresh until they reached the cities of England, it was impossible not to share his pleasure, though she was uncertain what this meant.
She was glad, if the truth be known, when he led her out of that hellish interior, but was happy again when he knelt with her by the river and watched its molten immensity flow past and told her once more the story of the river’s birth. How the well at its source blinded anyone who was bold enough to gaze at their reflection. How a girl of surpassing beauty, with flowing locks like her own, came to wash her hair in it. How the waters rose, shocked at her beauty, how she ran to escape them and how they finally overtook her here, at the seashore near Mornington, deprived her of both her sight and her life. Her name was Boinn, so the river was called Boyne, after the name of its first victim.
There were long tendrils of seaweed beneath the water which rippled with the moving tide. And looking down on them, she could well imagine a long bed of hair beneath the shifting river, the young girl of surpassing beauty still beneath it, the waters perpetually washing her ever-growing hair. Looking up, she could see the obelisk of barnacled stone that sprang up where the river met the sea and was called the Lady’s Finger. Beyond it was the ruined hulk of the Maiden’s Tower. When sailors wished to enter the river’s mouth, her father told her, they would shift their boats until the Lady’s Finger was in line with the Maiden’s Tower, then know they were at an angle to strike the bar. What strike the bar meant she had no idea, but a river whose mouth was guarded by the Lady’s Finger and the Maiden’s Tower and whose source was a young girl’s hair seemed without doubt to be a womanly river. And the men who angled their sails through her, who pulled the fish from her in dark wet nets, who dragged the scallops, cockles and mussels from her seaweedy depths were lucky to have a woman of such bounty. She wondered were the drowned girl and her secret companion one and the same. But she decided on reflection that they could not be, since her ghost wore clothes that were of a later time and the clothes were never, ever wet.
~
Shade. Of a bat’s wing, of a sycamore at noon, of an ash in thin moonlight, in the biggest shade of all. Nightshade. Shade of what was. I am that oddest of things, an absence now. A rumour, a shade within a shadow, a remembrance of a memory, my own. A stray dog forages with my Wellington boot, buries it in the potato patch, digs it up again, buries it again.
George sits in his cottage in the grounds after the event and listens to the accounts of afternoon race meets on his radio. There is a distant creak from the ironwrought gate by the house entrance as the postman pushes it open. The faint sound of crunching footsteps, as he wheels his bike down the curving avenue, stuffs a handful of bent brown envelopes through the letterbox which fall on the varnished floor. As the tide turns, the winds drop and the clouds quieten their movement, the white horses subside. A low, endless mackerel sky forms a backdrop to the falling sun. Oystercatchers pick their way along the mudflats of the estuary. A film of ice forms along the edges of the river. The blood on the grass grows white with hoar-frost. The world becomes a painting without me in it.
George rises from the car seat that is his only chair, walks out of his cottage leaving the door ajar, the radio on. He moves between the copse of ash and elder like a ghost himself. He wades across the river in his twine-tied boots, leaving elephantine prints in the mud behind him. The water reaches his neck, almost washes him clean. He makes his way along the other side of the river as the moon rises, picks mussels from the frozen shore, eats them raw. The words in his head are estuary, anglo-saxon, monosyllabic—mulch, shit, loam, earth.
He lies face down in the wet sand and feels the brine seeping through his old tweed jacket with the leather elbow-patches. The casts of lug worms stretch away before his eyes to the rippled sand of the shore where the water laps sluggishly in the moonlight. If he could burrow his way into the sand beneath him, he would. If he could shed his coat, his flannel shirt, his greasy jeans and the orange twine that binds them, his flesh and the tissue that binds it, if he could shed the whole of him and throw it up as wet cast, he would.
He is beyond connective thought, but the words thrum through him. What covers the earth is mulch and decay and he has delivered the living to it. He has partaken in the savage order of things. And George now feels the murmur of renewal inside him. A spider crab crawls between his fingers and edges into a wormhole. A kittiwake squawks and he rises, walks along the Mornington shore and the suck of wet sand beneath his feet changes to the crunch of broken seashell. Scallop, cockle, mussel, periwinkle, every footfall tells him of the necessity of death and how the earth needs its skeletons.
Mornington, Bettystown, Laytown, he covers each strand and wades waist-deep through the mouth of the Nanny river, a large hunched figure dark against the phosphorous glow of the breaking waves. He is on a journey back from reason, to the place he was released, St. Ita’s psychiatric hospital, Portrane.
It is morning when he reaches it. He walks from the shore past the round tower to the lawns with the red-bricked citadel of the asylum in the background. The nurses are arriving in their wrappings of stiff white. Beneath the barred window he once knew he stands covered in brine, sand, silt, any trace of the blood he spilt encrusted beneath it. He seems lost and wants asylum, in the old sense. Dr. Hannon drives by in a black Ford car, stops and says, “George, what on earth.” And George says, simply, “Home.”
H
ER MOTHER, UNLIKE
her father, seemed unexcited by the onset of the new century. The house was hers, had come to her through her father, Jeremiah Tynan, whose fortune rose steadily from the early days of the Drogheda Steampacket Company and who bought it with the profits gleaned from the first iron paddlesteamer, the
Colleen Bawn,
on the Drogheda-Liverpool route. He had died before the launching of the
Kathleen Mavourneen,
the largest steamer built for the Drogheda Steampacket Company, two hundred and sixty feet long, with a beam depth of one hundred and fifty feet and a gross tonnage of nine hundred and ninety-eight. But the fortune remained intact, indeed prospered, until the company was sold and the house passed to his wife and eventually his youngest daughter, by which time it seemed to have been theirs for ever. Baltray House, on the northern banks of the mouth of the Boyne river, with a view of Mornington, across the river, to the south.
His only daughter had been spared the vicissitudes of trade, had been educated at the Siena Convent on the Chord Road, Drogheda, founded by Mother Catherine Plunkett, grand-niece of the martyred St. Oliver, for the education of young Catholic ladies. On her graduation she had travelled to Siena itself in the company of a nun of her mother’s choosing and had there acquired, instead of a taste for the mysticism of St. Catherine of Siena, a taste for the fine arts. In Arezzo she dutifully copied the Piero della Francescas, and later, in Florence, the Raphaels at the Uffizi and the towering marble of Michelangelo’s
David
at the Accademia.
And there, in front of the
David,
she met a young Englishman named David Hardy who was tracing, on his rectangular pad, everything about the statue but its marble penis. A conversation was struck up under the watchful eye of the chaperoning nun which was resumed two years later, after a chance meeting in the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square under the canvas of Velázquez’
Immaculate Conception,
Elizabeth Tynan having travelled to London to further her studies in the fine arts. There were tears streaming down his face and the reason for those tears, when she questioned him gently, moved her deeply. They were caused, he told her, as he dried his cheeks on the handkerchief she had lent him, by his feeling of utter inadequacy in the face of the perfection of the canvas in front of him, a perfection he could never hope to match. In fact the tears, she would learn some eight years later, when the son that had been denied him entered their lives, had quite a different source. But in front of the canvas, the serene beauty of the Virgin’s face seemed a more than adequate explanation, and soon she was crying too. So he gave her back her handkerchief, and their fingers touched.
Indifferent artists both, their interest in Velázquez was soon overwhelmed by their interest in each other, and a courtship ensued, an irregular one, given that both were orphans in effect, the last parents on both sides having recently died, the mother in her case, the father in his. And soon the first of many trips across the Irish Sea began, from Liverpool to Drogheda on the
Kathleen
Mavourneen,
now in the ownership of the British and Irish Steampacket Company in which Elizabeth, with her four brothers, retained a substantial interest. David Hardy, of sufficient means to be unembarrassed by his fiancee’s estate, fell in love with the ship, the music of its name and, when he saw it, the thin, dun-coloured vista of the Boyne estuary which reminded him of nothing so much as the Flemish landscapes of Jacob van Ruisdael.