There were two tractors, one red and one blue, and the drivers wore high-vis jackets. And even the man on the lawnmower, curling around the beech trees on the lawn of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Co Monaghan, had a high-vis jacket on his back and ear muffs on his ears. Thank God, I say to myself, for health and safety.
It was an autumn afternoon and I was sitting at the window of the upstairs bedroom in the big house, looking at the lake. The sky was blue and a majestic tree stood halfway between the house and the lake’s edge, where two women in their 60s were waddling in for a swim.
I wanted to be with them. I wished I had the courage to swim in the middle of a lake on a chilly autumn day. That’s the kind of boisterous exercise that would keep a man in trim condition. But instead I just sat at the window admiring the view.
Suddenly there was a knock on the door, which is unusual in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, because the whole idea is to leave people alone so they can write, or paint in deep solitude all day long. And that works. When I close the door of the big room upstairs – Lady Guthrie’s room – my mind drifts far from the surface of everything. The centre is not unlike a monastery, except that here there are no Christian or Buddhist icons, and no overly declarative testimonies to hope.
Existential uncertainty
It’s just an artists’ retreat, and since artists are invariably existentially uncertain creatures who never seem to know exactly what they are doing or even who they are, their retreat spaces tend to be open-ended worlds, sites of ambiguity where it’s difficult to name precisely what the retreat is, or where it ends or begins.
The only bell is the one that chimes each evening for dinner, when they all emerge from their rooms – their private hells or nirvana zones – with confused expressions on their faces, amazed perhaps that they have just created something beautiful in poetry or prose.
For an hour at the dinner table they fumble with style, with manners, with exotic salads, and make a faint attempt at social discourse. But it’s all a surface. Everyone knows that everyone else is living on the inside, operating beneath the waves, in the quiet underwater of solitude.
The shock of the knock
So the knock on the door at 3pm was a shock, and I was glad that I had not gone to bed to sleep for the afternoon. I was at the desk sketching the structure of a new book. I hopped up instantly and open the door.
The man who stood before me was tall and he wore a white shirt with a company logo on the breast pocket, but I couldn’t read it.
“Mice bait,” he said. “Just a routine check.”
He entered and went straight to a spot at the window, just below the radiator, and took up a plastic container in his gloved hands.
“We check the bait once a month,” he said. “To see if any of it has been taken.”
“And has it?” I wondered.
“Not touched,” he assured me. And he was off, like a surgeon to the next ward, and I could hear his knock on the next door across the landing, as I returned to the laptop.
That’s when I heard the laughter. It was the two women in the water. They had swum the length of the lake and were back on dry ground. Something had charmed them into such abandoned laughter, and I recognised one of them instantly. I had met her 30 years ago when I first gazed on that beautiful lake. And even across a distance of 30 years, her laughter was instantly identifiable and seductive. So I sat there transfixed, at the window, looking at the great Sequoia between me and the lake that has not changed much since 1984.
I stared at the box of mice bait under the radiator, wondering would it be touched in another month, when the man would come again. I marvelled at the way human laughter can be so distinct, like a fingerprint, and so easily identified after such a long time.
The gong went for dinner. I munched my salad at the table with the others, in silence until someone spoke to me.
“How was your day?” she asked.
“Amazing,” I replied, and we smiled.