The Bay Read online

  THE BAY

  by

  L. A. G. STRONG

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Epilogue

  Prelude

  I wish to God I knew how to begin.

  I’ve half a dozen beginnings written out in my fat ruled exercise book, smug on the page there, jeering at me. It’s terrible how what is true in the mind is false when it’s put down unskilfully. If I’d gone my own way and never listened to them, maybe I’d be writing surely and calmly now: or, better still, the thing would have been written long ago. Instead, here I am, sweating and labouring, writing down a few words and scratching them out again.

  I could begin this way:

  “My name is Luke Mangan, my age is fifty-seven years and five months, I weigh thirteen stone two, and this is how I spent the first Monday in August.”

  There it is, true in fact, but slick and false on the page. It’s the dead truth, for my story begins and ends there, when I at last resolved to write it, floating on my back in Killiney Bay at ten o’clock of a perfect summer’s evening: yet that beginning is all wrong and jaunty, the “I” of it is not myself at all.

  Ah, if only I’d learned to write. If only I’d defied them all. Yet how could I?

  Try once more:

  “At the corner of Noggin Street, where the Fish Bank takes a twist and slopes down to the quays, lived Martin Taafe the barber.”

  That won’t do, either, for though Martin was the kindly genius of my early days, he wasn’t the centre. But the place is right, and that to me is much. Meantime, here am I, with all my story running in my head, and I don’t know how to start letting it out.

  Why begin formally at all? Why not let my mind go passive, in that same place that was for years the centre of my world, and begin with the first thing that rises up, as I would if I were talking to you across a hearth?

  It was on the end of the East Pier at Dun Laoghaire, a windy October night, all of four and forty years ago. The tide was running strong, and the light at the head of the steps spilled and scampered on the inky water. The beam of the lighthouse at the pier head leaped and swung every few seconds in the air above me, but it shed no light where I was standing, nor did it reach the two figures fishing beyond the steps. It swung overhead, with a thick shock that was almost sound. Inland, it hit the spires an instantaneous swinging smack, making them shoot up to attention: but, when I looked below, I could see how the beam rhythmically paled the lights along the shore, and pulled the waterfront with a jerk out of the darkness. Watching it, hearing the wind and the splashing of the tide upon the steps, I stood frozen in a trance of pure perception, which has always been my nearest approach to happiness.

  Yet through this trance, perhaps because of it, I was conscious of the two figures on my left. One was visible on the edge of the light cast by the lantern at the head of the steps. A dejected, drooping youth, he sat on the pier, and I knew that he was fishing. Every now and then he called in a plaintive voice to the second figure, apparently his father, who kept shuffling about somewhere in the darkness beyond the reach of the light. Fragments of their talk indicated that the older man was cutting up herring, and I knew therefore that they were fishing for conger.

  In a lull of the wind, I heard the youth report progress to his father.

  “I have a bite, Da.”

  An anxious cry came from the shadows. “Ease it to ’m, Bill,” it entreated. “Ease it to ’m.”

  The wind whooped and boomed over the granite shoulder of the pier, the sea was loud, and my senses rose and whirled in the air. It was some time before they fell, and I heard the melancholy voice again.

  “He has me stripped, Da.”

  “Bad scran to ’m,” objurgated the shadow. “Wait now, till I cut ye another.”

  Then began a long business, with fumblings and labourings, and a feeble flash or two which suggested matches sheltered in a hat: demands for haste from Bill, lugubrious retorts from “Da”, all heard by me in a daze, with a tenth of my observation, till, after ten minutes or so, the second figure emerged from the darkness and handed over the bait. Why he kept in the background, fumbling by himself in the dark, instead of joining his son by the light, was a mystery I only faintly considered. I was part of the flux, part of the exultant rush of air and darkness, of scattered light and sound.

  A small pilot-boat came out from the shore. I knew her, and I knew her captain. He came often of an evening to Martin Taafe the barber’s. At first the beam caught her funnel, quick and soft as the paw of a giant cat. Then, as she came closer, it touched no more than the tip of the funnel, and soon she was perceptible only as a red and a green light, and a vague added sound which became the crash of a sturdy, blunt bow breasting the water. I watched her dark shape gather, come near, and then, as she passed round the great hulk of masonry out of sight, a man aboard her yelled to someone on the pier end. If there was an answer, the wind carried it away. That cry, prosaic though its origins may have been, sounds in my ears ever since as something forlorn and strange, one of the notes that give a key to life. My mind followed the voice that had uttered it, going away on the boat, knowing how she would stand out from the end of the pier and get the full shock of the wind, so that it was some time before I paid heed to a mewing and commotion from my two fishermen, and turned my dazed, cold eyes upon them.

  The youth was on his feet, bent almost double, hanging on to his line and pulling for all he was fit.

  “I have ’m, Da!” he cried. “I have ’m!”

  “Stick to ’m, Bill!” came the valiant reply from the shadows, and his father scrambled down to help. But before he could reach his son and bear a hand, the youth staggered backwards, then half straightened. The father began to scold, the son to expostulate adenoidally. Either the line had broken, or the eel had got off.

  I looked on, still only noticing with the corner of my mind: then I knew that the rushing air had made me sleepy, and that Ann Dunn would be waiting for me, and that I must go home to my bed.

  Why, I wonder, does that night stand out so clear to me after forty-four years? It’s a better beginning to my story than either of the others, yet it too fails. The more I grapple with this question of writing, the more I dread it. It’s terrible how the beginning gives a colour to a whole book. That night, however apt in many ways, isn’t the right colour for mine. You see, I don’t want to write chronologically, starting with where I was born, and working up through childhood and the bead buttons on my aunt’s dolman, and that sort of guff, all set out in order, up to the present hour of grace. That might be all right if I were writing back in those days, and could keep pace with myself, as it were: but I’m writing now: no young man in his innocence, starting at the beginning, but an elderly man looking back and writing in the full knowledge of all that has happened since, knowing, when he introduces this friend or that friend, that one was killed in a train, and another has got fat and has two grandchildren: seeing his boyhood and maturity from beyond, and able to follow out the sequels. Maybe it’s just as well I never wrote before, for this book has to be written in a new way. I have to be able to move about in my life. I have to see it from a hilltop, to range about in it like a hawk, not to ride through it on the flat like a man taking a tram from Dalkey to the Pillar.

  No: not one of my seven beginnings is right. They traduce the story, worse than a pressed flower traduces the thing it was. This is a story that has to be written by my consciousness, and in my consciousness: and that is the only way I can see to a start that doesn’t betray me. I must start, not with the first thi
ng I remember, but with the first thing I remember with a mind I can recognise as my own: the farthest backward limit at which I can say, That is me: the place where consciousness and contemporaneousness begin. For everything in which we can recognise ourselves is timeless, an extension of now, just as that scene on the pier belongs to the present whenever I relive it. These recognitions depend, not on time, but on a quality in the experience that lifts them out of time. A clear memory at three and a half may be me, whereas a blurred, vague memory at five or fifteen is not. Many things that happened to me between twenty and thirty are so blurred that I can’t recognise them as having happened to me at all. I can only remember them. But everything in this book will be real and central, lived again, I promise you that. Nothing will go into it that didn’t happen to me, nothing in which I don’t recognise myself, Luke Mangan, of the age and weight aforesaid, the man who is speaking to you now.

  Chapter I

  What will we do with him?” said my Uncle John, giving me a wink, as if to suggest that the whole problem was a joke. “What will we do with him at all?”

  My aunt drew her thin lips tighter. She did it so often there were little vertical furrows in them.

  “I have told you twice already, John, I am perfectly prepared to take the child.”

  “You see,” said my uncle, with a mild candour, “George and myself, we’re no real guardians for him. George is never here, and I—well, I’m here, there, and everywhere, as you might say.”

  He stroked his full yellow moustaches, and shook his head gently, looking at my aunt with big, mock-sorrowful eyes, like a dog.

  “I repeat,” said my aunt, “I am only too ready to take the boy. I know my duty, and I hope I shall do it.”

  “You will, you will indeed,” assented my uncle warmly. He sighed, looked at the carpet, then lifted his head. “And Ann Dunn will always be by to lend ye a hand.”

  “Thank you, John. I shall not need any help.”

  “You take me up wrong, woman,” said Uncle John jovially. “Sure I only meant she could take the weight of him off you. It’s not easy, you know, for a woman that has none of her own.”

  My aunt did not reply to this. She drew in her breath sharply through her nostrils. Uncle John saw that he was making matters no better. He affected to be intent upon the carpet, prodding it with his umbrella, and finally taking a swipe at some imaginary object. He sighed again.

  “It’s a pity,” he said. “It’s a pity. A few more years would have made all the difference to the boy.”

  My aunt sat stiff.

  “It’s not for us to question the ways of Almighty God.”

  “Bedad,” said my uncle with animation, “you’re right there. Once we began, we’d never stop.”

  “John!”

  “Oh, yes.” He gave me another wink. “Maxime debetur. Mum’s the word.” He got up from the chair, automatically brushing his waistcoat, though there were no crumbs on it, as he hadn’t been eating anything. “Well now—since all that’s settled —I’ll be taking Luke for a walk. What do you say, little son?”

  My eyes glowed at him. I went over and stood by his side.

  “Don’t drag him all over Dublin, and bring him home dog-tired, as you did last time.”

  Uncle John and I avoided each other’s eye. The allusion was painful. I had disgraced us both, and had endangered future excursions, by getting a chill and being sick.

  “Ah no. Ah no. Sure we won’t go far.”

  “Well. Get your coat, Luke. There’s a sharp wind. Mind yourselves, now.”

  We got out of the room, I wriggling round Uncle John’s bulk in the doorway, as he turned to say something more to my aunt. He had the fear of her that severely respectable people inspire in scallywags, however the latter may deride them. Everything he felt was plain to me. I suffered for him, I plotted for him, I tried to steer him past: danger, mostly in an agony of silence.

  I ran upstairs for my coat, and heard Uncle John in the hall as I came down. You could always hear him, or sense his presence in some way. He was so big, he breathed loudly, enormous rumblings came from his stomach, his braces creaked, odd indeterminate sounds came from his clothes, money clinked in his pocket. There was never silence where he was. He stood, in front of the hatstand, filling up the tiny dark hall, and my heart ached with love of him as I came downstairs, holding on to the banister that was cold and clammy under my hand.

  He was meditating, his head down, and didn’t see me till I was near the bottom step.

  “There y’are,” he said, with an obvious effort to switch back into cheerfulness: and we stood for a moment, looking at one another, child and man, the hall full of our unhappiness and our wordless understanding. Then the kitchen door opened. My uncle turned his head, and saw Ann Dunn standing in the doorway.

  She stood there, not saying a word, her grey hair parted in the middle and drawn down so tight on either side of her face that it seemed to be compressing it. Ann had the stillest face I’ve ever seen. Its expression never changed. She’d always looked like that, always had her hair parted in the middle and drawn down so tight that the surface of it shone, but I’d never noticed it consciously till that moment. She’d been a fact I accepted and loved without noticing particulars about her.

  “Ah, Ann Dunn,” said my uncle. “There you are. It’s good to see you.”——

  Ann Dunn stood back, to let us into the kitchen. She treated my uncle much as she treated me. The movement was at once an invitation to shelter and a command, though Ann Dunn would never have thought of it as such. She put me to the kitchen table, and gave me a glass of milk and a bun.

  “It’s cold,” she said to my uncle. “The child’s stomach.”

  My uncle nodded enormously in tribute to her sagacity.

  “Oh ah,” he assented. “Aye, to be sure.”

  I hadn’t known I wanted anything, but I ate without question. Neither Uncle nor I ever dreamed of questioning anything Ann Dunn did.

  “Don’t eat too fast now, Luke,” she admonished me, and said something in an undertone about excitement.

  “To be sure,” cried Uncle John. “Take your time, little son. Take your time. A bad thing to hurry over food; a very bad thing.”

  He stood, shaking his head over the badness of it, with a look of sorrowful concern on his face. I loved him with a warm pang, feeling the older of the two, grand big important man though he was to me, because he was feckless and disorderly in his life, as even I could see, yet with Ann Dunn he always tried to put on an air of propriety and respectability. It didn’t deceive her for an instant: indeed, it wasn’t meant to. It was Uncle John’s concession to good principles, made for my sake, and out of respect to Ann Dunn. He felt the greatest respect for her, and his behaviour was a tribute as real as the gallantries with which he would greet a young woman, or the deference he showed to an old.

  But my perception of all this, though complete, was brief. I ate seriously and with absorption, as a child will, conscious all the time of the constraint that held the other two silent. The room was loud with it. Ann Dunn kept silent without effort: but it was an effort for Uncle John. He boomed and muttered a thing or two about the weather. Then there was a long silence, in which I heard my own munching, the small, secret coal-noises inside the stove, and the faint, half-asleep purring of Janey, Ann Dunn’s cat, which she always made when people had just come into the room. Then, with a suddenness that made me jump, Uncle John turned aside and blew his nose loudly, making Janey open one grey-green eye in reproach.

  Ann Dunn looked at him, and a faint tremor crossed her face, like the smallest, most transient of ripples on a pool. She had compassion for him. Then her face was as it always was, and she stood, her hands folded, watching me eat.

  Uncle John spent some time with his back turned. If he blew his nose, he always went through a sort of polishing ritual, finishing up with his moustaches.

  “Well,” he said at last. “We must trust it’s all for the best.”

&
nbsp; Ann Dunn did not move, and her expression did not change, but she managed to convey scepticism. Uncle John felt it, for he went on, almost apologetically, “We must do all we can to meet the situation: to see that it turns out as well as possible.”

  Ann Dunn’s stillness suggested that she was doing her best already. I swallowed the last bite of sponge cake, and reached for the milk.

  “In sips, now,” Ann Dunn warned.

  “Aye,” cried my uncle in relief. “Don’t go gollop it down.”

  And he explained to Ann Dunn, for my benefit, that if you took a cold drink slowly, the pipes had time to warm it before it reached the stomach, whereas, if you golloped it down— his pantomime was violently expressive—sure, it all fell down into you in a cascade, and the pipes had no chance at all.

  Ann Dunn gave a slight nod, and said, “Yes, sir.” She didn’t like physiological detail. .She held that the workings of the body were a mystery, and best left so.

  I sipped obediently, though I didn’t like taking my milk that way, as I got in a lot of air between sips, and had ado not to hiccup. On the other hand, if I took it all in a gollop, I never had to give it another thought.

  Uncle John blew out a sigh of relief.

  “There’s me man,” he said. He straddled his thick legs apart, brushed his moustache with his knuckle, then strode over to Ann Dunn.

  “It’s the mercy of God you’re here,” he exclaimed, and wrung her hand.

  Another tremor crossed her face, perhaps because his grip was so strong. She came to me, and did up my muffler, and pushed me into my reefer coat. Next minute we came in the street, Uncle John puffing and blowing, as he always did when he first came out, holding my hand in his large hand, and swinging his other hand round, clenched, so as to hit himself in the small of the back.

  “Aa-ah!” he said, with deep relish, drawing the air in, and blowing it out so strongly it lifted his moustaches. I trotted beside him, utterly content. The wind blew cold, and the streets seemed to have been stripped bare to let it through. They looked empty and spacious. A bit of newspaper rushed round a corner, hesitated, gathered itself up, rose in the air, and sailed off towards the Liffey. The line of the mountains showed through a gap in the houses. They lay low and cold.