Goodbye Again Read Free Page B

daisies.
    I pulled out one of the little drawers. A cut-throat razor, a decayed shaving brush, an old bottle of Collis Browne’s Tonic.
    At the back of another drawer was a collection of small black-and -white photographs. My parents at the Dublin Horse Show years before. But then, beneath these, I came across something quite different. An older photograph. My father as a young man in an Italian army officer’s uniform, smiling, pleased with himself. I’d not known my father had been in the army and thought he’d been exempted. Then I noticed the pith helmet and the Africans.
    Of course. This was before the war, Mussolini’s barbarous campaign in Abyssinia. My father had served out there, and here he was, at the head of a line of bedraggled, wounded and manacled Abyssinians. And my father holding the first of them, pulling him by a chain attached to his neck. I was surprised.
    I went into my mother’s big bedroom looking out over the bright, early-evening light on the bay. I sat down on the canopied four-poster bed. There was a formal studio portrait on a bureau nearby. My parents shortly after they’d married, sometime in the early fifties. They were smiling at each other. Not like later.
    My father, small with darkly brilliantined hair, neat moustache, suave good looks, very Latin; almost a caricature of an Italian. His chest puffed out, with the same aggressive confidence of the earlier African photograph, but matured, diluted in this later portrait by his dark bedroom eyes, softened with intimations of passion, warmth, even nobility.
    Cruelty and warmth. The photographs reflected the extremes in his character. He’d been a man of extraordinarily varied and unsettled temperament. Quick to anger, with a ruthless edge to him, butthen as quickly silent, as if stunned, when he became gentle and penitent, filled with tearful innocence.
    His eyes in this photograph showed something else beyond the seductive Latin airs, the genial man about town with other Dublin businessmen, drinking gin and tonics in the old buttery bar downstairs in the Hibernian hotel. There were shadows in his eyes, the haunted look of a man who, at thirty, had seen and experienced the very worst in Auschwitz.
    My mother, by contrast, showed a complete innocence in the studio photograph. A pleasant, round face, untouched by life. She was not like that later, when experience had laid hands on her. A face increasingly racked by pain and bitterness, vented often on me – I’ve never known why.
    Taking the bottle I went up to the second floor where there was a long, glass-roofed landing with rooms to either side, guests’ and maids’ rooms years before. It was hot under the glass roof, where the sun had blazed down all through the long hot day. I sat on the floor, back against the wall, took the bottle, drank, closed my eyes and tried to laugh at my life.
    I’d been a good all-round athlete at St Columba’s College, my school up in the Dublin mountains: a first-team cricket and rugby player, and I became a quick hand at boxing too, as a middleweight, taught by a burly cocksure ex-army sergeant, Johnny Branigan, who I had once surprised with a fast left hook to the jaw, stunning him for a moment, before he tried to do the same to me. After making a century in a cup match, I’d thought about becoming a professional cricketer with Middlesex. But when I was sixteen I fell in love with my father’s motor cruiser, the Sorrento , still moored in the boathouse, crewing it with my father in all sorts of weather, up and down the Irish Sea. The passion I came to have for boats then, thinking I might join the British navy, until I got the recruiting brochure and application forms,and felt the cold shadows of hierarchy, duty, restrictions – not the freedom of the seas.
    Eventually I realized I was best of all at painting and sculpting. A gift for drawing and colour, and handling clay. The art master at St Columba’s encouraged me. So at sixteen I finally