THIRTEEN
Of the event on that searing summer day in Ireland and, in time, indeed of him I rarely spoke. I learned that reticence is a benediction, a kind of grace. For on those rare occasions when I did break my silence—and love always had something to do with it—I found that after the story there was no way back. The listeners, the few that heard, heard only words and the words made them uneasy. I had burdened them. And, as I discovered, love, sexual love, is not designed to carry such a burden. That particular love is naturally selfish. Looking back I remember that sometimes I just stumbled to the edge, almost, of the conversation, a little too much wine perhaps, or tiredness, maybe a weariness, or some echo in a line, “glass splinters are stuck in my tongue.” I never said any thing very specific, just once or twice … you know the kind of thing, a response to the search by others for signals that might lead to intimacy. “Do you come from a large Irish family?” “No,” I’d say, and leave it at that. If someone got very close I might say, “I had a brother who died.” Best not to go further. If I mention my sister it all becomes mathematical, a kind of numbers game.
Anyway, once I went further—just blurted out—“Sometimes when I hear the sound of an ambulance, I freeze … then I shake … then it passes … though I feel weak … sometimes for hours.” And I told him everything. Almost. Maybe it was the strangled intensity with which I choked the words out that was so shocking, or the passionate grief all caught up in my tearless, blazing eyes that implied such a love for another, which led to the idea that “something must be done.” Men in love wish for no competition from anyone, dead or alive. Possession is at stake. Possession is an absolute when one is absolutely in love. And he was. “I am absolutely in love … it’s overwhelming.” And I used to think, well, that’s what it’s meant to be. It’s meant to over whelm you. Still, I was sympathetic. It’s terrifying, the “absolutely in love” time. “It breaks my heart to see you suffer … Don’t you think you should talk to someone?” “I’m talking to you.” “I know, but it’s clearly so painful. You don’t seem to have come to terms with it.” A term that has always struck a peculiarly legalistic note, as though one could bar gain with the dead, or their representatives on earth, who are not always fully briefed. “I want to help you. I am so desperately in love with you. And when I see you in this pain it’s awful. I feel rejected, I suppose. I feel you keep me … out side.” And that, of course, is the heart of the matter. My heart, my soul were indeed occasionally elsewhere. In a place in which I could not be reached. A door had been closed against love. Is it any wonder that a lover would strive to break it down? So I surrendered—for love, though not for the love of my life, which was sad for the other, because for the love of my life I could, and would, and did, do anything. Do everything. Absolutely in love is indeed absolutely over whelming. But for this love, which was overwhelming for him though not for me, an injustice of the heart, I went to see a psychiatrist. “Jack Harrington. Young. Very young. You’ll like that.” And I thought, you’re wrong. But he continued, “He’s just starting out. My cousin had an affair with his sister, beautiful girl. Will you do it for my sake?” It was a small thing to ask. I said yes. “For your sake.” And he smiled with such radiance I thought, go on Olivia … it’s a nothing thing he’s asked you.
“Miss O’Hara?” He came himself into the waiting room. Which surprised me. It was Harley Street, after all: I expected a secretary to come for me. But then he was only starting out, though clearly from a privileged base. I stood up. I was older and taller than he was. Not a good beginning. I followed him, and I know it’s a cliché but it was up a winding staircase that I followed him into a very sparsely furnished room. He motioned me to sit down and carefully positioned himself in his own chair, which itself seemed positioned at a precise angle. Perhaps one that he’d discovered allowed him a clearer view of the soul. I came straight to the point. Which saved us both valuable time. “I don’t really want to be here. I’m doing this for love,” I said. He was silent for a moment. Then, “That’s a good enough reason.” I assessed him. A patient has some privileges. His hair was very dark, pale skin, Irish colouring though everything else about him was English. Conventionally dressed. Manicured nails. Something slightly cruel about him. His was not a shoulder to cry on. Probably essential for him to impart that knowledge. Quickly. I started: “It was a very hot day, in Ireland. We don’t get many days when it’s eighty-eight degrees.” I expected him to say, at least, “Go on.” There was nothing. Oh God, I thought, Beckett, are we? And then, why not just go on? Let’s see what he does with it? And after this I’ll tell no one.
“I wore a yellow dress with daisies all along the hem. I’d been swimming in a lake, in the lake. I swim well and I walked home. It was a long walk. My mother was waiting for me. I love my mother, I thought as I sat opposite her and then I thought, I am happy. I am very happy. I’d been reading
The Portrait of a Lady
, which she’d given me. I’d read it, lying that sky-blue day on the grass verge by the lake. I read it with laughter all around me, a spinning of laughter like a mad circling of birds. For all of us were wild with astonishment that we could lie there in our swimsuits and not shiver with the cold or huddle under our towels. I remember the way we called out to each other, at the wonder of it—‘Isn’t it s-c-o-r-c-h-i-n-g!’ So, when I got home and sat there with her I told her that I’d noticed no one in the book seemed to have a proper mother. ‘At least, not like you,’ and she smiled her love back at me. ‘I’m near the end. Don’t tell me! Will Isabel make the right decision?’ ‘You must wait and judge, Olivia.’ ‘But what do you think, Mama?’ ‘You must finish the book, Olivia, we’ll talk …’ and then in he came, my brother, and he said, ‘Hi Sis, hi Ma,’ and my mother and I smiled at each other. He was always getting these sayings from cowboy films, and he must have noticed because as he went out and the door slammed behind him he called out ‘Sorry … Mama’ … and then, later, sound … sound was … Sound was like a force, a power, like nothing I’d ever known before. It was sound, I think, that threw my mother almost to the ground … As she fell forward she was clutching her heart … is she having a heart attack? What should I do if it’s a heart attack? Will my life-saving certificate help me? Maybe she’s hurt her chest on the table … at the same time the sound: it hit the wall and the house … ‘It’s coming from the back!’ … then there was nothing … then ‘My God! He’s in the back! … It’s him! … He’s calling! …’”
Then suddenly in that room in Harley Street I needed silence, again. “Yes Miss O’Hara?”
“I want to stop. I want to stop now. I will go no further. I have decided I don’t want to do this. Not even for love. It seems I don’t love this very nice man enough. The thing is—I just want to say this. I need to say this. I don’t want to get over it. Do you understand?”
“The question, Miss O’Hara, is, do
you
understand?”
“Yes. I believe I do. I’ve given it a lot of thought. Leaving the past behind makes for a very short and lonely road. Anyway, I want to know what’s wrong with loving someone for life? Even when they are dead?” And the words tumbled out of me, fierce, useless. “What exactly is wrong with that? Why should I put him away, out of my mind? Like he’s out of fashion. Does no one love for ever any more? Is no one built for the long road? So I carry him round. I know what it’s called, ‘ingestion,’ isn’t that right?” He looked at me and I knew I’d broken bounds. He was the professional here. I’d been impertinent. Or was there something else? Some thing I couldn’t quite read. He looked away from me suddenly. And suddenly I thought, I know that look. He was remembering, someone, something. It was only a second. Then he looked back at me. Perhaps he felt it was unprofessional, after all this was my time to remember. “Miss O’Hara—” But I cut across him. I was going to have my say and get out of there. I was not going to be robbed. “I love him and I remember him and that’s that. I only have the memory of him. Beloved. What’s wrong with that? It doesn’t stop me loving others. My God, isn’t that what everyone wants? To be remembered by those who love them, or is it all just lies? Should people just say, ‘I’ll love you for as long as you live, then I’m moving on’? Well I’m not leaving him behind. He’s lost enough without that. I don’t need to sacrifice him, again … and when I die, well, someone will remember me, maybe for a while … but not me, remembering him … Thank you Dr. Harrington, I am leaving now.”
“Very well, Miss O’Hara. You have my number, should you change your mind.”
“Have I made the right decision?” “Only you can answer that, Miss O’Hara.” I saw him once again, years later at a cocktail party, though I’d heard him spoken of occasionally. It’s a small town really, London. He’d built a reputation. Actually he’d built two. Brilliant and a bastard. With women. Perhaps he couldn’t forget someone. Certainly the clingy creature—Cora, I heard him call her—she wasn’t the one. You can tell in an instant. I didn’t acknowledge him. Though I noted him. But that’s what cocktail parties are for.
FOURTEEN
And so years went by for me and for my mother and for my father. Years, for me, of parts and parties, public and private, years of phone calls from them and letters and love floating back and forth between and down the lines, and visits of course, and all that strange surprise that adult life is when one is grown up, as they say, and way beyond grown up, talking to and looking at the man and woman who made you and wondering, what was the secret of your conception? Yes, all that went on, essential news reports from my old territory that I could map for you, blindfolded, tapping out the streets by the names of those who lived in them and tapping out the road out to where I buried them.
“Now don’t be angry with me, Olivia,” she said suddenly one day, during a phone call in which the living ghosts had had their story updated. And I thought, angry with you? Ah, never. At least never again.
“I’ve asked your father to take the gate back to the German.”
“No! I loved that gate!”
Was I angry? I don’t think so. I was upset. It had looked magnificent, inappropriately magnificent. I realised I was proud of it. Proud to own it. Proud that it marked the entrance to the place where I’d heard a boy cry out “Turn me over and don’t let my mother see me,” and had learned that in all my life I would never again see or hear such sweet courage. I started to cry.
“Ah Olivia. Don’t, darling!”
“But what’s in its place?” I asked.
“It was a magnificent gate, I know. But it’s not for us, not really.”
Then I felt ashamed. Perhaps Mr. Middlehoff would think us ungrateful or, worse, ill-mannered.
“What’s in its place?” I asked again. I’m a persistent girl. She knew that.
“Nothing, nothing,” she said with a sigh. “I’ve decided to leave it open. Just up the steps and you’re there. No barriers. And that gate, he would have grown out of his love for it.”
What could I say to that? Mothers are always right. It was a sudden decision. But then, sometimes, she was a sudden woman. My father told me that Mr. Middlehoff took the gate back with some reluctance. “Considerable reluctance,” as he put it. He was certain that Mr. Middlehoff believed it had something to do with the book he’d just published. Which was not exactly beloved by all. It dealt with his father’s time in Dublin and Clonmel in the late thirties. “This is not a story we will listen to here, Olivia. We have our own version of events. We have too good a story of our own to tell. In our own language. We don’t want misinterpretations or alterations. Besides, the telling takes time. But the book had nothing at all to do with your mother’s decision. She just felt the time was right. Anyway, I’m certain Mr. Middlehoff believes otherwise. I think he feels insulted, and I felt a bit humiliated when I was telling him, Olivia, but your mother was insistent.” And I thought, God how he loves her! And then, it’s awful how much he loves her, and then, thank God he loves her so.
FIFTEEN
My father sent me a copy of the book.
The Visitors
, subtitle, “Two Germans in Ireland.” The jacket mentioned his doctorate, very impressive. Flattering quotations from reviews by academic journals of his two earlier books, translated, both about Gottfried Benn, a poet I’d never heard of. What’s in a name? Well, quite a lot if your name is Middlehoff and you write a book about Ireland. One that doesn’t celebrate the lakes of Killarney, the lonely lunar landscape of Connemara, dear old dirty Dublin, or at least our natural charm. There was a slightly blurred photograph of Thomas Frederick—that was his second name. It didn’t show how handsome he was, nor did it hint at his height—tall—which was a pity. We like tall men in Ireland.
I read the book. My father was right: Thomas Middlehoff wasn’t exactly telling us what we wanted to hear. We certainly didn’t want to be told by a German of his father’s manoeuvres in Ireland, of his liaisons with the IRA, nor to have a detailed analysis of the Abwehr and Auslands organisation which, among other aims, tried to appropriate the IRA’s hatred of England for their own purposes and failed. Not a surprise. Appropriation of hatred, like the appropriation of love, is more difficult than you might think. Like stealing mercury. According to his father Erik, the IRA “were too focused on their own aims” and were not all that interested in helping Hitler, who hadn’t really featured in their plans, which were focused on England, the old defiler. My enemy’s enemy was a friend all right, and friendship demands a little bit of give and take. It had been cemented over the years and here he listed key people in the cultural life of the time—a director of a national museum, a professor of sculpture, one of music—who were known Nazis. Some of whom, it seemed, like us, loved to sing out their patriotic songs and, so the story goes, at one Christmas party in 1937, “Deutschland über Alles” and “Horst-Wessel-Lied” and “The Soldier’s Song” resounded through a Dublin hotel, a philosophical cacophony that I found absolutely hilarious rather than sinister. Maybe it was flattering to a small contingent in our small country that, for a time, Hitler considered us vital to his success. Ireland was perhaps part of a Gaelic–Germanic domino principle. Well, as Thomas Middlehoff made clear, the plan was defeated by de Valéra, whom he described as “Ireland’s Machiavelli”—not a bad description—though of course the Prince, Michael Collins, was dead, shot in an ambush in a place called Béal na mBláth, the Mouth of Flowers. Beautiful spot, they say, though I’ve never been there. Thomas Middlehoff made clear that de Valéra not only kept us out of the war, he out-manoeuvred the German contingent in Ireland. But then he out-manoeuvred everyone. The Garda played their part as well. They turned out to be much more effective than any of us might have thought. Yes, the Garda, slow-looking men patrolling slowly on their bicycles, and Irish counterespionage organisations (we were very good at it, he said) and military intelligence quietly defeated the entire enterprise. Neutral is one thing, but that’s as far as it went. We weren’t “neutral on the side of Germany” as someone put it later. However I was surprised, very surprised, to learn we’d been bombed by the Germans. Quite a few times, actually, and quite a few killed—in County Wexford, County Monagahan, in County Meath, County Carlow and in County Dublin, where thirty-four were killed in 1941. You could say they bombed far and wide over a short period of time and in a small country. Was it a mistake? Were we being warned to stay neutral? Or did the British interfere with radio communications? Why hadn’t anyone mentioned that part of our history at school? Why the silence? Had they forgotten? Or forgiven? Or was ancient history best packing for us?
Thomas Middlehoff offered no guidance on this one. Though he guided us to, or at least implied that, decades earlier, a shadow-doubt of pro-German sentiment had fallen on the shining beauty of 1916. Even his profound admiration for Pearse, “one of the great orator-teachers,” didn’t soothe me after that defilement of our sacred text, the story of the Easter Rising. Nor did the fact that he made clear that he believed Yeats’s assessment of Pearse, that he was “mad with the desire to be Robert Emmet,” to be quite simply “incorrect.” And though he declared Pearse’s “Boys of Ireland” speech, from which he quoted liberally, to be a masterpiece he still struck the wrong note. It was our masterpiece and it seemed inappropriate of him to appropriate it. We’d been usurped before. I knew much of it by heart, the only way. Still, I tried to read it through, with a kind of distanced concentration that I thought would silence the echo and the image of a boy jumping up and down on his bed with his wooden sword in his hand. But certain lines defeated me and I was lost again.
We of Na Fianna Éireann, at the beginning of this year 1914, a year which is likely to be momentous in the history of our country, address ourselves to the boys of Ireland and invite them to band themselves with us in knightly service. We believe that the highest thing anyone can do is to serve well and truly, and we purpose to serve Ireland with all our fealty and with all our strength.
… We believe, as every Irish boy whose heart has not been corrupted by foreign influence must believe, that our country ought to be free. We do not see why Ireland should allow England to govern her, either through Englishmen, as at present, or through Irishmen under an appearance of self-government. We believe that England has no business in this country at all—that Ireland, from the centre to the zenith, belongs to the Irish. Our fore fathers believed this and fought for it: Hugh O’Donnell and Hugh O’Neill and Rory O’Moore and Owen Roe O’Neill: Tone and Emmet and Davis and Mitchel. What was true in their time is still true. Nothing that has happened or that can ever happen can alter the truth of it. Ireland belongs to the Irish. We believe, then, that it is the duty of Irishmen to struggle always, never giving in or growing weary, until they have won back their country again.
The object of Na Fianna Éireann is to train the boys of Ireland to fight Ireland’s battle when they are men. In the past the Irish, heroically though they have struggled, have always lost, for want of discipline, for want of military knowledge, for want of plans, for want of leaders. The brave Irish who rose in ’98, in ’48 and in ’67, went down because they were not soldiers: we hope to train Irish boys from their earliest years to be soldiers, not only to know the trade of a soldier—drilling, marching, camping, signalling, scouting and (when they are old enough) shooting—but also, what is far more important, to understand and prize military discipline and to have a military spirit. Centuries of oppression and of unsuccessful effort have almost extinguished the military spirit of Ireland: if that were once gone—if Ireland were to become a land of contented slaves—it would be very hard, perhaps impossible, ever to arouse her again.
… Our programme includes every element of military training. We are not mere “Boy Scouts,” although we teach and practise the art of scouting. Physical culture, infantry drill, marching, the routine of camp life, semaphore and Morse signalling, scouting in all its branches, elementary tactics, ambulance and first aid, swimming, hurling and football, all are included in our scheme of training; and opportunity is given to the older boys for bayonet and rifle practice. This does not exhaust our programme, for we believe that mental culture should go hand in hand with physical culture, and we provide instruction in Irish and in Irish history, lectures on historical and literary subjects, and musical and social entertainments as opportunities permit.
… Is it too much to hope that after so many centuries the old ideals are still quick in the heart of Irish youth, and that this year we shall get many hundred Irish boys to come forward and help us to build up a brotherhood of young Irishmen strong of limb, true and pure in tongue and heart, chivalrous, cultured in a really Irish sense, and ready to spend themselves in the service of their country?
Sinne, Na Fianna Éireann
.
Like he said, a masterpiece.
When I finished the book I thought, language—that’s his real subject, not history. Still, he’d come to the right country, the one that daily sounds out to an ancient beat the oft half-hidden intersection. His grandfather had evidently been a revered lexicographer. He let that slip in. Was anyone impressed? I doubt it. The Irish are born lexicographers. But definitions need to be examined carefully. Thomas Middlehoff gave his “categoric support” to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. “We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community pre dispose certain choices of interpretation.” I read the sentence a few times in the hope of understanding it and I thought, my God, if this theory is right it’s terrifying. Language—his own—had after all given the world the speeches from which it still recoils in horror. Is language the key to everything? In the chapter “The Irish, Language and Memory” he certainly emphasised his belief that English was key to the story of Ireland, a language that had been forced upon us and then effectively stolen by us, a sound-boomerang, which the English never caught. In the end he was too clever for me and I gave up when it came to Kant. Though I liked Kant’s line about the crooked timber of humanity from which no straight thing comes—something like that. I liked it. But I disagreed with it. Strongly.
In fact, since much of the writing was not obscure exactly, but overly elliptical, he might not have alienated his minuscule readership had he not published his chapter on anti-Semitism. Our anti-Semitism—in a book by a German! We were outraged. Oh the bit about Maud Gonne’s mad anti-Semitism wasn’t a surprise. She was built for passionate hatred, that woman, and not for love, as Yeats found out. Not that it made any difference. He was going to love on, come what may. “Heart! O heart! If she’d but turn her head,/ You’d know the folly of being comforted.” “Mmm,” as May Garvey said to me once when I’d declaimed it passionately, “Olivia, that girl’s head was turned from day one.” Yes, the reprinting of an anti-Semitic poster which had been pasted around in Dublin that was “unforgivable.” Which for a country that believes in confession and absolution is a pretty powerful statement. It was hard to believe the rubbish-leaflet had been written by an Irishman. The language lacks rhythm, though the repetition of questions has its own pseudo-Socratic power, the power of insistence:
Who is your enemy? Who has for centuries trampled you in the dust?
Who engineered the artificial famine of 1846–48 when two million of our people famished amidst plenty and which forced millions of our people into exile?
Who let loose the scum of England—the Jew Greenwood’s Black and Tans—to murder, burn and loot our country?
Who is maintaining the inhuman partition of our country?
Who unceasingly endeavoured to represent us to all nations as a race of clowns and half-wits?
Who are the self-chosen “protectors and patrons of Christianity”?
Who organised the priest hunts, despoiled our churches and even excluded His Holiness the Pope from the Peace Conference at Versailles?
Who is flooding Ireland with Jewish masonic drivel and filth, insulting our national aspirations and the Christian religion, paralysing your mind and warping your judgement?
The answer is England—Ireland’s only enemy.
England’s foes are Ireland’s friends—may they increase and multiply!
Moladh go deo leo!
Who is persecuting and victimising our fellow countrymen in the enemy occupied area of our country?
Who has never concealed its sympathy with the German nation?
Success to Ireland’s friends.
Where do you stand in the war?
Well we didn’t stand anywhere, actually. We were neutral. A neutral, passionate society. That’s rare. Luckily for us, others weren’t—neutral, I mean. And now that it was all over we didn’t want to be called in on the wrong side of that awful horror, and by a German! Not when we’d been on no one’s side at all. Just our own. Because we believed, and who can blame us, that our centuries of suffering, which we knew by heart, in the literal meaning of that phrase, had absolved us of responsibility. Suffering has moral power. Carrying one’s cross is a well-known mark of identification. So we didn’t want to have our pathetic poster that had been written and disseminated by idiots in the thirties and forties reprinted for us. We were not anti-Semitic. We were anti-anyone who wasn’t Catholic. We weren’t going to persecute them. God, no. We were going to convert them, particularly in Africa. We were going to save their immortal souls for God, the Redeemer. Long tradition there. “Anti-Semitic, Tom?” as Bogus Brogan said to my father when the book came out. “He’s a perfectly nice man, Tom, but under stands nothing about this country. How could he? He’s a German! And remember, Tom, even a visit to a Protest ant church can lose us our immortal soul. Anti-Semitic? Protestants, Methodists, Anglicans, all inferior! What do you think, Tom? Am I being unfair here? Are we not the chosen people? Everyone else is headed for limbo. At best. So anti-Semitism? Par for the course, Tom! Catholicism, that’s the only religion.” And my father and I agreed that Bogus was a mite more subversive than we’d thought.