It was a fool’s tale, he knew, and it hung round his neck like a fool’s bauble, visible to everyone but him. He had always been the fool and had dragged his fool’s tale with him, ignorant of its secrets, unaware of its plot. It was collapsing now with the weight of impenetrable years and he collapsed with it, down to the roots of that apple tree, where his head sagged forwards onto his knees and his tears flowed down the frayed corduroy and could have washed those bones beneath his boots clean of earth, there were so many of them. He cried, from the awful realisation, somewhere deep inside him, that all those years could have been different. He cried for the infant he imagined buried by Nina below him, for the cries that might have come from its tiny mouth were it not for the suffocating clay. He cried most of all to drown out those words, still crying out inside him. Infant, ripe and rot.
Then, and he couldn’t have told how many hours later, he gathered the bundle of rotting shawl replaced it in the hole and filled in the earth again, the earth which was by now unfrozen, crumbling, like the crumble Mary Dagge used to make. He lay over it like a gravestone, with his arms stretched out, and Nina came upon him later and said, “You’ll freeze George,” and he said, “Maybe, but I’ll warm the earth.”
“Are you an Adonis, George,” she asked him, “an Adonis in overalls?”
And the next day he came upon her in the glasshouse. He held the shears to her neck as she turned and with quite spectacular clumsiness opened a moonlike gash on her throat. He mistook her loss of consciousness for death, then brought the world back to her while he dragged her through the roses, the world with its scudding clouds above. He realised she was still living while lowering her into the septic tank, then spent one energetic minute severing the head from the body that he had known, in one way or another, since his early childhood. And so her last sight was not of sky, sea or river, but of his blood-spattered watch on his jagging wrist and the time on that watch read twenty past three.
T
HE DAY OF
my funeral is a languorous, cloying one, hot, without a breath of wind, sodden precipitation in the air, a humidity that makes people sweat while they are standing. A day that seems designed for different latitudes, Mozambique, maybe, or Zanzibar or some tributary statelet along the Nile. Thunder was promised, but it never comes. The sky itself seems to bulge with immobile, dark-tinted clouds waiting, just waiting to spill their guts onto the church below, its slated spire in turn waiting to prick whatever membrane holds the rains in check.
The dramatis personae is minuscule, much to the disappointment of the supporting cast from the parish who have got news of the event. Yet they sweat together like a multitude. And perhaps the central players in any life would be comparably small, but the unseasonable skies above them seem to emphasize their fragility, the arbitrary nature of my absence and the lack of a centrifugal focus to their grief. What they’re missing, of course, is a coffin, the arrival of the hearse, the salving embarrassment of the ritual of hefting my weight onto whatever men would have been chosen for the task. Buttsy Flanagan and Gregory, though they could hardly have carried it between them; maybe Janie could have borne the foot-end helped by Bertie on the other side, wheezing from his emphysemic lungs. But the question doesn’t arise.
The church itself seems bound in a girdle of peace. The dust raised by the feet of the mourners beneath the yew-trees forms an umbra or a penumbra, I can’t be sure which, and lends the graveyard behind an aspect and a beauty that would have me believe in eternal rest, had my condition itself not implied otherwise.
The sky bulges lower and seems even to shrink. Any hint of infinity has been compressed into its immobile, humid folds, like a blouse concealing a large, sweating bosom. Come on clouds, burst. Drench them all. Janie, with her greying hair wrapped in that elegant mantilla, that black suit with the short hobble skirt, lavender silk stockings and high heels. Do her crying for her, quench that cigarette she’s smoking, underneath the yews. Throw a rivulet down Gregory’s elegant profile, a cascade of drips from the brim of his sober black hat. Allow the retired Miss Cannon to unfurl that golf umbrella she is holding and spatter her ancient, everlasting tweeds. The scene cries out for umbrellas, for some forced communion underneath a downpour. So the Moynihans, mother and daughters, could meet Dr. Hannon, from Portrane.
The priest comes late from the blessing of a meat processing plant in Slane, and his motorbike peppers the damp air with suspended globules of exhaust. His presence does at last what a coffin should have done, gives some shape to the event. They troop behind him into the thin, triangular interior with its single window, behind the altar, looking out upon the waters of the Boyne. And there is a strange relief in the fact that the tiny church is filled, that the event will have an audience after all, quite respectable in numbers. They genuflect and kneel, and cough and wait, while the priest vanishes behind the altar, to emerge after an infinity, his damp soutane covered by a greying chasuble, an altar boy in purer white behind him, carrying the bell and the cruets.
The drama begins then, intoned in toneless Latin, a celebration of another death, a long time ago, another body never found. There is some confusion round the gospel. Gregory has requested a reading, but doesn’t, of course, know when it should come. The Latin ceases for a while, the priest waits, then nods impatiently to the front pews, and Gregory rises, a prayer book in his hand. He walks to the lectern, coughs and reads, in slow, deliberate cut-glass tones, the lines of a hymn, “There is a balm in Gilead,” and manages to keep to himself his suspicion that in fact there is none. There was none in Jeremiah either, for the virgin, the daughter of Egypt. In vain shalt thou use many medicines, for thou shall not be cured.
But there is balm of kinds for him, if not in Gilead, and it arrives midway through his reading. A slim gentleman, in early middle age, in an Astrakhan coat and a Homburg hat, who genuflects uncertainly and blesses himself badly. Jonathan Cornfold, actor’s agent, of Gregory Hardy Associates, my half-brother’s balm and the other love of his life.
Gregory kneels by the front pews, Jonathan by the back, a bell rings out and between them the inhabitants of both banks of the Boyne river bend their heads in consecration.
A sacral hush descends, the coughing ceases and it is suddenly there, the event.
There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole.
The heavens open, the rain cascades on to the triangle of slates above and water drips onto the altar boys starched, startling white. That hole in the roof, the priest muses, though he shouldn’t, needs mending, and with Mr. Hardy’s donation, he can now afford it. The sound from above is like the fluttering of wings, and I remember
it
again, the delicious patter on the corrugated roof of Janie and George’s bedroom, the three of us curled up in the blankets below, v each raindrop like a falling angel, the beating wings of a dove. The congregation rises and those who want to receive the unburied one walk forwards and receive. And the wings ascend now, or descend from the wooden, dripping rafters, and my mourners gradually go forth, as the dove demands, in peace.
There is more rain outside, and a different sound, and each of them feels, as they meet the rain in their various ways, some with unfurled umbrellas, some with cowled overcoats over their heads, that they have been released from inside an echoing drum. This rain is almost tropical and the diffuse mist the downpour raises over the bulrushes of the riverbank could equally inhabit the bulrushes in Egypt’s land, contagious, as the song says, to the Nile.
They gather in cars and the cars drive off, since the rain won’t allow for funereal conversation, to the house, now wrapped in curtains of water, on the river’s north side. Neither Gregory nor Jonathan knows whom to exclude or include, and Janie, who does, seems beyond caring, sipping as she has been from a baby bottle of Powers concealed in her handbag. So the entire dripping congregation floods the house, making short work of the Moynihan sandwiches and the trays of whiskey, sherry and Guinness Extra stout.
When the bottles on display are empty, Janie volunteers to go for more and is driven, to her quiet delight, by Buttsy Flanagan to the nearest pub, the Nineteenth Hole in Baltray. Buttsy sinks two pints in the wood-panelled interior, one for each of Janie’s double-whiskies, while the bar staff fill the back seat of the police-car with more supplies. Their return is delayed further by not so much a detour as an intermission, near Mabel Hatch’s barn, where Janie wants to listen to the sound, of a thousand watery hands drumming off the car’s metal roof. Buttsy lights a cigarette and mistakes Janie’s knee for the gear-handle, a mistake Janie suspects is no mistake at all. And the principal outcome of their subsequent embrace is the entanglement of her mantilla in the steering wheel.
They rejoin the party, for party it has become, flushed with alcohol and a passion they imagine they can keep concealed. A song is reaching its conclusion, which warns of, or celebrates, “goodwill and hospitality, including false acquaintance.” And Janie starts up then, with an uncertain rendition of “The Girl from the County Down,” which she misremembers halfway through the second verse. “A noble call is mine,” she concludes as if she’d sung the whole of it. She spins the half-empty bottle of Powers on the carpet before her and manages to edge it with her toe so it ends up pointing at Buttsy. He rises to his feet and begins the first of seventeen verses of “The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill.” And Buttsy, unfortunately, remembers them all. The bottle spins again and elicits from the Moynihan sisters their party piece duet, “The Indian Love Call,” and from the aged Miss Cannon a word-perfect rendition of “Fair Daffodils, I Weep to See.”
So the living forget the dead, in an orgy of mnemonics. And later, much later in the night, while the persisting rain provides ample excuse for my wake’s continuance, while Gregory, downstairs, accompanies Jonathan in his bell-like, plangent account of “The Fair Maid of Perth,” Janie and Sergeant Buttsy Flanagan provide, upstairs on my virgin sheets, a display of the kind of acquaintance that would make the living blush and the dead rise up, if they only could.
T
HE RAINS COME
down for days, the river rises, bursts its banks, the tributaries spill into one, not so much a river as a meandering lake, lapping right up to the remade glasshouse. The house sits beached on the Irish sea, the trees perched on the water’s surface like surprised seagulls. Kittiwakes tread on the sodden gravel by the kitchen door, the swing idles two feet under water, an eel winds itself between the ropes. The tides remove the topsoil, expose the septic tank to the brine, and the brick of the old Victorian orb collapses inwards like a crushed
egg,
the effluent merges effortlessly with the silt and the mud of Mozambique, releasing my maggot-riddled bones.
I’m part of
it
now, the horizon, that endless line that stretches from the glasshouse door to Wales and Liverpool. There are days, endless days when the sun rises, and before it has quite dispersed the morning mists, spreads its equatorial fingers through a tropical swamp, a bayou. And then it begins its slow retreat and drags me with
it
and I am the river now, the seaweed my hair, the barnacles my bed, the long slow womanly weight of water dragging me towards the house when the tide flows, away from it when it ebbs.
There are three of us here, one died by drowning, one died by falling, one died by garden shears. We burble sometimes, we lap, we sing. We pray for the living who move above us in ships, for the pilot that guides them, for the harbour that awaits them. For we know that some day they’ll have no more existence than us, than the tendrils of our hair on the river bed, moving with the tides, than the horse that wrecked the barley, than the petals of spring cherry that detach themselves from the tree in the monastery garden, drifting downwards towards the bald pate of the bearded Abbot, still sleeping, dreaming of them.
Grateful thanks to my mother, Angela Jordan, born in Mornington on the Boyne river, whose stories of her father, painter and sometime shellfish exporter, provided some kind of imaginative template; and to Jacintha McCullough, born in Baltray, nanny to my youngest children, whom I pestered with questions over a two-year period.
The following books proved invaluable in the writing of
Shade:
Kathleen Tynan,
Twenty-Five Years Reminiscences
(Smith, Elder & Co., 1913); Sir William Wilde,
The Boyne and the Blackwater
(Kevin Duffy, 2003); James Garry,
The
Streets and Lanes of Drogheda
(Drogheda, 1993); John McCullen,
The Drogheda
Steampacket Co.,
in
Journal of the Old Drogheda Society,
1994, No.9; Myles Dungan,
Irish Voices from the Great War
(Irish Academic Press, 1985); Robert Rhodes James,
Gallipoli
(B.T. Batsford, 1965); J.B. Lyons,
The Enigma of Tom
Kettle
(Glendale Publishers, 1983); Alice Curtayne,
Francis Ledwidge: A Life of
the Poet
(Martin Brian & O’Keefe Ltd., 1972); N.E.B. Wolters,
Bungalow Town: Theatre and Film Colony
(Shoreham, 1985); Michael Holroyd,
Bernard Shaw, vol. III: The Lure of Fantasy
(Chatto & Windus, 1991).
Neil Jordan is the author of three other novels—
The Past,
The Dream of a Beast, Sunrise with Sea Monster
—and a short-story collection,
Night in Tunisia.
He is also the award-winning writer and director of such films as
Mona
Lisa, Interview with the Vampire, Michael Collins, The
Butcher Boy, The End of the Affair,
and
The Crying Game,
for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1993. He lives in Dublin.