Lark's Eggs (13 page)

‘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.

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.

In fact it was as though he was led by some force of persuasion, easiness of language that existed between him and Sister Sarah, a lack of embarrassment at silence.

He took a bus from his part of Shepherd's Bush to Camden Town. Rain slashed, knifing the evening with black. The first instinct he had was to get a return bus but unnerved he went on.

Entering the centre the atmosphere was suddenly appropriated by music, Tchaikovsky,
Swan Lake
. He entered the hall to see a
half-dozen
young men in black jerseys, blue trousers, dying, quite
genuinely
like swans.

She saw him. He saw her. She didn't stop the procedure, merely acknowledged him and went on, her voice reverberating in the hall, to talk of movement, of the necessity to identify the real lines in one's body and flow with them.

Yes, he'd always recall that, ‘the real lines in one's body'. When she had stopped talking she approached him. He stood there, aware that he was a stranger, not in a black jersey.

Then she wound up the night's procedure with more music, this time Beethoven, and the young men from Roscommon and Mayo
behaved like constrained ballerinas as they simulated dusk.

Afterwards they spoke again. In the little kitchen.

‘Dusk is a word for balance between night and day,' she said. ‘I asked them to be relaxed, to be aware of time flowing through them.'

The little nun had an errand to make.

Alone, there, Liam smoked a cigarette. He thought of Marion, his wife gone north to Leeds, fatigued with him, with marriage, with the odd affair. She had worked as a receptionist in a theatre.

She'd given up her job, gone home to Mummy, left the big city for the northern smoke. In short her marriage had ended.

Looking at the litter bin Liam realized how much closer to accepting this fact he'd come. Somehow he'd once thought marriage to be for life but here it was, one marriage dissolved and nights to fill, a body to shelter, a life to lead.

A young man with curly blond hair entered. He was looking for Sister Sarah. He stopped when he saw Liam, taken aback. These boys were like a special battalion of guards in their black jerseys. He was an intruder, cool, English almost, his face, his features relaxed, not rough or ruddy. The young man said he was from Roscommon. That was near Liam's home.

He spoke of farms, of pigs, said he'd had to leave, come to the city, search for neon. Now he'd found it. He'd never go back to the country. He was happy here, big city, many people, a dirty river and a population of people that included all races.

‘I miss the dances though,' the boy said, ‘the dances of Sunday nights. There's nothing like them in London, the cars all pulled up and the ballroom jiving with music by Big Tom and the Mainliners. You miss them in London but there are other things that compensate.'

When asked by Liam what compensated most for the loss of fresh Sunday night dancehalls amid green fields the boy said, ‘The freedom.'

Sister Sarah entered, smiled at the boy, sat down with Liam. The boy questioned her about a play they were intending to do and left, turning around to smile at Liam.

Sarah—her name came to him without the prefix now—spoke about the necessity of drama in schools, in education.

‘It is a liberating force,' she said. ‘It brings out—' she paused
‘—the swallow in people.'

And they both laughed, amused and gratified at the absurdity of the description.

Afterwards he perceived her in a hallway alone, a nun in a short outfit, considering the after-effects of her words that evening, pausing before plunging the place into darkness.

He told her he would return and this time he did, sitting among boys from Roscommon and Tipperary, improvising situations. She called on him to be a soldier returning from war and this he did, embarrassedly, recalling that he too was a soldier once, a boy outside a barracks in Ireland, beside a bed of crocuses. People smiled at his shattered innocence, at this attempt at improvisation. Sister Sarah reserved a smile. In the middle of a simulated march he stopped.

‘I can't. I can't,' he said.

People smiled, let him be.

He walked to the bus stop, alone. Rain was edging him in, winter was coming. It hurt with its severity tonight. He passed a sex shop, neon light dancing over the instruments in the window. The
pornographic
smile of a British comedian looked out from a newsagent's.

He got his bus.

Sleep took him in Shepherd's Bush. He dreamt of a school long ago in County Galway which he attended for a few years, urns standing about the remains of a Georgian past.

At work people noticed he was changing. They noticed a greater serenity. An easiness about the way he was holding a cup. They virtually chastised him for it.

Martha McPherson looked at him, said sarcastically, ‘You look hopeful.'

He was thinking of Keats in the canteen when she spoke to him, of words long ago, phrases from mouldering books at school at the beginning of autumn.

His flat was tidier now; there was a space for books that had not hitherto been there. He began a letter home, stopped, couldn't envisage his mother, old woman by a sea of bog.

Sister Sarah announced plans for a play they would perform at Christmas. The play would be improvised, bit by bit, and she asked for suggestions about the content.

 One boy from Leitrim said, ‘Let's have a play about the Tinkers.'

Liam was cast for a part as Tinker king and bit by bit over the weeks he tried, tried to push off shyness, act out little scenes.

People laughed at him. He felt humiliated, twisted inside. Yet he went on.

His face was moulding, clearer than before, and in his eyes was a piercing darkness. He made speeches, trying to recall the way the Tinkers spoke at home, long lines of them on winter evenings, camps in country lanes, smoke rising as a sun set over distant steeples.

He spoke less to colleagues, more to himself, phrasing and rephrasing old questions, wondering why he had left Ireland in the first place, a boy, sixteen, lonely, very lonely on a boat making its way through a winter night.

‘I suppose I left Ireland,' he told Sister Sarah one night, ‘because I felt ineffectual, totally ineffectual. The priests at school despised my independence. My mother worked as a char. My father was dead. I was a mature youngster who liked women, had one friend at school, a boy who wrote poetry.

‘I came to England seeking reasons for living. I stayed with my older brother who worked in a factory.

‘My first week in England a Greek homosexual who lived upstairs asked me to sleep with him. That ended my innocence. I grew up somewhere around then, became adult very, very young.'

1966, the year he left Ireland.

Sonny and Cher sang ‘I've Got You, Babe'.

London was readying itself for blossoming, the Swinging
Sixties
had attuned themselves to Carnaby Street, to discotheques, to parks. Ties looked like huge flowers, young hippies sat in parks. And in 1967, the year
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
appeared, a generation of young men and horned-rimmed glasses looking like John Lennon. ‘It was like a party,' Liam said, ‘a continual party. I ate, drank at this feast.

‘Then I met Marion. We married in 1969, the year Brian Jones died. I suppose we spent our honeymoon at his funeral. Or at least in Hyde Park where Mick Jagger read a poem in commemoration of him. “Weep no more, for Adonais is not dead.”'

Sister Sarah smiled. She obviously liked romantic poetry too, she
didn't say anything, just looked at him, with a long slow smile. ‘I understand,' she said, though what she was referring to he didn't know.

Images came clearer now, Ireland, the forty steps at school,
remnants
of a Georgian past, early mistresses, most of all the poems of Keats and Shelley.

Apart from the priests, there had been things about school he'd enjoyed, the images in poems, the celebration of love and laughter by Keats and Shelley, the excitement at finding a new poem in a book.

She didn't say much to him these days, just looked at him. He was beginning to fall into place, to be whole in this environment of rough and ready young men.

Somehow she had seduced him.

He wore clean, cool, casual white shirts now, looked faraway at work, hair drifting over his forehead as in adolescence. Someone noticed his clear blue eyes and remarked on them, Irish eyes, and he knew this identification as Irish had not been so absolute for years.

‘“They came like swallows and like swallows went,”' Sister Sarah quoted one evening. It was a fragment from a poem by Yeats,
referring
to Coole Park, a place not far from Liam's home, where the
legendary
Irish writers convened, Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, O'Casey, a host of others, leaving their mark in a place of growth, of bark, of spindly virgin trees. And in a way now Liam associated himself with this horde of shadowy and evasive figures; he was Irish. For that reason alone he had strength now. He came from a country vilified in England but one which, generation after generation, had
produced
genius, and observation of an extraordinary kind.

Sister Sarah made people do extraordinary things, dance, sing, boys dress as girls, grown men jump over one another like children. She had Liam festoon himself in old clothes, with paper flowers in his hat.

The story of the play ran like this:

Two Tinker families are warring. A boy from one falls in love with a girl from the other. They run away and are pursued by Liam who plays King of the Tinkers. He eventually finds them but they kill themselves rather than part and are buried with the King of the Tinkers making a speech about man's greed and folly.