INDIVIDUAL WILLS

There's a non-existent film of my parents playing opposite one another as Gabriel and Gretta Conroy. They were about thirty and still living in Seattle when it was made, so perhaps about the same age as the couple in 'The Dead'. It was shot on film, with all of the resultant anxiety that there might be a hair on the gate or that the loader would have a mishap. And then there was the fact that they were stage actors and had to adjust to the new lights, to the breaking down of a scene into such small segments that there was sometimes inane repetition when a retake was required.

Gabriel says everyone wears them on the continent.

Gabriel says everyone wears them on the continent.

Gabriel says - until it seemed not Joyce but Beckett, my father said:

Thirty-nine today, sound as a .

Thirty-nine today, sound as a bell, apart from my old weakness .

The make-up still thick but the lights hotter.

My mother wore her own shoes and earrings. The dress was from the Rep, one she'd worn in Chekhov the previous season. My father wore a dapper suit with a London label. It was also a part of the Rep's collection, heavy with the sweat of the summer season, beautifully made.

It wasn't too many months after my father had gone off the rails again, so they had been through the terrible silence of the first week, through rows and then recovery. My mother had insisted, for the first time, that he do something about it: go to AA, she told him coldly in the garden one morning. She was weeding flower beds and watching for her raccoon; despite warnings she'd befriended one who came regularly and now took food from her hands, standing up on its hind paws like a dog. There are other actors there, she told him without looking up. It was the power of being in her own house. In her own house - her name on the loan - she spoke up.

My father agreed; what else could he do? Then the script had arrived, and they'd delightedly begun to rehearse: words to say, lines that could be practised at the table when the pain of silence was too much to bear.

The lure of theatre: to have someone else tell you what to say, how to act, who to be.

Were you dancing?

Of course I was. Didn't you see me? What row had you with Molly Ivors?

No row. Why? Did she say so?

Something like that. I'm trying to get that Mr D'Arcy to sing. He's full of conceit, I think.

There was no row, only she wanted me to go for a trip to the west of Ireland and I said I wouldn't.

Oh, do go, Gabriel! I'd love to see Galway again.

You can go if you like.

There's a nice husband for you, Mrs Malins.

Over dinner - always with water, never with wine - they say these things back and forth to each other until the wounding has gone out of them. The words begin to transform in that way that cannot be explained to lay people, to those who have not lived as somebody else in the dark beneath lights, with the still listening that is a rapt audience. They are now Gretta and Gabriel in the modern Seattle house with a fondue set on the table, the light of a hanging lamp a warm circle between them. It is an alchemy they do not discuss but seize on: tenderness between them again because they are not only themselves.

The shell of a carriage is brought onto set for the scene in which they journey towards the hotel. My parents sit in it, exposed on one side where the camera is angled invasively - it seems to be pointing the finger and they both recoil. They want to return to the rehearsal space of their dining-room table and the hanging lamp, that cocoon of light in which they can speak and perform only for one another. In the studio they do not even have the illusion of the utter dark that is the front of the stage, the blackness twinkling with dust hanging in the light like star particles.

The false carriage is surrounded by crew, so many of them, in jeans and short sleeves because of the heat: they hold booms and clipboards and watch intently. My parents begin, and they repeat the lines and look to one another and without speaking of it, without acknowledging the strange discomfort of this shoot, they disappear into the scene, into the characters; they are alone in the carriage and the beautiful glow of the wood puts sparkle in their eyes. They live Gretta and Gabriel in that strained journey to the hotel.

My father looks at his wife and he longs for her: and he knows that he is himself longing for Maureen as much as he is Gabriel longing for Gretta. Even though he does not say it, even though it is not part of the script, he thinks those words to himself: moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory. She truly is so beautiful, and he turns his eyes upon her and thinks of their wedding day and her beloved face as she neared him in the church, the fear in her. He thinks of her weeping at different moments through the years and he wants to hold her against his heart and let her hear how those moments echo through him still, the constant tremble of regret. It is not part of the scene, though, and he does not move towards her, just looks - pours all of that longing and regret into it and hopes that she understands.

My mother has the harder role. Behind his head are the lights and a row of people all staring: she is vaguely conscious that it is her that they watch, the men and the women, her pale skin aglow in the hot lights and her eyes luminous.

You are a very generous person, Gabriel, she says. It was true; he was generous - he always had been. He would have shared anything he had. He'd presented spur-of-the-moment gifts not only to her but also to her family, nephews and nieces. He always had a pocketful of someone's favourite treat, lemon bonbons for her mother, an iced cherry loaf for her father. It was his way, an instinct of his - having always had money, it slid through his fingers like sand. It was how the house had been lost, of course, and how the odd drink had become bottles; the generosity extended towards himself as well. So Maureen-Gretta gazed at her husband with a sense of his limitation, his best trait. A smile curved her lips slightly, and Bernard-Gabriel smiled back.

When filming wrapped for the day they would sit together taking their make-up off. Outside the small dressing room the crew wrapped cables and returned lighting stands to corners for the next morning. My parents left together, waving to those still tidying the studio, often walked out by the director or a producer, everyone but my mother lighting cigarettes as the revolving doors nudged them onto the sidewalk.

Night, they'd all say, and stroll off as if the next day's shoot wasn't only twelve hours away. My father would take her hand as they walked and she would not pull away.

*

At some point in the eighties my dad contacted the TV station, but they'd destroyed the film. After he died, I wrote to some of their old theatre friends and someone sent me a slide of them on set in the carriage: a square of translucent image, the ghosts of my parents with light coming through them.

So I watch the non-existent film: I stare through the slide, held up to the window so that I see the vague green of the grass of my garden beyond, as if my parents are sitting there. There is something in me desperate to see this performance, to see them exchanging lines. If I can see the film, it will make sense of things. Because sometimes it is as if I have imagined the whole thing - our family life - as if I've made it up lying on my parents' bed staring at the ceiling, as if I am still four and in that hallucinatory state of pre-sleep, telling myself stories. But if I could hear them saying the words to each other, would I be able to bear it? The longing to see them again, together, is overwhelming at times. I wish that they could see their grandchildren, see that it is all okay: that things worked out in the end. That was, I think, what I wanted when I started that failed novel about them - an ending that made sense of things. I didn't know when I started it that it wasn't possible to rewrite or reimagine the past.

*

On the top shelf of a hall closet in our Manhattan apartment, stacked alongside a projector, were round cases of slides that represented my parents' lives before mine. The slide projector was fidgety, but as a child I was patient. The colours were odd, as if someone crayoned my parents' clothes, the sky and houses. The slides of Ireland were green like cartoon broccoli, the sea azure and dimpled.

I looked at them in their clothes from another time: bell bottoms and miniskirts, my mother's round sunglasses covering her small-boned face. Her hair in chignons, often twirled on her head so that her neck looked tender and young. My father had a beard a lot of the time, at the least a moustache, and was often smoking and grinning. They were beautiful and marked by lost glamour in the way that parents can be when you see them as having distinct lives, because they are not you and you clearly see that - their separation, their individual wills.

Other slides moved from Ireland to Seattle, then to Arizona. Things changed; the sky became a colour I didn't know in New York, a blue that was like marker; darker, bluer. I doubted its naturalness, suspicious of it as a trick of the camera, an accidental setting shift. But it was there again and again, as was the yellow sand and the orange rock and...