The Past Read Free

the window and sees the sun and the sea making a flat mirror beneath it. And his wife meanwhile is on the promenade, for the time being without that fiery quality you saw in her, just pregnant now, her belly like a swollen pod proud before her, meeting the
Cornish breezes. Una hides nothing of her shape nor of the flush of her cheeks. Her dress is bulky and white and she walks like a billowing flag of a new nation down to the wrought-iron chairs to drink three cups of that mineral water and pray that it will bring the same flush to her daughter’s cheeks. She prays quietly, watching the sea, hoping as everyone does for a magic child. She rises then, her stomach swollen more with the gaseous liquid and walks back, or if the breeze is too strong, takes a hansom cab to her husband who is still by the window, watching the same sea.
    Because that was the first month and it would have still been a honeymoon month and the war hadn’t yet broken out or the Parliamentary party been split and their bodies just might have made those shapes on the dampish bed like those maps in which the larger island envelops the smaller one, backwards admittedly, but expressive of an act of union rather than one of buggery or rape. The play of their bodies, warranted by that honeymoon under the ceiling with the plaster necklace would have been a gift to them, would have made their differences opaque. They would have lain, counting the plaster pearls which would have led, maybe, to a plaster dimpled Cupid in the centre, they would have kept smiling at its white penis and perhaps even made jokes. It would have taken two months for their differences to emerge, the repetitive whisper of an old word that slowly becomes a roar, for her swelling stomach to take its toll with its moods, its impatience with things physical, its ancient irrationality that he feels he has met before in different guises, perplexing to him at first, then deeply disturbing, a disturbance he would have kept private, however, that would merely have given to his mouth a tight, perplexed line. His face that later became a mask, unrevealing and
yet somehow like glass, transparent and still hidden from her as it would later be to masses of others. And his eyes that don’t want to speak for fear of what they might say would have risen further moods in her, loud silences and even louder words. For she has taken to sitting up late, Lili, smoking cigarettes, filling the enamel basin with them while he sleeps. And from sitting up late she rises even later. He leaves the bed and dresses under the plaster boy while she sleeps, each breath like the exhalation of centuries. And the flush of a month ago is rocked in that sleep so he dresses alone, dines alone and soon can’t imagine things otherwise. And the later she sits up the later she rises until she is hardly awake for two hours of daylight. Is it the fear, he wonders, that as her stomach grows larger until even her billowing skirt can’t hide it she might meet someone from home who will take back news of her advanced condition? A remote possibility, since they are now well past autumn and fine weather and the resort is empty but for the old, the invalid and the local. But he suspects it, hearing her talk of that ‘bunch of jackals back home’. He asks her is she afraid of the prying eye, the rumour carried across water to that country where there is only rumour and everybody is related. But she hears this slur on her native country and her voice grows shrill in its defence, her nationalism growing with her belly. His is beginning to wane. He sees a war on at last, to end all wars. He travels to London to hear Redmond speak, meets friends of his student days in khaki, thinks of signing with the Irish Guards. From a bench in Hyde Park he hears an anti-Redmondite called Bulmer Hobson and the name reminds him of seabirds and kelp and he sees the flushed, hard faces he knew back home surrounded by the black plumage of