Bishop's Delight, page 9
He rang the doorbell and looked up at the stained-glass fanlight. She opened the door and smiled.
‘Kevin!’ she exclaimed. ‘How lovely to see you!’ She had put on her best theatrical voice for him.
She was in her thirties now. She’d filled out, but hadn’t lost her figure. She still looked attractive, though her hair and skin had lost some of the lustre and bloom he remembered. As she led the way up the stairs to her flat, he had ample opportunity to observe her perfect legs and dainty little bottom. On the landing she turned and faced him. ‘Over the years I’ve often thought of you. I always read your Sunday column, and whenever I do, your voice rings again in my ear.’
Her living room was cosy, with old-fashioned furniture and uplights illuminating the enlarged photographs on the walls showing her in various moods. In one she was smiling, in a second serious, and in a third pensively studying a wilting rose.
‘I come back here to be myself,’ she said. ‘I never feel at home in the public eye.’ She was talking like a politician rather than a model. Perhaps she could count more than one politician among her friends.
‘I’ve been out all day,’ she confided. ‘I haven’t had time to cook dinner. We’ll have a glass of Chianti and a pizza, if you don’t mind.’
‘A pizza and a glass of Chianti would be perfect.’
‘You see, I haven’t forgotten. I remember how fond you were of Italian cuisine.’
She poured the wine, and they talked about what she called old times. She asked him about his work and the journalists he knew, and she told him about what she had been doing since they last met. After half an hour the doorbell rang. She went downstairs and came back with two flat boxes containing two pizzas.
‘I like my pizzas hot,’ she said, as they sat down on opposite sides of the circular table.
His thoughts kept darting in all directions. He was finding it difficult to concentrate. ‘I like your table,’ he said, hoping to keep the conversation impersonal.
‘I bought it some years ago at a Big House auction. I like round tables. They give everyone the same weight and value. No one can complain about being seated below the salt.’
It was at least ten years since he’d last had a pizza; they always gave him heartburn and constipation. This one was only lukewarm and it weighed heavily in his gut, but still he ate manfully and complimented her on her choice. They had exhausted all the obvious topics. It was time to get down to what his editor would call ‘the meat of the thing’.
‘Who is the lady you mentioned over the phone?’ he finally asked.
‘Which lady?’
‘The one who knew Maguire.’
‘Surely you must have guessed! It’s your old heart-throb, yours truly.’
‘I thought Maguire went to Paris for his fun.’
‘He found his Folies Bergère right here.’
‘Is that what you wanted to tell me?’
‘Only part of it. You see, I’ve outgrown the catwalk. I’m now planning to become an actress. I’m just the right age for all the great roles. I’ve always wanted to write a book. It would add weight to my CV. I’ve got all the right ideas, but I’ve never been trained to write them down. I need a ghostwriter, not any old hack but someone who knows me, preferably an old friend, someone I can talk to freely about my memories, and someone who knows which questions to ask and won’t be afraid to ask them. I need a good journalist like you.’
‘I can put you in touch with one or two ghostwriters.’
‘It needn’t take up much of your time, Kevin. We could meet here a few times a week with a tape recorder. I could ad lib and you could ask me questions. The names that come up will surprise you.’
‘I’ve never written a book. You need someone who does ghosting for a living.’
‘I was hoping you’d do it as a favour for old times’ sake. I’m not well off. We could come to some arrangement about the royalties, and of course I’d be only too happy to help you in any other way you fancy—I know a lot of people who might be of use to you.’
She poured more wine, and he told her he felt certain that she had an interesting story to tell.
‘You see, I feel at home with you. I often think about the past and wish I had it back. I was very young and green when I first knew you, but you taught me things I never forgot.’
She was getting personal, and he felt uncomfortable. He knew he had to make his escape.
‘Let me think about it for a few days,’ he said.
She got up and went to the coffee table. She picked up a book and flopped down on the sofa. ‘Come and have a look at this,’ she said. ‘Strange how some things survive.’
He stood looking down at the postcard in her hand. He could see that her lovely hair had lost its bounce from too many rinses. The flower that once hath blown. She patted the sofa and smiled. Dutifully, he sat beside her.
‘This is the card you sent me for my twenty-first. I came across it in a bundle of old letters the other day.’ She had thought of everything, it would seem; she had everything so conveniently to hand.
‘Let me read it to you in my best actress voice:
Let hawks come down from the air.
Let queens die young and fair.
I’ll love Louise forevermore.’
‘Did I send you that?’
‘Look, it’s your handwriting.’
‘It was a long time ago. I have no recollection of it.’
‘It’s a lovely little poem.’
‘It isn’t original. It’s a kind of medley.’
‘A melody in words. What a lovely thought! I was too young to appreciate you at the time. I’m a different person now. I’m deep, or so I’ve been told. I have deep thoughts, and deep things to say about life. I like to read the interviews that actresses give—they are so shallow and so self-centred. I’m more interested in other people than in myself. I’m no longer the playful little kitten you used to know. My only regret is that I didn’t read enough books, but in spite of that I’ve enjoyed my life, and the best of it is still to come. I’m on the brink of something new, and I know it will be something big.’
He couldn’t just get up and go. He needed to find a natural pause in the conversation or a friendly note to end on. ‘How do you see your life?’ he asked. ‘What’s the storyline?’
‘I’m on an up-escalator and I’m now halfway to the top.’
‘Where is the yeast that will cause the dough to rise?’
‘You see, that’s why I need you as my ghost. I’ve got all the ideas but none of the words. There’s nothing in life I haven’t come across. I’ve learnt a lot from the people I’ve met—politicians, solicitors, doctors, professors, architects, even one or two priests and—would you believe it?—a bishop. They used to ask me questions that made me think, and I used to ask them questions about how they felt. I’ve never had a shallow relationship with any man. The catwalk is fascinating, but it’s for youngsters. Now I need to express my whole personality and give readers the benefit of my experience. What do you think?’
‘You need to find the thread that will hold your story together. Otherwise it will be about spilling the beans, one bean after another.’ He wished to say that it isn’t easy distinguishing between beans, but he was not a man who liked giving offence.
‘You’re very hard on me, Kevin, but I know you don’t mean it.’ She leant over and smiled into his face.
‘Give me a week or so to think about it. I’m sure I can come up with something.’ He got to his feet and thanked her for a lovely evening. ‘I have to go now. I must knock off a review before bedtime. It’s prosaic, I know, but it’s my bread and butter.’
She got up and took his hand. ‘I really enjoyed seeing you again, Kevin. I was an innocent when we met. It was you who taught me how to kiss. You led me down the primrose path, you devil. Let me kiss you for old times’ sake.’
It wasn’t a long kiss. It was the kind of kiss a devoted wife might give her departing husband at a railway station: short, but not perfunctory.
‘Did that remind you of anything?’ she smiled.
‘I could stand a lot of those.’ He opened the door.
He was so pleased to have escaped that he was halfway home before he became aware that her kiss was still on his lips. And not just on his lips but imprinted on his whole sexual being. She had awakened something that had been sleeping in the unexplored recesses of his mind. She had lit a lamp that glowed inside him, illuminating dreams and impossible desires. They were not his desires, but the desires of an ancestor he thought he had disowned.
He spent a restless night, so disturbed in his body that he could not sleep. He asked himself if he had lost his inner equilibrium or whatever it was that caused his life to flow evenly from hour to hour and from one day to the next. He emptied his mind of every human image and imagined a gyroscope inside his skull that kept his thoughts revolving evenly and his mind from listing. When finally he found rest, it was to dream, not about Louise but Jane. He woke at eight, late for him, grateful for the cold logic of a new day. He had been the victim of a Chianti-inspired fantasy. She had wrecked his happiness once before. On no account must he allow her to wreck it again.
14
She had promised Woody to get everything ready for his next visit. She had looked through Jim’s journal and found it heavy going. Nothing but politics and policies, cabinet meetings, who said this and who said that. The dry-as-dust tone was untypical of the man. It read as if he had gone through life without ever discovering his true vocation. Even in their early days on the magazine she could tell that he was different. He was imaginative and original. Unlike other men, he did not keep telling her things she’d already read in the Sunday review pages. When he told her that he was planning to stand for election to the Dáil, she was deeply disappointed. She had already mapped out for him a more original, certainly a less pedestrian, career.
On the magazine, Woody wrote most of the articles but it was Jim who came up with the ideas. Jim was too fastidious to succeed at journalism, too ready to ponder over the exact meaning of a word. His heart was set on politics. He told her that his ambition was to ‘give a leg-up to the little man from Ringsend or Ballyhuppachaun at the expense of the well-heeled toff from Killiney.’ That was typical of Jim. He would have no truck with phrases like ‘the redistribution of wealth’; when he talked economics, he talked about people he knew. Listening to him, she often felt that he didn’t need to read the papers to keep in touch; that he carried the needs of ordinary people around with him in his heart and head.
After work they used to meet for drinks, unbeknown to Woody, when he would stretch his legs and give free play to his mind. He was half a dozen men in one, each of them at loggerheads with the others: man of action v. scholar-bibliophile; social charmer v. solitary contemplative; artist v. would-be politician. It was that aspect of him that she’d found fascinating; she’d seen it as her duty to take him in hand and create order from the chaos of his private antinomies. He used to say that he should have been born into the nomadic life, sleeping under desert stars and letting his camel choose the way. He admired the great adventurers. His heroes were Marco Polo, Shackleton and Scott. He liked to think that he had more in common with these men than with any politician, living or dead. Small wonder that the Irish people didn’t understand him. They voted for him reluctantly rather than wholeheartedly, condemning him to a life of looking over his shoulder at men he despised. At times it was painful to see the suffering in his face. She could understand why he used to talk fondly about the eighteenth-century enlightened despots of Europe. He particularly admired Joseph II and his enthusiasm for music and the arts. Though he never voiced such thoughts in public, he often said that he regretted the cultural ignorance of his fellow politicians. Over dinner he used to recall that the old Irish chieftains had their own bards. Then he’d laugh and say that perhaps he should have his own harpist like Fionn Mac Cumhaill.
In the early years of their life together she felt privileged in having such a rare man for a husband. When she began writing and publishing, she realised that marriage to him had condemned her to life in the shadows. How could she tell him that she longed for just one day alone in the sun?
She had decided that Woody should work in the study, where he might have a sense of intimacy with Jim’s way of thinking and perhaps even a sense of being in a special place. He would be free to look at the books that had furnished Jim’s mind, proving that he was not just another philistine politician out to feather his own nest. She looked around the room to make sure that it contained nothing unfit for a journalist’s eye to see. Finally, she went to the drinks cabinet to inspect the single malts. There was a half-full bottle of Highland Park, which she had not sampled before. Reaching for it, she noticed that the space inside the cabinet was not as deep as she had expected, which seemed odd to say the least.
She removed all the bottles and discovered what looked like a sliding door. She opened it to find up to twelve moleskin notebooks stacked one on top of the other. As they were only three inches wide, they fitted perfectly into the small space. She looked through one or two of them without stopping to read; they were nothing less than a personal diary in Jim’s neat hand—an odd sort of diary, full of abbreviations and symbols meant only for the eyes of the writer. Feeling a surge of excitement, she removed all the notebooks and put the bottles back in their place. She poured herself a large Highland Park and sat down at the desk to read.
The diary, which was an uninhibited confession, began eleven years ago, after they’d moved to Howth. It contained his private thoughts—thoughts he wouldn’t dream of airing in company, and certainly not in hers. She couldn’t imagine why he had written it except possibly as a safety valve, a means of blowing off steam. She had the impression that his whole public life had been a denial of his true nature; that he had lived a lie from start to finish; that he had never uttered a word of the truth before. At first she felt guilty for trespassing on his privacy, but soon her guilt turned to anger and shame as she realised that she knew nothing of the man she had been married to for almost thirty years. She had known only the public man, the passionate man on the platform, the man the electorate knew. He had shut a door in her face. He had been closer to the least of his mistresses than he’d ever been to her. The one he referred to as ‘L’ he called ‘my lovely Miss Kisscock’ because she was so good at ministering to his peculiar need. She found herself weeping uncontrollably. With a shaking hand she poured herself another whisky, trying to breathe deeply so as to calm down. He had humiliated her behind her back. He had forced her to live a lie, to live the life of a contented woman who thought the world of her husband and who was happy to allow him a certain amount of lenity because, as she used to put it to herself, ‘boys will be boys’. Now she knew what he’d really thought of her:
‘I am on a political treadmill by day and a domestic treadmill at night. Anna, God help us, is absorbed in her fairy tales. She talks to me as if I were a child, or worse, a naughty boy. What am I to do? No ease at home, no peace in the Kremlin. I am the captain of a ship tossed at sea. My life is no longer my own to control.’
The Kremlin was what he called the seat of government, Leinster House. As a young man, his whole ambition was to make his mark there. Having got to the top of the tree, he could only complain that the tree wasn’t tall enough. Nothing could ever please his restless and insatiable nature. None of that was beyond the bounds of her understanding. What she could neither understand nor forgive was his shameful sexual life, which degraded her as well as himself. If any of it should ever come to light, what would his admirers make of it?
Obviously, he was searching for something she could not begin to imagine. It could not have been crude sex, which was Miss Kisscock’s department. Whatever it was, he was convinced that only young women had it. The diary described one of his many visits to Paris when he was taken to a nightclub by his French host. He was so bewitched by the voice of a young singer that he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He told himself that by lunchtime the following day he would have forgotten all about her, but when lunchtime came he could still hear her voice in his ear. He had always treasured what he called ‘the authenticity of the moment’. He was convinced that all falsehood sprang from recollection, and he was determined to prove himself right. The following evening he went back to the nightclub on his own to talk to the singer. She sang ‘Danny Boy’ in French, and with such feeling that she brought tears to his eyes. She had sung it for him alone, he felt. Worse, he was convinced that if only he could make love to her he would gain access to the self-knowledge that an unsatisfactory life had denied him. It was the beginning of one of his many hopeless ‘love’ affairs. In many ways he was a child, which is why he used to enjoy her fairy tales in the early years of their life together. He used to say that, unlike the world of the Kremlin, her stories were perfect. Again, she found herself weeping.
Why did he do it? Why did he need to do it when he was so close to perfection in every other way?
