Lark's Eggs Read online

  Jackie made a meal, one he’d been preparing in his mind for a long time, lamb curry. Afterwards they had banana crumble and custard, eating on the floor. Moira said it would be necessary for her to get a job. Jackie didn’t disagree. Moira read the little pieces of print stuck about. A line from Yeats. An admonition from Socrates. Soon a point came whereby there seemed nothing else to talk about so both were silent.

  They went for a drink before going to bed. Jackie apologized for the grottiness of the pub. Moira said she didn’t mind, her eyes drifting about to young Irish men holding their sacred pints of Guinness.

  Afterwards they returned through the dustbins and slept in their individual beds.

  It being summer Moira got a job in a nearby ice-cream parlour, dressing in white, doling out runny ice cream to West Indian children. In a generally bad summer the weather suddenly brightened and Jackie was conscious of himself, a young Adonis on a building site. His body had hardened, muscle upon muscle defining themselves. His hair was short. His face more than anything was defined, those bright eyes that shot out, often angry without a reason as though some subconscious hurt was disturbing him.

  What he resented was the young Irish students who were arriving on the building site. They brought with them a gossipy closeness to Ireland and a lack of seriousness in their separation from that country. However, he and Moira were getting on exceedingly well. There was less talk of trauma than he’d anticipated. They had drinks, meals, outings together. On Sundays there was Holland Park and Kensington Gardens. They had picnics there. Sometimes they swam in the Serpentine. Moira’s head dipped a lot, into magazines, into flowers, into the grass. The vestiges of wardship were leaving. Jackie often felt like knocking back a lock of Moira’s hair. Something about her invited these gestures, her total preoccupation with a Sunday newspaper cartoon, her gaze that sometimes went from you and turned inwards, to that area they both held in common.

  Moira cooked sometimes. She was a plain cook but a good one. She made brown bread much like his mother’s. Jackie’s cooking was more prodigious, curries that always scared Moira, lest there be drugs in them, chicken paprika, beef goulash, moussaka, and then the plates of Ireland, Limerick ham glazed in honey, Dublin coddle, Irish stew.

  The divisions in the room were neatly made, borders between her area and his. Both were exceptionally neat.

  For the first time she mentioned the mental hospital. It slipped out. There had been a woman there who’d had nine children, whose husband had left her, who scrubbed floors in a café and who’d eventually cracked up. In a final gesture of humiliation she’d wept while mopping the floor one day so that the proprietor reckoned she should see a psychiatrist. ‘Jesus, I’m crying. I’m just crying,’ she’d shouted. ‘I’m just crying because they told me life would be better, men helpful. I’m just crying and I’m not ashamed. I can manage. I can manage myself.’They’d told her she couldn’t and quietly stole her children, placing them in homes. It was then she’d cracked up, looking like all the other mad visionary women of Ireland, women who claimed to have seen Maria Goretti in far-flung cottages.

  ‘They force you to crack up,’ Moira said, ‘so that they can be satisfied with their own lot. After all the idea of pain, real pain, is too big to cope with. Pain can be so beautiful. The pain of recognizing how hopeless things are yet accepting and somehow building from it.’

  His sister had grown. More than that she’d become beautiful, her Peruvian eyes calm and often a scarlet ribbon in her hair. Playing a game they’d played as children both of them dressed up at nights and went to showband concerts. Whatever her other sophistications Moira had not relinquished the showband world so they traipsed off to pubs, Moira in a summer dress, Jackie in a suit, a green silk Chinese tie on him, girls from Offaly moaning into microphones. You were scrutinized at the doors lest you were not Irish. Often there was some doubt about Jackie until he opened his mouth. Inside people jostled, a majority of women edged for a man. Lights changed from scarlet to blue and somehow Moira in her dreamy, virginal way seemed at home here, lost in a reverie of rural Ireland.

  Shyness had gone, a kind of frankness prevailed. Often Jackie sat around his room in just trousers. Moira washed in her slip, sometimes it falling over her hips.

  ‘You know we made a pact, didn’t we, when we were growing up?’ Jackie said one evening. ‘Mammy and Daddy never seemed to notice us.’

  It was true. Against their parents’ carnality they’d chosen a kind of virginal complacency.

  Once in Kerry, looking at the moon, Moira had stated that this country had always been a country of nuns. In ancient times nuns had built cottages by nearby beaches.

  It was less that they were a nun and a monk, more that they had to resist. Resist their parents’ self-absorption, resist the geese, the skies, the dun of the mountains, the purple changing to green of the rocks.

  Jackie had had his affairs. In fact Moira had hers. But it was as though they’d made a vow of celibacy when Jackie was thirteen and Moira eleven; they didn’t want to fall into the trap of closing themselves off. They wanted to be open, romantic, available. Looking into Moira’s eyes before going to bed Jackie saw that in fact they were closing themselves off in a different way.

  They were outsiders, resigned to be outsiders, and were making a fetish of this role. Moira had picked up a little teddybear in Shepherd’s Bush market. In her bed she held it. She was sitting up in her slip. ‘Goodnight Jackie,’ she said.

  The teddybear slept with her.

  That night Jackie walked the environs of Shepherd’s Bush, sat in a café, spoke to a man from Ghana. He waited some hours. The first light came. He returned home, picked up his things for work, waited for a lorry on Shepherd’s Bush Green.

  She wanted to dance now so she danced with him. They travelled to Kilburn and Camden. Saturday nights in ballrooms, the London Irish swung to visiting showbands. Despite this venture in a foreign city Moira had a lonesomeness for the decay of rural Ireland, for its fetishes. Jackie dancing with her, cheek to cheek, wondered if he could cure it.

  It was a miserable summer weather-wise. Early in August there was a much-advertised march against troops in Northern Ireland. Jackie and Moira saw it by accident, young English people shouting about women in Northern Ireland jails.

  Later that month the Queen’s cousin was blown up in County Sligo. Moira and Jackie didn’t listen to the radio much but they heard a jumbled commentary on the events. Jackie wondered about the provisional Sinn Féin people who’d lived in this room once, that was their domain, instant and shocking deaths in the cause of Ireland. He smiled. No one in the whole of London reprimanded Jackie or Moira but the papers were full of hatred, mistaking the source of the guilt.

  The guilt was a shared one, Jackie thought, a handed-down one. Everyone’s hands were dipped in blood; blood of intolerance. He’d thought about it so much, knew the kind of prevalent and often justified anger of Irish republicans. In Kerry they were eccentrics. One IRA man he knew grew the best marijuana in Kerry and decorated it with Christmas decorations come Christmas. Often Northern republicans fled to his house, men with trapped eyes. Reaching to them was like reaching to dynamite. They hit back easily.

  So Jackie and Moira assumed responsibility for the deaths of the Earl of Mountbatten, the Dowager Lady Brabourne and the two children killed with them. They walked about London with the air of criminals. The newspapers had ordained this guilt. Jackie and Moira accepted it, not as slaves but with a certain grandeur. They were Irish and as such bore a kind of mass guilt, guilt for the republican few, for the order of the gun, the enslaved and frightened eyes, the winsome thoughts of Patrick Pearse. It was all part of their heritage; to deny it would be like denying the wet weather. But in accepting a certain responsibility both knew, Jackie more than Moira, of a more real tradition which never met English eyes, the tradition of the great families of Kerry, the goblets of wine, the harp, the Gregorian chant.

  They’d left Kerry with their wolf
hounds, going to Europe, but something was always ready to be disturbed of this tradition, a hedge-schoolmaster behind a white hawthorn tree reading Cicero; O’Connell, another Kerryman, in Clontarf telling the Irish proletariat that the freedom of Ireland is not worth the shedding of one drop of blood; Michael Davitt in Clare leading a silent pacifist march against English landlords.

  Jackie knew, as all sensitive and knowledgeable Irish people knew, that the prevalent philosophy of Irish history was pacifism and he could therefore accept the rebukes of the English newspapers with glee, with a certain amount of wonder, knowing them to be founded and spread in ignorance.

  But Moira wasn’t so sure. He’d noticed her fluctuating somewhat. Although outwardly calm there was a new intensity in her dancing. She was going back, quicker than he could cope with, to the ballroom floors in Kerry, the point at which all is surrendered, the days of drudgery, the nights of squalid sex in the backs of cars. She was trying to be peaceful with a violent heritage.

  In a dancehall one night there was a fight. Someone hit someone else on the head with a chair. A woman started singing ‘God save Ireland said the Heroes’ and in moments Jackie’s dreams of pacifism were gone. A young man made a speech about H-Blocks on the counter and somewhere an auburn-haired woman described her lust for a Clare farmer.

  Jackie took Moira home. She began crying, sitting on a chair. In moments it was gone, a summer of harmony. The tears came, scarlet, outraged blue. Afterwards it was the silence which was compelling. She was steadily recalling the corners of a mental hospital, the outreaches of pain. Her heart in a moment had turned to stone.

  It was a curious stone too which her heart had become, exquisite and frail in its own way. She began going to dances by herself and one night she did not return. Jackie sat up, waiting until the small hours. When there was no sign of her he went out for a while, hugging himself into a donkey jacket. Autumn was coming.

  People are like doctors. We live with one another for a while. We cure one another. Jackie saw himself as physician but too late. Moira no longer needed his physician’s touch. She was sleeping around, compulsively giving herself, engineering all kinds of romances. And when she stopped talking to him much he too searched the night for strangers. At first unsuccessfully. But then they came, one by one, Argentinians, West Indians.

  She perceived the domain of his life, said nothing.

  ‘Pope visits war-torn country,’ the papers warned. It was true, John Paul was coming, giving an ultimate benediction to the dance-halls, the showbands, the neon lights, the jukeboxes that shook jauntily with their burden of song.

  He saw the look on Moira’s face and knew she was destined to return. Nothing could hold her back. Dancing to an Irish showband singer’s version of ‘One Day at a Time’ he realized her need for the hurt, the intimacy, the pain of ballroom Ireland. She wanted to be immolated by these things.

  There was nothing he could say against it. It was his life against hers and she saw his life as a shambles. He couldn’t tell her about the boys with diamond eyes, no more than she could tell him about the lads from Cork who jumped on her as though she was an old and unusable mattress. In mid-September she announced her decision.

  A bunch of marigolds sat on the mantelpiece, a little throne of tranquillity.

  ‘Will you come too?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said and half-naked he looked at her. He wanted to ask her why it was necessary always to return to the point where you were rejected, but such questions were useless. The Pope was coming, the music of ballroom Ireland was strong in her ears.

  He took her to Euston and she asked him if he had any messages for their parents.

  ‘Tell them I won’t be home for Christmas,’ he said.

  She looked at him. Her eyes looked as though they were going to pop out and grapple him and take their mutual pain but they did no such thing.

  Later that night Jackie wandered in Shepherd’s Bush. He knew he’d deceived himself, going from body to body, holding out hope he’d meet someone who’d fulfil some childhood dream of purity.

  All his life he’d been trying to reconstruct her, not so much Moira, as that virgin of Ireland, Our Lady of Knock, Our Lady of the Sorrows, that complacent maiden who edged into jukebox cafés, into small towns where apparitions had taken place in the last century and now neon strove into the rain.

  He wouldn’t go to Copenhagen. He’d go south. He’d pack up his things and leave, knowing there was a certain compulsion about the sun, the Mediterranean, the shine of the sun on southern beaches.

  Before leaving London there was one thing he wanted to do, dress up like any other Irish boy, comb his hair, put on his green Chinese tie and dance until all was forgotten, the lights of Killarney, the whine of the jukebox, the look on Moira’s face as she stared over a stone wall in Kerry, into a world which would consume their knowledge of the sea, their knowledge of stone, their reverence of one another.

  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 lying 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.