3
SO I EXTEND the picture on the postcard beyond the serrated edge with a line, say, of unobtrusive shrubs, not quite trees, between the esplanade and the road proper. These shrubs are in wooden boxes, bound by metal hoops, smaller than those ladies and their parasols and so invisible in that miniature scene; yet stretching down that esplanade far beyond the confines of the postcard to where the esplanade must end, to where steps must run down to the strand leading to a wharf, the upright stakes of which reflect in the water beneath, the scene most perfect, most symmetrical when the water is calm. These shrubs will grow, of course, into the palms I imagine them to be with their aching stems and stunted foliage, redolent of a more torrid climate since they are transplants, burgeoning their way into later postcards, ones that I shall never see. Though they stand now in their temperate soil and their hoop-bound boxes with just their palms flapping in the breeze for their trunks are resistant. Facing the esplanade, the wharf, the water. And behind them the road proper, the line of houses. Not just that row of regular Edwardian facades behind the postcard parasols, but a row differentiated into houses and hotels. More hotels than houses, if the town is as I imagine it, and these hotels in turn differentiated into those which drew attention to themselves and those which didn’t. Among those which didn’t, one moderately anonymous, intimating solid comfort on a small budget. With a canvas awning like the others and a tiled porch, the walls on either side painted blue and cream, the windows white. The paint was three summers old perhaps, bubbling under the brick. And its name, Excelsior, painted of course in gold above the first row of windows, rich between the blue below, the cream above.
The palms flap and the water waits for them. They would have pronounced the name roundly, presuming its importance. The cabbie grunts, hearing it, knowing their status. Or would they have walked, unsure of cabbies, unsure of what to tip; Irish, intimidated by the parasols, carrying their cases, their clothes too heavy for the hot day and just the palms intimating a welcome, flapping in their still boxes, whispering the confidence that they too are transplants to this imperial soil.
‘UNA WAS AN actress, of the worst kind, the kind that insists on you calling them by their first name. Oonagh, Oona, Una, I stumbled over it so much at first, I didn’t want to be on first name terms, damn her, I was a girl of nine or ten and hardly knew her, Mrs O’Shaughnessy struck me as much much safer. I was a wily child you see, suspicious of this mother of my friend with her large blowsy kisses and her first names. Children read adults, don’t they? An atrocious voice with a loud, melodramatic presence, Una never acted anyone but herself but she had the luck to be an Irish speaker and so to meet Messrs Yeats and Fay and then gradually to be thought of as the Irish woman resplendent, though her hair was mousy and her eyes pale and her face totally devoid of those high cheekbones that were meant to be typical of the Celt. Though she had plenty of Matthew Arnold’s refusal to submit to the tyranny of fact, the fact being that her stage presence was embarrassing and her refusal to submit to this being quite remarkable and, in the end, a triumph. But then to be fair I only saw her later, years later, when her figure had bloomed and when Rene and me were ten or twelve. When she met him I myself was just a blush on my mother’s cheek and Una O’Shaughnessy was by all accounts, sorry to repeat myself, quite a renowned beauty. But then those were the early days of the Gaelic League and as you know yourself a certain kind of passion and what they called “nobility” and in particular an ability to speak Irish, more particularly among those who couldn’t, was regarded as an adequate substitute for beauty, not to mention talent. And the kind of acting she relished when her husband met her didn’t take place in theatres on legitimate stages, no, nothing as vulgar as that, it found its place in drawing-rooms before select groups of thoughtful people who would gather to look at representations or friezes from their imaginary history of Ireland. You would have the “Rape of Drogheda”, say, and after hours of fuss with everyone finally seated and the whispering behind the drawing-room curtain finally stilled the same curtain would draw back to reveal, if you can picture it, a few painted flats to represent Drogheda’s walls and a group of ardent young Gaelic Leaguers dressed as Cromwell’s Roundheads with whatever pikes and muskets they could drum up for the occasion, all standing to one side in a balletic group, pointing their pikes and things towards a group of just as ardent young girls who represented the Maidens of Drogheda. And between them both, dead-centre of course, raised on a platform, a dais, would stand Una O’Shaughnessy, who else, dressed as Kathleen in a coat of flowing green with a petticoat of red and a symbolic chain maybe round her wrists, her face contorted into an expression of frozen pain, horror or melancholy, whichever was most appropriate. They engrossed my mother’s generation, those idiotic affairs. Una, by all accounts, made quite a name from it and it’s quite probable, if probability is what you’re looking for, that he met her there and that her Kathleen ni Houlihan began the liaison that would lead to Rene’s birth in that English town you want me to talk about and which I can’t, of course, having never been there. But these idiotic affairs died a death, of course, as soon as the quite amazing discovery was made that the Roundhead youths don’t really have to remain like limestone statues but can actually move and fortify their expressions of hate with violent gestures. And from there it was only one step into words, blessed words. “O my dark Rosaleen, do not sigh, do not weep, the priests are on the ocean green . . .” And thus Una became an actress. But she could never play O’Casey, despite her lineage. And why not? Because O’Casey demanded more than a green costume and a blas, he was music-hall and melodrama, farce and real tragedy and only a real actress could have done it. And she knew this, of course, and when The Plough came on she shouted her guts out from the pits with the rest of them, even though Mr Yeats shouted his apotheosis from his private box. And I know, I know, all this is beside the point, but what do I know of her pregnancy and that English town except for the fact that the child inside her would partake in none of her faults and would be called Rene—’
SO HEARTENED BY the flapping palms they would have walked under the canvas awning, Una’s heels striking the tiles, dragging the tufts of carpet in the hallway with her and striking again the hard oak stairs; and into a clean bedroom, with the walls cream-white, the ceiling done in necklaces of plaster; with a bed which they would find to be warm, with a film of damp.
There must have been a table with an oval scoop for an enamel basin. And the table would hold an enamel jug. All three of them white, echoing the walls and the slight curve at the pit of the jug echoing her form. The guest-book below reading ‘Michael and Una O’Shaughnessy’ in a young, perhaps a bold hand.
4
‘I DO KNOW THERE was a spa there. With those sulphur waters that she claimed gave Rene her complexion—’
SO I EXTEND the rim of the postcard even more, down the esplanade, past the steps and the wooden pier, where the palms and hotels ended, where the watering-place was, with maybe a sulphur bath. And Michael O’Shaughnessy, as young and admirable as you said Lili, reading The Times in the oak-panelled lounge of the hotel room, the browns mixing finely with his light tweed suit, English in its cut, sitting only a little awkwardly on his frame, set against the strength of his cheekbones and the tousled mop of his hair. He is thinking of Redmond and Home Rule while the thin light on the oak panels slowly becomes a blaze. Later he will think of Arthur Griffith and conscription, later again of de Valera and parades. But always as an afterthought, to the sweeps of light on the oak panels as he rises and goes to the window and sees the sun and the sea making a flat mirror beneath it. And his wife meanwhile is on the promenade, for the time being without that fiery quality you saw in her, just pregnant now, her belly like a swollen pod proud before her, meeting the Cornish breezes. Una hides nothing of her shape nor of the flush of her cheeks. Her dress is bulky and white and she walks like a billowing flag of
