A Guest at the Feast, page 3
I managed to leave the supermarket with my groceries and cross the road, but once at the bottom of my own street, I knew I could go no further. I sat down on the steps of an office building. I had, of course, come out without a phone. Anyone passing would think I was part of the city’s homeless crisis. I didn’t feel I could safely stand up. It wasn’t cold. If I remained here all day, I thought, something would be bound to happen. I studied the busy office people going by. If I was to accost one of them, I thought, I would have to get it right the first time. It would be too much to have to sit here as person after person ignored pleas for assistance. When I saw a tall, sporty-looking guy in a suit come towards me, I caught his eye and told him what the problem was and pointed to my house at the top of the street. I could stand up, I said, but I would probably need help walking and would need to rest along the way. This guy, who was South African, agreed to help. He was very cheerful. He thought my bag of groceries a bit ambitious. We stopped a few times when I needed to sit down on the steps of buildings. He deposited me, like a little frail old lady, at my door.
After a few days, when my walking had improved, the hospital called to say that it was time to do another CT scan. First I had to do some blood tests. These made it clear that I needed to get water intravenously, so I went into hospital for a few days. The CT scan people were cool, but they couldn’t understand why I didn’t want a needle in my left arm. The reason was simple: many, many needles had gone in there, including cannulas, which allowed for the chemo to go into the veins. Most people who work in hospitals don’t know how to put in cannulas. Nurses tend to be better at it than doctors. What doctors lack in skill, they make up for in confidence. The younger they are, the more certain they become that they know how to put in a cannula. This means that they tend to put the needle in where it least needs to go, and they put it in badly. Often, they have to do it two or three times. In my hospital, there was one nurse who could put in a cannula sweetly, simply, painlessly, perfectly. But she could be busy. Nonetheless, I asked for her when I thought she might be free. In the meantime, my left arm felt like a Francis Bacon painting.
The CT scanners must have thought I was someone who liked making a racket. When they stuck the needle into me, I started to yelp. I yelped my way through the little tunnel as my insides were scanned. I yelped as the scan returned me to civilization. I yelped more loudly as they took the needle out. The scan, despite all my yelping, turned out to be good, with much of the cancer having disappeared. I did not need any more chemo for the moment, but I would have to be checked regularly. I was on parole. The news coincided with the arrival of my boyfriend from LA. I couldn’t drink alcohol; I still had no appetite for food; I was skinny and miserable and bald; I couldn’t sleep; I found walking hard; I had only one ball. But there really was nothing to complain about.
A week or so earlier, I had begun to work with a physiotherapist. He brought news from the outside world. He went to Vegas on his holidays. He and his girlfriend enjoyed going to restaurants. This meant that I could ask him: was there a big crowd in Vegas? Was there a big crowd in Fallon & Byrne? He made me sit on a chair and then stand up, and do this twenty times. He made me walk up the stairs without touching the banisters and do this twenty times. He had lines of tough material, like the stuff that makes balloons, that I had to stretch out with my arms. He had many more exercises. He made me walk for miles. I felt better after sessions with him.
Now, as I prepared to leave hospital for what I hoped was the final time, the physio was going to work with me so that I could, by Christmas, have some of the characteristics of a real person. And when I got home, my boyfriend was going to be there and we could talk and make jokes or sit opposite each other on the sofa. I could watch him reading a book while pretending to read one too. We could watch a movie, like ordinary people. An hour after I got home, when the phone rang, I recognized the number. It was the hospital. Could I repack my suitcase and come back over, they asked. And do it now, without any delay at all?
The scan, on closer examination, had revealed blood clots. I needed injections to thin my blood and I needed to stay in the hospital while this was being done. That evening my boyfriend and Catriona came to see me. And then they went to dinner together. I would have liked to go with them. This was one of the five or six things I would like to have done last year and didn’t: a friend’s wedding in Glasgow; the pope in Phoenix Park; Patricia Bardon in Mahler’s Second Symphony at the National Concert Hall in Dublin; the Wexford Opera Festival. As I lay there, however, I could not take the blood clots seriously. I knew that they were potentially dangerous, but that knowledge still didn’t make me worry. In bed, I identified the difference between cancer and blood clots. In a tennis match, blood clots would be all smashes, aces, double faults and disputes with the umpire. Cancer would be steadier and stealthier, keeping calm on match points, returning the ball accurately – low, cross-court strokes – rather than hitting big winners. In literature, blood clots were Christopher Marlowe, violent, restless, brilliant, while the cancer would be Shakespeare, coming in many guises, dependable, sly, fully memorable. In painting, the blood clots would be Jackson Pollock, the cancer Barnett Newman. In Tory politics, Boris Johnson would be a blood clot; William Whitelaw, if anyone remembers him, the cancer. In Dublin, Malahide is a blood clot, Monkstown the cancer. In Europe, Macron is a blood clot, Merkel the cancer. In other words, instead of battling cancer I was becoming foolishly respectful of it. Like Shakespeare, Newman, Whitelaw, Monkstown and Merkel, it would not respond well to being underestimated.
A rumour spread in the hospital that a doctor who knew about blood clots would visit me later in the day. Only he could decide whether I went home or not. He had the same name as a character in Wallace Stevens’s ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’, who was also referred to as ‘major man’. By this time I was confronting the fact that I was slowly going mad, and that this wasn’t helped by the steroids and the lack of sleep and the general excitement about going home and seeing my boyfriend. In bed, I began to whisper ‘major man’ as Catholics in a similar state might call out the name of Jesus or his mother. I also prepared a joke to tell this doctor so that he might accept my urge to go home. Preparation was important, as I can’t really tell jokes. I just don’t know how. I can try to tell them, but they come out skewed and flat and somewhat sad.
When the doctor arrived, I worried, at first, that I had started the joke too quickly. It was about Randolph Churchill having a tumour removed and the tumour turning out to be benign and Evelyn Waugh saying that they had removed the only part of Randolph that wasn’t malignant. The doctor laughed. He seemed like a good-humoured guy. He checked that I would be able to inject myself in the stomach every night with some blood-thinning agent. He told me not to take any long-haul flights for the moment. He suggested I see him before Christmas. And then he told me I could go home.
This time I marched proudly if rather slowly past the nurses’ station, thanking them for all their kindness and care. I got a taxi home. Soon, I would watch my boyfriend having his dinner and then we would light a fire and lie on the sofa. In the morning, there would be physiotherapy. In the meantime, I went to the bathroom and looked at the scarecrow in the mirror. I hardly knew what to say to him. ‘Was there a big crowd at the hospital?’ I whispered.
‘One less now they’ve let you out,’ he replied sourly. It would take a while before his hair and his eyebrows showed signs that they might grow again. It would take him even longer to get used to having only one sad, lonely ball. They used to complete one another’s sentences, those balls, they were so close, but now the surviving testicle has to get used to the change. It has to realize that the time of two balls has passed. The age of one ball has been set in motion.
A Guest at the Feast
Penguin, 2011
There were no artists in Enniscorthy, but there were rumours and the odd mention of a writer and a painter who had been born in the town and had left. My uncle had written poetry in both Irish and English and he had died in his early twenties of tuberculosis. He was the youngest of my father’s family and left behind an afterglow that was strong enough when I was growing up – he had died fifteen years before I was born – that I took his name as my Confirmation name. He was the cleverest of them all, they said, and the funniest.
My mother wrote poetry too in the years before her marriage; some of the poems were published in the local paper, and one, which she often quoted, was reprinted in one of the Dublin papers; others were published in a small, short-lived and cheaply printed periodical that my father also worked on.
In the 1930s, each county had two or three university scholarships. My father studied at University College Dublin on one of these scholarships, having come first in the county, and returned then to the town to work as a teacher. My mother was seven years younger. She saw him for the first time as he rode his bicycle past her mother’s huckster shop on Court Street on his way to give a Latin grind to a woman called Nancy Connolly. Her father pointed him out and she remembered going out to the footpath in front of the shop to look at him. She was thirteen then, and within a year, on the death of her father, would leave school to go to work, and this would make her hungry all her life for books and learning and impressed by anyone who had access to them. In 1946 she married him, the man on the bicycle who knew Latin.
*
The plaque to my father is on the left-hand side of the door, and the plaque to Fr Joseph Ranson with whom he founded the museum is on the right-hand side. I put both of them into my novel The Heather Blazing in the years when they worked at making Enniscorthy Castle into a museum. I am not quite sure how much I imagined and how much I remember. But I remember fragments, I suppose; none of it made any sense then, it didn’t need to, it was complete and perfect and fascinating. It seemed natural that a model threshing machine should rest on a table in a room where a copy of the execution warrant of Mary, Queen of Scots hung on the wall. There was a room full of old carriages, one of them owned by the poet Moira O’Neill, the mother of the novelist Molly Keane. There was a backstairs that was wooden and an older stone stairs and from the battlements you could see the entire town.
Upstairs there was a 1916 Room, with a postcard on display that my grandfather sent to my father from Frongoch prison in Wales, where he was interned after the 1916 Rising. My father could have been only two or three years old, and the postcard addressed him as Big Fellow. I remember that he didn’t want this side of the card displayed because his students already had one nickname for him –The Boss – and he didn’t want them to have another.
Behind this was the 1798 Room with pikes and maps of how our side had escaped through Needham’s Gap. Old ghosts walked freely in the castle wondering, I imagine, if they should let the queen know what dreadful use the building had fallen into. I remember discovering the dungeon, cut into the rock in the very bowels of the castle. It was airless and dark with a smell of damp and mould. Soon, they put a light down there and distempered the walls, leaving a space for the etching that someone who was imprisoned here had made in the wall, a crudely drawn figure with armour and a sword.
Some Tudor adventurers stayed in this building. In 1581 a lease of the friary and castle was granted to Edmund Spenser. In 1594 there is an entry in the diary of the Lord Deputy, dated 17 December: ‘Sir William Clark and Mr Briskett went to Enniscorthy to the Lady Wallop’s for Christmas.’ Mr Briskett was the poet Lodowick Bryskett, an intimate friend of Spenser’s, whose most famous poem was written on the death of Sir Philip Sidney. Bryskett owned property along the river. Lady Wallop was the wife of Sir Henry Wallop, who came to Ireland in 1579 as Treasurer of War for the Elizabethan administration. He made a fortune from the forests that stretched away to the north and west of Enniscorthy. In one of his several petitions for further rewards for his services, he wrote: ‘I presume I have deserved favour in greater measure for having planted at Enniscorthy, among so wild and barbarous a people.’ In the 1960s, as we, the descendants of the wild and barbarous, played around the castle, we were led to believe that the word ‘wallop’ had entered the language courtesy of Sir Henry and his violent disposition. ‘There is no way to daunt these people but by the edge of the sword,’ he wrote in 1581.
I have never seen a building with the same small, squat, determined shape as Enniscorthy Castle. How could they ever have imagined that we would, someday, have their castle as the museum for things we deem important. (Sweet Slaney run softly.) But this is literary, a game you can play with history, and I feel no real connection with it, as I feel no connection with 1798 other than as an event in the past that was regularly commemorated. 1916, the War of Independence and the Civil War are much closer, more real and genuine.
The Roches, who sold the castle to the museum (I remember the figure of £1,100, but I could only have been five or six at the time of the sale), also sold their gardens, and the Castle Ballroom (it has since gone through several name changes) was built on the site. I know that the Roches had a tennis court and a daughter called Betty because once upon a time one of the more unmannerly natives of the town was invited to play tennis with Betty and began the game by roaring down the court, ‘Balls to you, Miss Betty,’ or so it was reported.
Dodo Roche, the last of the Roches to lodge in the castle, went to live with her maid on the Mill Park Road. She was extremely polite and worked for the blind. In the old days, local people pulled Roche wedding carriages through the streets, but now the castle was ours, and visitors wrote their names in the Visitors’ Book before they went to look at all the exhibits. And if you wanted something that your parents could not afford, someone always said to you: ‘Who do you think we are, the Roches of the castle?’
In 2008, while I was staying with my friends Patrick McGrath and Maria Aitken on the island of Ibiza, we were visited by Maria’s nephew and a friend of his called Limo. They were very polite and well-educated young Englishmen. In the course of the conversation, I realized that Limo is Lord Lymington, after whom Lymington House and Lymington Road (also called The Back Road) in Enniscorthy are called. He is a Wallop. I inquired if I could ask him a question. Very politely he agreed that I could. ‘Do you own Enniscorthy?’ I asked, knowing that many of the ground rents remain in the family’s hands, or did until recently. He thought for a moment. ‘Oh yes, we do,’ he said. ‘Or we did.’
*
The hill that overlooks Enniscorthy, Vinegar Hill, is famed in song and story; it was the last stand of the rebels in 1798. It stood across the valley from our house. I was told how the English tortured the rebels and their associates by giving them ‘a pitch cap’, pouring boiling tar on their heads and then pulling the hardened tar off. As a small boy, I imagined the English pulling the very tops of their heads off and staring inside at the strange, soupy, viscous mixture that made up the brain.
As we passed through the town of Tullow, north along the Slaney valley, my father would point at a shop whose owners (or rather, whose owners’ ancestors) had betrayed a rebel priest, Fr Murphy. He said that you could never go into that shop. I often wondered why those people did not change their name, or set up shop in some other town.
At Vinegar Hill, o’er the pleasant Slaney,
Our heroes vainly stood back to back,
And the Yeos at Tullow took Father Murphy
And burned his body upon the rack.
My father believed that every boy should be at the Christian Brothers by the age of seven, even if this meant skipping whole years with the nuns. Thus I found myself aged seven, raw and unprepared, standing in front of a small surly Kerryman called Tommy Brick, whose habits were known to all. He lived in digs and he played bridge and he walked through the town in long strides with his hands in his pockets.
For recreation in the classroom, while his charges were doing a composition in Irish or in English, he would pick his nose and make a ball of what he found there and then flick it at random towards us seven-year-olds. You kept one eye on your composition and one eye on Tommy and you learned to duck his flying snots and this was, in many ways, more useful for later life than the Irish or the English composition.
Since my father had two degrees and had won scholarships and written articles, everyone presumed that I would have to be smart too. But once when a visiting teacher and friend of my father’s came to the class and noticed me, I watched the teacher telling him with great solemnity that I was, in the phrase of the time, ‘no good’. And it was true. I lived in a permanent state of dreamy distance from things. Even still, if someone gives me directions, I find I have nodded and given every indication that I am following and thanked them. But I have not been listening. I haven’t a clue what they have just said.
So it was with Tommy Brick and Brother Curtin and Mr Dunne and Brother McInerney and Brother Carbery, each of whom I suffered under for a year. I never listened and I never did anything but the bare minimum at home. Tommy Brick and Brother Carbery used a leather strap to see if it might wake me up. Brother Curtin tried a long stick, Brother McInerney a short one. Mr Dunne used the back and the front of his hand. None of it worked. I couldn’t listen. I would try to listen and then something would occur to me, something quite banal and useless would detain me while every other boy sat quietly listening and afterwards could do the sums or the grammar.
There were only two things I could do and these merely made matters worse for me. I could do mental arithmetic faster than any other boy, except a chap called John McCann, who had a speech impediment that was even worse than mine. I only stammered over certain hard consonant sounds. He stammered over everything. Both of us could multiply fifteen by two hundred and two much faster than anyone else. Both of us could add fifteen to forty-seven and then divide that by seventeen and include the decimal points. The teacher became bored asking us so once we put our hands up we were left alone. In any case, because of our stammers, it took us both an age to come out with the answer and this didn’t seem to please.
