Remembering Light and Stone (9 page)

‘Today was fun, wasn’t it?’ Ted said. ‘I liked that a lot. We should do it again, we can go to all sorts of places together, go to the sea, go anywhere you want.’

‘Today was lovely.’

We had gone to visit another hill village in the area, smaller and higher in situation than S. Giorgio. We had driven there in my car, out along quiet roads, and the dark fertile land was beautiful. The twisted vines were bare, and even at this, the bleakest season of the year, the richness of the land was clear to see. The road wound up into the hills, we parked outside the town walls, and looked out over the valley. We could see for ever so far, back across the plain, back to S. Giorgio itself, spilling down the side of a distant hill. The whole scene was washed by an unexpected bright pink light, of the sun late on a winter afternoon. The streets of the town were almost empty; our footsteps echoed loudly. In the church there was a fresco, and the background of it showed exactly the local landscape: the same slender trees, the same all-pervasive softness, the same pearly light. The steep streets of the town were cobbled. A hefty cat sat on the wall which surrounded a small garden; the garden as empty and still as an ornament under glass. The heaped clouds were all pink.

The day had been special to me because it had been so ordinary. We hadn’t done anything in particular, and there were so many similar pretty towns around we could have visited. More and more I had come to treasure the ordinary things of life, and to feel ill at ease with things that proclaim their strangeness, their exclusivity. First-class hotels and smart restaurants unnerve me, not least because I feel that they were planned to unnerve people. Functional things have much more warmth and appeal. And sometimes an ordinary, happy situation can be so hard to find, that when it does happen, when you find yourself in a quiet town on a winter afternoon with someone you like, it doesn’t seem ordinary any more, it seems miraculous.

We didn’t speak for a while. I let the silence run on, took the chestnuts from the fire, poured out more wine, and still he said nothing. I asked him if he was afraid of me, and he didn’t answer immediately.

‘Yes, sometimes I am. I admit that. Maybe a bit less so now. I think I’m beginning to understand you a bit better, and I like you a lot. But you never took me in, though, not even at the start. Do you remember the weekend you came up to see me in Florence, and we met a friend of mine at the station when I was seeing you off?’ I remembered him, remembered how he had grinned and stared at me, the way people look at their friends’ new lovers. I had been my most charming self. ‘That guy teaches with me. I met him in the college a couple of days later, and he said, “That Irish girl I met you with at the station on Sunday night seems like a real sweetie.” And I thought to myself “Oh yeah?” I could see why he thought that, but I know the score. I know you might not like me saying this, Aisling, in fact I know you don’t want pity, but I have to say it – sometimes I feel real sorry for you.’

‘Yeah, well, thanks,’ I mumbled. ‘Saves me the bother of feeling sorry for myself. Things change, though, don’t they, Ted? Some people hate change, they want life always to stay the same, even if it isn’t up to anything much. But for me, I always like to know that things can be different, even that they’re bound to be different in time. Sometimes people tell you they want to change their lives, but if the opportunity to do that presents itself, they just shy away. I always try to be vigilant with myself in that way, I try to be sure that I’m not fooling myself. But it’s hard to make changes happen. Sheer will isn’t enough. I know that now.’

‘I like you. There are lots of things I like about you. I just wish you liked yourself a bit more.’

I suspected that it was Ted who was the sweetie. He couldn’t imagine that life could feel like a winter night, when you walk along a wet street, and you see all the lights and fires in the houses, and you recognize all the faces of the people inside. But if you ask at any door, there’s always a plausible reason, not unkindly meant, as to why you can’t come in. I remember very
clearly those two days when Ted came to stay with me, and I think everyone remembers the weekend of 11th November, 1989, when the Germans opened the Berlin Wall, just as
everyone
remembers where they were during that whole autumn, when things were changing so fast all over Eastern Europe. It was one of those times like when someone else has a baby, and you can afford to be delighted because you’re not the one who’s going to be changing its nappies or seeing to it when it cries in the middle of the night. A wall across a city is so self-evidently a bad thing that when it came down it was easy to feel a simplistic pleasure, and just enjoy the pictures of people dancing on the Brandenburg monument or Rostropovich giving a concert beside the wall, or young women giving roses to the soldiers and all that. You could console yourself with the thought that it was the end of something bad, without bothering yourself too much about whether it was the start of something good. It was like taking a wedding at face value and confusing it with the marriage to come. Life gives so few opportunities for easy optimism, that when such an occasion presents itself, it’s hard to resist.

On the Sunday morning, Ted went out to get the newspapers while I put on the coffee. While I was waiting for it, I went out on to the kitchen balcony, which overlooked the square. There were two balconies in the apartment in S. Giorgio. The other was in the bedroom, and overlooked the yard at the back of the shop. It was a singularly unpicturesque view. The yard was full of old crates and stuff, and there were also a couple of brokendown Fiat 500s. They were good little cars, so good that they went out of production. Franca had a 500, and had bought the old wrecks in the yard to raid for spare parts, as there was no other way of getting them. Beyond the yard were the backs of some other apartments, many of which could have done with a lick of paint. These buildings also had balconies, and there were usually a few frames of laundry sitting out on them to dry. I actually liked both views, and thought that they complemented each other very well. From the kitchen you could see S. Giorgio as the tourist board wanted you to see it – pretty, quaint, with the church and the café and the little shops full of pottery. Then if you went into
the bedroom, you could see another aspect of the town, one less well publicized – its dreariness, its provinciality. I liked the view from the bedroom, because while you can see pictures of the pretty side of Italy, even of S. Giorgio, while you’re still abroad, you’ll only ever see such dreariness if you go to the place itself. It’s why I sometimes think you can get more of a sense of a country which you haven’t yet visited from a batch of badly taken holiday photographs than from a glossy coffee-table book which shows only the most beautiful places, looking better than they could ever do in real life. It gives such a false impression. There are places in Tuscany and Umbria and until you’ve seen them for yourself you wouldn’t believe how drab and dreary they can be.

I watched Ted from the balcony as he walked across the crowded square. I always like watching people I know from a distance, I don’t know why, it makes me feel powerful. I recognized quite a few of the people down in the square that morning, and I scrutinized them after Ted had vanished into the paper shop. Sunday morning is always busy in S. Giorgio, summer and winter. Suddenly I spotted Fabiola and her
husband
Pietro, who was carrying their baby in his arms. Fabiola was wearing a mink jacket, and the baby was hopelessly overdressed in a velvet cape with a white collar, white hat, and clumpy black shoes. They had just come out of a cake shop, and Fabiola was holding a flat package, wrapped in red paper and tied with a yellow bow. The loose ends of the ribbon had been carefully coiled into long springy ringlets.

I often saw Fabiola and Pietro like this on a Sunday morning: Pietro’s mother lived in S. Giorgio, and they usually had Sunday lunch with her. The scene was repeated all over the square: expensive cars were being parked, the man always in the driver’s seat, the woman in furs, or an elegant suit, their child (there was rarely more than one) stiflingly overdressed. I stared down at Fabiola with rapt attention, as if my look could pierce the veneer of her life. She was smiling broadly and blankly. She knew that everyone in S. Giorgio knew her; knew too that she was the loveliest, the most elegantly dressed, and the most affluent
woman in the square at that moment. That was the source of her power. Hers was a life of pure surface, and she felt no pain, because there was nothing inside to be hurt. Her greatest contentment came from the knowledge that others could only aspire to the life she had. That the things she had ultimately bored her was of no importance. The people who coveted her possessions – her jewels, her cars, her money – did not know this, and imagined they must surely make Fabiola happy, and would make them happy too, if they were in her place. Her happiness came instead from being the focus of this envy. Peering down at her, I wished that I could take everything away from her, if only for a moment – her furs, her jewellery, her house, all her make-up and smart clothes, even her husband and child. More than that, I wanted to deny her the right to partake in all these rigidly fixed social conventions – her presence in the square on Sunday, the family lunch, even the obligatory wrapped cake. I wanted to take all these things away, because I wanted to know if, stripped of her possessions and her social context, there would be anything there at all. I doubted it: not even a naked, shivering scrap of suffering humanity would remain.

Suddenly, everything went black. Someone had crept out on to the balcony behind me, and was pressing their hands tightly over my eyes. I screamed and lashed out violently. At once I was free again, and there was a loud crash as the person behind me fell backwards over a potted plant into the apartment. Everybody down in the square heard both the scream and the crash, and were now staring up at me, including, to my mortification, Pietro and Fabiola. I stepped quickly back into the kitchen, and slammed the balcony doors.

Ted picked himself up off the kitchen floor, rubbing his head. ‘Jesus, it was only a joke!’ I said angrily that I hadn’t found it a very funny one, and that I was surprised at his being so insensitive. Then I saw it from his point of view. I said I was sorry and I started to cry. He put his arm around me and said he was sorry too, that it was a stupid thing to have done, and then I started to laugh, because I was in that nervous state when there’s
hardly any difference between laughing and crying. But I felt afraid that having let him see how vulnerable I was the night before, I’d never be able to hide my nervousness from him again. And while part of me was relieved by this, part of me was appalled.

The day after Ted went back up to Florence, I had a letter from my brother Jimmy in Dublin. I can’t say I was altogether pleased when I opened the post-box and saw it sitting there. I never got on particularly well with Jimmy. At best we had nothing much in common, at worst we fought dirty and vicious to hurt each other in the way only siblings can. I always do a double take when I see a letter from Jimmy, because his handwriting is exactly the same as mine. He also talks like me, and moves like me; we have all the same little mannerisms. If you saw a photo of me and a photo of Jimmy, you wouldn’t say that we look alike at all, but if you saw us together, in real life, you’d know immediately that we were brother and sister.

I had just arrived home from work. Usually I rip open my post and read it on my way up the stairs, but I took this particular letter up to the apartment intact. I was looking forward to lunch, and I was afraid that Jimmy’s letter might spoil it for me if I read it first. While I was cooking and eating, however, I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

I thought it was really unfair that although Jimmy had given my mother far more trouble and cause for worry than I ever had, at the end of her life he was seen as the good son, and I was cast as the selfish and irresponsible one, The Girl Who Broke Her Mother’s Heart. Jimmy’s six years older than I am. When he was eighteen, he took himself off to London and lived in a squat there. We hardly ever heard from him, and when we did, it was never good news. My mother used to cry about him, and there was nobody locally with whom she could share her woes, because she was so ashamed. She invented some elaborate story
about how he had a job in London and how well he was doing over there. I remember how people used to stop us coming out of Mass on a Sunday morning, and if they asked after Jimmy my mother would tell them the most blatant lies so artlessly that for a time I was completely confused, and wondered if he really was working in England, and for reasons of her own, she pretended in the house that he had gone to the dogs. She used to complain bitterly on the way home from chapel, and say that on top of everything, Jimmy was guilty of ‘making me sin my soul coming straight from the altar rails’. That in itself was another lie, of course. Later I came to appreciate that my mother was a born liar, that there was a layer of deceit and a facility for fabrication in her that I have seldom seen surpassed. It seemed an extraordinary aberration, because outwardly she was such a pious person, but I came later to see that piety and deceit were not mutually exclusive, as you might imagine. She was also adept at
self-delusion
, and cherished double standards. Years later, when Jimmy was home again and back in her good books, she remarked casually one day, ‘I never was really that worried, Aisling, and anyway, what sort of a man is it who doesn’t sow his wild oats?’

When he was in England, there was even a period when she wanted to go over and find him, and make him come home, but my father wouldn’t let her go, and he was right. My mother knew nothing of city life: a trip to Dublin every year on the 8th of December to do a bit of Christmas shopping was as much as she knew, and almost more than she could handle. I can hardly bear even now to imagine her wandering around in the
Underground
, looking for Jimmy.

He was arrested and charged once for possession of drugs – a bit of marijuana – and once he crashed his motorbike near Brighton and broke his leg. To be honest, I thought that for a black sheep in a family in the mid 1970s he wasn’t up to much, and I told him so. He was really angry with me.

He didn’t stay in London very long – I think it was just about a year and a half altogether, and then he came back to Ireland and reverted to being completely conservative and conventional. By
various contacts he managed to get a job in an insurance company in Dublin, and soon my mother didn’t have to tell lies about him to the neighbours any more. He bought a car, and came home to see us most weekends. There was a woman called Nuala who worked in the same office, and she was also from Clare. Jimmy used to give her a lift home as far as Ballyvaughan when he was going home, and a year or so after they first met, they got engaged.

If I didn’t have much in common with Jimmy, I had absolutely nothing in common with Nuala. Thinking about it from the safe distance of S. Giorgio, however, I could see how I cultivated the differences, even if only in my own mind, because I was so afraid of being like her. We were from very similar homes in the same part of Ireland, and I think she was the sort of woman my mother would have been had she been born later. It therefore follows that Nuala was the sort of woman my mother would have liked
me
to be; and that Jimmy was marrying her because she was like my mother. In some ways families appear to be such a complex web of emotions and psychology, but if you look at it carefully, it’s often frighteningly simple. People marry people like their parents. After eighteen years with my father, however, I made a conscious choice that I would never marry a man like him. The catch was, I thought that all men were like my father, even the ones who seemed to be nice, they were only pretending until such time as they had you in their clutches, and then they would let all their nasty side out, and there would be nothing you could do about it. As I got a bit older, in my early twenties, I suspected that this wasn’t the whole story, but I was still frightened. Then I went to Paris and I met Bill and I felt at first that he was concrete evidence that my earlier theory was false. Then he left me, and I swung right in the other direction, and thought that this was a classic proof of what I had believed when I was a girl. There’s something particularly galling about knowing that you had more savvy about men and the ways of the world when you were fourteen than when you were twenty-four. It seemed strange to me now at thirty to have gone through all this and to know what I did, and yet still to be so baffled.

Anyhow, my relationship with my family began to sour a bit around the time Nuala and Jimmy got married. Our father was dead by then. Inevitably, the wedding itself was a source of dissent. Nuala was going for clear soup, turkey and ham, a
three-piece
band, and seventy guests in a hotel in Ballyvaughan; it was to be your standard Irish wedding. I am not, however, your standard Irish bridesmaid, but Nuala couldn’t see that, and for some reason she thought that her day wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t go up the aisle behind her in some ridiculous yellow tulle confection. I refused politely, but she persisted until I refused rudely, and then of course I got terrible flak from my mother and Jimmy.

Jimmy and Nuala were married in spring, and I went up to Dublin to go to university that autumn. To my amazement, everyone took it for granted that I would lodge with them in their new house. That didn’t fit in with my plans at all. For years I had been slogging away at school so that I could get to university and be independent in the city, and I wasn’t going to let that slip from me now. My mother said that it would be such a help to them with their mortgage; I replied that their mortgage was no concern of mine, and if they needed help they could always get a lodger, it didn’t have to be me. I guessed, correctly, that they would probably have a baby within a year, and that if I was living with them, I would get roped in for unpaid babysitting. Nuala and Jimmy still went up and down to Clare most weekends, but I seldom accepted their offer of a lift. I preferred to stay in the city, and for this they said I was selfish and had abandoned my mother. It wasn’t fair: I wrote to her and phoned her very often, but I have to admit, I was ruthless about claiming my own life, and still feel I was right to do so.

What I resented most of all was the implication that I was up to something nefarious in my tatty little bedsit in Ranelagh, engaged in things which would never have been tolerated in a respectable home like Jimmy’s and Nuala’s. In fact, I was leading a completely innocuous life, and my new pleasures were
touchingly
simple: cooking and eating what I wanted when I wanted;
listening to Bartok until all hours on an old stereo I had bought myself second hand, eating a few chocolates out of a box and then going out, secure in the knowledge that when I came home, the Raspberry Whirl would still be there. That first year in the city was one of the happiest times in my life.

People get so defensive when they get into their late twenties or early thirties, when they begin to make big choices in life. If they get married then they seem to think that you should be married too, or if they buy a house, they see an implicit criticism in the fact that you’re still renting. I used to feel that sort of pressure a lot with Nuala and Jimmy, and when I left Ireland, I think they took it personally. I haven’t got this particular
hang-up
myself (one of the few I seemed to have missed out on). I don’t think other people should do what I’m doing just because I’m doing it. I’d have been appalled if Jimmy and Nuala had followed me to Paris.

Yet the strangest thing of all is that I love Jimmy, and I know that he loves me. I suppose that if, instead of a letter, he’d been right there with me in S. Giorgio, we’d have been scoring points off each other the way we always did. And yet I’d lay down my life for Jimmy, and I know he’d do the same for me. I don’t use the word ‘love’ lightly, and my love is hard to engage. It’s a mysterious thing. People generally don’t like to admit that you can love people you don’t like, but you can. It’s not ideal, in fact it’s confusing and painful, but I suspect that it happens a lot. That’s why unhappy families can hold together for years and years. You can even love people who are cruel to you, and so there are women who love violent men. And a terrible lie grew out of this – that it’s the violence they love, and not the person who inflicts it. Such women love these men
in
spite
of
the cruelty, never because of it.

Of course, the world would be a better place if liking and loving went together. Life would be simpler, and hideous myths, like the one I’ve just mentioned, would have no credence whatsoever. But it’s never an easy thing to bear. I know what it’s like. It’s best if you like the people you love, and I wish I liked Jimmy more, wish I had liked my parents more, although I don’t
blame myself for not doing so. I had the best possible reason for not liking my father.

I had finished eating my lunch, but I decided I’d wash up, and then read the letter over a cup of coffee. As I cleared things away and filled the sink with hot water, I thought of how there was something unusual in the relationship between Jimmy and me. Usually when there’s an age gap of six years it makes a big difference when you’re small and is less important when you’re adults. But with us it worked the other way round: we were good chums when we were children, but grew apart when we grew up.

Our family home was in an isolated part of the country, and because there were no other children around, we were thrown into each other’s company. The age difference worked well for both of us. It meant that when Jimmy was twelve, he could play childish games with me without loss of face, when he was just that bit too old for them, but still wasn’t ready to give them up. For me, the bonus was that Jimmy was so good at everything because he was bigger. He could draw well, and do complicated jigsaws and he was brilliant at making things. When I was eight, for example, he made a car out of cardboard boxes for my two favourite dolls. It was exactly the right size for them, and it had windows and wheels and everything, even two headlights that really worked. (They were actually two pocket-torches.)

As I wiped the plates, I was surprised by how many pleasant memories came back to me. When I was six, I wanted a cat more than anything else in the whole world. I used to pray every night that God would send me a cat, and then one day, Jimmy came home from school with a kitten sitting in a box full of straw. One of his friends’ cats had had a litter, and he had asked for one when it was big enough. My parents had never given in to my pleading, but Jimmy knew that if he just showed up at the house with a kitten in a box that he’d probably be able to coax my parents round.

He was right: I was allowed to keep the kitten. I can still see that cat sitting in its box, as if it was yesterday. I can still see it struggling to its feet on the straw, and opening its pink, frail
mouth. It was a female cat, so I called her Nora. She was a black cat with white socks and a white splodge on her face. I loved Nora so much, and I looked after her for years. And then when I was about twelve, my father killed her one night after he’d been drinking. The next day he said it was an accident, and my mother said Nora was an old cat, and maybe she had been going to die anyway, but I didn’t believe either of them.

Another time, when I was about eight, there was a carnival on near our home, and Jimmy took me there with his friends. There was a stall where you threw darts at little badges pinned to squares of cardboard, and if your dart hit the card, you won. Jimmy and his friends played darts for almost the whole evening, and they gave me all the badges they won. When I went home that night, from neck to waist my coat was completely covered with coloured badges. It was a great feeling.

Waiting for the coffee, I remembered a day when Jimmy and I went out for a walk, and I got tired on the way back. I got slower and slower until I came to a complete halt, and Jimmy had to give me a piggyback home. I loved that, loved being so high off the ground. I buried my face in the back of his neck, and closed my eyes, then pretended to myself that I was really riding a pony. And then I fell asleep. When I woke up we were in a dark lane, with trees on either side of it. I held on tightly to Jimmy, and flung back my head. It was spring, and the trees were covered in blossom, wild apple, wild cherry. There was a wind, and the wind blew the petals from the trees, and the sunlight was broken by the branches of the trees. I remember feeling mad with happiness, and I wished that we would never go home again, that Jimmy would carry me through the fields and the hills for ever.