Fathers Come First Read online

  During dinner I don’t remember what he said. What I said. I remember his eyes, his brown-black eyes and this feeling of him all over me, all through me, touching his hand and feeling the touch spreading all over me. Rocking in his eyes and becoming beautiful and golden in the watchfulness of his eyes.

  He said, ‘Come to Galway with me for the weekend.’ We were having liqueurs and cigars. He said, ‘I’ve got to do a recording of traditional music in Spiddal.’ He said we’d stay the night in a hotel in Galway, on the company’s expenses; that I could come out and watch the recording session; that we could go down on the train and have lunch and a bottle of wine; that it might be quite fun. I was saying, ‘Yes, yes I’d love to do that.’

  I was thinking I’d write Suzanna a note saying my father was ill and to cancel any appointments for me for the weekend, and I’d write Miss Gore-Browne a note saying I was ill. And I’d write David a note saying I was going to visit an aunt in the country.

  Colin was saying, ‘It’s simple—just follow your desires and to hell with what other people think of you. They can’t eat you.’ We composed them each a small note, enough to be going on with. Keep them at bay with white paper.

  Suzanna would say—did say—‘Well why jeopardize your career? You could be a very good model, you know, but you can’t just run off whenever you want to and have dirty weekends in Galway.’ I thought, Career, job, money, they’re not important. I’ll think about all that later.

  That second night we went to Colin’s flat. He said, ‘We’ll make love in three different places, three different nights. Variety is the spice of love.’

  We were quieter then. He wanted the light on and he leaned on one elbow looking and barely touching and he kept his eyes open and he said, ‘It’s beautiful to see you come.’ I felt frightened almost, exposed.

  The following afternoon he picked me up in a taxi. He introduced me to Jilly, his production assistant, and Bill Summers, the cameraman. The rest of the crew was in Galway already. I wondered if he had slept with Jilly. She was tall and heavy with bad skin and curly brown hair; she was attractive in a defiant sort of way that said ‘Look I know I don’t look like a fashion model, but if you want me you can have me—and I won’t thank you for it.’

  On the train the three of them talked about the recording session and how it must look and sound authentic and none of this Begorra and Bejaysus stuff. Every so often Colin would squeeze my hand and say, ‘Are you all right there Missus?’ and I would be, then.

  We booked into the Great Southern Hotel. Colin was booked in a single room, so he asked the porter for a double; he said his wife had come down with him. The man said, ‘Oh yes, certainly sir, no trouble at all sir.’ Colin signed ‘Mr and Mrs Dempsey, Seapoint, Co. Dublin,’ in the book.

  We went up to our bedroom and he closed the door and pulled me against him and both of us fell onto the bed and we made love just like that, dressed. He had to rush out then to join the others and he was very excited and he said, ‘It’s almost like being a teenager, screwing like that, with your togs on,’ and he gave me the name of the pub where they’d be doing the recording and said, ‘Have a bath and a change and take a taxi down when you’re ready.’

  I nearly didn’t go. I wanted to stay in the bedroom, to get into bed, to pull the sheets and blankets up, to keep it now, to keep it like now for ever.

  Laughing sometimes you’d be frightened to stop and frightened to go on. A hand might come out of the sky and shout, ‘Idiot!’ and a huge thumb would squash you flat like a fly on the ground.

  The next morning Colin said, ‘You must come and live with me when we go back to Dublin.’ I said, ‘Yes, I will.’

  He’d woken me up by making love to me and he said, ‘I love you, come and live with me, you must come and live with me.’ He was like that. He’d make it a very we-together situation if he liked you. I just thought, Yes, I’ll go. I felt as if I’d been waiting a long time. Preparing.

  We had breakfast in bed and we made love again and we had baths and we stood holding each other and I said, ‘I’m frightened to go out into the world again.’ And he held me tight against him and was saying, ‘Poor scared dicky-bird, I’ll protect you from the world.’ And I believed him.

  We moved my clothes and things into his flat the following week. It was out by the sea and you could hear that blue splashing sound day and night and the air was salty. Colin paid my landlord three weeks’ rent in lieu of notice. I would have tried to creep out, or been terribly embarrassed; he’d just say, ‘Okay what’s the problem?’ and solve it.

  At the beginning we spent most of our time in bed. I was shy with him. With David it had been different. I felt I was the one with the power: the loved, not the lover. But now, now I was melting, and dissolving, and wondering.

  Wondering about bodies. You couldn’t believe their differences and their samenesses. A familiarity and then a yawning gulf of strangeness. Sometimes I lay back very still when we made love. I used to think of trying to avoid my stepmother’s kisses when I was a child, of hating the English nun who was always trying to touch me. Yet here I was lying back allowing Colin make these fantastic intrusions into my body and into me. Sometimes one, sometimes both.

  Sometimes you couldn’t believe it, the things he would do with your body. There were times when he came in without touching, his face closed like a fist; you were completely separated and yet so stuck together, his eyes closed, your eyes open, him pulling and pulling until he finished and went to sleep—it was like a blind man trying to grasp something, desperately.

  The first time he wanted me to kneel up and let him come in from behind I was saying, ‘Ah no’ and turning to him and he got very angry and said, ‘Oh all right’ and flung me back and thrusted himself in and in and threw himself off finally into a chasm of sleep and I lay awake, tears pouring down my face.

  I remember saying, ‘I love you’ and wanting something more unique to say to him and Colin saying, ‘Nobody’s unique for Christ’s sake.’

  I’d feel terrified sometimes when we were together—nobody is allowed to feel so happy, so stretched into every corner of your skin that you’ll burst. It can’t last. Somebody will prick the edges.

  I asked Colin one night whether he thought that for every high in life there had to be a low, for every smile a groan, a see-saw? I thought my voice sounded rather dramatic and silly but the question was serious.

  He said, ‘Is that what the nuns told you?’ He laughed. I don’t know, is that what they told us? But hasn’t everyone else told us, ever since? The way they looked at us if we sang and held each other’s arm and kissed suddenly in the middle of a grey, windy street? Haven’t their eyes said it? Oh you’II get what’s coming to you—their faces cocked, waiting for you to trip and fall. One pays, and one pays, and one pays, they would say.

  Colin would say, ‘Grab what you can. You’ve got a short breathing space between the helplessness of childhood and the hopelessness of old age. On either side there’s a blank. Grab what you can, while you can.’

  The best thing was going out together. Going to cinemas, to theatres, to restaurants. Holding on to him with the pavements creaming out for us and the houses friendly. At weekends we’d drive up to Glendalough with a bottle of wine and a picnic. We’d go and visit his friends who lived in a big old house in Enniskerry. They were a sort of commune. They all smoked pot and didn’t take much notice of anyone new arriving. You felt rather silly and didn’t know whether to sit or stand or what. You were starving and were scared to ask about food.

  One night we met David and he was with a fat girl called Margaret who’d been in the year below me at school. She wore two sets of lipstick, one over the other; it made her lips look cracked, like an old painting. David looked at Colin with his crab’s eyes and you almost expected him to go scuttling off sideways, back to his table. He had a tragic look on his face and you didn’t even feel sorry
for him. You were that arrogant in your love. Colin said he didn’t understand how you could bear to go round with ‘that lot’. I said, ‘What lot?’ He said, ‘The get-rich-quick-boys from Foxrock.’ I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Colin was preparing a series of programmes on traditional singers and musicians all over Ireland. Sometimes he’d let me come with him. They’d be making films in old, dark pubs, and there’d be old men with eyes like rock pools, full of shadows, and young men with thick wrists sticking out of their jackets, and women, their eyes closed, listening to the weird winding tunes that were about the people’s sorrows.

  I’d sit and watch Colin working and think: How easily he does things. How sure he is. I’d never felt sure like that. I felt all my sureness from modelling had been just a fraud. It just showed you how to cover up, to make up, to fake up, and be something you weren’t.

  Colin had so many friends it was amazing. He said it was working in television; you met new people all the time. I’d think, Yes and you meet new girls all the time too, but wouldn’t say it. That would be the kind of remark that would drive him mad. ‘Yes, I like women,’ he’d say, ‘I love them.’ He’d look at you with those black-brown eyes and then burst out laughing, and you’d laugh too.

  He laughed when you told him about school. He’d say, ‘Tell me the story of the night you pierced your ears again.’ He said, ‘For fuck’s sake, those bloody nuns are terrible, the things they’d tell you.’ He said Catholicism left you with a mark for life; you could never really enjoy yourself.

  He’d gone to day school until he was fifteen and then his mother had died and his father had taken to drink and Colin had to leave school and look after him. He was earning ten pounds a week as copy boy in one of the newspapers; the basic was six pounds ten but he used to do overtime. His father drank most of the wages. Plus his pension. His father had a Republican pension from the Civil War, and another from the bank.

  Colin’s mother was the daughter of an English officer whose father had been stationed in Ireland. She was a very beautiful girl and all the men were after her. She met Colin’s father when he had carried her brother home one night, dead drunk. She’d answered the door in her nightdress and helped carry the drunken brother upstairs. Her family said she was throwing herself away on a ‘dirty little Republican’ when she said she was going to marry him. They cut her off without a penny. She didn’t mind. They went on their honeymoon to Killarney.

  When she was thirty-five she got multiple sclerosis. Bit by bit her body collapsed around her. It took five years. Colin said that she was like a vegetable in the end. He left home. He couldn’t bear it. He said he’d have killed himself if he’d been the victim. I said, ‘That’s easy enough to say now.’ He said, ‘No. I mean it. I’d never inflict myself on people like that …’ His voice was like a mangle—a grinding, choking voice. He almost hated her for staying alive.

  One night he cried.

  We’d been to a party. This friend of Colin’s had been talking to me all evening. He was also working in television. He was very serious. He was a left-wing socialist, he said, and he talked about the class structure in Cork and I didn’t really understand what he was saying but he had a lovely voice, like a cello’s voice.

  He said, ‘I don’t believe in going to bed with women unless I think I can convert them to socialism.’ I thought that was very brave—stupid, but brave too. I pictured him in a night cap and striped nightshirt, holding a candle; sitting up all night, freezing on the edge of the bed talking about the Rights of Man.

  Colin said, ‘Bloody rubbish, he’ll go to bed with anything in a skirt.’ He said, ‘What was old randy pants talking to you about anyway?’

  I said, ‘About classes in County Cork.’

  Colin burst out laughing. I said, ‘What are you laughing at?’ We were sitting up in bed having a drink and a cigarette and talking about the party.

  He said, ‘And what would you know about the class structure in County Cork, may I ask?’

  I said, ‘Well there’s nothing to stop me learning is there? Even if I didn’t know before.’

  We started arguing then and Colin said I was stupid, that I was pretentious. I didn’t know what pretentious meant except from the way he said it: Pretentious little whore. I said, ‘I’m not a whore.’ He said, ‘Well you got into bed with me quick enough, didn’t you? Could hardly wait to get your little panties off, could you?’

  He went on like that and I started crying and I was saying, ‘I’m not a little whore,’ and not knowing why not, and he was shouting, ‘Well why spend the whole night flashing it at your left-wing socialist?’

  Then I shouted at him, ‘What, What, Whaaat?’ and I couldn’t believe he was jealous and he turned over and buried his head in the pillow and tears were sobbing out and he said, ‘Love me, oh love me,’ and I held on to him until he fell asleep.

  I could feel a howling starting somewhere in a wilderness inside me. It was the mad man, the lunatic in the painting; the road rushing towards him and those elongated, tortured hands, holding the edges of his howling head together.

  —10—

  It was about six in the evening. It had been a dry, high-skied day. Colin had been at the studio since seven that morning, editing. He shouted through the letterbox for help to carry in some gear from the car.

  I helped him in with the stuff: two new loudspeakers for the stereo and a box of records he’d bought at an auction. He started fiddling round with the equipment.

  I thought: I won’t say anything for a bit. I’ll just be friendly and sweet. There’s nothing men hate more than a naggy woman; women who pick on them for nothing. I’ll pour him a drink, and myself another drink (a small one) and we’ll sit down and talk about his day. Look at the sea. Decide what we’ll do tonight. Perhaps we should go out somewhere for dinner. Relax. I’ll ask him afterwards in bed. That will be best. When we’re warm in bed. Now I’ll just act completely normal, as if nothing has happened.

  ‘Colin’—the words came bumping out, involuntarily—‘where were you last night?’ It had started. Too soon, too harsh, too sudden.

  ‘Uh?’ His back was turned to me and he was bending over the speakers, fitting them.

  ‘I said, how did your meeting go last night? You must have been quite late. I didn’t hear you come in.’ I’d heard. I’d lain awake in bed, stiff. He’d gone to sleep almost immediately. It was after one o’clock. He left for work at six-thirty that morning.

  I got up and lit a cigarette. Be calm, go easy, shut up. Colin will explain. He’ll explain everything.

  Colin turned round and stood up. ‘Now what the hell is the matter with you?’ He walked towards me, put his hand out. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  I laughed. A quick prism of a laugh, all angles and sharp lights. I turned and ran upstairs shouting in an uprush of tears, ‘Bloody meeting indeed.’

  I sat in front of the dressing table and looked in the mirror. Watching the tears streaking mascara rivulets down my cheeks. I thought of the nun telling us St Peter had two deep scars down his face from crying so much after he’d betrayed Jesus and got him crucified. The thing is once you start crying it’s easier to start again the next time; you can go on indefinitely into madness, crossing deep streams of tears all the time, the world’s tears.

  Colin came in. He sat beside me on the stool and put his arm round me and then put his hand on my forehead. Like you would with a sick person. I took his hand in mine and bit it. It was bony, like biting a chicken’s leg. I dropped it and screamed. He spun round. His hand felt flat; it cracked like India rubber against my face. He was shouting, ‘You’re hysterical’ and going, crack, crack—across my face.

  I was shouting through tears, ‘Well why do you go out with little tarts and tell me you’re at meetings? I saw you last night, I saw you going into the pub with a woman,’ and saying it made it even worse; it was
a turning, a twisting, a reality said and done, done first, then said.

  Colin got up and said, ‘If you’re going to start prying on me, accusing me, then you can just piss off out of my life.’ He was white-faced, his hands clenched. The words came out black and poisonous. Each one separately. Like sheep’s shit.

  ‘I’m not accusing, I’m not,’ I said. ‘I just want to know. I just don’t understand what’s going on, that’s all.’ I got up and took two steps towards him and he turned his back so I was just holding his back and saying, ‘Please, please, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to make a scene, I’ve just been so miserable all day …’

  ‘I’m going out,’ he said. He walked out of the room and down the stairs. He slammed the door. He slammed his car door. I could hear the engine right up the hill, the noise like a scar in the evening.

  I lay down on the bed and cried until I was shaking all over. Until my face dissolved and my head expanded and I quaked. I gripped the pillow and when I stopped I’d torn it apart.

  I got up and went into the bathroom. My face was red and purple and white. I made it smile at itself. It was a grotesque, frightened face with mad eyes. I bathed it. I mended it with powder and make-up and mascara. It was a clown’s face, the pain bare under the layers of paint. It was a face that called out for annihilation. There was no way of doing it.

  I went downstairs and poured another drink. And lit another cigarette. And thought, What do other people do in the same situation? Nobody had ever been in the same situation. They would have told you.

  I went over and over the scene. Oh, but I’d botched it. I’d acted like a damn dried-up wife. I’d accused, I’d cried, I’d screamed, I’d said, ‘Where were you?’ And Colin was free, he was a free man, I must never say, Where were you? as if I’d a right to know.