Lark's Eggs (22 page)

There'd been a distance between them ever since. Lally was the one whose life worked, Lally was the one with the pop star's
miraculous
sweep of dark hair over his face, Lally was the one with
concise
blue eyes that carried the Clare coast in them.

Toady she saw it exactly. Lally was the one who believed.

Miles was so chuffed at being in this
company
that he said nothing; he just grinned. He hid his head, slightly idiotically, in his coat. The countryside rolled by outside. All the time he was aware of the journey separating him from his quest for his mother. But he didn't mind. When it came to the point it had seemed futile, the idea of finding her in that crowd. And romantic. When he looked out from a porch, near a pump, at the sea of faces, it had seemed insane, deranged, dangerous, the point of his quest. There'd been a moment when he thought his sanity was giving way. But the apparition of Lally had saved him. Now he was being swept
along on another odyssey. But where was this odyssey leading? And as he was on it, the car journey, it was immediately bringing him to thoughts, memories. The landscape of adolescence, the
stretched-out
skyline of Dublin, a naked black river bearing isolated white lights at night as it meandered drunkenly to the no-man's-land, the unclaimed territory of the Irish Sea. This was the territory along with the terrain of the black river as it neared the sea which
infiltrated
Miles's night-dreams as an adolescent, restive night-dreams, his body shaking frequently in response to the image of the Irish Sea at night, possibly knowing it had to enter that image so it could feel whole, Miles knowing, even in sleep, that the missing mechanisms of his being were out there and recoiling, in a few spasmodic
movements
, from the journey he knew he'd have to make someday. He was on that journey now. But he'd already left the focus of it,
Walsingham
. What had come in place of Walsingham was flat land, an unending succession of flat land which seemed to induce a mutual, binding memory to the inmates of the car. A memory which
hypnotized
everybody.

But the memory that was special to Miles was the memory of Dublin. This memory had a new intensity, a new aurora in the
presence
of Lally; the past was changed in the presence of Lally and newly negotiated. Miles had found, close to Lally, new
fundamentals
in his past; the past seemed levitated, random, creative now. Miles knew now that all the pain in his life had been going towards this moment. This was the reward. It was as if Miles, the fourteen, fifteen-year-old, had smashed out of his body and, like Superman, stormed the sky over a city. The city was a specific one. Dublin. And remembering a particular corner near his aunt's home where there was always the sculpture of some drunkard's piddle on the wall Miles was less euphoric. The world was made up of mean things after all, mornings after the night before. That's what Miles's young life was made up of, mornings after the night before. Maybe that's what his mother's life had been like too. Now that he was moving further and further away from the possibility of actually finding her he could conjure an image of her he hadn't dared conjure before. He could conjure an encounter with her which, in the presence of an artist, Lally, was a hair's breadth away from being real.

Rose Keating had set out that morning from her room in Shepherd's Bush. She was a maid in a Kensington hotel where most of the staff were Irish. Her hair, which was almost the colour of golden nasturtiums, was tied in a ponytail at the back. Her pale face looked earnest. She made this journey every year. She made it in a kind of reparation. She always felt early on this journey that her womb had been taken out, that there was a missing segment of her, an essential ion in her consciousness was lost. She'd almost
forgotten
, living in loneliness and semi-destitution, who she was and why she was here. All she knew, instinctively, all the time was that she'd had to move on. There had been a child she'd had once and she'd abandoned him because she didn't want to drag him down her road too. She felt, when she'd left Dublin, totally corrupt, totally spoilt. She'd wanted to cleanse herself and just ended up a maid, a dormant being, a piece of social trash.

There was a time when it was as if any man would do her but the more good-looking the better: at night a chorus of silent young men gathered balletically under lampposts in the Liberties. Then there was a play, movements, interchange. Which would she choose? She looked as though she'd been guided like a robot towards some of them. All this under lamplight. Her face slightly thrown back and frequently expressionless. There was something wrong with her, people said, she had a disease, ‘down there', and some matrons even pointed to the place. Rose loved the theatre of it. There was
something
mardi gras
about picking up young men. My gondoliers, she called them mentally. Because sometimes she didn't in fact see young men from the Liberties under lampposts but Venetian gondoliers; the Liberties was often studded with Venetian gondoliers and jealous women, behind black masks, looked from windows. Rose had a mad appetite, its origins and its name inscrutable, for men. There was no point of reference for it so it became a language,
fascinating
in itself. Those with open minds wanted to study that
language
to see what new things they could learn from it. No one in Ireland was as sexually insatiable as Rose. This might have been fine if she'd been a prostitute but she didn't even get money for it very 
often; she just wanted to put coloured balloons all over a panoramic, decayed, Georgian ceiling that was in fact the imaginative ceiling of Irish society.

It was a phase. It hit her, like a moonbeam, in her late teens, and it lasted until her mid-twenties. She got a son out of it, Miles, and the son made her recondite, for a while, and then she went back to her old ways, the streets. But this time each man she had seemed tainted and diseased after her, a diseased, invisible mucus running off him and making him curl up with horror at the awareness of this effect. He had caught something incurable and he hated himself for it. He drifted away from her, trying to analyse what felt different and awful about him. Sex had turned sour, like the smell of Guinness sometimes in the Dublin air.

But Rose, even living with her sister, could not give it up; her whole body was continually infiltrated by sexual hunger and one day, feeling sick in herself, she left. The day she left Dublin she thought of a red-haired boy, the loveliest she had, who'd ended up spending a life sentence in Mountjoy, for a murder of a rural garda sergeant, having hit him over the head one night in the Liberties, with a mallet. He'd been half a Tinker and wore mousy freckles at the tip of his nose—like a tattoo.

London had ended all her sexual appetite: it took her dignity; it made her middle aged. But it never once made her want to return. She held her child in her head, a talisman, and she went to
Walsingham
once a year as a reparation, having sent a postcard from there once to her sister, saying: ‘If you want to find me, find me in
Walsingham
.' That had been at a moment of piqued desperation. She'd written the postcard on a wall beside a damp telephone kiosk and the postcard itself became damp; people, happy people, sauntering, with chips, around her.

For a few years she found a companion for her trip to
Walsingham
, a Mr Coneelly, a bald man from the hotel, a hat on his head on the pilgrimage, a little earthenware leprechaun grin on his face under his hat. He had an amorous attachment to her. There was always a ten-pound note sticking from his pocket and a gold chain trailing to the watch in that pocket. But the romance ended when white rosary beads fell out of his trousers pocket as he was making
love to her once on a shabby, once lustrous gold sofa, she doing it to be obliging, and he taking the falling rosary as a demonstration by his dead mother against the romance. In fact he found a much younger girl after that and he made sure no rosary fell from his pocket in the middle of making love. He had been company, for a while.

Rose had geared herself for a life of loneliness. Today in
Walsingham
it rained a little and she stood to the side, on a porch and watched.

Sometimes Áine's feelings towards her brother came to hatred. She never pretended it. She was always
courteous
, even decorous with him: the worst and the most false of her, ‘schoolmistressy'. She resented his strident, bulbous shirts, the free movements of those shirts, the colours of them. She resented what he did with experience, turning it into an artifact. Artifacts weren't life and yet, for him, they created a life of their own: those Botticelli angels looking at him from an audience, full of adulation. Áine wanted reports on life to be factual, plain; Lally, the Irish artist, threw the facts into tumults of colour where they got distorted. Eventually the words took on a frenzy, a life of their own. They were able to change the miserable facts—rain over a desultory, praying horde at Walsingham, crouched in between Chinese takeaways—and turn themselves into something else, a miracle, a transcendence, an
elevation
and an obliviscence: wine turned into the blood of Christ at mass. A mergence with all the Irish artists of the centuries. Of course Lally was only a pop star and yet his words, she had to admit
sometimes
, were as truthful as any Irish writer's. His words exploded on concert stages, on television, and told of broken Irish lives, red-haired Irish women immigrants who worked in hotels in West London.

Miles had stood not very far away from his mother that day and Lally had noticed Miles's mother, when there was rain, as she stood talking to two men from Mayo. There was a hullabaloo of Irish accents between Rose and the two men from
Mayo. Lally paused; a story. Then he went on. Miles didn't tell Lally in the car that he'd come in search of a red-haired woman. He said very little and was asked very little.

Rose, sheltering her body from the rain, got into a livid conversation with two men. They were bachelors and they were both looking for wives. They came to Walsingham,
Norfolk
, from Birmingham each Whit Monday looking for wives and they went to Lisdoonvarna, County Clare, in September looking for wives. So far they'd had no luck and their quest was telling on them: their hair and their teeth were falling out. One bandied a copy of the previous day's
Sunday
Press
as if it was the portfolio of his life's work.

‘And do you have a husband?' one of them asked.

‘What do you think?'

‘You've had your share of fellas,' the other one said grinning. ‘A woman like you wouldn't have gone without a man for long.'

‘What do you mean. A woman like me?'

‘Well, you're not fat but you've loads of flesh on you. Like a Christmas goose. That's not derogatory. You look as firm as my grandmother's armchair.'

Rose screeched with laughter.

‘And you both look as though the hinges are coming out of you.'

‘Mentally or in the body?'

Rose laughed again.

‘Whatever hope there is in Clare there's no hope here. Unless you want a Reverend Mother.'

‘Oh, you'd be surprised.' A twinkle in the eye. ‘Lots of randy women go on pilgrimages.'

Nearing the sea as though it was the Atlantic Ocean that blanketed the west coast of Ireland all kinds of words and images came into the head of Lally, the driver: sentences,
half-heard
at Irish venues—music festivals, Irish ballrooms—and
elaborated 
on by him. So they could take their place in a narrative song. But more than words and images came now—an apotheosis came too. Lally was flying with the success and daring of his life. He was proud of himself. He'd turned something of the decrepitude and semi-stagnation of his parents' lives into art. More than that. Art for the young. He'd dolled his ancestry up in fancy dress.

How many days and months would she have to live? Ellie thought of Clare where she'd been born, the harvest fields there she'd walked before leaving Ireland, those blond, human fields, warm after days of summer sun. The imminence of death brought the friendliest images of her life.

The bastard, Áine thought, the bastard, he's taken everything that was of my creativity; he's used up my creativity. He's left me as nothing. There's no more to go around. He's a man, an exploiter, a rampant egotist. He doesn't see who he's trampled on to get where he's got, who he hurts. He doesn't see he's squashed my self-confidence out.

For Miles, as they neared the sea, it was a trip backwards: at least this journey, this expedition to Walsingham had allowed him to be solemn about his life, to see it: he sat back as though his life hitherto, as he could see it, was a state funeral.

There had been state funerals he'd seen in his life. De Valera's for instance, which he'd seen with his aunt, ‘Ah, sure, look at his coffin.' All kinds of voices came back from Miles's life. Especially the voices of early adolescence. ‘Ah, sure, look at the little eejit. The fool. Nitwit. Silly git.' All kinds of names were planted on Miles's always withdrawing figure with its gander legs in thin jeans. That figure was a continual epilogue, always disappearing around corners, always on the edge of getting out of the picture. But maybe that was
because he knew there'd be an area where he could totally affirm himself, totally show himself—when the time came. Now there were ikons of Miles in fashion magazines, the young archangel in suave clothes. His tormentors in the Liberties would be bilious. But the young man in the picture was unmoved by this prospect. He seemed frigid of countenance. This loveliness was the product of pain. These secretive eyes in all the pictures looked back on tunnels of streets in the Liberties, streets where his mother had gathered men as if they'd been daisies.