W
HEN THE SUMMER
heat closed the theatre, we three siblings took a trip to Torquay, walked among those equatorial trees.
“This can be our Zanzibar,” said Gregory, “a companion to our Mozambique.”
“Mozambique?” asked Jonathan.
“Yes,” said Gregory, “my sister and I invent whole continents without the need to move.”
“Sounds alarming,” Jonathan said.
“No,” said Gregory, taking both our elbows, “no need for alarm whatsoever.”
On the old brocaded bed in the hotel that seemed to want to tumble down into the metallic sea, in the afternoon, afterwards, I watched him as he slept beside me. Sleep came on him on the instant as it does to the innocent, the guiltless, and I thought I had been wrong about my brother, there was no vying for affection, but that both of us made a family that this guiltless wonder could join. I said as much to Gregory as he played the piano in the empty ballroom: Mozart, the childish round of fractured notes that never seemed to end, that could be interrupted for a word, and then resumed as if it had never stopped.
“I owe you an apology,” I said, “I was wrong, there was no what do you call it, intent. So there, Greg, I’m sorry.”
“Never never,” he told me, “apologise.”
So I went walking through what he called Zanzibar, the ash trees melting in the un-English heat. Like a girl again, I hung from the slim trunks of trees to help my journey down and I glimpsed the silver sheen of the water’s surface through the hot green, still and almost tropical, and made my way down, balancing, trunk after trunk. And I saw the boat, moving gently by the rock, untended, two figures through the moss-covered trunks, biscuit-coloured skin against the silver water through the green. I sank my fingers in the moss and felt as if I was moving the tree-trunk past me, though it was I that moved past the trunk, to see them both, knee deep in water, one brother’s arm against the other’s shoulder, the other snaking down to find his trunks, to caress that exclamation-mark. Be you his eunuch, and your mute I’ll be. He heard me then and turned. They both turned. And what he didn’t say was, What larks, sis.
~
“If there is a judge,” says Gregory, “in the court of love, she sat out in that melting sea among her affidavits and saw the three of us, Nina up among the trees, Jonathan and me standing in the water beside the rowing boat, and as Nina turned and clambered back up through that moss the scales of her justice tipped against me. And if there is a judge in the court of love she has the face of my dead mother and she sits wheezing in the dead heat in a rattan chair, which is the only memory I have left of her. She sits in permanent session and measures each breath, each promise, each betrayal and each possibility. I would no longer be my sister’s manager. I would set up shop in Soho, Gregory Hardy Associates, Theatrical Management, and my associate was him. I would thrive of course; I had my father’s effortless head for a business I hardly wanted. His career would founder, his only real talent was for sodomy. But he had a gift, if I can call it that, for bookkeeping and for simple, plain companionship, and my only defence would be that we endured.”
~
There was a train steaming by the small station with the blue and yellow eaves, and Gregory was shifting from foot to foot when I asked him to tell me that it was love or something like that, because anything else would be unforgivable.
“It is,” he said, and I kissed his cheek and I hoped for his sake that it was. It has taken us a long time, I told him, to grow up. But can adulthood be so bad? I got on the train then and as it drew away became someone different; the difference was subtle, but for ever, and acute. Gregory waved and I turned my head around and didn’t feel like waving back. But someone else did wave, raised her hand as if everything that had passed was just a play, a play whose outcome didn’t matter much. Nina Hardy waved. And the train drew her through those sleepy, summer southern stations to a future without him.
She and I. We are not the same at all. She waved as if it didn’t matter much. I turned from the window so he couldn’t see my streaming tears.
~
“You were wrong,” Nina Hardy told George Bernard Shaw, “about the punctuation.”
He was sitting in the walled garden of his country cottage, in the late spring heat, dressed in a three-piece tweed suit with bees, of all things, buzzing round the apple blossoms. “Shakespeare,” she informed him, “was all exclamation.”
“I will soon be dead,” he said, “and am sure I will discover I was wrong about most other things too.”
W
ITH DAN TURNBULL’S
death they realise they are truly alone.
The house seems immense without him, the gardens and the grounds untenable, the shadows concealing the ghost of a child that will never speak. And when they realise, finally, how truly alone they are, some thaw begins between them. It happens unexpectedly: leaving Dan Turnbull’s funeral mass she takes his hand, suddenly, as the coffin moves past towards the churchyard. He feels the hand in his, the wedding-ring, the paper-thin skin above the bones he had wanted to console so many years ago.
They begin gardening the same patch together that afternoon, Dan’s vegetable patch. She is by the strawberry bed and he comes behind her with a trowel, kneels, and clears the weeds for her.
“Thank you, love,” she says, and the word, like the touch, is so unexpected it brings tears to his eyes.
“She’s not coming back, I’ve known that for years, I realise that now.”
“No,” his wife says, “and perhaps it’s my fault.”
“Who would have thought,” he says, “childbirth could bring so much trouble?”
“She left us on our own,” she says, “because she imagined it would punish me.”
“And has it?” he asks.
“Not any more,” she says. “And I realised this morning, all I ever really wanted was you. I wasn’t good at mothering. But I was good at loving once, wasn’t I?”
Happiness, however limited, confines them even further. She moves into his bedroom, the tiny one facing the estuary and they shrink the house to it, it seems, and the stairs between it and the kitchen.
The old quilted bedspread moves at night with their bodies beneath it in a ritual that seems ancient to them now, so long unpractised. He’s a stranger again, he realises, in a house he hardly knows, and strangest of all the body he moulds with his veined hands.
“We’ll take a walk tomorrow,” he says, “down by the shingle and count the oystercatchers on Baltray strand.”
“They are uncountable,” she tells him.
He falls into her arms one autumn day, in the garden—where else?—and of course she cannot hold him. She tries, but turns, and he tumbles into the hollyhocks, destroying whole swathes of them, pulling her down with him, as if in a vain effort to be heard. He never finishes his last word to her. He manages the V and the S of the second syllable, and she has to intuit from them the name of a Spanish court painter with nine letters. She knows the name already, and knows also that he is dying.
Mary Dagge helps her with the still-breathing frame into the house. The wheelbarrow was nearby, without it how could two old women manage? But manage they do. They
get
him across the garden, scouring two heavy wheel-marks in the new-mown grass to the steps, then lift him bodily inside and place him on the chaise-longue while Mary Dagge rings Dr. Henry.
She spends the next hour beside him, listening to his breathing, hoping for another word. But none comes, just the gradually decreasing pressure of his hand on hers. And for a time it is as if none of it had happened, any of it, births, betrayals, departures. They are in the Accademia again, looking at the marble
David,
and she is thinking of him, imagining his absence already, the absence she remembers from the days in Florence to the afternoon in the National Gallery in front of the Velázquez. By the time Dr. Henry arrives he is dead, and she knows those hidden parts will be hers for ever.
~
She was in America when she heard the news, marooned there because of the war. In the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, a bellboy walked through calling, oddly, for a Mister Hardy. She stood on instinct and walked towards him and accompanied him through the huge ornate foyer to the telephone booth, where she heard Gregory’s distant voice at the other end, for the first time in eighteen months. When he gave her the news of the death, it was not as if she had already known, but as if she had already experienced the loss.
“What should we do?” he asked. “Go back, go home?”
“Yes,” she said, “I suppose we should, but I don’t know how.”
“We have to,” he said, uselessly.
“Yes,” she said again, “I know we have to, but how will I travel?”
“One of us must go,” he said, “and I suppose it must be me.”
“You?” she asked, knowing already, despite what promises he made, he would not keep them.
She visited the Chapel in La Brea in the sweltering heat and tried to imagine what the weather was at home. Windy, she decided, with the white caps spreading from the sea down the mouth of the river, diminishing to sculpted crests of almost black where the estuary rounded the field below the house. She tried to think of a word for those dark crests. Obsidian.
B
Y THE TIME
she made it home, her mother had died too. The war had ended. She had spent it in America, having little choice and less appetite for a transatlantic crossing. Her ship had to wait outside the Boyne estuary until the tide was ready and she felt almost sick with pleasure and dread at the same time. She could see the Lady’s Finger prodding from the blue with the low dull green of the wetlands around it, the haze of smoke that was the town behind it. Then the foghorn sounded even though there was no fog and the cattle-dealers smoked their cigarettes and pressed against the rail, and the Lady’s Finger came ever so slowly closer, with the Maiden’s Tower behind it, and the captain knew, as her father had told her so many years ago, that it was time to strike the bar.
There was a black Ford car waiting for her at the wharf and a driver in a grubby peaked cap, who took it ofif as he shook her hand and replaced it as he reached for her bags and left her standing, as the cattle were prodded from the rear of the ship towards the waiting lorries. He drove then, through the brown sludge that they left in their wake, down the road towards Baltray House.
She was shocked, initially, by the outcrops of cottages that surrounded it, small council dwellings in rows where there had been fields and hayricks. The grounds were intact, though, the fields, the gardens, the chestnut and the copse of trees to the left of the bend of the river, the combined impact of which was enough for her to consider this return to the milieu of her childhood justified.
She had bought out Gregory’s portion of this, their only inheritance, and could remember with the clarity of an ache that afternoon in Brown’s Hotel, Piccadilly when they signed the papers in the company of that small loquacious man from Gill and Company, Solicitors. She had paid far more than the market value to avoid any rancour. There was tea in china cups, good tea, which she appreciated after five years of American coffee, and she remembered thinking, watching Gregory’s long fingers wielding the solicitor’s fountain pen, how much she appreciated the nearness of those fingers too. And in the wood-panelled bar, the only sound between them being the rustle of parchment and the scraping of the nib of that fat-barrelled Parker pen, she could see their mutual future with an aching certainty.
There would be no acknowledgement that they were releasing each from the other, finally, like two tugs that had plied the same waters for years, tied together. He would plough on through whatever ocean he found himself in without any further recourse to her. For he would never visit, he had told her that, and she had no reason to disbelieve him. She had looked at his immaculate suit and his handmade shoes and tried not to wonder what his life was like now.
And on the street outside, as they had said their goodbyes in the mid-afternoon traffic and crowds, she cried. It took a moment like this, she had told him, and she lied, to bring the reality of a death home to her. And he had hugged her and said, “I know sis, but, onwards, eh?”
And now, some thirty years after she had left home, the black Ford car purred in the forecourt as she wandered through the glass-riddled kitchen, poking away broken milk bottles with her laced bootee. She could have taken a plane from London to Dublin, but had preferred, for sentimental reasons, to go by rail to Liverpool and take the run-down ferry. She wanted to arrive back here the way her father had, through the brown alluvial silt of that river. For if there had ever been home for her, she knew this was it. Take me in.
Her name was now recognisable, her face less so. She had flitted between theatre and film like a moth flitting between two contrary lamps. She had been lucky, she would admit that readily, had managed a fruitful and lucrative career with a modicum of embarrassment and had revealed of herself, in the course of it, nothing whatsoever.
The real Nina Hardy was known to very few. And the real Nina Hardy now walked through the ruins of her childhood home and gathered, from the stench of spilt alcohol and urine, that it had long become a venue for late night drinking sessions. But the damage, she surmised, was limited and much less offensive to the senses than the changes her mother had made in her absence. Polka-dotted wallpaper, flame yellow paint, mock-oak veneer, three decades of fads, fashions and fittings were mouldering, rusting, peeling, mildewing and generally rotting on the floors, windows and walls. A broken radio sat, unaccountably, on the living room floor, wrapped in the same cobwebs that spread over the blotched surface of the grand piano.
She lifted the wooden cover and pressed the faded ivory keys and was surprised by the fullness of the sound. Was surprised too, by her memory. She played the first few bars of the Mozart sonata and found her fingers reaching, automatically, for the development of the theme. I cannot, she thought, cannot have remembered it all, but the house, clever thing that it was, drew it from her. And as it filled up with music, childlike music indeed, played like a child, she knew with a certainty that had hit her several times in her fifty years, that she had, at last, at the very least, done the right thing.