An Evening of Long Goodbyes

5

The first thing that struck me — the first thing after that fast-moving piece of masonry — was that my plan had come off; because for some time after the Folly went up I was under the impression that I was residing in Chile, in a charming period hacienda, with the poet and Nobel laureate W. B. Yeats. It sounds unlikely when I set it down like that, I know; but that’s dreams for you, you can’t tell they’re dreams when you’re in them; and anyway, Yeats and I were quite happy there and I didn’t feel like rocking the boat. We were living in the lee of the Andes, on a slope of the Casablanca Valley. Santiago lay to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west; I could see it from the verandah, a faint blue line beyond the vineyards.

It was coming into summer, so the days were long, and everything in the valley was vibrant with colour and life. Sometimes it got so hot that I felt I was being smothered: the air was like a thick blanket held over my face, and my muscles ached as if I had been pulverized. But these periods of suffering never seemed to last for long, and when the heat had lifted, I would go out to the garden behind the house and wander happily amid the bees and blooming hibiscus. Lime trees grew in an odiferous corner; Yeats would pluck the fruit to make gimlets that were like nothing I had ever tasted before, so fresh and sharp and cold that they made me gasp, like jumping into a frosty sea.

The days slipped by peacefully, with little variation. I had begun work, at long last, on my Gene Tierney monograph, and that’s how I spent most of my time. Generally I would rise mid-morning and, after a light breakfast and a cup of mountain coffee, go to my desk. While Yeats did his chores, I would write, filling page after page without pause — fancying I could feel her come to life before me as I did so, I could sense her gratitude and relief at being restored after decades of ghosthood.

Towards the end of the day I’d send Yeats down to the bodega for some of the local wine, and amuse myself with a crossword puzzle until I saw him, a spindly figure with a shock of white hair, returning up the dust-road. I’d help him prepare dinner and then, after we’d eaten, we’d sit out on the verandah together, talking and watching night fall. Out here the sunsets were like Italian operas, torrid, emotional affairs that went on for three hours or more, hanging in the sky like burning castles. Yeats could be curmudgeonly at times — it was the 1930s, and he was getting on — but he was an excellent cook and a conscientious housekeeper and we had quite a lot in common. We’d both had Follies, for one thing. Yeats’s was called Thoor Ballylee, a stone keep in County Galway that had been built by the Normans originally but had fallen into disrepair; like me, he’d had considerable trouble with the builders who were supposed to be restoring it.

‘Did they have social consciences?’ I asked. ‘Were they always going on strike?’

‘I don’t know about social consciences,’ he said, ‘but they were local men and they all had tiny, ailing farms, and any time they felt like a break they’d tell me they had to go and resuscitate them. Saving the harvest, that was the favourite excuse. In January, mind, or the middle of June. They must have thought I was a terrible fool. Mice as well, they all claimed to be terribly afraid of mice. The lead fellow, what was his name, Raftery, forever writing these interminable letters to my wife, “Dear Mrs Yates, Oi know Oi said last time the plastering would be done by autumn, but it is going terrible slow because of the mice, there is such a dreadful scurrying and squeaking every night that my men can’t get a wink of sleep, I hope Mr Yates has sent the mousetraps and that they will arrive soon, the roofing is also going fierce slow…”’ He sighed. ‘Still, I suppose it was worth it. A man needs a Folly, after all.’

‘You’re so right,’ I said, with a nostalgic pang.

He had little time for the modern world, its vapid protocols and blandishments. He didn’t believe in jobs, or in material success. He said that he had always hated work; he was proud never to have been gainfully employed, and claimed the whole idea of working for a living had been made up by the Bolsheviks.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘the way I look at it, living itself is a kind of work, isn’t it? I mean to say, if you have to go through the effort and trouble of being alive, you might as well take the time to do the thing right, live with some manner of style —’

‘Sprezzatura,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ he said.

I explained how instead of getting a job I’d tried to reintroduce the spirit of sprezzatura into the day-to-day running of Amaurot. Yeats wasn’t surprised when it came to the part about the bank. Actually, he hated modernity even more than I did. ‘Men live such petty lives these days,’ he complained. ‘So small and scrabbling. In the days of the aristocracy a man had the chance to develop, to mould himself into something of permanence.’ He shook his head gloomily, and sank his chin into his hand. ‘When I stand upon O’Connell Bridge in the half-light, and notice that discordant architecture, all those electric signs where modern heterogeneity has taken physical form, a vague hatred comes up out of my own dark…’

‘Yes, yes,’ he would go on like this all night if you let him, ‘here, written any poems lately?’

He’d always hesitate at first; but then after a moment he’d cough and mutter that he had been tinkering with a couple of things; and take a stand by the fire with the pages in one hand and the other holding his spectacles to his eyes, reading in that dreary droning voice of his: ‘Ahem. I have heard that hysterical women say, They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow —’

‘Hold on —’

‘Yes?’ looking up –

‘This isn’t going to be one of your difficult ones, is it, one of those slouches-towards-Bethlehem-gong-tormented-sea things, that no one can understand?’

Yeats would pause with a chilly, quizzical smile.

‘I mean, they’re good, don’t get me wrong,’ I hastened to clarify, ‘but how come you don’t do any of the old-type ones? Like that fairy one, Come away, O human child, to the waters and the wild, that sort of thing.’ For these were the ones that Father would recite to Bel and me, standing on the clifftop.

‘I’m afraid,’ Yeats would say with a grimace of politesse, ‘that these are the thoughts that afflict old men.’

‘Yes, but, these new ones, they’re not the sort of thing that anyone’s going to read and think, well, that bucked me up, you know, I’d love to meet that Yeats and maybe have a drink with him —’

‘That,’ he’d say, ‘is not the goal of poetry.’ And he’d wheel round and go into the kitchen, and start noisily rattling the dishes round the sink.

Most of the time, however, we steered clear of the divisive subject of poetry, and our conversations went on for hours, stretching far into the night. Yeats especially liked to hear about Father’s work, how from rows of polymers on a whiteboard he knew how to transform a single ordinary face into a hundred different ones that when you looked at them seemed to ring out like steel hitting stone. Sometimes he would get excited and lean forward to me with his elbows on his knees and start gabbing away about masks and anti-selves and how, to live fully in the world, you needed to construct a new personality for yourself that was the exact opposite of your real one. Father used to say things like this too; I never pretended to understand what he meant either.

We spoke often of love, though it seemed that neither of us had any particular flair for it. I told him about Laura, and that whole rigmarole with Patsy and Hoyland, and the beautiful girl in the Folly I’d met minutes before leaving the country for ever. Yeats, for his part, had contrived to fall for the one woman in the world who was immune to his poems. Her name was Maud Gonne; she was a famous actress of the time, and a celebrated beauty. She had dangled him on a string for literally years on end before marrying a policeman named MacBride, a drunkard whom Yeats had always abhorred.

‘I never understood why you didn’t just give up. I mean, when she was obviously a lost cause.’

‘It wasn’t that simple,’ Yeats said, looking abstractedly into the roof beams. It was very late; we were sitting on hard wooden chairs by the kitchen stove.

‘It was perfectly simple, the woman had a heart of pure Bakelite that you couldn’t have melted with a blowtorch. And all this celebrated-beauty business. I’ve seen photographs. She wasn’t so great.’

‘Oh, photographs,’ he scoffed, ‘what do they tell you…’ But his voice faltered: he had never quite got over her. Really she reminded me quite strongly of Patsy. ‘All that we learn,’ he said, ‘we learn from failure. We come back to the business of the masks, Charles. The poet finds his true self in disappointment, in defeat. That’s how he learns to face the world. Maud Gonne was my quest, the transcendent ideal I failed to achieve.’

‘The mountain you failed to mount,’ I quipped, which didn’t go down particularly well.

‘She was a remarkable woman,’ he said softly, studying the fob of his watch. Perhaps he was thinking of their glory days together, when they’d founded the National Theatre that would lead eventually to the Easter Rising; or the time he and she had pushed a coffin through Dublin and thrown it into the Liffey to protest about the King’s visit.

‘I don’t see why you’re always defending her,’ I said, swiping irritably at a moth that fluttered around the lantern. ‘It’s all very well talking about masks and the triumph of failure and so forth, but the fact is that she led you on while it suited her, and then dropped you when it didn’t. You have to watch out for girls like that, Yeats. Especially when they’re actresses, I mean really you’re asking for trouble there.’

He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket, spread it out on his lap, carefully folded it again and returned it to his pocket. ‘Perhaps every woman is an actress when love is the stage,’ he mused; and before I could puzzle out what he meant, he went on, ‘But what about that actress you’re so obsessed with? The girl with the man’s name?’

Did he mean Gene? Because that was totally different: because what captured me about Gene was that — although she may have dated princes, danced with Picasso, attended lavish parties in the Hollywood of the 1940s — she only seemed to truly exist when she was up there on the screen; where she appeared, no matter what role they cast her in, only as herself, shimmering through every scene like a double-exposure, like some panicky spirit-creature they had trapped between lights and glass –

‘Aha!’ Yeats leaned back in his chair beaming delightedly, like the teacher whose recalcitrant pupil has blundered into iterating a truth. ‘So it’s her bad acting you love her for! And your sister, she’s not a real actor either, I take it?’

I didn’t quite see what he was getting at, and I felt my cheeks crimsoning. ‘Well, she isn’t,’ I said defensively. ‘I know she thinks she is. But it seems to me that Bel’s far too preoccupied with her own life to actually do it. I mean she’s always too busy fighting with Mother or haranguing me or swanning about with some oaf. That’s her true calling, if you ask me. Though obviously I’d be far too frightened of her to actually say it.’

‘Do you know, Charles, I think all this time we’ve secretly been in agreement…’ and with a dry chuckle he rose to trim the wick.

On some evenings, after we’d been talking, he’d fall into deep silences, and I’d know that he was brooding over Maud and thinking of what might have been. At times like these I would remind him of his Nobel Prize, which was usually enough to cheer him up; or else we’d go to the dog-track and watch the greyhounds.

The races were nothing like the one I’d seen with Frank: the track was marked out in complicated chalk divisions, with flags at certain points around it, and the dogs had unearthly sounding, occultish names like Hecate and Isis. The sun could still be quite hot and Yeats insisted on wearing his absurd sombrero with the enormous brim that obscured most of his face. This wasn’t to say that he didn’t take the whole business very seriously. He always brought along a sort of almanac, into which he scrawled feverishly for the duration of the race. He was very mysterious about it, guarding it jealously with his arm. I presumed it was some kind of racing form; but on the couple of occasions I managed to peek over his shoulder, all I could see were strange runes and astrological diagrams. He refused to explain what they meant; nor would he disclose why he seemed far more interested in the patterns made by the various dogs during the race than who actually won it. Instead he limited himself to arcane remarks about connectedness.

‘What does connectedness have to do with anything? It’s a race, isn’t it? I mean, the only question is will this Shiva win and we can buy that fancy samovar you liked, or won’t she, in which case we’ll have to stick with the regular teapot —’

‘The shape of things, Charles,’ he replied, a hermetic smile flashing beneath the brim of the sombrero. ‘Isn’t that rather the more interesting question? How can we know the dancer from the dance?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Look, there’s one of those snack vendors. Run over and buy us some hot dogs, why don’t you.’ When he returned, as I chewed down the warm spicy meat, I wondered what extra information he could be searching for, when we had everything anyone could possibly want right here in front of us. Tan-skinned natives cheered around me, raising their hands as the dogs approached the finish-line; I looked away to the sun setting over the ocean, and wished for an instant that Father could be here to see it. He would have liked it here, up on this little corral east of the mountains with Yeats and me: old hunters, talking with gods.

Then one day, quite out of the blue, Yeats asked me to turn on my side as he had to administer something anally, and when I looked around to make sure I’d heard him correctly he had changed into a hatchet-faced nurse and Chile into a dimly lit room with green paint on the walls and perforated ceiling tiles. There was a strange tight clinging about my skull and shadowy figures standing around me. I resisted as best I could; I shut my eyes, I begged them to leave me in peace. But it was like being underwater: no matter how I wriggled, every second impelled me closer to the surface; and already Chile, our little house, the lime trees, were far, far away…