Dear father, I am never coming back. This is not because I don’t love you, which I do, or mother, which I suppose I must. It is a daughter’s duty to love a mother, so I will continue to do so, or try. No, I am never coming back because that was what was requested of me. My brother came to me too late for me to see him as my brother. So I will change myself, my home, my life, I will become someone other than your little Nina, become Rosalind, become Cordelia, become Lady Macbeth, who knows. I have left the best part of myself there and so, in some way, will always be yours, Nina.
How can I imagine another’s pain? One’s own is all there is. But there it is, in front of me now. He stands with Janie among the tomato plants in the glasshouse and folds my letter neatly, places it with his glasses in his top pocket and says, “Thank you Janie,” and turns back to the tomato plants, “I’ve lost them both.”
There is a green mould which clings to the green leaves of the tomato plants and
it
covers him gradually during that afternoon. After Janie leaves, he moves among them slowly, painfully tying every sprig with burgeoning fruit, and when he has covered the whole glasshouse he begins again, retying them, changing their position on the wooden lattice. The summer’s sun beats down and is exaggerated through the panes, his frayed jacket and collarless shirt amplify the heat in turn, and rivers of sweat run down his face but do nothing to stem the coating of green that gathers on his skin. And he emerges when the sun goes down, into a late sunset, a pink mackerel sky covering the townland from the river’s mouth. His face is covered in that dusky green like a death mask, and he meets her by the entrance to the house, she had been cutting roses, she has her arms full of them.
“We have lost our daughter,” he says.
“No,” she says, “we have no daughter. Nor son either.”
He goes upstairs and pours himself a bath and I can see him in it, lying in the old lead receptacle with the lukewarm water flowing from the taps, naked as I have never seen him, the jagged shoulders and the sodden line of hair in the centre of his sunken ribcage, the veins around and above his knees standing blue, almost clear of the skin. And perhaps this is the story I have to tell, the one without me in it. He lowers his head under the greenish water for what seems an age, longer than a living being could stand it, and then raises it again and breathes out my name.
“Nina.”
~
“Did I exploit her?” asks Gregory rhetorically, and then gives himself the answer: “I don’t think so, I hope not, but we were like two orphans alone in that huge metropolis. I was unemployed and unemployable, one among half a million demobbed soldiers. I had a grandfather in Surrey, I wrote hoping for some recognition or assistance, but got no reply. We were walking through the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and I saw our reflection in the glass window of a huge canvas, I forget which one, and I saw her for the first time as others must see her: willowy, with that natural elegance, a true Irish rose. I saw me beside her in my tattered military greatcoat and saw immediately what others must think of me. And that’s when I asked her to lend me money, enough to take me to a bespoke tailor’s to make myself presentable and present myself as, of all things, her manager.
“Those early pictures were made out of chaos and paid for in chaos. I began to put some order in her business. I became her shadow, a shadow as elegantly constructed as possible, the interpreter of her deepest desires. I took to referring to her in the third person: Miss Hardy requests, Miss Hardy doesn’t do, Miss Hardy would like. It allowed me the illusion there was some distance between us and created in others the illusion of inaccessibility, and it was all illusion after all, let’s face it, one I could make sure we both profited from.”
~
And so Gregory became my manager and confidant. We constructed a unit that was unbreakable, unshakable, uncomfortable, unsound. He exchanged his uniform for a Savile Row suit and found it distressingly simple to forget the mayhem he had experienced. We thought of changing my name—I was changing everything else, why not that too?—and would have done it but for the moderate fame the
Colleen Bawn
brought me. So the name stayed, Nina Hardy.
Studios were glasshouses then, whole walls and roofs of glass designed to let the sun illuminate the hothouse plant inside, chief among them being me, the Irish Rose. There was one they’d set up in Shoreham, near Brighton, and we made picture after picture there, in a purpose-built glasshouse ten times bigger than the glasshouse at home. And we played Orlando and Rosalind, again, no George, no Janie, no tomato plants, just the sun pouring in through that cathedral of glass when it shone, and when it didn’t, we supplemented
it
with lamps to
get
an exposure. By the sea a row of cottages or bungalows, some things had changed immeasurably and others not at all. We could travel down on the train from Brighton or London to our new glasshouse, and we constructed around us different versions of what we had left, we replaced you both with a succession of others. I would introduce my paramours to him for approval, he would introduce his to me. We held each other’s lives in erotic suspension, a pattern that stayed with us like a smoking habit. I could gauge the time each young thing from the provinces would preoccupy him as accurately as a doctor would a fever, I could tell when the temperature would rise and fall, the virus depart and leave us back where we started. I supervised his love-affairs as he did mine.
“Does she stir you?” I would ask about a young ingenue actress.
“How long would you give her, sis?” he would ask.
“Two months,” I would reply, and deal with her tears in exactly two months’ time.
T
O SAY THE
house grows quiet in my absence would be to humanise it, and houses, as we know, aren’t human. They may, though, have human qualities, and this one does have me. So, it grows quiet, there is no escaping the presumption. The war has ended and another kind of war begun. The shellfish business loses its impetus and my father keeps the sullen workforce going till the pretence at business seems pointless any more, but he can’t quite bring himself to close down the factory. He is spared his agonies of indecision by the sight of flames one night from the upper bedroom and knows instantly their source. They had burnt the RIC station, most of Balbriggan and half of the big houses round. He rides round there with Dan Turnbull and sees a figure, face wrapped in a scarf against the flames, vainly trying to quench them with water from the river. “Let it burn, Georgie,” he says, and all three of them stand ankle deep in the water as they watch the walls fall in, the ice-machine melt in the heat.
So George has returned. I see him at night round the hayricks like a dog that has lost its master, the burns on his face always covered with a scarf. He senses a presence inside, a ghost, a malingerer, remembers the Hester of his childhood. Or else the thought of fire comes to consume him, afraid that after they’d burnt the factory, they’d come for the house. He stays intermittently in his parents’ cottage, which Janie leaves each day for her teacher-training course, claims his disability pension, becomes suspect in the townland for taking the King’s Shilling: it is not the time, we have to understand, to advertise such a stipend, what has been up is now down, what was down is now up. And they come one night with the rags and cans of petrol, and George is waiting for them behind a haystack with his father’s shotgun; he lets off two blasts and retreats inside, closing the gates behind him, so they have to content themselves with burning the hay ticks instead. Janie, cycling home from the station, sees the orange glow and thinks they’ve finally done it, Baltray House has gone the way of all the others. But she meets Georgie by the avenue, the sparks falling over his face like yellow snow. She sees the pride and the gathering lack of reason in his face and leads him home by the hand like a giant child, telling him he’s got to stop this, they’ll not let him off lightly, leave that sort of thing to the peelers. But of course, the peelers had been burnt out too.
~
“Lovers,” says Gregory. “The term seems ridiculously French, though of course it’s not. Love, I can’t think of a more Anglo-Saxon verb unless it’s fuck or shit, all nouns too, I might add, English and direct. But lovers, the plural seems French or Latin somehow in its propensity for drama. Yes, she had lovers and I supervised them, I regarded it as my filial and managerial, even dare 1 say it my dramatic duty. And my duties went like this: approval, in those languorous initial stages. Some of her choices were impossible, let’s face it. Those burly prop-hands, those immense electricians, they reminded me of George, which is maybe why she flirted with them and why I ensured, like a well-meaning lago, that all she did was flirt. I discovered the class system, you see, a mathematical precision in its organisation that was quite missing at home, and I had my own uses later for those ersatz Georges. No, her choices had to be above all of use, had to advance the cause of the Irish Rose and her imprecise shadow, me. Intervention, then, in the latter stages when I could see the need descend on her, the sense of belonging inappropriate to those English verbs, love, fuck, shit. For courtship, engagement, marriage, those impossibly French nouns, had to remain just that, impossible. For both of us.”
~
The director with the drying skin knew he would sleep with me that evening. He was wearing shorts because of the heat in whatever glasshouse it was, Lime Grove, I think, in Shepherd’s Bush. I tried dress after dress to satisfy him, knew each time I disrobed he could see me in the wardrobe mirror and knew that he knew that I knew. I crossed Piccadilly with him that evening in a taffeta skirt, felt his shoe underneath it at dinner and glanced at Gregory across the table and knew that he knew. I let him remove it from me later in his quarters above the fish restaurant and remembered that scaly smell from my father’s factory by the river. It seemed as appropriate as the smell of semen that covered my chest before he had even removed my stockings. And there, I thought, I was wrong about that too.
T
HEY COME BACK
some nights later; not for the house, but for George, who still keeps vigil outside the front gates. They give him what is colloquially called the mother and father of a hiding. It takes seven of them, with hurley sticks and pickaxe handles, given his size and his strength. His blood spatters the hayricks and they leave him there with the owls flitting round him. And he crawls inside the gate, where my father finds him in the morning, drives him to the same hospital where we both recovered from the fall. He is bandaged and plastered, a much larger version of the broken child that lay there. Janie visits him with her mother, and sees in his unfocused eyes how some retreat has begun inside him, he is becoming one of the malfunctioning, inarticulate ones.
He emerges six months later, his shoulders bowed, his burnt skin pale and whey-coloured from confinement in plaster. And my father, sitting alone in the kitchen at night, hears from outside a distant, rhythmic creak, as a tree-trunk would make in a hard, steady wind, but when he walks out into the courtyard there is no wind, only a breathless evening with a moon barely hidden in concentric circles of motionless cloud. The rhythm is still there though, like the creaking of a leather halter off a horse’s straining neck, and he follows the sound through the arch, past the glasshouse, down the lawns, and before he sees its source, knows it comes from the movement of the swing he constructed all those years ago. He moves down the grassy field and sees the huge shape, hunched on the seat, moving gently, silhouetted by the water.
“George,” he says softly as he comes behind him.
“Hush,” says George, “you’ll send her away again.”
“I would never want to do that,” says my father softly, and places a hand on his shoulder.
“No,” says George. “If a hart lack a hind, let him find out Rosalind.”
“You should be home, George,” says my father, “in your bed.”
“I can’t leave her here,” says George.
“Yes, you can,” says my father, “she’d want you to sleep.”
“Would she?” asks George with a child’s innocence, and places his huge hand on my father’s.
“Yes,” said my father, “every boy needs sleep.”
He leads him by the four-fingered hand, off the swing and across the grassy hill, to the road by the river, past Mabel Hatch’s barn to his father’s tin-roofed cottage. And his idiocy proper begins there, a spell for three months in St. Ita’s, Portrane, by which time the new Civic Guard is formed, and George on his release is apprehended outside the Bettystown Funfair in a fracas with a strongman. Three nights in the Drogheda cells and my father, for George’s safety as much as anything else, gets him employment as a merchant seaman, Drogheda to Liverpool first, then to Ostend, Rotterdam, and each spell of leave for George ending in incarceration of one kind or other. He travels further— Marseilles, Constantinople, Hong Kong, Macau, Australia—and the gaps between the spells at home grow, and Janie gets a teaching job, and the barred room in the Portrane asylum comes to seem like, whenever he revisits it, home.
~
“I had my own ghosts,” says Gregory, “my reasons, if she had married I don’t know what I would have done. I can remember that evening I arrived in the kitchen with my case wrapped in twine and she, or was it me, invented the fiction that I was posted from England, posted as what? As a gift, of course, to her. If I had anticipated such a sister, such an equal in everything but sex, it could have been different maybe. But a life began for me then, another life, and the thought of it ending felt like an end for me too.
I traced my mother’s grave to a small churchyard in Surrey, which I visited and saw her name on the brown gravestone already covered in lichen. Annabel Martin. In the village beyond, with its spire and smoke curling in the September air—it was September I remember—there was a house, a substantial house I assumed, substantial enough for Sir Henry Martin to exclude her and me from its favours. I wondered for a mad moment would that have been my name—Gregory Martin—but it seemed impossible, two first names and no surname, and I realised I became what I was when I walked into that kitchen and saw her, Nina Hardy. I was Gregory Hardy and didn’t know what I would have been without her. I was her gift, I was in her gift, as she was and would always be, in some way, in mine.”