By the time I got to the cottage, about twenty people had already gathered; I’d never seen most of them before. The fine weather had drawn everybody out of doors—and then I saw her. I hung back for a moment, relishing the sight of her in the sunlight.
Tall as a statue, striking as a princess from a James Clare legend, she stood like some wonderful lighthouse, mingling with the others, yet apart, though they swarmed around and about her. Of Sarah I saw no sign, but her father was dominating the occasion; from hundreds of yards away I could hear King Kelly’s voice booming out across the fields.
Professor Fay saw me. He called me over and introduced me to a gentleman called O’Duffy, whose name would become very familiar in the coming year.
“Ben is one of us,” said the professor, and I had no idea at that time what he meant. King Kelly then greeted me with a crushing grip on my shoulder, and told Mr. O’Duffy that I showed “great promise,” and that he was “delighted to have me on board.” Promise of what I could not say; on what or whose board I had no idea.
For many minutes I stood with those men as people came to our group, greeted us, and went off to talk to others. Young enough to be their grandson, I was bewildered, but sufficiently anxious to keep my wits about me. No sign did I see of the man with the gun and the shiny black hair. Nor of Miss Fay, which disappointed me. What struck me most about the place was the lack of mirth. Were this party at our house, the laughter would have blown across the parish like a gale.
The ingratiating Mary Lewis appeared with food, and once more I saw her in a different light—she had a competent edge to her. Therefore, despite my immaturity, I’d always been right—she had long been deceiving Mother. She saw me looking at her, and it didn’t faze her at all; in fact she came over to where I stood and said, “A new side to me, Ben, right?” and winked.
I especially didn’t want to be winked at by Mary Lewis, so I went at the food—egg sandwiches, mostly, and some ham sandwiches. Mr. Kelly put a drink in my hand and insisted that I taste it; I didn’t like it and said so and ate another egg sandwich.
“See,” Professor Fay almost shouted. “See how forthright he is. Forthright.”
All this time I had only one intention—to meet Venetia. She who came to fetch me; I knew when she was standing behind me—that’s how strong a presence she had. When she joined our group, all fell silent.
“Hello again, Ben,” she said. And to the gentlemen, “Excuse us.”
She took my arm and led me toward the path by the river.
You’ll have observed that I haven’t speculated on the nature of my father’s relationship with this young actress. Were they lovers? That would have been anybody’s question. Not mine; I knew nothing of such things. However, Sarah’s embraces when greeting me had caused a change in focus—I was now thinking about dark and exciting matters of which I only dimly knew.
Venetia said, “Tell me where to meet you. We can’t talk here.”
I pointed. “Go along the path. Up past the wood, where you’ll see a well in the middle of the field. I’ll be there.”
She said, “Give me half an hour.”
It became the longest time in my life.
I had no experience of girls. None whatsoever. Nil. Zero. I hadn’t even come a little close, no female cousins of my age, no sisters of school friends—that was my sheltered life. So, instead of the more natural wondering what should or might happen between Venetia and me, I thought of her and my father.
Should I ask her? Should I say, “What goes on between you?” Should I ask, “Is my father in love with you?”
Love I knew from the cinema and from books. Kissing I somewhat understood. Of the other things I had no concrete impression as to what took place; animals in the farmyard, the necessary trips to stallions and prize bulls, cats, dogs—I’d seen all of that, and the exciting, spontaneous behavior of my own body, but it gave me nothing by way of insight into human behavior. Thus, as you can understand, I had myself churning in some turmoil by the time I reached the wood.
Life is an ambush, by and large. None of the questions in my head became relevant that day or ever again, because events turned out very differently.
They’re mostly beech, those trees (they’re still there) and some ash, sycamore, and most of all hazel. The summer canopy offers an almost totally closed shade; look up and it feels so green and exotic that you’d expect to see parrots. I’ve tried to get back there every year; it calms me more than anyplace I know.
James Clare used to say, “Everybody should have a sacred place.”
In winter, and noticeably that day, the trees reach up to scratch the sky. Their trunks are cold and a little dank, but they’ve always welcomed my touch.
That afternoon, the well always in my sight, I went from tree to tree, and back again—that side of Wade’s Wood stretches to about a hundred yards or so. Eventually, as I was always going to do, I stayed at my favorite tree—a great beech.
This was the tree of all my childhood; this was the tree I used to climb, and then swing down to the ground on one of the stoutest branches. The branch would naturally snap back up into place with a thrilling whish! Now I could reach it anytime I wanted and swing from it. Over the years, as I grew bigger, the branch didn’t snap back quite as fast or as fully.
I was hauling on it when I saw Venetia, picking her way like a gray stork, up through the grasses of the field to the well. A memory of something I didn’t quite grasp flooded into my mind and I started in alarm.
Do you recognize that uncomfortable feeling? Some call it déjà vu—“what you’ve already seen.” Meeting her mother, Sarah, had given me a slighter jab of the same dart; this one, however, jolted me hard.
I went through the trees to meet her. Some clouds had encroached upon the sky, lighting the grasses where she walked, and shining on the river behind her, while casting the trees near me into shadow. She kept her head down as she approached, watching her step. Keeping pace, I aimed to reach the well at the same time as she did.
Venetia looked up, saw me, and waved. I tried to place her in the world—the same age, perhaps, as Mother’s cousin who’d married and had a baby all in the same year? A few years younger than Large Lily (but so, so different)? A good deal older than irksome Mary Lewis? My range could stretch little wider than that; I couldn’t guess the ages of women or girls—I still can’t, and I think it’s mildly indecent to do so.
As she drew closer I had to keep swallowing.
“This is the well,” I said.
“Will you get me a drink from it?” I hadn’t seen her smile like that before.
Kneeling down on the cold flagstone, I did what I could and brought up my cupped hands full of the brilliant water cold as lead. She steadied my hands and drank from them, then wiped my hands on the hem of her ankle-length skirt. Then she headed for the wood; I followed and walked beside her.
I remember thinking, She’s completely at one with this place, she likes it, she likes what I like. Fifteen, maybe twenty yards into the trees, in the deepest part, she halted, turned to me, and took my hands.
“I’m so sorry, desperately sorry for what’s happened to your father.”
If that didn’t take me aback, her next move did; she laid her head on my shoulder.
I kind of patted her hair, thicker than hay, smoother than satin. What else should I do? She didn’t move, not even when she said, “And I’m even more sorry for what’s going to happen to him next.”
“What? What’s going to happen next?”
There was a hesitation in her. She checked, she held back. She edited what she meant to say. I saw the change of mind, change of direction. And then she lifted her head from my shoulder and said, “This.” And she kissed me.
Other than by my mother on the cheek or the top of the head, I had never been kissed. Nor have I ever been kissed again like that. It was so simple. She laid her lips softly on my mouth and kept them there, never moved them, just stood at equal height to me or, so it f
elt, her mouth lying on mine.
No movement came from her lips or tongue—nothing, just a soft lying there, her eyes closed. I didn’t even know that it’s good manners to keep your eyes closed during a kiss.
Possibly I exaggerate when I say that we stood like that for five minutes, and then she put her head on my shoulder again. I’m not young anymore, and memory distorts things into what you want them to be until they fit you—everybody knows that. But my bones tell me that it was the longest kiss I have ever experienced.
As to time—we then stood with her head on my shoulder and my arms around her, supporting her, and I can be objective about that period; the sun moved right around the sky, as it always did in the early afternoon, until the wood grew shadowy and cold.
Stiff in our limbs, we drew apart. She lifted the silence.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, “in a quiet and safe place where we’ll not be interrupted. I don’t want anyone drawing conclusions. Not yet.”
Going to our house was my idea, and I never stumbled or hesitated at the thought. I knew that the fire in the parlor was set, ready to light; and I knew that nobody was there.
Although we didn’t speak as we walked up through the fields and into the grounds, I knew that I had never met anybody like this, nor did I know that such people existed. She looked at everything; she stopped and scrutinized a stone or a burst of grasses. Once, she halted and gazed at the sky, turning a full 360 degrees.
“I love clouds,” she said.
Inside the house, she walked around as though in a church. She admired everything, touched objects here and there, sometimes with her tongue. When she saw me looking at her tongue on a glass bottle, she said, “Fingers have limited ability.” She spoke candidly. “I’ve heard so much about this house. I feel I almost know it.”
“Does he talk about it a lot?”
“He mostly talks about you.”
While I made tea she roamed the hallway and the downstairs rooms; above the roaring in my ears I could hear her footsteps. I might as well admit that it was tremendously exciting to see her there, even though guilt and other difficult feelings pressed in on me. She came into the kitchen, picked things up, took things down, scrutinized things.
“Oh,” she said, “I recognize this.” Meaning the large mug with the black horse, my father’s when he drank tea anywhere out of doors. “He misses it, he says.”
“How much has he told you about us?” I said, but I meant about Mother.
“I wish,” she said, “I had a father who spoke as fondly of me.”
When I brought the tray into the parlor, the fire had taken, with lovely flames and the smell of wood smoke. Venetia sat on the floor in front of the fire, near enough to my chair to lean on my knees.
“Where shall I begin?” she said.
I was about to reply with the obvious remark “At the beginning,” but she spoke again.
“But why am I asking? I know where to begin. With you.”
What? said my mind.
“The true loving—and that’s what’s going on here—is from me to you. Not me to your father. I’ve come to you. I’ve come for you. He was the pathfinder. But he doesn’t know that yet.”
I was mute—with shock, and with what turned out to be hope. And I stayed mute, as she told a story that had a beginning, middle, and would soon, as far as she was concerned, have an end. She knew what the end would be; it just might take time to achieve it. As briefly as I can, I’ll recount what she said, and I promise not to dwell on the immense, almost unmanageable conflicts that attacked me. Contrary to what you might think, this was no romance, like in films or books.
My father, on his way back from Galway some years earlier, had stopped in Ballinasloe to visit some friends. They, on their way out to see Venetia Kelly’s Traveling Show, persuaded him to come along—not much pressure needed, I imagined.
As they sat in the hall they told him that the girl at the core of the road show was the daughter of the renowned Abbey actress Sarah Kelly. My father told them how, when he was a younger man, he’d seen Sarah Kelly with J. M. Synge, walking the red roads of Ballsbridge in Dublin.
That night, as my father watched, Venetia played the scene from the end of Act One in Macbeth where Lady Macbeth goads her husband into getting Banquo killed. For me, by the fire, she spoke—she performed in miniature—some of the lines: “Was the hope drunk / Wherein you dress’d yourself? Hath it slept since? / And wakes it now to look so green and pale?”
Even though she tossed the lines off almost casually, she matched the flames from the logs. The light of huge energy danced in her face.
“Your father was stricken to the heart, and he wrote a note asking to see me; he was staying at Hayden’s Hotel. I didn’t reply; I receive many such notes from men. We traveled on—to Tullamore, and he was there that night too, in the front row, and he wrote again. I’m afraid that his second note landed as fallow as the first—but after that he wrote to me every week. Eventually I wrote back, and said that I’d meet him in Callan one night.”
I remembered my father going to Callan, and I remembered his high spirits next day; that was about two years before he finally decamped.
Venetia said that my father “sounded” her that night in Callan. “He asked delicate questions as to my ‘status.’ I told him, No, I’m not married, nor do I have a ‘swain.’ Don’t you love the word? He told me it means a country lad who woos.”
If I needed to know whether she was telling the truth, I knew from that moment—I recognized the word “swain” as my father’s. And all through her narrative I knew that she was telling the truth, because the language she attributed to him was so recognizably my father’s.
He went away—and some weeks later wrote to her again.
“It was a long and careful letter, and it was a declaration of profound love.”
Now I felt deep shock. But I held my counsel (as my father would say) and listened on.
“I told nobody, not even Sarah, and I agreed to meet with him. He told me that he was prepared to give up everything for me and travel the roads too, protecting me, financing me, caring for me. I turned him down flat and he wept salt tears” (a term of Mother’s, this—how my nerves jangled).
Above and beyond her gifts as an actress, Venetia was a magnificent storyteller. Yes, I know the tale she told was about me—but nobody could have told it better: the voice, the delivery, the perfectly timed and appropriate hand gestures, and from a less than advantageous position, sitting on the floor.
“When he wept, my heart was touched—and when my heart is touched, I believe that I must look beyond that to find meaning. I began to believe that your father had been sent to me for a purpose. And I came to the conclusion that you were the purpose.”
“Me?”—my only interruption. The fire crackled. “That’s wood from an old apple tree,” I said.
Venetia looked at me, paused, and nodded her head a number of times.
“Yes. I was right about you.” She continued. “Here was the meaning I found. During the meeting, he talked about you, his son, his only child. And he talked so touchingly about you that when next I saw Sarah I told her the entire story. Sarah told me not to dismiss your father, that a follower of such ardor would be difficult to find, especially a man of substance.”
By now I had picked up many of the story’s threads: my father late back from the Galway races; his disappearances on nights with his unusually late homecomings; the visit to Callan; Mother’s comment that he had been “following” somebody for years. Everything made—unpleasant—sense.
Venetia listened to her mother’s “strong advice” and accepted my father’s attentions. “Sarah isn’t a woman you can argue with. And her father, my grandfather—he has a great influence on her, and he kept pulling some strings that I couldn’t quite see.”
She reached up and took my hand. “I went along with it—but I didn’t do so on Sarah’s recommendation; actually it was more of an instruction. I
based my decision on the way your father spoke of his son, Ben, his only child. That, I figured, was the life to which I wanted to belong. And I felt—in some almost magical way—that I was utterly right.”
It was, as James Clare said, “an unusual but understandable interpretation”—but it left me wondering whether I was in some way to blame for everything.
She finished telling her story. Difficulties loomed like mountains. Venetia had wanted a father, but Harry had hoped for a lover, and in due time a bride. She told me all of this in a clear and important way. Her voice, her bearing, the urgency in her shoulders—we weren’t dealing in trivial matter.
I look back now and I see the room so clearly, and I see the two people in it—one young, the other younger, both vulnerable, one less so than the other, and you’ll be surprised to know that I was the less vulnerable. After all, I’d had my father’s unalloyed tenderness for eighteen years, and Venetia had had it at that stage for no more than three weeks.
The flames danced from the cords of wood, a bird outside called to the powers of evening, and not another sound could I hear, except the breathing of the girl sitting on the floor gazing into the fire, the strange, half-cheerful young woman who had just brought her crucial tale up to date.
As often happens in such circumstances we both began to speak at the same time, and then went, “You first. No, you first.”
She anticipated my—so obvious—question.
“This is what happens. Harry, your father, travels with me. Always. He looks after all my things, my costumes, my boxes, Blarney’s suitcase, everything. All those stage needs. When a show finishes—or in the mornings, if we’re not traveling that day—he and I talk. He tells me about farming. And about you. I tell him about the stage. I—well, I perform. For him. And him alone. We manage to get a lot of private time. He says that I entrance him.”
Suddenly she turned to me and put her head down on my knees. She continued to talk.