A State of Mind Read online

  A STATE OF MIND

  Kevin Casey

  for Eavan Boland and Eavan Casey, with love

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  Copyright

  A STATE OF MIND

  ONE

  THIS IS AN ATTEMPT to record the events of last summer. I want to understand what happened. I am tired of bewilderment and sadness and the faint unease with which I awake each morning, as if from a disturbing dream. If I describe my feelings, I will, perhaps, learn to understand them. In the fiction I have written, I sometimes stumbled with surprise on a hidden truth, a sudden awareness of a character’s possible motivation, something that I did not realize I knew. I would push on with the plot in the manner planned, always hoping for the unexpected moment, the reward for a month’s labour. I start this record with the same hope of discovery, writing in this small red notebook, awkwardly, like a child.

  I love words. I love their shape, their sound, the precision of their meaning, yet somehow, four or five years ago, I lost confidence in my ability to use them. Day after day I would stare at the blue lines in my notebook, the blank sheet of paper in my typewriter. Nothing could have been worse. My craft crumbled, my confidence waned. I felt defeated and incomplete. My books went on selling but I felt estranged from them. The bright covers of paperback editions rebuked me. I was no longer the man who had written them. My publishers, believing that I was working on an ambitious project, sent me encouraging letters which made me feel even more fraudulent. I went less and less into my study. I drank more but managed to give up cigarettes.

  I pretended to my wife and daughter that I was not worried, but they would occasionally express their concern. I wondered if I should return to journalism. I thought of ideas for plots. I lived a life of rural leisure and private desperation.

  The house that my books had bought for us was situated in that part of County Wicklow favoured by foreign writers who wish to avail of Ireland’s tax-free concessions. It has a stolid, middle-class charm that has appealed to us from the start. A drive leads from the roadway upwards through a small and sloping paddock towards a Gothic portico that a previous owner, a merchant in the village of Ashford, had added to proclaim his prestige. One should, I suppose, have set about demolishing this gesture, to reveal the more spare and telling lines that the original builder had devised but somehow the self-important imperfection of those pillars is like a character defect that makes a friend all the more endearing.

  Behind the portico there was a house that one could come to admire and even grow to love, angular and self-confident, a proclamation of windows and chimneys that, in their parody of the mountains that rose above them, benign and enduring and safe, echoed an owner’s hope of longevity. I had become fascinated by the title deeds. My solicitor, a friend since schooldays, had set about the minor task of detecting the name of the man who had built the house. He was, it appears, the second son of the local landlord. The series of social awkwardnesses and progressions by which this modest lodge, overlooking a pond and a river and a series of unchallenging peaks, had become more imposing and assertive could be understood through a study of the changing ownership since then.

  We had bought it from the widow of a Dublin barrister. When all her furniture had been taken away in vans, the interior looked subdued and shabby but after a few months’ work and the installation of our own things it became friendly and filled with light.

  There is a large hallway with a parquet floor and a narrow welcoming fireplace. Much-admired mahogany doors with plain brass fittings lead into a sitting room, a dining room and the study in which I am writing these words. A passage leads to the kitchen and to a former scullery, now converted into a breakfast room. Upstairs, there are five bedrooms and two bathrooms. I suppose that I am describing all this bourgeois respectability because I am proud of it. It proves that I was once a writer, that I knew something about plots and about characters, that I had something to say. I can touch the walls of this house and for a few seconds, at least, my success is tangible.

  I could not have afforded this leisurely lifestyle on my salary as a journalist. The five or six books I wrote so effortlessly redefined me and my way of life. The first success was unexpected and, because of that, all the more exciting, like a new sexual experience involving facets of the personality that have previously remained detached. Good reviews, the first film offer, the first foreign translations, the first interview on television – it was a world of heightened consciousness which seemed to interleaf fantasy and reality even more adroitly than I could do in my books. I was, for a while, a minor celebrity, a creature of the media, quoted and corruptible. I look back at that time with some amusement, missing only the quiet hours that I spent working on the next book.

  When I left journalism, after practising the trade for almost twenty years, my colleagues presented me with an inscribed silver salver. I have it here on my desk. There was a reception in the local pub at which most of us got very drunk.

  I must confess that my memories of the occasion are blurred but I know that as the evening went on the opinions being expressed by a number of the guests were radically different from the sentiments inscribed on the salver. This hurt me, for I had taken pride in my persistence and accuracy as a journalist. For two years I had acted as Northern Ireland correspondent and the pieces I had filed from there were often praised and were not without some influence. I was a professional and I expected to be assessed professionally. ‘You were always a hack,’ Brady the chief sub-editor said to me that evening, ‘so it’ll be no problem to you to go on churning out hack fiction.’ Everyone standing near to us had laughed. I felt both hurt and oddly isolated, knowing, rationally, that he was motivated by jealousy at my success, yet wounded, emotionally, because I was made to feel different and friendless. Brady and I had never been particularly close but neither had we had any disagreement. I had to conclude that he was articulating an official viewpoint and that those who publicly wished me well may have been saying something different in private. It occurred to me then that I had little gift for friendship. There was something about my manner or my personality that discouraged intimacy. I had a tendency to invent myself for others, presenting them with that aspect of my character with which, instinctively, I assumed they would feel most comfortable. This tendency allowed me to have a wide circle of acquaintances, all of whom impinged on my life on different levels and in different ways but none of whom could be described as a friend. My only close relationships are with my wife and daughter.

  Wife and daughter: this might be the title of some forgotten Victorian novel or one of those exquisitely subtle but almost unreadable books by Ivy Compton-Burnett. My home is feminist, a tiny matriarchy built on the new and alert aspirations of intelligent women. I sometimes feel awkward, like an old colonizer who is back, blundering through the landscapes of oppression in what is now a newly independent nation. There is no one here with whom to share the crude race memories of the oppressor. It is the future that is pointed to, not the past. When my daughter leaves these peaceful rooms, she will have to conquer the world.

  Wife and daughter: Laura and Rachael. The names now assume a kind of Biblical au
thority. Some months ago Rachael asked us, for the first time, how we had chosen her name from all the others that would have been at least as appropriate. To our surprise, we could not remember. It had no particular logic, it commemorated no ancestor; we must simply have liked it. This is the way I have given names to the characters in my books but it seemed a little sad that the identity of a real and much-loved person should have been arrived at almost casually. Yet lives are made as casually as that in couplings, happy and thoughtless, and in this island of ours they are also taken away with perhaps even less premeditation. I must admit that it is only since I have had a child of my own, a life that would not have existed if I had not felt some passion or commitment or, at the very least, some lust, that I have become sensitive to the personal domestic tragedy of little deaths. One can use words like soldier, terrorist, gunman, Catholic, Protestant, innocent victim. These words and phrases preclude important daily rituals and needs: the kiss, the pay-packet, the smile of approval, the good school report. It must be terrible to look down on the shattered body of a loved one, to see the blood oozing and the bone exposed by the impact of a planted bomb. How could one accept the finality of that act of violence? There were moments last summer when I worried about the safety of my family and I remember the feeling of rage, rising like lust, difficult to control.

  When I first saw Rachael, her little body was dark and streaked with blood. I was reminded of African tribal markings, as if she had come from the womb already initiated into some secret ritual. Laura was laughing, her face glistening with sweat as the nurse lifted the new and separate life and the first sound that the baby made was more like a cough than a cry. That was fifteen years ago but the emotions created by the event spread out from the table, filled the harshly lit and antiseptic delivery room and they come back to me now as if just experienced. I can remember the smell of the moment of birth, the urgings towards exertion as if it were an athletic event, and Laura’s anxious eyes. She held my hand, gripping it as a climber might, holding on for life. I felt closer to her than in the lovemaking that had created the baby, joyous though that had been. She was vulnerable and courageous and even pain could not take away her pride. She settled into the exercises that she had practised, holding my hand and ignoring the strange if not unfriendly faces of white-coated men and women who would pause to take a look and then move to the door of another cubicle.

  Last summer, when I feared that they were threatened by a force that I could not understand, I thought a lot about those hours in Holles Street Hospital. And, as if seeking for some pattern of logic in a sequence of unconnected events, I also thought about our first meeting. To what extent can the accuracy of my recall be trusted? I do not think of myself as having a particularly good memory but the necessities of journalism trained me to create pegs and pointers for important events, so I believe that I am a reliable witness to some, at least, of the events in my past. I envy painters who can find greater truths by distancing the image from the object but I must rely on literal accuracy with the mundane aid of sounds, smells and snatches of music.

  A collection of schoolgirls, boisterous rather than lyrical, were singing Christmas carols to the accompaniment of some guitars, a whistle or two and the rattle of collection boxes as I walked down Grafton Street to the Bailey to meet a girl with whom I dearly wished to have sex. It never happened. She was an American, the daughter of a Chicago businessman, and she reminded me of a woman in a Sargent portrait, unsure yet full of tension and of grace. In the yeasty warmth of the bar she introduced me to her flatmate. ‘This is Laura,’ she said and out of the anonymity of the crowd a girl smiled at me, lips parting slowly to reveal strong white teeth. That smile, familiar now, but exciting, even exotic, then, was like the gift of a password to a new way of life. She was wearing something ordinary – denim jeans and probably a denim jacket – and although she was pretty, even beautiful, there was no logical reason why it should have seemed to me that everything in my past had been a preparation for this special moment. I looked at her and tried to think of something adequate to say. I noted her small skull and the dark hair parted rather severely in the middle and her prominent eyebrows and the long lashes and the grey-green loveliness of her eyes. Her nose had a sensuous sweep, despite a slight fleshiness. I liked the way that she smiled and her determined chin and her air of calmness appealed to me as if it had been devised for my benefit. ‘It’s so nice to meet you,’ I said, and she laughed.

  It all started from there; out of the trivial we create the tabernacle of our feelings. An English-born radiographer, the daughter of emigrant Irish parents, became a part of everything that I was and that I wanted to be.

  TWO

  THIS MORNING, when I woke and pulled the curtains on the window of our bedroom, the scene that I witnessed had a beauty of such intensity that it caught me by surprise. There are numerous landscapes by minor Victorian painters that can prompt a similar emotion: small frozen stillnesses, precisions of clouds and trees and tranquil, grazing cattle, glimpses of escape from reality. These other worlds can haunt us with their promises of peace.

  When I opened the window, the air was already warm and resinous. Magpies clattered in a neighbouring wood, angry at some intrusion. The mountains were benign and one-dimensional, the fields mottled with subtleties of greenness. A rook moved slowly against the translucent sky.

  I turned from the window and looked around the room, chilled by a memory of impending loss. I wanted to construct some lasting edifice to the concept of family, to create a bond of enduring strength with the two women in this house. Laura was asleep and breathing peacefully, but her face had a troubled expression as if she were contemplating, in the awkward logic of a dream, some newly perceived threat. Her eyelids flickered and the fingers of her left hand pulled restlessly at the sheet. A strand of hair had fallen across her high and unlined forehead and, as she moved her head, as if dissenting from the dream, there appeared to be some bruise-like smudges beneath her eyes. She shifted her position; the soft outline of a breast was detectable under the rumpled sheet and suddenly, involuntarily, she swallowed, her throat constricting, the lean line of her jaw momentarily tightening, a curve of defeat or depression lowering the usual tilt of her lips. I watched her, anxious to interpret these moments of utterly private reappraisal, stirred by the shape of her body, imagining the texture of her skin beneath my fingers, wanting her. We had made love so often, there was little novelty or surprise left in the act but there was always reassurance. Our passion may have assumed a certain ritualistic progression based on so many years’ awareness of individual preference, but beyond that elaboration we had retained some spontaneous urgency. We needed the sudden intimacy of release, the tastes, the sounds, the involuntary bodily movements that redefined us to each other. We belonged together. We had combined to form a family.

  The concept of family meant little enough to me until Rachael almost died. Its three syllables encompassed the memories of a lost boyhood in County Meath rather than a manner of comprehending and redeeming middle age. Families stretched backwards in faded photographs; they were a benign coven of black-skirted, large-bosomed maternal ancestors with severe hairstyles, keen eyes, broad mouths and the same pieces of jewellery unageing against wrinkled necks. Families were redolent of dust. They were familiar names chipped into damp gravestones, they were ornaments bought while abroad.

  When Rachael wasn’t yet two years old I was invited to Iowa City to take part in a conference on contemporary writing. The three of us travelled together and everything was going well until, on the fifth day, I went to wake Rachael and saw immediately that she was unwell. She was holding her head oddly and there was foam at the corners of her mouth. I remember longing for her to smile, to come out from behind some pretence, but she stared up at me, her lovely eyes the colour of sucked butterscotch and there was no sign of recognition, no welcome for the start of a new day. She had kicked back the blankets and there were sweat marks on the sheet. From the apartment next
door I could hear the familiar urgent sound of water sizzling in a shower. The voice of a radio announcer injected some drama into the news. For a few moments I was locked into inaction, staring down at her staring up at me, her little hands clenched into fat fists, her breathing fracturing the air between us with its harshness. The yellow-walled room, bare except for the cot and a few of our empty suitcases, was already fluid in the distinct and magical early morning light of Midwestern America. The panic I felt was a mixture of fear and cowardice. I wished I could have been somewhere else, that this precious life depended on a person of greater resourcefulness. I simply did not know what to do. Iowa City had been comprehensible and welcoming for days but was now an alien place. There was no one to call on the telephone, no authoritative relative to consult. There was just the three of us.

  Laura, aware of an abnormal silence, came hurrying into the room.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just found her like this.’

  ‘Her neck is stiff,’ Laura said. ‘I think there’s a risk it’s meningitis.’

  ‘But people die of meningitis!’

  ‘We can’t lose another minute.’

  After that it was all rush and flurry. One of us remembered that the conference folder contained a list of useful addresses. We had not had to consult it before. The time in Iowa City had been full and interesting and happy. Now Rachael’s illness made all that seem unreal. The list, when I found it, included the name of a doctor. The street on which he had his surgery was close to our apartment. Holding Rachael tightly and anonymously, like an imperfectly wrapped piece of shopping, I ran along the length of leaf-strewn North Dodge towards the downtown area, aware that Laura was running just behind me. We must have looked like a crazed couple from an amateur movie or from a country in which some atrocity was happening. I remember a woman frowning at us and pulling her small, ugly dog nearer to the safety of her legs. We passed the corpse of a squirrel on the sidewalk, its worn teeth revealed in a grimace of rage or of pain. If she dies, I thought, if she dies, if she dies … unable to complete that unthinkable proposition. Laura was crying, big, public, uncharacteristic tears.