“You arrived then, dressed in your father’s evening suit, as the sun was going down over the dunes. My father was sitting on the small wickerwork chair outside the front door and bawled at me, his pipe still stuck between his teeth. Time, Janie, he said. I could hear the scrip scrape of Garibaldi’s hooves on the shingle and remember thinking it should have been a clip clop. I was fixing the rose to my blouse in the tiny kitchen and my mother was fussing with my hair. She knew nothing of course would come of it, it was only the tennis-club dance, and was whispering to me, don’t get any ideas, but with the excitement of someone who couldn’t help but imagine them. Ideas, that is, of her youngest daughter being married to^ a son of Baltray House, questionable though his birth might be.
“And you shook my father’s hand, you exchanged pleasantries about the weather, grand evening for it, he said as if some ancient, untouchable rite was about to begin and you said, in your polite English vowels, grand indeed, Mr. Tuite. You pronounced it tweet, not tchute in the local way, and my mother smiled at me, inside. She let the idea take hold of an old-fashioned courtship, and smiled at me in the mirror and said, your gentleman’s here. Stop it, Ma, I said, he’s not mine and he’s not even, in all probability, a gentleman. But there was no stopping that smile, that I knew, and so I kissed her on the cheek in the way I knew she loved and went out to meet you.
“Georgie by that time would have been on his bike, creaking his way down the avenue towards your much, much bigger front door. Your father met him there, your mother, stepmother or whatever the correct term is, watched from the upstairs window, I know because Nina told me. And Nina walked out without any fuss or ceremony, clapped your father on the back and threw herself over Georgie’s crossbar. Off we go then, Touchstone, she said. And I know that because he told me.”
~
He was wearing a borrowed or a rented dress suit, and underneath the smell of mothballs I could detect the unmistakable whiff of heather, that peaty gorsy smell that came with him in summer. In winter it was damp and turnip-skinned, but in summer it was always the smell I remember from lying on my back in the prickly heather and staring up at the marching clouds. His chin touched the crown of my head as he cycled, came down with the pressure of each pedal, and I knew it was squashing the corsage my mother had picked and I had hooped round my bound hair, but I didn’t really care. His arms were like two steel hawsers on either side of my shoulders and his knees came up and down like pistons, moving the bicycle relentlessly forwards. All I could think of was an agricultural machine like the ones they now threshed wheat and barley with, the one that ate Hester and crushed her, but a machine designed to balance me on its lap, with one purpose only, to move me as safely and as quickly as possible to the tennis-club in the village of Baltray. An agricultural machine that, having gotten me to the entrance, would tilt itself to one side and balance the bicycle part of itself with an iron grip as I got ofif. That would transform itself into a two-stepping, lumbering approximation of dance once the band struck up. A dancing-agricultural machine then, with the promise of, in the event of any offence to the dignity of my person, a quite terrifying pugilistic machine.
So there was a muscle-bound dignity to George as he cycled to the clubhouse, balancing me perfectly, even elegantly on the bar of his bike, stopping by the knot of local dress-suited toughs outside the entrance, quietening the sniggers in their noses with the mere fact of his solidity, his size. He would have carried me over the dusty gravel and deposited my new shoes on the boards inside, but I was afraid those stilled sniggers would erupt into snorting laughter and the pugilist in the machine by my side would be suddenly switched on. So I linked my arm through his and nestled his elbow underneath the swell of my breast in that lace-fringed dress. And we walked, in a kind of erotic union, over the dusty crunch of the gravel to the boards inside.
If there was a dignity to George outside, there was almost a hauteur to him inside, as he took my hand in one of his, placed the other round my waist and guided me round the floor in a perfect three-step as the band played the Anniversary Waltz. I glided between the shuffling boots with my dancing machine and the toes of my red shoes survived, miraculously untrodden.
“Where did you learn to dance, George?” I asked him, and he answered, “I practised with Janie.”
~
“We swapped partners of course,” says Janie. “Don’t tell me I’m the only one that remembers those delicious few hours where everything seemed possible. Anyway, we swapped partners, danced with other admirers and of course, in the
ronde
of exchange the moment came when brother danced with sister, half-brother with half-sister. We had practised in the kitchen at home, my father playing polkas on his seaman’s melodeon. I got so entranced with the success of my tuition, the mechanical perfection of the steps I had taught him, that I allowed myself to forget for a moment about you, Gregory, and when the tenor stopped singing “Oh The Night Of the Kerry Dances’ and the shuffling stopped, you both were gone.”
“I fixed the corsage on her hair,” says Gregory, “I tried to make the honeysuckle stand upright but they were crushed beyond repair. I did better with the rose, it had a kind of indestructibility about it, and I inhaled the perfume I had got used to in my seven or eight or was it nine years there, and I told her she put all of the others to shame. She said the problem with the flowers was they had no air. So shall we give them air? I asked her, and she said, why not. We walked outside the crush around the door and headed towards the bunkers where the air was keen and the sand was fresh and white.”
~
I lay on the bunker of the eighteenth hole and he brushed the sand from my pale stockings. It glistened on the fabric like tiny diamonds in the moonlight and he would clear one knee and I would laugh and turn and turn back, the other knee now covered in tiny diamonds which he would clear too. The band was playing the Kerry Dances gone alas like my youth too soon, and I lay down then, my hair spread out over the white sand, daring him to do what he wanted, which I knew was to take his hand and place it on my cleavage while undoing the buttons at the top and bring his lips down towards me, oh to think of it, oh to dream of it fills my heart with tears. Would there be others, I wondered, who would move me as much as him? And I hoped there would, but somehow knew there wouldn’t. And I realised there was another function latent in George, he was a preventative machine, there to stand between me and my half-brother, to absorb all this feeling welling inside me and to prevent an eruption.
“Do you remember Brother Barnabas?” I asked him, “and the horse that crushed the barley?—It sounds like a jig or a reel that the band might play, the horse that crushed the barley.”
“Yes,” he said, “why do you ask me that now?”
“Because,” I said, “he told us we didn’t exist, we were the dream of the Abbot in the monastery garden. We can only exist this way,” I told him, “in the dream of someone else.” I brought my lips close to his and could see the blond downy hair on his neck but I didn’t kiss, or couldn’t.
“Is that tragic or comic?” he asked me.
“I wish it was comic,” I told him, “but I suspect it’s tragic.”
~
“So you both vanished,” Janie says, “during the song about the Kerry Dances, through one of the small green doors at the back. To do what? Stand and look at the purple sea? Hold hands like brother and sister and walk along the long dune grass whose sharp points would have tickled her knees, the underneath of her dress? I wanted to be the one walking there, you understand that, Gregory, feeling the prickly grasses probe between my knees, my hand under your hand, your hand counting the fingers. It was a quite innocent desire, but God, did it flood me with a warmth I didn’t understand. I looked at George beside me sipping his lemonade, and the awkwardness of the dancers behind him, and could see then how wrongly shaped it all was, like a puzzle that had only one solution, but the solution was impossible of course, the pieces of the puzzle dragging towards their only possible fit, the impossible one. And then she came back in with you on her arm and the band started up and we changed partners and it was apparently all right again.
“And when we walked home, George holding the bicycle by the side of the trap, Nina stretched across the seat, her head angled back, looking at the world upside down, you and me walking, my arm in yours, along the moonlit river, it was still possible to imagine, wasn’t it, that everything would be all right? That we would have normal lives, whatever normal meant. But in the early summer of that year it would have meant a clerkship in the carriage office for me, marriage one day maybe, children. A cottage and smallholding for George, marriage, maybe one day children. And for you and Nina, a continuing life in Baltray House at least.”
~
I remember the trees going over my head, the leaves rustling with the cool breeze that came from the river, like a long bowed umbrella, the soft, still expanse of mackerel sky beyond them with the moon somewhere beyond that, unseen, but brightening the clouds. The feelings I had were gentle ones, as gentle as that sky, we were the four of us part of the same feeling. I remembered Sister Camille telling us about the fifths of Ireland, five provinces,
cuige,
she called them, but there were in fact only four, Munster, Leinster, Connacht and Ulster, and the fifth was the unity the other four made. And I thought that would be as apt an account as any of us, four of us, but in fact five, the fifth was all of us, or the spirit that bound all of us. And I allowed myself to dream of that fifth, that spirit, and thought of Hester again, she was the one, the unseen fifth, only there when all four of us were together. A mad thought perhaps, but no madder than what the future in fact held, far more comforting, maybe even more true than the reality.
I held the handlebars on George’s bike and then when that became too much of a stretch, the crook of his arm. “I don’t want to grow up,” I said.
“You’re already grown up,” said Janie.
“No,” I said, “I’m not, and neither are the three of you. And if any one of us grows up it will be irrevocably tragic.” I laid back my head and watched the mackerel sky moving beyond the leaves of the trees and thought how much I liked that word “irrevocably.” It sounded like the clop of Garibaldi’s hooves, like the gentle swish of the reins that Dan stroked over her back, it sounded like a word that Nina would have relished sharing, long ago, with her dear and only Hester.
P
OOR CATHOLIC BELGIUM
,” says Janie, walking from the living room towards the kitchen where Brid Moynihan had left a week’s grocery supplies and an electric kettle, “remember Poor Catholic Belgium?”
“I remember Lady Day in Slane much better,” says Gregory.
“Poor Catholic Belgium,” says Janie, “haunted Sister Camille so much she quite forgot her passion for poor me. She could see herself martyred by the Hun bayonet in the ruins of Louvain, the murmur of her voice turned into the mutter of novenas, in the kitchen, the corridors, the garden, the sacristy. The act she imagined was rape, though of course she never said the word, the sexual act so far sublimated it hardly existed in the real sense. In the broader imaginative realm it became a tide, a tide of blood, spreading to our virgin shores, threatening our virgin petticoats, her novitiate woollen drawers, though whose world was about to be ravaged? It wasn’t mine, it was yours and Nina’s, your father’s—”
“What I do remember,” says Gregory, “is Lady Day in Slane. The Volunteers had their stalls in the field of the demesne with all the pipe bands playing. The Marquis of Conyngham bellowing from the platform and that little Dublin politician next to him. Dan Turnbull took us out on the trap for the afternoon and George cycled alongside Garibaldi, tried to keep up with her trot. All the pilgrims round the Holy Well with bottles and cans for the water. There was a stand behind the platform and George saw the sign there with the magic figure, seven shillings: he didn’t care about King and Country but he cared about that, much better than Keiling’s farm, three squares and a cot, boots and khaki thrown in. But I was primed already because I believed, you see, I believed with your Sister Camille the stories of the slavering Hun and the nuns in Belgium, and I knew my time was up here anyway, my childhood was about to be over, better end it quick.
There was a pencil tied on a piece of string to the green-baize table and a captain in uniform handing out bottles of porter, and we both signed and drank and tasted the dark bitter foam for the first time. And I put my arms around him and hugged him then, there was an odd satisfaction to the predicament we had both embraced, like we had embraced each other, again for the first time . . .”
~
But when the class of 1914 said their goodbyes on a hot June day in the quiet garden of the Siena Convent, the tide of blood that was threatening their virgin petticoats seemed very far away indeed. Nina, who had won first prize for elocution, a hand-bound copy of the poems of George Herbert, took her leave of Sister Catherine—two and then three kisses on both cheeks—and assured her she would always remember their walks in the garden together. She could see Janie, sitting on the twin chairs underneath the magnolia, swinging her feet, one foot entangling itself now and then round the calf of Sister Camille, who leaned close to her, proffering one more cup of tea. She could see her mother and father through a long range of bonnets, both ecclesiastical and secular, bending the ear, as they say, of the principal.
“Acting,” Sister Catherine whispered, “would not normally be a profession I would have considered as remotely appropriate to a Siena girl. But I was stage-struck myself once, Nina dear. And I have a friend in Dublin, Ida, Ida Lennox, whose mission is to change the perception of the theatrical arts. You have a God-given talent, Nina dear, and perhaps what we need to do is place it in safe hands . . .”
Nina pinched her arm, gently, as another bonnet edged round hers. “Mother,” she said, and Sister Catherine stopped her sentence, turned and saw, not her Reverend Mother, but Nina’s, Mrs. Elizabeth Hardy.