BIRDS OF PASSAGE. CHAPTER 5, cont. No shortage of things to fear
London was as bizarre and meaningless to her as the Fuselis, the Rossettis and the washy Turner skies in the Tate. She liked the friendly faces of the Stubbs dogs and horses more than the curling lips of dead romantics, and she liked what she saw in the paintings more than anything she saw in the veiled eyes of her colleagues, all parading around in black, phonies one and all. Within weeks she was thinking about going back home, but her guts would tie themselves into knots whenever she imagined her return, so she gritted her teeth and carried on.
Her escape had turned into a prison of her own making, less bloody, less honest, but no less brutal than the one she had left behind in a blur of harsh voices, Ulster fries, and soft, endless rain.
There was a Francis Bacon exhibition coming up. Alice had thought Francis Bacon was a writer, dead for centuries. So she thought nothing of it when she was asked to photograph a roomful of his canvases, just heaved her gear on to her shoulder and walked into the gallery where they were hanging.
For an eternity, a few seconds, she was still, a small, encumbered woman in sensible shoes alone and unprepared in an immense gallery.
Then she gasped. She turned away, averting her eyes from the one painting, whirling her head, spinning on her heel, to the next, and the next. Bodies scrunched behind bars, into boxes, agonized mouths open, white limbs. Limbs? No, bones, bones. And another. A beaten cur. The pope. A face with cheeks as fat and shiny as pork sausages, and the eyes of an ostrich. Meat, butchered meat, lamb or beef, by the look of it.
What kind of meat? Wasn’t that a man, or a woman? Or a child? No matter which way she turned, there was no mercy. Alice was transfixed. Something very, very close to her began to explode, no, it wasn’t close to her at all, it was inside her, and it was exploding inside her, agonizingly slowly at first, and then roaring to a crescendo of metals and screams and red, mangled flesh.
She dropped her equipment onto the polished floor, lifted her hands to her face, and let out a high-pitched, breathy sound like a woodland creature in pain. And then another, this time so loud that her voice echoed through the gallery. It was only then that she started running.
She didn’t stop until she was almost at the Chelsea Bridge, and then, with her back to the embankment wall, she slid to the ground, drew her knees up, and buried her head under her arms.
She was there until dark and, this being London, in all that time only one person spoke to her to ask her diffidently, in some soft accent, if she were unwell.
“Leave me alone,” she replied. Her voice was steady enough, though it had an oddly automatic quality to it, as if she had pushed some internal button and this was the voice that came out. She did not look up.
Eventually she breathed deeply, in, out, and again, shivered, stretched out her arms, her knees, her back, pulled her hands over her head, and, with her eyes closed, waited for feeling to return. She was wearing only a shirt-dress, and she was cold.
When she opened her eyes, she thought at first she was alone. And then she saw him, sitting a little way of. When she stood, he stood also. In those days Daniel was painfully thin. He had kind eyes, and he was lonely too.
“Forgive me”, he said, in that unplaceable accent. “I do not want to offend or to intrude, honestly I don’t. I just wanted to be sure you were all right.”
“I’m not all right at all,” she said, more to herself than to him. She spoke slowly, as though each word were a struggle. Whole conversations might have filled the spaces between her words. She said nothing more for a long time. “Mind you, I have reached two conclusions,” she said finally. He didn’t press her; he was already wise.
After some time, she continued, speaking faster and faster. “One is that I really don’t know why I’m here. And the other is that I don’t know where else to go.” She stared at him, and then, as though her own words had come as a surprise to her, she added, “Right enough.”
Daniel stayed where he was. “Come with me.”
She focused on him more closely, took a big noisy breath and asked, “Where to?”
“Canada.”
Daniel was in his last year at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and with no hope of work in London, he was planning to go to the National Theatre School in Montreal.
Alice and Daniel were married and in Canada by early summer. they took an upstairs apartment in a house in the district called Saint-Henri, just around the corner from the Lionel-Groulx métro station. It was small, it was cheap, and it was conveniently close to downtown. With a reference from the Tate Gallery, which was relieved to be rid of her, Alice found work at the Musée des beaux-arts. That was where she first met Pierrette, the museum’s senior photographer at the time and on her way up.
Alice knew full well that she herself was no artist — she didn’t have the conviction, the authority or, if truth were told, the interest to be more than a competent photographer — and so she quit the museum without a backward look when she became pregnant. Indifferent all her life to her body, she now found it a revelation.
In no uncertain terms it told her to stop drinking coffee, alcohol, tea. It sent her to bed in the afternoon and early every evening. Threatening her with nausea, it insisted she leave a room in which anyone was smoking. It directed her steps to a health food store, where it made her buy rosehips and yoghurt and whole-grain bread.
She was stunned by its mysterious powers, even slightly frightened, and felt the need for a good dose of matter-of-factness. She pored over every detail in the stack of manuals she borrowed on pregnancy and babies and child care, and she became obsessed with health and exercise.
Each afternoon she walked briskly across the city for her swim at the Women’s Y and then walked back, stopping only to buy apples and Birchermuesli and the day’s newspapers. She was fitter the day Peter was born than she had ever been in her life before. Afterwards, she hooked her toes under the sofa every morning while he slept and did sixty sit-ups. When she stopped breastfeeding, her stomach was flat and tight.
Her hair had grown out thicker and redder than ever before. An actor oohed and aahed over it at a cast party, and the next morning Alice picked up a packet of Nice n’ Easy at the drugstore and turned herself into a brunette. She had started running by then, no more than five kilometres a day at first, and when spring came she saved enough from the grocery money to buy Peter a baby seat and tiny helmet, and every day after that she cycled across to an island in the St. Lawrence and back, wearing a baggy pair of jogging pants or discoloured shorts with a T-shirt that used to be Daniel’s.
But it was the running she loved most of all. She would dream of running, and when she wakened, she would lie in bed and imagine herself running, fast, fast, impossibly, wonderfully fast. It was as though she was flying, as though she had wings on her feet. She was afraid of nothing and of no one, and everything looked clear to her, and simple: right and wrong, love and sadness, today, tomorrow, everything.
Sometimes, seeing her, Daniel would tell her to buy some new clothes, but she thought it a waste. It was a difficult time for them, without Alice’s income and with Daniel making a meagre living, and they had started to disagree. What with one thing and another, she saw less and less of him. The theatre kept him out a lot in the evenings, and she got into the habit of going to bed to read the day’s papers soon after she’d settled Peter down for the night. She’d be up by six in the morning and out long before Daniel woke, but they’d still have lunch together at home before he went on his way. She loved Peter passionately, with the truest and purest of loves, and would not consider having another baby.
When Peter was four, she enrolled him in nursery school and registered herself as a mature student in the Education department at McGill. There weren’t many lunches with Daniel after that.
It took Alice a long time to learn that tribalism looks different in different places, that the venom of a wasp, or a hornet, is every bit as dangerous as that of a bee.
In Quebec it had a different look than in Ireland. So, at first, in her early years in Quebec, Alice misread the political signs all around her. She admired René Lévesque; she loved the popular anthem, Gens du pays; she even considered joining the then-romantic Parti Québécois. A kind of anti-English feeling was in the air, but Alice had never thought of herself as English, and neither had Daniel. On a trip out past Quebec City, she and Daniel paid to see the insides of seigneurial mansions on Ile d’Orléans, and they smiled at a puzzled young tour guide both before and after he’d finished reciting his anti-English lecture.
Alice didn’t think much about the laws that made English signs illegal and that led English schools to close, but she did eventually decide that language had taken the place of religion in Quebec. English was taboo, the purity of the French language was the order of the day, and nationalism was rampant. By the time Alice began teaching physical education at an elementary school in Montreal West, she was agreeing with her colleagues, who complained of feeling unwanted and irrelevant. Daniel, looking behind the rhetoric, saw things differently, told Alice she was overreacting. His plays were beginning ot get good notices in La Presse and Le Devoir. Reading them, Alice was unsure of what she herself had done wrong. She felt cheated of what she was sure was her natural place on the side of the angels.
In Hungary, tribalism has a different look again, but Alice has met it often enough now to distinguish it behind its two favourite disguises. The bully boys and girls are one guise. Police work in Belfast and sixteen years in Quebec have taught her a lot about the victors, the might-is-right types. The other guise is the celebration of defeat: we have been victimized by you and therefore we are better and spiritually purer than you.
But is there anything wrong with playing the long-suffering victim? Is there? It must be worse, surely, to put other people down. Childish and ridiculous as other people’s tribalisms may appear, how difficult it seems to be to rise above one’s own. It’s all too confusing for Alice. She wants nothing to do with the loud, public world, anyway. She wants Daniel.
Alice has been hoping a year in Budapest will save them. Maybe some part of Daniel has hoped so too. Save them from what, anyway? Alice has never quite formulated the answer to that one. She doesn’t really know what Daniel fears, anymore. And as for herself? What does she need to be saved from? Well, from loneliness, for a start. From unhappiness. From the Tate Gallery, loyalists, racists, troubles, stagnation, despair, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, hatred, horror, self-hatred, desperation. From separation, divorce, separatists, nationalists — oh, there’s no shortage of things to fear.
It is the last Sunday in October, and the last time Alice and Daniel made love it was August. “Tonight,” she says out loud to herself. “Tonight for sure.”
Peter, solemn beside her, does not look up. He’s used to her odd outbursts. He has his father’s black hair and eyes, his mother’s long narrow nose. A boy who hangs around his parents, preferring the company of adults to that of children, and the company of girls to that of boys, he has not had an easy time of it making friends in Hungary. He’s too much like Daniel, Alice thinks, too shy, too thoughtful, too much of an observer. You’d think that, with the amount of time he spends with Alice, he’d have come out of himself more, become a bit bolder. Now he folds the white serviettes, carefully matching corner to corner, and puts one in each glass.
