Читать книгу House of Mourning and Other Stories - Desmond Hogan - Страница 10

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‘Miles from here.’ A phrase caught Miles’s car as he took the red bus to the North Wall. Someone was shouting at someone else, one loud passenger at an apparently half-deaf passenger, the man raising himself a little to shout. The last of Dublin’s bright lights swam by. What took their place was the bleak area of dockland. Miles took his small case from the bus. He had a lonely and unusual journey to make.

Miles was seventeen. His hair was manically spliced on his head, a brown tuft of it. He was tall, lean; Miles was a model. He wore his body comfortably. He moved ahead to the boat, carrying his case: foisting his case in an onward movement.

Miles had grown up in the Liberties in Dublin. His mother had deserted him when he was very young. She was a red-haired legend tonight, a legend with a head of champion chestnut hair.

She had gone from Ireland and insinuated herself into England, leaving her illegitimate son with her married sister. The only thing known of her was that she turned up at the pilgrimage to Walsingham, Norfolk, each year. Miles, now that he was a spare-featured seventeen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old with a rather lunar face, was going looking for her. That lunar face was even paler now under the glare of lights from the boat.

The life Miles lived now was one of bright lights, of outlandish clothes, of acrobatic models wearing those clothes under the glare of acrobatic lights; more than anything it was a life of nightclubs, the later in the night the better, seats at lurid feasts of mosaic ice cream and of cocktails. Dublin for Miles was a kind of Pompeii now: on an edge. He was doing well, he was living a good life in a city smouldering with poverty. Ironically he’d come from want. But his good looks had brought him to magazines and to the omnipotent television screen. He was taking leave of all that for a few days for a pilgrimage of his own. There were few signs of garishness on him. The clothes he slipped out of Ireland in were black and grey. Only the articulate outline of his face and the erupting lava tuft of his hair would let you know he worked in the world of modelling.

The night-boat pulled him towards England and the world of his mother.

She’d come to Walsingham each year, Ellie, and this year there was a difference about her coming. She was dying. She came with her daughter Áine and with her son Lally. She walked, propped between them, on the pilgrimage, the procession of foot from slipper chapel to town of Walsingham. Áine was a teacher. Lally was a pop star.

Miles was in fact late for the procession. He arrived in the town when the crowds were jumbled together. He looked around. He looked through the crowd for his mother.

Afterwards you could almost say that Lally recognized him, rather than he recognized Lally. Lally was discomfited by lack of recognition here. Miles recognized him immediately. ‘How are you? You’re Lally.’ A primrose and white religious banner made one or two demonstrative movements behind Miles.

‘Yeah. And who are you?’

Who am I? Who am I? The question coming from Lally’s lips, funnelled mesmerically into Miles’s mind on that street in Walsingham.

Miles was an orphan, always an orphan, always made to feel like an orphan. He was, through childhood and adolescence, rejected by his cousins with whom he lived, both male and female, rejected for his beauty. Nancy-Boy they called him. Sop. Sissy. Pansy. Queer, Gay-Boy, Bum-Boy. The ultimate name—Snowdrop. His enemy cousins took to that name most, considering it particularly salacious and inventive. Miles was none of these things. He looked unusually pretty for a boy. The names for him and the brand of ostracization gave him a clue as to his direction in life though. He found an easy entrance into the world of modelling. He was hoisted gracefully into that world you could say. At seventeen Miles had his face right bang on the front of magazine covers. He’d become an aura, a national consciousness arrangement in his own right. This success allowed him to have a flat of his own and, supreme revenge, wear suits the colour of the undersides of mushrooms down the Liberties. Miles sometimes had the blank air of a drifting, unpiloted boat in these suits in the Liberties. There must be more to life than bright suits his mind was saying; there must be more things beyond this city where boys in pink suits wandered under slender cathedral steeples. There must be more to life than a geography that got its kicks from mixing ancient grey buildings with doses of alarmingly dressed and vacant-eyed young people. His mother, the idea of her, was something beyond this city and Miles broke with everything he was familiar with, everything that bolstered him, to go looking for her, to stretch his life: to endanger himself. He knew his equilibrium was frail, that his defences were thin, that he might inflict a terrible wound on himself by going, that he might remember what he’d been trying to forget all his life, what it was like as a little child to have your mother leave you, to have a red-haired woman disappear out the door, throwing a solitary backward glance at you, in a house not far from the slender cathedral steeple, and never coming back again.

Who am I? Ellie Tierney had asked herself as she walked on the procession. Who am I, she wondered, now that she was on the verge of dying, having cancer of the bone marrow. An immigrant. A mother of two children. A widow. A grocery store owner. A dweller of West London. A Catholic.

She’d come young to this country; from County Clare. Just before the War. Lived the first year in Ilford. Had shoals of local children pursue her and her brothers and sisters with stones because they were Irish. She’d been a maid in a vast hotel. Met Peader Tierney, a bus driver for London Transport, had a proposal from him at a Galwaymen’s ball in a West London hotel and married him. Had two children by him. Was independent of him in that she opened a grocery store of her own. He’d died in the early 1970s, long before he could see his son become famous.

Who am I? Lally had thought on the procession. The question boggled him now. He was very famous. Frequently on television. A spokesman for a new generation of the Irish in England. A wearer of nightgown-looking shirts. He felt odd, abashed here, among the nuns and priests, beside his mother. But he strangely belonged. He’d make a song from Walsingham.

Who am I? Áine had thought as she’d walked. A failure. A red-haired woman in a line of Clare women. Beside that young brother of hers nothing: a point of annihilation, no achievement.

It occurred to Lally that Miles had come here because he knew that he, Lally, would be here. Lally welcomed him as a particularly devoted fan.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Dublin.’

‘Dublin?’

‘Dublin.’

The hair over Miles’s grin was askew. Miles waited a few minutes, grin fixed, for a further comment from Lally.

‘We’re driving to the sea. Will you come with us?’

The flat land of Norfolk: not unlike the sea. The onward Volkswagen giving it almost an inconsequential, disconnected feel; a feel that brought dreams and memories to those sitting, as if dumbstruck, silently in the car. Mrs Tierney in front, her face searching the sky with the abstracted look of a saint who had his hands joined in prayer. Walsingham was left behind. But the spirit of Walsingham bound all the car together, this strangeness in a landscape that was otherwise yawning, and to Irish people, alien, unremarkable—important only in that it occasionally yielded an odd-looking bird and that the glowering sweep of it promised the maximum benefit of the sea.

That they all considered it flat and boundless like the sea never occurred to them as being ironic; a sea of land was something almost to be feared. Only by the sea, in landscape, they felt safe.

Or in a small town like Walsingbam which took full control over its surroundings and subjugated them.

The people of Britain had called the Milky Way the Walsingham Way once. They thought it had led to Walsingham. The Virgin Mary was reckoned to have made an appearance here in the Middle Ages. The young Henry VIII had walked on foot from the slipper chapel to her shrine to venerate her. Later he’d taken her image from the shrine and had it publicly burned in Chelsea to the jeers of a late-medieval crowd. Centuries had gone by and an English lady convert started the process of reconstruction, turning sheds back into chapels. To celebrate the reconsecration of the slipper chapel vast crowds had come from all over England on a Whit Monday in the 1930s. Ellie remembered the Whit Monday gathering here in 1946, the crowds on the procession, the prayers of thanksgiving to Mary, the nuns with head-dresses tall as German castles, pictures of Mary in windows in Walsingham and the flowers on doorsteps—a gaggle of nuns in black, but with palatial white headdresses, standing outside a cottage, nudging one another, waiting for the Virgin as if she was a military hero who’d won the war. The statue of Mary had come, bedecked with congratulatory pink roses. For Ellie the War had been a war with England, English children chasing her and brutally raining stones on her.

Her head slumped in the car a little now: she was tired. Her son, Lally, the driver, looked sidelong at her, anxiously, protectively. Her memories were his this moment: the stuff of songs, geese setting out like rebel soldiers in a jade-green farm in County Clare.

Lally was the artist, the pop star, the maker of words. Words came out of him now, these days, like meteors; superhuman ignitions of energy. He was totally in command: he stood straight on television. He was a star. He was something of Ireland for a new generation of an English pop audience. He wheedled his songs about Ireland into a microphone, the other members of his group standing behind him. His face was well known in teenybop magazines, the alacrity of it, the uprightness of it.

How all this came about was a mystery to his mother; from a shambles in a shed, a pop group practising, to massive concerts—a song in the charts was what did it. But a song with a difference. It was a song about Ireland. Suddenly Ireland had value in the media. Lally had capitalized on that. His sore-throat-sounding songs had homed in on that new preoccupation. Without people realizing it he had turned a frivolous interest into an obsession. He remembered—through his parents. His most famous song was about his father, how his father, who’d fled Galway in his teens, had returned, middle aged, to find only stones where his parents were buried, no names on the stones. It had never occurred to him that without him, the son of the family, there’d been no one to bury his parents. He had a mad sister somewhere in England who talked to chickens. Lally’s father had deserted the entire palette of Ireland for forty years, never once writing to his parents when they were alive, trying to obliterate the memory of them, doing so until he found his way home again in the late 1960s.

That song had been called ‘Stones in a Flaxen Field.’

Words; Lally was loved for his words. They spun from him, all colours. They were sexual and male and young, his words. They were kaleidoscopic in colour. But they spoke, inversely, of things very ancient, of oppression. A new generation of young English people learnt from his songs.

And only ten years before, Ellie often thought, her grocery store was stoned, one night, just after bombs went off in Birmingham, the window all smashed.

Ah well; that was life. That was change. One day scum, the next stars. Stars . . .Ellie looked up from her dreams for the Milky Way or the Walsingham Way but it was still very much May late-afternoon light.

Her father told her how they used to play hurling in the fields outside his village in County Galway in May evening light, ‘light you could cup in your hand it was so golden.’ There are holes in every legend. There were two versions of her father. The man who ran away and who never went back until he was in his fifties. And the man who’d proposed to her mother at a Galwaymen’s ball. ‘But sure he was only there as a spy that day,’ Áine’s mother would always say. Even so it was contradictory. Áine resented the lyricism of Lally’s version of her father; she resented the way he’d used family and put it into song, she resented this intrusion into the part of her psyche which was wrapped up in family. More than anything she resented the way Lally got away with it. But still she outwardly applauded him. But as he became more famous she became older, more wrecked looking. Still her hair was very red. That seemed to be her triumph—even at school. To have this almost obscenely lavish red hair. She got on well at school. She had many boyfriends. Too many. She was involved on women’s committees. But wasn’t there something she’d lost?

She did not believe in all this: God, pilgrimage. Coming to Walsingham almost irked her. She’d come as a duty. But it did remind her of another pilgrimage, another journey, almost holy.

It had been when Lally was a teenager. She’d gone for an abortion in Brighton. A clinic near the sea. In winter. He’d accompanied her. Waiting for the appointment she’d heard the crash of the winter sea. Lally beside her. He’d held her hand. She’d thought of Clare, of deaths, of wakes. She’d gone in for her appointment. Afterwards, in a strange way, she realized he’d become an artist that day. By using him as a solace when he’d been too young she’d traumatized him into becoming an artist. She’d wanted him to become part of a conspiracy with her, a narrow conspiracy: but instead she’d sent him out on seas of philosophizing, of wondering. He’d been generous in his interpretation of her from out on those seas. His purity not only had been reinforced but immeasurably extended. While hers was lost.

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.’

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