STANDING IN THE corridor of glass with the escaping steam behind him, holding the head of the wickerwork basket and his wife still half-hidden in the steam, would he have shown the germ of the person he would later become and if he did would anyone have noticed? The knot of family, cousins, friends and half-friends, they stood beyond the steam waiting for it to clear. He watched their shapes emerge, moving to embrace him.
The steam died round his boots and he carried the basket behind her. They seemed like any couple. There would have been a passing sweetness in being home, greater than their differences. He quickly ensconced himself in his father’s legal practice and helped to make it one of the leading firms in the city.
And she, Lili, if I have heard you correctly, began again where she had left off and rose to become the star of a new style of theatre, peasant in emphasis, nationalist in theme. She resumed her Irish classes and acquired an enviable blas. Her hair, which was of that arresting blonde shade that people would later remark on in her daughter, she dyed black. The eulogies to her talents in the papers of the time (with the exception of the Irish Times, which was Unionist in politics) are so frequent that they are hardly worth quoting. Suffice it to say that the qualities critics found to praise in her were sociological rather than aesthetic. She was praised for her ‘modesty of bearing’, her ‘passion of utterance’, but most of all for an elusive quality which was referred to variously as her ‘Irishness’, her ‘Gaelic splendour’, her ‘purity of soul’, a quality which, the Freeman’s Journal claimed, was ‘representative of what is best in Irish Woman-hood’. And thus, in one of those qualitative confusions which are perhaps inevitable in an emergent drama, not to mention an emergent nation, her public praised her as if she were the part itself.
8
SHE IS SEEN in frieze, as it were, on an impromptu stage in what looks like a drawing-room with elegant French windows. She is holding a spear and she has her head thrown back, her marvellous hair bound by what seems to be a leather cord. There are two youths on either side of her, dressed in pleated skirts which could be Grecian but for the elaborate Celtic signs emblazoned on them. And all three are staring towards what must be the cowled head of a photographer.
SHE IS IN a peasant shawl, with a flat behind her depicting the gable end of a thatched cottage. The drawing-room is larger and more sumptuous and the flats are bounded by a heavy brocade curtain, covering, I have no doubt, a set of even more splendid French windows. Her head is raised and her eyes are blazing with a kind of posed defiance. To her left is a figure with a grotesque false paunch and a large top hat bearing the legend ‘John Bull’. This figure is glowering, over her shoulders, towards an equally caricaturish figure on her right who can be taken, from his goatee beard and his spiked Prussian helmet, to represent the Kaiser Wilhelm. And between them Una’s fleshy arm is raised to point to a banner stiffly fluttering from the cottage’s thatched gable. And the banner reads: ENGLAND’S DIFFICULTY?
AND IN THE last photo the drawing-room has given way to the interior of a theatre and the flats and the setting are more elaborate, though the scene they depict is even more decrepit. The scene is a room in a Dublin tenement in which a young man is sitting by a typewriter, his mouth open wide, obviously declaiming something to an unseen audience, his hand ruffling his unruly hair. I have no doubt that the play is O’Casey’s first, The Shadow of a Gunman, and that the stage is the early Abbey; that the youth is Domnall Davoren and that the line he is declaiming is Shelley’s ‘Ah me alas, pain, pain, ever, for ever’, with which O’Casey for some reason peppered the dialogue. Behind him, peeping over his shoulder at his typewritten sheet, holding a bowl of sugar, is Una. And I have no doubt that she is meant to represent the most ideal and fragile of all of O’Casey’s heroines, Minnie Powell; and that her Minnie Powell was on the plump side and definitely too old. She was thirty-three by then, and looked it.
9
THEY ARRIVED ON the Second of June 1915. In the Easter of the next year there was a revolution. A Gaelic League colleague of hers named Eamon de Valera held Boland’s Mills and was lucky enough to survive the subsequent rash of executions. His pallid face, his gangling, unlikely bearing, his tenderness for mathematics and his strict academic air had, Lili tells me, been the butt of many of her private, rather caustic jokes. But when the revolution (which surprised her, Lili tells me, as much as anyone, though she later pretended of course, that she was in on it all along) extended itself into first months and then years of gradually accelerating chaos, then open rebellion, she lent to it her sense of melodrama and backstage intrigue, discovered a sudden liking for the gaunt schoolmaster.
‘And rumour had its heyday here, I mean that man who would stamp his unlikely profile on the history of this place as surely as South American dictators stick theirs on coins and postage stamps, the mathematical rigour of his speech, his actions, and her, who was fast becoming the grande dame of Irish Republicanism—not that there weren’t others jostling for her place, but none of them had her advantage, she was an actress after all, a bad one maybe, but she knew how to upstage with all the cunning of her limited talent.’
How Michael became implicated is uncertain. Taking briefs at first, Lili tells me, in Republican cases and later assuming a full and active role in what would become known as the I.R.A. Una claimed it was at her behest, Lili tells me. I would like to imagine it was in remembrance of that promenade, remembering the affair of the bathing shelter, with the sense of holocaust, like the sea, all around them. His involvement gradually took its own momentum until by 1919 he had donned the cap and trenchcoat that characterised activists in the upper echelons of the guerrilla effort.
‘Never got his name on a street. That must be to his credit. It’d sound odd, anyway. O’Shaughnessy Street—’
He took at one stage to writing verse, a practice that seemed obligatory for activists in those days. He never mastered Irish. His verse is somewhat painful to read, only memorable for the number of instances in which he refers to Kathleen, the daughter of Houlihan, as blonde-haired.
TWO
DUBLIN, 1921
10
I HAVE TO IMAGINE you, Rene, since he took no photographs.
Una did, but only after he had died. You were three when you went to the convent on Sion Hill Road. You had a broad face for a child, eyes that could be seen as too small, but those who knew you didn’t care. You were an ordinary child in every respect and what greater blessing can one ask for, than to have an ordinary childhood?
It’s just your hair that is distinctive. Curls hanging all around your forehead. Your hair is thin but has a creaminess of texture that gives each strand its own way of falling. Flat near the crown but falling all around it to a fringe of spirals, like those clumps of flowers, the stems of which droop from the centre and the petals fall to make the rim of a bell. Blonde is a shade that catches the tints of the colours around it. Your hair is cream blonde and catches most lights and the outer strands make a halo of them. To have extraordinary hair is almost as good a thing as to have an ordinary childhood.
You sat with Lili on the small benches and the Cross and Passion nuns moved among the benches like beings from another world. Their heads were framed by those great serge and linen bonnets that nodded like boxes when they spoke. It is you at the time that Lili described, when your father would walk in in his Free State uniform and lift you on to one hip and then the other, trying to avoid paining you with his shoulder strap or his shoulder pistol while the gun-carriage rattled outside and the