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Rainsongs Page 2
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Another glass of wine? he’d say, opening a second bottle, slumped on the sofa in front of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight. Or, have you seen yesterday’s Guardian? Such perfunctory exchanges were all that they could manage. Yet weren’t they simply tokens—proffered, as a colonial explorer might offer suspicious natives worthless glass beads—to prove that the channels of contact, however fragile, remained open?
But what could he have done? Nothing that would have made her feel any better, restored her sanity, erased the realisation when she woke into the drained light of morning from her Prozac-induced sleep that this was, now, her life. That, cry and pray to whom she liked, rail as she might against the gods, she’d have to get up each day, brush her teeth, comb her hair and face this continued, resolute absence.
The fire is dying. She’s too tired and cold to sleep in this damp room surrounded by the ocean and endless night. Had she really needed to come back? To come face to face with what she thought was buried, only to find that like sheep bones submerged in the bog, revealed after heavy rain, her memories are resurfacing.
In Rome they’d stayed up by the Villa Giulia near the British School at Rome. The Villa Giulia was one of her favourite places. An ancient country house full of Etruscan artefacts. In the shuttered afternoon heat she stood in front of the glass cases of granulated gold jewellery and Roman glass, relishing the quiet, as the sun beat down outside. Brendan was attentive, like a small boy trying to get back into his parents’ good books after a serious misdemeanour. They made love in the carved walnut bed of the guest house with an intensity not experienced since their early days. As if touch might somehow erase what they both wanted to forget. So intimacy amounts to this, she thought, as he rinsed shower gel from his pubic hair and she stood naked in front of the sink, cleaning her teeth. Such moments suggested they’d repaired the rent. Or, at least, patched it over. Romantic love didn’t give any clues as to how to deal with things once the whirlwind had passed. But love wasn’t fixed, was it? Like the skies above this Irish cottage it was in a constant state of flux.
They sat on the terrace of a small bar overlooking the Tiber drinking Prosecco, then strolled through the busy streets up to the Basilica Santi Quattro Coronati, as Rome made its passeggiata. Girls in short sun-dresses flaunted tanned legs, while children in carefully-ironed clothes played tag or sat on the church steps eating ice cream. When they reached the Basilica there was no one else around. Bats flitted in and out of the cloisters as the sun disappeared behind the hill and the tall cypresses turned black against a pink sky. Without a word Brendan slipped his arm through hers and she responded by laying her head on his shoulder, breathing in the scent of his newly showered skin.
It was a small enough gesture. But they both knew what it meant.
2
A beam from the lighthouse sweeps though the tiny fish-eye window, momentarily lighting up the room with ghosts. She has no idea what time it is. She pulls up the covers, wishing that she’d made up a proper bed. Wasn’t tragedy supposed to bring people together? Yet even before their lives had been turned inside out like a rubber washing-up glove left on the edge of the sink, Brendan had a tendency to obfuscate. To offer explanations that he thought she wanted to hear rather than the truth. Did all lives run on compromise; on little verities that oiled the wheels? He was charming, of course, got by on his charm; had used it to get into the Courtauld, to woo her father, to build up his art world contacts. But he wore it like a suit of armour. Whether it was a form of emotional cowardice—a way of never making a deep connection, of keeping his options open—she was never sure. He was one of those men who avoided introspection, who preferred to keep things light. There wasn’t any obvious reason for this. He’d had a happy enough childhood. His father, Dermot, left Kerry when he was fifteen. Took the boat across to Haverfordwest like so many of his generation. In London he found a job as a porter at the Dorchester. Good looking, with a quiff of raven hair, he had no difficulty getting on and landing an advantageous marriage.
Brendan’s maternal grandparents ran a small hotel in Dorset. They were looking for a new manager when Dermot, tired of London, applied for the post and fell in love with their daughter, Rose. My English Rose, he teased her. With her freckled skin and string of seed pearls, she embodied a certain kind of Englishness he thought he wanted. When her parents retired, he and Rose took over the hotel and put in a golf course. In his Val Doonican sweaters, Dermot moved effortlessly among the guests with his soft-spoken charm. There were golf tournaments and the hotel was filled with international stars: Roberto De Vicenzo in his checked trousers and white peaked cap, Dick Mayer who’d won the US Open in 1957. Mayer loved England and came every summer with his wife and girls. Brendan and his younger brother Michael earned pocket money fetching balls from the rough and caddying. The hotel formed the backdrop to their childhood. They played crazy golf with accountants from Croydon, a dentist and his children from Surbiton. Rode their bikes up and down the laurel-fringed drive, and built camps in the sand dunes. And both boys were strong swimmers with that natural ease of children who grew up by the sea.
They also played cricket for their local team. While Rose, in her summer prints, a pastel cardigan draped over her shoulders, made sandwiches and manned the tea urn in the marquee up in the high field. It was as if she couldn’t quite believe, with her freshly-permed hair and Coty-red lips, that she was grown up enough to have two big sons. Both boys were sent to Sherborne and lost their Irish accents. For Dermot being able to educate his sons privately was a source of pride. Though why he didn’t chose Downside or Ampleforth, one of the old Catholic schools was, as Brendan always said, a bit of a mystery. In a boys’ world of bullying and buggery, as he so graphically put it, you didn’t want to sound like a Paddy.
To his surprise he got a place at the Courtauld. Art History was an unlikely subject. But a summer hitchhiking round Italy at seventeen introduced him to the Quattrocento and to Gloria, a beautiful museum curator in her thirties, to whom he lost his virginity. It was Gloria who introduced him to Uccello and Piero Della Francesca. To gnocchi and afternoon sex.
Brendan, you have to appreciate Della Francesca’s calm, the utter clarity and austerity of his sentiment, she insisted in her heavily-accented vowels, as the shutters cast zebra stripes across her voluptuous body, straddled above his boyish frame. Later, he saw how Piero’s geometric structures and flat earthy colours made perfect sense in terms of the modern painters he grew to love.
How different it had been from her own upbringing, she thinks, as the wind rattles the eaves. The only child of elderly parents her predominant memory of Maresfield Gardens, where the stained glass panels on the front door bled coloured light onto the black and white hall tiles, was of quiet and order. It wasn’t a house for a child. The walls were covered in paintings and prints that, as a small girl, she took for granted. A Cézanne lithograph, a little Pissarro oil of an apple orchard, a Ben Nicholson constructed from white and blue cardboard squares, like a window opening onto the sea. Antique glass lamps emitted a rosy glow over her mother’s discarded library book among the plump cushions on the tasselled sofa. And on the mantelpiece a black marble clock, framed by a pair of gilded fauns, ticked into the silence while, in the far corner, stood a baby-grand that nobody played. It had come from Zurich with her grandfather. A photograph of him in a feathered trilby, standing amid a meadow of wild flowers in front of the Matterhorn, sat in a silver frame on the lid next to the black and white one of her parents’ wedding. Her mother in a trim war-time suit holding a bunch of freesias. Her father in his RAF uniform, looking like a boy, despite his neat moustache. She looked like her mother. Pretty, in a transparent sort of way, as if taking up too much space in the world.
But her abiding memory of that house was of the silence that descended when her mother was having ‘a lie down’. The creak of the floorboards, the blue Milk of Magnesia bottle and tin of Epsom salts glimpsed on the bedside table through the h
alf-open door as she crept across the dark landing. She tried to be quiet but sometimes her mother would call out and she’d turn on the stair to see her lying on the mahogany bed beneath the satin eiderdown, her face turned to the trellis of pink cabbage roses on the wall. Next day, everything would be back to normal. No one would mention that her mother had been indisposed. She’d find her on the phone in the kitchen talking to the grocer, or bent over the wicker laundry basket sorting her father’s striped shirts.
Her mother had been born just below the equator in a country where the map was still pink. There, beyond the green gardens of The English Club, Mombasa broke into a maze of narrow streets, where hidden worlds lurked behind carved doorways. Nyerere Avenue, Haile Selassie Road. The names were a litany to her mother’s mysterious colonial childhood.
She pulls the cover up under her chin. Alone on the windswept headland surrounded by miles of cold sea, the past is closing in. What if she’s suddenly taken ill? Who could she call, who would she tell?
3
When Brendan was eleven, Dermot brought him and Michael back to Kerry to visit their grandfather. Despite the Kwells, both boys were sick on the ferry. For the rest of his life Brendan only had to smell that mixture of ozone and diesel to feel the bile rise in his stomach. The drive from Dublin to Killarney took hours, slowed by a shambling horse and cart, and a rickety bus belching fumes. When they reached the whitewashed cottage on the edge of the Atlantic there wasn’t even an indoor lavatory.
You know, boys, Cromwell was said to have sent the rebels to Kerry as an alternative to going to hell, Dermot joked as they sat huddled in a heavy downpour behind the misted windows of their Ford Prefect, a thermos of milky tea and their fish-paste sandwiches balanced on their knees.
When I was young most of the families here still spoke Irish. But there wasn’t any work. Look at me now. If I hadn’t gone to England I’d never have met your mother. And then where would you two have been, he winked. I was hardly older than you when I left.
They spent the summer roaming the cliffs and helping their grandfather carry the chipped enamel pail up to the cattle on the far ridge, dug potatoes, separating the big from the small. On wet days, when the badly-drained field was full of sticky black clay, there was half an acre of mud stuck to their boots as they tramped back to the cottage.
It was Brendan who inherited the place. It wasn’t much use to Michael settled in Canberra with a wife and two girls. Apart from those childhood holidays, Ireland didn’t figure much in his life. At the Courtauld he became interested in the St Ives group, while writing his MA thesis, and had contacted her father to ask if he’d known the painter Peter Lanyon.
Yes, her father wrote back. They were in the RAF together. He’d also met Naum Gabo once, and Barbara and Ben Nicholson on a couple of occasions in Cornwall.
Then, one April morning, Brendan just turned up at the gallery unannounced and, by mid-afternoon, her father had offered him a job.
It’s a risk, I know. But we need someone younger, someone who’ll keep up with what’s happening in New York. The art world’s changing, he announced to her tight-lipped mother over their Dover sole. He seems a bright young man. Anyway, initially, it’s only for six months.
Her father welcomed Brendan like the son Martha was sure he’d always wanted. The family gallery had been started by her grandfather in Zurich. Then, as Hitler flexed his muscles, he moved to Hampstead and opened the gallery in Cork Street. After the war her father looked after the artists and clients. Then, in the ’60s, as her grandfather became crippled with arthritis, he took over completely, moving away from French and continental art to specialise in modern British painters. He’d met Peter Lanyon in flying school. They remained friends after the war and Martha can still remember, as a small girl, being driven down those winding Cornish lanes to visit him. Even then she was taken by his good looks and strange aerial paintings.
Perhaps that’s why she studied drama. A tentative bid to strike out on her own. For a while she even considered the stage but never had enough confidence to stand out in the limelight. How, as a shy bookish girl, had she ever imagined becoming an actress? Friends at university thought her life bohemian.
You’re so lucky, Martha, to have a father who’s an art dealer. Mine’s just a boring old dentist. Did he really meet Braque?
She loved her father, of course, but in that very grown-up Hampstead house, there was always a distance.
And her mother? Well, for her mother she knew that she never quite came up to scratch. She wasn’t sure that her mother was even aware what she was studying at Manchester. As far as she was concerned it was neither Oxford nor Cambridge.
The first evening Brendan came to dinner with her parents he seemed, with his shoulder length hair and floral shirt, the epitome of Carnaby Street cool. Seven years older she thought, when he asked her to accompany him to a Francis Bacon exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, that he was just ingratiating himself with his new employer’s daughter. The following week they went to see Belle du Jour and in the smoky darkness of the Odeon she was very aware of his long fingers resting on his worn corduroy knee just inches from hers. Then, after a drink in The French House in Dean Street, she went back to his room off Gordon Square and lost her virginity. That she’d got through university with it intact was always a bit of an embarrassment. Graham, whom she dated during her first two terms, persistently tried to relieve her of it. Why did she resist? It was ‘the Summer of Love’. Her skirts were high, her hair long and the Beatles more famous than Jesus. Yet she felt weighed down, by what? Some censorious maternal voice.
Her involvement with Brendan began around the same time that she started to teach. For years she dreamt that she was standing in front of a class and had forgotten what she was talking about. There’d be giggling and whispering, the banging of desk lids. Then she’d wake, her pulse racing, fearing that she’d finally been rumbled. Of course, it never happened. But in her heart she knew it might. But as the day wore on she forgot her night-time fears and rose to the challenge of encouraging children, who’d never been inside a theatre to play Oberon and Titania.
4
Martha you can’t believe how beautiful it is, Brendan enthused as he put down the phone to the solicitor. We have to go. The cottage is right on the edge of the Atlantic, as far west as you can go without falling off Europe. From the door you can see across the bay to the Béarra peninsula and, on a clear day, as far as Waterville and the MacGillicuddy’s Reeks. There’s nothing except gorse, rocks and sheep. It’s like being on the edge of the world. And we can take a trip out to the Skelligs. They’re these extraordinary rocks in the middle of the Atlantic. In the 6th century they were settled by monks. It’s unbelievable that anyone should have lived there, given the weather. It’s said the monks were descended from the desert fathers, you know, like that Simon-what’s-his-name who sat on a pillar for thirty years near Antioch. The boats only go out for a few weeks in the summer, the currents are so strong. But it should be ok in August. The cottage is pretty basic but you’ll love it. I know you will. And so will Bruno.
Brendan’s death was sudden and unexpected. She wasn’t prepared for it and neither was he. Maybe that’s how death always happens. In the middle of an unfinished life. He was putting together his new book working, this time, with a young editor, Jonathan Chambers. Then one Sunday morning, after walking to the corner shop to buy the papers, he complained of pins and needles in his left arm.
I think we should call the doctor, she insisted, as beads of sweat broke out across his ashen face.
Don’t fuss, Martha, I just need to do more exercise and lose that stone. I’m not bloody ninety.
But by the evening he was in intensive care. And by midnight she had lost him.
There were no last words. No catharsis or setting straight the ledger. He simply collapsed and didn’t regain consciousness. She’d forgotten how prosaic death was as she sat
in the small recovery room off the main ward, staring blankly at a Samaritans poster, preparing to go home without him.
The following weeks were spent in limbo. She stood in the middle of the living room for hours without moving, listening to the rain outside, contemplating her options—suicide, running away, taking to drink? She couldn’t stay in the flat, so drove down to Brighton to be with her old friend, Lindsay. They regularly exchanged Christmas cards, always promising that this year they’d definitely meet up. Maybe a concert at the Festival Hall or a Chinese in Soho? When she rang, Lindsay was kind.
How terrible—Brendan was no age. Of course Martha must stay as long as she liked.
She wandered along the esplanade, watching the foreign language students sitting on the sea wall eating fish and chips. Poked around the antique shops in The Lanes and visited the Pavilion with its exotic Moorish domes, while her friend counselled the errant teenagers of the city. In the evening they drank too much Merlot, so that she was unable to sleep in the unfamiliar bed and was woken by troubling dreams. After three days she left.
Back in Myddleton Square she sorted through Brendan’s study. The ash trays were still full of stale cigarette stubs. He never let the cleaner in in case she moved things. He’d endlessly promised to give up smoking and managed to confine it to his study so the place smelt like an old-fashioned pub. She went through his papers. His notes from university. The photos of his summer hitchhiking round Italy when he was seventeen. How skinny he was then, with his unruly, shoulder length hair and his arm around a voluptuous girl in white sunglasses whom, Martha presumed, must be Gloria. As she put faded pants and T-shirts in a black bin bag for Oxfam, she wondered why Brendan had so many odd socks. How did she put matching pairs in the wash only to end up with a single one at the end of a cycle? Folding the old grey cashmere he wore when writing, she buried her face in his fugitive smell and wept.