Rainsongs Page 5
Everywhere people are dressed in brand names and designer wear, drinking champagne instead of Guinness or stout. It’s as if the free Irish air would be even more desirable if it were bottled, to mark out those who can afford it from those that can’t. It’s like watching a lottery winner who doesn’t quite know how to spend his sudden windfall. For years this country was scared by poverty and emigration. For an older generation, a new bungalow meant running water and an indoor toilet. Now this conspicuous wealth and rash of unsold holiday homes just seems uncouth, with scant regard paid to the uniqueness of what’s being lost and the destruction of this savage landscape.
Sitting on Martha’s left is a plastic surgeon from Dublin with a winter tan and large sapphire cufflinks at the wrists of his designer suit. He’s just come back from the Seychelles, he tells her, and is planning to open another clinic in Killarney.
It’s mostly boob jobs down here, he says. Or a bit of nip and tuck. On the whole Irish women don’t have big noses. Nose jobs tend to come from Athens, Istanbul and Tel Aviv.
To her right is a man with chiselled features, wearing a crisp white shirt buttoned at the throat. He asks why Martha is here. She realises she’s not sure and mutters something about coming over to sort out her late husband’s affairs.
And you, she asks, deflecting his interest. Are you from these parts?
Sure. I’m a Kerry man born and bred. A landscape gardener. Couldn’t live anywhere else. I’ve tried, mind. But I can’t. Though I’m a fan of English gardens and those English lady gardeners. Hard as nails but magnificent in an emergency. Very practical, very sensible.
He smiles, moving in closer, to reveal a set of even white teeth.
It’s something she remembers from previous visits, just how hard it is to pigeonhole people here. A gardener. Yet his conversation is peppered with references to Yeats and Joyce, the layout of Sissinghurst.
You have to admire her, that Vita Sackville-West, he continues. She may’ve been English but she knew how to make a garden, alright. I also play music. Just for myself, like. I learnt the balalaika in the monastery in Mongolia.
Martha isn’t surprised by this exotic revelation. There’s something restless about her dinner companion. She wonders what it is in the Irish spirit that seeks out this sort of extreme solitude that sent those early monks out to their rocky outcrop on the Skelligs. What demons both he and they were escaping?
As the drink flows, a woman in a sequinned cardigan launches into ‘Danny Boy’. Then someone else sings ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’. Some have lovely voices, while other performances are a triumph of alcohol over talent. As the evening wears on Martha becomes aware of an anti-English sentiment creeping into the proceedings. But no one seems to register her presence in their midst. Anyway, she thinks defensively, her antecedents weren’t even in England at the time of The Troubles, let alone Cromwell. They were having their own problems in some Russian shtetl.
People begin to drift next door. At the far end of the room a piper and fiddler are playing and couples start to dance. Everyone seems to know the steps and tunes from childhood. As she watches, Seamus O’Sullivan makes his way across the floor towards her.
It’s good to see you again after so long, Martha, he says, holding out his hand. I’m very sorry for your troubles. I liked Brendan. We occasionally shared a jar together when he was over. Put the world to rights. It made a change from babies and bunions to have a bit of culture.
Then, before she can object, Sean Kennedy grabs her round the waist and whisks her into the middle of the dancing. Despite his advancing years and ample girth, he’s light on his feet and free with his big meaty hands. On the far sofa she can see Eugene with his blonde companion, sipping whiskey and smoking a large cigar. The reel finishes and, as the dancers catch their breath, the fiddler picks up his guitar. His voice is dark and raw, welling from deep within his chest. It makes her think of the wind whistling in the peat bogs and she’s afraid she will cry.
Then it’s midnight and everyone is kissing and embracing. Sean comes and gives her a hug. Over his shoulder she can see the wife of the pink cashmere man turn away as he reaches for her lips. How she hates New Year. What on earth is she doing here among these people she hardly knows, people who’ve known each other all their lives, who’ve grown up together, gone to school together and married each other’s cousins? But where else should she more rightfully be? She doesn’t want to think of the year ahead. Nor, for that matter, the one after. She wonders where the gardener has gone and goes to look for him but he’s nowhere to be seen. Then, slipping off to find her coat, she leaves without saying goodbye. She’ll drop Eugene a note in the morning.
As she drives back up over the hill clouds race across the face of the moon. The sky is full of stars. She unlocks the door, fills a hot water bottle and climbs into bed. And, as the waves batter against the cliffs below, tries to imagine how she’s going to live the rest of her life
Monday
1
The sky is streaked pink and, across the strait, the islands rise like whales surfacing out of a tin-coloured sea. Apart from the wind catching under the eaves it’s totally quiet. She sits up in bed and looks out of her little window as the light changes from peach, to oyster, to dishwater grey, and wonders what to do with her day. She should go for a walk but needs to finish sorting through Brendan’s things. How little she really knew him. She can barely remember his face. She closes her eyes and tries to recall his high-domed forehead with its receding hairline, the grey eyes creased with laughter lines, his long thin fingers like a pianist’s. But all she can manage is the faded memory of the man she woke beside for more than thirty years.
She picks up his sketchbook. The little drawings and watercolours with their lattice of dry stone walls and jigsaw cliffs executed in loose expressionist brush strokes. He must have climbed down onto the rocks above the swelling surf to get a better view of the islands, which is a surprise, given his fear of heights. She pictures him in his wax jacket and battered hat, gingerly making his way out over the slippery boulders with his sketch book, a tin of water colours stuffed into his pocket. Scrawled in pencil are a series of notes: Mars black, Payne’s grey, Chinese white, and other observed details: yellow-green lichen, blue twine on a gatepost, small weather-beaten stone cross/grey? /ochre? It’s as if he wanted to pin everything down. As though, through these observations, he could escape those moments when his feelings seemed more real than the external world, when everything turned the colour of mud and rain.
She’d always thought of Brendan as essentially urban. His natural habitat was the gallery and library, whether in London or New York. There was something grown-up about cities. They demanded panache and a thick skin. The wild, on the other hand, stripped everything away so all that was left was an essential self. Brendan loved St Ives because he loved the painters associated with it. Being in the city defined who he was. An art dealer and a writer. He relished the endless round of openings and private views. There he bumped into colleagues and exchanged professional chit-chat with curators and journalists over canapés and a glass of Chardonnay, never having to disclose anything much of himself, except an opinion on the recent auction prices achieved by Charles Saatchi as he off-loaded yet another batch of art works onto the market before moving into a new collecting phase. Brendan was never happier than when arranging to meet a friend for dinner at the Groucho or organising a trip to a gallery in New York.
Our lives are so hectic that not to be busy is considered a modern vice, evidence of inadequacy, proof that we’re no longer important. Surplus to requirements. On the way down and out. A diary full of meetings and working lunches emphasises we’re in demand, that we are somebody. And when all that’s stripped away? What’s left except a self that we hardly recognise?
Is that why Brendan came here? To sit on a clifftop and watch the ever-changing skies? To make contact with what he’d lost?
2
They’d intended that summer in the late ’80s, to take a trip out to the Skelligs. For some reason those mysterious rocks had captured Bruno’s imagination. Why had the monks lived in the middle of the sea? What had they eaten? Weren’t they cold? They found a local history book with pictures of the beehive huts that he copied into an exercise book and carefully coloured in. On cloudy days they would stand in the high field trying to get a glimpse of the rocky crags through the mist. When the weather was clear they appeared so close.
If people can swim the Channel could someone swim out to the Skelligs?’
It’s unlikely, she answered. It’s too cold and rough. The currents are treacherous.
Please, please can we go?
If it’s fine tomorrow. But you will have to be up with the lark.
But by the time they went down to the pier to enquire about departure times, the weather had turned.
The last few days of their stay they were trapped indoors. Bruno spent the mornings sitting by the stove cutting out old copies of Irish Country Life: a Lamborghini, a polo pony, a house for sale with a big blue pool in the Bahamas. She watched as he guided his scissors neatly round the shapes, then collaged them into surreal scenarios in a scrap book with the big tube of cow gum. There was no radio, let alone a television. In the evening they played cards and Monopoly, empire building in Pall Mall and Mayfair. Or read aloud. The Hobbit and ‘The Pobble Who Has No Toes’ were favourites. This, for some reason, she always read in an Edinburgh accent, which made Bruno laugh. How she relished those moments. Brendan, bowed over his desk as the evening chilled. Bruno at her feet while she read to him in the firelight. She wanted to hold them fossilised in that amber glow. And, as she bent and brushed Bruno’s hair with her lips, telling him to put away his scissors and glue and go to do his teeth, for it was time for bed, she thought: he will never be this carefree again. Soon it will be over. He will go out into the world and make his own way.
The next day, their final day, a fog came down and settled over the headland.
No chance of the Skelligs today, Bruno, Brendan said, she thought, a little tactlessly.
So, aware of her son’s disappointment, she had promised, as they packed up the car ready to head back towards Rosslare, the ferry and home, that next year they would definitely make the trip. But she knew, somewhere deep inside, that her betrayal—that they’d not gone when she had given her word—would stay with Bruno for the rest of his life.
3
Brendan never mentioned it. Yet as Martha reads through his notebooks she realises that he must have made the trip out to the Skelligs alone. He’d gone from Portmagee, the little fishing village on the other side of the headland where the first telegraphic messages were transmitted across the Atlantic to Newfoundland. In one of the notebooks he’d written:
As we chug out into the open sea there’s quite a swell. We pass the squat Lemon Rock, then the small Skellig. It’s as jagged as a child’s drawing and almost completely white from the gannets that nest there. But our goal is Skellig Saint Michael 7 1/4 miles WNW and a 1/4 mile N in Saint Fionán’s Bay that rises from the deep like a finned sea monster. When we arrive we land with some difficulty because of the swell. As I scramble onto the little pier to start the dangerous climb up the hand-carved steps I realise this place is unique. I’m scared of heights and below the slippery walkway there’s a sheer drop to the Atlantic. There are no handrails and a couple of years ago an American fell to his death. But nothing could have prepared me for the clutch of beehive huts with their corbelled domes clinging to the pinnacle against a duck-egg sky. I’ve seen the Great Wall of China, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul and the Alhambra in Granada but this is one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever visited. You don’t have to be conventionally religious to be moved by this place. It’s holy just because it exists. Not just on the edge of a continent, but on the edge of the human imagination. Each of us needs the chance to rediscover what’s essential, to find a landscape to fit our dreams and disappointments. When there’s nothing left, there’s still the ocean and the sky.
Those early monks, following in the tradition of the desert fathers, believed holiness could only be achieved by withdrawing from the world. In the 6th century this rock was a bolt-hole for those descended, not from Rome, but the Copts. At the time the norm for Irish monasteries was outside the convention later established by the great continental orders such as the Benedictines and Cistercians. No Celtic community consisted of a monastery under a single roof. It was a settlement of separate buildings built around the church. There’s still a tiny windswept graveyard on Skellig Michael where the monks who died are buried, the tombstones worn down to illegibility from the Atlantic storms. The terraces and three staircases from the landing stages were all built by hand. The only tools the monks had were iron hammers and chisels, a crowbar or two, a leather bag and some ropes to form a primitive pulley.
Could it really have been a simple matter of faith, a doctrinal difference between the Celtic and Roman strands of early Christianity over the date of Easter that forced them out into the middle of the Atlantic? Placing themselves in the hands of divine providence, they cast adrift, accepting their fate. The original voyage made, according to legend, by Saint Fionán and his companions, was in the great Irish tradition of ‘peregrination pro Dei amore’ (wandering for the love of God). The purpose was not to proselytise but, as another monk Adomnán claimed when setting sail for Iona, ‘to discover a desert in the pathless sea.’ This was about going into retreat to meditate on and repent of man’s original sin. To embrace a life of penance, hunger and perpetual damp. It made the monks feel as if they were the true disciples of a martyred Christ. Their goal was to trample down pride through submission. To serve the Corpus Christi in the Great Chain of Being. Mediaeval communities mirrored the feudal principal of lord and serf, master and man, husband and wife, parent and child. The whole was greater than any part. This offshoot of Hebraic monotheism included the belief, virtually absent from Old Testament Judaism, of a separate, immaterial and immortal soul. Levantine Gnostic sects expressed contempt for the body. They regarded it as the dungeon of the spirit and a hothouse of vile appetites. Such views left their mark on early Christianity.
It‘s hard for us to understand the medieval mind. The more I read, the more I realise their world view was utterly different to our materialistic one. It was as though the ego hadn’t yet been invented. And if it did make an unwelcome appearance it had to be chastised. Such trials were simply a preparation for death and the afterlife.
It’s uncertain why the monks left the Skellig in the 13th century. Climactic change or the social transformation that began when the Vikings turned up raping and pillaging? Who knows? Luckily I don’t have to be quite as extreme to experience a little introspection. But it’s testing getting away from all the things that buoy up normal daily life. It takes you deep into the essence of yourself which, most of the time, lies shut behind a door marked ‘private’. Of course, if all else fails, there’s always the pub.
Martha is touched by her husband’s disclosures and wishes that they’d been able to share the experience together. But Brendan seems to have needed to go out to the Skelligs alone. To survive, the monks had scaled the rocks—a noose fixed to a pole—to catch puffins and gannets, stuffing them into canvas bags strapped on their backs. They used everything: flesh, feathers, oil and quills. Every bird caught was a dice with death. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine a life of such self-induced privation with its daily diet of obedience and rank sea birds, the unaccompanied chant of male voices. She can picture them riddled with rheumatism, waking to the matins’ bell, their leather sandals slapping over the rocks in the rain-lashed dark as they make their way to the freezing chapel. Half-starved and soaking, how would they have dried their heavy woollen cassocks sodden from the freezing Atlantic spray?
Perhaps the monks hadn’t been so diff
erent to the lighthouse keepers who came later. Men who found sanctuary away from the demands of conventional jobs and society. Men looking for inner peace as they polished the great lamp, trimmed the wick and raked over their scrap of garden to plant a few stunted rows of kale. Were they, too, running from intimacy in order to avoid love’s vulnerability? There would have been no regular letters or newspapers. Only the same waves breaking week after week against the same dreary rock. The sea birds dashed against the lamp in the fierce storms. She isn’t stuck on a rock in the Atlantic but, maybe, her reasons for being here aren’t so very different.
She pulls her fleece over her pyjamas and goes to brush her teeth. How opaque we are to others, she thinks, standing in front of the mirror, her mouth filled with foam. How little we’re able to provide solace to each other in our moments of darkness. No other person can answer our deepest needs. Hadn’t she, too, often wished to escape, maddened by Brendan’s relentless upbeat tone, his refusal to talk about the one thing that hovered between them like a ghost? Then she’d slip out of the house into the anonymity of Islington, past the terraced houses with their terracotta window boxes, and make her way down to the towpath of Regent’s Canal. She felt at ease among the flotsam and jetsam of the city. The alcoholics with their cans of Tennant’s Extra hidden in brown paper bags. The lone fisherman bent over his rod beside a Tupperware box of sandwiches, the skateboarding boys in their back-to-front baseball caps. She’d sit on a bench by the wall covered with graffiti tags and watch the ducks dive for snails and try to get a grip. She avoided the Heath now. There were too many memories. The kites they’d flown. The hot days spent swimming in the ponds or the lido. That special tree with the low spreading branches that he’d loved to climb near the Vale of Health. She can still see him that first time he made it to the top. Triumphant as a mountaineer, waving as if he’d just conquered the world.