My first sight of him was in a London restaurant called Appenrodts. I was twelve years old and life to me appeared in a series of luminous blurred impressions like blossoming trees in a picture by Manet: I can remember nobody else among the party that crowded about our table except Bobby Andrews, whom I knew already and who terrified me because he was six years older than I and seemed so poised and experienced. My sister Mana was there too but that was a matter of course: Mana was always there: and the other people were all grown up and that was natural too. I lived, as most stage children do, in a world of grown-ups and they were all impersonal: cherry-trees by Manet, pleasing or incomprehensible and all in a blur of light.
Appenrodt's was a frigid but happy place – it vanished, I think, during the First World War – and as its name suggests it was Teutonic in spirit and in fact: white, glistening and spotless it stood near the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus, and the air as soon as you passed the threshold was fragrant with the scent of Leberwurst and gherkins and cool creamy potato-salad, and there was icy beer in blue mugs or tall glasses, and hot frothing chocolate in thick white cups.
Bobby Andrews, from a perforated jar, sprinkled a rust-red powder over a potato-salad and murmured with a smile “How pale paprika makes it! Its real name is Vice,” and I gazed at him in awe.
That was two years before the murders at Sarajevo and the war, and because I was a child and McMaster, arriving suddenly in pale grey with a lilac-coloured shirt, was in his twenties he seemed to me not merely grown-up but the most hilariously beautiful living creature I had ever set eyes upon except, perhaps, Ellen Terry or Nijinsky. Tall, slim, golden-haired and with astonishing eyes that were the colour not of violets, as many people said, but of harebells, the term Greek god was frequently applied to him. It was applied to his whirlwind entrance to Appenrodt's on that day.
"And of course it could be true," he said turning to me when he had expressed his gratitude to the payer of the compliment, "because you see I'm half Irish and half Greek . . . I mean me stepmother was Greek, you see – oh yes, dear: Pappiyanni was her name before she married me father – and if that doesn't make me half Greek what does?"
The characteristic note was struck immediately: Mac’s sense of calculative exactitude was never his strong point.
“But me poor nose dear!” he went on to the table at large. “Just plain north of Ireland. Or I suppose you might call it Roman. Yes, R-r-roman . . . like Sarah in Britannicus.”
Already, having run away to London, when he was sixteen to go on the stage, he was obsessed by Sarah [Bernhardt] and all she meant in the theatre: one of the things he shared with me was a half-secret regret not to have been born to the French language. And Sarah was his goddess; living or dead she was remembered, described, analysed, quoted and worshipped through all the days of his life; he collected not merely every book and photograph that celebrated her but innumerable press cuttings, odd pages of old scripts she had used, a stone from her grave at Père Lachaise, even some leaves he had plucked from a tree that grew opposite the famous appartement on the Boulevard Pérèire.
I had gathered from his peculiar deductions about his descent that my own country played some part in this and I suspected, rightly, that the Irish origins were more factual than the Greek. This, as well as his enthusiasm for Bernhardt and for the Russian Ballet – opera, his greatest passion, was still unknown to me – struck a sympathetic note.
My own first longings to work in Dublin were already faintly stirring, though they were not to crystallise for a couple of years into a decision, and as time went by, and my sister and I saw more and more of him, we would talk of Ireland together, he of the North and we of the South.
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Selected by Joe Joyce; email fromthearchives@irishtimes.com
