The Pathless Country E-Book

James Harpur

• Herausgeber: Cinnamon Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 448

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

1900s London. For Patrick Bowley, fresh from rural Galway, a place of mind-expanding encounters with mystics, suffragettes, theosophists and free-thinkers. Drawn into the world of such luminaries as Jiddu Krishnamurti, Annie Besant and W B Yeats, it seems that Patrick is on a quest for meaning that will bear fruit. But a bruising failure in romance leaves him disillusioned with London and its class divisions and, in spiritual crisis, he flees to the familiarity of rural Ireland. But Patrick finds no peace and as Europe slides towards war and Ireland towards rebellion, his longing to shut out the world is challenged by a vocation to preach peace in Ireland that will not be quieted. And so he begins an epic pilgrimage to Dublin, arriving days before the 1916 Easter Rising. It is here that Patrick's journey reaches a gripping climax – one that finally reveals the true nature of the 'pathless country'. Winner of the J G Farrell Award and an Irish Writers' Centre Novel Fair Award, James Harpur's debut novel deftly weaves a story of spiritual awakening with fin de siècle alternative thought, love and political history, exploring how conscience and spiritual quest survive in an atmosphere of war, sectarianism and class hierarchy.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Epigraph

Dedication

Prologue

Part One — The Calling

i

ii

iii

iv

v

vi

vii

viii

ix

x

xi

xii

xiii

Part Two — The Work

i

ii

iii

iv

v

vi

vii

viii

ix

x

xi

xii

xiii

xiv

xv

xvi

xvii

xviii

xix

xx

Part Three — The Pilgrimage

i

ii

iii

iv

v

vi

vii

viii

ix

x

xi

Author Biography

The Pathless Country

James Harpur

Published by Liquorice Fish Books an imprint of Cinnamon Press, Office 49019, PO Box 15113, Birmingham, B2 2NJ

www.cinnamonpress.com

The right of James Harpur to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988. © 2021 James Harpur.

Print Edition ISBN 978-1-911540-11-3

Ebook Edition ISBN 978-1-911540-15-1

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, hired out, resold or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

Designed and typeset by Liquorice Fish Books.

Liquorice Fish Books is represented by Inpress.

Krishnamurti’s Dissolution Speech (‘Truth is a pathless land’), © 1929 Krishnamurti Foundation of America. Content reproduced with permission. Permission to quote from the works of J. Krishnamurti or other works for which the copyright is held by the Krishnamurti Foundation of America or the Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Ltd has been given on the understanding that such permission does not indicate endorsement of the views expressed in this book. For more information about J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986) please see: www.jkrishnamurti.org.

The quotation from Matthew 5:45 is taken from the Wyclifffe Bible, 1382, with copies held in Trinity College Dublin and accessed at www.biblegateway.com.

The quotations form Rabindranath Tagore’s poems ‘Leave this chanting’ and ‘Brink of Eternity’ are from The Gitanjali or `Song Offerings' by Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), with an introduction by W B Yeats (1865–1939). First published in 1913, it can be accessed at sacred-texts.com/hin/tagore/gitnjali.htm.

Acknowledgements

A number of people have given me help and encouragement during the writing of this book, and I’d like to thank in particular Penelope Buckley, Faye Carney, Jules Cashford, Tom MacCarthy, Grace Wells, Ian Wild and Liz Wyse.

I would also like to thank various friends and members of my family for reading the text at different stages and making helpful suggestions, including Alyson, Ania, Francesca, John F., Margaret, Rosemary, Sarah, Ursula, Mel, Pat and Evie.

With some of the historical parts of the story I have been indebted to Mary Lutyens’s biography, Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening (Shambhala, 1997); the Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse (Phoenix Publishing, 1924); and The Joyful Wisdom by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by Thomas Common (T.N. Foulis, 1910).

Finally, many thanks to the organisers and judges of the J.G. Farrell Award and the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair Award, and to Adam Craig for his literary midwifery; and my profound gratitude to J. Krishnamurti and his writings.

The Pathless Country

‘The country we came from is There, and There is our Father. How, then, shall we return to it? How will we flee? We cannot use our feet, for they will only take us from country to country.’

Plotinus, Enneads, I.6.8.

For dearest Gracie, with much love.

May you find your path to pathlessness.

Prologue

Another cloudless day. We walked through the Luxembourg Gardens to Rue Mouffetard, both of us shrinking from the smell of entrails and cheese filling its narrowness. Mme Bouchet took longer to come to the door. She seemed older but still with smiles and charm. ‘You are looking well, and your daughter… she is so beautiful!’ Her room was dim, more disorganised, shutters open; curtains drooped like bridal veils. Madame full of fuss and offering refreshments. We acquiesced, then I gave her the typescript. She opened up the cover and flicked through the pages, stopping to read aloud from one of them: ‘He feels a terrible strength trying to shift him towards the drop. He can hear the sea hissing and rearing up at him.’ A pause, then she said, ‘Eh bien, this is it. This is finally the work, your work.’ ‘Our work,’ I said. ‘Non! I did little, and what I did was done through me. I am the medium only. What I did was small things.’ ‘You began the process, and you kept me going; things I had forgotten or had no knowledge of.’ ‘The spirits need to speak in order to make… a completion. I only write down the dictations they give me. Monsieur Flournoy says it is all in the mind of the medium, in some sort of buried… niche. But how would I have the imagination to invent the stories and the thoughts, all the twists and turns, the love, the hate?’ As I began to thank her, she shrugged and flicked her hand up, as if batting away a fly. ‘And your daughter, I can see, has a glow about her. About her head. C’est bien.’

part one

THE CALLING

He is shocked to see St Stephen’s Green looking so different. Barricades in the heart of Dublin! People scuttling around holding their heads. Gunshots. He ducks a useless half-second after each bang. Some yards away a uniformed man is going berserk, shouting and pointing at an old man, who has shrunk down and pulled his jacket over his head. He’s never heard such shouting, such rage, and wonders why the old man won’t do what he’s told. Just do what he says! He wants to run in the opposite direction, but he’s mesmerised by the soldier, who looks as if he might kill the old man just with his shouts. He must do something. He runs over and stands between the old man and the soldier. He thinks he’ll scream or burst into laughter at the soldier’s contorted face and big moustache and jabbing finger—it’s as if Lord Kitchener has jumped out of his recruiting poster. It’s strange the way the soldier’s finger has turned into metal, as though his hand has been amputated and replaced with steel. The soldier is yelling obscenities, face completely red, comical frowning lines on his forehead, a trace of spittle on his bottom lip. The soldier wants him to do something, but what? His shouting is too disjointed. He either wants him to run away from the old man, or stay rooted to the spot. He must decide. Somehow he is too late—he knows this from the sudden noise, loud but distant, like a door banged shut by the wind or something crashing down. The noise thuds into him, knocks him over, shocks a sweet numbness through him. It has the most unusual effect on his brain.

And then he knows what’s happening.

He nearly laughs—it is just how he imagined it to be, quite beautiful in its way. The noise is like a key slipping into an infinite number of locks and sliding open drawers of memories. He can feel them flowing precise and luminous in good order. He hears a voice shouting, ‘This one’s alive, this one is still alive.’ He knows the owner of the voice is speaking about him, and knows in a strange omniscient way that if the voice has an Irish accent he will live, because it means he will be taken to hospital. He isn’t sure why this should be so, but he knows it to be true. He wants to hear the voice again, to check on the accent, but fears it. Faces are looking down on him, faces of strangers…

He can see himself in a horse and cart with his father, Joe, a bag of clothes and a bag of tools slung in behind them. They are trundling up a boreen in the countryside of south Galway, a morning’s drive from the city, and heading for Tulira Castle. The sky is as mottled as the plaster on the city’s warehouses, and the grass in the fields has the sheen of lake water.

It’s strange seeing his father as a young man. Joe is in his thirties, sitting with the self-conscious hunch of someone tall and rangy, his muscular arms and shoulders befitting his profession; the brown flat cap, pulled tightly down, concealing a thinning widow’s peak; skin stretched thin on a face that always did begrudge a smile; his small eyes radiating honesty from the shadows of their sockets.

Summer, 1896. A week’s work at the castle. He himself is fifteen, already an apprentice woodworker and dexterous with the saw, hand drill, plane, protractor and spirit level. He remembers the thrill of emerging from a green tunnel of trees into a revelation of sunlight, and there it is!—not an actual medieval castle as he had hoped, but a Big House, a grand sprawling edifice with neat turrets, tongue-and-groove battlements, high rectangular windows, a forbidding wooden door framed by a stone arch the shape of a bishop’s hat.

He cannot wait to meet the owner of Tulira, Edward Martyn, who, his father has told him, is a writer of theatrical entertainments and known for his disloyalty to Britain: he had refused to sing ‘God Save the Queen’ at a public occasion. He imagines Edward as a tall man with an unkempt beard and wild staring eyes.

They knock at the back door and wait. The door is flung open to reveal a short, neat, corpulent man in a wine-coloured smoking jacket. He scrutinises them through his spectacles.

Joe says: ‘Good day, sir, I am Joseph Bowley, gentleman woodworker and joiner, and this is my son, Patrick. You are expecting us?’

The man’s untamed eyebrows spring to life, and a hand as pale as a dove’s wing slips from his pocket; he proffers it to both of them in turn while muttering that he is indeed Edward Martyn.

Edward leads them inside and glides them from kitchen to pantry to dining room, pointing out items of work that need to be done. A window frame, extra shelves, precarious table legs, scratches on surfaces. ‘A plenitude of little labours,’ he says. ‘Utilitarian work, but it must be done with the precision of clipping fingernails.’

In the library he marvels at the swirling gold and green wallpaper and his heart quickens at all the shelves of beautiful leather-bound books, while Edward addresses Joe: ‘In this country we have a distinguished history of creating beautiful things—the Kells gospels, stone crosses, Celtic brooches, and so on. This house, too, is a shrine to our artistic heritage. Woodworkers such as yourself and your son are part of this noble Irish tradition.’ He wonders what Joe is thinking behind the nods he offers up to Edward.

They proceed to the Great Hall, where his eyes alight on a painting of two girls. He moves closer and finds himself transfixed by the delicate colours and the human shapes. Ballet dancers off stage in a dressing room. As he stares into the painting he can feel a strange sensation—it’s the first time he can remember something like this happening: it is as if the frame of the painting is enlarging and pulling him towards it. He finds himself drawing closer and closer. And then the most extraordinary thing happens—he can feel himself entering the painting, as if climbing into it through a window. There he is, standing in the room with the two girls! He is invisible to them, but actually there, studying their white arms, exposed backs and sheeny blue dresses frilling out from their waists. Their muscles are taut and shapely. One girl is bending over and resting her two forearms on the back of a wooden chair. He walks around, admiring the well-made chair; even more, he wants to admire the girl’s smooth, pale skin, but it is cast in shadow. The other girl is adjusting the knot of a great blue ribbon tied behind her back, and her hair has been scraped into a bun, exposing her nape. She is talking to her friend. He can almost hear their secrets.

A tug on his sleeve—he emerges from the painting as if the girls have seen him spying and have shut a door in his face.

He is still half there in the dancers’ world when Edward says: ‘Like it do you, young man? Acquired it from Monsieur Degas. Ah, yes, when he was at Rue Victor Massé. What was it they said about him?—his studio a thing of beauty, his mind a chamber pot of anti-Jewry. Handsome picture.’ Joe again tugs at his arm. ‘No—let your son look. This is what art is for: to bewitch and raise our spirits to the ineffable.’

Edward leads them up the stone staircase to the second floor and a dark corridor, where they hear the deep murmuring of male voices in one of the rooms. ‘I have visitors, two gentlemen of, shall we say, a bohemian temperament, but they are under strict instructions not to impede you.’

Edward opens a door and shows them into a large bedroom with a high ceiling and a bay window looking out onto the front lawns. The two single beds are nearly as wide as doubles. Paintings hang on the wall, along with a crucifix. Edward leaves the room, closing the door softly behind him.

He follows his father over to the window and they look out at the front lawn, the ancient trees and the driveway disappearing into its leafy tunnel of mottled light; the sun has found an opening in the cloud and has picked out a gardener pushing an empty wheelbarrow; crows are raising mayhem within layers of branches. All he can think about is the painting of the two ballet dancers and how he was able to enter their world. He wants to tell his father what happened, but he knows he can’t; it would have been different with his mother.

The following day he’s working away in the library with Joe, longing to pause from chiselling and sanding the windows to inspect the books, packed tight like beige, green or gold blocks of wood. When they pause for a break, he takes out a volume of St Chrysostom—it was the name that attracted him—while Joe sits on the windowsill, framed by a vista of full-leafed trees. Bound in greenish calfskin that looks as if it’s been French polished, and with pages edged with gold leaf, the book is heavy as a mallet. He balances the tome on his knee, opens it at random and finds the words surprisingly easy to comprehend. He sees a passage about Chrysostom deciding to become a monk and his mother begging him not leave her.

He reads the passage aloud to Joe: ‘My son, my only comfort is to see in your face the faithful image of my beloved husband, no longer with us. I ask only one favour from you: do not make me a widow a second time; wait at least till I die. When you have joined my ashes with those of your father, nothing will then prevent you from retiring into monastic life.’

He looks up from the book: ‘Wonder if he did his ma that favour?’

‘He did.’ The reply comes not from Joe but from Edward Martyn, who is standing at the open door.

Joe jumps to his feet as if he’s been caught opening a drawer of silver cutlery, and his words rush forth: ‘Excuse my son, sir—he’s been brought up to read and revere books—you see we are of the Quakers’ tradition and we take our literature and spiritual succour from the Word, the Word of God, of course—the Bible is the hearth of our studies—but also George Fox’s Journal, the Pilgrim’s Progress, the writings of John Wesley, and many others.’ Joe pauses for a moment, but the silence unnerves him and he continues in one breath: ‘We’re also, I might add, not averse to those authors with a gift of poetry and storytelling, and I often read aloud to my wife and son the more improving works of Mr Dickens, Mr Tennyson, Mr Hardy and Miss Eliot. In short, sir, your bookcase is… a harvest of temptation.’

With a flick of his fingers, as if disentangling them from a spider’s web, Edward brushes aside Joe’s apologia: ‘Refresh yourselves in my books whenever you’re not at your labours. And as for Chrysostom—“Golden Mouth”—we could do with his oratory at the moment, couldn’t we? Our patriot leaders lack passion and eloquence. True, Mr Parnell did have a splendid golden mouth; but what a shame about his less-than-golden eyes that lusted after Mrs O’Shea. If thy eye offends thee, pluck it out, what?’

Edward lets out a heavy sigh and loses his train of thought. His eyes swivel from Joe to the bookcase. ‘What was it Chrysostom said—Christ catches people using the bait of their own crafts? A fish to trap a fisherman, a star to trap a magician? How would he catch a woodworker, I wonder? A finely made table? I admire Chrysostom for honouring his mother. Then, with her passing, he pursued his calling with a passion. Ah, the eternal conflict between life and work!’ Edward gives another sigh, signifying some mystery that would seemingly take too long to unravel, and walks off.

Next morning he is entering the drawing room to sand the windows. He stops dead when he sees two men sitting there, conversing. They look up at him with glances of irritation; he mutters an apology and turns to leave. One of them tells him to stay a moment. He is wearing glasses and has a mop of hair which he flicks away from his eyes.

‘Young man. You’re a carpenter and therefore an indisputable arbiter of beauty and good taste. I’ve written a poem I now regret creating. A youthful affair. My friend disagrees. We should value your estimation.’

‘I know nothing of poetry, sir.’

‘Do you have ears? A brain?’

He nods.

The other man has a pale narrow face, fair hair and eyes that blink a lot: ‘Have you ever been in love with a girl?’ His voice has a distinct English accent.

‘Arthur! You’re embarrassing the lad.’

‘How will he understand the poem if he hasn’t been in love?’

He wants to run away.

‘You don’t have to know love to appreciate a love poem. I cannot make a table but I can appreciate one. Let us see what he thinks.’ He lifts up a book and begins reading in a slow chanting voice, looking up from time to time to study the reactions of his two listeners.

‘… and now they stood

On the lone border of the lake once more:

Turning, he saw that she had thrust dead leaves

Gathered in silence, dewy as her eyes,

In bosom and hair.

“Ah, do not mourn,” he said,

“That we are tired, for other loves await us;

Hate on and love through unrepining hours.

Before us lies eternity; our souls

Are love, and a continual farewell.”’

After a polite pause Arthur says: ‘A toothless vagrant could declaim that and it would sound like the music of the spheres. The ending is exquisite, a delightful cadence: “Before us lies eternity; our souls are love, and a continual farewell.” Perfect pitch.’

The two men turn to look at him, but he has nothing to say. The ‘dewy eyes’ and ‘bosom’ and ‘hair’ make him think of the ballet dancers. And the last line makes him feel momentarily wistful.

Arthur snorts out the approximate sound of a laugh as if to give a full stop to the episode, and changes the subject. Within moments the two men have become too wrapped up in another topic of conversation to notice him creeping out. He makes himself busy in another room while wondering what sort of lives the two men live. How can they just sit there talking about poetry? How do they earn a living? He is tempted to go to the Great Hall and try to enter the painting again.

It’s the day before he and Joe are due to leave and he is working outside on a ground-floor window at the front of the house. He stops for a rest and crunches across the drive to the lawn. He sits down with his back to the trees and hears footsteps. It’s the man with the floppy hair who read the poem to him.

‘Good morning, you must be the woodworker Edward has been swooning over.’ The man gives no indication of ever having seen him before.

‘That would be my father, sir. I’m Patrick, his son.’

‘May I join you? I’ve been puffing away through the trees and could do with a soft nest of grass to bear my weight for a minute or so. You seem to have picked the only spot on the lawn with a patch of sunshine. Enchanting to see a touch of radiance around your head. A crock of gold, no less.’

He is puzzled by this remark, for the sky is uniformly grey.

The man, probably in his early thirties, lowers himself to the grass.

He wonders what the man’s accent is. It’s Irish all right, but the manner of his speech is unusual, with sudden pauses followed by a rush of words. His appearance is rare, too; short delicate nose and gold-rimmed glasses that give him the air of a teacher, though his hair seems too dishevelled for that profession. A green tie luminous against his grey double-breasted jacket.

He senses he is expected to say something. ‘Splendid house, isn’t it, sir?’

The man raises his eyebrows. ‘Splendid? Splendidly vulgar, I’d say! What you see is a fantasy, a place of Edward’s Gothic dreams. But I’ll say this for it—I haven’t stopped having dreams since I came here. Powerful as visions, some of them. Have you had any?’

He stares into the sky and is about to mention his experience of entering the painting of the ballet dancers then decides not to. ‘I’ve not had any.’

‘Of course you’ve had them. You just can’t remember them. Takes practice. Know what a centaur is?’

He nods.

‘I saw one galloping along, night before last, vivid as my seeing you. Wild and beautiful, the colour of snow or swans’ feathers. Then I saw a woman, like a goddess, standing on a pedestal, and she was naked. She was holding a bow and arrow and she shot an arrow at a star.’

The words paint pictures in his head. The naked woman excites him; the arrow penetrating the night sky makes him think of a shooting star leaving behind a silvery streak. Before he can stop himself, he says: ‘I had a dream in the daytime. The painting in Mr Martyn’s hall, of the ballet dancers.’ He stops, thinking he is about to sound foolish. But the man leans forward with such obvious interest that he gains the confidence to describe how he entered the painting and stood beside the dancers.

‘To be honest, sir, it’s the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me. I fear I may be unwell. I haven’t told my father.’

‘Nonsense! Nothing wrong with you. In fact there is everything right with you by the sound of it. Never fear the imagination. Embrace it. It’s a gift for all of us, but few of us use it. If the same thing happens again, surrender to it, be enveloped by it, cherish it.’ The man stares at the grass, then turns to him again: ‘So you’re a carpenter?’

‘I’m learning the trade. My father’s teaching me.’

‘And a fine trade to have. But never listen to fathers too much, Patrick. Everyone has a destiny, and it’s governed by the age we live in. And by the stars and where we’re born. When did you first see the light of day?’

‘1881.’

‘And where?’

He wonders how much he should say. But the man’s eyes somehow induce deep trust. He blurts out: ‘In Cashel. My mother and father were not joined in marriage at the time. She is of the Roman faith. He belongs to the Society of Friends. She had to leave home before the birth.’

He fears a look of disapproval or disgust, but the man says: ‘Of course, of course—I understand. These things happen. Neighbours. Gossip. Scandal. You could be doing without that for the rest of your life.’

‘She and my father went to his brother in Cashel, but everything had to be done in secret. Not even the maid was to know. I was born in an outhouse on the farm. They were married just after. A minister of the Friends did it.’

‘Fine folk, fine folk. The Quakers are an example to us all. So, Cashel, 1881. And two religious contraries in your blood, Catholic and dissenting Protestantism—hasn’t done you any harm by the looks of things. We all have a definite time and place when we enter this world, and this informs our destiny. We are mapped by the stars. Take Charles Stewart Parnell for instance. There he was, wind in his sails, leading us out of British captivity and then… political suicide! Perhaps he was fated to love another man’s wife? A fool, yes. But which one of us can say Mrs O’Shea would not have stirred illicit feelings of desire in us?’

At this the man gives a vulpine grin and mops his forehead with a cream handkerchief pincered from his top pocket. He leans forward, as if to share a secret. ‘Parnell. What an opportunity lost. But perhaps not? There are cycles of civilisation, one after the other, and the point when one ends and the other begins is when a soul of destiny appears. If Jesus hadn’t existed it would have been someone else. The spirit of the age seizes the sensitive soul—it’s like being possessed. If you resist it, you become desiccated, like stale bread, crumbling to nothing. If you let it take over your life it can destroy you.’

From the downstairs window Joe shouts at him, and he gets to his feet.

The man raises a hand and says: ‘Farewell for the time being, young fella. Follow the arrow to the star.’

Their final morning at the castle. They are standing by their horse and cart. Edward emerges from a back door and gives Joe an envelope. ‘Thank you kindly for your care and skill. The house is better for it.’

Edward disappears into the house and he and Joe climb into the cart and set off down the driveway, the branches of trees nodding at them as they pass. Before they reach the end, they see a figure walking towards them, gesturing. Joe pulls on the reins. It is the man he spoke to on the grass. ‘Aha, you’re off. Edward was delighted with your work. Worth your weight in fairy gold. And you, young fella, you’ve a spiritual face on you. Have faith and the great deities will place you in their arrangement. With due respect to your papa, get out of Galway. Ireland. Don’t be ditchwater—be an ocean to yourself.’ The man raises his hat and continues his walk, swivelling his head from side to side as if to catch the slightest movement in the trees and bushes.

Joe tugs at the reins and the horse breaks into a trot. He himself sees nothing but the two ballet dancers, dressed like pale blue swans and smiling; they lift their graceful hands to caress the air with sensuous goodbyes.

He is working inside a church: St Nicholas’s, Galway city. Sanding and varnishing pews. March 1901, just before his twentieth birthday. It’s the first day of his week’s work in the church and he feels like a trespasser. He expects someone to jump out at him at any moment yelling, ‘Out! Out! You Quaker-Papist mongrel!’

A woman is fussing around the interior, rearranging things that already appear to be neat and tidy; she seems to have limitless time on her hands. She comes over and introduces herself as Mary Coleville. Her cheeks are bulbous and set. Her fine dark brown hair seems to balloon up at the back and wisp away from its myriad pins. She has the look of someone who would take craftsmen for granted, as part of her birthright. She tells him how much she loves the church and insists on showing him around. He says, politely, he has work to be doing, but she waves her hand as if to brush away his hesitations.

She leads him to a stone tomb with a Norman inscription on it. ‘Supposed to be a crusader beneath that. Always been a fighting tradition in this church. St Nicholas was patron of the Byzantine army. The Connaught Rangers are honoured here.’

She mentions the Boer War then looks at him as if to gauge whether what she’s about to say is worth saying. Her face, made paler by lipstick, has a female delicacy, but her expressions have the mannered forcefulness of a politician. ‘War won’t stop until women have a voice in the affairs of state.’ The fine vertical frown lines between her eyes have deepened. ‘War is a man’s business, run by men, for men against men. The world would be different if women were treated as equals.’ She looks at him, oozing centuries-old Protestant certainty. ‘Do you think I’m wrong?’

‘I don’t know, ma’am.’

‘Don’t know? Let me put it this way. Should women be allowed to be… carpenters, or is there some law stating they should never be so; that they should never contemplate being anything other than wives and mothers?’

He can feel his thoughts float away like sawdust.

She relents. ‘The younger generation must change their thinking about women. Young men like you. As with our neighbours across the water—there’s a movement happening in Ireland to change things, and mark my words, women will soon be heard. Even in the provinces. Yes, here in Galway. Things will change. Voting in government elections. Employment. Men won’t care for it, but it will happen. My husband doesn’t believe it, but my son Singleton’s generation will benefit. He’s only twelve, and when he’s twice that age he’ll be living in a world quite unlike the one we know now. Women will be equals, not skivvies.’

They proceed to the chancel and Mary points to the five lancets of the stained-glass window, describing some of the details that he can easily see for himself. As she goes on talking, directing his attention to the different sections of the window, he begins to feel light-headed and distant from himself; it reminds him of the sensation he had at Tulira Castle just before he entered the painting of the ballet dancers. A sunbeam has struck the second lancet, which shows Jesus healing the daughter of Jairus, and is spilling streaks and droplets of colour across the stone floor towards them. The light washes through him, as if he were becoming a rainbow; he is drifting from Mary Coleville’s words into the frame of the lancet, into a reverie so sudden and luminous it’s as if he’s stepped into another world while retaining all his faculties. He feels a moment of panic but then remembers the words the strange man told him at Tulira Castle and which he’s never forgotten—surrender to the imagination, or whatever it is that induces states of deep reverie. Although he is still aware of Mary speaking beside him, he allows himself to look around him and it is as if he is standing next to Jesus as he gazes at the sick girl! Jesus is wearing a deep red robe and there’s halo, like a full harvest moon, behind his head; he feels he could reach out and touch the pillow of the sick girl and he can hear her shallow breathing. Jesus reaches out and touches the forehead of the girl. There is a great sense of peacefulness…

He is jolted back to the church by the sound of Mary’s voice repeating, ‘Are you feeling all right?’ He nods, but he is not all right. The vision was as real as the church is now. He wants to sit down; he is bursting to tell her what he has just seen.

His brain tries to readjust his emotions: surely it was just a daydream, an effect of the coloured light? But his heart is not convinced.

Before he can feel more disoriented, she leads him to a wall memorial of a certain Jane Eyre. He mentions Charlotte Brontë. She tuts: ‘No, this is another one.’

She directs his eyes to the inscription, which he obediently reads aloud, glad of something to distract him from what has just happened: ‘Her piety, prudence and well-disposed bounty to the poor, giving bread to the hungry, and clothing the naked, made her a worthy example to her sex.’ Beneath this are the words: ‘The sum of £300 is given by the Widow, Jane Eyre, to the Corporation of Galway, for the yearly Sum of £24, to be distributed in Bread to 36 poor Objects, on every Sunday, for ever.’

Mary is smiling at him, as if inviting him to share her pride: ‘That’s a true hero, and a woman. Not Redvers Buller firing his wretched cannons at wretched Boers and everyone else. Nor a Gladstone issuing orders across the empire. A simple woman who was kind and used her money wisely. And a Protestant. I will confess we haven’t been archangels over the centuries, but not all of us are landlords, soldiers or evangelisers.’

They both gaze at the engraved words, but he is still shaken. He was standing next to Jesus.

Mary decides the tour is at an end and bids him goodbye, twitching her mouth in lieu of a smile. She walks off, lunging to tidy a stack of hymn books on a table at the entrance as she leaves.

He’s back home, in the parlour, talking to his parents about his day. He waits until his father is out of the room then tells Bridie about his vision or reverie. She is sitting forward on her chair, her freckly face flushed from the fire, her chin tucked in. She listens and grunts every so often with approval. ‘The gift is in your blood, Patsy. Your nan would’ve been proud of you. She had it too. She’d often be seeing the faces of those passed from this world. And I dare say you’d be able to as well. Second sight can be a curse… and second sight can be a blessing.’ He knows what she is going to say next and is thankful his father isn’t there to sigh and summon the higher deities with a rolling of his eyes to witness the ramblings of his wife.

Bridie half turns towards the fire; her hair, temporarily combed back into a bun, glows in the light of the flames; her eyelids droop as her brain switches into memory. She puts her mug down and he can smell the aromatic malt. She begins with her usual words, ‘’Tis strange what can happen to folk out of the blue.’ She shifts in her chair. ‘Your dreaming yourself into that window is what I’d call fairy dreaming. But there’s queer things abroad if you know how to look. Who’d’ve thought anything peculiar would be happening on that evening in Knock?’

He knows her telling of the miracle at Knock almost off by heart, but in the light of his own visionary moment he is glad to hear it yet again.

‘August 1879—a little over twenty years ago—and the whole of Mayo under cloud, the rain splattering the earth and turning roads to puddles and mush. Daylight giving up its ghost and cottages leaking lamplight between curtains.’ She takes a sup and continues, using her hands and fingers to describe the moment when the two women are stunned to see white ghostly figures standing at the end of the church.

When she has finished the story she smiles like a child who knows she has done something adults will be pleased with. ‘A miracle. Those women saw angelic figures sent by Our Lord. ’Tis how the times are at the moment. First there was Lourdes. Then Knock. As if God is trying to contact us. Warn us.’

Joe enters the room. ‘So this Mary Coleville of yours is for women being equal is she?’ Joe winks at him and stands behind Bridie, puts his hands on her shoulders and leans forward to kiss her on the cheek. ‘What do you think of that, Mrs Joseph Bowley?’

Bridie does not rise to the bait: ‘Mrs Coleville’s a good soul. I’d know of her. She’d help the sick and the poor, and all the cats and dogs, Catholic and Protestant, no matter what; and there’s more of us should be doing that. And it’s women like her whose sons are being sent off to South Africa to scrap like lurchers for a scrubby patch of desert.’

Joe gives out a sigh that moves towards her like a slow-moving arrow. In his most kindly, school-masterly manner he says: ‘It’s not a desert but a principle, the British’d be saying. If the Boers have their way, God knows what’ll happen next. India? Ireland? You see… the empire’s like a huge chair with cross-bars strengthening the legs. Take one away and it weakens the whole thing. That’s why they’ll fight us on Home Rule. British hearts might agree to us ruling ourselves… but British heads will take away whatever they offer.’

Bridie isn’t listening but nods frequently enough to encourage Joe to keep talking. When he eventually stops, she emits a grunt, indicating any number of inexpressible thoughts.

He is walking towards St Nicholas’s, picking his way through handcarts with their long handles touching the ground and backsides in the air, and women crouching beside pots and pans, trays of trinkets, and baskets and boxes full of vegetables—some of them as earthy and gnarled as their feet. He watches a small boy standing on a mattress on an iron bed pretending to shoot passers-by.

It’s his last day at work.

Inside, he is tempted to go over to the lancet window again and try to enter its frame. But something stops him. It feels too soon to have another powerful reverie.

The church is empty apart from a woman sweeping the floor of the south aisle and another woman, or girl, sitting in a pew two along from the one he is working on. After a while she turns round. She is humbly dressed but pretty, dark haired, with a hint of a turned-up nose and sleepy looking eyes. She looks about seventeen.

‘Mad for the work are ya?’

‘It’s my last day,’ he says, looking at the girl’s lips.

‘You don’t look the sort that’d be coming to this church.’ She speaks with a knowing air.

‘You’re right on that. And you don’t look the sort either.’

‘You’re right too. I come here to escape the crowd at home. I’m living in Bowling Green. A shout away. And shouting’s all I hear in the house. Drives me mad. ’Tis peaceful here. Are you courting?’

He’s taken aback by her sudden switch of interest. He shakes his head.

‘Have you ever courted?’

Warmth blossoms in his face. ‘Are you courting?’

She gives a long sigh.

‘You don’t sound happy.’

‘Three fellas I’ve had a fondness for, and all of them’s dead.’

‘Sorry for your trouble.’ She looks too young.

‘My friends call me “Man-killer”. A lad I knew died in Africa this year past. ’Twas the fever got him, not the bullet. Bloemfontein. Lovely name for a place of death? So you haven’t stepped out with a woman?’

He shakes his head.

‘Is it the priesthood you’re headed for?’

‘Not at all.’

‘That’s grand altogether—you’re a nice looking lad, a good height on you and a bulge in the muscles.’

His cheeks respond.

‘I’m Nora.’

‘Patrick.’

‘I’ve seen your face around town alright.’

‘Do you work?’

‘Laundry. Hate it. Hate home. Me mam’s always screaming. She threw my da out for drinking. I’m going to run away to Dublin and meet a rich man and sail away to France or Italy.’

He pictures her hanging onto the arm of a top-hatted gentleman, watching the waves of the Mediterranean Sea. He imagines the man taking off her dress. How can he be so jealous after knowing her for five minutes?

‘Ye’ll be varnishing benches all your life?’

‘I’m a… woodworker and joiner.’

‘A woodworker then?’

He wants to say no he won’t.

‘Don’t you want to see the world a bit? Have women friends? Do things? Change the world, Pat, before it changes you. I heard someone say that.’

He can tell from her expression that he is oozing melancholy.

‘Come here to me. I want to show you something.’ She leaps up from the pew and waves at him to follow her. He wonders if she’ll show him the Jane Eyre memorial. It’s the last thing he wants to see. She walks to a column in the north aisle and leans her back on it, out of view from the rest of the church. He stands in front of her.

‘Come here, I want to whisper something.’

As he bends down towards her she reaches up with her two hands and gently pulls his face towards her. The speed of her action catches him unawares. Her lips press against his. He instinctively opens his mouth slightly and to his thrilling joy her tongue slips into it. Blood rushes to all parts of his body. Kissing a girl. Kissing a girl in church. A Church of Ireland church. He is kissing a girl for the first time, in church. Nora pulls back and looks into his eyes. ‘’Twas lovely. And all the better for being in here.’ He is desperate to join his lips with her beautiful smiling lips again; he wants to touch her breasts, but he knows from the look on her face that the moment has come and gone. The clop of footsteps on the other side of the church alarms him. Yet as he looks into Nora’s pretty face all he can think about is kissing her again.

‘I’ve kissed one or two fellas in my time, and that’s as good as any.’ She takes his hand and squeezes it. ‘Best be off. Wait here a minute.’

‘Will I see you again?’

‘Sure Galway’s small enough.’ He can feel her sensing his dismay. ‘You’re a looker, Pat, a good set of bones in your face. You’ll be making plenty of girls turn their heads. And if you don’t see me you can remember our kiss. Take care of yourself, Pat.’

He watches, helplessly, as she moves away from him and leaves the church. He returns to work; his heart wants to escape its cage; he is filled with such joy, and such unutterable sadness.

He is trying to recall the years between his encounter with Nora and his leaving home; it’s as if all the details of these years, his mid-twenties, have merged into mild grey summers and cold grey winters. He was still living at home, working with his father but also taking on his own work, carpentry and painting, in the city and even occasionally around the county: Athenry, he remembers, with its cows in the fields rubbing their backsides against crumbly medieval ruins; and Clifden, buffed bright by westerly winds and looking out across the Atlantic to America. Those early years after the death of Queen Victoria were full of hope that there might be change in the country. But the British government was as agonisingly stubborn as the Home Rule movement was toothless. The country, like his own life, was a backwater of inaction and dullness, ready to stagnate further into bitterness and anger.

He waits for a solid recollection to break the surface, like a silvery fish wriggling on a hook. Eventually, a ripple, a stirring, and he can feel the atmosphere of a rare hot summer emerging: 1906. Images of faces and places start to form themselves into sequences of memory. One in particular he thought he’d banished forever—but there it is once more, his ‘dark secret’, rising unadulterated into the light.

He’s sitting at the front of St Mary’s, the church beside Galway’s harbour, attending mass with Bridie. His eyes are drifting to the wall to the left of the altar and the niche framing a mosaic picture of Galway Bay in which waves are bucking and curling around a fishing boat. As he gazes at it he can feel himself slowly being drawn through the frame into the heart of the picture—he manages to let himself surrender and enter the scene. In a flash he finds himself standing on the cliffs above the bay and looking down at the vessel as it slices through the water, as smoothly as a fin. He then transfers himself by a flickering of thought to the boat’s deck and feels the brisk, briny wind in his face as he skims into a world of light. He revels in the unbounded space and freedom: the horizon, empty and shining, beckons him. He can physically feel all his worldly cares—routines of life, the grey façades of the city, his want of female companionship—dissolving into a beautiful radiance. For a moment he thinks this is what ‘God’ must be—not an entity like a supernatural person but a state of grace, a feeling of being shorn of one’s sense of self and basking in a state of unbounded peacefulness, freedom and love. Surely this is what religion is!

The spell is broken by a stirring of people turning to their neighbours or getting up to leave. Bridie adjusts her headscarf and with a nudge of her elbow indicates she is ready to go. He feels infused by a lightness of being and a joy that makes him nod and smile at everyone around him.

They step outside the church into the fish-smouldering air and join the crowd that’s gathered on the quayside for the city’s annual Blessing of the Bay ritual. Fishing nets have been spread out on the pier like huge black spiders’ webs, ready to be blessed; a small armada of currachs, light hookers and other boats eases up and down on the water. Fishermen stand, sit and kneel in their vessels, some holding oars, others adjusting sails.

He hears a booming voice—like the voice of God!—and sees in one of the boats a white-robed priest, like an alabaster statue, intoning a prayer about multiplying the fishes in the ocean and calling upon Mary, Star of the Sea, for her protection. As the priest utters his blessing, Bridie and others cross themselves in unison—the action is so spontaneous it moves him to do the same. The priest sprinkles holy water on the sea and the fishermen who are standing sink to their knees in supplication; their sudden obedience feels truly humble and gains more force from their being out in the air among the boats and the sea, not inside a church. A hymn sung in melodic unison even seems to pacify the breeze.

The singing, the actions of the fishermen and the simplicity of the prayer make him suddenly grasp why Bridie feels her Catholic faith connects her with the first apostles, those fishermen whose lives were turned upside down by Jesus. And he appreciates how her love of simple piety brings her close to Joe’s own uncomplicated Quaker faith of silence, prayer and holy writ. He can see the ancient orderliness in the Blessing of the Bay, and yet… the peacefulness he’s feeling has come from the reverie he’s just had in the church. Can grace be conferred by prayers, rituals and services? And if so, the rituals and services of which church?

As the hymn draws to a close, a discordant yell—almost a scream—rings out, followed by a splash and a collective cheer. People are standing by the end of the pier, looking down into the sea. A man who looks as if he’s throttling his hat is shouting at the water, as if his wits have left him: ‘Ye throw folk out of their homes for the want of a penny of rent—well, ye can try throwing the fishes out of their homes!’ It’s difficult to gauge whether the man has taken leave of his senses or is shouting at someone; then a small figure, apparently flailing and gasping for air, is hauled out of the water to a chorus of boos and jeers. The sodden man is wearing the bottle-green police uniform—now made even darker—of the Royal Irish Constabulary.

A few days later—or was it weeks?—during the same summer, he’s sitting on a bench on a patch of grass near the canal, beside the buildings of the university of Galway, where he’s being employed to install oak panelling. The shadows are sharp on the grass and the rushing frothed-up waters of the nearby Corrib are making the air tingle. Studious-looking youths with eyes full of purpose pass him and vanish into the university compound.

He remembers choosing that particular bench because of the attractive young woman sitting on it. He has seen her in the confines of the university a couple of times and has been wondering who she is—the daughter of a professor? A governess? A teacher? She has the poise of a pianist and is wearing a long grey dress with puffed sleeves; she’s using her straw hat to waft air across her fine-featured face; strands of her brown hair, tied back in a neat bun, flicker away from a central parting of the smoothest ivory.

He nods at her as he sits down, and remarks on what a fine day it is. He knows that his work clothes and muscular frame will distinguish him from the students, and also that his accent, shaped by the Quaker community, will reassure her of his social class. The woman’s tentative but gracious smile encourages him to say a few more words beyond speculative pleasantries, and before he knows it he’s talking more about his work than he intended to. He stops and looks down at his dusty boots.

Eventually she says, looking straight ahead: ‘I’d say you’d need to know your geometry. The spaces to be filled, the angles. The amount of wood needed.’ She half-turns to him: ‘We think of woodworkers being brawn and neatness, but they need Pythagoras and Euclid too.’

Her genuine interest takes him by surprise. ‘Have you a family member who’s a carpenter?’

‘No. But I’m interested in mechanical matters. I study engineering here.’ She points behind her shoulder to the university buildings.

He laughs. He’s never heard of a woman studying engineering. He didn’t know women were allowed to study anything.

The restrained impatience in her eyes prompts him to apologise. He wants to say something else, but nothing comes to mind.

‘You’re not the first to laugh, and in mitigation I believe I’m the first of my sex to study here.’ She turns to face him fully for the first time. ‘I blame Mr Darwin.’ She pauses until she’s sure of his complete attention. ‘We can all agree humans are superior to the ape. But his theory seems to suggest an ordained ladder of intelligence. Someone is always superior to another; and to a man of an uneducated mind it may seem that from the facts of history a man has a greater intellectual capacity than a woman.’

He’s grateful that the gentle tone of her voice softens the implication that he himself has an ‘uneducated’ mind.

His rushed response is full of his wish to make amends. ‘In my father’s faith—the Society of Friends—women are given equal prominence. There’s no ladder. No male priests. No priests at all in fact.’

Her laugh is really a short abrupt noise. ‘Some would say the Friends are not a faith at all—just a group of kindly folk, listening for God.’

He wasn’t expecting such a summary. ‘What’s your affiliation, may I ask?’

‘Presbyterian.’

She’s the first Presbyterian he’s ever met and he looks at her as if to pick out distinguishing physical marks. But all he sees is her beautiful slender neck and her moist lips, the slightest tremble of which seeming to indicate the process of her thoughts. ‘Presbyterian? Sure, isn’t that all hell and damnation?’

‘That is the received caricature. Hell and damnation. But also heaven as well. I like the certainty. Suits my temperament. You know exactly where you are. Black and white. We are all predetermined to be saved or damned, and if you carry out the virtues and follow the precepts of the elders, it is certain to be the former. Same with engineering. You don’t want a bridge to wobble from uncertain principles, do you? You’ll appreciate this from your carpentry. You value your spirit level because of the certainty it brings.’

He hasn’t come across a young woman, any woman, like her before and feels daunted by her fluent thoughts. He introduces himself more formally and she tells him her name is Alice Perry. He’s curious to know her background. She reveals that studying is a family tradition. Her sisters are at universities too, and her father helped to found the Galway Electric Light Company.

She seems so certain of herself. So confident. It makes him want to question her further, and perhaps… even shake her edifice of conviction?