On Canaan's Side Page 2

  Discretion.

  *

  When he was gone I took down the book he had given me years before. I had never read it, as indeed he had predicted the day he gave it to me. He had been coming up my lane, he had said, after a long walk by the sea, the beach in a great shroud of fog, just the way he liked it. He had seen a little wren going in and out of a hole in the old roadway wall. Stretching away from it, he said, was the vast potato field. Stretching the other way, the great series of dunes and saltwater canals. Above this tiny bird was the colossal, clearing sky of the Hamptons, the fog being dispersed by the huge engines of the sunlight. This, he had thought, was a bird that didn’t know how small it was, that existed in an epic landscape, and believed itself to have the dimensions of a hero. This was a bird, he thought, that only read epics. And for some reason, best known to himself, whether he associated me with that bird, I don’t know, or because I merely lived next to it, that very same afternoon he had decided to bring me a gift, a red-leather-bound volume of Pope’s Homer.

  ‘You may read it, or not read it, that is not part of our contract.’

  The contract he referred to, I believe, was the contract of friendship.

  I smoothed the beautiful leather under my hand:

  Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring

  Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess, sing!

  The light sat on the myriad cobbles of the parade ground as if there were a bright penny balanced on each one. I was standing with my sisters and brother in a shock of vaguely made-up dresses and a slight stab at male grandeur. Our mother was dead my whole life and there was only my father’s hand and eye to manage these dark matters. It was I think the day my father was made chief superintendent, and we had moved that morning into our new quarters in Dublin Castle, because we were to be denizens of that place. It was a lovely square flower-pink house and I was still so young that I had spent the morning showing my dolls the rooms. But I don’t quite know what age I was. My brother Willie seems young enough too in my mind’s eye, so it was certainly before the Great War. But all that, whenever it was, before and after, was nothing to the emotion that filled me at the sight of my father in his new dress uniform. There was no guesswork in that. The commissioner, dressed as my father said ‘in a London suit of the finest sort’, had come over from said London and was formally bestowing on my father, my own father, the signs and formulas of his new condition. I know now he was to lead the B division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, and had risen now as high as he could ever expect, after thirty years in the police. No Wicklow sunrise over Keadeen Mountain, where our cousins and aunts and uncles still lived, could have matched the brightness, the shavenness and utmost delight in his face. It was the same look I saw every evening I came home from school, and I ran into his arms, and he kissed me, and said, ‘If I didn’t have your kiss I might never come home’, but magnified a thousand times. His large frame that would have thrown any tug-of-war team into despair at the sight of it, if it were coming to oppose them, was bound up in a black uniform with rushing darts of what looked like silver to me on the cuffs, but may only have been glistening white braid. His hat had a white feather that streamed in the solemn castle wind. His height made the commissioner, splendid enough but in his mere civilian suit, look sketchy and oddly fearful, as if my father might somehow engulf him on a whim of strength. The commissioner spoke for a few moments, and all the ranked constables and sergeants, themselves as black as burnt sticks, every one of them six foot tall and more, made a strange murmur of approval, as sweet to my father as the rush of the salt sea on the Shelly Banks was to me. The small delicate tide of friendship, shoaling against my father’s bursting face, bursting with pride and certainty.

  ‘A day for Cissie, a day for Cissie to see,’ he had said to me, as he dressed me a few hours previously. This mysterious and unknown Cissie was my mother, whom my father rarely invoked. But it was the sort of day when a widower misses the excited eyes of his lost wife watching him. My father, who had learned much arcane expertise as a father, scorning at every turn any maiden aunt offered to him from Wicklow, smoothed out the sash on my dress with his big cold hand, and went round behind me and hunkered down, first tugging at the top of his trouser legs to prevent creases and stretching – one of the thousand possibilities in his life he said ‘would never do’ – and with just the right amount of care and the right amount of speed, tied my bow.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘No king’s child could be better kitted out, and no king could be better pleased with his daughter.’

  Then he took me in his arms, myself a little silken girl, and squeezed me so that just for a moment the small cage of my chest was without a breath, and glad I was to be breathless, and he put his large moist mouth to my cheek and kissed me with enormous precision. I did not need to be told what the delicate tip of an elephant’s trunk felt like, as it ate its stale loaves in the Dublin zoo, because I was sure and certain it felt like my father’s mouth.

  ‘There now, there now, and wouldn’t she have delighted to see you, Lilly, wouldn’t she though? She would.’

  This little conversation with himself, though seemingly addressed to me, needed no answer since he had just supplied it himself.

  Now we were out on the parade ground and our father had been taken from us, so that things could be said to him, and his men beam their approval at him. But soon we would go home to our new house, and my sisters Annie and Maud would stoke up the challenging new range, and we might have God knows what, tea, and I knew in the drip-press Annie already had a bowl of bun-mix curing, and she would set that out dollop by dollop into paper cups, and they wouldn’t be long plumping out in the range.

  So far so good, so far so good, but then I come in my head to the strange souring of that memory, and I am wondering to this day if I really did see what I think I saw. Not having clapped eyes on Annie or Maud for a whole long lifetime, and indeed both of them dead, Maud a long long time, I could not ever ask them. I wonder is it mentioned or described in any annal of the Dublin police, I suppose not, because who is there left on the earth to read of the doings of the DMP? I can imagine all the books, all the daybooks and the night sergeant’s ledgers, the infinite and infinitely growing sheaves of reports and court-papers and the like, put into some cellar like the very coffins of vampires, and left there for the million pages to soften and melt together, so that not even the eyes of angels could turn them.

  We returned to our splendid house. What I would make of it now with my grown old eyes I do not know, but its big front door, its five high windows, excited me because it looked like a place where lovely things would happen, my sisters spoil me, while my brother tramped in and out, glowering and happy in the same breath, and my father continue to master the tying of sashes and the complimenting of daughters. The photographer, who had already done his work on the parade ground, had followed us over, and my father was to be photographed standing now in the frame of his front door, and while the photographer adjusted his dials and prepared to throw the black cloth over his head, my father stood there, fidgeting, I thought, which I knew was a minor crime in this life, and looking to me differently from on the parade ground, there was an odd look in his face, not fear, but something close to it, a little traipsing leak of anxiety that I had never detected before. He was thinking his thoughts and what they were no child was ever to know I suppose.

  Big as he was, and he was a man that ate four pounds of meat a day, the door was three times his width. It was open, and I could see the black darkness within, and it amused me that the last sunlight of that day might quite soon inch its way along our red-bricked wall and peer ever so briefly into the house, like a person with a candle. The sun currently sat on the extravagant roofs of the Chapel Royal, where all the flags of the viceroys hung, but not a place we would go into much, as Catholics. There was a little clasp of soldiers coming up from the Little Ship Street gates, they had just changed the guard there I am sure, and they were moving along s
martly enough, but at the same time chatting and laughing, their guns carefully laid to their shoulders. Now and then the laughter grew, and the youthful noise clattered along the cobbled way, and climbed the low wall into the stable yards, making I was sure the lovely horses stir in their solitudes.

  My father stood on the top step. Now the photographer was ready.

  ‘A few minutes, sir, now, do not stir yourself. Now, sir, a good smile for me, sir, please.’

  And my father, much to my surprise, obliged this person, a rangy long fellow in a suit with shiny leather patches on his knees and elbows, no doubt related to his work, with as much kneeling and leaning involved as the life of a nun or a cornerboy, and, his boots planted firmly, his feather stilled now in the lee of the house, the little raggle-taggle of soldiers just passing, beamed out a smile as good as the Wicklow lighthouse when at last it turns in its great arc towards you. What use was the lighthouse’s light to those on land, I never knew, giving light to heather and fields, but really desiring to put that moon path of silver light along the tundras and swells of the Wicklow sea. What use was the lighthouse’s light? I was thinking, a child’s thought, and curious that I remember it, but that is partly because as I write I see it again, I am that girl again, Lilly Dunne herself, before everything, in my full reign as it were as a little girl, Queen Lilly herself, and my father is my father again, though dust he is now. I do not even know precisely where that resplendent man is buried, God forgive me, and when he died I was not told of the fact, or did not receive news of it, for seven years, for seven years my father lay dead in an unknown yard, and still he lies there, but at this moment, this long-fled moment in that long-fled life, with his uncharacteristically unsure face, beaming his smile, the photographer under his cloth, the soldiers passing respectfully enough, but not entirely so, because this was mere police business, and they were soldiers, mighty soldiers, in the shadows of the hall I saw something. And just at that second the last finger of sunlight that I had been anticipating touched into the hall also, and gave a grave little light there, as if a deep well with a last glistening coin of water far below, and there loomed up from the shadows into the explaining sunlight a long brown creature, at first on all fours, and then when it saw my father’s back, reared up, and most foully roared out, roared out like a great steam engine emitting steam, making my father spin round in adroit terror on his substantial feet, and stand there entirely frozen, the soldiers also frozen, but then in a moment one of them rushed forward and levelled his rifle, and fired it just by my right ear, an enormous and bewildering sound that I had never, in my years as a policeman’s daughter, heard, the celestial effort it requires to force a lump of lead from a barrel, and in the instant of the bullet a sudden poppy of blood appeared on the bear’s face, just above the nose, and in the same instant I saw that from the huge soft nose, through a hole in it, a hole that shouldn’t have been there it seemed to me, hung a few feet of chain, jangling about, and the bear, because it was a bear, reared up further, in violent pain, his last pain on this earth, and fell full length out onto the top of the granite steps, hitting the stone with a soft bang, whoof, and my father seemed to bend at the knees just slightly, as if poised to leap away now, and throw himself to safety among us, but strangely he didn’t leap, he seemed to fix there with bended knees, gazing and gazing at the dead bear, and it was a child’s eye that saw it, and I hoped, I hoped and prayed no one else did, but the beautiful creases and the excellent material of his dress trousers began to darken at the crotch now with piss.

  Quite changed and different we sat all together that evening in our new parlour, children in unnatural but seemingly unbreakable silence, eating a sombre tea, Annie’s bun-mix undisturbed in the drip-press, and Annie looking every few seconds at her father, in his nightdress and dressing-gown, his serious-looking slippers like the bellies of seals, Maud, who took small things badly, now crying small tears in a corner, all our things still unpacked in tea-cases, left where the recruits had put them that morning, all the tune gone out of the whistle of life, on that day of days, long awaited, long worked for by my father, his long beat as a policeman, Dalkey, Store Street, Kingstown and now the castle, all our dwellings along the way, most especially Polly Villa in Dalkey where my head first cleared and I knew I was alive, and loved, all the story of those places, chapter by chapter, leading to this moment of the strangest humiliation.

  At length, as a bell somewhere in the castle buildings marked some forgotten hour, making the many stone statues briefly jump, and I jumped with them, a man in the uniform of an inspector came in to us, and spoke quietly to my father, who this once did not get up, and did not seem to have any orders to give back. My father only nodded his head, quietly receiving whatever information he was being given, and the inspector nodded his head, and said something I didn’t catch, but knew from the tone that it was a pleasantry, and how relieved I was to see my father’s face lift up to him, and offer a halfpence of laughter back. Then he laughed a little more, and then Annie began to laugh, and the inspector laughed, maybe greatly chuffed to have his remark so universally well received. But I did not laugh, because I saw still in my father’s eyes those tiny hunting dogs of sorrow, moving across that dark terrain.

  Next morning early at breakfast my father was recovered enough to tell us what the inspector had whispered to him. Some men unknown had come in by the gate and steps that led down into the police headquarters at the back of our house, though how the gate had been unlocked inside was a mystery, unless it was by a friendly hand, again unknown, and had led in by the chain in his nose a dancing bear, belonging to some travelling huckster, now identified, who had wept at the news of the death of his stolen bear, though whether because of the loss of his livelihood in hard times or from affection for the bear my father could not say, but at any rate they had led the bear stealthily in, and down the mossy steps, and into our house from the rear, and let the animal loose into the hall to cause grief to my father in his moment of great triumph.

  ‘You may take some comfort, Jim,’ he had said, ‘from the fact that the teeth of a dancing bear are knocked out when he’s a cub, and his claws are drawn from his paws – though a blow from one of them might have made you stand up straight right enough.’

  And it was only many weeks later that these men were found, and identified as members of the new civilian army, the citizen army of Larkin himself, who my father had arrested in Sackville Street some while before in the great agitation and turmoil of the Lock-out. And I do not think, though at the head of his profession now as he was, did he ever quite get away from that moment, nor ever quite clear the new motes and hounds of sorrow from his eyes.

  Third Day without Bill

  Mrs Wolohan very kindly telephoned me this morning but was obliged to leave a message on the machine, which I know she dislikes. I went out early, having experienced a strong desire suddenly to stand and look at the sea. It is a long long walk down the sea lane, and getting longer, it felt like. But I was very content to reach the shore and gaze upon it. There is such solace in the mere sight of the water. It clothes us delicately in its blowing salt and scent, gossamer items that medicate the poor soul. Oh yes I am thinking the human soul is a very slight thing, and not much evolution has gone into it I fear. It is a vague slight notion with not even a proper niche in the body. And yet is the only thing we have that God will measure.

  Having stood there, and having thought these useless thoughts, I traipsed back the way I had come, at least teasing a little heat into my bones from the exertion. Then I came into my wooden hallway and saw the light flashing on the answering machine. And it was Mrs Wolohan’s welcome voice. ‘Oh, Lilly,’ she began, as she always does, with everyone, Oh Henry, Oh Whosoever she has rung, ‘I am just ringing to let you know I am thinking of you. I will come over later with strawberries. They are really lovely strawberries and I will bring them over in a little while. I just have to do something with the dog.’ Then she hung up. Very abruptly some might sa
y, but not I, who know her so well, or flatter myself that I do. I know my Mrs Wolohan, and I have no argument with her. Years ago when I married Joe Kinderman, and I asked the priest in Cleveland, Catholic of course, if there might be an objection to me marrying someone of origins so vague he didn’t know his own religion – Joe thought or said he was Jewish, but Joe was not Jewish – and not against taking the religion of his new wife, the priest, Fr Scully, said the prospect was ‘unobjectionable’. And I think that is a fine word, and I have often applied it in life, as a sort of high compliment.

  Mrs Wolohan. Unobjectionable. Who nursed her husband through his great illness, and buried him at last in the certitude that she had gone the last yard for him. Now there is no one on earth more lonesome than she, I do think, despite her wealth and her infinite busyness. Her capacity for survival is infinite, and you might supply a church with the stations of her life, and draw tears from the observation of it. She has allowed me to live here for twenty years, an expense I am sure she did not entirely agree to undertake, when she said she ‘found a little house’ for me. She said recently, when I mentioned this, that ‘the quality of your baking’ made it an absolute duty and necessity. She said it with her usual lightness, and she delighted me in the saying, even though it is of course twenty years since I baked for her with all the old passion of my kitchen self of those days. There is a way right enough to make a fairy cake that is not just about the simplicity of making them. A child of five can make them. But then, another ingredient can slip in all unexpected and the cook herself unaware – a sense of her own mother’s baking, or in my case, the fearsome, fiery activity around the pot oven in the yard of an Irish cottage, when you see your aunty hovering with a tray of raw cakes, trying to get them under the lid of the pot-oven before the rain pelting down melts them, and all the care needed to make sure that not a speck of the blackened lid touched them. Something of that great dance may have got into me, right enough, I hope so. It is not for me to say.