‘I am and I amn’t.’
‘Arra.’ He tossed his head ruefully.
I forget most else of what passed between us as my head was suddenly crowded with fresh thoughts, thoughts which had nothing to do with Glynn but were instead a realisation of what it signified to inhabit the world as a man, to possess a past and a small degree of certainty. All new to me at the time, as I say, and a little previous as it turned out, but there it is, there you have it. One thing I clearly recall is Glynn’s announcement of his decision to quit teaching. He issued this statement then coyly examined my face for a reaction. I did not react. What did he want? What did he expect me to say, after everything?
He averted his face. ‘I’ve lost them,’ he suddenly admitted.
‘Who?’
‘My fairies.’
‘Your fairies?’
‘The women. The four girls. I’ve lost them.’
I paused. ‘Yes, I’m afraid you have lost them.’ There was no point in lying to the man any more.
‘They were so beautiful.’
‘They were.’
‘They are still in the world, I suppose.’
‘I suppose they are.’
‘Abroad in the world.’ He liked that idea. His hand described a curlicue in the air, ever the maestro.
‘Yes.’
‘But no longer in my world.’
‘At least you had them, Professor Glynn.’
‘There is that.’
‘And you’ll see them from time to time, here and there, in unexpected places.’
‘I dearly hope so.’
I didn’t tell him that he had driven his fairies away, that he had nobody to blame for the early and terminal disbandment of the group but himself. I didn’t need to tell him. Glynn knew. He was, after all, an artist of personal tragedy, not the noble, stoical kind but the self-inflicted variety. It was why the six of us understood each other so well.
I left him there, racked with remorse, shuddering in pain, already searching for the words to describe it, already groping for metaphors. He had lost the women and recovered his great subject — longing. They were his fairies, alright. Glynn was precisely where he wanted to be, in a paroxysm of torment approaching the condition of ecstasy. Suffering, whilst training a canny eye on that suffering, the artist’s eye, the eye of the imagination.
‘By the way,’ he asked as I was leaving, ‘what do you think of Conversations with a Blackbird as a title?’
Glynn took pleasure in teasing us this way, right to the bitter end. All year, he had led us on, flashing demure glimpses of his artistic self, a raised hem here, a lowered neckline there, taunting us with the notion that our opinions actually mattered to him.
‘It’s a beautiful title,’ I averred as vehemently as I was able. ‘It is absolutely stunning, Professor.’
I knew he would despise this response — the measure of a work of art’s beauty as the criterion by which it was assessed — but that was the whole point. I wanted Glynn to despise my judgement. I wanted him to feel that he knew more than the likes of me and to thereby regain the authority, the courage, the audacity required to proceed. I indulged him to facilitate the engendering of a mood conducive to composition. Nobody wrote about September like Glynn.
Some writers preferred platitudes to no response at all. I had presumed before I knew him not to count Glynn among their number, which shows how little I understood about the chaos of the writing life, the dreadful tumult that descends upon a man. No instructions, no manuals, no progress reports. Just the wanderings of your own imagination. The chaos had to be calibrated every now and then. It had to be shattered by matters of no importance to remind the artist why he had devoted his life to it in the first place. Once Glynn got his dose of platitudes, he could reject their mundanity and feel confirmed in the choices he had made. All the man needed was to feel he had choices. It wasn’t so much to ask. I hesitated before closing the door — the finality was momentarily unbearable — then I pulled it shut on him, gently, gently, so as not to in any way suggest it was a reproof.
He didn’t go with the blackbird title in the end. Electra Is Complex, his novel charting the doomed affair between a middle-aged professor and his young student, was published two years later. His doomed affair and subsequent redemption. Glynn was a new man in his author’s photograph. No longer meat-faced, liver-lipped, clown-haired, glowering. A big, unguarded smile for the female photographer, revealing a gaggle of mismatched teeth, at least one of which I knew to be fake.
*
Which left Guinevere. Guinevere Wren. The name became her. More so than Electra, but these are matters of taste and artistic difference. Would she be waiting for me at the gate?
The farewell to Glynn had taken less time than I’d allowed for, so I sat in the sun on the steps of the Reading Room to await the appointed hour, my rucksack at my feet. I put my head between my knees and contemplated Guinevere’s absence in terms of imagery, how stark the black railings beyond Front Arch would look without her. If this were a Glynn novel, she wouldn’t be there. I was under no illusions.
At one minute to three, the condemned rose and crossed the quad. It took my eyes a moment to adjust to the cool darkness beneath Front Arch after the brilliant May sunshine. A pigeon beat its wings in the vaulted ceiling with the violence of something trying to break. I did not falter. I would face whatever was there, or not there. I would go alone. I would leave Dublin without her. I had done it before.
The sunlight, when I emerged on the other side, was blinding. It bleached the world bare of detail. There was nothing. Nobody was waiting. Well then, I said to myself. Okay so. Are you happy now? I stood there in the middle of the entrance, blocking everyone, all the tourists, the undergrads, I didn’t care. Then a hand touched my shoulder. I dropped my rucksack.
I stooped and gathered Guinevere up, lifted her off the ground and buried my face in her hair. Thank you she says I chanted into her neck, and I take her word for it, I take her word. Around and around we went, revolving slowly, her feet dangling in the air. ‘Are you ready?’ I asked when I was able.
She nodded. ‘I’m ready.’
She accepted my hand and set her calm face to the street, as if joining me in a dance. Through the gates, onto Dame Street, uphill to Swift’s cathedral. I will call this moment the beginning.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to those who read and commented on drafts: Mia Kilroy, Simon Trewin, Simon McInerney, John Boyne and Liz O’Donnell. A very special thanks to the Arts Council of Ireland, An Chomhairle Ealaíon, for its generous financial support, and to Angus Cargill of Faber and Faber, esteemed editor.
About the Author
Claire Kilroy’s debut novel All Summer was described in The Times as ‘compelling … a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts’, and was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was followed, in 2009, by the highly acclaimed novel, All Names Have Been Changed. Educated at Trinity College, she lives in Dublin.