Lark's Eggs Read online

  I knew something that night I’d suspected for a long time. It slipped out. Beside Tibby Raymond in worn clothes suddenly began laughing and his laughter became drunken and hysterical and then it became crying and then it became screaming. He allowed me to hold him. He was shivering. He kept saying, ‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.’

  Raymond: ‘The city was orange. We arrived on an orange night. I’d been coming for years. My uncles had babbled on the journey about Gaelic football and heroes that had scored points in County Down years before. I’d heard all this before. I’d grown up with it. There were many things I tried to do in my lifespan to be free of this babble. Read. Tried art school. Dabbled with self-portraits. But something always drew you into the smoky circle. The funereal voices, the faces contemplating the cards. It was as if there wasn’t a you, couldn’t be a you until you’d done something terrible to atone for an unknown past. Besides there were rungs on a ladder. Trying to be different wasn’t easy. Trying to get out was impossible. We arrived and walked from the boat through the orange lights. My uncles had a slip of paper that was soiled with Guinness and tobacco. It was an address in this city. A woman answered. Her face was a skull in the orange light. I was the one who was going to place the device. In a Derry accent she to me, “Sure you have the face of a ewe.”’

  An outrage was done in this house once. A young woman separated from a young man. The female part of a person separated from the male. The childhood part of the person separated from the adult. The creative from the social. One part of a country was amputated from another.

  Raymond was in my bed when they clambered in. It was six in the morning. I’d been lying awake; Raymond there, turned towards me. His face, his cold white body like a ewe’s all right. We had not made love. Just slept together under a large multicoloured Tinker’s shawl of a Foxford rug. One of the men from the anti-terrorist squad took up a position alongside us. He was squat and gruff. I’d been expecting them. ‘Merry Christmas,’ I said and one young fellow threw himself against the door, facing us with a revolver.

  Dear Aunt Bethan,

  I’m nearly ten years in London and there’s a lot I want to say to you. The reason I’m writing is because I passed the street the other day. There are brand-new council flats there, regimented ones. Raymond’s been in jail now nearly ten years. It wasn’t anything like a large bombing he’d been responsible for. A small and almost forgotten one. He writes poetry in prison now and some of his poems appear in republican papers. They mistake the images of doves as symbols of a struggle for a free Ireland. Needless to say I’ve polished my accent since. I did a secretarial course and am in quite luxurious employment as a secretary. The council long ago re-housed me and Mícheál and Tomás and Tibby. I’m a nice polite middle-class person now. Well almost. Mícheál is bigger than I am. He’s grown to the ceiling. He teaches me things about ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. Tibby wears tight pink satin jeans. I’m writing really to commemorate and celebrate coming to this city. I’ve kept my word. I never went back to Ireland. We wait here in our comfortable lodgings for the nuclear bomb, mushroom cloud, whatever, but in the meantime have a good time. There are lots of laughs, lots of celebrations but the laughter is innermost and most intense when I think of him in the corridors of his prison and I think of the cells of his poetry, now like Easter lilies they grow until they fill my mind and I want to appeal to the prime minister or the queen on his behalf, saying it wasn’t his fault; it was other people. It was the pre-ordained. There’d been no one around to salvage his sanity at the time. But I know they would not listen to me so instead I try to teach my children what this city taught me: love. Yes, Aunt Bethan, love will bring us through the night of the nuclear bomb and the onset of middle age. It will bring us through the nights when the children and the people have gone. There was a night of accord once, a night of simplicity and that makes up for an awful lot, doesn’t it?

  The Vicar’s Wife

  1

  1959 was the year Joly won the local beauty competition and the year Colin came down from Trinity as a Teddyboy vicar, a bouncing limousine of black hair in front of his forehead. 1959 was the year in which everything dangled precipitously on a scales, past and future, the end of things, the initiation of other things. There was something fearful about the things beginning. It was the year Joly and Colin met and became lovers.

  There was such a mind-boggling difference in their backgrounds that their pairing didn’t so much cause anger as a kind of earthquake; Barna Craugh’s earthquake, 1959, the narrow roadway of Bin Lane opened and devoured a lady or two who had to walk up this disreputable lane because it connected the church with their part of town. Off Bin Lane Joly had been born. ‘Born brown-haired!’ people pronounced over and over again. Because now her award-winning curls were a cheeky peroxide blonde. It was her tits that had got her the prize, uncouth and bellicose farm labourers insisted. Her breasts were very large and she didn’t try to sunder their largeness. It was those breasts the vicious and the jealous swore to themselves had attracted the attention of Vicar Colin Lysaght. Although much of the ultimate version was that he’d picked up a Catholic rose and transformed her into a black Protestant nettle. Joly Ward converted to Protestantism to marry the Teddyboy vicar.

  The house was the most immeasurable leap for her; the house she moved into. It changed her automatically, from beauty queen to dark-haired, demure Protestant wife. That was the first word that came to her in the house. Fear filled her to a point at which she thought she was going to explode with it. But she kept silent. Shadows wrapped around her, twisted around her, shadows of dark banisters. Joly was in a house in the country, suffocated by gardens and by trees.

  The wedding had been a pantomime, a joke, mainly lizard-like, old eccentric vicars at it, a flotsam of young ex-Trinity students. Ascendancy heirs rushed at champagne glasses, young men in snappily white shirts and in dark, casually askew jackets. There was a quick snow of champagne on a number of young, nearly-black moustaches. Joly was a proof of a Protestant sense of humour, a testimony to Irish eccentric Protestantism’s ability to laugh at itself. She was in the line of a tradition of jokes; that day a dummy in white, an unwitting foible. Young Ascendancy men gauged her breasts in her wedding dress with their eyes. But her own family didn’t look at her. They, to a man, did not come to the wedding. There was no Catholic there.

  If she thought of it afterwards there were mainly men there and what women were there seemed to be stuffed into rag-doll textures of garments; their faces when you went close were blanks, their eyes didn’t look at you. They looked through you. They were the faces of the dead.

  Dead. There was death in this house. A subtle, omnipresent whine. She remembered the Catholic Church’s teachings about purgatory but this house had more the reverberations of hell. No possible escape within the mood of the house. Both Colin’s parents were dead, Colin’s father himself having been a vicar. She touched a banister on her first arrival as Colin’s wife—Colin hadn’t let her see the house up to then—clinging to it for a moment, in a blue, matronly dress, for life. She knew that moment she had lost all worlds, the world of home, and the world of frivolous, combative youth.

  Joly had gone against the grain from the time she was a little girl. Decked out in her holy communion costume, a veritable fountain of a veil, Joly had stampeded towards an obese member of the local town council, a very respectable man, his collar open, and plied him—successfully—for a russet money bill. She developed a relationship with this man, himself unmarried. At public functions, a St Patrick’s Day parade, the crowning of the king of the fair, she always managed to get money out of him, a little prostrate flag of hair on the otherwise bald top of his head. It was unheard of, a relationship between a member of the town council and a child from Bin Lane. As a member of the town council you could be beneficiary for the sons and daughters of army colonels, of shopkeepers, of police superintendents. But not for a child from Bin Lane. Children from Bin Lane might as well have bee
n squirrels with a contagious disease to the respectable people of town, and tawdry, unkempt squirrels at that. You could approach them, cautiously, at Christmas, with presents, in your annual symbol of generalized support for the Vincent de Paul.

  A man on the local council and Joly; a photograph in the local press. Without a jacket, the man in a white shirt, his face round like a balloon, a meteor of a smile on his face, apple flushes on his cheeks. He looked quixotically retarded. It was this photograph which was the marked beginning of Joly’s break with her own world and of her steep rise to stardom, notoriety and to the social grazing area of old, beak-nosed parsons. It had been a passport for her, her countenance in the photograph full of knowingness.

  In 1959 she won the local beauty competition. The events that went into this success were manifold. Joly had won a scholarship to the convent secondary school, the first girl from Bin Lane to have done so. But the nuns at convent school immediately rejected her. She smelt, despite ‘her brains’ as they put it, raw. They had to admit the ‘brains’. Joly seemed to be able to wriggle her way around any problem and she was able to come out with all sorts of information, adding even to the nuns’ store of general knowledge. But she made them baulk. She was shameless in her gait. And it was this shamelessness combined with her nearly always manifest mental ability which made her such a special beauty queen for Barna Craugh. Her hair dyed blonde she’d turned down a secretarial job with a ‘topnotch’ firm of solicitors in Dublin to participate in the contest. It was both a joke and a gamble for her. A joke within the vocabulary of the effervescent way she looked at life—all rampant blonde curls and daring scarlet lips—and yet an ironic intellectual thumb in every joke. Was anything worth it really? The job in Dublin she turned down to parade herself in a beauty contest. It riled her family, her decision almost caused a revolution among them. They thought they had one member so near to success! And if it was a gamble for her it more than paid off. It seemed to bring her much further than any job with a solicitor in Dublin—after a brief secretarial course—could have done. It landed her in an altogether different stratum of society. She felt like Judy Garland when The Wizard of Oz turned from black and white into Technicolor. Her hair turned back to brown at the same moment and all her features, as well as her converted soul, seemed to become demure and tentative and Protestant. She merged perfectly with the landscape of the rural, grey, elongated house.

  There was more to Joly’s sudden fame in 1959 than the winning of the beauty contest. Winning the beauty contest would not, in fact, have been spectacular in itself. Given her unusual personality as well as her sharply striking looks she got a series of national offers after winning the contest. Her face was in a ladies’ magazine, advertising the luscious red lipstick she liked so much. In another advertisement her blonde curls sported a hat which looked like a pink sandcastle. She was a bride in the most widely admired advertisement photograph. And that was appropriate enough. For Colin Lysaght saw the photograph and it was as if he picked the bride from the image as he would a bit of resplendent apple blossom. They were married in May 1960. Joly, though not in any way having been persuaded to, renounced Catholicism and became a Protestant to marry the delectable youth of a vicar and be an acceptable vicar’s wife.

  The morning she married, the nuns in her former school had the girls there send up shoals of prayers for her soul as if she had been their penultimately prize pupil, now having made a staggering fall.

  Colin had been living in a town house beside the railway station since his father’s death. After the wedding he brought Joly to the rural vicarage which had been industriously painted for weeks. It had been a secret. Now the secret unfolded. There was death and an ancient stagnation in the Teddyboy vicar.

  What had she really known about him? Very little. She looked at gravestones in a nearby field the following autumn. Ignat Lysaght. An ancestor of Colin’s. She was pregnant with a Protestant child. She was carrying the continuity of a contorted history inside her.

  Autumn was the greatest wonder in this house; the greatest torrent of Technicolor in the house, apple on apple creeping across the lawn and gardens, all different in colour, some a hue of luminous gold, others more scarlet, more vermilion, apples very often a garish and unexpected clown’s-cheek rouge. A gold too went into the green of the lawn, the gardens and the surrounding countryside, all of which had been a very dark and peculiar green throughout the summer. Tinkers’ caravans in the backlanes had nestled in this green, taken a silent refuge among the green. Very few Tinkers seemed to emerge from the caravans and if they did they were archaic faces, very often male faces, that met you silently and seemed stranded on the roadway. All was atavistic here, skeletons were suggested very close to the surface in graveyards and frequently there were bones to be seen on graves, tussled among the clay. They would be strange sights for a child.

  All summer long Joly had got to know her husband and herself better.

  She’d looked in a mirror and had been amazed at the physical change in herself. She’d got plumper, more demure; her eyes seemed haunted by aspects of this house and of her husband’s behaviour. She’d been made to seem meek in her demeanour by what she’d come to realize. Her husband, for all his Teddyboy looks, was one of the sequence of shapes of an ogre from the deepest past. He’d been contaminated and made violent by the past. That summer, before she became pregnant, he began to beat her up and the beatings continued after she discovered she was pregnant. She was in a prison. She could not go back. She had to stay where she was, with, for the moment, just one other cell mate.

  Colin’s face had changed once he’d got into the house; from a protruding frigate of an adolescent face it became debauched in appearance, mean, curdled. The lips, especially, looked dehydrated. With this life-despising change came the news of new life. News of new life came, it later seemed, with a solitary visit by Joly to a dark church with one, Technicolored, stained-glass window.

  But, despite change in Colin, the church she’d been received into was still a statement for her; it was a statement of surrender of old values, the values of a totalitarian premiss on life, and the choosing of something new; something more liberated, something that gave her many choices; she was a Protestant by choice, a keeper of sentinel rows of geraniums, luminous in the mellifluous, vicarage, autumn sun.

  She wore black a lot at Christmas. By then she’d accepted Colin’s change of personality. The funny thing was that in the atmosphere of this house, in entry into this house, she was not surprised by the change in Colin. The source was a mystery to her, the emanation of this house. She was fighting with it. She served sherries to dried, old, outstretched, Protestant fingers that Christmas.

  The baby was born in April. A boy. He came with medieval-Annunciation-painting trees of apple blossom, little celebratory bolls of apple blossom. She gave birth to the child in Barna Craugh’s one hospital, a Catholic hospital, and a nun, in white, eyed her threateningly, her eyes saying that for this child’s sake, if not for your own, pull back from the abyss. Audoen was baptized a Protestant child in a ceremony by a rural font. A wash of pale, hallucinatory May light came through the Technicolored window. Colin’s face was alarmingly drained that day. He’d been ranting to himself in the nights previously. Another vicar, called into this parish especially, performed the ceremony.

  Colin, in these days, had given himself over to Joly, asking for compassion, saying he was ill, that he had a disease, that his own father had treated his mother appallingly, that violence was rampant in male members of his family, that it was a rancid gene in the family. He was a boy in her arms now at night, the little boy who’d been cradled by other boys in a posh, Protestant school in Dublin, the little boy who’d dreamt of the Dublin Horse Show at night among evangelically laundered sheets.

  In May 1966, when Audoen was five years old, he was run over on the road near the vicarage and killed. By then Joly had two more children. Colin was no longer a Teddyboy. There was a decrepit grey on the edges of his
hair. For the funeral another vicar did not have to be brought in. It took place in Barna Craugh, which was part of another diocese, though close to the rural one where Colin presided. Audoen was buried in the Protestant part of Barna Craugh cemetery. Colin, face anaemic and blanched, bawled at the funeral. The faces of the women of Barna Craugh peered out from a dusk of their own in the cemetery. Justice had been done. God had punished this woman. But by then the teachings of the Ecumenical Council were creeping through and there wasn’t as much gloating about the event as there might have been. Joly’s marriage, bound together by children and a stoic compassion, was breaking up. The only thing that held it now was wonder on Joly’s part at Colin’s personality, wonder as to how such violence as she’d known and continued to experience could have insinuated itself so readily into a frame as aesthetically pleasing and as, almost shockingly, susceptible to the senses as Colin’s had been. He’d had a pale adolescent face you could almost eat. But that face, the good looks, had been a mask.

  The little rural hell was seven years old when she left Colin. On the day she got a taxi to the station from the centre of Barna Craugh she heard someone sing a refrain from ‘O Lady of Spain I Adore You’ on the main street. Her two children went with her. Colin had beaten her senseless with the leg of a chair a few nights previously, a leg from a chair which, before attacking her, he’d attacked, thus extracting the leg. She had bruises all over her on the main street the day she left. A woman looked closely at her, almost sympathetically. The bruises on Joly’s face were like the marks of napalm. The bruises on her psyche from the vicar and from the town were worse and more enduring, as she was to find, than any television-screen napalm could suggest.

  2

  Comely Bank Grove, Edinburgh, was the address that she moved into with Midge, the Polish truck driver. She’d previously been living with a friend, from her school days, in Dundee. The friend had emigrated halfway through convent secondary education and the two girls had kept in touch. Joly’s friend had not married, not wanted to marry. She nursed Joly, with a sense of vocation, for five years. There was a speechless communication between them, a distance, but sometimes in that distance bolts of desire from Joly’s friend. But silent and ultimately stagnant bolts. The woman was so beholden to Joly for company, for purpose in life, that she even looked after Joly’s children when Joly began going out with Midge. By then Barna Craugh was far away. Joly was a tart again, raspberry lipstick on her and her hair curled now, looking black rather than brown. Their most exotic occasions, hers and Midge’s, were Chinese meals on Saturday nights in a Chinese restaurant among an industrial estate by the sea. Joly picked up bits of a Polish accent which she interspersed with her new Scottish accent.