On Canaan's Side (3 page)

Quite changed and different we sat all together that evening in our new parlour, children in unnatural but seemingly unbreakable silence, eating a sombre tea, Annie’s bun-mix undisturbed in the drip-press, and Annie looking every few seconds at her father, in his nightdress and dressinggown, his serious-looking slippers like the bellies of seals, Maud, who took small things badly, now crying small tears in a corner, all our things still unpacked in tea-cases, left where the recruits had put them that morning, all the tune gone out of the whistle of life, on that day of days, long awaited, long worked for by my father, his long beat as a policeman, Dalkey, Store Street, Kingstown and now the castle, all our dwellings along the way, most especially Polly Villa in Dalkey where my head first cleared and I knew I was alive, and loved, all the story of those places, chapter by chapter, leading to this moment of the strangest humiliation.

At length, as a bell somewhere in the castle buildings marked some forgotten hour, making the many stone statues briefly jump, and I jumped with them, a man in the uniform of an inspector came in to us, and spoke quietly to my father, who this once did not get up, and did not seem to have any orders to give back. My father only nodded his head, quietly receiving whatever information he was being given, and the inspector nodded his head, and said something I didn’t catch, but knew from the tone that it was a pleasantry, and how relieved I was to see my father’s face lift up to him, and offer a halfpence of laughter back. Then he laughed a little more, and then Annie began to laugh, and the inspector laughed, maybe greatly chuffed to have his remark so universally well received. But I did not laugh, because I saw still in my father’s eyes those tiny hunting dogs of sorrow, moving across that dark terrain.

Next morning early at breakfast my father was recovered enough to tell us what the inspector had whispered to him. Some men unknown had come in by the gate and steps that led down into the police headquarters at the back of our house, though how the gate had been unlocked inside was a mystery, unless it was by a friendly hand, again unknown, and had led in by the chain in his nose a dancing bear, belonging to some travelling huckster, now identified, who had wept at the news of the death of his stolen bear, though whether because of the loss of his livelihood in hard times or from affection for the bear my father could not say, but at any rate they had led the bear stealthily in, and down the mossy steps, and into our house from the rear, and let the animal loose into the hall to cause grief to my father in his moment of great triumph.

‘You may take some comfort, Jim,’ he had said, ‘from the fact that the teeth of a dancing bear are knocked out when he’s a cub, and his claws are drawn from his paws – though a blow from one of them might have made you stand up straight right enough.’

And it was only many weeks later that these men were found, and identified as members of the new civilian army, the citizen army of Larkin himself, who my father had arrested in Sackville Street some while before in the great agitation and turmoil of the Lock-out. And I do not think, though at the head of his profession now as he was, did he ever quite get away from that moment, nor ever quite clear the new motes and hounds of sorrow from his eyes.

M
rs Wolohan very kindly telephoned me this morning but was obliged to leave a message on the machine, which I know she dislikes. I went out early, having experienced a strong desire suddenly to stand and look at the sea. It is a long long walk down the sea lane, and getting longer, it felt like. But I was very content to reach the shore and gaze upon it. There is such solace in the mere sight of the water. It clothes us delicately in its blowing salt and scent, gossamer items that medicate the poor soul. Oh yes I am thinking the human soul is a very slight thing, and not much evolution has gone into it I fear. It is a vague slight notion with not even a proper niche in the body. And yet is the only thing we have that God will measure.

Having stood there, and having thought these useless thoughts, I traipsed back the way I had come, at least teasing a little heat into my bones from the exertion. Then I came into my wooden hallway and saw the light flashing on the answering machine. And it was Mrs Wolohan’s welcome voice. ‘Oh, Lilly,’ she began, as she always does, with everyone, Oh Henry, Oh Whosoever she has rung, ‘I am just ringing to let you know I am thinking of you. I will come over later with strawberries. They are really lovely strawberries and I will bring them over in a little while. I just have to do something with the dog.’ Then she hung up. Very abruptly some might say, but not I, who know her so well, or flatter myself that I do. I know
my
Mrs Wolohan, and I have no argument with her. Years ago when I married Joe Kinderman, and I asked the priest in Cleveland, Catholic of course, if there might be an objection to me marrying someone of origins so vague he didn’t know his own religion – Joe
thought or said
he was Jewish, but Joe was not Jewish – and not against taking the religion of his new wife, the priest, Fr Scully, said the prospect was ‘unobjectionable’. And I think that is a fine word, and I have often applied it in life, as a sort of high compliment.

Mrs Wolohan. Unobjectionable. Who nursed her husband through his great illness, and buried him at last in the certitude that she had gone the last yard for him. Now there is no one on earth more lonesome than she, I do think, despite her wealth and her infinite busyness. Her capacity for survival is infinite, and you might supply a church with the stations of her life, and draw tears from the observation of it. She has allowed me to live here for twenty years, an expense I am sure she did not entirely agree to undertake, when she said she ‘found a little house’ for me. She said recently, when I mentioned this, that ‘the quality of your baking’ made it an absolute duty and necessity. She said it with her usual lightness, and she delighted me in the saying, even though it is of course twenty years since I baked for her with all the old passion of my kitchen self of those days. There is a way right enough to make a fairy cake that is not just about the simplicity of making them. A child of five can make them. But then, another ingredient can slip in all unexpected and the cook herself unaware – a sense of her own mother’s baking, or in my case, the fearsome, fiery activity around the pot oven in the yard of an Irish cottage, when you see your aunty hovering with a tray of raw cakes, trying to get them under the lid of the pot-oven before the rain pelting down melts them, and all the care needed to make sure that not a speck of the blackened lid touched them. Something of that great dance may have got into me, right enough, I hope so. It is not for me to say.

Her husband, a man actually of similar energy, but not applied to mere cakes, deserved her devotion. He did deserve it, and doubly so, because she thought he did. I cannot claim much expertise myself on the topic of husbands. But I cooked his breakfast for him from 1955 to 1970, when he was at home, which is no small thing, if you were to imagine all those pancakes piled up in some strange heaven in an aromatic pillar.

Unobjectionable. Maybe it is servile in a former servant – for what else was I, in the little dictionary of life? – to admire her former mistress. To love her, and to feel brightened by her voice on – I noticed – a slightly grimy answering machine. It is queer the items in a house that never receive proper ministrations.

Mrs Wolohan is like a landscape to me, a whole country. Or that pleasing lighthouse on the last spit of land, where the beach has become stony, more like the Atlantic where it gnaws away at Ireland. Even if her idea of ‘a little while’ might not result in her actual appearance. But I was able to sit down here at the kitchen table, the Formica beaming the sun on into the hallway behind me, like a great flat stone of light bounced on the sea.

And be thinking, remembering. Trying to. All difficult dark stuff, stories stuffed away, like old socks into old pillowcases. Not quite knowing the weight of truth in them much any more. And things that I have let be a long time, in the interests of happiness, or at least that daily contentment that I was once I do believe mistress of. The pleasure in something cooked right, just the small and strangely infinite pleasure to be had from seeing, from witnessing, a tray of freshly baked biscuits. Like I had just completed the Parthenon, or carved Jefferson into a rockface, or maybe the contentment, felt in the very sinews, of the bear when he digs a salmon out of the water with his paw. Mightily healing, deeply, and what else could we have come here for, except to sense these tiny victories? Not the big victories that crush and kill the victor. Not wars and civil ructions, but the saving grace of a Hollandaise sauce that has escaped all the possibilities of culinary disaster and is being spread like a yellow prayer on a plump cod steak – victoriously.

I am thinking of these things even as I am about to go. Mother sauces. The infinite delicacy of the bain-marie saucepot. ‘Heat is how the pot thinks, Lilly. It is like my grandma singing a lullaby, not too loud so you keep sleep away, not too soft and baby can’t hear the words. Try and hear the heat, Lilly. Hear the pot thinking. You hear it, you hear it? It’s there. You will. And when you do, you’ll be able to do any sauce in the world.’ And her big arms showing me, oh yes. Arms that could punch out your lights, but never used for such. Dear Cassie Blake, who gave me these guns and bullets for the long fight of life. And was herself shipwrecked on the rocks of life in the upshot.

I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough.

The one thread maybe, from Bill to my brother Willie, all the way back, through how many wars is that, it must be at least three? No, it is four. Four killing wars, with all those sons milled into them, and daughters these times too. And I have felt all that, for those that went out for the good of America, for the love of her. Oh, and I knew what safety and haven was America to me, so how could I not understand that something had to be given up for her? Something so close in to me, it was really part of me. Oh, Bill.

He used to like to look at the photos in the corridor, going down to my bedroom. It’s not bright there, because it has no window of its own, but you can see them plain enough, even in daylight. There’s a picture of Willie in his uniform. Bill used to gaze at that when he was very small, he spotted it quite early, because, truth to tell, he had a look of Willie, and he didn’t just grow into his own face, but eventually into Willie’s. Willie went out to the Great War as they called it, he was only a boy, just like Bill in the desert, and he was very happy to go, and when he was a few years in it, I don’t know if he ever came home, even when he did on furlough. Something of him was lost in France, buried into the ditches they dug there, so that he would appear in our house in the castle right enough, but dressed in shadows, disguised by the thin dust of terror he carried on him maybe. But he was a sweet boy, I do remember that, or let me say, that is how I remember him, as sweet. What his true nature was I will leave to God, but I have a sense still that I loved him, I mean to say, I feel that love still. Even as I sit here, I don’t know what I am, I suppose like any grieving person, I am broken-hearted, but even so, in the centre of that, in the heart of things, sort of beyond reach, I can hear my love for Willie still abiding, like the heat in the bain-marie. The thing put away most carefully in a drawer can sometimes be the very thing beyond finding. It is beyond finding, right enough – but it is still there.

Willie fought for three long years. He was nine months first in training down in Cork. I must have been twelve when he left, a child. When he didn’t come back finally, I was a young woman. Willie not coming back … There were thousands, millions, of boys in that war, that didn’t come back to their households. Parents grew old in the little aftermath of letters. Nice letters written conscientiously by their officers, lads themselves sometimes. Platitudinous, how could they be otherwise, with boys killed every day in trenches? Even unimaginable and murderous news has a formula, maybe it has to have, I mean, maybe it is better so. You have your marching orders then. You lose a child, a brother, whatever it might be, and you die in the aftermath, so you are walking about, breathing and thinking, but you are not alive.

I am not alive. It is almost a comfort to me that although I will take my life, I am already dead when I do so. It seems less of a sin. Because I know it is a great sin. It is a sin that we were told as girls had no remedy, one of those, with hell to follow, for certain. I suppose it might be so. I don’t know.

My poor father got three communications about Willie. The first from his line officer, formal and distressing. That came to him among all his official post as an officer himself of the
DMP
. A letter, he said, that burned his hand as he read it. He came away from his offices at teatime, his big face flushed with terror, I saw it as he entered into our sitting-room, as if he had exchanged his own face for a lantern. He could have used his face to beam a light to Baltinglass. My sisters Annie and Maud were fussing about at the table, and I must confess barking at me to assist them, an eternal struggle I am sure, and my father in his big clothes and his burning face stepped in. He took the helmet off his bald pate. I caught the strange mood a few moments before Annie and Maud, and stood in the centre of the room, my bold mockery of my sisters stilled in my throat. I felt like a dog that has been reprimanded but cannot work out his misdeed. My father looked into the middle distance. I think he looked into it for the rest of his life.

Then Annie at least caught up. She conscientiously put down the great platter she was bearing.

‘What is it, Papa?’ she said.

‘Terrible …’ said my father, but could offer no further words at that moment. He drew out a letter from his coat, with the elephant and pineapple on it of the Dublin Fusiliers. Not that we saw that then. But we examined that letter for flaws and lies many times in the days after, with no success.