Time Present and Time Past (5 page)

‘She always used to nag us before we went, “Don't be touching the farm animals because they're very dirty and if you do happen to touch them be sure to wash your hands as soon as you can afterwards.” And then she used to nag us when we got back, because we might have picked up a bit of an accent.'

‘Picked it up? I worked hard at mine,' Fintan says. ‘I loved the way they spoke up there; I used to imitate Edward. I used to practise under my breath and repeat the things he said.'

‘I came home one year and announced that I wanted to keep chickens,' Martina says, starting to laugh. ‘I only did it for badness, I think, but I kept on and on about it, it really wound Joan up. I used to tell the neighbours. I used to hang over their gates and say, “We're going to get ten hens. Five black ones and five red ones, and a rooster. They're going to live in the garden and they're arriving next week.” Joan was mortified. I drove her wild.'

‘There was real bad feeling though, when we stopped going up there to stay.' He stares again at the photograph. ‘Can I keep this?'

‘Absolutely not,' Martina replies. ‘But you can borrow it, so long as you keep it safe. Take her ladyship with you too, if you like, but I want her back as well.' She hands him the horse photograph, together with the picture of the young woman in the muslin dress, then glances over at Beth, who has finished her whiskey, but who has also drifted off to sleep. ‘This is a pity; I'll have to waken her in a while for her to go to bed.'

She stands up and walks over to her aunt's chair, where she observes Beth in silence for some moments, with that strange gaze that Fintan recognises, and he understands the emotions Martina is feeling. It is a look of love which is not uncomplicated; which is loving, solicitious and fearful and which Fintan realises probably plays on his own face, even now, when he watches Lucy sleep. It strikes him, not for the first time, how unexpected it was that Martina and Beth should end up living together. Even though they had always got on well, that was something he – indeed no-one – could ever have foreseen, and he thinks of the quick terrible moves in life that brought this situation about. It has worked out well, he thinks. Whatever about Beth, he had always foreseen another life for Martina as she no doubt had for herself. As one got older, so much of life became damage limitation. He is glad they have each other. He stands and takes his leave. Martina sees him to the door and kisses him.

‘Say goodnight to Beth for me.'

‘I will. And don't forget to tell Colette to call over to the shop to look at the jackets. If she doesn't like them or doesn't need one, then no problem, but I'd be delighted to see her anyway.'

‘She always needs new clothes,' Fintan says, with more truth than loyalty.

Fintan is sitting at his desk in work. His office is on the top floor of a block near the river, and he can see all the cranes on the skyline. There are the names of construction companies fixed to them, and they turn slowly. Fintan feels ill. No, he thinks, not ill, for that would imply a simple cause and a simple cure: a tension headache and paracetamol; a stomach upset from something he had eaten. He is not sick, but a phrase turns in his mind and he cannot deny it, nor understand why it should be the truth, but there is no getting away from it:
There's something wrong with me
. He feels uneasy and anxious, yes, he is in the grip of a deep anxiety and has been so for some time now. He cannot identify what is causing it and he doesn't know how to cure it. He has a pain in the pit of his stomach that he knows comes from no physical cause, and he feels a kind of free-floating guilt about everything and nothing.

The economy appears to be roaring ahead, and
although
some people are now warning that a crash is inevitable, Fintan happens not to believe this. He is not against the boom – far from it, how could he be, given who he is? But when he stops to think about it, as he does now, gazing at the cranes, it adds to his anxiety rather than calming it. Much of the worst aspects of it do not touch him. He is aware of the pressure people are under and how this manifests itself in aggression when they are driving, in the
abrupt
service in cafes, the long commutes, the kids dumped in crèches at the crack of dawn, the lousy ready meals warmed up and eaten in front of the TV, with a glass of cheap wine to anaesthetise the effort of the whole thing: Fintan can see that this is the life so many people around him are living, and he knows how lucky he is to be escaping it.

For all that, he feels dizzy with unease. Yes, there is something wrong with him. Sometimes he feels like he has been caught in machinery; that his cuff has got trapped and he has been pulled in, so that now he is being minced and squeezed between rollers, between bright metal cylinders. He looks at the white-faced clock on the wall with its black hands. The fine red second hand sweeps around and around, he watches it with a kind of fascinated horror. Time racing on, racing like a palpitating heart, so that he feels his life will be over before he has had a chance to live it, certainly before he has had a chance to understand it. Sometimes he feels he can almost hear time rushing past him; it is like a kind of unholy wind. He wakes, he works, he sleeps, and then another day is gone and then another week.

He thinks of how, after dinner the other night, he had asked his whole family to sit quietly for a moment before they dispersed. When it happened he could hardly have said why he wanted it; it had been a spontaneous request. Now he thinks that maybe it had had something to do with the idea of stopping time, of working against just this rush of life that he finds so disturbing. He had wanted to keep the moment, to preserve it, and even by the strangeness of his request to make of it something that they might all remember.

And what had that moment been? That they were all together, yes, but also the particular atmosphere of that moment: the way the sun was shining in on the ruins of the chicken, its breastbone picked clean, the teapot, the empty cups, the faces of his family. He wanted to preserve it as other moments had in the past naturally preserved themselves for him. Some of these moments were naturally memorable – him and Colette cutting their cake on their wedding day, the burial of his father – but others were quite trivial; mundane incidents from family life which he remembered for some reason with an unnatural precision and clarity. He thought of Rob and Niall doing their homework on a wet day when they were still in national school; of a particular morning when Lucy woke up with her toy giraffe beside her and smiled at him.

Yes, his family had registered the oddness of his request over the dinner table, but what had happened when he went to visit Beth and Martina had been stranger still, even though he was certain that they had noticed nothing.

He has always found that house where they live to be rather a weird place, in spite of his fondness for it. It has a psychic force, which is not negative or bad: on the contrary. He used to think that maybe it was just the unusual way in which it was furnished, so particularly old-fashioned, that made one feel that one had entered a different reality. But he has been going there for years and nothing like this has ever happened before.

It had begun when Beth had taken her first sip of the whiskey, closed her eyes, leant back in her chair and said, ‘Oh, I needed that.' That is, she spoke twice. Or rather, she didn't. She said the first phrase once, but Fintan heard it twice. She said those four words in her normal voice, which was the voice of an elderly woman; a light weak voice, like a poor sound recording. But then Fintan heard the words again, even though she did not speak. It was the voice of a much younger woman, the voice Beth must once have had, and there was a different inflection, full of passion and frank desire. ‘Oh, I needed that.' And then Beth had opened her eyes, looked sideways at Fintan and said in her usual tone, ‘It helps me to sleep.' ‘I bet it does,' Martina had replied. She poured the tea and Fintan tried to put what had happened from his mind. Beth talked then about how she liked whiskey and how her husband had introduced her to it, ending with the remark, ‘He taught me all kinds of things.' And then it happened again: the two voices, the possible double meaning and the tone so loaded that Fintan didn't know where to look. It was like an echo, an auditory hallucination. He didn't know what to make of it, and it was clearly just something to do with him for again Martina did not react or comment in any way.

And if people who are close to him are becoming strange, he is also beginning to see strangers in an intimate and overly familiar way. He had passed a female Garda in the street that morning, a small
woman
who had turned her head just as Fintan drew level with her, turned her bright young face towards him. Immediately he saw her no longer as she was, standing on a street corner in her functional dark uniform with its peaked cap; but sitting beside an open fire wearing the kind of cheap pyjamas they sell in Dunnes, with a motif of stars on them and her long dark hair fanned over her shoulders. He was past her by then, and didn't dare to look back.

And then on the DART, going home the previous evening, he had sat opposite a young man with carroty hair cropped short, who was crouched so low over his phone as he texted that all Fintan could see was the crown of his head and the rims of his ears. It had been a disturbing sight; it had dehumanised him to Fintan, who imagined the boy as a body on an operating table, as a corpse, even, until the boy had looked up to show his living face, his freckles and clear blue eyes.  

Just remembering all of this makes Fintan feel panicky. To break the mood he gets up from his desk and crosses over to the window, is standing looking at the city skyline and thinking about all of this when suddenly there is a knock on the door of his office, and his colleague Imelda comes in without waiting for a response.

‘Have you signed those contracts, Fintan?'

He stares at her. She is wearing a chalk-stripe suit, a skirt and jacket. Her blouse is white and its rather large collar is worn out over the collar of the jacket.

‘Contracts?'

She is always dressed like this, in a dark suit, navy or black, chalk or pin-stripe, sometimes a skirt, sometimes trousers. She never wears a coloured blouse, always white or cream.

‘Contracts.'  

‘Oh yes,' he says, remembering. ‘I haven't signed them yet, but I have them here in this folder,' and he goes over to his desk, where he notices a letter that had arrived in the morning's post. ‘By the way, would you have a look at this?' He pushes the letter across to her and it buys him time. He could always ask Imelda, couldn't he? Imelda, who can fire people with the same insouciance with which an abattoir worker can kill a pig. Imelda, who doesn't like novels or films because they're made up. Imelda, who probably didn't believe in Santa even when she was a nipper. He could always ask her.
Imelda, have you ever looked at a female Garda and found yourself imagining her in her pyjamas? Have you ever heard the erotic memories of an elderly relative echo around the room? Do people on the DART ever appear to you to be dead?
Yes, he could always ask Imelda, but what would be the point?

She finishes reading the letter and pouts. ‘It's what I expected. It'll be a challenge.'

‘You mean it'll be difficult.'

Imelda frowns at him, not getting it.

‘What about those contracts?' she says yet again. ‘Jesus, Fintan, wake up! Wake up!' and she leans over the desk, snaps her fingers twice sharply, just under his nose.

‘I am awake!' Fintan cries hotly. ‘I am!' He takes out his fountain pen with its white star on the end of the cap, and he signs his name again and again,
Fintan Buckley
,
Fintan Buckley
. It soothes him. He feels the give in the nib of the pen. The black ink is wet as he loops the letters.
Fintan Buckley
,
Fintan Buckley
. That is me. He lifts his head and gazes into Imelda's eyes, troubled by what has happened between them, and trying to connect. She stares back at him blankly.

‘I don't know how you're bothered with a pen like that. The ink takes ages to dry.'

As Fintan is crossing the landing that evening Niall calls out from his room, ‘Dad? Is that you?'

‘It is,' he says, and he puts his head around the bedroom door.

‘I've got something for you.'

 Fintan, who has only just returned from work and is still carrying his briefcase, steps into his son's bedroom rather shyly. It is a place he rarely visits. This is partly out of respect for Niall's privacy: he is acutely aware that both his sons are grown men. Unlike Colette, he feels that the sooner they are out of the house and gone, the better for everyone. It is also for the more practical reason that Niall's room is so small, and so packed with things, that there is barely room for two people to be in it at the same time.

Niall's is the smallest bedroom in the house, no more than a box-room really, into which, obliging as ever, he had mildly agreed to move when they found out that Lucy was on the way, his old room
becoming
the nursery and then her bedroom. Niall's only request had been for built-in bookshelves, floor to ceiling, which his parents had provided with alacrity. These bookcases are another thing that Fintan dislikes about the room, for they make it tremendously claustrophobic: it is like being trapped in library stacks. He does not know how Niall sleeps in such a place. Fintan himself feels sure that he would have nightmares about the laden bookcases moving inexorably together, crushing him where he slept in the little narrow bed; it gives him the creeps even to think about it. Although it is stuffed with things it is the room of an ascetic, the room of a man for whom little matters more than the life of the mind. Books and music-related technology predominate. There is an open laptop on the desk, with a Renaissance painting as its desktop picture. The room is oddly lit. Apart from the glow of the computer screen, there is an angle-poise on the desk, and another small lamp clipped to one of the bookcases.

All at once, there is the confusion of feelings that the seeming poverty of his son's desires habitually triggers in Fintan. Impressed and humbled by Niall's frugality, there are also moments when he finds it irritating that he should be satisfied with so little, with his tatty paperbacks and shabby clothes. In fairness, it had been worse when Niall was in his early teens, when he had been a vocal and frequent critic of Fintan's own little pleasures, his Christmas cigars, his holiday lobsters. (‘It's just a symbol, Dad, a symbol of luxury.' ‘No, it's not, it's a glass of cognac. Now feck off and let me enjoy it in peace.')
The only criticism these days was either implied or imagined.

‘We should get you one of those fancy shed things,' Fintan says, as he sits down on the edge of the bed. ‘Put it in the garden and give you a bit of space.'

‘Oh, you don't have to go to that sort of trouble, this is fine,' Niall says vaguely, rummaging through a bag of books on the floor. ‘Do you remember you asked me the other evening about early colour photography? I've been looking into it for you. There's a ton of stuff online, but I know you're kind of old-school, so I got some books out of the university library.' He hauls them out and clears a space on the desk, sets them down. ‘You sort of did me a favour asking about it, because it's something I didn't know much about, and it's actually very interesting.'

‘It was Lucy who made me think about it,' Fintan says, and he recounts the anecdote of her asking about the change from black-and-white photography to colour, attributing it to a change in the world itself.

‘She's a philosopher, that kid,' Niall says, and he laughs. ‘She's always saying things like: “Where does the past go?” '

For the next half-hour or so, until called to dinner, they leaf through the books and look at the photographs. Niall points out how photography started by trying to mimic painting – there are portraits, landscapes, still-lifes and nudes – just as the movies started out by trying to ape drama. There are pictures of lemons and trout, pale eggs in a blue bowl, biscuits and studies of flowers. What strikes Fintan – and he hesitates to say this to Niall, for fear of sounding foolish – is how alarmingly familiar all these things look, exactly like eggs and biscuits, fish and flowers which he might come across on any day of his life.

Niall explains the technical side of it to Fintan as best he can: how there are several different types of colour processes, and both of them are particularly impressed with one of the earliest, Autochrome. Niall shows Fintan how it employed grains of potato starch to make blobs of colour, and how this then operated like pointillism, the tiny specks of colour interacting to give the illusion of reality.

‘It's like pixels in a digital photo, you know?' he says. (Fintan doesn't know.) ‘But what I can't figure out is that it's quite a crude system – look closely, for example, and you can see the individual specks of colour with the naked eye. You'd think then that the photos themselves would be poor quality, but they're not, they're amazingly sharp.'

Fintan doesn't agree. It is the strange combination of accuracy and a kind of softness that he finds so appealing in the Autochromes. He finds himself imagining, until Niall inadvertently pulls him up, that this is how life would have looked before the First World War. ‘It washes everything in this kind of buttery light, doesn't it, and then we get all kind of nostalgic because we know what was ahead of these people. The whole illusion of reality is very attractive, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' Fintan wants to cry, ‘yes it is.' He wants to warn these people in the photographs, to save and defend them: the little boys for whom the trenches of northern France are waiting; the babies who will come of age in the first half of the twentieth century. There is an Edwardian girl with her parasol, her white muslin dress and coiled, elaborate red hair. Fintan finds he can believe in her, identify with her as he could not with the people in the black-and-white photos he had seen in the cafe some days earlier. The colour makes a difference that he could not have imagined; it is almost shocking to him.

‘And isn't it interesting,' Niall remarks, ‘just who gets photographed? A pity, too. The bourgeoisie, the aristocrats. You only get one side of society, in the main.'

‘What I like', Fintan says, ‘is the way photographs like this stop time.' Niall, who had been slowly turning the pages, stops and looks sideways at him in surprise.

‘But they don't,' he says. ‘How could they? You'll be telling me in a minute that they look real.' Fintan says nothing, stumped as to how he might explain to his son the complex of ideas and emotions that the photographs open up for him. But Niall understands and he laughs. ‘They're just a construct, Dad. A kind of, like, an idea of reality, not “reality” itself,' and he hooks invisible punctuation marks in the air with his fingers. ‘How could they be?' he asks rhetorically, before starting to turn the pages of the book again.

There is a small calendar above the desk where he is sitting, and in the square for the date three days hence is written ‘Catherine 4.00 pm'. Fintan does not know who Catherine is. Colette had been annoyed with Fintan some time back when he remarked to her his surprise at how popular both their sons seemed to be with girls.

‘Why wouldn't they be popular? Aren't they both great fellows?'

Fintan knows almost nothing about this side of Niall's life. At times he wonders how much even Niall himself knows about it. Ever since he was in his mid-teens girls had been drifting in and out of the house in his company. Niall had often appeared to be surprised by their presence, even as he made them pots of tea and put out biscuits, as if they were the
human
equivalents of stray cats who had followed him home, and kindness suggested that they be offered refreshment. Lovely young women they were too, confident and bright, always full of chat. It mystified Fintan as to what they saw in his younger son, so lacking in dynamism, so dreamy and vague.

He finds Rob's intimate life similarly baffling. His rather cynical personality, his rationality and
ambition
might have suggested a somewhat cold approach and a succession of trophy girlfriends, leading eventually to a trophy wife. But in Freshers' Week at UCD Rob met Mags, a garrulous girl with an infectious laugh, hair the colour of toffee and a gap between her front teeth: they have been together ever since. Although he is extremely fond of her, Fintan veers between wondering what Mags sees in Rob and what Rob sees in Mags. Colette, more shrewdly, understands perfectly the dynamic at work and knows that Mags will most likely be the mother of her grandchildren. She knows, too, not to speak to Fintan about this, that it would only bewilder him.

‘What I find hard to believe', Fintan says, struggling to articulate what it is about the photos that astonishes him, ‘is that if someone from a hundred years ago were to walk into this room now they would look exactly the same as we do. I think,' and it is suddenly revealed to him, ‘I think that I was making exactly the same mistake as Lucy, without even realising it: I also thought that the world was black and white in the past. Of course I knew it wasn't, but I couldn't get past what the photographs seemed to present.'

‘Black and white,' Niall says, laughing, ‘and slightly out of focus and fuzzy at times.'

Now Fintan has it exactly.

‘I was confusing the technology with what it was recording.'

‘As if you thought people in the past had crackling, scratched voices when they sang, like the recordings on that old horn gramophone Auntie Beth has in her house. But look at it this way, Dad,' Niall continues. ‘You're old enough to remember the past – not the First World War, obviously. No, but seriously, think about your childhood. You must be able to remember things from, say, the sixties, in a way that's different to how they look in photographs from that time and that are unlike anything you'd see nowadays.'

In a most uncharacteristically obliging manner, Granny Buckley immediately presents herself to Fintan in his mind's eye, dressed for Sunday Mass, in a black wool coat that comes almost to her ankles. The coat has a collar of curious ridged black fur to which is pinned a brooch in the shape of a wishbone, embellished with a pearl and a small garnet. Her shoes are black leather, laced up and close-
fitting
, with blocky concave heels; and her hat is a dome of black felt, adorned with a bunch of hard fake cherries which are absurdly shiny and bright. From beneath this hat Granny Buckley's little face, all parchment skin and age spots, peers out, unsentimental and hard. This is exactly how she looked and dressed when Fintan was about six – younger even than Lucy is now; and yet she seems to exist in the same time continuum as his colleague Imelda earlier in the day, with her business suit and her pale blouse – that is, the reality of both women is convincing to Fintan.

‘Yes,' he says to Niall, ‘I take your point. I see what you mean.' From his briefcase he takes the two photographs that Martina had loaned him, and sets them on the desk. Niall laughs when he sees the young woman with the straw hat, lounging in her chair.

‘She looks really hot!' This is a thought that Fintan himself has not wished to acknowledge until now, given that the woman is a long-dead relative and looks very like his own sister. ‘Has Rob seen this?'

‘He hasn't, no.'

‘Has Martina?'

‘It was Martina who gave it to me, and she also gave me this. It was taken up north with my father's family.'

‘Oh this is so cute,' Niall says, ‘with the horse and everything. You must show this to Lucy, she'll love it.' He moves the photo under the light of the lamp, the better to see it. ‘Tell me who the other people are. I recognise you and Martina, but who's the other boy?'

‘That's my cousin Edward.'

‘And that's your dad's mum?'

‘That's Granny Buckley, yes. Don't be taken in by the fact that she's laughing and looks quite jolly: she was as tough as an old boot. I liked her, though,' he adds, surprising himself. ‘She was kind-hearted underneath it all. I think women's lives were very hard in those days, especially in the country, and they had to be tough to endure it.'

‘How did she get on with Joan?' Niall asks.

‘She didn't.'

‘Why does this not surprise me? It's a pity your dad isn't in the picture. You hardly ever mention him; what was he like?'

‘He was wonderful,' Fintan says with feeling. ‘I might not talk much about him, but there's not a day goes by that I don't think about him. He was actually quite like you, Niall, very gentle and sweet-natured.'

‘Was he away to be a priest at one stage, or did I imagine that?'

‘No, no, you're quite right. He went to the seminary in Maynooth, and I don't think Granny Buckley ever forgave him for leaving it two years later. It was the old story, he always used to say: she was the one who had the vocation, not him. He couldn't go back to live at home again, so he stayed in the Republic and trained to be a teacher. It was seen as a bit of a disgrace in those days, to go off to be a priest and not to stay the course. Whatever about his mother, I don't think he ever quite forgave himself for dropping out. Martina always says' – he hesitates and then decides to press on – ‘Martina always says that he married Joan to sort of punish himself for the priesthood not working out.' He regrets this rather mean-spirited remark as soon as it is out of his mouth, most particularly as he has given Martina full ownership of it, instead of honestly claiming the sentiment for himself.

‘Poor old Granny!' Niall protests. ‘She isn't as bad as all that!'

‘I didn't say she was,' Fintan replies, trying to backtrack. ‘Herself and my father weren't a good match, that's all I'm saying.'

‘Were you there in the seventies?' Niall asks, looking at the photograph again. ‘When the Troubles were on?' Fintan explains what the situation had been and tells him about the subsequent falling-out. ‘You can't blame Granny,' Niall says. ‘I mean my granny, that is: Joan.'