Lark's Eggs (11 page)

It was less that they were a nun and a monk, more that they had to resist. Resist their parents' self-absorption, resist the geese, the skies, the dun of the mountains, the purple changing to green of the rocks.

Jackie had had his affairs. In fact Moira had hers. But it was as though they'd made a vow of celibacy when Jackie was thirteen and Moira eleven; they didn't want to fall into the trap of closing
themselves
off. They wanted to be open, romantic, available. Looking into Moira's eyes before going to bed Jackie saw that in fact they were closing themselves off in a different way.

They were outsiders, resigned to be outsiders, and were making a fetish of this role. Moira had picked up a little teddybear in
Shepherd's
Bush market. In her bed she held it. She was sitting up in her slip. ‘Goodnight Jackie,' she said.

The teddybear slept with her.

That night Jackie walked the environs of Shepherd's Bush, sat
in a café, spoke to a man from Ghana. He waited some hours. The first light came. He returned home, picked up his things for work, waited for a lorry on Shepherd's Bush Green.

She wanted to dance now so she danced with him. They
travelled
to Kilburn and Camden. Saturday nights in ballrooms, the London Irish swung to visiting showbands. Despite this venture in a foreign city Moira had a lonesomeness for the decay of rural
Ireland
, for its fetishes. Jackie dancing with her, cheek to cheek,
wondered
if he could cure it.

It was a miserable summer weather-wise. Early in August there was a much-advertised march against troops in Northern Ireland. Jackie and Moira saw it by accident, young English people shouting about women in Northern Ireland jails.

Later that month the Queen's cousin was blown up in County Sligo. Moira and Jackie didn't listen to the radio much but they heard a jumbled commentary on the events. Jackie wondered about the provisional Sinn Féin people who'd lived in this room once, that was their domain, instant and shocking deaths in the cause of
Ireland
. He smiled. No one in the whole of London reprimanded Jackie or Moira but the papers were full of hatred, mistaking the source of the guilt.

The guilt was a shared one, Jackie thought, a handed-down one. Everyone's hands were dipped in blood; blood of intolerance. He'd thought about it so much, knew the kind of prevalent and often
justified
anger of Irish republicans. In Kerry they were eccentrics. One
IRA
man he knew grew the best marijuana in Kerry and decorated it with Christmas decorations come Christmas. Often Northern republicans fled to his house, men with trapped eyes. Reaching to them was like reaching to dynamite. They hit back easily.

So Jackie and Moira assumed responsibility for the deaths of the Earl of Mountbatten, the Dowager Lady Brabourne and the two children killed with them. They walked about London with the air of criminals. The newspapers had ordained this guilt. Jackie and Moira accepted it, not as slaves but with a certain grandeur. They were Irish and as such bore a kind of mass guilt, guilt for the
republican
few, for the order of the gun, the enslaved and frightened eyes, the winsome thoughts of Patrick Pearse. It was all part of their
heritage
;
to deny it would be like denying the wet weather. But in accepting a certain responsibility both knew, Jackie more than Moira, of a more real tradition which never met English eyes, the tradition of the great families of Kerry, the goblets of wine, the harp, the Gregorian chant.

They'd left Kerry with their wolfhounds, going to Europe, but something was always ready to be disturbed of this tradition, a hedge-schoolmaster behind a white hawthorn tree reading Cicero; O'Connell, another Kerryman, in Clontarf telling the Irish
proletariat
that the freedom of Ireland is not worth the shedding of one drop of blood; Michael Davitt in Clare leading a silent pacifist march against English landlords.

Jackie knew, as all sensitive and knowledgeable Irish people knew, that the prevalent philosophy of Irish history was pacifism and he could therefore accept the rebukes of the English newspapers with glee, with a certain amount of wonder, knowing them to be founded and spread in ignorance.

But Moira wasn't so sure. He'd noticed her fluctuating
somewhat
. Although outwardly calm there was a new intensity in her dancing. She was going back, quicker than he could cope with, to the ballroom floors in Kerry, the point at which all is surrendered, the days of drudgery, the nights of squalid sex in the backs of cars. She was trying to be peaceful with a violent heritage.

In a dancehall one night there was a fight. Someone hit someone else on the head with a chair. A woman started singing ‘God save
Ireland
said the Heroes' and in moments Jackie's dreams of pacifism were gone. A young man made a speech about H-Blocks on the counter and somewhere an auburn-haired woman described her lust for a Clare farmer.

Jackie took Moira home. She began crying, sitting on a chair. In moments it was gone, a summer of harmony. The tears came, scarlet, outraged blue. Afterwards it was the silence which was
compelling
. She was steadily recalling the corners of a mental hospital, the outreaches of pain. Her heart in a moment had turned to stone.

It was a curious stone too which her heart had become,
exquisite
and frail in its own way. She began going to dances by herself and one night she did not return. Jackie sat up, waiting until the
small hours. When there was no sign of her he went out for a while, hugging himself into a donkey jacket. Autumn was coming.

People are like doctors. We live with one another for a while. We cure one another. Jackie saw himself as physician but too late. Moira no longer needed his physician's touch. She was sleeping around, compulsively giving herself, engineering all kinds of romances. And when she stopped talking to him much he too searched the night for strangers. At first unsuccessfully. But then they came, one by one, Argentinians, West Indians.

She perceived the domain of his life, said nothing.

‘Pope visits war-torn country,' the papers warned. It was true, John Paul was coming, giving an ultimate benediction to the
dance-halls
, the showbands, the neon lights, the jukeboxes that shook
jauntily
with their burden of song.

He saw the look on Moira's face and knew she was destined to return. Nothing could hold her back. Dancing to an Irish showband singer's version of ‘One Day at a Time' he realized her need for the hurt, the intimacy, the pain of ballroom Ireland. She wanted to be immolated by these things.

There was nothing he could say against it. It was his life against hers and she saw his life as a shambles. He couldn't tell her about the boys with diamond eyes, no more than she could tell him about the lads from Cork who jumped on her as though she was an old and unusable mattress. In mid-September she announced her decision.

A bunch of marigolds sat on the mantelpiece, a little throne of tranquillity.

‘Will you come too?' she asked.

‘No,' he said and half-naked he looked at her. He wanted to ask her why it was necessary always to return to the point where you were rejected, but such questions were useless. The Pope was coming, the music of ballroom Ireland was strong in her ears.

He took her to Euston and she asked him if he had any
messages
for their parents.

‘Tell them I won't be home for Christmas,' he said.

She looked at him. Her eyes looked as though they were going to pop out and grapple him and take their mutual pain but they did no such thing.

 Later that night Jackie wandered in Shepherd's Bush. He knew he'd deceived himself, going from body to body, holding out hope he'd meet someone who'd fulfil some childhood dream of purity.

All his life he'd been trying to reconstruct her, not so much Moira, as that virgin of Ireland, Our Lady of Knock, Our Lady of the Sorrows, that complacent maiden who edged into jukebox cafés, into small towns where apparitions had taken place in the last
century
and now neon strove into the rain.

He wouldn't go to Copenhagen. He'd go south. He'd pack up his things and leave, knowing there was a certain compulsion about the sun, the Mediterranean, the shine of the sun on southern beaches.

Before leaving London there was one thing he wanted to do, dress up like any other Irish boy, comb his hair, put on his green Chinese tie and dance until all was forgotten, the lights of Killarney, the whine of the jukebox, the look on Moira's face as she stared over a stone wall in Kerry, into a world which would consume their knowledge of the sea, their knowledge of stone, their reverence of one another. 

Coming through the black night he wondered what lay before him, a father lying dying. Christmas, midnight
ceremonies
in a church stood up like a gravestone, floods about his home.

With him were his wife and his friend Gerard. They needn't have come by boat but something purgatorial demanded it of Liam, the gulls that shot over like stars, the roxy music in the jukebox, the occasional Irish ballad rising in cherished defiance of the sea.

The night was soft, breezes intruded, plucking hair, thread lying loose in many-coloured jerseys. Susan fell asleep once while Liam looked at Gerard. It was Gerard's first time in Ireland. Gerard's eyes were chestnut, his dark hair cropped like a monk's on a bottle of English brandy.

With his wife sleeping Liam could acknowledge the physical relationship that lay between them. It wasn't that Susan didn't know, but despite the truism of promiscuity in the school where they worked there still abided laws like the Old Testament God's, reserving carnality for smiles after dark.

A train to Galway, the Midlands frozen in.

Susan looked out like a Botticelli Venus, a little worried, often just vacuous. She was a music teacher, thus her mind was penetrated by the vibrations of Bach even if the place was a public lavatory or a Lyons café.

 The red house at the end of the street; it looked cold, pushed away from the other houses. A river in flood lay behind. A woman, his mother, greeted him. He an only child, she soon to be a widow. But something disturbed Liam with excitement. Christmas candles still burned in this town.

His father lay in bed, still magically alive, white hair smeared on him like a dummy, that hard face that never forgave an enemy in the police force still on him. He was delighted to see Liam. At
eighty-three
he was a most ancient father, marrying late, begetting late, his wife fifteen years younger than him.

A train brushed the distance outside. Adolescence returned with a sudden start, the cold flurry of snow as the train in which he was travelling sped towards Dublin, the films about Russian winters.

Irish winters became Russian winters in turn and half of Liam's memories of adolescence were of the fantasized presence of Russia. Ikons, candles, streets agleam with snow.

‘Still painting?'

‘Still painting.' As though he could ever give it up. His father smiled as though he were about to grin. ‘Well, we never made a policeman out of you.'

At ten, the day before he would have been inaugurated as a boy scout, Liam handed in his uniform. He always hated the colours of the Irish flag, mixing like the yolk in a bad egg.

It hadn't disappointed his father that he hadn't turned into a military man but his father preferred to hold on to a shred of
prejudice
against Liam's chosen profession, leaving momentarily aside one of his most cherished memories, visiting the National Gallery in Dublin once with his son, encountering the curator by accident and having the curator show them around, an old man who'd since died, leaving behind a batch of poems and a highly publicized
relationship
with an international writer.

But the sorest point, the point now neither would mention, was arguments about violence. At seventeen Liam walked the local hurling pitch with petitions against the war in Vietnam.

Liam's father's fame, apart from being a police inspector of note, was fighting in the
GPO
in 1916 and subsequently being arrested on the republican side in the Civil War. Liam was against violence,
pure and simple. Nothing could convince him that 1916 was right. Nothing could convince him it was different from now, old women, young children, being blown to bits in Belfast.

Statues abounded in this house; in every nook and cranny was a statue, a statue of Mary, a statue of Joseph, an emblem perhaps of some saint Mrs Fogarthy had sweetly long forgotten.

This was the first thing Gerard noticed, and Susan who had seen this menagerie before was still surprised. ‘It's like a holy statue farm.'

Gerard said it was like a holy statue museum. They were sitting by the fire, two days before Christmas. Mrs Fogarthy had gone to bed.

‘It is a museum,' Liam said, ‘all kinds of memories, curious
sensations
here, ghosts. The ghosts of Irish republicans, of policemen, military men, priests, the ghosts of Ireland.'

‘Why ghosts?' Gerard asked.

‘Because Ireland is dying,' Liam said.

Just then they heard his father cough.

Mr Fogarthy was slowly dying, cancer welling up in him. He was dying painfully and yet peacefully because he had a dedicated wife to look after him and a river in flood around, somehow calling Christ to mind, calling penance to mind, instilling a sense of winter in him that went back a long time, a river in flood around a
limestone
town.

Liam offered to cook the Christmas dinner but his mother scoffed him. He was a good cook, Susan vouched. Once Liam had cooked and his father had said he wouldn't give it to the dogs.

They walked, Liam, Susan, Gerard, in a town where women were hugged into coats like brown paper accidentally blown about them. They walked in the grounds of Liam's former school, once a Georgian estate, now beautiful, elegant still in the East Galway winter solstice.

There were Tinkers to be seen in the town, and English hippies behaving like Tinkers. Many turkeys were displayed, fatter than ever, festooned by holly.

Altogether one would notice prosperity everywhere, cars, shining clothes, modern fronts replacing the antique ones Liam recalled and pieced together from childhood.

But he would not forfeit England for his dull patch of Ireland,
Southern England where he'd lived since he was twenty-two, Sussex, the trees plump as ripe pears, the rolling verdure, the odd delight of an Elizabethan cottage. He taught with Susan, with Gerard, in a free school. He taught children to paint. Susan taught them to play musical instruments. Gerard looked after younger children though he himself played a musical instrument, a cello.

Once Liam and Susan had journeyed to London to hear him play at St Martin-in-the-Fields, entertaining ladies who wore
poppies
in their lapels, as his recital coincided with Remembrance Day and paper poppies generated an explosion of remembrance.

Susan went to bed early now, complaining of fatigue, and Gerard and Liam were left with one another.

Though both were obviously male they were lovers, lovers in a tentative kind of way, occasionally sleeping with one another. It was still an experiment but for Liam held a matrix of adolescent fantasy. Though he married at twenty-two, his sexual fantasy from
adolescence
was always homosexual.

Susan could not complain. In fact it rather charmed her. She'd had more lovers since they'd married than fingers could count; Liam would always accost her with questions about their physicality; were they more satisfying than him?

But he knew he could count on her; tenderness between them had lasted six years now.

She was English, very much English. Gerard was English. Liam was left with this odd quarrel of Irishness. Memories of adolescence at boarding school, waking from horrific dreams nightly when he went to the window to throw himself out but couldn't because window sills were jammed.

His father had placed him at boarding school, to toughen him like meat.

Liam had not been toughened, chastened, ran away twice. At eighteen he left altogether, went to England, worked on a building site, put himself through college. He ended up in Sussex, losing a major part of his Irishness but retaining this, a knowledge when the weather was going to change, a premonition of all kinds of disasters and
ironically
an acceptance of the worst disasters of all, death, estrangement.

Now that his father was near death, old teachers, soldiers,
policemen called, downing sherries, laughing rhetorically, sitting beside the bed covered by a quilt that looked like twenty inflated balloons.

Sometimes Liam, Susan, Gerard sat with these people,
exchanging
remarks about the weather, the fringe of politics or the world economic state generally.

Mrs Fogarthy swept up a lot. She dusted and danced around with a cloth as though she'd been doing this all her life, fretting and fiddling with the house.

Cars went by. Geese went by, clanking terribly. Rain came and church bells sounded from a disparate steeple.

Liam's father reminisced about 1916, recalling little incidents, fights with British soldiers, comrades dying in his arms, ladies fainting from hunger, escape to Mayo, later imprisonment in the Curragh during the Civil War. Liam said: ‘Do you ever connect it with now, men, women, children being blown up, the La Mon Hotel bombing, Bessbrook killings, Birmingham, Bloody Friday? Do you ever think that the legends and the brilliance built from your revolution created this, death justified for death's sake, the stories in the classroom, the priests' stories, this language, this celebration of blood?'

Although Liam's father fought himself once, he belonged to those who deplored the present violence, seeing no connection. Liam saw the connection but disavowed both.

‘Hooligans! Murderers!' Liam's father said.

Liam said, ‘You were once a hooligan then.'

‘We fought to set a majority free.'

‘And created the spirit of violence in the new state. We were weaned on violence, me and others of my age. Not actual violence but always with a reference to violence. Violence was right, we were told in class. How can one blame those now who go out and plant bombs to kill old women when they were once told this was right?'

The dying man became angry. He didn't look at Liam, looked beyond him to the street.

‘The men who fought in 1916 were heroes. Those who lay bombs in cafés are scum.'

Betrayed he was silent then, silent because his son accused him on his deathbed of unjustifiably resorting to bloodshed once. Now guns
went off daily, in the far-off North. Where was the line between right and wrong? Who could say? An old man on his deathbed prayed that the guns he'd fired in 1916 had been for a right cause and in the words of his leader Patrick Pearse had not caused undue bloodshed.

On Christmas Eve the three young people and Mrs Fogarthy went to midnight mass in the local church. In fact it wasn't to the main church but a smaller one, situated on the outskirts of the town, protruding like a headstone.

A bald middle-aged priest greeted a packed congregation. The cemetery lay nearby, but one was unaware of it. Christmas candles and Christmas trees glowed in bungalows.

‘O Come All Ye Faithful', a choir of matchstick boys sang. Their dress was scarlet, scarlet of joy.

Afterwards Mrs Fogarthy penetrated the crib with a whisper of prayer.

Christmas morning, clean, spare, Liam was aware of
estrangement
from his father, that his father was ruminating on his words about violence, wondering were he and his ilk, the teachers, police, clergy of Ireland responsible for what was happening now, in the first place by nurturing the cult of violence, contributing to the actuality of it as expressed by young men in Belfast and London.

Sitting up on Christmas morning Mr Fogarthy stared ahead. There was a curiosity about his forehead. Was he guilty? Were those in high places guilty like his son said?

Christmas dinner; Gerard joked, Susan smiled, Mrs Fogarthy had a sheaf of joy. Liam tidied and somehow sherry elicited a chuckle and a song from Mrs Fogarthy. ‘I Have Seen the Lark Soar High at Morn'. The song rose to the bedroom where her husband who'd had dinner in bed heard it.

The street outside was bare.

Gerard fetched a guitar and brought all to completion,
Christmas
, birth, festive eating, by a rendition of Bach's ‘Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring'.

Liam brought tea to his father. His father looked at him. ‘'Twas lovely music,' his father said with a sudden brogue, ‘there was a Miss Hanratty who lived here before you were born who studied music at Heidelberg and could play Schumann in such a way as to bring tears
to the cat's eyes. Poor soul, she died young, a member of the ladies' confraternity. Schumann was her favourite and Mendelssohn came after that. She played at our wedding, your mother's and mine. She played Mozart and afterwards in the hotel sang a song, what was it, oh yes, “The Star of the County Down”.

‘Such a sweetness she had in her voice too.

‘But she was a bit of a loner and a bit lost here. Never too well really. She died maybe when you were a young lad.'

Reminiscences, names from the past. Catholic names, Protestant names, the names of boys in the rugby club, in the golf club.
Protestant
girls he'd danced with, nights at the October fair.

They came easily now, a simple jargon. Sometimes though the old man visibly stopped to consider his child's rebuke.

Liam gauged the sadness, wished he hadn't said anything, wanted to simplify it but knew it possessed all the simplicity it could have, a man on his deathbed in dreadful doubt.

Christmas night they visited the convent crib, Liam, Susan, Gerard, Mrs Fogarthy, a place glowing with a red lamp.

Outside trees stood in silence, a mist thinking of enveloping them. The town lay in silence. At odd intervals one heard the gurgle of
television
but otherwise it could have been childhood, the fair green, space, emptiness, the rhythm, the dance of one's childhood dreams.

Liam spoke to his father that evening.

‘Where I work we try to educate children differently from other places, teach them to develop and grow from within, try to direct them from the most natural point within them. There are many such schools now but ours, ours I think is special, run as a cooperative; we try to take children from all class backgrounds and begin at the beginning to redefine education.'

‘And do you honestly think they'll be better educated children than you were, that the way we educated you was wrong?'