Читать книгу House of Mourning and Other Stories - Desmond Hogan - Страница 6

The Mourning Thief

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 living 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. ‘l 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 Fogtrthy, 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?”

Liam paused.

‘Well, it’s an alternative.’

His father didn’t respond, thinking of nationalistic, comradely Irish schoolteachers long ago. Nothing could convince him that the discipline of the old style of education wasn’t better, grounding children in basic skills.

Silence somehow interrupted a conversation, darkness deep around them, the water of the floods shining, reflecting stars.

Liam said goodnight. Liam’s father grunted. Susan already lay in bed. Liam got in beside her. They heard a bird let out a scream in the sky like a baby and they went asleep.

Gerard woke them in the morning, strumming a guitar.

St Stephen’s Day, mummers stalked the street, children with blackened faces and a regalia of rags collecting for the wren. Music of a tin whistle came from a pub, the town coming to life. The river shone with sun.

Susan divined a child dressed like old King Cole, a crown on her head and her face blackened. Gerard was intrigued. They walked the town. Mrs Fogarthy had lunch ready. But Liam was worried, deeply worried. His father lay above, immersed in the past.

Liam had his past, too, always anxious in adolescence, running away to Dublin, eventually running away to England. The first times home had been odd; he noticed the solitariness of his parents. They’d needed him like they needed an ill-tended dog.

Susan and he had married in the local church. There’d been a contagion of aunts and uncles at the wedding. Mrs Fogarthy had prepared a meal. Salad and cake. The river had not been in flood then. In England he worked hard. Ireland could so easily be forgotten with the imprint of things creative, children’s drawings, oak trees in blossom. Tudor cottages where young women in pinafores served tea and cakes home made and juiced with icing.

He’d had no children. But Gerard now was both a twin, a child, a lover to him. There were all kinds of possibility. Experiment was only beginning. Yet Ireland, Christmas, returned him to something, least of all the presence of death, more a proximity to the prom, empty laburnum pods and hawthorn trees naked and crouched with winter. Here he was at home with thoughts, thoughts of himself, of adolescence.

Here he made his own being like a doll on a miniature globe. He knew whence he came and if he wasn’t sure where he was going, at least he wasn’t distraught about it.

They walked with his mother that afternoon. Later an aunt came, preened for Christmas and the imminence of death. She enjoyed the tea, the knowledgeable silences, looked at Susan as though she was not from England but a far-off country, an Eastern country hidden in the mountains. Liam’s father spoke to her not of 1916 but of policemen they’d known, irascible characters, forgetting that he had been the most irascible of all, a domineering man with a wizened face ordering his inferiors around.

He’d brought law. He’d brought order to the town. But he’d failed to bring trust. Maybe that’s why his son had left.

Maybe that’s why he was pondering the fate of the Irish revolution now, men with high foreheads who’d shaped the fate of the Irish Republic.

His thoughts brought him to killings now being done in the name of Ireland. There his thoughts floundered. From where arose this language of violence for the sake and convenience of violence?

Liam strode by the prom alone that evening, locked in a donkey jacket.

There were rings of light around distant electric poles.

He knew his father to be sitting up in bed; the policeman he’d been talking about earlier gone from his mind and his thoughts on 1916, on guns, and blazes, and rumination in prison cells long ago.

And long after that thoughts on the glorification of acts of violence, the minds of children caressed with the deeds of violence.

He’d be thinking of his son who fled and left the country.

His son now was thinking of the times he’d run away to Dublin, to the neon lights slitting the night, of the time he went to the river to throw himself in and didn’t, of his final flight from Ireland.

He wanted to say something, urge a statement to birth that would unite father and son but couldn’t think of anything to say. He stopped by a tree and looked to the river. An odd car went by towards Dublin.

Why this need to run? Even as he was thinking that, a saying of his father returned: ‘Idleness is the thief of time.’ That statement had been flayed upon him as a child but with time as he lived in England among fields of oak trees that statement had changed; time itself had become the culprit, the thief.

And the image of time as a thief was forever embroiled in a particular ikon of his father’s, that of a pacifist who ran through Dublin helping the wounded in 1916, was arrested, was shot dead with a deaf and dumb youth. And that man, more than anybody, was Liam’s hero, an Irish pacifist, a pacifist born of his father’s revolution, a pacifist born of his father’s state.

He returned home quickly, drew the door on his father. He sat down.

‘Remember, Daddy, the story you told me about the pacifist shot dead in 1916 with a deaf and dumb youth, the man whose wife was a feminist?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I was just thinking that he’s the sort of man we need now, one who comes from a revolution but understands it in a different way, a creative way, who understands that change isn’t born from violence but intense and self-sacrificing acts.’

His father understood what he was saying, that there was a remnant of 1916 that was relevant and urgent now, that there had been at least one man among the men of 1916 who could speak to the present generation and show them that guns were not diamonds, that blood was precious, that birth most poignantly issues from restraint.

Liam went to bed. In the middle of the night he woke muttering to himself, ‘May God have mercy on your soul,’ although his father was not yet dead, but he wasn’t asking God to have mercy on his father’s soul but on the soul of Ireland, the many souls born out of his father’s statelet, the women never pregnant, the cruel and violent priests, the young exiles, the old exiles, those who would never come back.

He got up, walked down the stairs, opened the door of his father’s room. Inside his father lay. He wanted to see this with his own eyes, hope even in the persuasion of death.

He returned to bed.

His wife turned away from him but curiously that did not hurt him because he was thinking of the water rising, the moon on the water, and as he thought of these things the geese clanked over, throwing their reflections into the water grazed with moon which rimmed this town, the church towers, the slate roofs, those that slept now, those who didn’t remember.