Lark's Eggs (9 page)

She wondered why he approached her so much. Would she become coquettish, she wondered.

She stared at a box of marigolds outside a window one day.
What was it that led her here, she wondered, was it the force of
salvation
itself? Her thoughts came easier. A stranger was making
conversation
with her and she was glad, glad of words, talk, coffee to accompany them.

He told her about trees in his city that they tried to cut down but which the people did not allow. He told her about a poet who stayed in the trees in a hammock. He described how they still stood, green and bold in summer and how the young ate strawberries under them. Sheila thought of her own young and a wisp of guilt flew through her.

He was a kindly person. He liked books. He talked of the Town Hall in his city where great men had been honoured by the Nobel Prize. Sheila looked at him and said, ‘Isn't it a funny thing how men reach their goals?' He smiled at that remark and said it was beautiful.

‘Would you like to join me for dinner tomorrow?' he asked.

Sheila was delighted. ‘Where?' she asked. He suggested the Shelbourne.

She met him there and he fondled her warm hands as though they were gloves and they ate veal. She didn't want wine. It was too much of a luxury. He talked again of his home country, mentioning the far lands up north where snow fell and the sun never set in summer, where the Laps wandered, a people clothed in deerskin with caps, and eyes staring from caps—like moles.

It was the country of his youth, he said, everyone has a country of their youth.

Sheila considered her own hometown and regretted so much those moments that there had been no such place in her youth but was comforted when he talked of children dying in Asia. Other people had their problems too.

She said goodbye to him at the top of Grafton Street and felt ridiculous and left, going back to work. Staring at the Larsson
picture
she noticed odd things about the figures and would have asked the artist to correct them if he'd been about.

She met him again the following morning as he smiled but he didn't stop to talk to her.

He was busy. She saw him having coffee with some diplomats and was glad he didn't talk to her because she understood his work
to be more important than her. She dusted oak and pinewood and was glad of its sweet smell, near her nose as she bent to dust it.

There was one room in the embassy where there was a chink of stained glass and Sheila went there, in awe of it. She loved its
particularity
and one day she was standing there when he put his arm on her shoulder. She laughed.

He laughed. He sat and asked her what it was about Irish women and she said she didn't know and he spoke about his dead wife, Elizabeth, and he cried.

She gave him her new clean handkerchief and he said more than anything he wanted children but his wife had had no children.

‘There were alderberries around our summer home,' he said. ‘I always wanted to share their taste with children.'

She put her arm about him and he held her, quite platonically, and then he let go of her and apologized. His wife was beautiful, he said. They didn't get on.

And he intimated darker things about her death.

Sheila was living in a world miles from the one she used to inhabit. She rose in the mornings, serene, calm and dressed herself neatly. She understood herself to be miles  beyond pain and thought they would never reach her here, they being relatives and the mangy dogs of her village.

She went about her chores and each day took time off to talk to her new friend, not about the problems of the Third World which he knew so much about but the areas of pain, loss that the human being encounters.

He whispered things about his home country, about
wheaten-coloured
grass and boats on the Archipelgo and she in turn thought of golf-playing doctors in the hungry fields about her home.

He took her one day in the pantry and kissed her. She walked about for two days, understanding this kiss, knowing it was not from passion it was given but from appreciation.

Her sister wrote to her and asked her how she was getting on. She didn't reply.

Her friend asked her to dinner and she turned up in a new turtle-brown suit. They had white wine and now she laughed more freely and her eyes were becoming wider.

 They were in Wynn's Hotel, which caters for priests and nuns. Suddenly over a table she saw her sister. Her sister looked at her, half from embarrassment. Sheila jumped up and introduced her friend. Her sister smiled a sad knowledgeable smile and left.

They left her alone for three weeks and then began writing suddenly, asking her how she was.

They hadn't written before, her husband, son, daughter, sister but suddenly a barrage of letters came.

She didn't reply to any of them. She had a picture by Carl Larsson in her room and the plant on the window she watered carefully.

In August her friend told her he had to go back to his country on urgent business. She said goodbye to him as if he was only going for a few days and walked about the town where French students were thronging. It was there she met her sister again. Her sister
recognized
her happiness and her ability to cope and smiled.

They went to a café and had tea.

Her sister asked her questions about work but Sheila could not reply the way she would have done once, she knew other things now and the things she knew about did not make her despair.

Her friend did not come back and she went to the zoo and looked at the polar bears and thought of him. She shopped for
herself
and at Christmas bought perfumes for her daughter and sister. But still there was no word about him.

She went to mass on Christmas morning in the Carmelite church off Grafton Street and shared Christmas with the char-woman.

Her husband wrote from London. She never finished his letter. Her daughter and son sent customary greetings. Her sister wrote a short note.

In the new year when he didn't come and when it snowed she felt an august closeness to him, crossing the Green, partial to light and golden shadow. She knew that in his country the earth would be covered like this. She wanted to write to him but didn't have his address, all she desired to do was to register this complicity again.

The mornings were clean and blue and she looked at the sky when she rose and realized now she was happier than ever.

Her sister sent her some clothes and her husband asked her about separation. Her daughter wrote an abusive letter to her, just
suddenly out of the blue, accusing her of cruelly ruining her
adolescence
. Sheila put the letter from her but she realized somewhere she was crying inside. Yes, she had been bad.

She crossed streets now by herself and sometimes found herself crying in a café. She drank tea, looking about suspiciously, fearful of someone alien to her entering.

At night she began having nightmares. These nightmares
disturbed
her suddenly. They were like someone with a red-hot poker. She'd rise, almost as though there was a substance present. She'd reach out but there'd be no one there and she'd go back to sleep, dreaming of the canal at home and the houses staring like spinsters.

Sometimes over work she'd break down crying.

These times were noted with compassion and a doctor was brought. The doctor gave her pills but then one day her daughter arrived, hatred in her eyes, telling her maybe she should have a ‘rest'. She knew what they meant.

She allowed them to lead her as though in a trance, wishing punishment for all her sins.

After three weeks it was understood there was nothing wrong with her so she left the mental hospital but her job had been filled and she had to go back to her house. She reopened her pub. The old faces returned like dreary dogs. She sat in the pub and sometimes didn't move but waited, waited as though for fate to punish her.

It didn't come and she spent three months like this.

Her relatives checked her but found she was not creating fits. Her husband obtained a legal separation from her. Her children never wrote.

She knew the wrong she was doing herself and often thought to leave but something kept her here, the weight of the past, the time she boxed her daughter's ears, the time she hit her son with a brush.

Flame burned in front of the Sacred Heart. There was no piety for such a figure in her heart.

She went about her work. She fed her cats.

One day, however, she did go to Dublin. She got a train from Mullingar.

She had a handbag under her arm. She had a brown hat with a velvet ribbon on. She wore a grey suit.

 It was like going back to a dream, a dream not tested before, an interim in her life when all made sense.

She walked up Grafton Street and nearing the top she had a heart attack.

It was outside a bookshop and a priest tended to her and her people were both glad and shocked. They were glad she was dead but shocked at the suddenness of her finish. But none of them knew the secret she shared with a diplomat miles from this place.

Approaching the Green she saw that the trees were in bloom and she observed that the leaves were pushing through the railings. She thought of a city faraway where trees were saved from being destroyed by the response of the people and she knew that because they stood, those trees, something was alive that neither her death, nor the death of others, her sadness, nor the sadness of others, could destroy. They buried her without much ceremony.

Her daughter wept. Her son stood as though paralysed.

The figures walked away. One figure stood alone, that of her daughter, her ears still ringing with the memory of a punch from her mother long ago.

But the occasion moved her to wait.

She walked away minutes later. They sold her house, the cats were sent to a cats' home and people ultimately were relieved.

It was as though by closing her off they were putting a seal
forever
on all of life's misfortunes.

Her office overlooked the college grounds; early in the spring they were bedecked with crocuses and snowdrops. Looking down upon them was to excel oneself. She was a fat lady, known as ‘Windy' by the students, her body heaved into sedate clothes and her eyes somehow always searching despite the student jibes that she was profoundly stupid and profoundly academic.

She lectured in ancient Irish history, yearly bringing students to view Celtic crosses and round towers marooned in spring floods. The college authorities often joined her on these trips, one
administrator
who insisted on speaking in Irish all the time. This was a college situated near Connemara, the Gaelic-speaking part of
Ireland
. Irish was a big part of the curriculum; bespectacled,
pioneer-pin-bearing
administrators insisted on speaking Irish as though it was the tongue of foolish crows. There was an element of
mindlessness
about it. One spoke Irish because a state that had been both severe and regimental on its citizens had encouraged it.

Emily delayed by the window this morning. It was spring and foolishly she remembered the words of the blind poet Raftery: ‘Now that it's spring the days will be getting longer. And after the feast of Brigid I'll set foot to the roads.'There was that atmosphere of instinct abroad in Galway today. Galway as long as she recalled was a city of Travelling people, red-petticoated Tinkers,
clay-pipe-smoking
sailors, wandering beggars.

In Eyre Square sat an austere statue of Pádraic Ó Conaire, an Irish scribe who'd once walked to Moscow to visit Chekhov and found him gone for the weekend.

In five minutes she would lecture on Brigid's crosses, the straw symbols of renewal in Ireland.

There was now evidence that Brigid was a lecher, a Celtic whore who was ascribed to sainthood by those who had slept with her but that altered nothing. She was one of the cardinal Irish holy figures, the Isis of the spring-enchanted island.

Emily put words together in her mind.

In five minutes they'd confront her, pleased faces pushing
forward
. These young people had been to New York or Boston for their summer holidays. They knew everything that was to be known. They sneered a lot, they smiled little. They were possessed of good looks, spent most of the day lounging in the Cellar bar, watching strangers, for even students had the wayward Galway habit of eyeing a stranger closely, for it was a city tucked away in a corner of Ireland,
peaceable
, prosperous, seaward-looking.

After class that day she returned to the college canteen where she considered the subject of white sleeveless jerseys. Jimmy used to have one of those. They'd gone to college in the 1930s, Earlsfort
Terrace
in Dublin, and Jimmy used to wear one of those jerseys. They'd sit in the dark corridor, a boy and a girl from Galway, pleased that the trees were again in bloom, quick to these things by virtue of coming from Galway where nature dazzled.

Their home was outside Galway city, six miles from it, a big house, an elm tree on either side of it and in spring two pools of snowdrops like hankies in front of it.

Jimmy had gone to Dublin to study English literature. She had followed him in a year to study history. They were respectable
children
of a much-lauded solicitor and they approached their lives gently. She got a job in the university in Galway. He got a job teaching in Galway city.

Mrs Carmichael, lecturer in English, approached.

Mrs Carmichael wore her grandmother's Edwardian clothes because though sixty, she considered it in keeping with what folk
were wearing in Carnaby Street in London.

‘Emily, I had trouble today,' she confessed. ‘A youngster bit a girl in class.'

Emily smiled, half from chagrin, half from genuine amusement.

Mrs Carmichael was a bit on the Anglo–Irish side, taut,
upper-class
, looking on these Catholic students as one might upon a rare and rather charming breed of radishes.

‘Well, tell them to behave themselves,' Emily said. ‘That's what I always say.'

She knew from long experience that they did not obey, that they laughed at her and that her obesity was hallmarked by a number of nicknames. She could not help it, she ate a lot, she enjoyed cakes in Lydons and more particularly when she went to Dublin she enjoyed Bewleys and Country Shop cakes.

In fact the Country Shop afforded her not just a good pot of tea and nice ruffled cream cakes but a view of the green, a sense again of student days, here in Dublin, civilized, parochial. She recalled the woman with the oval face who became famous for writing stories and the drunkard who wrote strange books that now young people read.

‘I'll see you tomorrow,' Mrs Carmichael said, leaving.

Emily watched her. She'd sail in her Anglia to her house in the country, fleeing this uncivilized mess.

Emily put her handkerchief into her handbag and strolled home.

What was it about this spring? Since early in the year strange notions had been entering her head. She'd been half-thinking of leaving for Paris for a few days or spending a weekend in West Cork.

There was both desire and remembrance in the spring.

In her parents' home her sister, Sheila, now lived. She was
married
. Her husband was a vet.

Her younger brother, George, was working with the European Economic Community in Brussels.

Jimmy alone was unheard of, unlisted in conversation.

He'd gone many years ago, disappearing on a mail train when the War was raging in the outside world. He'd never come back; some said he was an alcoholic on the streets of London. If that were so he'd be an eloquent drunkard. He had so much, Jimmy had, so much of his race, astuteness, learning, eyes that danced like Galway
Bay on mornings when the islands were clear and when gulls sparkled like flecks of foam.

She considered her looks, her apartment, sat down, drank tea. It was already afternoon and the Dublin train hooted, shunting off to arrive in Dublin in the late afternoon.

Tom, her brother-in-law, always said Jimmy was a moral
retrograde
, to be banished from mind. Sheila always said Jimmy was better off gone. He was too confused in himself. George, the youngest of the family, recalled only that he'd read him Oscar Wilde's
The Happy Prince
once and that tears had broken down his cheeks.

The almond blossom had not yet come and the War trembled in England and in a month Jimmy was gone and his parents were glad. Jimmy had been both a nuisance and a scandal. Jimmy had let the family down.

Emily postured over books on Celtic mythology, taking notes.

It had been an old custom in Ireland to drive at least one of your family out, to England, to the mental hospital, to sea or to a bad marriage. Jimmy had not fallen easily into his category. He'd been a learned person, a very literate young man. He'd taught in a big school, befriended a young man, the 1930s prototype with blond hair, went to Dublin one weekend with him, stayed in Buswells Hotel with him, was since branded by names they'd put on Oscar Wilde. Jimmy had insisted on his innocence but the boy lied before going to Dublin, telling his parents that he was going to play a hurling match.

Jimmy had to resign his job; he took to drink, he was banished from home, slipping in in the afternoons to read to George.
Eventually
he'd gone. The train had registered nothing of his departure as it whinnied in the afternoon. He just slipped away.

The boy, Johnny Fogarthy, whom Jimmy had abducted to Dublin, himself left Ireland.

He went to the States, ended up in the antique trade and in 1949, not yet twenty-seven, was killed in Pacifica. Local minds
construed
all elements of this affair to be tragic.

Jimmy was safely gone.

The dances at the crossroads near their home ceased and that was the final memory of Jimmy, dancing with a middle-aged woman
and she wearing earrings and an accordion bleating ‘The Valley of Slievenamon'.

Emily heard a knock on the door early next morning. Unrushed she went to the door. She was wearing a pink gown. Her hair was in a net. She had been expecting no caller but then again the postman knocked when he had a parcel.

For years afterwards she would tell people of the thoughts that had been haunting her mind in the days previously.

She opened the door.

A man aged but not bowed by age, derelict but not disarrayed, stood outside.

There was a speed in her eyes which detected the form of a man older than Jimmy her brother but yet holding his features and hiding nothing of the graciousness of which he was possessed.

She held him. He held her. There was anguish in her eyes. Her fat hands touched an old man.

‘Jimmy,' she said simply.

Jimmy the tramp had won £100 at the horses and chosen from a variety of possibilities a home visit. Jimmy the tramp lived on Charing Cross Road.

Jimmy the tramp was a wino, yes, but like many of his
counterparts
near St Martin-in-the-Fields in London was an eloquent one. Simply Jimmy was home.

News brushed swiftly to the country. His brother-in-law reared. His sister, Sheila, silenced. Emily, in her simple way, was overjoyed.

News was relayed to Brussels. George, the younger brother, was expected home in two weeks.

That morning Emily led Jimmy to a table, laid it as her own mother would have done ceremoniously with breakfast things and near a pitcher, blue and white, they prayed.

Emily's prayer was one of thanksgiving.

Jimmy's too was one of thanksgiving.

Emily poured milk over porridge and doled the porridge with honey from Russia, invoking for Jimmy the time Pádraic Ó Conaire walked to Moscow.

In the afternoon he dressed in clothes Emily bought for him and they walked the streets of Galway. Jimmy by the Claddagh, filled
as it was with swans, wept the tears of a frail human being.

‘Emily,' he said. ‘This should be years ago.'

For record he said there'd been no interest other than platonic in the young boy, that he'd been wronged and this wrong had driven him to drink. ‘I hope you don't think I'm apologizing,' he said, ‘I'm stating facts.'

Sheila met him and Tom, his brother-in-law, who looked at him as though at an animal in the zoo.

Emily had prepared a meal the first evening of his return. They ate veal, drank rosé d'Anjou, toasted by a triad of candles. ‘One for love, one for luck, one for happiness,' indicated Emily.

Tom said the
EEC
made things good for farmers, bad for
businessmen
. Sheila said she was going to Dublin for a hairdo.

Emily said she'd like to bring Jimmy to the old house next day.

Sure enough the snowdrops were there when they arrived and the frail trees.

Jimmy said as though in speed he'd lived as a tramp for years, drinking wine, beating his breast in pity.

‘It was all an illusion,' he said. ‘This house still stands.'

He entered it, a child, and Tom, his brother-in-law, looked scared.

Jimmy went to the library and sure enough the works of Oscar Wilde were there.

‘Many a time
The Happy Prince
kept me alive,' he said.

Emily dressed newly, her dignity cut a hole in her pupils. They silenced and listened to talk about Romanesque doorways.

She lit her days with thoughts of the past, rooms not
desecrated
, appointments under the elms.

Her figure cut through Galway. Spring came in a rush. There was no dalliance. The air shattered with freshness.

As she lectured Jimmy walked. He walked by the Claddagh, by Shop Street, by Quay Street. He looked, he pondered, his gaze drifted to Clare.

Once Johnny Fogarthy had told him he was leaving for
California
on the completion of his studies. He left all right.

He was killed.

‘For love,' Jimmy told Emily. He sacrificed himself for the speed of a car on the Pacific coast.

They dined together and listened to Bach. Tom and Sheila kept away.

Emily informed Jimmy about her problems. Jimmy was wakeful to them. In new clothes, washed, he was the aged poet, distinguished, alert to the unusual, the charming, the indirect.

‘I lived in a world of craftsmen,' he told Emily, ‘most alcoholics living on the streets are poets driven from poetry, lovers driven from their beloved, craftsmen exiled from their craft.'

They assuaged those words with drink.

Emily held Jimmy's hand. ‘I hope you are glad to be here,' she said.

‘I am, I am,' he said.

The weekend in Dublin with Johnny Fogarthy he'd partaken of spring lamb with him on a white lain table in Buswells, he told Emily.

‘We drank wine then too, rosé, age made no difference between us. We were elucidated by friendship, its acts, its meaning. Pity love was mistaken for sin.'

Jimmy had gone during the War and he told Emily about the bombs, the emergencies, the crowded air-raid shelters.

‘London was on fire. But I'd have chosen anything, anything to the gap in people's understanding in Ireland.'

They drank to that.

Emily at college was noted now for a new beauty.

Jimmy in his days walked the streets. Mrs Kenny in Kennys Bookshop recognized him and welcomed him. Around were writers' photographs on the wall. ‘It's good to see you,' she said.

He had represented order once, white sleeveless jumpers, fairish hair evenly parted, slender volumes of English poetry.

‘Remember,' Mrs Kenny said, ‘the day O'Duffy sailed to Spain with the Blueshirts and you, a boy, said they should be beaten with their own rosary beads.'

They laughed.

Jimmy had come home not as an aged tramp but as a poet. It could not have been more simple if he'd come from Cambridge, a retired don. Those who respected the order in him did not seek undue information. Those puzzled by him demanded all the reasons.