Time After Time Read online

  VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS

  475

  Molly Keane was born in Co. Kildare, Ireland in 1904, into ‘a rather serious Hunting and Fishing Church-going family’, and was sketchily educated by governesses. Interested in ‘horses and having a good time’, Molly Keane wrote her first novel, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance, when she was seventeen in order to supplement her dress allowance. She used the pseudonym M. J. Farrell ‘to hide my literary side from my sporting friends’. Between 1928 and 1961 Molly Keane published ten novels under her pen name, novels in which she brought acuteness and good-tempered satire as well as affection to her portrayals of the ramshackle Anglo-Irish way of life. She also wrote several successful plays. But the untimely death of her husband brought a break in her career which ended only in 1981, when Good Behaviour appeared under her own name, triggering a revival of interest in and respect for her work. Molly Keane died in 1996.

  Novels by Molly Keane

  The Knight of Cheerful Countenance

  Young Entry

  Taking Chances

  Mad Puppetstown

  Conversation Piece

  Devoted Ladies

  Full House

  The Rising Tide

  Two Days in Aragon

  Loving Without Tears

  Treasure Hunt

  Time After Time

  Good Behaviour

  Loving and Giving

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-1-40552-686-9

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © The Estate of Molly Keane 1983

  Introduction copyright © Emma Donoghue 2001

  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, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  Novels by Molly Keane

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1: In the Kitchen

  2: In the Dining-Room

  3: Bedtime

  4: Separate Pursuits

  5: The Revenant

  6: Rediscovery

  7: Time Translated

  8: Revelations

  9: Time After Time

  Introduction

  I was thirteen when Time After Time (1983) was published, and I hated it. The cruelty in Good Behaviour (1981), Molly Keane’s comeback novel after a twenty-year absence from fiction, had not much bothered me at the age of eleven, because I had been entirely engrossed in the romantic yearnings of its first-person narrator Aroon St Charles, a ‘statuesque’ girl who is constantly made to feel too big. But Time After Time, with its cast of maimed old farts playing tricks on each other – I read it at arm’s length, and threw it aside with relief at the end.

  Only on re-reading it, many years later, did I realise that almost every incident had stuck like a burr in my reluctant memory. Time After Time is an unforgettable book, quite literally. Not ideal for thirteen-year-olds, perhaps; it takes longer than that to develop a taste for an author as sophisticated as Keane, and an interest in the plights and stratagems of unhappy people growing older. But to everyone over twenty I would recommend Time After Time as a dazzling drama of human cruelty and frailty.

  When Molly Keane introduces Jasper Swift as ‘the elderly owner of a large and encumbered estate and a house burdened with three sisters, one widowed, two unmarried’, her homage to Austen’s social comedy is audible, but she also has a Dickensian eye for grotesque descriptions and dramatic twists. She is most often placed at the wryly modern end of the Anglo-Irish ‘Big House’ literary tradition, which includes many other mistresses of satire, from Maria Edgeworth to Edith Somerville and Martin Ross.

  Time After Time is set in a post-World War II gloom which is only marked as the 1970s by the occasional ‘appalling news from Ulster’ on the radio. The Swift siblings – their name wonderfully ill-suited to their stagnant lives – are bound, by the manipulative terms of their mother’s will, to live together in a sort of four-way parodic marriage. Their ‘big house’ is all decrepitude and decay; every biro has dried up, we are told, and the many shameful human and animal smells cling to the air ‘like grey hairs in a comb’ – a perfectly chosen image for a world grown old. ‘Horrible times’, as Jasper calls them.

  But Time After Time manages to be deeply funny. A plot summary would sound like a crude joke: a one-eyed man, a deaf woman, a fingerless woman and a half-wit are sitting in a house when in walks a blind woman. Keane has loaded her characters with almost too much to bear, and they know it. ‘We’re all maimed – what a family!’ cracks Jasper. As well as their various ‘maimings’ and creeping penury, the Swifts have to bear with incontinent dogs, and, worst of all, each other – Hell being, as Sartre puts it, other people. But Keane, with a delicate touch, gives the siblings some compensations: great food, ravishing glimpses of forests and swans, moments of wry alliance, and lots of good lines. Jasper steals the best of them: warding off a woman who is trying to slip into his bed, he says, ‘Dearest girl, let me offer you half a Mogadon. It’s all I have.’ ‘Don’t joke. It’s life and death,’ June tells Jasper when he offers to warm up her little runt pig in the hot roasting oven – but matters of life and death make very good jokes, in Molly Keane’s hands. Not in the least politically correct, she plays games with the readers’ expectations on such matters as homosexuality and the Holocaust. She blithely uses disabilities to create a sense of the grotesque, but her irreverence and unsentimentality make her a very intelligent commentator on their unpredictable side-effects; April’s deafness, for instance, renders her not helpless but blithely aloof; May’s two-fingered hand, far from being clumsy, proves itself over and over in a career of stunningly deft craft work.

  Characterisation is the real meat of this novel; Keane creates a tiny battleground full of people who are almost diagrammatically contrasted to each other, each with their particular addiction (April’s pills, June’s handsome farmhand) and their own totem cat or dog. Their possessions characterise them too; Jasper is just like his temperamental Aga cooker, and May takes after her brittle, twice-mended Meissen candlestick. But Keane sprinkles in unpredictable elements to make these people real: elegant, old-world April smokes the odd joint, for instance, and ever-busy May does a little shoplifting for kicks. The Swifts are all too credible as siblings – with their Irish Protestant arrogance, their weary knowledge of each other’s flaws, but also their profound ignorance about each other’s dreams. This crumbling household of isolated beings could be read as standing for a whole nation – perhaps a whole society – of mutual alienation.

  ‘Who wants sordid details?’ April wonders. Well, readers do, it seems. Molly Keane has an eye for the sordid detail, the shameful intimacy; she always tells us where in a room the brimming ‘po’ is hidden. ‘I know something you don’t know I know’, May tells Jasper; these characters hoard up secrets – their own and others’ – then lash out in scenes of revelation which Keane consistently describes as orgasmic.

  The only sex scene in this novel is the mating of two dogs in a caravan, but desire bubbles up on every page. ‘Aren’t we, all five of us, a bit old for these gambols?’ Jasper asks diffidently – but it seems not. The poor old Labrador is on heat again, and June, from her days on the farm, knows that ‘anything was possible, at any age’. Sexuality in Molly Keane’s novels is
never simple, and is often rather queer (in both senses). Mostly, these virginal characters sublimate their frustration into a lust for fine clothes, for the perfect soufflé, for small china rabbits – or instead of reading all this as sublimation, one might say that in the palpitating world of Keane’s fiction, sex is only one of many overwhelming passions. Standing in the rain, looking down on the site of his elaborate horticultural plans, ‘Jasper was in love; age forgotten, no age he’.

  Time After Time is set up like a tragedy. We have a household riven by jealousies, like an orphaned version of Lear’s own ménage. And then, precisely a third of the way through the book, arrives the catalyst, the visitor from the past, their cousin Leda. As the title proclaims, this novel is about time. The Swifts have been living in ‘a state of dream’; in a significant detail, Jasper never throws away old calendars. When Leda, ‘the lost Princess Doll’ they all once craved to own, arrives to reawaken them, her new blindness turns the clock back because in her mind’s eye the Swifts and their house are still beautiful. ‘I’ve gone through the looking glass,’ she tells them merrily; ‘Time’s a joke.’

  But Leda, with her ‘fingers lean and strong as the spring in a rat trap’, uses her new helplessness and undimmed charm to bind each of the Swifts to her again, and aims to bring down disaster on this house from which she was once banished. Wittily Keane hints that Leda stands for the dark side of authorship: ‘Leda might have been wanting to write a book about her cousins, but all she wished for was a power over each against each, and to steal even the secrets they didn’t know they kept.’ So will this ghost from the past destroy the Swifts once and for all?

  Molly Keane hates to be predictable, and in the novel’s last few chapters none of the ironic rewards or punishments land just where we expect. Her achievement of what might be claimed as a happy ending for the Swifts is both clever and oddly moving. ‘It had been a brief entertainment, ridiculously exciting,’ thinks Jasper ruefully at the end. After their various indignities, the Swifts finally win a hint of Beckettian dignity. As the famous ending of Malone Dies (1958) puts it: ‘You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’

  Emma Donoghue

  2000

  1

  In the Kitchen

  Jasper Swift, owner although not sole possessor of Durraghglass, was back in the kitchen where he belonged. He had been on his weekly shopping expedition. Today he had forgotten his shopping list – something that could happen to the most efficiently equipped person, even to his sister May. He was not going to taunt his own memory, or his age, on the matter.

  His elegant, lengthy figure was bent, like a reed in a cold breeze, over the bags and packages in the basket he had put down on the kitchen table. He lifted up his handsome head and cursed – he had left the meat behind. That was a bit senile, he had to admit. And April’s prescription – no harm. Far too many tranquilizers going down that silly throat. There was something June had wanted, was it for the farrowing sow? Well, too late now – let her get on with her farrowing in her own way. At least he had remembered to buy, for himself, a new hot-water bottle. He wasn’t altogether dotty.

  Dottiness was the last thing from which Jasper suffered. Uncertain and nervous perhaps, but that was to be expected in the elderly owner of a large and encumbered estate and a house burdened with three sisters, one widowed, two unmarried, each of them with a right of residence. That was the way darling Mummie had left it. Jasper had always accepted her wishes devoutly, even more devoutly since her death.

  Now he took off his cap, a dark checked cap – Mummie had bought it, perhaps thirty years ago, from that most classical of hatters in St James’s. It was as graciously becoming to him as any hat dreamed up by Proust for Odette. He wore it with an air and at an angle that saved his blind eye a little from the light. Mummie had chosen the stuff for his tweed coat too. She had purred suggestions to the tailor during the fittings and the resulting coat still moved in a flow of perfection, giving grace with austerity. Perhaps the cuffs, grafted and integrated with their sleeves and serving no more useful purpose than that of pleasing the eye, were its most touching and elegant feature. An ageless antique and needing care, it could fall to bits on him any day now. But Savile Row – he shuddered: three hundred pounds for anything proper today. Forget it. Horrible. Horrible times.

  He put his cap on again because the kitchen was cold. The Aga was in a dispirited mood because the wind from the west was blowing towards the mountain. He accepted such natural facts and allowed the Aga to take its own time to revive and recover.

  There was a time when kitchens in the afternoon held their distance. Cooks and kitchenmaids used to tidy up the kitchen at Durraghglass, perhaps take a little rest from their duties until it was time to make the Sally Lunn for drawing-room tea. Not any more, naturally. Times change.

  In the big kitchen, where Jasper now ruled, nothing was ever tidied up, stored, or thrown away. Cats were the scavengers. Cardboard wine cases that had carried more groceries than wine to the house were piled and heaped and thrown in corners. Cats had their kittens in them – mostly born to be drowned. Jasper’s great tiger cat, Mister Minkles, was the sire of them all. Strangely, he was clean for a tom cat. No dog ever had a more loving heart. Jasper returned his love and respected him as a person. Now he sat with majesty at the centre of the white deal dresser – sat on the breadboard. Behind him tier on tier of chipped and unchipped dinner services (Mason’s ironware mostly), rose upward to the hook-studded ceiling, barren now of hams, and covered in dust thick as ashes. Large calendars from the Allied Irish Banks, year after year of them, hung on a brass hook. There were pictures of duck flighting, stuff like that, which Jasper didn’t want to throw away. His close vision was all right.

  Jasper hardly ever looked out of the tall sashed windows, or below them to the slope where he cleared briars and ivy from azaleas and camellias planted long ago, and nurtured his own more recent plantings. Red Himalayan rhododendrons grew like banyan trees behind the choicer subjects; and behind them again wild ponticum formed a second barrier to winter winds from the Black Stair mountain. Jasper had larger horticultural plans that milled around like dreams in his head – expensive ideas which he felt just young enough to develop and direct. Money was the hopeless problem. Lack of it kept everything in a state of dream. But at least he could keep the briars in check down the steep bank with its broken stone terraces falling to gold reeds, blue flag leaves, and low, unseen mountain river.

  Across the water and beyond was an infinite distance of sun-filled untidy gorse-grown fields; some fields bent themselves round small lakes for wild swans, or moorhens, or water-lilies. Jasper maintained his lack of interest in all this, he had other things to occupy him. There was the constant unremitting fight he must keep up to maintain his authority and position as head of the family. His most important offensive and defensive here was present, as always, when April, his eldest sister and the only married and widowed Swift, spoke to him.

  April glided in. A tall and elderly lady, still beautiful, she stood near the Aga, shuddering a little while her eyes avoided their usual disgust with the kitchen. Her expensive clothes became her very well. They had ease and length and fullness. Some contrivance nipped them always in the right and prettiest directions. Violet, wanda, or dark brown were her favourite colours. She was big and elderly and she swayed gracefully on long thin legs. She had the defensive aloofness of the very deaf. A fierce chihuahua clung and buried his face somewhere under her armpit. She stood apart, humming and murmuring, while the fingers of one hand were devotedly busy round her little dog’s ears. Her eyes rested on Jasper, distantly unconcerned with his work, as though plucking pigeons was some sort of unnecessary amusement. When she spoke it was a different story.

  “I just wanted to let you know I’m going off my diet tonight.”

  He had to contradict and deny even though it meant more trouble for him: “Nonsense – you’re horribly overweight. Yoghurt and hummus for you.”

  “I
’m glad it’s pigeon pie. My favourite. And could you let me have my pills? My head’s been more than splitting.”

  “O’Keefe’s were shut.”

  “No need to shout. How much were they?”

  “The chemist was SHUT.”

  “I don’t care if it was raining.”

  “I said –”

  “If you took your cap off in the house, Jasper, you might hear better. At least it would be rather more civilized.”

  “Do I have to write it?” He put down a pigeon and crossed over to the dresser where, ignoring the cascade of bills, cooking recipes cut from Sunday papers, keys of all sorts, as well as hoarded sardine tin openers, he looked without hesitation into a two-pound marmalade pot (Coopers of Oxford) and turned from it quite pale with annoyance.

  “Now who has taken my Biro? I’ld like to know who has been in the kitchen while I was shopping and taken the kitchen Biro.”

  “Ah! Biro!” She was for once abreast of the problem. “Every Biro in the house is dry. It’s a contagious disease. I tried the library and the drawing room and the morning room and the gents’ loo, all the same story. Here’s a Biro. I found one here at last.”

  “My own personal, red, private pen! How dare you? Damn you.”

  April smiled and spoke indulgently: “Write it down if you can’t hear me.”

  “Librium OFF” he wrote on the back of an envelope and handed it to her with a slight air of triumph. He gave back the pen too, as though he too were deaf and she must answer in writing.

  “Oh, NO! And I’m down to my last, my very last.”

  “Not a bad idea, if you are. Horrible stuff.”

  “You forgot on purpose,” she went on, her deaf voice as isolated as echo in a cave. “I know that perfectly well. I know you and your utter selfishness.”

  “Steady yourself, dear girl,” he spoke in his most sensible voice, “and may I have my pen? My pen, please – I said: MY PEN.” Jasper knew she couldn’t hear, but in his necessity and annoyance he snatched awkwardly and roughly at the pen in her hand. As he did so the chihuahua raised his head from her armpit, screamed twice, and bit him sharply. Jasper yelled too. “Little bastard – bitten me to the bone.”