Marble Heart

‘“Is Finn your boyfriend?” I asked.

‘“My lover and comrade,” you corrected.

‘I gazed at you and then at Finn’s long back, impressed by this mysterious world I was glimpsing and experiencing a twinge of envy that you were involved with such an interesting-looking man.

‘Did I fall in love with Finn a little myself that night? I think I must have done, otherwise why would I have come to dislike him so intensely? He was dark and sure of himself; even his irascibility fitted a certain brooding stereotype and I had, like many another teenage girl, immersed myself in the Brontës and Du Maurier. When he came back with his drink he sat next to me and asked me questions about how I was finding Ireland. He tipped mixed nuts from a bag into his palm and offered them to me, saying I should pick out the almonds, they were the best. When the nuts had vanished he licked his salty hand as carefully as a cat licks its plate clean, running his tongue between his fingers. As he spoke to me he was examining my face. Although his eyes were a soft brown they had a directness that made me feel nothing would escape his attention. And nothing did, Majella, nothing did; he was watchful and always at the end of the road before we had turned the corner.’

Nina sighed and opened a new document, naming it ‘Martin’. She typed quickly, her eyes a little blurred.

‘You are beginning to understand that I left you not just because I am ill or contrary. If you are bewildered by me, well, that makes two of us. When you harbour a knowledge that cannot be revealed you feel set apart from the rest of humanity. There were times in the long nights when I longed to wake you, confess to you, beg your help. But I had no right to taint you.

‘Can you picture me in that pub? My hair was long and wild and sometimes I used to colour it so that it took on a hue like ripe red gooseberries. I wore pale pink nail varnish until Finn remarked that it looked cheap; he was a puritan about make-up although I expect he would have approved of the type of products you can buy now, recipes originating from far-flung populations of the third world.

‘That was a magic night in Mulligans; the kind of vivid experience you always remember with completeness: the sounds, the colours, the voices, the feelings engendered. On that night when I met Finn I started to feel a release of energy, a thrilling giddiness. It seemed to me that I had spent my days up to my eighteenth year in a timid stasis, waiting for something to happen. My mother’s message to me was enshrined in her stock phrase, “no fuss please, darling,” and my father’s self-effacement and premature death left a void.

‘In my mother’s shaded drawing room, behind ruched curtains, I had watched television pictures of Soviet tanks in Prague and rioting in the streets of London and Paris; demonstrations against the Vietnam War in Washington, civil rights marchers from Belfast with blood streaming down their faces, the reality barely impinging on me as I went about the discreet life lived in English suburbia, preparing to go to the tennis court or the library. I was dimly aware of Joan Baez singing “We Shall Overcome” and of the student power that was setting European streets ablaze. The only cold war I was familiar with was the one my mother had waged for years against my father, a series of frosty skirmishes that left me stranded in no-man’s land, unsure of who I should offer my loyalty to in any particular week. There were plenty of occasions when they communicated by leaving notes for me and I ran back and forth like a messenger between the trenches. My mother’s dugout was the drawing room, my father’s the potting shed. The events of 1968 took place while I was attempting and failing to broker peace somewhere between these camps, carrying communications written in codes which the two sides were doomed to misinterpret. If I paid any attention to them, it was with feelings of distaste and anxiety at such breakdown of order; locked as I was in the long disintegration of a marriage, I couldn’t face combat in the outside world.

‘In Mulligan’s bar I grew inebriated on the yeasty tang of stout and the fumes of golden hot whiskies in which cloves bobbed like tadpoles. I tried my first plate of boxty, the publican’s speciality, a dish that I became addicted to. It was hot, peppery and buttery and when someone said it was the food of the gods I agreed. A student who I later learned was Declan, the treasurer of Red Dawn, leaned across and asked teasingly if I’d heard that old rhyme:

“Boxty on the griddle

Boxty on the pan

If you don’t eat Boxty

You’ll never get a man!”

‘I smiled at him, registering that he had deep blue eyes but Majella reproved him, saying that we didn’t want to hear any of that old sexist claptrap. Finn took a spoonful from my plate without asking permission and declared that boxty was good, humble peasant food, the backbone of Ireland, the kind of dish that had its equivalent amongst working people in all cultures. A man stood up and sang a traditional ballad that brought tears to my eyes, a song about loss of land and family. Then Majella rapped the table and launched into a song that spoke of present injustice. She sang with such passion that I bit my gum through the boxty:

“Armoured cars and tanks and guns

Came to take away our sons

But every man will stand behind

The men behind the wire.

“Through the little streets of Belfast

In the dark of early morn

British soldiers came marauding,

Wrecking little homes with scorn;

Heedless of the crying children,

Dragging fathers from their beds,

Beating sons while helpless mothers

Watch the blood pour from their heads.

Round the world the truth will echo

Cromwell’s men are here again,

Britain’s name forever sullied

In the eyes of honest men.”

‘Afterwards, I asked her in a whisper if that was really happening and she said yes, nightly; men taken away and never charged, never given the chance of a fair hearing, their families left devastated. We were living in a tyranny but Bob Dylan was right, these were times of upheaval and change; this system of injustice couldn’t last, the people’s blood was up.

‘I understood that night that life had been racketing around elsewhere while I quietly occupied my little corner, mediating my parents’ antagonism and avoiding my mother’s censorious eye. In our tidy bungalow tucked away in a cul de sac it was a crime to leave an unwashed cup on the table, draw the curtains back untidily or spill a drop of liquid on the furniture. The background orchestration to my childhood had been the tight hissing from my mother’s lips as she heaped blame on my father or found fault with me. Now I was in a city where people opened their mouths wide to bellow their opinions and were willing to suffer terrible wounds, even death, for their beliefs. A sense of sheer animation, an impetuosity I would never have guessed at, was pulsing in me. I saw it reflected in Majella’s eyes, heard it echoed in her voice. The urge of something to aim for, something to risk everything for, that was what I wanted. The deliciousness of the boxty was giving me a taste for more flavours. I was ready for tumultuous change. I was ripe for falling in love and I did, with the scarred warring city and Majella and Finn.

‘When you are judging me, when you finally weigh up what you have learned, remember that the impulse was to do good, to create, to make a positive mark on the world. I fell far short of my own aspirations but I did possess them, and that remains some comfort to me.’

5

MARTIN

He looked in the bathroom mirror the evening Nina told him their life together was over and saw that he had a puzzled expression, like a child who doesn’t understand what it’s done wrong or a dog that suspects its owner is displeased. Then he did something he used to do as a child when he wanted to ease his troubles. He breathed on the mirror, wrote NINA in the condensation, then rubbed her name away hard with a flannel, making sure that none of the letters reappeared in the humid air. There, he thought angrily, morosely, self-pityingly; if that’s the way you want it, you can have it.

The next day he felt numb, as if his limbs had been shot full of Novocain. He prodded his arm; nothing. When he picked his hand up and let it drop it rested on his knee; someone else might have left it there. On the way home from work he stopped and had his right ear pierced in three places. The slap of the gun and the mild stinging helped him back into himself as did the burning antiseptic he had to bathe it in later. Nina didn’t notice, she was looking through him but when he fingered the tiny punctures and wiped the spots of blood he knew that he was real.

During the following weeks he stayed strangely calm. Maybe, he thought, he’d been expecting Nina’s decision for some time. She had always eluded him. Before she became ill she was light on her feet, fast moving. There she would be on the periphery of his vision, vanishing through a door or up the stairs. He would hear the car ignition and realise that she had left the house with no warning. She would come back hours later, cheeks flushed, or yawning, with puffy eyes. When he asked where she’d been she would reply for a walk or a visit to a museum or just sleeping in the car. The first time she said that, ‘just sleeping’, he was convinced that he was being made a fool of and she was seeing someone else. Yet it was only a few months into their marriage and he couldn’t detect an air of deceit; she looked at him full in the face and spoke with such simple frankness, he had to believe her. She had driven up to the Heath, she’d say, parked near the pub on Spaniard’s Hill and drifted off. When he asked why, if there was something wrong, she shook her head, saying that there was no explanation she could give.

He followed her once, feeling craven, a sneak. He was annoyed that she was the one taking off, behaving oddly, and yet he was acting as if he was the guilty partner, trailing her covertly. His hands were damp at the possibility that she might spot him but she didn’t, driving just over the speed limit. She headed down by the River Lea near Tottenham Hale and pulled up at a fishing area. Then she reclined the seat, folded her arms and tucked her chin down. He waited there for an hour, feeling ridiculous, spying on his wife sleeping and wondered what he had done to cause her to flee from him.

Before he and Nina married they had known each other for just over a year, living together for six months prior to the wedding. During those months she had never, as far as he was aware, felt the need for solitary outings. She was often a little touchy about her own possessions and her books but he understood that; they had both lived on their own and it was difficult adjusting to an invasion of territory. It seemed that, as soon as they were married, she found the need to put spaces between them, spaces that grew, broadening, deepening. He was alarmed, thinking of those people who discovered that the charms of their partner quickly waned once they had formalised the relationship but when he asked Nina – and he asked her often, more often than he wanted to – if she was happy she would smile and say yes, of course, he mustn’t mind her strange foibles. Mystified, he would put his arms around her, sniffing the brackish odour of the river or polish from a museum bench in her clothes and hair.

She was rushing past him the first day he noticed her at the university. He had been appointed manager of personnel a month before and was still finding his feet. A person flashed by him, sweeping him into her slipstream rather as a tornado sucks up objects from the ground. He sought out that small, slim figure with the huge brown leather satchel that banged against her hip as she blew around the corridors. It was her lightness, a kind of sprite-like quality, that attracted him and held his interest. He would have to put his hand on her arm to secure her attention and keep her still. Her students, he discovered, called her ‘The Exocet’. She was a popular lecturer, admired for her zest and wit. Her singing voice was surprisingly strong for someone so slight and she occasionally entertained her colleagues or students with Italian and French songs. Her talent for mimicry was well known; she did a convincing Edith Piaf and Shirley Bassey.

He sat opposite her in the buffet one day and introduced himself, explaining that he’d seen her whirling along a corridor. Ah yes, she said she’d noticed his name in the university newsletter. Her head was neat, her glossy brown hair cut like a cap, glinting where the sun was illuminating it from behind. He found out that she had spent the summer in Italy which accounted for her lightly tanned complexion, the same honey shade as the melba toast she was crunching, and the deeper, caramel scatter of freckles across the bridge of her nose. He recounted his own fortnight spent on a walking tour of Tuscany and they swapped stories of Florence and Siena. She pushed her plate away and rested her chin on linked knuckles. He saw that she bit her nails and guessed that her confident air was overstated. He wanted to reach out and cradle her head, which to him seemed terribly vulnerable, between his hands. When she laughed she ran her fingers through her feathery hair so that strands stuck out. He liked the way she didn’t care, wasn’t bothered about her image. She reminded him of one of the wood pixies in an illustrated plate in one of his favourite childhood books, a hardback volume called Tales of the Forest Folk. The pixies were nimble and busy, collecting berries and honey, bandaging the wounded paws of squirrels and badgers. As she talked she played with an empty sugar sachet, folding and smoothing it with narrow fingers, shaping it into a star. Even when she was sitting she appeared active, her arms moving, shifting in her chair.

He used to joke that if he’d known he was going to fall for someone so energetic, he’d have taken up fitness training. Their relationship grew as they walked and cycled. He had to buy a bike, not having owned one since he was sixteen. At weekends they caught the tube and tramped around Epping or Theydon Bois or drove down to Sussex and walked on the Downs. Their cycle routes took them through Hampstead Heath or south of the river, following the Thames. It was autumn when they met and the air was growing misty. Yellowing leaves dived under their wheels and an edge of cold nipped their fingers. Their conversations rose and fell with dips in the road, paced to the rhythms of their booted feet and clicking gears. He found some of the longer walks, the ten-mile ones, hard going but the intensity of a new love buoyed him up, willing his legs on.

She was unlike any other woman he had come across. The two serious relationships he had been involved in before now seemed pleasant but arid affairs. Neither Helen nor Suzy would have made him stop on a road, pushing his head towards a bush and urging him to sniff deeply the pungent leaves. Nina knew the names of trees, plants and wild flowers; she would bend and scoop rainwater from a blossom with a quick flick of her tongue or deftly pick berries and cram them into his mouth so that his lips were purple stained and he would taste the tang of wild fruit for the rest of the day. She told him the best places to find small sweet plums in August and took him to a bridle path where blackcurrants massed, so heavily clustered that they bent to the ground. Her small garden was a riot of carefully tended plants and tubs brimming with greenery. Often, when he arrived, he found her crouching, hands buried in a bag of compost or taking cuttings. Herbs grew everywhere, on window ledges throughout her flat and in a special trough just outside the back door so that it seemed that there was no dividing line between inside and out. She gave bunches of herbs away at the university; dill, sage or marjoram frequently trailed from her satchel, scenting the pages of marked essays as she stood in corridors, advising on their use in cooking or in medicinal drinks. Sometimes she would slip from bed in between love making, returning with a handful of lemon balm which she would massage onto his skin. They rolled on the leaves, crushing them on the sheet as they slipped down a tunnel of fragrance.

One warm morning, when he had stayed the night with her, she took him onto the patch of lawn outside her garden flat and got him to lie face down with her on the damp grass, one ear to the ground. If you listened quietly you could hear all of London moving, she said; the tramp of thousands of feet, the rolling of buses and trains, the surging of boats on the Thames. Concentrating, eyes closed, he thought he could; there seemed to be a humming under the soil.

‘This is my favourite season,’ he said, freewheeling near Richmond. ‘The colours are soft.’

‘Yes, but the tastes are tart and many of the berries are inedible or poisonous. It’s a deceptive time of year; the golds and russets make you want to linger when you should be on your way home, securing your winter nest.’

He gathered that all this evening and weekend activity was what Nina was used to; she had done these walks and cycle trips alone. He wasn’t overweight when they met and he lost half a stone in the first months. A friend commented that love makes some people sleek and others thin. Perhaps he should have read more into the fact that Nina’s weight stayed the same.

It was at a campus party where Nina had sung ‘La Vie en Rose’ in the style of Piaf that he first noticed what he came to recognise as her mask look. It had dawned on him that Nina had no friends, just acquaintances. Her general popularity was exactly that; general, not specific to any one person. He was used to women having networks of friends but apart from when she was socialising in a group, Nina spent her time on her own. He pieced together a picture of a life lived reading, gardening and preparing lectures with frequent exercise and the odd party or theatre outing. She wouldn’t go to the cinema; she couldn’t stand the way it falsified life, she said, lending it a glamour it didn’t deserve.

Piecing together was exactly what he had to do because he found it difficult to form a comprehensive picture of Nina before he met her. She side-stepped those questions that lovers ask each other, confiding in return images of themselves at ten, fourteen, twenty, the problems of previous relationships, the flavour of a childhood. When he talked about his family or his first girlfriend or Angus, a close friend from university days in Warwick, Nina listened and nodded and made the odd comment, but there was no return of information. When he jokingly said that he sometimes thought she must have landed from another planet, that she was an alien sent to gather information, she laughed, replying that she was in regular contact with Mars. Nina would never give an inch when she didn’t want to. The pattern of their life together was quickly established in those first months; when she was being elusive he would joke, nervously trying to conceal how frustrated he felt and, taking his cue, she would joke back. So on each occasion he set a trap for himself and provided the escape route that she used for swift avoidance. Unwittingly, he sowed the seeds of his own unhappiness.

After Nina had done her Piaf at that New Year’s Eve party a young Irishman, a student, came up to them and told her how much he’d enjoyed it. He was obviously on a return trip to the sixties: his hair was long and he wore John Lennon glasses and a tie-dyed shirt.

‘It’s unusual to find a person singing at a party in England,’ he said, ‘other than drunken rugby choruses or the Birdie Song. It’s more the kind of thing you get back home in Ireland.’

‘Which part of Ireland are you from?’ Martin asked him.

‘Strabane.’ He turned to Nina. ‘We have a bit of a connection,’ he told her.

‘I’m sorry?’ she said.

‘My name’s Conor Lally. You knew my father, Declan Lally, at Queen’s, didn’t you? Look, I’ve a photo he dug out.’

He produced a wallet from his back pocket and found a creased black-and-white photograph. Nina didn’t take it. She let him hold it in front of her and Martin peered over her arm. There was Nina with long, free-flowing hair, wearing a layered skirt and waistcoat. Her right fist was in the air in a clenched salute, her left hand curled around one pole of a banner saying, TROOPS OUT NOW! A young man whose face still held the last residues of puppy fat lifted the other pole.

Nina took a step back and sipped her drink, looking down into it. ‘Declan Lally. It rings a bell. We were always demonstrating about something then.’

The young man nodded, moving closer to her. ‘I was home for Christmas and I was talking about some of the lecturers, the ones worth mentioning, the ones who don’t just take the money and run. Dad said he’d known a Nina Rawle. When I described you he said you must be the same person and he found this photo in an old album. The right-on sixties!’

‘This is Belfast?’ Martin asked, looking at that other, grainy Nina and then turning to her, touched her arm. ‘I didn’t know that you’d lived in Ireland.’ He was puzzled, because he’d told her that his grandmother who lived in Dagenham was originally from Galway and he had once had a holiday with her there.

‘No, you didn’t know. I don’t teach you, do I?’ she asked Conor, her voice polite but tight.

‘No. I’m doing Spanish and International studies.’ He was pleasantly drunk and you could tell that he was one of those earnest young types who pin you to the wall at parties and give you their world view.

‘Dad said that you were both into politics in a big way. He wanted me to ask you if you still sing “The Red Flag”? He’s active but he’s gone soft; he’s in the SDLP, refuge of the woolly middle-of-the-roader. That was the time to be a student, back then. There was real radicalism, burning-hot stuff. Look at the leaders you had: Tariq Ali, Danny Cohn-Bendit, Bernadette Devlin. Not like now – there are no real lefties, it’s hard enough to find a committed feminist. People spend their time worrying about bank loans and keeping their noses clean in case they can’t get a job. You’ve no idea how lucky you were to have been part of things then, you had the chance to make a real difference.’

Martin was looking at Nina as Conor delivered his enthusiastic monologue. Her face was freezing and setting, shutting down. He was shocked because her features were usually so expressive and the severity of her look alarmed him.

‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ she said, putting her glass down. ‘I think the pizza’s disagreed with me, I must go home.’

Martin hurried after her to the car. She was accelerating away before he managed to close his door.

‘Are you feeling sick? I can drive if you are.’

‘I’ll be okay, probably needed some air.’ She was winding her window down full and an icy breeze caught in his throat.

‘He was a bit of a bore, that guy. Do you remember his father?’

‘Vaguely. I might have spoken to him once or twice. We all went to lots of meetings.’ She turned her head towards her window, taking deep breaths. Her tone was flat, tired, her profile still expressionless.

‘What did you make of Belfast?’

‘It wasn’t a happy time in my life. Could we drop the subject? I think maybe I’ve caught that bug that’s doing the rounds.’

And so the subject was dropped and they never returned to it. Martin assumed that Nina had been homesick in Ireland or experienced a bad love affair. He had nearly left Warwick after a girl jilted him. Because he never met anyone close to Nina, a confidante of any kind, he had no one to ask casual questions of, no way of filling in the gaps she left.

There were other subjects that brought on Nina’s mask face. Funerals, for example; when Martin’s Dagenham grandmother died Nina told him she wouldn’t be going to the mass and service at the cemetery. He was astonished. She hadn’t known his grandmother well but he had assumed that she would accompany him. He had loved his grandmother and felt her loss. When he heard Nina’s words, spoken rigidly, the loss was heightened because he had expected to have her by him in his grief.