us instead...
Children’s mnemonic for learning the alphabet, Kanturk branch of the Children’s Land League,
Co Cork, 1881.
Chapter 1 - The most beautiful man in the world
‘Lolly rang yesterday.’ Hilary was careful to keep her voice neutral. ‘About his birthday party.’
Loyola Ryan was turning fifty. According to his (much) younger brother Vianney, you would think no one had ever turned fifty before. ‘You wait till it happens to you,’ Lolly had half grinned, half grimaced.
‘They want to invite Xavier to the party.’ Hilary raised her voice a little, although she hadn’t intended to. Vianney hated raised voices.
Vianney, however, gave no indication of having heard anything. He was nodding intently as the iPod whispered the Irish language encouragingly into his ears. His left hand clutched a bottle of Coopers. His glasses rested precariously on the top of his dark hair, falling across half his face, further obscuring her vision of him.
That hair, Vianney’s famous hair, now shimmered occasionally with a silver strand. The black, however, remained as darkly lustrous as when they had first met. And although he had trimmed it back over the years, he had never utterly surrendered its length.
His sister, Siena Ryan, said Vianney’s hair was a bulwark against the cult of Australian masculinity. For which resistance she – and Hilary – loved him fiercely. But they could not say so. Vianney defended his resistance through silence. He would not discuss his hair, but kept it curling over his collars.
‘Mo chara thú go daingean!’ he recited, at last looking up at her. ‘My Beloved, I hold you deep within me.’ And smiled, his words offered up simultaneously as sincere and parody, and then returned to the task of listening to the Irish mysteries, long legs stretched out comfortably along the couch.
Vianney’s Irish language class was putting on a bilingual performance of The Lament for Art O’Leary at the Sydney winter school. He had been declaiming grief and desire for some days now. Is ar mo chroí atá do chumha, upon my own heart is the grief.
Hilary still thought the Irish language sounded Germanic, or even like Arabic with its deeply guttural sounds. It didn’t sound like the lilting silver tongue you’d expect, redolent of soft rain and melancholy. It sounded determined, confident, at heart deeply humorous, as if the speaker were about to burst out laughing at any moment.
Vianney said the fact that Hilary heard humour in the tonal nuances of the Irish language was due to her deeply ingrained, possibly genetically encoded, WASP belief that the Irish were in themselves amusing. The comic objects of Empire.
Yet he knew, they both knew, the sounds of Irish had once enchanted her – when she had first heard it, on a warm fragrant Sydney evening, at a harbour side party, where the golden haired maiden had met the raven-haired prince. Mó ghrá thu agus mo rún! My love and my secret Thou!
‘Vianney?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Lolly wants to invite Xavier to the party’.
‘Well he can,’ he said, the very voice of reason, not looking up.
‘He doesn’t know where he is. And he hasn’t got an email for him -not since Xavier’s last one got hacked.’
‘Oh come on, Xavier’s around.’ Vianney took another slug of his beer and frowned with even greater intensity, as if the iPod was being very cryptic . ‘He’s just very busy working on his book.’
‘But where exactly around?’ Her voice was giving it away.
‘As far as I know, Xavier is still shacked up with that woman, down the South Coast. What’s her name? Rosie!’
Vianney returned to his study, as if he had answered all questions. Thugas léim go tairsigh; my first leap reached the threshold. She saw that he was barricading himself inside the Lament . His knees were drawn up, his whole body was silently emitting warnings, like the cat, William O’Brien. One more loud noise, one more rude interruption to my peace and quiet, and I’m gone.
But Hilary had promised Lolly that she would try. Xavier, contrary as ever, didn’t even have a mobile phone. Or not one they knew about. But everyone knew he kept in touch somehow with Vianney. The two youngest Ryan brothers had always been as thick as thieves.
‘Don’t you have any contact details for Xavier? Just an email?’
Vianney leaped from the couch like a man driven to the edge. An dara léim go geata; My second reached the gateway. ‘Jesus!’
‘We just thought -,’ she said hurriedly, cowardly.
His answer was to stand at the door, dark eyed. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet Hilary? It’s not Lolly who wants it.’ His tone was full of accusation. ‘It’s Kate. She’s trying to nail Xavier down, as per bloody usual.’
And then, in a graceful, lithe and seriously offended swish, he was gone.
***
Kate Ryan, the Snow Queen of Lithgow, patron saint of tough love, mother of Loyola, Aquinas (RIP), Vianney, Xavier and Siena Ryan, had featured from their first courtship conversations.
In Hilary’s mind, she had heard the Ryan family story on the first night, the night of the famous Parsley Bay party, although Vianney always disputed this. ‘You were very hot’ he said, ‘Goldilocks in her little party dress. Why on earth would I have told you about my mother on the first fucking night? Give me some credit!’
But Hilary hadn’t been put off by the story of his tough-minded mother, the difficult asthmatic childhood, the family deaths – the little brother in the dam, the charismatic father lost in the bush. Far from it. She had been reeled in by the stories.
It may not have been on that night, but it was at a very early stage in their relationship, she would swear, that Vianney asked her if she had read Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men. She had not. So he told her the story of the bright peasant boy in an isolated area of China; his family's, indeed his entire village’s great hope that his cleverness would bring them out of their poverty and powerlessness. They all hoped and dreamed that the boy would become a mandarin, part of the great Imperial bureaucracy of power and patronage. And the boy had studied very hard, for years, for the privilege of sitting the gruelling three-day examinations. And he had passed them. Rejoice, honour, wonder and congratulations.
But the Qing dynasty was in reality dead. The examination was the last one ever held. Really it had only just rolled on from centuries of habit, the last twitches of the corpse of Imperial China. There was to be no marvellous career for him. Maxine Hong Kingston’s father emigrated instead, illegally, to America – to work in a laundry.
Ever since he’d read China Men, Vianney told Hilary, he’d understood his own story, and the deep delusions that his own village community – an isolated enclave of Irish Catholic Australia – had suffered under. They too had believed in a cultural greatness, a future as dramatic and glorious as the past. They had cherished this idea of greatness,
