Lark's Eggs (20 page)

The little rural hell was seven years old when she left Colin. On the day she got a taxi to the station from the centre of Barna Craugh she heard someone sing a refrain from ‘O Lady of Spain I Adore You' on the main street. Her two children went with her. Colin had beaten her senseless with the leg of a chair a few nights previously, a leg from a chair which, before attacking her, he'd attacked, thus extracting the leg. She had bruises all over her on the main street the day she left. A woman looked closely at her, almost sympathetically. The bruises on Joly's face were like the marks of napalm. The bruises on her psyche from the vicar and from the town were worse and more enduring, as she was to find, than any television-screen napalm could suggest.

Comely Bank Grove, Edinburgh, was the address that she moved into with Midge, the Polish truck driver. She'd previously been living with a friend, from her school days, in Dundee. The friend had emigrated halfway through convent
secondary
education and the two girls had kept in touch. Joly's friend had not married, not wanted to marry. She nursed Joly, with a sense of vocation, for five years. There was a speechless communication
between them, a distance, but sometimes in that distance bolts of desire from Joly's friend. But silent and ultimately stagnant bolts. The woman was so beholden to Joly for company, for purpose in life, that she even looked after Joly's children when Joly began going out with Midge. By then Barna Craugh was far away. Joly was a tart again, raspberry lipstick on her and her hair curled now, looking black rather than brown. Their most exotic occasions, hers and Midge's, were Chinese meals on Saturday nights in a Chinese
restaurant
among an industrial estate by the sea. Joly picked up bits of a Polish accent which she interspersed with her new Scottish accent.

Her children were Finn and Bríd. When eventually she moved in with Midge they might as well have been his children, judging by the ease of their appearance with him as they all sat around a table, joined in a meal. There was a conspiracy of pretences. But they all knew they were followed, by the sense of the children's father, by the inchoate hurt of Joly's friend. When she departed nothing in her mind had
prepared
her for Joly's departure. She even thought that by making it easy for Joly to see Midge she'd further strengthen her bond with Joly. But Joly went when Midge bought a house for a cheap price and there was a cocoon for her, her children, her relationship with Midge and her own confusion about herself and her past.

Not a day went by when she didn't try to unravel her
relationship
with Joly Ward, the multiple Joly Wards, the woman who had broken so many hearts and left so much patternless debris.

Ireland in Midge's mind was the country of grandiose scenery that they'd both seen in
Ryan's Daughter
in Dundee and Joly did not wish to disillusion him. For him she was haunted by the lofty tourist-brochure scenery that had something unexpectedly
malevolent
stuck in it. He did not realize and she never informed him that she came from flat land, nothing like the scenery of
Ryan's Daughter.
To have betrayed this would have been to betray a secret. You always had to keep secrets from lovers. However safe you felt with them you were also, always, on the run and you couldn't give too much away. In fact, even in love, you had to invent a pose rather than give your real self away. This was how Joly felt with Midge. Happy but
incomplete
. At worst an over-made-up character in a pantomime. A rather idiotic character, lots of lipstick on, her neck moving around in a
kitchen, to the rhythm of a conversation, like a gander's neck, a
halfwit's
smile on her face.

The black, almost funereal doors of Edinburgh; mystery. Joly walked alone on winter nights when rain beat on these doors. She paused in front of these doors, staring at them in a nebulous gesture. What did they remind her of? Of the door of a vicarage, painted gleaming black. Of a brass knocker with a Cupid at its nub. Of a demure, dignified vicar's wife. Of the choice of hers to love a strange man. Colin. She was still under the spell of love for him. There was still a romantic yearning in her for a young cleric in black, with a Teddyboy flop of hair on front of his forehead; there was still a belief in her that the purity of this young man still existed. It only had to come to the surface, through complex effort and through earnest search. The past, the black bits of it, could be dispelled. The black bits in Colin came from a general blindspot in his ancestry. He only had to go through it, walk through it to the other side. Easier said than done. But everything was possible. She knew then he was searching for her. She wondered would he catch up on her. There were two persons in her now, the person who wanted him to find her and the tart who, partly out of laziness, wished to be without him. These parts of her were at war.

There was a war going on in Ireland. The rain here waged a war in sympathy to the mood of the war in Ireland. People rebuffed Joly for this war, mainly women. Irish. Irish had a dirty ring these days. Bodies. Mutilations. The bomb that surprised you from under your restaurant seat. Joly had to undergo the ritual of demoralization, because of the race she was from, again and again. Made to do so by people who understood nothing of Ireland or nothing of history. The incessancy of this eventually caused the straight beauty queen figure to look pinched, to have a hint of middle age in it.

The year Joly came to look middle aged she went south with Midge in his truck, on one of his journeys, through Yugoslavia to Greece and back.

The oxen in the fields, the peasant women, the rain of sun on the readiness of corn; renewal. Marigolds in a vase in a café in
Belgrade
, oh so lucid white wine in carafes on the shelf. Outside a man sweeping up a searing dash of yellow ochre leaves. The smell from
those leaves; what did it remind her of? A vicarage. The first time she'd ever really experienced autumn.

She'd been a gauche girl before knowing autumn, but autumn, the smell of the leaves, of the opaque-gold apples, of the rain-haggard dwarf dahlias opened her to many other things; a view of life that transcended anything she'd known before. Autumn, a vicarage in the autumn, was history. It was a symbol of the subjugation of the land she came from. Remorse in some people who'd subjugated that land turned to terror, terror on wife, son, terror on self. Colin's father had committed suicide.

That floret of information was kept to the very end; squeezed tight in Colin's pale hands all those years. Colin's father had beaten him, tried to debilitate him in every way. The young man she'd encountered, who'd just come down from Trinity, was a temporarily escaped version of Colin, Colin after a few years of exuberance and oblivion. But there was the Colin tied to family. The demon Colin. History, family history, had not been worked through in Colin. And he took this inability to cope with what his father had tried to do with him out on Joly. In a kind of loyalty to his father he was crazed with his wife. There was a kind of metamorphosis that occurred late in the Lysaght night. Not only the suicide of Colin's father was lived over and over again in Colin but the vicious instincts which led to the suicide. Something was alive in Colin. A family ogre, a bogey man, untrammelled evil itself. Joly was to have been the cure for the evil, her peroxide curls were the bait, but she too became a victim to the evil. She left. But there was something she'd done. She'd set an erratic process of redemption in motion in Colin. She'd initiated a humility in his eyes. They were eyes she nearly saw telepathically in moments of intensity in a kitchen in Edinburgh when the music was uncharacteristically evocative on Radio 2.

Colin Lysaght had had a favourite toy when he was a child. A horse, white, with a scarlet drape on it. The horse had lain in a garden behind the house, inanimate there, striking against the verdure, always reassuring in its subliminal inanimateness.
This had been one of the few tokens of peace when he'd been a child. His father, Vicar Lysaght, outwardly a piece of genteel grey, his frame sometimes seeming to have been festooned in apple-tree lichen, had catatonic, totally transforming fits behind the doors and windows of the vicarage. He used to beat his wife, his son, lock his son in the nursery for hours with just a little, overfilled chamber pot for company, and a long-redundant playpen. Once Colin noticed apple blossom against a blue sky outside the nursery when he was locked in it and knew he'd escape some day.

Trinity College, Dublin; what fun. Colin was one of the
brightest
and the most popular of the students. Although following in his father's footsteps to be a vicar he headed some of the wildest of forays from Trinity, to the mountains, the sea, to dungeons of flats where bodies eventually twinned, in a sort of inveterate way. Colin was the rock and rolling would-be vicar, he led a dance once in a marquee, in his black clerical clothes, his oiled and extravagant hair as black. The idea of being a vicar seemed a clever extension of and a foil to being a rock and roll dancer. But still Colin passed all
examinations
with distinction and was ordained a vicar. He came down to Barna Craugh, just in time to meet Joly in her hour of success. The marriage was perfect, between the rock and roll vicar and the Bin Lane Marilyn Monroe. A few months before Colin was ordained a vicar though, his father had committed suicide and the impact of this event was still subsumed in rock and roll music as was the death of Colin's mother at the end of Colin's first year at Trinity. These events took their toll—after the wedding photographs.

Shortly after Joly left Colin gave up the trappings of being a vicar and went away himself, to Dublin, where he got a job teaching divinity and English literature in a boys'
Protestant
school. The black clerical clothes were exchanged for a
characteristic
chestnut sportscoat. The grey edges arbitrarily went from Colin's hair and it all became a subdued black, more curls in it, more divides. The vicarage had in fact belonged to the Lysaght family. So had a house in Barna Craugh. There was a complicated deal made
whereby if they were sold most of the money went to the diocese where Colin and his father had functioned as vicars. Colin sold both houses. He got a small part of the price but what, for the needs of his life now, was a substantial amount of money. He banked most of that money for a secret, long-term plan. In Dublin he rented a second-floor flat in Terenure, near the school where he taught. He merged into his environment, becoming a leading member in the local branch of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and of Amnesty International. He protested outside rugby pitches where South African teams played. He was photographed, looking distraught on these occasions, among the melée outside rugby pitches, by
The Irish
Times
. He became a familiar protester on the front page of
The Irish
Times
. Few people could have realized that this mellifluous-faced, rather autumnal-looking young man had been a wife-beater, in fact a wife-torturer. Colin shelved his secret on the neon-lit, late 1960s and early 1970s Dublin night. He bellowed protests at South Africans. He held a red flag against the sky outside the American embassy—the red was in fact part of a batik depicting Vietnamese blood, not the red of a communist flag. The October sun eddied through the batik in Ballsbridge. Flower children followed Colin, a line of Protestant, middle-class girls who had long, Pre-Raphaelite, blonde hair and who wore long, fussily floral dresses. Colin became a perfect child of his time and environment.

But he never stopped thinking of Joly and of his children: alone at night in a flat in Terenure, among the sheets soiled with
haphazard
, bachelor discharges, close to the socks that looked well during the day but smelt at night. In his bedroom the Dublin
suburban
night came in, the mountains—he kept the curtains always open—and excavated his mind. There were two Colin Lysaghts. The one he was running from. And the one he was now. But each time he imagined Joly both seemed to merge, in contrition. He knew he had to see her again. But he knew the risk of a journey to her. He had sanity in the covert-self he was now. Maybe he'd lose that sanity when he saw her. Anyway he didn't know where she was other than that she was in Scotland. He couldn't confront her family. So the years drifted until he had a letter from Joly. She wrote to say she needed to divorce him, to marry a Polish truck-driver.

Two people confronted in a kitchen in Edinburgh.

Colin said: ‘Don't worry. I'm different.'

Joly said nothing.

Colin said: ‘It's been hard. Being without you.'

Joly said nothing.

Colin said: ‘The children?'

Joly said: ‘They'll be in later.'

Colin said: ‘Joly, I love you.'

Joly looked at him. She knew her face had become hard. She said nothing. She was the aged one. He was the younger one. There was almost a visible passage of bitterness, of sarcasm, through her face and then she knew that that wasn't worthy of this encounter and she softened. ‘I'll make tea.'

She meandered almost drunkenly towards the stove. Scarlet print on a calendar told her it was August 1979.

The children came in later, Finn, Bríd, teenagers. Bríd was in emerald. Idiotically Colin thought she looked like an overgrown child in an Irish dance costume. There was no ambiguity about Finn's dress. He had metal earrings and his hair shot up in black, electric protest. Colin felt there should be a mediator, a
talcum-haired
priest from Ireland, a Reverend Mother from a local,
prison-looking
school, to negotiate them into some accord with one another; he made an erratic and abortive attempt to rise. But Finn saved the day. In heavy, working-class Scottish accent he said, ‘Da, you've nearly axed yourself shaving.' Colin had badly cut his face shaving that morning.