Rainsongs Page 14

  Halfway down the street is O’Shea’s the undertaker, and a wool shop crammed with knitting patterns and boxes of buttons. Next to this is an amusement arcade that seems to be permanently shut and a hardware store that sells garden gnomes as well as plaster saints. A faded floral curtain sags across the empty window of McCrohan’s.

  She wanders into the church named after the town’s most famous son, Daniel O’Connell, who established civic freedom for Irish Catholics in 1829. A painted board charts the growth of the restoration fund for the sagging roof, though the heavy 19th century architecture is without much merit. Pushing open the heavy wooden doors she feels as if she’s suddenly in France or some Italian village. A large mahogany confessional stands beside a rack of burning candles. Up near the altar two women in headscarves sit with their heads bowed. A gloomy wooden tableaux of the Stations of the Cross runs around the walls and there’s a fragrance of stale incense. Martha considers lighting a candle but decides against it. On either side of the altar a pair of blue banners urge visitors to: Repent and believe in the gospel and Return to the Lord your God. She picks up a leaflet that claims the average weekly attendance is around two thousand souls. Could that be true or just wishful thinking in the light of recent Catholic scandals? She thought people were leaving the Church in droves.

  In a side chapel, Blu-tacked to a pillar on a sheet of lined paper, is a hand-written prayer:

  Dear Saint Anthony. You are the patron saint of the poor and the helper of all who seek lost articles. Help me find the object I have lost so that I will be able to make use of the time I will gain for God’s greater honour and glory. Grant your gracious aid to all people who seek what they have lost—especially those who seek to regain God’s grace.

  She’s impressed by the nifty logic. The shift from lost objects to lost souls. Outside she stops in the porch. There are posters for prayer meetings and a forthcoming discussion on domestic violence. On WaterAid and classes to prepare for Catholic marriage. Two recycled Coca-Cola bottles, wrapped in slips of hand-written paper secured with elastic bands, sit on an oak table beside a dish of coins.

  Every Catholic home should have in a supply of Holy Water. Remits Venial Sins. Untold spiritual wealth is contained in a tiny drop of this blessed water.

  Outside, the churchyard is covered over with grass and concrete, though her leaflet informs her that Daniel O’Connell is buried here somewhere but she can’t see any graves. So, too, she reads, is Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty. The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican. O’Flaherty was, it seems, no lover of the British and supported the IRA. His mother came from local farming stock and his father, a policeman, was a golf pro. The young O’Flaherty appears to have been something of a charmer. A boxer and a golfer who did a spot of caddying at his father’s club and had a scratch handicap. Yet despite his athletic talents he had a calling to be ordained. After time in Egypt, the Caribbean and Czechoslovakia in the ’30s, he was sent to Rome. Many there found him rough-edged. Despite his rise through the Vatican he raised a few eyebrows when he became an amateur golf champion. By 1942 the Germans and Italians were cracking down on Jews and anti-fascists. O’Flaherty was friends with many of these people and had played golf with them before the war. He hid them in convents and monasteries, even in his own residence, playing cat and mouse with the Gestapo. Despite his previous antipathy to the British he began to help British POWs escape. He’d take the evening air on the porch of Saint Peter’s, in the neutral territory of the Vatican City, in plain view of both the German soldiers across the piazza and the windows of the Pope’s apartments. There escaped prisoners of war and Jews would find their way to him. Disguised in the robes of a monsignor or the uniform of the Swiss Guard he smuggled them through the German Cemetery to his old college. One evening a whey-faced young Jew slipped out of the shadows, drew him aside and unwound a heavy gold chain from his waist. He and his wife, he whispered, expected to be arrested at any moment. They’d be taken to Germany where they would almost certainly perish in a Nazi gas chamber. They had a young son. He was only seven. Would the Monsignor consider taking both the chain and the boy? Each link would keep him alive for a month. O’Flaherty agreed, somehow managing to procure false papers for the parents. When the war was over he was able to return both the boy and the chain.

  And, all the while Rome’s Gestapo chief, Herbert Kappler, was setting traps. While dining with Prince Filippo Doria Pamphili, the man who funded O’Flaherty’s operation, the SS surrounded the palace. O’Flaherty managed to escape through the basement and make a getaway in a coal truck. Of the 9,700 Roman Jews, nearly 2,000 were shipped off to Auschwitz with the connivance of the Church. Others were saved by the bravery of individual priests and nuns. After the war Kappler was sentenced to life in Gaeta prison, where his only visitor was O’Flaherty, who converted the man who’d sent thousands to their deaths to Catholicism.

  Martha had been deeply affected by her visit to the Jewish ghetto in Rome, now a bohemian quarter full of bars and little restaurants. When she visited with Brendan there was still a Yiddish bread shop on the corner of the narrow street, tucked beneath lintels carved with Hebraic script that must have dated back to Roman times. It sold plaited poppy-seed loaves and delicious cheesecake. Then, as she’d wandered into a little square, she noticed a small plaque on a wall that marked the spot where Rome’s Jews were rounded onto trucks and transported to the death camps. She thought of her grandfather leaving Zurich for London. Switzerland may have been neutral but still it hadn’t felt safe.

  Parting and exile. Remembering and forgetting. The Jews and the Irish have a lot in common. James Joyce knew what he was doing when he made Leopold Bloom a Jew. At first glance they seem so different. But look harder and they begin to seem like brothers separated at birth. Two ancient peoples destined to wander the world as outsiders subject to suspicion and derision. No blacks. No dogs. No Irish (and, probably, they’d have added No Yids if they’d thought about it) announced the notices on slammed lodging house doors in 1950s London. She’d read that some even speculated the Irish were one of the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel. What was it Brendan Behan said? ‘Others have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.’

  Is this what so attracts her to this little country? The passion. The lack of reserve. The warmth and raw emotions? Is this why she feels so at home? She puts the leaflet back on the porch table and, as she leaves, it starts to rain.

  3

  It was Breda McKenna who turned Colm on to literature. He can still remember the shiver that ran along his spine as she read about a ‘beast slouching towards Bethlehem.’ He was thirteen and, suddenly, felt excited by the power of language. Breda had spent years teaching in rough London schools before coming back home to Kerry. Thin, plain and tough, with hair scraped back from her face in a childish hairband, she had a formidable intelligence and a gift of empathy for those she taught. She insisted it was Colm’s duty to work. That there was another life out there beyond sheep, cattle and the pub, beyond marrying the first girl you kissed, and that it was yours for the taking if only you read, if only you were inquisitive about the world, asked questions and did not accept that because things had always been a certain way they always would be.

  He was never sure about University College but loved Dublin. The music scene, the museums, the squares with their 18th century houses, their green doors and polished brass knockers. Quite probably he’d have stayed if things had been different. And what then? What would he be doing now if he’d finished his degree? Teaching at the university, working for a publisher, running a bookshop? The first term they’d studied Irish poetry from Yeats to Ciaran Carson. He’d always read poetry but it had been a private thing. Now he enjoyed the analysis. Breaking down the imagery with the precision of a lab technician carrying out a dissection. He read Eavan Boland and Paul Muldoon. The experimental prose of Paul Auster and Italo Calvino, as well as English writers like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. He knew that t
he more he read, the more it would feed into his own work.

  Like all Kerrymen he grew up with music in the house. His father was a mean fiddler and his mother, Mary, still had a sweet voice. When he came back from Dublin he loved to listen to the old fellows in the pub. Eavesdrop, as they set the world to rights, blathering on about cattle and politics, their hernias and overdrafts, football and racing. They were great talkers. Every one of them a philosopher.

  Being in Dublin gave him the chance to develop his music. At school he wasn’t much interested in the Celtic stuff his parents played. It was U2 and House. For a while he fancied himself a drummer and was part of a five-man rock band that played student gigs. But studying Irish poetry took him back to his roots. He wasn’t interested in all that pseudo-Celtic, New Age mysticism shite. He wanted the real thing. He developed an interest in sean-nós, the old-style unaccompanied songs that grew out of the oral tradition. He started to write his own to be sung, just as they’d originally been at weddings and wakes. Like the older Christy Moore from County Kildare, with his tongue-twisting rush of garrulous monologues that told of growing up in Catholic Ireland in the 1950s, Colm used his voice to explore the harsh landscape and sing about the people he’d been raised among.

  And singing attracted women. It didn’t take him long to suss that out. Being in a band meant you never had to go home alone. That’s how he met Sinéad. She just followed him into the bar after a session and stood beside him in her black leather jacket and Doc Martens while he bought a pint. Then she asked if he’d buy her one too. He liked her nerve. So he did. It took him a while to realise that he was attractive. Perhaps he was just slow on the uptake. He didn’t think he had a snowball’s chance in hell of going with her. There’d been the odd girl at school. He wasn’t a virgin by the time he was sixteen. But still he never clocked that women actually fancied him.

  Sinéad was older. Just back from university in England where she was studying textiles and set design. Her room was full of strange knitted webs of raw wool strung from the ceiling and bits of bark woven through muslin. She was working in a swanky new coffee place off St Stephen’s Green—all blond wood and minimal cool—while she decided on her next move. The night she asked him to buy her a drink, she sat in her short black skirt and ripped fishnets, perched on a stool at the bar, sipping her Guinness, chatting about this and that till closing time. Then she invited him back to her place. Straight out. He’d have been an eejit not to go. She had a tiny blue stone pierced through her belly button and her skin was soft, her mouth wet, as she pinned him to the bed, tying his arms on the bedpost with a velvet scarf so he couldn’t move. But she was completely crazy. She’d say she was going to go to some interview for a job with a film company or a gallery and then forget or disappear for days, once spending a week in Bruges for no reason he could ever fathom, only to turn up at his digs in the middle of the night as he was finishing an essay, demanding a night of drink and lust. But when he told her his father had died, that he had to go back to Kerry, she stopped coming round or answering his texts. The day before he left for the funeral he saw her in the pub with an American from his faculty. Everyone knew that a bigger bollox never put his arm through a coat. But though the guy was as thick as shite, he was rich. Sinéad waved as if there’d never been anything between them. Then she went on talking to her new date. He wasn’t going to beg.

  Anyway he admires women who knew their own minds like Breda and his mam, who’d taken over the herd after his father died and was as good as any man. He enjoys their company. Particularly if they don’t take any bullshit. He hates girlie girls, into fashion, spray tans and New Age therapies. He likes women who think as well as fuck.

  He first met Brendan a few years ago, one winter evening in the small pub at the far end of the village, where the local musicians hung out. It was a regular Sunday night gig and Colm was trying out a few new songs. A heavy mist had come down over the moors so that apart from a clutch of local stalwarts gathered round the peat fire, the pub was fairly empty. After their set Brendan came over and offered him a pint. He sounded English and lived in London but was, he told Colm, half-Irish, and had inherited the old cottage up on Bolus Head. An art dealer and critic, he was working on a book up there.

  They met on a number of occasions after that. Brendan always insisting that he buy the drinks. It was, he said, good to get out and have a bit of stimulating conversation. Colm was doing him a favour. Brendan talked about art and his passion for Abstract Expressionism. For Rothko and Cy Twombly. In return Colm lent Brendan books of contemporary Irish poetry. If he wanted to reacquaint himself with his Celtic heritage then no better way than to read the poets. And Brendan took an interest in Colm’s work. He knew a couple of editors of English literary magazines. If Colm wanted to show him some of his poems he might be able to recommend where to send them. But, for some reason, they never got round to it.

  Martha was out when he left his manuscript in a plastic bag beneath a stone on her doorstep. He wonders if she’ll read it.

  4

  Time has become elastic. Collapsing and expanding in ways that have little to do with reality. Her classroom feels a world away. If she never went back, would anyone even notice? Normally she’d be preparing for the next term but has taken extra leave until Easter. Now she’s having to familiarise herself with her own rhythms. She should be organising a trip for her GCSE students to the Globe and another, later in the year, to Stratford. Often it’s a waste of time and the kids just see it as a chance to miss a day’s school. But, occasionally, someone becomes struck and one or two have gone on to study drama at university or got into RADA. And that’s made her proud. Particularly Alex, who lived on a crime-infested council estate in King’s Cross. His mother surviving on antidepressants and never showing the slightest interest in anything her son did. An absent father in and out of prison, he’d plenty of opportunities to get in with the wrong crowd. But Martha had taken a chance and cast him as Brick in the end of year production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. For one so young, he was electric, finding some deep connection with the character once he got on stage. Martha badgered and cajoled him through his exams. Sorted out his grant applications and helped him apply for a scholarship to the Central School. Recently she had seen him in the Almeida production of The Winslow Boy. She was touched that he bothered to send her a ticket. Afterwards, as they chatted in the bar, he still occasionally forgetting and calling her Miss instead of Martha, people came up to congratulate him and she wondered if they might think this gangly young man was her son. He could have been. And she’d have been proud.

  5

  She hopes that everything is alright at home. Françoise, the French PhD student who rents her top room said she’d keep an eye. A serious girl from a big family in Limoges, she’s studying international relations. Although they live quite separate lives, occasionally she comes down to the kitchen for a glass of wine or to share a spaghetti bolognese and they chat about her plans to work for UNESCO. Such brief exchanges force Martha to stay connected. Prevent the house from being inhabited solely by ghosts.

  She and Brendan had, like many of their generation, bought the place as a wreck in the ’70s. It was divided into rooms for Irish navvies working on the motorways. There were cracked basins with a single cold tap in each bedroom, stained lavatories on the landings and mottled linoleum on the communal stairs. The deposit came from her father who didn’t think they should squander money on rent and felt, once Brendan was working at the gallery, that they should have a place of their own. She remembers the day they got the keys. The wallpaper was black with damp and a rusty geyser in the bathroom, just off the kitchen, dripped brown water into the stained tub. Slowly they pulled the place apart, sanding floors and pine shutters, fixing the wiring and revealing Victorian fireplaces hidden behind plasterboard, decorating the rooms to create the home she still has today. They bought old furniture from Bermondsey and Portobello markets early in the morning for a
few pounds. A pine and marble washstand with blue and white Art Nouveau tiles. A tallboy for the hall and a Victorian spoon-back chair, when such things could still be had for a song. Carting them back strapped to the roof of their old green deux chevaux. The walls of her sitting room are still covered in the paintings Brendan collected over the years by the artists he showed. A Sean Scully with subtle taupe and grey rectangles. A Hughie O’Donoghue diver. A Tony Bevan head. She also still has the piano her grandfather brought from Zurich. She always hoped Bruno would learn. But he never practiced willingly and, rather than create a rift, she reluctantly allowed him to give up.

  6

  She takes the low road that sweeps down to St Finéan’s Bay and then up over the mountain but hasn’t reckoned on the fog. When she left the cottage the weather was quite clear but as she climbs up onto the moors the road suddenly disappears in a swirling white mist. She switches on the headlights but that just makes it worse. She can’t see a thing. The edge of the road, the ditch or the way ahead. She changes down into second gear and creeps along but the gradient is so steep the car stalls. She pulls on the hand break and revs the engine hoping that she’ll manage to follow the curve of the steep bend and not come off the road or, worse, fall over the cliff. On one side there’s a sheer drop down to the sea. On the other a wide expanse of boggy moorland. She can’t see either. There isn’t a house in sight or a single other car out on the road. It must still be another ten miles to Portmagee. She could be stuck for hours. No one knows she’s here so she has no choice but to drive on. Suddenly she feels scared as she edges along the road, trying to follow the left hand verge, telling herself that if she drives slowly nothing much can happen. It’s like being smothered by a great white blanket and she nearly hits a disorientated sheep, which runs off bleating into the fog. Eventually she makes it to the top of the moor where the cloud lifts, and turns down into the little fishing port where she parks outside the pub. It’s taken her more than an hour to do a half-hour journey. Piles of nets and lobster creels sit stacked along the slipway and, ahead, is the new concrete bridge that joins the mainland to Valentia Island. Old fishermen’s cottages, now mostly B&Bs, nestle between gift shops and the two village pubs. Parked on the quay, watching the fishing boats bob in the darkness, she realises how anxious she’s been. She climbs out of the car and makes her way to the first of the pubs. There’s a fire in the grate and a group of men, women and children are standing around a flat-screen TV watching the end of a rugby match. All are dressed in green, white and orange T-shirts. She goes to the bar and orders a glass of white wine and wonders why in Ireland it always comes in little bottles. She can’t see Colm anywhere.