Yesterday's Weather (30 page)

‘No, I don’t,’ he said, and then as a small concession, ‘it was far from intelligence that I was reared.’

‘Well, start now,’ she said, ‘do my back.’ He lifted his head and looked along the beach.

‘I will not.’

‘Pig.’

She flicked out the towel then lay down on it, with her back to him. After a moment’s pause he made his way across to her on his belly.

‘Here,’ he said, taking the plastic bottle of sun oil from its dugout in the sand. ‘What do I do with this?’ He spilt some on his fingertips and slapped it on her back, then moved over the skin like a farmer with a new lamb.

‘You’re done,’ and quietly he lifted the hair from the nape of her neck. He stroked the side of her face, until her breathing eased, his eyes still out to sea.

‘Did you see the body in the water?’

‘Which one?’ Her voice was muffled by her arms.

‘With the clothes on.’

‘No.’

‘Floating on its face.’

‘No.’ Her voice had an edge to it.

‘It was badly swelled. The gas brings them up, you know, after nine days.’

‘No, I did not see it.’

‘Pity.’ His hand left her face, and he lay down the length of her. After a while, he seemed to sleep.

The afternoon wore on, and still neither of them moved. There was something obscene about the two forms lying so close together, one fully dressed and curved around the naked limbs of the other. She looked like a tropical fish in a dirty pond, with a bad old pike to protect her. Everyone around them was busy being amazed by the good weather, playing and shouting and soaking up the sun, but these two were not sunbathing or flirting. They were probably not even asleep.

The heat grew less intense, and as a slight breeze pulled at her hair, she stirred and slipped away from the curve of his body. She sat up and stared around her, as though surprised by what she saw, and then she reached for her bag and started to search around in it. She produced a bundle of postcards and a pen, and shuffled through them to find the right one. It was a picture of a cat in a window, reaching for the blind above her, with the sign ‘Guinness is good for you’ posted on the wall outside.

Dear Fiona, (she wrote) the weather is glorious. The lump is being lumpish, haven’t seduced him into the sea as yet. Will you check the cat for me? Should never have trusted her with that couple downstairs. We miss ickle pussums, we does, and you too.

She tore it up and took out a fresh one; this had a picture of a donkey and a red-headed girl with a turf creel in her arms.

Dear Fiona, is he psychotic or what? The nights are, as always, amazing, but the weather doesn’t seem to suit his sensitive skin. Besides, he keeps on sneaking downstairs to make dubious phone calls. I don’t care about An Other Woman … maybe, but I keep fantasizing that he’s got a kid salted away somewhere. If you see Timmy, say I’m fine, i.e. give him a crack in the gob and tell him I’m sorry. All is …

She had run out of space and was writing where the address should go. The breeze had brought up the hairs on her arms, and she paused for a moment to examine them. Then she started to write on the front of the card, over the donkey’s face:

I have lovely arms. Not that it makes any difference.

And she abandoned everything where it was and ran off down the strand, into the sea.

She could swim for hours. The water was beautiful, despite the cold, and she aimed straight for the horizon. She felt like diving down, wriggling out of the swimsuit and swimming on and on. The foolish picture of its limp blue and green washed up on the beach drifted into her mind. They might even accuse Daniel of the crime.

She took a breath, grabbed her knees to her chest and bobbed face down on the surface of the water. Slowly, as she ran out of breath, her muscles eased. She blew what was left in her lungs out in an explosion of bubbles, then shot up into the air and took breath. No. She would not be angry. Anger did not suit her. She would carry around instead the chic pain of an independent woman – the woman who did not whinge or demand, or get fat on children.

‘I like independent women,’ he had said once.

‘Bloody sure you do,’ she answered. ‘They’re not allowed to complain.’

The shadows had grown harsher and longer by the time she got out of the water, her hands numb and her legs stiff with the cold. She made her way up the slope heavily, shaking her fingers in front of her. Long before she reached their place, she saw that Daniel had gone. The postcard she had written and left was torn up like the first, the pieces scattered and half-buried in the sand. Among them was his discarded shirt, and
a pair of trousers lay broken-limbed and empty on her yellow towel. She yanked at the towel to clear it of debris and the bundle of postcards flew up into the air. Moving slowly, and shivering with the cold she went to each one in turn and picked it up. Daniel had written on the face of them all.

The first was a pictue of a Charolais cow on the cliffs of Moher. The sky was a hazy mauve, and the cow, which was right on the edge of the cliff, stared seductively at the viewer. Across the line of the sky he had written, ‘A Rathmines Madonna Dreams of The Intelligent Life.’ The next was a glossy reproduction of the beach in front of her, the colours artificially bright. Along the curve of the strand were the words, ‘Yes, the nights are amazing, but as yet, I have no child.’ She stared at it for a long time, and looked around to see where Daniel could be, before picking up the next one. It had an oul fella sitting in a pub, the light bounding off the polished surface of the bar counter and a fresh, new pint in the shaft of the sun. There was a crudely drawn balloon coming out of the old man’s mouth with the words: ‘What is the difference between a pair of arms?’ Finally, there was the beach again, though this time there were footprints drawn along the strand, enormously out of proportion, and a figure in the sea with HELP! coming from it. The caption read, ‘O Mary mo chree, I am afraid that the water will claim me back again.’

‘All washed up.’ The voice came from directly above her, and she gave a start. When she looked up he was there, perfectly dry. He was wearing a pair of navy high-waisted swimming trunks. His body was white as wax and his front was sticky with hair. She was ashamed to look at this body and so looked at his face.

‘Oh all right,’ she said, and wanted to turn off the sun like a lamp, so they could make love on the beach.

F
ELIX

Felix, my secret, my angel boy, my dark felicity. Felix: the sibilant hiss of the final x a teasing breath on the tip of the tongue. He was the elixir of my middle years, he was the sharp helix spiralling through my body, the fixer, the healer, the one who feels. But when he was in my arms he was simply breath, an exhalation.

Did he have a precursor? He did, to be sure. There might have been no Felix at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain boy-child in my Tir na nÓg by the sea. Felix was as young as I was that year, the year I first fell asleep, and when he whispered me awake, my life became fierce and terrible. (Look at that tangle of thorns.)

Believe me, I write for no one but myself. Mine is not the kind of crime to be spoken out loud. This, then, is the last, or the penultimate, motion of these fingers that burned alive on the cool desert of his skin. You can always count on a suicide for a clichéd prose style.

I was born in 1935 in Killogue, a small town in the west of Ireland. My father was a small, introverted man of uncertain stock, who ran the pub that faced out on to the town square. My mother died of creeping paralysis in my seventh year, and nothing remains of her in my mind save the image of a woman sitting in the parlour in a perpetual Sunday dress, her throat caught in a stained circle of ancient diamanté and a charm bracelet at her wrist. When they laid her out, again in the same room, with the glass-fronted china cabinet pushed precariously against the back wall, I noticed that her ‘jewels’ had been removed. This sensible, pious figure seemed to have nothing to do with the woman I remembered, and I was suddenly aware
that she must have undressed like that every night, unless she wore the diamanté to bed.

My father grew more nervous after my mother’s death, his silences grew longer and were punctuated by sudden rushes of speech, always about the harvest or the Inland Revenue, the goings on ‘beyant’. He began to sleep over the bar at night, bringing a small iron bed into what had once been a storeroom, and leaving the bedroom that they had shared intact. He became a crusader for the gombeen class, claiming that there was no such thing as good staff to be found. The days were spent in a silent frenzy of suspicion, watching every boy who was brought in to serve behind the bar, until the explosion burst loose and the boy was sacked – for not charging his friends, or shortchanging the regulars, or simply for sloppy work, licking the knife that was used to cut the sandwiches. Meanwhile, I sat outside, squatting on the kerb that faced the square, where I could see over the brow of the hill to the sea beyond. The strand was hidden by a dip in the road, and it looked as though the water came right up to the crest of the hill and joined it in one clean blue line. I ran towards it like a plane taking off, hoping to dive straight in, always disappointed to discover the street below, the untidy line of houses, the sea wall, and then the beach with its load of mothers wrapped up against the cold, children playing in the sand, and the breakers rolling in beyond.

I was nominally attached to a good woman who lived in a rundown house between the hill and the strand; who washed my clothes, fed me and let me go – perhaps because of some old debt she owed my father, perhaps for a small fee. As far as I can remember, I was a brave child. (It is not the loss of innocence that I regret, but the loss of that courage.) I swam in the deep, underwater world of childhood, my limbs playing in the shattered light of the sea. I loved the cold shock, diving off the cliffs, my body growing numb as I prised free the starfish that hid in the crevices, or teased the nervous mouths of translucent sea anemones. I chatted easily and dangerously with the visitors to the town, with a friendliness that came as second nature to the daughter of a publican. Old men with whiskey
breath would lift me on to the bar counter, tip the wink to my father for a bag of crisps and call me ‘princess.’

It was the summer of my eleventh year. I was grown wild – more reckless in the sea, more brash with the locals and coy with the tourists, who filled the town with their white, bared flesh. My father picked on a young boy called Diarmuid to help behind the bar, some distant relative from Galway with (I can’t continue this for much longer) … with the black hair and fine, blunt cheekbones of a Connemara man. Daddy gave over the storeroom to house the boy and slept again in his old room, treading carefully and with a sense of unfamiliarity over the wooden boards. His presence there was light, but unsettling. He brought back the ghost of my mother with him.

I must stop. ‘Ghost,’ ‘flesh,’ ‘fine, blunt cheekbones,’ these words are all strangers to me. I am trying to construct a childhood, so I can pick my way through it for dues. ‘Felix came
because
’ … because in the summer of my eleventh year, my father hired a boy called Diarmuid. Any other boy would have done, any other childhood. The secret must be in the style. If I must choose some way of lying to myself, I thought, this might be the most appropriate. Take on the cadences of an old roué in a velvet smoking jacket, cashmere socks, and a degree of barefaced and thoughtful dignity that is not permitted to the rest of mankind. But look at me. I am a woman of fifty-one years of age, in a suburb of Dublin; not exactly sitting with rollers in my hair, but certainly subject to the daily humiliation of coffee-morning conversation and the grocer’s indifference. I buy winter coats in Clery’s sale. I have a husband. Every year we drive to the same guesthouse in Miltown Malbay. There has been no tragedy in my life, you might say, apart from the ordinary tragedies of life and death that Ireland absorbs, respects and buries, without altering its stride. In my clean, semi-detached house there are only a few sordid clues; my daughter’s empty bedroom, a doll without a head, one broken arrow from a boy’s bow, that sits like so much junk at the back of the coal house. Where is the poetry in that?

I have always been struck by the incongruous picture of an old woman with a pen in her hand. Is it not slightly obscene, Ms Lessing, to show your life around like that? Of course your neighbours are rich, they respect you, they are proud to have you living nearby. They don’t watch you in the street and say, ‘Why write about orgasms, when you look like that?’

Middle-aged women write notes to the milkman, not suicide notes. When they die, they do so quietly, out of consideration for their relatives and friends. And then there is the subject of perversion. Old women are never perverts. They may be ‘dotty’ or ‘strange’, poor things, they may, and often do, ‘suffer from depression’, but they emphatically do not feel up boys in public parks. Their lust is a form of maimed vanity, if it exists at all. It is not the great sweeping torment of the poet. It is not love. The only thing we suffer from is the menopause (‘Let me tell you something, Iris dear, the change of life is a blessing … when he stops … you know, wanting things in the middle of the night.’ I want I want I want). I want I want I want. I am not an hysteric. I am a woman of ten and a half stone with a very superior brain. I do not know what the word ‘maternal’ was ever supposed to mean.

So it is back to the smoking jacket and the man with refined hands who translates Baudelaire for a hobby; the man with a bubble of hot poison in his loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in his subtle spine, poor fella, may he rest in peace, God bless him. It is back to the summer I fell asleep (in fact a bout of glandular fever) and Diarmuid, who is no lamia, but a man I met in the street the other day, short, fat, his ‘Connemara bones’ laced with a filigree of hot purple veins. Incidentally, I too have read my Poe and Proust, my Keats and Thomas Mann. Who cares? None of them chased things that were real. My boy-child
was
real – does that mean that I am not a poet? Oh, but I am. I am a poet not quite in curlers, because I make the poets’ claim that ‘
Form
…
ja wesentlich bestrebt ist, das Moralische unter ihr stolzes und unumschranktes Szepter zu beugen
.’ You see. In a woman who dresses from Clery’s sale, such tactics can only be childish.