My Time in Space, page 20
A hundred years ago the whole chamber was one of the Lace Schools set up by the Congested Districts Board here and there throughout its poverty-stricken fiefdom under the charitable patronage of the Viceroy’s wife, Lady Aberdeen. A young lady from Fermanagh, Margaret Cosgrove, came to teach the craft here, and married Richard O’Dowd, clerk to the landlord’s agent, who had his office next door on the quayside; their descendants still own O’Dowd’s, the summer visitors’ favourite bar and restaurant, overlooking the harbour, and when we took over this building and began to rescue it from years of dereliction, one of them gave us a photograph of Margaret and her two sisters, also lace-teachers, one employed in Ros Muc and other villages of Connemara and the other in Cliffony, County Sligo, all three wearing wondrous evening gowns of their own creation.
That photograph hangs by the gable window of the big room, together with others relating to an earlier stage in its history when, according to the oldest resident of Roundstone, it was the ballroom of someone called ‘Sainty’ Robinson, of whom she knew no more than his intriguing name. I was anxious to find out more of him, foreseeing that I will be conflated with him in folk-memory if there still is such a thing in another century’s time. It seemed likely that he was a connection of George Robinson and his son, who were successively land agents for most of Connemara from the 1850s to the 1930s and lived in Letterdyfe House just north of Roundstone. But I could establish nothing about him, until one evening there was a knock on our door, and an elderly gentleman of Edwardian mien greeted me with ‘Mr Robinson? – I’m Robinson!’ This Dr Philip Robinson of Dublin, who turned out to be descended from George Robinson, had heard tell that his forebear had been a harsh, evicting agent, and was calling on me as a local historian to find out if this was so. I took him down to the studio, opened my files and showed him the evidence that it was indeed so. Nevertheless we became fast friends, to the point that we found ourselves almost adopted into the posterity of the Letterdyfe Robinsons, and inheritors, after Dr Philip’s death, of several memorabilia of the family. So it comes about that I can identify ‘Sainty’ in a copy of the family tree as a St-John Robinson, one of George’s younger sons, and that a pair of framed Victorian silhouettes of George and his wife Rebecca hang in Sainty’s former ballroom. And once a year, on the day of Roundstone Regatta, we remind the room of its past, hold open house and drink to the dancers of old. While the traditional work-boats, the Galway hookers, gather below our windows to race in the bay, an extraordinary mix of guests drop in for a lunch of courgette eggah and apple crumble, watch the events from our windows, go off to crew a boat or join the crowd of spectators on the quayside, and return for tea. Sometimes a visiting poet recites, musicians bring out their fiddles and flutes, ladies from the village dance a Connemara set; sometimes when we sit down with a few lingering guests, the evening is mellow with wine and the last of the red-brown sails are ghosting home to the harbour through a pearly mist, there are moments in this room when time itself is perfectly content.
The rest of this level of our house is an extension to the back, probably added when the building became a knitting factory under the regime of a State development body, Gaeltarra Éireann, in the 1950s. First comes a space we have turned into a kitchen, originally an office separated from the big room by a glazed screen through which the supervisor used to keep an eye on her workforce, as several elderly ladies of the village well remember. From there a corridor leads back, with cookery and gardening books shelved on the left, and on the right, two windows onto a small rockery under a misshapen cypress that leans close to the house, called Crann na gCat, the cats’ tree, because cats, our cat and her visitors, love to lie along its broad, comfortable branches. There are circular jumble-sale mirrors looking each way along this corridor; in fact the house has so many mirrors, glazed doors and windows that a diagram of how scraps of sky and garden are multiplied within it would look like that of an optical instrument. And since the sea surrounds us on the north and east, whatever light falls into the house from those quarters is accompanied – shadowed – by a thin restless inverse of itself flung upwards onto ceilings.
At the end the corridor turns left into the bedroom, from which a portion has been glassed off as M’s room: her Italian books, the ironing-board, her desk, and in a drawer the backup copies of my writings, to be snatched to safety in the garden in case of fire. Our bed is very wide, on a low platform homemade out of planks and two-by-one timber; there is room for entwining and room for being untouched, surface area for books and breakfast tray, and for Squig the dog who sleeps nested against the curve of M’s back; Nimma the cat sleeps in the library but sometimes joins us in the morning and curls up under my caressing hand while I read the paper. Lying in bed we are facing two windows and a glass-panelled door onto the garden; we watch the seasonal transformations of an ancient hawthorn tree against the minute-by-minute transformations of the sky. Morning sunlight beams in, glowing in the leaves and blossoms of geraniums on the window ledges as in stained glass. One or two friends who know our late-morning ways sometimes follow the path round the house to the garden door, and if they find it as is usual wide open, come in to sit in chairs opposite us, as at a Petit Lever. All is luxe, calme et volupté, with a good deal of the often forgotten ingredient, ordre. Finally there is the bathroom, narrow, with two little square windows at the far end like picture frames holding trial-pieces of the hour and its weather.
We are house-proud, and garden-proud. First-time visitors would not know we had a garden other than the shady rockery under the cypress by the front door; in fact the topography would not seem to provide room for more. So if we want to amaze them we bring them through the house to the garden door, where it is as if space had suddenly sprouted a new dimension. A rather undulating and irregular lawn leads away down a long perspective between, on the left, a high, ragged, thunder-dark fuchsia hedge, and on the right a sequence of incidentals – paths curving out of sight between raised flowerbeds, a garden hut overwhelmed by honeysuckle, a little sunset mountain-range of hydrangeas, a grove of a dozen birchtrees – that demand to be explored. We respond to that demand every day except when the rain is heavy; we carry our mugs of coffee around in a ritual that includes the animals, Squig bounding ahead and looking back with a ball in her mouth, Nimma sauntering after as if it were only by chance she had decided to look round the garden at the same time as us. We commend every blossom in its burgeoning and fall; we allow ourselves to be amazed again and again, like a child with a favourite storybook, by the sequence of the seasons.
The paths are odd, being made of rectangular concrete blocks, which soon lose their harsh blue-grey tone and sharp edges as moss takes them in hand, and are easily dug up and reset when I decide to realign a path, as I frequently do. These narrow ways fork and loop and duck under trees around a dozen little subsections of the garden in a romantic, even sentimental, way, and then unexpectedly – even to us, who made all this – straighten themselves up into the perimeter of a slightly sunken, square, parterre, the centre of which is marked very formally by the slim vertical of a cordyline palm. This forum, as we call it, is surrounded by aspens and birches and larches, which screen it from the new holiday apartments overlooking us from inland but are slender enough to leave it sunny, and one can sit in still air here even when the rest of Connemara is hysterical with gales. Its area is divided up by a symmetrical pattern of 144 concrete blocks into 145 square plots of earth, 81 of them defined by the long edges of four blocks and 64 by short edges, the larger plots being regularly interspersed with the smaller ones. In the 32 plots nearest the edge, all the way round, we grow extravagant amounts of parsley from which once a year we make jamjarfuls of a sweet jelly called parsley honey, and in the others are chives, mint, blue corydalis, pink oxalis and so on, in an irrational and planless mixture. This numerological garden was a work I undertook at a time when I was spending long nerve-stretching hours every day dotting details onto my Connemara map with a magnifying glass; in the evenings I would restore a sense of scale to my muscles and bones by digging out barrowloads of earth and levering the heavy blocks into position with the back of a spade. It has settled itself comfortably into the ground, weather has gentled it and fernspores have discovered its crevices, so that it already looks as if it has been there for a hundred years. Walking across it, feeling the regularity it imposes on the step, reminds me of Aran’s fissured limestone flags, and of the ‘wavy concrete floor’, the unrealized project of my London days.
If every garden has a secret, that of our garden is the sea. Behind the fuchsia hedge the ground falls almost sheerly for eighteen feet or so to the seashore. Gaps in the hedge give us irregular windows onto the waters of the bay, and when one of Roundstone’s half-deckers goes by one hears waves on the rocks below discussing the event for some minutes afterwards. There is a little patio outside the garden door, and from a corner of this one can lean over a wooden rail and look along the cliff face, a tangle of brambles and nettles, with ledges settled by sea-pink from nature below and montbretia from culture above.
The cliff meets the gable end of the house at an angle and seems to disappear; it is difficult to make out how it is folded into the structure of the building. This becomes clearer when one goes round to the other side, past the conservatory or front porch, where a broad flight of steps descends to a courtyard between our inland gable and the apartments next door. From here one can see that the nucleus of the building has two stories and is built against the cliff; the upper storey with its old slate roof looks like a long cottage, and consists of our library and the big sea-room, with the extension running back from it at clifftop level. The lower storey also has an extension, to the front, at sea-level. There is no interior communication between upstairs and downstairs. Above is our home, which we call Nimmo House after the Scots engineer who founded Roundstone in the 1820s, built the pier just outside the courtyard gate and may have had a store on this site; below is the premises of Folding Landscapes, publishers of maps, archivists of local lore, lookers-out at the sea. When we acquired the building in 1989 it had long been in use as a rubbish dump and store for a dreadful knitting factory next door, which had gone into bankruptcy and is now replaced by the holiday apartments. The front extension in particular was a concrete shell, a dismal clutter of windowless cells, broken-down garage doors, rusty boilers. Penetrating its filthy corridors we found at the back a huge room the low ceiling of which had partly collapsed onto the heaps of plastic bags full of reject woollen socks that almost filled it. The rear wall of this dank cavern masks the cliff face. Nowadays Folding Landscapes is full of light that floods through many windows, interior openings and glass screens, but I am still aware of the cliff it is founded on, that has not been seen since Nimmo’s time, or at least since the Robinsons of Letterdyfe had turf-stores and sheds for carts and pony-traps here, and I imagine it waiting, unresignedly, until we have all gone away.
THE FINENESS OF THINGS
Once, looking out into the poplartree that tapped with hundreds of triangular leaves at a window of our first-floor flat in London, I saw a small furry caterpillar. I have always been fond of such creatures, so I opened the window and collected it into a jamjar. It had a creamy stripe down the back from which four tufts of brownish hairs stood up like a liner’s funnels, and longer sheaves of hairs stuck out in front of it and to the rear. I still possess my 1946 reprint of Richard South’s Moths of the British Isles, probably the most intensively read book of my childhood, and from it I was able to identify this curiosity as the larva of a Vapourer Moth – ‘quite a Cockney insect, and found in almost every part of the Metropolis where there are a few trees’. A few days later it retired among the leaves I had given it to feed on, spun up its cocoon, and pupated. I left the jamjar open on a windowledge, and a month or so afterwards noticed that the moth had emerged and crawled out of the jar, and was clinging to the inside of the windowpane. It – she – was a poor-looking, greyish spider-like object; the female of this species is wingless. She was motionless, apparently inert. I raised the sash window a few inches to see if fresh air might invigorate her.
By a marvellous chance later in the day I was passing through the room and happened to glance out just as a small moth came flying towards the window from across the lawn. Its course was slightly irregular and side-slipping, but as purposeful as a saw biting through wood. It shot in through the gap under the sash, went across the room and down to the floor, where it fumbled and tumbled, gradually back-tracking to the window and eventually finding its goal after many dartings and near-misses. It – he – was a bright-winged little creature, red-ochre with a whitish spot on the trailing edge of each forewing. They clung together immediately, and she began to lay her eggs as they mated, egg after egg after egg, her body slackening and thinning, until after a few hours and about two hundred eggs, she was empty, spent, dead.
One of the hundred threads of implication one could tease out from this passionately observed event – like all such, a knot of parables – is that the transparent space above our lawn that day was seething with messages. The male moth had been able to lock onto the plume of eroticism emanating from the female, which if it had been visible would have looked like a wavering magic carpet unrolled through the air from the narrow slit under the window sash. Simultaneously, countless other insects, indifferent to the Vapourer’s aphrodisiac effluvium, had followed the scent of their own destinies across the garden. But these pheromones – externalized hormones that co-ordinate, and sometimes destabilize, social and sexual behaviour – are not peculiar to insects; from the single-celled protozoan partaking in a slime-slow conglomeration with indefinite numbers of its like, to the rational human being flustered by a je-ne-sais-quoi wafted into the margins of consciousness by another’s passing-by, we all are subject to their persuasions. The substance secreted by the female Vapourer’s sex-glands is known to the specialist as (z)-6-Heneicosene-11-one (there is a web site on which one can find such recondite information). Its molecules are built of twenty-one atoms of carbon, thirty-eight of hydrogen and one of oxygen, combined in a specific shape; they go twirling through the jostling throng of lesser molecules constituting air until, perhaps a mile away, some of them happen to fall into the right position to fit the equally specific shape of receptor molecules in cells of the male Vapourer moth’s antennae. Pheromones are clouds of keys, drifting at random; but in such billions they will find their locks.
The Cockneys’ mating took place in high summer: the Earth was rounding that part of its orbit where its northern regions are favourably inclined towards the sun by day, splendid energies were being lavished on the Metropolis, and sequences of influences we hardly know about had primed the moths to multiply while food for the next generation was green and juicy. What are the proportions between these realms, of the solar system and the moths’ sexual chemistry? When I was a child my fond parents wrote a rhyme in which they boasted: ‘Tim will discover stars / forty times as big as Mars!’, and although I may have disappointed them in that respect, I have learned something of the relative scales of things. The diameters of the smaller planets such as Mars and Earth stand to my height in roughly the same ratio as I do to a single cell of my body, while stars, like molecules, figure in ranges much remoter from the human scale. It is only in a very narrow range that we have a natural sense of size. The degree of smallness that most impresses us is, by a perspective effect, the closest to us; not the microbial or atomic but that of objects a tiny but appreciable fraction of our own size, down as far as dust-motes, the vanishing points of the domestic. In folktales a sprinkling of ‘fernseed’ renders one invisible, and indeed the size of fernspores marks one of the two exits from the world of naturally visible objects. The further reaches of smallness, like the figures astronomy offers for galactic distances, fade into the abstract, the inconceivable, the incomprehensible. Contemplation of these two vistas led Pascal to his magnificent meditation on the abysses between which the human being is suspended:
Let man contemplate the whole realm of nature in its full and exalted majesty; let him lift his glance to this dazzling light, placed like a lamp to illumine the universe to all eternity; let the earth appear to him but as a point in the vast circle described by this luminary, and let him pause to wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a tiny point compared to that described by the stars revolving in the firmament. But if man’s view be arrested there, let his imagination pass beyond…. This whole visible world is but a speck on the broad bosom of nature…. It is a sphere, whose centre is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere….
