SEAN READS THE LAST SEPTEMBER

Here is a quote from one of de Valera's more remarkable radio broadcasts delivered in 1933:

The Irish genius has always stressed spiritual values . That is the characteristic that fits the Irish people in a special manner for the task of helping to save western civilization.

Being a year old when that claim was made, I knew nothing of the risk that saving the West might become part of a Fascist agenda - as it might have that same year, when Irish citizens, enticed by the Blueshirt movement, were flirting with Fascist plans. Luckily, these foundered when General O'Duffy, the potential Führer, lost his nerve.

A more tenacious spectre, however, was haunting our young Free State. When hopes of achieving a pious, all-Ireland Republic also foundered, hypocrisy - 'the tribute vice pays to virtue' - grew exponentially. Coercion ensured that our population would at least seem to be amassing enough prayer-power to help save the West - and that my age group would grow up in an age of pretence.

So how trust anyone's memories?

I have been rereading Seán's defiantly named memoir, Vive Moi, which he rewrote towards the end of his life. To spare my mother's feelings, an edition published in the Sixties had made no mention of his love affairs.

Later, though, when he sensed love and identity slip away, he wrote an expanded version for publication after his death. This one too, though, missed completeness, not just through the paradox of that planned, posthumous gasconade, but also because, while wistfully reliving old loves, it failed to consider how they had affected my mother, or how best he and she might, in the time left to them, manage their mutual unhappiness. Instead, as his narrative advanced, her image receded - rather like those of the old comrades who vanished from group portraits in Stalin's Russia. She was stoical, as women of her generation often had to be. Her health, perhaps because of this, broke down, and Seán, who, it now turned out, both needed and was exasperated by her, lived with her until 1988, when she died. Then he fell apart, got dementia, lusted impotently after a youngish woman who encouraged him so rashly that he lost his bearings, fought with his housekeeper, ran into the street inadequately clad - some said not clad at all - to rage like Lear at the human condition and shock the neighbours who wrote to tell me this.

When I flew back from California where I had been living, they invited me to tea so that I might be warned against the dangerous woman and hear how effectively they had concealed Seán's sad antics from the editor of a national newspaper who lived in the same street. They were proud of having preserved decorum by keeping the incident out of the press. Virtue's tribute had yet again been paid, and I, for once, was glad of this because, although Seán had fought hard against the wretched Censorship of Publications Act and other petty curbs, he also, when in his right mind, cared as much as anyone about privacy.

Which is why, when I was growing up, I knew none of his secrets. These emerged piecemeal, sometimes indecorously and, as often as not, confusingly, as secrets tend to do.

Confusing moments, as it happens, can be the ones which stay with you.

*

The rue Montpensier in Paris runs along the side of the Palais Royal garden, a place pulsing with memories of intriguing ghosts. It belonged to Philippe Égalité, the revolutionary duke who was guillotined by fellow revolutionaries in 1793, and whose illegitimate daughter, Pamela, married Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a blue-blooded Irish rebel whose story has striking echoes of her father's. Lord Edward too plotted against his own class, and was then betrayed and apprehended with such violence that he died of his wounds in a Dublin jail. Just as compelling is the memory of Desmoulins, the firebrand whose speech delivered from a café table top outside the same Palais Royal sparked off the French Revolution. And so is that of the looting and arson which later revolutions unleashed there in 1848 and 1871. The memory which comes to me, however, when I find myself in the rue Montpensier, focuses on Seán. It is of a baffled moment when he and I came out of one of its restaurants, and having lunched too well and probably drunk a little too much, and being dazzled by sudden sunlight, I took a while to notice that he was weeping. This must have been in the autumn of 1953, so Seán, who shared the century's age, was also fifty-three. He was embarrassed and apologetic, so I refrained from asking what was wrong.

I was shaken, though, for, being socially backward like most of my compatriots, I had always relied on him to be worldly and in control. He had been my mentor when it came to affairs of the heart, and thinking back I see that I must have known more about his than I let myself know I knew, though I remember guessing that his tears had to do with a woman.

*

With hindsight, his marriage to my mother strikes me as providing a small but telling illustration of how people in de Valera's Ireland felt obliged to live.

As was true of large parts of that society itself, disappointed idealism and a soured personal experience of its quarrelsome and rebelly past contributed to the glue which held them together. When Eileen died, it was seventy years since she and Seán had first met as eighteen-year-old enthusiasts in a Gaelic class in Cork City. Ironically, in those days, de Valera was soon to become one of their heroes.

Did Seán ever let himself see how badly and often he hurt her? I'm not sure. Did I? Of course I did, but when their estrangement was at its worst, I was living abroad and trying to stretch the postgraduate scholarships which were enabling me to spend as many years as I could at the universities of Rome and Paris. So I limited my trips home and, when I did make one, I felt unable to help, except once, about two years after the scene in the rue Montpensier. By then I was entangled in my first serious love affair, which Seán manoeuvred me into ending by claiming that Eileen had threatened to leave him unless he got me to leave my lover - a French, North African, Jewish, Communist activist, scandalously unsuitable in the eyes of the Ireland of the day.

'Your mother', said Seán grandly, 'is punching above her weight. She doesn't realise that she couldn't survive without me. And what's worse, having issued her threat, she'll be too proud to climb down. So it's up to you to get us out of this mess. You're the only one who can.'

This struck me as a mean passing of the buck.

'Why should I believe him?' I asked myself, and felt outrage both on her behalf and my own. But though his appeal might be a bluff, it seemed dangerous to call. Between us, I feared that he and I could indeed back Eileen into a corner and provoke her into some sort of craziness.

Could we though? Truly?

What made me think we could was a small secret of my own, a shy memory of how, when I was six, I had been in love with her. There is no other term for my feelings at the time. Shortly before my brother's birth, I became excessively attached to her, and something - I forget quite what - tipped this state of mind towards recklessness. Perhaps she had been talking too happily about the new baby she planned to bring home from the Hatch Street Nursing Home or had shown off her preparations with too much pride. There was, I remember, a softly draped and canopied cot in which I would have enjoyed sleeping myself, if it had been big enough, with next to it a Moses basket heaped with crocheted coatees, bonnets and tiny shoes. All new! The sight made me so jealous that I went straight into her garden, where I picked and ate a selection of brightly coloured berries which I had been warned were poisonous. 'Attention-seeking' I suppose this would now be called or, more charitably, a 'cry for help'. In the end it failed as both, when the berries turned out not to be poisonous after all. Nobody knew I'd eaten them, and I don't even remember being sick.

In 1955, though, what the embarrassing, old memory brought home to me was the danger of making people jealous.

At the same time, I began to wonder whether, despite what Seán thought, Eileen might do very well without him. Better perhaps. She could still go beagling in Wicklow with her friend Lily and to point-to-point races and country-house auctions. Couldn't she? For all I knew she might be happier? Maybe. But I couldn't risk being wrong, even though she was still an attractive woman who, I knew, had in their early years as a couple been its live wire.

But now he was a successful writer and public figure, while she was a middle-aged housewife, and I wasn't worldly enough to judge her chances of - well, what? - didn't people speak of 'Making a new life'? In Ireland, that didn't happen often. Not then. Not for women.

And Seán back then was still dangerously good-looking. Someone might snap him up. They would certainly try. Quite recently I had noticed women brighten in his presence. He was burning with energy, long-legged and lean, with good cheekbones and an amused smile.

There are photographs to prove it.

For all I knew, however, he might have invented the story about her threatening to leave him. He was a fiction-writer, after all. Impish and a bit of a tease! When bored at a party, he was quite capable of opening a woman's handbag, if he found one left on a chair, and shamelessly examining the contents. I had seen him do this more...