Lark's Eggs Page 12

  They spoke. They mentioned backgrounds. They parted.

  That night Damian realized he was in love.

  His mother sat by the fire as though in prayer.

  She sat staring into the flame.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Well.’

  He went to his room and packed his clothes. He was moving out. His mother sat as usual by the fire when he returned from school on the following days.

  He told her he was going and she hardly seemed perturbed.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To squat in West Harrow.’

  His mother shrugged. ‘Don’t get cold whatever you do.’ The squat consisted of high Edwardian buildings, fronted by rubbish dumps.

  Damian got a room in one of them with the assistance of a friend. First he tacked a picture of Pablo Casals on the wall.

  Then he arranged a matted quilt on the bed. The quilt was multicoloured. He would sleep beneath colours.

  There was a fireplace in the room and he lit warm fires in the afternoons, sitting beside them with a warm rugged polo neck on.

  He usually tracked down the Irish teacher on her way to the bus, dwelling a few minutes in conversation with her as leaves merely rested on dusty earth.

  He was going to ask her out. He planned it for weeks.

  The squat in which he lived housed runaway girls who wore long black coats and big Edwardian hats. Their maroon and pink colours dashed into afternoons of black sidling rain. ‘I want to make love,’ Damian told himself, ‘I want to make love to this woman.’

  He invited her to tea one day.

  She was at first surprised by the invitation. Then she accepted.

  ‘I’d love to,’ she said.

  He bought a cake iced in a Jewish bakery and they ate sweet things.

  She left early. He watched her go and knew how deep was his attraction for her. An attraction to calm, simplicity, the hush her voice was.

  His mother had joined a mystical group and was reading the words of Greek and Russian mysticists. Years previously she had known a man in California who had known the mentor of her group, Gurdjieff, and this single fragment had inspired enough confidence to move, search. She was going out again and very, very slowly talking about her travels and her affairs and her intimacies with artists, widely known and little heard of.

  The teacher came to Damian one day, uninvited. She brought with her tomatoes.

  She took off her gloves and her coat.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me calling,’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘I suppose I was feeling lonely today,’ she said.

  ‘Lonely?’ He laughed. ‘Do you miss Ireland?’

  ‘I was hurt by Ireland,’ she said. He didn’t ask her any more but made tea and smiled at her and poised Tchaikovsky on the record player he’d recently bought. ‘These days my mother talks of Central Park,’ Damian said. ‘It’s like as though it’s a womb.’

  Madeleine—the teacher—looked at his ring. ‘It’s lovely,’ she said. ‘Silver?’

  ‘Yes.’ She stared at him. ‘It’s good to know someone I can come to see.’ He took her hand.

  He kissed it. She withdrew, shivered almost. He moved towards her. In moments they were lovers.

  They made love from love. This was an experience never to be repeated. It was her world and his that merged, the colours, sombre, green, of Ireland, the mad dash of kaleidoscopic colours that had been Damian’s travels.

  They looked at one another afterwards, recognizing friendship, friendship never to be repeated.

  She rose, put on her clothes, walked away. He stood with her outside a Seventh-Day Adventist church, attending a bus. Her brow was furrowed. He was willing to wait for a long time, he was willing to wait until an eternity. He wanted to tell her that together they’d discovered what his mother had never found in her travels—the experience of creativity. But before he could open his mouth a bus came and she was taken from him, chocolate papers brushed the pavement already wet with afternoon rain.

  His mother was reading Isaiah when he called. ‘And the leopard shall lie down with the kid,’ she said snapping the book closed, almost accusing Damian. Damian quietly made tea while she talked about his father, the poet, times with him in retreat in the West of Ireland. ‘A highly illicit affair,’ she declared, almost shouting.

  Damian ate sweet cakes that his mother fetched from a confectionery shop in Soho. Damian stared at the flames, penetratingly. He knew that moment that he, a person without a country, his mother, also a person without a country, were now crossing paths, realizing that one moment of love could exonerate one of a life of loneliness.

  He saw her often. She came to his house and they slept in the big bed and they spoke about countries by firelight.

  She whispered, ‘Someone told me I was frigid in Ireland. They said I was frigid to hurt me. You have repaired me.’ Damian was drinking cocoa. ‘They told me I was frigid because I was rather spiritual, because I kept to myself and observed certain laws, laws of solitude, laws I hoped of love. The Irish are a people at war with themselves. England has given me an order.’

  He turned to her, momentarily observed pain, pursed his lips and looked again at the stars, little silver stars sparkling and spitting in the flame.

  At Christmas she returned to Ireland. He walked her to Euston and observed her board a train and felt very much the young lover with his genitals ringing as wheels clattered. He walked away, hoping the Guinness pubs would not defile her and when she returned she spoke of change, the rosettes of white houses in Connemara, new buildings, new blood.

  She spoke of having seen a punk-rock band play in a hall that lay among fields where stones were gilded with moon and how she saw toothless couples dance to the mad murderous music. They made love, out of a hush, out of a calm left by conversation. They renewed physical contact and then Madeleine wept and she wished she could return to Ireland but defiled by it she was an exile at heart, an exile in abeyance to wounds.

  Wood crackled in January as they sat on Saturday afternoons drinking coffee, talking, the photograph of Pablo Casals curling up in agony.

  ‘I knew a girl at school,’ Damian said, ‘who had long hair and played a guitar and would run across fields like a fairy. Sometimes we’d just sit on the grass not saying anything, just holding hands.’

  ‘School is the most creative experience of one’s life,’ Madeleine said. ‘God speaks to us at secondary school, light through the doorway, a plant on the window, a picture of Joan Baez playing guitar in Birmingham, Alabama.’

  ‘God?’

  ‘Yes. Is that what’s troubling all of us? Your mother, me, you; it is a terrible thing to believe, worse to doubt.’

  ‘Aren’t we all being driven by a force asking us for a simple gesture, a simple pain that is close to a real experience, an experience of life.’

  His mother was happier now, thrilled almost.

  Men and women were drifting into her apartment, supping coffee, discussing art, literature, religion. She was relinquishing her solitude and inviting the strands of her life, mislaid, to meet again. Her son came among these people, black knotted hair, a white shirt on him, his lips succulent. He was an added treat, youth, beauty remembered by all of them in circles in California where men spoke of Buddha or Indian philosophers emerging from the rainforests to speak of God to post-War dilettantes.

  In February Damian told his mother he was having an affair. His mother took it philosophically until Damian mentioned his lover was Irish. Then his mother whispered, ‘They’re a cruel race, a cruel race.’

  She was ill for a few days and when she returned to school Damian asked her if she’d accompany him to Greece.

  ‘Greece!’

  Early Easter holidays were approaching.

  ‘We could get a bus.’

  She’d been ill, she said over coffee, she’d stayed in bed.

  ‘Why didn’t you come to see me?’

  Damian paused. He realized it ha
d not occurred to him. He’d been in Madeleine’s bedsitter but once. It was her custom to come to him. He’d never expected otherwise.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re used to being looked after,’ Madeleine said. ‘Yes, I’ll go with you.’

  He painted through March and was influenced much by Chagall whom his mother met in Venice once when he shook her hand with his pale, pale Russian hand.

  He brought Madeleine to little cinemas and he cycled to school on an old bicycle picked up in Portobello Road.

  On a grey day in March they caught a bus from Argyll Road to Athens, crossing Europe through snow and rain and reaching an island by boat where blossoms were shaping like curls on a baby’s head.

  They lived in a whitewashed cottage for three weeks, the sea daily becoming bluer and Madeleine’s hair falling on her shoulders now and her face a sort of cow-like serenity.

  ‘You’re too young for me, you know,’ she said over retsina one evening. Damian looked at her. He knew she was going to say that and that she’d just been holding back, waiting for this moment, watching Greeks, watching donkeys, watching priests with beards blowing in March breezes.

  Madeleine’s head dipped. She took hold of her wine glass like a pistol.

  ‘I have been reading Chekhov,’ she said. ‘I found this quotation.’ She read, almost in a murmur, ‘“I don’t believe in our intelligentsia. I believe in individual people scattered here and there all over Russia—they have strength though they are few.”’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘That lives cross briefly, that we are in danger of losing ourselves unless we make supreme acts, reach out, know where to stop.’

  ‘Like my mother,’ Damian said.

  ‘Like your mother, coming, going between people. The trouble is she never knew where to stop. But she has searched.’

  Madeleine quietened. ‘She has searched.’

  They walked by the strand where the light on the sea reminded Madeleine of Connemara and where they spoke of the Atlantic where Madeleine came from, and where Damian’s mother holidayed with Damian’s secret father.

  ‘The sea wills a strange power on us,’ Madeleine said, ‘a power of believing.’

  They held hands and strode along until Damian quietly announced it was Easter Sunday and that it was believed Christ had risen on this day.

  Back in London they saw one another less. In May Madeleine lived with him for a week and they slept in the big bed under the multicoloured quilt, and made love, his body seeking hers as though she was an immense bear, shielding him.

  Then one morning she left—discreetly—before he woke and he saw her only at school after that. She didn’t go home with him. She acted older than him, determined on the course of her life, refusing solicitude.

  He was shattered. He pursued her with his eyes. She never acknowledged him. She studied the work of her students and left his looks unrequited, and when he followed her she said, ‘Damian, it’s unwise to go ahead with certain things. Forget it. Forget it.’

  ‘What are you doing for the summer?’ he asked.

  ‘Going back to Ireland. I think I can come to terms with it now. I think I can get to know it.’

  ‘Might you stay there?’

  ‘Perhaps. England is not my country. They tell us Irish we’re bombers whereas it’s a few British subjects from the North who are planting bombs. I think I’ll go home, teach in a small school, marry a farmer.’

  ‘Madeleine, please come home with me,’ he begged her.

  ‘Damian.’ She turned. ‘Find yourself some nice nineteen-year-old.’

  He could have killed himself. Instead he went to his mother. She was drinking brandy and saying sweetly to herself, ‘Life is beautiful. Life is a collection of moods, moods, fine, peaceable, attractive. Life is a coloured shadow. Life is a coloured shadow.’

  Damian realized she was quoting the Irish poet who’d been her lover. He went to his room and asked of it what he’d done wrong, realized that this impermanence was just living and decided to go south again for the summer. He didn’t go south. Instead he went to Ireland where he hitched about, taking in Cork and Limerick, finding no trace of her but discovering mountains wild and blue, and sheep, rinsed yellow ochre and white. He sat in cafés thinking of her as American tourists clambered after tweed and would have asked the skies to show her to him had he not realized that was rather over-romantic and that anyway she was in another part of Ireland, one as yet unknown to him. He didn’t go to Connemara because heavy squally rain began and wouldn’t stop and he found himself one August morning in London, drinking steaming coffee.

  In September back at school he discovered she had not stayed in Ireland, that she was teaching at another school and when he heard she was playing in an amateur production of Yeats’s Herne’s Egg at the school he went to see her in it. He caught a bus from the squat, through streets swishing with rain where girls in long coats and Edwardian hats ran.

  He sat in the auditorium as she danced the part of Attracta, priestess of love, sombrely, fatalistically.

  ‘She was Irish,’ he told himself, ‘she had been driven out again by a word, a look, a gesture back to London.’

  Afterwards he waited in the cafeteria for her, in his white-blue embroidered shirt, whispering under his breath, ‘I love you. I love you. I love you,’ and when she didn’t come he went home, took up a knife to cut his wrists and suddenly, just suddenly found himself pardoned by the glowing of the fire, which caught the knife, telling him sonorously of travels, travels through lives, faces, bodies, travels that wrought images of Irish women with black Cretan hair and faces that always looked as though about to give way or of women of middle age sitting by the fire, telling themselves over and over again that life was beautiful as flame glinted and eyes spat and hair that was grey turned gold.

  Memories of Swinging London

  Why he went there he did not know, an instinctive feel for a dull facade, an intuition borne out of time of a country unbeknownst to him now but ten years ago one of excessive rain, old stone damaged by time, and trees too green, too full.

  He was drunk, of course, the night he stumbled in there at ten o’clock. It had been three weeks since Marion had left him, three weeks of drink, of moronic depression, three weeks of titillating jokes with the boys at work.

  Besides it had been raining that night and he’d needed shelter.

  She was tired after a night’s drama class when he met her, a small nun making tea with a brown kettle.

  Her garb was grey and short and she spoke with a distinctive Kerry accent but yet a polish at variance with her accent.

  She’d obviously been to an elocution class or two, Liam thought cynically, until he perceived her face, weary, alone, a makeshift expression of pain on it.

  She’d failed that evening with her lesson, she said. Nothing had happened, a half-dozen boys from Roscommon and Leitrim had left the hall uninspired.

  Then she looked at Liam as though wondering who she was speaking to anyway, an Irish drunk, albeit a well-dressed one. In fact he was particularly well dressed that evening, wearing a neatly cut grey suit and a white shirt, spotless but for some dots of Guinness.

  They talked with some reassurance when he was less drunk. He sat back as she poured tea.

  She was from Kerry she said, West Kerry. She’d been a few months in Africa and a few months in the United States but this was her first real assignment, other than a while as domestic science teacher in a Kerry convent. Here she was all of nurse, domestic and teacher. She taught young men from Mayo and Roscommon how to move; she had become keen on drama while going to college in Dublin. She’d pursued this interest while teaching domestic science in Kerry, an occupation she was ill-qualified for, having studied English literature in Dublin.

  ‘I’m a kind of social worker,’ she said, ‘I’m given these lads to work with. They come here looking for something. I give them drama.’

  She’d directed Eugene O’Neill in West Kerry,
she’d directed Arthur Miller in West Kerry. She’d moulded young men there but a different kind of young men, bank clerks. Here she was landed with labourers, drunks.

  ‘How did you come by this job?’ Liam asked.

  She looked at him, puzzled by his directness.

  ‘They were looking for a suitable spot to put an ardent Sister of Mercy,’ she said.

  There was a lemon iced cake in a corner of the room and she caught his eye spying it and she asked him if he’d like some, apologizing for not offering him some earlier. She made quite a ceremony of cutting it, dishing it up on a blue-rimmed plate.

  He picked at it.

  ‘And you,’ she said, ‘what part of Ireland do you come from?’

  He had to think about it for a moment. It had been so long. How could he tell her about limestone streets and dank trees? How could he convince her he wasn’t lying when he spun yarns about an adolescence long gone?

  ‘I come from Galway,’ he said, ‘from Ballinasloe.’

  ‘My father used to go to the horse fair there,’ she said. And then she was off again about Kerry and farms, until suddenly she realized it should be him that should be speaking.

  She looked at him but he said nothing.

  ‘Ten years.’

  He was unforthcoming with answers.

  The aftermath of drink had left his body and he was sitting as he had not sat for weeks, consuming tea, peaceful. In fact, when he thought of it, he hadn’t been like this for years, sitting quietly, untortured by memories of Ireland but easy with them, memories of green and limestone grey.

  She invited him back and he didn’t come back for days. But as always in the case of two people who meet and genuinely like one another they were destined to meet again.

  He saw her in Camden Town one evening, knew that his proclivity for Keats and Byron at school was somehow justified. She was unrushed, carrying vegetables, asked him why he had not come. He told her he’d been intending to come, that he was going to come. She smiled. She had to go she said. She was firm.

  Afterwards he drank, one pint of Guinness. He would go back, he told himself.