Fr Gaunt was always there or some such, one or other of the curates, the herons among the minnows. By God, there was some sort of Dancehall Act I seem to remember. Or maybe I imagine that. I believe they railed against dances in the church, but I wouldn’t have been privy to that. There wasn’t supposed to be much touching. It would be queer cold dancing without touching. It was lovely to snuggle up to a lad at the end of a dance, you sweaty and him all sweaty too, in the summer, the smell of soap and turf off him. And that stuff in their hair that time, Brilliantine, was the name I think. There’d be fellas there whose fathers and mothers probably spoke Irish in the back hills of Sligo, and who from going to pictures now and then had the idea they had obligations to look like stars of the silver screen, unless it was looking like Irish patriots they were trying to be, maybe that was it too. Michael Collins had been a strong man for the grease in his hair. Even de Valera was well slicked down.
And Tom McNulty’s Band blowing up a storm. Young Tom standing there at the edge of the stage with his trumpet or clarinet raised, blasting out the sort of music we had then. You had to have the jazz for the dancing, but also the foxtrot was still danced there, and even the waltz. Tom even had a recording made, called Tom McNulty’s Ragtime Band, by Jesus that sent the hall into a frenzy. There was a light shining out of Tom then. Of course at that time Tom was just the great man I had never spoken to, unless it was in the café to say ‘What would you like?’ To which the answer would most likely be, ‘China tea and a deadfly bun. Earl Grey for the brother.’ He was dead keen on the deadfly buns. I wonder if they still have them. They were like religious objects at that time, you couldn’t have a café
without them, what would be the point. It is funny how fixed everything was in those times. Deadfly buns, cream cakes, eclairs, cherry buns with white icing on top, it was like those things were as ancient and established as whales, dolphins, 140
mackerel – like natural occurrences, the natural history of the café.
It mattered altogether that my father was gone, but somehow I was able to tuck that in under the pillow of my hair, to sleep on it as it were. I couldn’t help the happiness, when I woke in the morning, yes, there was my mother to see to, but I was able to feed her and look after her, she never said anything or went anywhere, just kept to the house in her stripy housecoat, and there was that energy in me, like a motorcar being started with a starting handle, cranking me up, I was cranked up mysteriously every morning I woke, I was aflame with energy, it swept me out of the house, and through the streets of Sligo, and in through the glass doors of the Café Cairo, and had me kissing my friend Chrissie good morning, and laughing, and if Mrs Prunty was around, she would give me her shy smile, and I would be jubilant, jubilant.
It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can. When I was in that state, everything looked beautiful to me, the rain slicing down looked like silver to me, everything was of interest to me, everyone seemed at ease with me, even those slit-eyed cornerboys of Sligo, with the yellow fingers from the coffin nails they smoked, the yellow stain above their lips where the fag was stuck in permanent. Accents like bottles being smashed in a back lane.
There now, and all that comes back unbidden. I sat down today to write of Tom and the sea. Rescuing me in the sea of happiness.
I plunged in. I think I knew where I was going. It is curious to me how I remember so completely the feel of that light wool bathing suit on my skin. It had three thick stripes alternating 141
and I had saved the whole winter for it. You couldn’t have found a nicer one in Sligo. A hot Irish day is such a miracle we become mad foreigners in a twinkle. The rain drives everyone indoors and history with it. There is a lovely lack of anything on a hot day, and because our world in its inner truth is so wet, the surprised greens of the fields and hills seem to burn with a sort of bewilderment, a wonderment. The land looks lovely to itself, and the girls and boys along the strand are painted into the tawny yellows and the blues and greens of the sea, also burning, burning. Or so it seemed to me. The whole town seemed to be there, everything suffering the same brushstrokes of the heat, everything joining and melding. I don’t know if the Plaza existed just at that time, it must have done, because I had seen Tom McNulty playing, but if it did it would have been 1929 or after even, so I wasn’t exactly a girl, but I am confused about this. It is hard to know a person’s age in a bathing suit, in the riot of the sunlight, and I can’t see what age I was, I am peering back with my mind’s eye, and all I see is fabulous glitter.
And the undersea just as glittering, speckled, chained in miracles somehow, that wonderful half blindness the eyes have underwater, blurred because the sea itself is a huge lens, like you are wearing the sea itself before your face. So it’s gone even more like a painting, a furious mad painting, there was a whole book of them in the town hall library, the fellas that painted in France and were laughed at to begin with, like they didn’t know how to paint. I won’t risk writing one of the names, but I do remember them, hard harsh names, and troubled lives to match, I can say them in my head as I write. But I’d be ashamed to spell them wrong. And myself in that undersea, my whole body loosened, but also sharpened, my lungs rich with air at first and then beggared, and the head lighter, lovelier, and the chiller water deeper, washing my face, asking my face who it was, what shape it was, in infinite detail. Suddenly I am longing to tell Dr Grene about this, I don’t know why, I imagine he 142
would be interested in it, it would please him, but I would also fear he would read something into it. He interprets things, which is dangerous, extremely. Oh yes, the beach at Strandhill, high tide as it was, is good for a little, then it plunges down, you are suddenly in the big water of the bay there, the big muscle, enormous, like the famous Hudson river, no, not as big as that of course, but I felt I was not so much entering as touching something vast flexing there under God’s eye. And could I feel it pull me out, swiftly, deeper? I don’t know. I do know I gave my heart to it, I do know I was moved by it, maybe I wept, can you weep underwater, it must be possible? How long was I swimming without coming up? A minute, two, three, like a pearl diver in the south seas, wherever they are, whatever they are? Myself and my bathing suit, and inside the suit a little pocket with two bob in it, which would be my fare back to Sligo on the old green bus, for safety’s sake stuck in that pocket, like something you could keep a scapular in, if you were Catholic. And I suppose my youth, my softness, my hardness, my blue eyes, my yellow hair sleeking underwater, and maybe three hundred sharks out there, beginning to be in the neighbourhood of sharks, wonderful, wonderful, I didn’t care. Become a sort of shark.
The great pull of the current beginning to take me, like a word lost in a swell of music.
Then in all that happiness, suddenly enveloped, stolen back, taken up, by human arms I knew, expert, almost devious. And this person, sleek and round and strong, raised me up through the wild glitter, and we broke the surface, and there was the roaring world again, and the heaving sea, and the sky whether up or down I didn’t know. And the swimmer drew me back to the strand, with the boys and the girls, the buckets, the old cannon pointing out to sea, the houses, the Plaza, the stunned donkeys, the few motorcars, Sligo, Strandhill, my fate, my fate as woeful as my father’s, my ridiculous, heartless, funny fate. 143
It couldn’t have been anyone in the world fishing me out except Tom McNulty. It was always going to be him. Anyway, he was a famous swimmer, he already had a medal for saving a life given him by the mayor of Sligo himself, which was what got him into the politics, he always said. The other person he saved was an old crone that the tide plucked from the shoreline, like the joker it is – an old crone, but not as old as I am now. No.
‘I know you,’ he said, glistening on the sand, his nice square fat face smiling at me, and the world and its aunt gathered about us, and Jack also there now, in his sombre black bathing trunks, and h
is body that never really looked like flesh, but something stonier, the bones and muscles of a traveller. ‘You’re the lass from the Café Cairo.’
And I laughed, or tried to, the salt water spluttering in my throat.
‘Oh mercy,’ he said. ‘You swallowed the ocean. Yes, you did. Jaysus,’ he said, ‘where’s your blessed towel? Do you have one? You do? And your clothes? Yes, come on. Come on with me.’
So my towel was put around my shoulders and my clothes gathered for me by Jack, gingerly holding them, and the two walked me up across the burning hot road towards the Plaza, we kept to the grassy verge when we could, and across the desert of the carpark and into the ticket office with us, and Tom was laughing, very easy and relieved he probably was, to have rescued me. I can’t remember if he got another medal for me, I hope he did, because he probably deserved it, all things considered.
Oh, dear, it is difficult to look back on the joy of those days, but on the other hand, it is something rare I know in a life to know such joy, and such luck.
144
I knew my luck, knew it as well as a sparrow when it finds a speck of bread all to itself.
It was pride too, my pride in him, with his fame and his confidence. We’d go up the concrete steps to the pictures between those laurel hedges. We might have been a couple in Hollywood, I might have been Mary Pickford herself, though I suppose in all honesty Tom was too small to be Douglas Fairbanks.
The dark in our little world was the drinking habits of Sligo. Men like Tom and his brother would be so drunk in the small hours things would happen which not only could they not remember, but they wouldn’t want to, which was no doubt a great blessing.
I would be standing down on the dancefloor, happy to be on my own, looking up at the stage where Tom’s band were ranged, his little dapper father a dab hand on the clarinet, on any instrument you liked. Late in the evening Tom would play
‘Remarkable Girl’ with his hawk’s eye peering down at me. When we were walking on the beach at Rosses Strand one time he teased me by singing ‘When Lights are Low in Cairo’, because I was the girl that worked in the Café Cairo. There was a singer called Cavan O’Connor that he modelled his voice on, he thought Cavan was the greatest singer that ever breathed. But Tom had grown up more or less on Jelly Roll Morton and he was cracked on Bubber Miley, like all the trumpeters were, even more than on Louis Armstrong himself. Tom said Bubber had put the jump into Duke Ellington, no question. These matters for Tom were nearly as important as the politics. But my brain left him there, once he started on that. It didn’t seem as interesting at all as the music. Soon he had me sitting in with the band playing piano when the piano player proper was unwell. He was a big lad from the back of Knocknarea with TB.
‘Black Bottom Stomp’ was his party piece as one might say. Jack was never on stage but he liked to sing in the early part of 145
his cups, when he was cheerful, very cheerful. Then it would be
‘Roses of Picardy’, ‘Long Way to Tipperary’, because he had been in the British Merchant Navy when he was only a boy, but I think I wrote this before. Saw every port from Cove to Cairo, but I think I wrote this. Maybe it’s worth saying twice. Jack was always about and then he’d be gone for a while. He used to go out to Africa on contracts. Oh, Tom was very proud of Jack, Jack had done two degrees at Galway at the same time, Geology and Engineering. He was just a brilliant man. I have to confess he was about three times better-looking than his brother, but that is neither here nor there. But he was, he had those smalltown filmstar looks, you’d be in the cinema watching Broadway Melody or some such, and when the lights would go up at the end, yes, you’d be back in bloody Sligo – except for Jack. Jack still had some halo of Hollywood about him. But Jack kept a few feet between us, what sort of feet I don’t know. He was too ironical to be friendly, he’d be jesting and joking the while, and sometimes I caught him looking at me with the wrong sort of look. I don’t mean coveting me, but maybe disapproving. Long looks when he thought I couldn’t see him. Sizing me up.
Jack kept a Ford car though, to go with the leather collar on his coat. We were always in that car, we saw a thousand Irish landscapes through the front screen, we washed a million tons of rain off it with that little wiper back and forth, back and forth, and gallons of whiskey they drank in it, as we went along. The big thing was to get out onto the strand by Coney island at low tide, and surge along through the shallow inch of water, roaring and at our infinite ease. There were always friends with us, the prettiest of the girls that hung after the band, and other likely lads of Sligo and Galway. The funny thing was, Jack had a girlfriend that he was actually going to marry, Mai her name was, but we never saw her, she lived in Galway with her parents, very well-to-do they were. Her father 146
was an insurance salesman, a very impressive fact to Jack, and they lived in a house in Galway that was Something House, and that was a big fact for a man whose father was the tailor in the Sligo Lunatic Asylum. He had met her at the university, she was one of the first girls there, oh, and I’d say one of the first girls at a lot of things, looking down her nose at me being one of them. No, that isn’t fair, I don’t think I ever met her but the one time.
But actually I do Tom a disservice talking like this. Because his own first cousin owned the Sligo Champion and was a TD in what they used to call the real first Dáil, that is to say the Dáil after the Treaty. And Jack always said – I used to hear him telling a new acquaintance – that he was a cousin of that darkhearted person Edward Carson, who opted out of the Free State like a rat leaving a sinking ship, or what he hoped and prayed was a sinking ship. Tom told me his own people had been butter importers in Sligo, or was it exporters, and had had ships, just like the Jacksons and the Pollexfens. And that the Oliver in his name, Thomas Oliver McNulty, was there because they had lost their lands in the time of Cromwell when an Oliver McNulty had refused to become a Protestant. He said this with a wary eye on me, to see how I would take it, being a Protestant myself I suppose. I was a Protestant, but maybe not the right kind of Protestant. Jack liked the bighouse Protestants and he had it in his head that he was sort of Catholic gentry. I don’t think he thought much of the great Presbyterian tradition in Ireland. Working-class. That was the dread phrase.
‘That fella is working-class through and through,’ was one of Jack’s put downs. Because he had been in Africa he also had strange phrases like ‘Act the white man.’ And ‘hamma-hamma’. Because he had seen a thousand drunken nights, another phrase was ‘Keep the party clean.’ If he thought someone was untrustworthy, that person was ‘a casual pack of buggers’. 147
Red hair, auburn really, combed back. Quite severe features, very serious about the eyes. Oh yes, Clark Gable or better still Gary Cooper. Gorgeous.
I am looking for my mother in these memories, and I cannot find her. She has simply disappeared.
148
chapter fourteen
Dr Grene’s Commonplace Book
Driving into work this morning I passed a previously unnoticed hillside of windmills. I may not have noticed them before because they just weren’t there, but if so I certainly missed their erection, which must have taken quite a long time. They were simply suddenly there. Bet always said I did not have my mind on the world at all. One day I came in from the rain, sat on the couch, and a few minutes later, happening to touch my hair, asked, ‘Why is my head wet?’ Bet loved to tell that story, or used to, when there was someone to tell it to.
But there were the windmills, suddenly. It is a hill – more of a mountain I suppose, if we have such things in Ireland –
called Labanacallach, and there is a wood also, called Nugent’s Wood, going up to the frostline. Who Nugent was or why he planted a wood is anyone’s guess, or at least there would be only old codgers who know these things. I was driving along in my Toyota, feeling quite wretched, with the same drumming recrimination going on in my stupid head, when I saw the windmills silverly turning, as one might say, and my heart li
fted like a quail from the very bog. It lifted. They were so beautiful. I thought of windmills in paintings, the strange emotions still attaching even to their memory. Don Quixote maybe. How sorry I always used to feel when I saw a ruined mill long ago. Magical buildings. These modern versions of course are not quite the same thing. And of course they are strongly objected to. But they are beautiful. They made me optimistic, like I could still achieve something.