The Blood Dimmed Tide (21 page)

When I went up to their rooms, I was alarmed to discover that Yeats’ condition had worsened. He lay in his wife’s arms, his breathing fast and rasping. I examined him quickly, feeling a feverish temperature, but every time he awoke, he complained of the cold. The doctor arrived before midnight, and after taking his temperature and pulse, assured us that the patient would survive. However, he made us promise that Yeats would receive no visitors or experience any form of disagreeable emotion or excitement for at least three days.

21

Three of Swords

THE next Sunday morning, Sligo was all church bells and shuttered windows, men doffing their hats and retreating out of the rain into the darkness of doorways. Even the winding streets that dissolved into the pouring griminess seemed redolent of a particularly Irish form of self-effacement, designed to misdirect the visitor, suggesting there was nothing here worth investigating or bothering about.

The cobbles were wet and my squelching footsteps echoed in the quiet streets. I turned round several times imagining the echo of my feet might be the footsteps of a pursuer, a shadowy agent or a policeman in black gumboots. I ran across an empty square. Seagulls flapped their wings and flew high over the roofs. I waited breathlessly in a doorway, surveying the soaked square and only emerged again when I was sure no one was following me. I stayed close to the walls and leaking drainpipes until I arrived outside Yeats’ hotel.

I ordered a pot of tea in an eating-house across the street, through whose rain-swept windows I could watch the entrance to the hotel. I sat in a dark alcove while a waitress moved a greasy cloth back and forth across black tables, and watched me with melancholy eyes. When she had finished wiping the tables, she took down the pictures of boats hanging on the walls and began cleaning them. The paintings were by a local artist, and depicted sailing vessels that frequented Sligo’s famous harbour. I was distracted by one of the names of the boats,
Cheerful Charlie,
inscribed upon its sleek stern. It was one of the codenames in Rosemary’s journal.

Shortly after two o’clock, a young woman dashed out of the hotel. She was dressed in a dark raincoat beneath which the flannel of her dressing gown flapped as she ran. She paused before crossing the street, and seemed to stare straight at me. At first, I did not recognise her. I had not seen Georgie for a few days. She looked different. There was no longer anything calm or soft about the expression on her face. Her cheekbones were sharp and her eyes hollowed like that of a prisoner unused to daylight. Her face carried an expression of panic, a desperation that had probably been rising all morning. She ducked under a few shop awnings and, without a backward glance, disappeared into a public house.

I rose and made my way into the hotel and upstairs to Yeats’ rooms. I told myself there was no cause for alarm or secrecy. The building was sunk in the afternoon calm of a provincial hotel, and the Yeatses were its only guests. The previous day, I had gleaned from the porter that Georgie would leave the hotel every afternoon while Yeats slept. Her excursions usually took her to the nearest pub, he told me, where she would order three gins with orange juice, one straight after the other.

The door to their rooms was unlocked. Slowly, I pushed it open. Beyond the columns of books, I made out the gaunt shape of Yeats, fast asleep on a reclining chair in what seemed like a strange cross between a fur suit and a bathrobe. His velvet blue sleeping cap matched perfectly the padded slipper on his left foot, but on the other he wore a black gum boot. I wondered had he injured his foot, or had Georgie misplaced the other slipper. A strong odour of sweet perfume, antiseptic and oddly, of cats, wafted from the room.

A specialist had travelled up from Dublin the previous day and dismissed my diagnosis of concussion in favour of Malta fever, an exotic illness transmitted through contaminated milk. He had recommended that Yeats should have bed-rest for seven days after his temperature returned to normal. During that time, he was only allowed custard, jellied consommé and three spoonfuls of brandy a day. Even by the standards of romantic poets, Yeats was a determined hypochondriac and wholeheartedly embraced the role of convalescent. However, the idea of anyone other than his young wife tending to his fevered body reduced him to tears. Hence the absence of a nurse and the desperation on Georgie’s face as she escaped to the pub during his afternoon nap.

Careful not to disturb the slumbering poet, I made my way down a narrow corridor towards the bedroom door. A pale, fox-like face flashed in a mirror within the room and stared at me. I stepped back, heart racing. Dishes clattered in the kitchen below. On the street, a lamp man was busy illuminating the gas globes, casting a waxy glow through the windows. A coach drove past, its iron wheels ringing on the cobbles. When I looked again the face had disappeared. Perhaps it had been paranoia, an hallucination of some kind, or the reflection had been mine all along, startling me with its look of haunted unease.

I entered the bedroom and walked to a bedside cabinet upon which lay some drawings of Yeats’ ancestors, a set of tarot cards and a collection of detective novels. Beneath the table, I found a heavy trunk with a lock but no key, which a search of the rest of the bedroom failed to uncover. I crept back to the study. I surveyed the contents of the room and my eyes alighted on a cuckoo clock on the wall that had stopped working. The hands were frozen at nine o’clock, the time Yeats and Georgie usually finished their evening interrogation of the spirit world. I crept over to the clock and opened the door to its cogs and wheels. Jammed against the winding mechanism was a silver key. I crept back to the bedroom with the key and opened the trunk.

From my perusal, I concluded that the reams of notes within were either the most extensive supernatural researches ever recorded by a creative mind, or the misguided product of a grand
folie
à deux
. Georgie’s script was thickly packed into a collection of folders which would have created an ocean of paper had I spread it on the floor. Fortunately, it had been catalogued with the poet’s customary scientific zeal into the different voices or avatars, as Yeats called them. In some ways, it was a futile attempt to bring order to a thousand lines of madness. Out of this shifting ground of childish complaints, recycled dreams and philosophical gibberish, he had identified at least a dozen different spiritual ‘instructors’, as well as an untold number of ‘frustrators’, whose sole intention seemed to be to prevent Yeats from mastering the complex symbols and concepts relayed by the ‘instructors’.

I opened the folder belonging to Leo, the spirit whose writing I had earlier noted very closely resembled that of Rosemary O’Grady’s letter. The most conspicuous feature of his messages were the repeated reminders of secrecy, and the conspicuous manner in which they followed Georgie’s personal agenda, frequently taking her side, praising her, while criticising Yeats. The spirit often drew attention to Georgie’s physical needs, when she felt lonely, tired or hungry, or when she needed more attention or physical fulfilment in the marital bed.

I next came across a series of calculations and geometric designs. I stared at the shapes and numbers. What was it about them that struck me as oddly familiar? As though I had seen them perform another role, under a different guise. The way they formed a list, like a calendar of dates. What did I almost understand? I realised that I had found a clue not to the mystery of Yeats relationship with his young wife, but to something more secretive, something cruel and premeditated, the murders of Rosemary O’Grady and Captain Thomas Oates.

The sound of a soft pair of feet running up the stairs interrupted my reading. I bundled the folders back into the trunk and slid under the bed just as someone arrived at the door of Yeats’ study. I heard Georgie call his name softly, but there was no answer. She hurried breathlessly into the bedroom, and without glancing in the direction of the bed, stepped into the adjoining bathroom and began running water into the tub.

My back burned where I had grazed it against the metal springs of the mattress. I lay miserably, face pressed to the musty carpet. Remembering that the ‘instructors’ had forbidden any third party to peruse the script, I refrained from making my presence known, even if it meant that under the circumstances I was at risk of committing a significant indiscretion with Yeats’ wife.

A minute later, Georgie emerged into the bedroom, undressed and collected her bathing robe. She was on her way back into the bathroom when something made her stop. My heart froze with anxiety. Her bare legs went rigid with something other than the cold. I glanced across the floor and noticed the trunk sticking out from under the cabinet.

‘Willie,’ she called again, this time with a note of impatience in her voice. She padded over to the trunk and flipped back the lid. After sorting through the papers for a few minutes, she gave an angry exclamation and hurried out of the room.

A muffled exchange between her and Yeats reached me through the wall. In a slightly slurred voice, she remonstrated with him about the unlocked trunk. His entreaties came back sounding confused and weakened by sleep and ill health.

‘You promised me not to touch the scripts in my absence,’ she hissed. ‘Honestly, if a herd of buffalo had tramped through them, they could not be in a greater mess.’

Yeats made some reply and Georgie’s voice shot back louder.

‘I’m beginning to suspect you’re trying to kill off my ghosts.’

‘Kill off who?’

‘Thomas and Anne. What have you done with their messages?’

‘Hush.’

‘Tell me the truth. You don’t want to hear from them any more, or at least you wish to edit and amend their comments beyond recognition.’ Her voice rose hysterically. ‘You’d rather they were cast into the oblivion of eternity.’

Yeats sounded fully awake now. ‘Am I permitted to tell you there is too much gin on your breath?’

Georgie’s voice thickened with guilt. ‘I know you disapprove of their instructions.’

‘This is not the time for such a conversation. Wait till I am well and you are more sober, and then I will tell you what I think of their messages.’

‘I want you to tell me now.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘Confess that you are planning to do away with my ghosts.’

Yeats’ voice lost its meekness. ‘The spirits will hear us. I beg you to be quiet.’ I heard his body fall back against his chair. The sound of his racked coughing brought an abrupt end to the argument.

The carpet was soggy from the forgotten bath as I crept out the bedroom. When I stepped past the study door, Georgie was attending to Yeats with the weary concern of a wife who had married a man more than two decades her senior. Her mouth was grimly set as though she were storing up words for the spirits’ next marital lecture.

22

Nine of Swords

AFTER his coughing fit, Georgie made Yeats bathe in the cast-iron tub and then retire to bed. She fed him warm consommé and rubbed goose fat over his wheezing chest. She removed the proofs of his latest book of poetry that he had been trying to edit, and placed one of her detective thrillers firmly in his hands.

‘The doctor warned you not to tax your mind.’ She glared at him, her mouth set in a frown. Then she receded into the darkness of the room. The last thing he saw was her scowling mouth hanging by the closing door like that of a bad-tempered Cheshire cat.

Yeats dropped the book. He felt wrung out, exhausted to the core of his being. Fortunately, the soup and Georgie’s massage had a lulling effect on him, so that when he rested his head against the pillow, he found himself drifting off immediately to sleep.

His mind slipped into a vaguely familiar fairyland of rain and wind making wavy patterns over glimmering bog land. Images flashed before him, propelled by his burning fever and the lingering agitation of their row. A man with a dark coat and a hat like a detective in one of Georgie’s thrillers stood on his own, examining a body in a ditch. When the detective rolled the body over with his foot, the water-logged face of a monstrously overgrown baby stared back at him. He blew a whistle in alarm, and suddenly policemen were rushing out of bog holes and trenches, forming numerous coiling paths across the bog land, which swarmed thickly towards the detective. Before they could reach the baby, however, it roared with a mighty force that blew them all backwards. The baby roared again, and the policemen joined in, all of them roaring in unison with such devastating intensity that they were like frogs in danger of bursting their heads.

When he woke up it was the middle of the night. He tried to draw back the heavy blankets, but was reminded that the fever had reduced him to an enfeebled state. He tried to interpret the images of his nightmare. Dear God, he wondered, am I in danger of losing my head over this baby Georgie so desperately wants?

From the sound of his wife’s hushed breathing, he guessed she was awake also. Their row had made everything seem so alien, its lingering hostility altering the shape of their bed, its orientation in the darkened room, even the outline of her body, as she lay turned away from him. It seemed to him that he was sharing his bed with not only his sensible, well-educated wife but a dark subcontinent of scolding female voices.

For the past fortnight, they had been trying to conceive a baby, a son, who would not only be a reincarnation of one of his ancestors, but become the future leader of an Irish republic. The child had grown in their excited imaginations to the status of a new messiah, a redeemer, but Yeats found the entire process taxing, more complex than that of writing a volume of poetry or one hundred plays. The spirit ‘instructors’ had ordered them to conduct complicated rituals and meditations involving swords and green ribbons and pentagrams. Night after night, they lay in the different positions of the compass, surrounded by symbols of the four elements, mindlessly following the erotic directions given to them.

At the same time as all of this overwhelming physical intimacy, he felt himself being pushed ever further to the margins of her life. They had been making slow but efficient progress together on their spiritual quest, but now he found himself tipped back into unknown sexual territory. Rather alarmingly, the body of the woman whom he had fallen in love with was soon going to change and grow in unfamiliar ways. The idea of his unborn son in her expanding belly disturbed him, its embryonic body advancing towards him like an unstoppable beast. The burst of water and blood that would herald his son’s new life would also ring in unpleasant domestic changes. He would be deprived of the total attention of his wife, upon whom he had come to depend, and disturbed day and night from his poetic reveries by the squalling noise of an infant.

Georgie, however, had taken on a radiance, a ghostly shimmer as though the new life she was inviting into her womb had put her in touch with a heightened level of reality. He was unable to get over the indignant suspicion that she was withholding something from him, something more than the biological secret of creation.

He shifted his body, making the bed-frame creak. He guessed that it was sometime around three o’clock, the hardest hour to get back to sleep. It would not be daylight for another four hours at least. Georgie turned on her back and even though she did not speak, he could tell that she was lying next to him with her eyes wide open staring at the ceiling. For a while he did not move, wishing her to think he was fast asleep. The next thing he remembered, a church bell was tolling, and a band of moonlight had crept across their bed. It was much later but not yet dawn.

His thoughts kept returning to the trunk containing the script, lying there on the bedroom floor, a repository for all the answers to his provocative questions about life and death. He yearned to shake the bundles of pages that had been flung from her feverish hand. The wish to shake anything close at hand left him trembling. In the darkness, he felt overwhelmed by anger, and furiously rotated his body beneath the covers.

This time she could not ignore his agitation. Without uttering a word, she rose and lit a candle. With her usual composed motions, she chose a detective novel from the pile on her bedside table, sat back in bed and began reading.

After a few minutes, he muttered darkly, ‘It is quite clear that for you there is no abyss.’

She put down the book and lay back in bed. Neither of them moved.

‘Aren’t you going to snuff out that candle?’ he said.

She got up and put out the flame. The slightest vibration of their breath seemed magnified one hundred times in the darkness. He tried to control the rise and fall of his chest. The possibility rose in his mind that either Georgie or her ghosts were bent on torturing him for past misdemeanours, and that his desire to create a new philosophical system from the script was doomed from the outset. Philosophy had a structure, but so too did madness to a lunatic. Perhaps her automatic writing contained no spiritual guidance, no messages from the gods, no history or mythology, just an endless stream of free associations and behind it all a dead silence. A silence as deep as that from within the rocks and cliffs of Sligo’s rugged coast.

He sighed heavily. The life of a poet was a difficult one, with many setbacks. One could easily lose touch with the currents of history, with what really mattered. Then there were the months of silence to deal with, the loss of purpose, the sickness of body and mind. What was he doing back in Ireland? He had wandered onto the stage of important events, wanting to be a part of their pattern, their ebb and flow, but somehow the tide of history had cast him aside.

He had not suspected how serious the younger generation of revolutionaries were in their planning, but then the Easter Rising had taken the entire country by surprise. Nor had he envisaged the public’s reaction to the court martial and execution of its fifteen leaders. The rebellion had been extreme, insane even, but something about it, in hindsight, seemed beautiful and fitting and terrible. Intuitively, he could see that their intentions had been correct, but he baulked at the violence their actions had triggered, the cult of blood and sacrifice to which they had devoted themselves. He wanted to invent a way out of this predicament for his fellow countrymen with whom he had a permanent and unshakeable bond. It was his responsibility. How could it be otherwise for Ireland’s leading poet?

His mind returned to the trunk on the floor, which now resembled an indefensible outpost of his imagination, one that lay open to all sorts of assault and battery. He wondered was the script a means of diverting his attention from the problems of his marriage and his country, a way of escaping the world of politics and marital responsibilities, an opening not into the self, but into lunacy?

In the darkness, he listened closely to the sound of her chest. He realised she was controlling her breathing, pretending to be asleep. He reached out and touched her on her chest, above her heart, but she did not flinch. How very different she was from her rivals in love, those reckless and passionate women who had vexed his heart for decades. So much more calm and remote and disciplined. She lay beside him feigning sleep as if nothing could waken her. Perhaps it was the same skill she used to convince him she was slumbering during their séances.

A coldness came over him, the coldness of death itself. He thought of her automatic writing and wondered what had been play-acting and what had been genuine contact with the spirits. His suspicions increased, tearing up whole masses of rooted belief. The morbid thought struck him that he was wedded to a fraud, a charlatan, the most subtle con-artist he had yet to meet in his thirty years of investigating the paranormal.

‘Why are you playing at being asleep?’ he asked, his voice husky with dread.

She did not reply, as though answering that question might prompt her to talk about other subjects she was too afraid to discuss. He closed his eyes and the question ‘What else are you playing at?’ came easily to mind but with great difficulty to his lips.

He felt the bed shake slightly as she moved away. Perhaps she had guessed the question that was preying upon his mind.

‘I’m not the one playing at inventing a religion,’ she replied, her voice sounding calm.

‘How am I playing at inventing a religion?’

‘All your unanswerable questions about mystical patterns and symbols.’

‘We are entering a time of great upheaval. A new age should have a new religion.’

‘Is that why you stayed with me rather than chase after Gonne and her daughter? The script taught you that I was worth loving.’

Yeats closed his eyes. A numbness hit his heart. ‘I never thought you weren’t worth loving.’

‘But I always felt it.’ She pronounced the words carefully, making sure he heard them. ‘Those frantic women you surrounded yourself with. How could I compete with all that melodrama, all that nervous energy? You only stayed with me because I can do what your Mr Adams seems incapable of. I can catch your ghosts, channel their messages, reveal their secrets. You love me only because you are an artist and I supply your outlines. I draw the shapes while you paint in the colours and take all the credit. If I had known the true state of affairs, I would never have consented to marrying you.’

He felt his chest tighten and another coughing fit come on.

‘Your accusations are smothering me. Why are we putting such effort into having this child if you believe I do not love you?’ The coughing choked the rest of his questions.

Eventually the fit subsided and a silence grew between them. It continued for a long time, so long he drifted back to sleep. He was brought back to consciousness by the sound of her voice, so small and quiet that the words were hardly there, like those of a ghost already fading from view.

‘Goodnight, my dear Willie,’ she whispered.