He is going to hear Roger Casement speak, he tells his wife. The name echoes strangely round the walls, and seems to carry to the palms outside. And why do you want to know, she asks him, about rubber and blacks? Mr Casement is speaking about the war, he tells her, against the war. She can only assent.
They meet in the empty station and travel up together, shocked by the sight of each other against a background of trains, dining cars and passing fields. They realise how used they are to sea, sand and deckchairs. As if it is not they who are travelling, their persons seem to leave them and each gesture and word is looked down on from above, by both of them, from that plane where their meetings began. They arrive in London and book a room in the least shabby of the hotels around St Pancras. His London is different to hers, he realises. She is a stranger like him, but a native stranger to her own capital. They walk together to his bank in Regent Street, where they withdraw the amount she needs. He wants to accompany her then but she is withdrawn and evasive. She arranges instead a time and place where she can meet him in the evening. He watches her fawn coat, barely visible in the crush of the upper deck of a tramcar. He walks from Regent Street through a succession of squares, streets and circuses towards the club in Bloomsbury where the Casement meeting is. The sunlight glances off the fringes of the lintels, bleaching all the roofs. He arrives there to find he is an hour early and so decides to dine. He orders all four courses to while away the hour but barely touches any of them. He has no appetite for food, the word love courses through his mind like a cold wind, he sees her fawn coat on the tramcar, he sees the jug and enamel bowl beside his wife’s bed. He is finishing his coffee when he hears a commotion outside and sees through the glass-panelled doors a group of men arguing with a police inspector. They have Irish accents and one of them, whom he thinks he recognises, could be the Member of Parliament for West Mayo. The commotion increases and blows are exchanged and suddenly there is a phalanx of policemen and between them is being escorted a thin man in a tweed suit with the air of a country gentleman but with a black beard, an incredibly ravaged face and burning, melancholy eyes. The man walks quietly, puts up no resistance and passes, with his escort, out of Michael’s sight. He finishes his coffee, watching the arguing groups, their anger subsiding gradually now that the cause of it has gone. Is that the Casement, he wonders, who toppled Leopold of Belgium? He feels he should join that group outside but he cannot summon up the energy. He sits and watches as they disappear one by one and as the last words trail off. Then he pays his bill and rises, walks through the glass door and sees in the hallway that the notice for the meeting has been written over in a scrawled hand: ‘Cancelled’. He passes into the street.
He spent the afternoon in a moving-picture palace. He remembered nothing of the story but the fact that it switched rapidly from dining-room to bedroom to garden and back. He thought of how depth and movement could be caught on a square of white. He thought of the canvas hut and the hotel bedroom, all pretence of distance between them abolished, and of the death of time.
Some years later he would see an ingenious set constructed by an American on the Abbey stage for a play in which his wife would be performing. It would be the sole performance of hers he had attended since their marriage and the last he would ever attend. The set would be built on a circular rostrum, like a merry-go-round, with a representation of the interior of a peasant cottage on one side and the Lord Viceroy’s drawing-room on the other. He would watch from the back row during rehearsals, his wife standing in a shawl with a bunch of flowers by the door of the peasant cottage. And then, in a sudden transformation which always amazed him, the set would slowly slide, the cabin disappearing to be gradually replaced with the Viceroy’s room, the ball-and-claw tables, the sumptuous armchairs and the rattling cabinet of drinks. And there, behind the cabinet, a little in the shade, but coming more and more into the footlights as the set righted itself would be his wife, whom at that moment he loved, in a gown of lace and black satin, holding the stem of a wine glass. And he would be reminded of both his other rooms, how many years ago he can’t remember, of the two people who inhabited them, while he would watch his wife walk down from the set to discuss some obscure point of stage craft with the American designer, while he would look at his child who stood before the proscenium arch, passing her hand back and forwards in front of the footlights, disturbing the dust that gathered there like diamonds. He would wonder what had happened to his other room, the canvas room, to the girl who inhabited it. He would realise that both rooms were in the end his creation. Within several days he would be shot and these memories would die with him, he having left to his daughter just his love of blonde hair, his sense of the other side of things and sense of coincidence, the cumulative history of her conception and birth.
But on the Thirty-First of January 1915 he walks back to the St Pancras hotel to find June lying on the small bed, a blanket pulled over her and her cardboard case on the ground beneath it. She is paler than he has ever seen her. She doesn’t look up when he comes in, her eyes are staring at the ceiling. Did you see the doctor? he asks her. Yes, she answers and he knows something is wrong by the sound of her voice. He sits on the bed beside her and he finds that the blanket is wet around her thighs. He pulls the blanket back and finds that it and the sheets are sodden with blood. Don’t worry, she tells him, there is always blood afterwards, less this time than the last. He goes to ring the maidservant but she stops him, tells him it will cause trouble, everything will be over by morning. What will be over? he asks her. Don’t you know what? she replies. He says nothing, but passes his hand over her face, her breasts, her stomach under the wet blanket until he sees she is asleep. Then he sits by the window looking at the dark square, turning to look at her whenever she breathes heavily. When morning comes and the shapes of the square have emerged from the mist he turns once more and sees she is awake and looking at him, but with sleep still behind her eyes. It’s over now, she says. You’d better go. And you? he asks. She shakes her head. I will stay here, she says. With friends. He goes to the bed and kisses her once and her mouth responds but her eyes close suddenly, as if their opening had been simply a dream.
On the train back he thinks of nothing but the passing fields. At the station there is a maid, who tells him his wife is in labour. And the child is born with him watching, holding the curved jug above the enamel basin which is swimming with blood and water, from which the midwife wrings towels, continually.
7
SO RENE WAS born on the First of February 1915, St Brigit’s day, across from the promenade which would have been by then quite empty of umbrellas.
‘BUT WHY CALL her Brigit when the whole point of their stay there was to hide the fact? Una reached Dublin three months later and even then she claimed the child was premature. Which was how the myth grew up of Rene’s extraordinary eyes and hair, her miraculous maturity. The child they saw in that station, whom Una claimed was at the most two weeks old was in fact a three-month-old bundle of vitality. I would say she was quite a tender mite, a fragile copy of the father, with blue eyes and hair that even at that age showed its blondness. No wonder they were all amazed by this two-week-old marvel with a straight, intelligent stare and hair that didn’t stick to its crown like some black secretion but stood up, half-blonde, and even dared to curl. For her first few months she was a source of constant amazement among all those who saw her, a disjointed sense of awe and misapprehension was foisted on her which was fed of course by her mother, terrified that they would discover that this wonder of hers had been conceived out of wedlock, maybe in an Amiens Street hotel after a Conradh na Gaeilge meeting. I discovered this later through a First Communion form and a senile nun who didn’t notice any difference. I mean, beautiful as it is to be born on St Brigit’s day, the advantages are more than outweighed by the stain of illegitimacy. Which is why they stayed in England in the first place, why they took three months to travel