~
When did I come to hate them, those artificial dramas with their chases, their stunts, their pratfalls, their flouncing, sweating period dresses, their simpering close-ups, their manufactured mystery and suspense, their light and shade? I think around the time they broke up the houses of glass and photographed the events in the great soundproofed stages. And maybe what I had liked had nothing to do with the river of black and white that ran through the cameras, but the glasshouses themselves, those cathedrals of light with the sun pouring through from ceiling to floor. In those glasshouses I was never too far from our game of pretence among the sweltering tomato plants, the four of us swapping affections like sugared sweets. When they shattered the glass and built the walls and brought in the lamps with their sparkling carbon, I began to hate the presumption of those lights, the darkness behind the halated glow. I could see my lost succubus there, wheeling in the dust behind the carbon arcs. I came to agree with those primitive peoples who believe the camera is sucking out the essence, the soul, the succubus. It was no longer me, moving in the caked make-up, the costumes stiff at the armpits from someone else’s sweat. It was her, a person I didn’t know any more, called Nina Hardy.
And that’s when I thought I should have changed my name, called myself Isolda Birtwhistle or some such pretension, because at least the separation between us both would have been complete. I came to hate the reduction of meaning to whatever way she crinkled her face when the lights blazed, the camera turned. I wanted true artifice, not this artificiality, Rosalind’s artifice. And that’s when I said to Gregory, we have to stop this, I have to do the stage. But the money was too good, I realised, for him at least, and my reputation stank too much of this fairground wonder.
And at the same time I came to realise that Gregory’s affections were not really, or not exclusively, fixed on the young blonde ingenues around me, the make-up and costume girls, but on the barrel-chested prop-boys, the electrician hefting that lamp, the muscles on his biceps twisting into cords. “Do you miss George, Gregory?” I asked him. “Sometimes,” he answered, “I pine for him.” And I came to realise the game of desire we had played in our garden of Eden, our first glasshouse, was far more complicated than I had ever imagined.
Mr. Shaw effected my release, came to the studio one winter’s morning on a quasi-regal visit, to view the source of this new phenomenon that was filling the picture houses, promising me a play that was like those pictures, one hundred percent talk. I had tea with him in Adelphi Terrace, sandwiched between two ladies in mourning black where all three of them expressed implicit approval of his “new Irish Rose.” We followed them to Malvern where he swam each morning in the pools, his beard preceding him in the water like a duck’s nest. I played Orinthia in
The Apple Cart,
to everyone’s approval but that of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who had once been, it seemed, his old Irish Rose. His septuagenarian affection proved as thrilling as that of any nineteen-year-old and his jealousy even more compulsive. He followed the production to London and for two hundred and fifty-eight days plied me with advice on performance, diction, deportment and style. I was to be the last of his intellectual romances, he warned, so I must humour his ardour.
“How better can I humour it?” I asked.
“We are due to spend time,” he said, “in Italy, Lago di Como. You must join us.” He seemed proud of the way he pronounced those prolonged Italian vowels.
“Can my brother come too?” I asked.
“
Il suo fratello?”
Again the same pride, the lips forming the O out of the oatmeal beard.
“Certissimo.”
M
Y FATHER PAINTS
, sketches relentlessly, the riverbank, the Lady’s Finger, the Maiden’s Tower, the water beneath it, he hints at a girl beneath the ripples. He paints his wife gardening, on the summer and the autumn lawns, hoping for a glance at his endeavours, a word of appreciation which never seems to come. She lets the Meath Hunt occupy her winters, the golf-course her summers, gardening and crosswords everything in between. He embarks then on a sketching tour of the antiquities of the Boyne river, starting at the well at the foot of the hill of Carbury, where Boinn ran from the rising waters. He sketches each ruin first, from Carbury Castle to Monasterboice to the Maiden’s Tower and the Lady’s Finger, then begins an assiduous depiction of the megalithic remains: Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, each detail of those ancient interiors. The project grows from winter to summer, summer to winter, its scope expands. He begins sketching a series of dramatic tableaux, starting with the mythic, the retreat of Boinn from the river’s waters, ending with the historic, the rout of King James’s forces by King Billy, William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. He flirts with the idea of publication by the Meath Historical Society but realises, at his present rate of progress, it may never be finished.
~
The lake was dark, darker than I thought water could have ever been. From the terrace of the old hotel above one of its corners we viewed its immensity and entertained ourselves with stories.
“I can imagine a cast of characters,” GBS told us, “confined to this hotel, unable to face the gathering gloom in the world outside, with nothing else to pass the time but narratives of each other. Each narrative ends in one of the parties’ demise. So the audience shrinks, story by story, to an audience of one, a soliloquy which concludes of course, in an act of
auto da fe”
“Is there a metaphor there?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, “nothing as vulgar as that, what in the end is fiction but a way of passing the time? You first, Nina Hardy.”
“Can I be last?” I asked him.
“A suicidal soliloquy would hardly suit you,” he said, “a sentence, by the way, the sibilance of which hardly suits this beard of mine.”
“On the contrary,” I told him, “I would dive from the castellated wall here into those insanely dark waters below and wouldn’t find death there, I’d find another kind of life.”
“What other kind of life?” he said with prosaic petulance. “There is no other kind of life.”
“I would find,” I told him, and I only told him this to trouble him, “a monastery garden with a riderless horse, an old Abbot asleep underneath a moulting cherry tree with a pair of sinewy feet in sockless sandals and a beard large enough for bees to make a hive in.”
“What does this Abbot do?” he asked me, his eyes flickering with recognition.
“He dreams,” I told him. “He dreams of me.”
He took me rowing on the lake towards the town of Bellagio, but barely made it from the shoreline.
“Why an Abbot,” he asked me, “why bees in his beard?”
“Because the Abbot is old,” I told him, “and the bees do his pollination for him.
“Does this Abbot ever wake?” he asked.
“If he did,” I replied, “what existence would I have?”
He raised the oars on the rowlocks and perched them on the gunwale of the boat so the lake’s water dripped on my face and my dress. How odd, I thought, that the dripping water isn’t dark after all.
“Forgive me,” he said, “if I have husbanded my resources so frugally that when the time comes to spend them, they have quite dried up.”
I kneeled, then, on the gently rocking boat and leaned forwards between his tweed-covered legs because I knew he wanted me to. I pressed my bosom on his bearded chest and placed my own lips against his pursed, leathery, literary ones.
“Can I let you in on a secret?” he asked softly, and the Irishism of the phrase sounded odd in his timbre.
“Let me in,” I said, as softly.
“I do dream of you,” he said, “and with your permission, would like to continue.”
“Don’t stop,” I said.
~
Another riderless horse clops down the avenue one summer’s afternoon, foam drying round its mouth and its sides heaving. The horse we rode through the monastery barley field must have long become horsemeat, but this one followed the same route, throwing its rider before the finishing post, throwing arcs of spray down the long beach with its bridle swinging behind it, leaping the small crumbling wall by the Maiden’s Tower straight into the river with its leaping salmon. My mother stands up from her flowerbed, throws off her gardening gloves and walks to it, stroking its trembling sides, hushing it into silence. She knows horses, whispers arcane phrases into its pricked-back ear the way George once did, and for a moment I think she might mount it, take her husband on its back and leap through the fields of barley to the monastery garden where the Abbot lies in the afternoon heat, under the moulting cherry tree, dreaming of all of us. But no, of course not, she calls Dan Turnbull, and Dan leads it by the wet reins down to the reconstituted RIC station, where young Buttsy Flanagan, Civic Guard, strokes his beardless chin and wonders whence it came.
~
He had a dream, he told me, that I was in
Twelfth Night
at the Lyceum, and I understood that this was less a dream than a desire, an arrangement he had already mooted with the management, and found myself walking down the Strand with him expounding on the character of Viola. Viola, cousin to Rosalind, surely, both of whom, through an odd alignment of parenthood, were second-cousins to the melancholy Jacques. So I began rehearsals and wondered where Viola had been all my life. Viola, with an even more complex predilection for disguise than Rosalind, loved and lost her brother Sebastian, last saw him lashed to a mast, holding acquaintance with the waves, on the seas off Illyria.
Prove true, imagination, Oh, prove true, that I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you
He had himself chosen the youth who played Sebastian and chosen well, he was my fictive brother after all, long feminine lashes leading like fans down to alarmingly sculpted cheekbones. Jonathan was his name, Jonathan Cornfold; he kissed me in the empty stalls when he thought the cast had gone, and what’s this, I thought, as his cock stood to attention in his sequinned tights.
“What’s this?” I asked him out loud, as I ran my fingers down the sequinned shaft.
“An exclamation-mark,” he said.
“Are there exclamation-marks in Shakespeare?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “the text is full of them.”
“It will have to remain,” I told him, “a question-mark for the moment, until I have need of exclamations.”
I asked the bearded one before the opening night about the function of punctuation in Shakespeare. “In Shakespear,” he said, managing even to pronounce it without the “e,” “the iamb provides its own punctuation.”
“No exclamation-marks,” I asked him, “let alone question-marks?”
“They are Victorian addenda,” he told me, “to a torrent of language that otherwise might crush its readers.”
Viola, however, with or without punctuation, was about to be crushed. “What if I let myself love him, Gregory?” I asked in the house in Regent’s Park, where the leaves were turning brown in the quarter-circle outside.
“Even worse,” he said, “what if he lets himself love you?”
“Would that be so bad?” I asked. “Would things be that different?”
“No,” he said. “An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin than these two creatures.” He took my hand as he quoted, parted my fingers with his.
“Please,” I asked him, “this time, leave me on my own.”
“No more larks then, sis?” he asked.
“No,” I told him. “No more larks.”
I was everyone’s Viola that opening night, my bearded abbot’s in the stalls, my brother’s in his box, my Sebastian’s in the wings. But I allowed myself the fantasy, as an actor must, that in reality I would be the latter’s. Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife. I expunged all punctuation from the text and let the iambs speak and let the language crush me.
And so it began, the brief dance with desire, the lights became kind again, those footlights wrapping his body in a sheath of white. His entry in the play was late, but I was filled with anticipation for that presence, Viola in her boy’s disguise, wooing the bride that by the play’s end would be his. Tempests are kind and salt waves fresh in love, and the tempest built throughout the run. The winds that coursed down Catherine Street outside the theatre to the Strand, it was May I remember, they lifted my skirt and his overcoat, he held mine down and kissed me. We joined Gregory in the Savoy for drinks—a certain femininity in their gestures, I was warned of course, I should have known, but theirs was a freemasonry with signalled gestures known only to each other.
“Are you sure it’s him you want, my dear?” my half-brother asked when my fictional brother had left.
“What a question,” I replied, “what presumption, Greg.”
~
“I fell,” says Gregory, “and unlike George, I fell without her. It was an inverted fall, a fall from grace and a fall into grace, into the arms of her Sebastian. I had kept this destiny of mine at arm’s length for years. I had used her presence to confine it to what I had hoped it was, a tendency, an occasional weakness for the callow youths that tended the costumes, for the rough diamonds that humped me much in the same way as they humped the lamps. But with him I felt something and I knew that it was different.
“Because he looked like her, maybe, those long lashes and the declining curves of cheekbone, he looked impossibly like the brother she could have had, and playing her brother, he imitated her. She didn’t see it coming, I could tell that, no matter how I tried to warn her of it, he imitated her for me and me for her, I sat with her in that room full of mirrors in the Savoy and he sat between us, a mirror for both of us.
“ ‘Are you sure,’ I asked her, when he had gone on some pretext of an errand, ‘that he is the one?’ And she chided me gently, before she left too. We watched her then, from upstairs in the room I had booked, emerge from under the metal awning on to the Strand, the spring breeze whipping her coat round her ankles, and I couldn’t feel sadness or guilt. All I felt was a miraculous Tightness as he turned to me and gave me that which should have been hers. That long, slow afternoon of pleasure. You are playing with us both, I told him after it, and yes, he admitted, I have been, but the game is over now.”