Stones of Aran (45 page)

The history of the Residence after the eviction of O’Callaghan, and the tenure of his successor, Moloney, whom I have already dealt with, is soon told. For many years it was rented out by the Kings to summer visitors, and stood gathering damp into its bones through the winter; then in 1972 it was taken for a longer period by a couple from London. I have not been in a good position to hear much talk of these people, and the following is put together out of the blurbs of a few books and maps they have subsequently published, one or two rather cagey newspaper
interviews
, and a C.V. concocted as part of an unsuccessful
grant-application
to Galway County Council.

Tim Robinson was born in England in 1935, attended the grammar school in Ilkley, a small country town in the Yorkshire Dales, and did his National Service as an RAF radar-fitter in Malaya. He went to Cambridge to study physics, switched to mathematics, obtained a second-class degree, and has not
maintained
any links with his college or his contemporaries. He
married
in London (little information is available about his partner), and took up a teaching post in Istanbul preparing Turkish students for entry to Robert College, an American foundation now known as the University of the Bosphorus. After three years he relinquished the academic life and moved to Vienna, where he embarked on a career as a painter under the name Timothy Drever (his mother’s maiden name was Drever; she was Scottish). His first exhibitions were at the Galerie Fuchs and Galerie Nansen-Haus; the former was the focus of a belated surrealist group known as the Wiener Schule, and the latter had some
obscure
connection with the Cold-War propaganda instrument, Radio Free Europe, but it does not appear that “Drever” was
associated
with either ideological tendency. He returned to London
in the 1960s, exhibited abstract works in such bastions of the avant-garde as Signals Gallery and the Lisson, and in 1970 had some critical success with a large “installation” entitled “
Moonfield
,” in the Camden Arts Centre. However he shortly thereafter disappeared from the London art scene and resurfaced in Aran, reverting to the name of Robinson. A projected novel never materialized, but in 1975 he published a rudimentary map of the islands. This was followed by more detailed maps of the Burren in 1977 and of the Aran Islands in 1980. In 1982 the Robinsons left the island for no known reason and were next heard of in
Roundstone
, a small fishing village in the west of Connemara. There “M” (as she is designated, in her brief appearances in one of Robinson’s books) established a small concern called Folding Landscapes to publish the Aran and Burren maps and a map and “gazetteer” of Connemara that appeared after long delays in 1990, together with some related prose works. In 1989 the collected output of Folding Landscapes won the Ford European Conservation Award as Ireland’s official entry. This seems to have suggested to Robinson that it was incumbent upon him to participate in local environmental controversies, but little has been heard from him on such topics in more recent years. A TV film entitled
Folding
Landscapes
by Michael Viney and David Cabot hinted at a metaphysical or perhaps merely mathematical background to Robinson’s mapping procedures. The first volume of his book on the Aran Islands, or rather on one of them,
Stones
of
Aran
,
was published by Lilliput Press as long ago as 1986; a second volume is promised, but has been so long in gestation that by the time it appears the first will have been forgotten.

This “career” can best be described, I think, as inconclusive. The Residence has stood empty for many years now, and gives an impression of internal collapse; its garden is occasional grazing for the blacksmith’s horse. If one asks Mícheál about its former resident, he says merely “Tim Robinson? Oh, I knew him as well as an old penny!”

The weed-grown path, north-south, bisects the rectangle of our garden. The house is symmetrical about the same axis, and at times the solar system nods to this fact. At six o’clock of an equinoctial evening the half-moon, seen from the gate, stands just above the chimney-pot, its diameter exactly vertical. A long braid of starlight and dark matter divides the glamorous night of Aran above the garden: the Milky Way, the
home-galaxy
seen from within. As the earth rotates, this vast pointer swings across the dial of the sky at half the rate of an hour-hand; twice a day, therefore once a night, it is aligned with the garden path. Life is repetitious enough for us to rehearse tomorrow’s words, it provides respites in which one can try to make sense of unrepeatable acts like our coming to Aran; it suggests that a book is a compilation of sentences. I think much about these things, thinking nothing of them. Once, chatting with a passing islander at the gate on a summer evening, I aired my knowledge of the constellations (which in fact does not extend much beyond the two Bears and the Seven Sisters), and he said “I suppose now, if you were put down in the middle of the Mediterranean”—that being the most impressive-sounding sea he had to hand—“you could find your way to shore, on the strength of your education!” But education assumes that
yesterday’s
lesson is valid today, and as a might-have-been
mathematician
whose thumbs ache from milking a cow, I know that
nothing happens twice, that if today you find the right words to greet your beloved or the passer-by, it does not mean you will do so tomorrow; nor does a surplus of meaning in one sentence stand to the credit of the next. At six o’clock of a midwinter evening the half-moon is high in the sky above the chimney, and tilted; the slant of its flat side, according to a little diagram I have drawn in the margin of my manuscript, represents the inclination of the earth’s axis to the plane of its orbit about the sun. So the
midwinter
moon says Here we go, spinning through space like a stone skipped on water; if we slow, we sink—but we will never slow. And why should I accept even that assurance from the backslider of the heavens, every evening a little later, a little older? However I do not envy those with a southern hemisphere to their minds, whose night skies are certified with the Cross. Mine are queried constantly by those three constellations, the Greater, Lesser and Least Question Marks, and I like it so.

The garden wraps around the house like an old coat, out at elbows, suitable only for gardening in, pockets full of seeds and string. Moloney built high walls to temper the wind to his shrubs, and put windows in the walls to sun them; the glass is long gone and blackbirds can fly through their panes of air. The garden is neither battlefield nor neutral ground between nature and the
domestic
, but a bazaar of exchanges and thefts. As I tug out yards of goosegrass and bindweed, the guardian robin watches me from the bushes, its eye glinting through first one triangle of twigs and then another. Donkeys wandering the road make a note of what they see, and come back by night to nose the gate open and rip the young carrots out of my neat ridges. The white stonecrop does not grow in our garden, but it must have done so once and been thrown out of one of the windows with garden rubbish, for it flowers on a heap of stones outside and has crept along the grykes to the east and to the south for a hundred yards or more. When I wanted a rockery (a curious wish, on Aran!) and brought in stones from the crag with interesting saxifrages and cranesbills, various grasses came too, and soon all I had was a grassy mound.

To the left of the house, where the cypress lifts its derelict limbs into the windy spaces above the walls, there is a gateway which once had a high wooden gate in it, leading to the back yard and a stone outhouse, its doors, windows and corrugated iron roof half wrecked by storms. Gusts funnelling through the gap between this store and the house are to be respected; in squally weather when we have to run out for a bucket of coal or to
disentangle
the sheets on the clothes-line strumming across the yard, we find ourselves adopting the crouched, hen-like scuttle we have noted in certain village housewives on their rare sallies into the open. The floor of the yard is a single huge flag of the limestone bedrock, the two or three fissures across it filled in with concrete. We often dine there, moving cushions around to catch the last of the sun. In high summer we sunbathe with our backs to the back of the house, naked as the rock, melting into a drowse but keeping an eye awake for the horsefly that materializes out of a tiny crescendo whine into sudden immobility beside us on the baking stone, and an ear for the click of the front gate or the tactful whistling with which the postman always announces his approach. Sometimes the small stone enclosure is too intense with life for comfort. One spring there was an exceptional emergence of six-spot ladybirds; the split husks of their larvae were everywhere on the whitewashed rear wall of the house, with the adult beetles oozing out as glossy as fresh drops of blood. Every summer there comes a humid day on which the ants take their mating flight, and by sunset the yard is littered with fallen wings and spent bodies.

The thick, solid, chin-high wall closing the yard off from An Chreig Mhór, the great crag, is of big blockish stones mortared together, with alternate stones of the topmost course set on end as a rough castellation. It is inhabited by little ferns—wall-rue, common spleenwort, the rusty-back, which is rather an Aran
speciality
—and is knobbly enough to be climbed with ease; I once scrambled over it from the other side holding a butterfly in my cupped hands, an unfamiliar moth-like one I’d caught on the crag and was bringing home to identify (a dingy skipper, it turned
out to be). It is a good wall to lean against with one’s morning coffee and look over at the level acres of rock stretching
southwards
to the Atlantic. If the ocean is still and grey it is hard to make out in this low perspective where stone ends and water begins, somewhere beyond the rooftops of Gort na gCapall half a mile away. But further to the right of the view the edge of the land rises, and Dún Aonghasa is profiled against the sky. I had not realized how much the daily sight of that fold of mysteries, in uninterrupted co-presence with my own home, meant to me,
until
we returned from a brief absence to find that an electricity pole had been erected exactly on that line of vision. I have no belief in the flow of Celtic energies and the psychic virtues of ancient stone, no respect for the theory of ley-lines, based as it is on the fusty paradigms of Victorian physics—but some communication was broken by that damned pole. On seeing it for the first time I felt that my presence in Aran was unsettled, that the idea of leaving Aran could be explored, as one’s tongue worries at a tooth that has been loosened by a blow.

The front door of the Residence is difficult to open; it has sagged on its hinges and drags on the tiled floor within. Now and then I rasp a bit of rotten wood off the lower edge with whatever tools I can find, but it soon lapses a bit further and jams again. The hallway is just space enough to turn around in and hang up a coat. And there is sometimes another obstacle to getting through it, an image that fills it completely with horror. A very old lady I met on the road one day told me about the death of David Callaghan’s wife, whom she could remember. Mrs. Callaghan, she said, was very fat and heavy, and she liked a drop of drink. One day she staggered against the kitchen range and set herself on fire. She tried to run out of the house to scream for help from anyone passing the gate, and she died in that little box of a hall—perhaps the door jammed even then. But we pass through the hall so often that the idea of Mrs. Callaghan’s death there is fading, like linoleum due for renewal.

Two doors open off the hall, the living-room to the left and the
kitchen to the right. The living-room has a little hearth, and a sash window at either end. When we moved in, it was papered in a curious pattern of seaweed-coloured bricks which undulated subliminally because the wallpaper was half detached from the damp plaster, and the yellowish net curtains had tattered hems because, as Mícheál explained, his dog Oscar had once been locked in here accidentally and had clawed at them in jumping up to the windows. But once we had scraped down and whitened the walls and filled an alcove with bookshelves, it became a charming room. Its front window faces into the lower boughs of the cypress; once during a sudden battering downpour I looked out to see a sparrowhawk perched within a few feet of me, as impatiently
self-contained
as a clenched fist. The back window faces onto the yard and the great crag beyond. I used to write up my diary at a table before this window. Some days rave on for pages, others expire in a phrase. One entry, I see, reads in its entirety:

I have no memory of this unmemorable September 24th, on which I must have alleviated my boredom by leafing through the pictures of dozens of species of dull, ochreous, brindled moths in my childhood copy of Richard South’s
The
Moths
of
the
British
Isles
,
and savouring the names of the Light Arches, the Reddish Light Arches, the Dark Arches, the Cloud-Bordered Brindle, the Clouded Brindle, the Brindled Ochre—a nomenclature which I take it was the great achievement of rural Anglicanism in its early nineteenth-century torpor, a state I thoroughly understand. Too many days I have sat at this table, staring vacantly at the view over the back wall of the dozen roofs of Gort na gCapall, which looked smaller than the cauliflowers of spray slowly burgeoning from the rim of the land behind them and apparently hanging above them for moments before subsiding. I was supposed to be writing, or researching, or thinking. Oscar would come rattling in and hop
up to lie in the sunlight on the table-top; sometimes it hardly seemed worth disturbing him by lifting his paw aside to put
another
word on my paper. Or the chorus-line of M’s slips and nighties belly-dancing in the breeze on the rope outside would lure me from my withered plant specimens into erotic reveries. Later I made myself a study out of a room with only a tiny window, upstairs.

The kitchen, with its concrete floor, its ceiling of
mahogany-painted
board that Mícheál thought was real mahogany and would not let us repaint, its rudimentary furnishings that had suffered many a summer letting and winter mouldering, and the scullery and bathroom in the dank little back-extension opening off it, were the most intractable parts of the Residence. During our first brief summer visit to Aran, lodging at Gilbert Cottage, we had noted the engaging expression of the frontage of the house, but had not seen the interior. Mícheál, whom we happened to meet at its gate, had mentioned that he sometimes let the place to visitors “for seven pounds a week; that’s a hundred and forty shillings”; and later on in London, faced with a sudden bifurcation of life’s paths, we had recalled that modest and comfortable-sounding arithmetic, and wrote to book the house for an indefinite period from the middle of November. My diary of our arrival:

But M is courageous and resourceful, and soon took the place in hand, gradually bearing down my feeling that every ridiculous derelict detail of it, such as the lump of stone holding the wet sacks in position against the gale under the back door (which Mícheál had pointed out with the air of a landlord showing a prospective tenant the controls of the central heating) was more respectable than all the comforts we had abandoned in London and should not be changed. We scraped the fungus from under
the leaky stone sink in the scullery, we got tea-chests and covered them with plastic tablecloths from Evelyn’s shop to make
working
surfaces and storage places. We survived the winter. One morning I found that the sun, striking obliquely through a
knot-hole
in the back door, had left a golden guinea on the floor; I put my hand down to it, and called M to admire it glowing in my palm. As I lifted it towards the knot-hole it fluttered and dwindled, until I had it dancing like an angel on the tip of my finger. When I poked it back into the hole and took away my hand, it flitted instantly back to the same spot on the floor. Despite all our improvements the Residence, a jackdaw nest among the stars, never ceased to be subject to drips, draughts, cosmic conjurings, elemental percolations.