‘I’m going to start by reading a poem that I know was close to Eleanor’s heart. I introduced her to it, actually, and I know how much it spoke to her. I am sure that many of you will be familiar with it. It’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats.’ She started reading in a loud lilting whisper.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
Whereas it was sophisticated enough to order nine oysters, thought Nicholas, there was something utterly absurd about nine bean rows. Oysters naturally came in dozens and half-dozens — for all he knew, they grew on the seabed in dozens and half-dozens — and so there was something understandably elegant about ordering nine of them. Beans, on the other hand, came in vague fields and profuse heaps, making the prissy precision of nine ridiculous. At the very least it conjured up a dissonant vision of an urban allotment in which there was hardly likely to be room for a clay and wattle cabin and a bee-loud glade. No doubt the Spiritual Tool Box thought that ‘Innisfree’ was the climax of Yeats’s talent, and no doubt the Celtic Twilight, with its wilful innocence and its tawdry effects, was perfectly suited to Eleanor’s other-worldly worldview, but in reality the Irish Bard had only emerged from an entirely forgettable mauve mist when he became the mouthpiece for the aristocratic ideal. ‘Surely among a rich man’s flowering lawns, / Amid the rustle of his planted hills, / Life overflows without ambitious pains; / And rains down life until the basin spills.’ Those were the only lines of Yeats worth memorizing, which was just as well since they were the only ones he could remember. Those lines inaugurated a meditation on the ‘bitter and violent’ men who performed great deeds and built great houses, and of what happened to that greatness as it turned over time into mere privilege: ‘And maybe the great-grandson of that house, / For all its bronze and marble,’s but a mouse.’ A risky line if it weren’t for all the great mouse-infested houses one had known. That was why it was so essential, as Yeats was suggesting, to remain bitter and angry, in order to ward off the debilitating effects of inherited glory.
Annette’s voice redoubled its excruciated gentleness for the second stanza.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
Peace comes dropping slow, thought Henry, how beautiful. The lines lengthening with the growing tranquillity, and the deepening jet lag, and his head dropping slow, dropping slow onto his chest. He needed an espresso, or the veils of morning were going to shroud his mind entirely. He was here for Eleanor, Eleanor on the lake at Fairley, alone in a rowing boat, refusing to come back in, everybody standing on the shore shouting, ‘Come back! Your mother’s here! Your mother’s arrived!’ For a girl who was too shy to look you in the eye, she could be as stubborn as a mule.
Where the cricket sings, thought Patrick, is where you live with Seamus in my old home. He imagined the shrill grating coming from the grass and the gradual build-up, cicada by cicada, of pulsing waves of sound, like auditory heat shimmering over the dry land.
Mary was relieved that plenty o’ nuthin’ seemed to have gone down well with Patrick, and she felt that the make-believe simplicity of ‘Innisfree’ was a charming reminder of Eleanor’s yearning to exclude the dark complexities of life at any price. What Mary couldn’t relax about was the address she had asked Annette to make. And yet what could she do? There was no point in denying that side of Eleanor’s life and Annette was better qualified than anyone else in the room to talk about it. At least it would give Patrick something to rant about for the next few days. She listened to Annette’s singsong, cradle-rocking delivery of the final stanza of ‘Innisfree’ with growing dread.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Annette closed her eyes and reached again for her amber necklace. ‘Om namo Matta Meera,’ she murmured, re-empowering herself for the speech she was about to make.
‘All of you will have known Eleanor in different ways, and many of you for much longer than me,’ she began with an understanding smile. ‘I can only talk about the Eleanor that I knew, and while I try to do justice to the wonderful woman that she was, I hope you will hold the Eleanor that you knew in what Yeats calls the deep heart’s core. But at the same time, if I show you a side of her that you didn’t know, all I would ask is that you let her in, let her in and let her join the Eleanor that each of you is holding in your heart.’
Oh, Jesus, thought Patrick, let me out of here. He imagined himself disappearing through the floor with a shovel and some bunk-bed slats, the theme music of The Great Escape humming in the air. He was crawling under the crematorium through fragile tunnels, when he felt himself being dragged backwards by Annette’s maddening voice.
*
‘I first met Eleanor when a group of us from the Dublin Women’s Healing Drum Circle were invited down to Saint-Nazaire, her wonderful house in Provence, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with. As we were coming down the drive in our minibus, I caught my first glimpse of Eleanor sitting on the wall of the big pond, with her hands tucked under her thighs, for all the world like a lonely young child staring down at her dangling shoes. By the time we arrived in front of the pond she was literally greeting us with open arms, but I never lost that first impression of her, just as I think she never lost a connection to the child-like quality that made her believe so passionately that justice could be achieved, that consciousness could be transformed and that there was goodness to be found in every person and every situation, however hidden it might seem at first sight.’