Time Present and Time Past (14 page)

It's the following morning. The rain has stopped, at least for now; and Fintan and Martina are sitting in her car outside his house. Already their plans have been disrupted, by Fintan having left the lights of his own car on overnight and drained the battery. Martina has driven over to collect him, rather than his collecting her, as had been the original plan. He has climbed into her car only moments earlier and has been somewhat overwhelmed by the force of her physical presence in such a confined space: her perfume, her abundant hair, her silk scarf printed with tulips. She is staring straight ahead through the windscreen, lost in thought, and then she turns to him.

‘We'd best get going.'

Later, as they move onto the motorway, Fintan cannot help wondering if his flat battery was something of a Freudian forget, an unconsciously deliberate mistake. He dislikes driving and is only too happy to let Martina take the wheel, although he had felt when planning the trip that he should offer to take them north. And so things are working out well. It's rare for him to have a good block of time on his own with Martina. Usually he meets her in the company of Beth, or over at his own house with all of his family. He has noticed many times before now that she will always relax and talk in the car; and as the road slips past they update each other on their lives in recent times. They talk about her job, about his, about Joan and Beth, about Colette and the children. Already Fintan is enjoying the day.

Not long after they pay the road toll and head for the border Martina says, ‘I never told anybody this, but I was afraid back then, up in the North. I thought we might get shot or blown up. I didn't like seeing the soldiers about the place. But I liked being with Edward and Granny. I enjoyed the animals and the countryside, so I didn't let on that I was scared. Joan stopped us going anyway. Are you nervous about seeing Edward again, after all these years?'

He hasn't realised that he was until Martina asks him this question. ‘Maybe just a bit. I have this image in my mind of a little boy and of course he's a grown man now.'

Edward had given Martina directions on the phone as to how to find the house, which she had written down and which Fintan now reads aloud as they approach Armagh. Their cousin is still living in the old home-place, the house where they had stayed as children, and Fintan now realises that he is also anxious about this, as well as about seeing Edward again and meeting his wife Veronica. He feels slightly melancholy to realise that he needs directions, that without them he would be unable to find his way back.

They turn off the main road onto smaller, narrower byways, which are flanked by rolling green hills, hedges and trees. There are cattle grazing on the bright grassy slopes; and already something is beginning to wake in Fintan's memory. He does not recognise any given house, field or hill, but the generality of them speak to him. They are all familiar in a visceral way, and he knows deep down that he has been here, or hereabouts, before now.

Suddenly Martina stops the car abruptly. ‘There's something I want to look at here.' She puts the car in reverse and they go backwards along the road for about a hundred yards, to an old ruined farmhouse, which Fintan hadn't noticed as they passed it. To the side of the house is a grassy lane which Martina overshoots, then she changes gear and drives into it. ‘This will only take a minute,' she says, switching off the engine, ‘and we have plenty of time.'

They get out of the car and Fintan sees that behind the house there is a farmyard with stables. He realises exactly where he is, even as Martina says, ‘This is the place.'

The air is moist and fresh after the stuffy car. They walk tentatively into the yard and stand there, looking around. It's a long time since any horse has poked its head out of these stables. All the doors have been padlocked shut, but to what purpose? Most of the padlocks are rusted, and in one case the top part of the half-door has rotted away and swung open, so that it gives onto a square of perfect black space. Fintan turns to Martina, who is standing in the middle of the stable yard, looking thoughtful.

‘How did you know this was here?'

‘I recognised the gable at the side of the house; that is, as we were driving past, I thought there was something familiar about it. I didn't realise that this was where the photograph was taken, but I felt that there must be some connection, and that I'd like to have a closer look. I didn't expect this. I'm as surprised as you are.'

Whatever Fintan had thought he might feel were he ever to come back to this place, he isn't feeling it. He isn't feeling anything.

‘At least you now know what the colour is,' Martina remarks, but he doesn't know what she means.

‘The doors,' she says with a touch of impatience, pointing at them. ‘When we looked at the photograph, you wondered what colour the doors were.'

The stable doors are dark green. The paint is chipped and worn, and the whitewash of the stable walls is scuffed and grubby. The cobbles of the yard are broken and uneven; briars and ugly weeds shoot up from the juncture between the walls and the ground. It is so strange to see Martina standing there. She looks as if she is taking part in a fashion shoot in a deliberately incongruous place: an abattoir, a town dump, a neglected stable yard. The place somehow defamiliarises her to Fintan.

He walks over to the open half-door and peers
into
the darkness. He can see nothing, but he suspects that there may well be nothing to see. There is the dank smell of old things: rotting wood, rotting vegetation. Suddenly he is startled by a little bird flying out; it swoops and is gone.

‘What do you think?' he asks his sister.

‘I'm astonished that this place exists. I mean, that it still exists. It was just somewhere in a photograph. I never thought that we might find it; that we would ever be here again.'

‘Me neither.'

‘I wasn't even looking for it.' They stand in silence for a moment or two longer, and then Martina looks up at the sky. ‘It's going to rain,' she says. ‘Let's go.'

There's some debate when they arrive at Edward and Veronica's house as to whether or not it's the right place. Fintan insists that it can't be. It's a two-storey building, like the home-place, but it looks quite new and has dormer windows, with stained-glass panels on either side of the front door. Martina agrees, but says that she followed Edward's directions exactly, and that Fintan must admit the surroundings are familiar, which he does. With that, the front door opens and a man waves to them where they're still sitting in the car.

‘Fintan?' he calls. ‘Martina?' Martina gives a little cry of delight as she recognises Edward, and she hurries to him. He embraces and kisses her; he gives Fintan a half-hug and a bone-crushing handshake. He's wearing brown corduroy trousers, with a petrol-blue pullover and an open-necked check shirt. His face is like something in a dream, Fintan thinks: perfectly familiar and yet translated into something different from what he remembers. He's a middle-aged man with a tanned face, freckles and sandy hair. Weirdly, when he smiles, something of the look of Rob shimmers in his eyes.

‘Isn't this great?' he says, as he ushers them into the house. ‘We should never have left it so long.' Edward's wife Veronica emerges from the kitchen, a country woman, kindly and smiling. She is introduced to Fintan and Martina, and leads them all into the sitting room, where a fire is lit in the grate. They hand over the gifts they have brought with them: a good bottle of whiskey, an orchid in a pot and a box of chocolates. They're rather anodyne presents, Fintan thinks: trying to decide what to give had made him aware that he no longer really knew his cousin, and didn't know his wife at all; but everything is received with genuine delight and gratitude. Fintan feels oddly shy and at a loss, unlike Martina, who is clearly happy and relaxed, and for whose company he is deeply grateful.  

‘So what's the story with the house?' she asks, as they settle in, and Edwards laughs.

‘We have everyone bamboozled over that.' He explains that some four years ago they had needed to put on a new roof, but in the course of preparations for the work had discovered a host of other problems, including advanced dry rot. ‘It had never been the most practical place – it was hard to heat and some of the rooms were very poky, as you'll well remember. We thought about it and decided that the place needed so much work that we might as well knock it down and start from scratch, get a decent modern house. So that's what we did.'

Martina compliments them on it and Fintan murmurs his assent; but in truth he regrets the loss of the old home-place, its dark rooms, its flagstones and deep windows. The new house seems to him to lack character. The sitting-room walls are painted a buttermilk colour. There are chintzy curtains, a vase of silk flowers sits on a nest of pine tables; and all of this occupies the exact place where the home-place once stood. As Martina, Veronica and Edward talk about double-glazing and damp-courses, Fintan imagines another house contained within the shell of this one: a dream-house, eternal, where the three of them are still children and Granny Buckley is still alive and always will be.

Martina tells them that she lives with her aunt in an old house and she describes it to them, its quaint strangeness, and how it came to be like that; tells them vaguely about how she came to be living there.

‘And what about you, Fintan,' Edwards asks, turning to him. ‘How are your family? They must be well up by now. Are any of them married and away?'

‘I wish,' Fintan says fervently, and they all laugh. He talks to them about his family, about Colette, Niall, Rob and Lucy. He regrets that he didn't think to bring photographs with him, so that all he has is a couple of rather limited snaps that he keeps in his wallet. He tells them about the children's lives, their studies and their plans, such as they are. Veronica and Edward talk about their daughter, who is married and lives nearby, and their son, who is at college in Belfast.

‘And how's your mammy? Is she well?'

Fintan says that Joan is fine, but he cannot in any sincerity pass on good wishes, not least because neither he nor Martina have told Joan about this trip to the North.

‘I never knew your mammy well,' Edward says. ‘She never came up much to these parts, did she? It was always your daddy who drove you up when you were coming to stay.'

They fill each other in on the detail of their lives, and bring each other up to date. Edward has worked as a motor mechanic for most of his adult life, and has his own garage a few miles out the road. The family has got out of farming completely. The few fields the Buckleys had weren't enough to make a living from these days, and the land, which they still own, is set to a local man in an adjoining farm. Veronica works part-time as a teacher in nursery school. Martina tells them about her life in London, and about the shop.

As they talk, Fintan remembers something Colette had once told him. When they announced their engagement Joan, unexpectedly, and in a gesture somewhat out of character, had hosted a celebratory lunch for them, inviting Christy, Beth and Martina, the latter attending with good grace for Fintan's sake. Colette had told him about looking at these people sitting around the table, none of whom she knew well at all at that point, and realising that they would be in her life forever afterwards, and she in theirs. What Fintan feels today is something similar. There's that strange combination of distance and intimacy. Already he feels connected to Veronica, who had been a stranger until he met her less than an hour ago. Even Edward he would have passed in the street without recognising him: indeed, it's possible that he has already done so, for Veronica has mentioned that they both like Dublin and go there from time to time, for GAA matches and for shopping. There's a forty-year hiatus in their knowledge of each other, and yet still he feels profoundly close to Edward, feels that he knows him in a way that he doesn't know Imelda, with whom he spends the best part of each working day, and has done so for many years.

In due course, they are taken into the kitchen for tea. Fintan and Edward sit beside each other at the table, with their backs to the window, and the two women sit opposite. Veronica has prepared for them a classic spread, with ham and salad sandwiches. She has made fruit scones, and there's jam, both raspberry and blackcurrant, served in small glass dishes. There are chocolate biscuits, and an apple tart with fresh cream. She brings a metal teapot from the hob and pours tea into fragile cups sprigged with roses, offers them sugar and milk. It reminds Fintan of the old days, and leads to them talking about Granny Buckley: there's much laughter as they swop anecdotes.

When they have finished their tea and stand up, Martina nods to Fintan, indicating that he look behind him. There, through the kitchen window, is the old orchard of the home-place, looking exactly as he remembered it, as if at any moment soldiers might materialise out of the trees, moving towards the house.

They go back in to the fire and Martina says, ‘Don't forget to show Edward the photograph.' From a large envelope he has brought with him Fintan takes the picture of the farmyard with the stables. He passes it to Edward, who laughs with delight, and calls Veronica to his side.

‘This was taken at the farm just up the road,' Edward says.

‘I know,' Martina replies. ‘We happened on it by chance when we were on the way here.'

‘I must call by to look at it myself, some of these days,' Edward says softly. He is still staring at the photograph, and he laughs again, but Fintan can see that he is deeply moved.

‘You have it all clear in your mind,' he says, lifting his head and looking directly at Fintan, ‘and then you see a thing like this and it all seems like a hundred years ago.'

They stay for more than another hour; and by the time Fintan and Martina are ready to leave they all feel that solid bonds of friendship and family have been established amongst them, bonds they are keen to maintain.