The Ikon Maker Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title page

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Copyright

  THE LILLIPUT PRESS

  DUBLIN

  To R.R. Zanker

  The men in the forest they ask it of me

  How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?

  I answer them back with a tear in my eye

  How many ships sail in the forest?

  Song

  ONE

  1

  When spring came she looked westward. Down the sliding road, over the hills, to where Galway city lay. The Spanish Arch, Claddagh buildings, the lovely, the decayed, horses, tinkers and memories of her husband George as a young man fresh from the peat jungle.

  He worked as a builder’s labourer in Galway before the war. Making houses where now doctors lived. Then Galway was a place of mystery – cobblestone, Spanish faces, gipsy eyes. The ceaseless roar of waves and ladies, in black, crouching about the Claddagh. Ladies, dark and moronic. Pipe-smoking women.

  Their eyes like arches. Holding no fear and always their trek about Galway marked by Gaelic conversation.

  Not all of them wore black; there were those in scarlet with blue and green patterns.

  After the Spanish Civil War Susan always associated them with Spain, those women in scarlet.

  Their eyes were always blue – glass-blue – they seemed to snare some of the sea. There was one called Maire who had hair like eels and watched the sea as though for Spanish ships.

  Everybody in Galway then seemed to be waiting for something; the sun in these last years of the thirties crumbled on old stone. Vegetables hung in the air like infants. Galway was an exciting place and she and her husband-to-be took a ride on an old red bus to Barna.

  By the sea.

  They’d watch seagulls – white – and virgins.

  For everybody then was a virgin.

  Girls in sandals or girls in bare feet walking the tide.

  Girls walking on a shore.

  The laughter returned now.

  Voices hidden, seaweed sprawled like names.

  Autographed silences; yes, it had been lovely come evening in Barna then. The sun swallowed in holes; orange devouring every shape, penetrating the windshield of a car.

  An old Ford coupé placed along the shore.

  One would have expected Norma Shearer to emerge.

  For such were the days then.

  You could recognize Joan Crawford in the face of a nun on Salthill.

  A bony-faced nun. For the world was full of expectation. Most of all at the markets. Men speaking Irish, vigil of smoke rising from clay pipes. A gangster movie playing at the Estoria; Dillinger reincarnated in the face of a draper’s assistant.

  Yes, there’d been sadness too, wrecked lives, men from Galway and Clare trekking to England, a long silent march. Faces that didn’t know how to protest.

  People packing up, going towards the streets of Birmingham, Nottingham, London to earn crusts or packets of soup for families tawny, bony like themselves. The march of history.

  People reversing their paths. Once they’d gone Connacht-wise. Before Cromwell’s soldiers. Now they were going back.

  The midlands flying by, the peculiar sombreness hanging over midland Ireland.

  Cottages, children, the beginnings of the peat industry.

  Towards galless ships and the Irish Sea. Susan herself had gone on one of those ships, she and George, before being married in Kilburn, in a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart.

  Galway, a few impenetrable hours had floated back.

  They’d had to face life in the raw; Irish faces prone with anxiety.

  Building a universe in a world where they were unwanted.

  Susan had registered her own protest; as her husband worked she’d go to Kew Gardens or Haymarket.

  She’d visit antique shops, go to museums, look at portraits of Queen Elizabeth or other henna-haired women of that time.

  She’d escaped; she wasn’t going to be shoved downwards. She attended concerts in parks though she didn’t like the music.

  In Hyde Park, cloistered by the sounds of Bach, her mind would wander back to home, a crossroads there where people once gathered at evening and danced jigs – solemnly – as though waiting for death.

  Skirts rising, arms brawny. A druidic stare on the faces of passers-by.

  Or a waltz. ‘Come by the Hills’. People dancing rhythmically, dancing carnivorously; waiting for dark or stillborn children.

  Waiting for emigration or anxiety.

  And once or twice a year a carnival touched on the village, ‘The Lakes of Killarney’ painted on the caravans. And again as the lights of bulbs died out people would dance to the music of Slievenamban, a melodeon crying like a cat in one’s sleep and someone echoing the refrain: ‘In the Valley of Slievenamban’.

  Funny, it seems like yesterday, Susan thought one day, remembering concerts in Hyde Park when she’d recall her version of home. But yesterdays slip away, she thought. Youth is gone before you’d see a swan drop a feather. And what are you left with?

  The memories of bulbs, bright and blue, at a crossroads in 1939.

  2

  These days were waiting days. Essentially. She’d buy bread and butter and Mrs Conlon would ask:

  ‘Have you heard from Diarmaid?’

  Mrs O’Hallrahan would say ‘yes’.

  ‘Of course.’

  And she, Susan, would go into awkward explanations as to how Diarmaid was working as a petrol-pump attendant.

  ‘Isn’t it something,’ she’d say, though she didn’t really believe it.

  Didn’t believe petrol-pump attending was anything despite the fact that Diarmaid wasn’t working as a petrol-pump attendant.

  The fact was she hadn’t heard from him for weeks now; the last time was after January.

  It had been snowing then and lakes in the fields were frozen and few cars passed her doorstep.

  She’d wander up to buy groceries then and wonder at the eternal loneliness of life. Here she was a widow with an only son in England. The year was 1972.

  It had been over thirty years since she married. Her first child had come late. Riddled with miscarriages it had seemed she’d had no chance of a child until 1953; back in Ireland, here at home, she’d miraculously become pregnant. She grew big like a cow. Her belly had ached and she’d carried a child like a big pod of lazy flesh. She’d been very big. Almost too big. She’d sauntered through the village and made phone calls in a kiosk to Ballinasloe where her husband worked. There one day he informed her he was leaving for the States. He was fed up of Ireland. He needed rest from a country getting on its feet, feeding itself into post-war bureaucracy.

  Every day then the papers bore images of Irish leaders making deals with foreign investors. Ireland was becoming just a little better off; cars ran to Galway for Sundays.

  Ballinasloe had new houses. The village, though, still had its poverty and its tedium of Guinness signs and young men with holes in their trousers.

  No, this village still was given over to alcohol. There had to be something else.

  ‘I’ll make a lot of money,’ her husband had said. ‘I’ll make a fortune.’

  ‘We can live happier then.’

  He’d left her and she still pregnant. No, it wasn’t his fault. He loved life, needed it.

  He’d been to the war.

  Inside he was scarred; he’d met with Russian soldiers, American soldiers, he’d been in the British army. He’d seen Danzig after the war, been to Belsen. He needed life. He knew what it was all about. There was no time for rest, life was motion; he’d known bu
rnt-out cities in Europe after the war and he’d drank gin with American soldiers who’d entered Berlin. Yes, his head still rang; he’d known the blisters of bombs in the sky, planes. He’d seen buildings gutted and dead soldiers affirm their shapes on soil.

  He knew what it was all about. Funny, in 1954 when Diarmaid was born he was dead.

  He’d died in an elevator accident in Chicago, an out-of-work salesman. ‘George,’ she’d cried. His body was brought back. It was draped in the Irish flag; apparently he’d once joined Sinn Féin.

  Went to meetings in Galway with Constance Markiewizc’s picture on the wall, listened to men speak in Irish of the GPO burning on Easter Monday, 1916.

  Little impressed he’d left it. But they remembered it and draped his coffin. He was buried beside a well in a graveyard.

  She was sure the baby inside her would die, but he was delivered on Easter Monday, 1954. A boy. Safe. In Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe, and in memory of an Irish fruit vendor in Haymarket she called him Diarmaid.

  Mrs Conlon cackled now. ‘Tell him I was asking for him.’

  ‘I will to be sure.’

  ‘Something good will come his way.’

  ‘I’m sure it will.’ Mrs O’Hallrahan moved outwards. Yes, it was spring all right.

  Sheep trod along the road; alongside them calves swayed. And lambs. Somebody’s animals gone astray. Then a farmhand appeared.

  She walked nobly through the village.

  In the school voices shouted their sums; a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary stood outside it in glass. Her nose was chipped and her feet which held a snake were decayed.

  Roses were made of plastic; their lives over, too. Ugly.

  Like golf balls. But Mrs O’Hallrahan praised Mary. She prayed often now, Susan did.

  Prayed that God would deliver her child from harm.

  3

  A letter arrived from him – unexpectedly. Brown the envelope was, colour of his flesh.

  She tore it open. His handwriting was unchanged from the time he was sixteen. Large, dangling, the ‘a’s. Like puppets.

  ‘Mama,

  I’m coming home,’ it read.

  And more.

  ‘Maybe I’ve been too long here.’

  She was overjoyed. She sauntered up to the grocery shop.

  ‘Diarmaid’s coming home.’

  ‘Great. When?’

  ‘Next week.’ Though he’d never said.

  ‘That’s wonderful.’

  Mrs Conlon wiped her brow. ‘I’m sweating.’

  A stray dog entered the shop, a big, shaggy fellow.

  ‘What will he do then?’

  ‘Maybe go to college. Maybe I’ll afford it next year.’

  ‘That would be marvellous. He could do agricultural science or something.’

  ‘Certainly. He needs a break.’

  She left the shop, Susan did.

  Outside a certain blueness had amassed over the fields, colours smouldered, giant shadows ran.

  She was happy. She went up the road a mile and a half to tell her mother.

  Her mother was eighty and lived in a cottage with Susan’s niece.

  The niece was quite on in years too.

  Susan had married in her teens, so had her older sister, Jennifer, who’d been born when her mother was seventeen, which meant Jennifer’s oldest was quite old herself now. Middle-aged. Jennifer had died of lung cancer and her daughter, Alice, looked after the octogenarian. Peeled carrots for her, fed her though she was able and loved the sunlight, walking laneways where lambs dazed past, sunlit.

  ‘Mammy, Diarmaid’s coming home.’

  ‘He’s not gone long.’

  ‘Long enough.’

  Alice stood in a corner. Her face always seemed rigid. Like a goalpost.

  ‘Will he stay long?’

  That was a good question. Susan suddenly realized maybe he wouldn’t wait, maybe he’d tire of home.

  There was nothing here for him.

  ‘I hope he will,’ she said simply.

  Alice produced a chicken.

  She was a sad lady but a good cook. Long ago in Dublin a half-caste sailor had jilted her and since then she’d lived in shadow.

  Here in this kitchen. Sometimes she went to dances with teenage girls and who knows but sometimes she lay in the fair green in Ballinasloe for young men.

  She had a bad reputation, Alice had.

  Susan wouldn’t have known but she sometimes heard people talk under her window at night.

  Wild words from young men.

  She looked at Alice almost bitterly now and realized that Alice knew what life was all about. People like her always did.

  4

  He was to return on 20 February. This she found out in a further letter.

  That morning was very pale – lace curtains blew, colours lay stranded in the fields. A hen whistled – its voice shot through her, and distantly a train shot by, loudly wailing. It was far away, the train, a monster in her imagination. It used bear Diarmaid to Ballinasloe once to school, clumsy, awkward, cold, a succession of jumpers on him, red and blue, and eventually gold.

  And his hair dangled, penetrated by light. But as such he’d changed. His hair had grown longer; his face lost some of its pallor. The last time she’d seen him, towards the close of summer, even that had changed. He’d lost the turnip shape, the high forehead; he’d walk in the fields in August, collecting mushrooms.

  When he was three he’d done likewise.

  ‘This one has a face like a clown,’ he once said to her, picking out a huge, elephantine mushroom.

  Long ago; he was four or five.

  And last summer he’d gone back to the fields, walking where Jacobean soldiers once fled before the Williamites. After the Battle of Aughrim.

  Last summer Diarmaid had collected pails of mushrooms; when it rained he didn’t fail to walk the fields. When it was fine he was still there, a scattering of poppies in the garden when he returned.

  And she’d have her programmes of Irish music on.

  ‘Danny Boy’. Songs she didn’t want to hear anyway, but such words surrounded him.

  He was fated. She knew that.

  Something about Diarmaid frightened her; his eternal silence. Like a busload of autistic children she’d once seen in Dublin. On a wet day. He was so tied up within himself. Like a shoe all knotted up.

  Diarmaid was like something that had long ago silenced itself; a cry.

  Making dresses she reared him; she opened a little clothes shop, lilac-coloured frocks, linen dresses with roses sewn on. Gaiety had somewhat taken over the village, people wore her dresses, loved them, except those who were too snobbish to buy them and went perpetually to Cassidy’s in Dublin.

  She made First Communion frocks for little girls, outfits for young boys. A successful dressmaker, she’d arrange flowers in her window.

  People would pass, look in, wave. And she’d be sewing under a picture of the Sacred Heart.

  With time she changed that picture. She put instead a reproduction bought in Dublin.

  A little boy writing, bent silently over a desk. On the back she saw that it was painted by a French painter and the boy was the painter’s son.

  Diarmaid was her son.

  He was ten when she realized what that meant; she’d fed her life into him.

  She’d watched him, fed him, she tended to him with a sense of dedication.

  And watched him grow in a harsh environment of loss, of alcoholic farmers, of stone walls.

  Diarmaid was a dreamer. As a child he looked after kittens, called them ‘Pussy’. He bought a budgie in Galway one day. When the budgie flew away he’d cried for a week. Then an uncle bought him a hamster, his grandmother bought him a rabbit, another uncle presented him with a lamb and he tended his flock like a junior Christ, watching his rabbit nibble lettuce and his hamster scoop about a cardboard castle he’d designed.

  But the animals disappeared – just as the circus that came to Ballinasloe every
year disappeared – and what was left was Diarmaid’s stunning sense of identity. He made shapes, put bits of cardboard together, eggshells, fluff – mattress fluff, ducks’ feathers. He constructed these ikons, was proud of them, brought them to national school, where the old teacher praised his efforts as he praised a little girl’s bunch of premature marigolds.

  ‘Daft,’ she once heard a woman say of him. ‘That child should have his head examined.’

  Susan was hurt, angered; yet she welcomed this rebuke. She could withstand failure. Her husband George was a failure. Her whole family were failures. She could construct something from that.

  She could make something of it. All her people were emigrants.

  They’d landed in Britain. A brother in 1955 committed suicide by jumping from a bank in Kilburn.

  Bald, small; he’d lost out. They found him broken like a frog on the pavement. They buried him in London.

  It wasn’t right to bring him back her mother said. Let him be, let his spirit be.

  Now Diarmaid, too, threatened failure, something over-preponderant about his forehead. Something over-exact. She raised him quietly – little was said. His jumpers knitted politely against the texture of the fields. His eyes almond-coloured.

  At night they’d listen to Irish comedians on the radio. And one night, Friday night, when he was nine, President Kennedy’s death was announced and Diarmaid wept.

  He wailed.

  Tears soaked his cheeks.

  And the next morning she’d found he’d wet his bed.

  Then he went to school in Ballinasloe, Saint Ignatius’ College, some miles outside town. Took a train from Woodlawn each morning, weaned on cold weather, winter fog, going to learn maths, geography, history, wandering off there with some other boys who seldom spoke either.

  The years, thirteen, fourteen; difficult years. Quiet years, sombre years. Diarmaid did his sums at night, painted little pictures.

  Read books which didn’t interest him; a new kitten he’d had had grown up and he often softened by the fire with it, stroking its fur, black and white.

  She’d make tea for him; they’d eat scones, floured with freshness. They’d listen to Country and Western music on the radio – ‘My Wild Irish Rose’ – feel safe with one another. ‘Are you lonesome tonight?’ Mrs O’Hallrahan’s mind would seek some image in London immediately prior to the war, a café, toasting beans in a coffee shop. A woman’s veins sticking out like rhubarb.