shapes of the square have emerged from the mist he turns once more and sees she is awake and looking at him, but with sleep still behind her eyes. It’s over now, she says. You’d better go. And you? he asks. She shakes her head. I will stay here, she says. With friends. He goes to the bed and kisses her once and her mouth responds but her eyes close suddenly, as if their opening had been simply a dream.
On the train back he thinks of nothing but the passing fields. At the station there is a maid, who tells him his wife is in labour. And the child is born with him watching, holding the curved jug above the enamel basin which is swimming with blood and water, from which the midwife wrings towels, continually.
7
SO RENE WAS born on the First of February 1915, St Brigit’s day, across from the promenade which would have been by then quite empty of umbrellas.
‘BUT WHY CALL her Brigit when the whole point of their stay there was to hide the fact? Una reached Dublin three months later and even then she claimed the child was premature. Which was how the myth grew up of Rene’s extraordinary eyes and hair, her miraculous maturity. The child they saw in that station, whom Una claimed was at the most two weeks old was in fact a three-month-old bundle of vitality. I would say she was quite a tender mite, a fragile copy of the father, with blue eyes and hair that even at that age showed its blondness. No wonder they were all amazed by this two-week-old marvel with a straight, intelligent stare and hair that didn’t stick to its crown like some black secretion but stood up, half-blonde, and even dared to curl. For her first few months she was a source of constant amazement among all those who saw her, a disjointed sense of awe and misapprehension was foisted on her which was fed of course by her mother, terrified that they would discover that this wonder of hers had been conceived out of wedlock, maybe in an Amiens Street hotel after a Conradh na Gaeilge meeting. I discovered this later through a First Communion form and a senile nun who didn’t notice any difference. I mean, beautiful as it is to be born on St Brigit’s day, the advantages are more than outweighed by the stain of illegitimacy. Which is why they stayed in England in the first place, why they took three months to travel home. And why they arrived in Westland Row Station carrying her in a Moses basket like a two-week-old.’
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
