Lark's Eggs (5 page)

At Christmas they had the previous year's trees fished from
rubbish
dumps and they sang of the roads of Ireland and ancient days, bombs falling as they caroused without milk or honey.

He didn't come back one day and she searched London three days and three nights, passing rubble and mothers bemoaning their dead children until his body was found in a mortuary. She didn't curse Hitler or his land. She fell on her knees and splayed prayers and lamentation over his dead body as further sirens warned of bombs, and, as her body shaking with grief became young and hallucinatory,
imagining itself to be that of a girl in Connaught without problems.

They buried him in London. The McDonaghs and the Wards and the McLoughlins came and as it was winter there were only weeds to leave on his grave but the women shook with crying and the men pounded their breasts.

Above Eileen saw geese fly north.

She woke with tears in her eyes and she wiped them with
hospital
linen. Joe, Joe. My darling lover. Joe, Joe, where did you go, times when bombs were falling like bricks and little girls were lying in the rubble like china dolls.

She was leading woman of her tribe then. Her family gathering, hanging their washings like decorations.

At Christmas 1944 a duchess drove up with presents for the children. She had on a big hat of ermine grey and Eileen refused her gifts, knowing her kinsmen to have fought this aristocracy for nine hundred years and realizing she was being made a charity of. Once in Ballinasloe she'd known a lady who'd been a music hall artiste in London and who married the local lord. That lady had addressed her as her equal.

Eileen had had hair of purple and red then and she'd had no wish of charity. The lady of the house had found companionship in a girl living in a tent on the edge of her estate.

‘We'll go back to Ireland,' her son Seamus said at the end of the War.

Eileen hesitated. She was not sure. The last memories had been mangy. She and her family were English-dwelling now and they received sustenance for work done and they abided with the contrasts of this country.

She led her family north before deciding. Up by
Northumberland
and seeing a fleet of British planes flying over she decided on embarking.

The customs man glared at her as though she was an Indian.

‘Are you Irish, ma'am?' he said.

‘Irish like yourself,' she said.

He looked at her retinue.

‘Where were ye?' he said. ‘In a concentration camp?'

They travelled straight to Galway. Its meadows still were sweet
 but on the way men had looked crossly at them and women
suspiciously
. This was the land her parents had travelled. It had not even a hint of the country beset by famine. Cars were roaming like hefty bullocks and in Athenry as they moved off from Ballinasloe little Josephine Shields was killed.

A guard came to look at the crash.

‘I'm sorry,' he told Eileen. ‘But you can't be hogging these roads. Something like this has been bound to happen.'

They buried the little girl in Galway. There was a field of daisies nearby and Eileen's eyes rose from the ceremony to the sea spray and a hill where small men with banana bellies were playing golf.

I'm leaving this land, she told herself.

They journeyed back to Liverpool, erupting again on the face of England, germinating children like gulls. They moved north, they moved south and in Croydon, standing still, Eileen met Joseph Finnerty, half-Irish Tinker, half-French Gypsy by his mother's origin. They married within two months. He was thirty-nine. She was sixty-two. She was a good-looking woman still and welcomed his loins. Their marriage was celebrated by a priest from Swaziland and performed in Croydon. Tinkers came from Ireland, more to ‘gawp', said Eileen, and Gypsies, wild and lovely from France.

‘My family has broken from me like a bough,' said Eileen. ‘Now it's my turn for the crack.'

Men of ninety found themselves drunk as hogs in hedges about Croydon. A black priest ran among the crowd like a hunted hare and a young girl from Galway sang songs in Irish about deaths and snakes and nuns who fell in love with sailors.

Eileen looked at the London suburb as though at the sea.

‘I can return to Ireland now,' she said.

She brought him back and they travelled widely, just the two of them for a while.

She brought him back to old spots, Galway and the Georgian house where the gentry lived and the girl from the London music hall of the last century. They went to the sea and marvelled at the wayside contrasts of furze and rhododendrons in May.

Joseph played a tin whistle and there was dancing along the way
and singing and nights by high flames when a girl stepped out of Eileen like a ballerina.

‘The years have slipped off your face,' people told her. They went to a dance one night in Athenry where there was jazz music and they danced like the couples with the big bellies and the bouncing hair.

‘I'll take you to my mother's country now,' said Joseph, so off they went in a van that wheezed like a dying octogenarian through France.

They passed houses where they heard music the like Eileen could not understand, thrilling music, music of youth, music of a cosmos that had changed.

They passed war ruins and posters showing brazen women. They weaved through towns where summer lingered in February and rode hills where spring came like an onlooker, gazing at them with eyes of cherry blossom. They lingered on a mound of earth as they caught sight of a blue, blue sea.

They got out.

‘This is my real home,' Joseph said. ‘The Camargue. My
mother's
people came from here. This is the heart of the Tinkers' world. I was born here, of a father from Kerry and a mother from Saintes Maries de la Mer. I was gifted with second sight and feet that moved so I spent my first days in Ireland and saw the fighting and the flags and the falling houses and then I came back here and danced the wild dances and loved the strong women. From Marseilles I went south.' He pointed. ‘Over there is Egypt. I arrived there when I was
twenty-six
and from there my life flows. I recall the palm trees and the camels as though it was yesterday. I went there and understood, understood our people the world over, the Travelling people, men who moved before gods were spoken of, men who—who understood.'

‘We are of an ancient stock, my father used to say,' said Eileen. ‘We were here before St Patrick and will be when he's forgotten.'

‘Our secrets are the secrets of the universe,' said Joseph, ‘a child, a woman with child, a casual donkey. We are the sort that Joseph was when he fled with Mary.'

Sand blew into Eileen's eyes as she drank wine for the first time. In March she watched young men with long legs from Hungary ride
into the sea with red flags. It was the feast of St Sarah, patron saint of Gypsies.

They carried her statue like a bride betrothed to the sea and praised her with lecherous and lusty tongues.

The sea was already taking the shape of summer, a blue, blue sea.

‘In October they come again to celebrate,' Joseph explained. ‘They are faithful to their saints.'

She sat on sands where she drank bottles of wine and bottles of Coca-Cola and walked by the sea, which asked of her, ‘Is this folly?'

She wanted to go home. She wished like a child fatigued of fun to see Ireland again.

‘I'd like to take off soon,' she said to Joseph but she saw coming across his face a villainous look. He was drunk with red wine and wandering by the sea like an old man in Leenane. ‘I want to go,' she told herself, ‘I want to go.'

Summer edged in. She plucked wild flowers and wondered about her children and her children's children and asked herself if this her cup had not brimmed too high. ‘Was it all folly?' she demanded of herself. Was it a madness that drove people littler than herself into Ballinasloe mental hospital to enquire daily if they were saints or sinners? She began to wonder at her own sanity and placed wine bottles full of wild roses on the sands of Carmargue before crying out, ‘Am I going mad? Am I going mad?' They brought her first to a priest, then to a doctor in Marseilles. They left her alone in a white room for two days.

‘Joseph Finnerty I curse you,' she said. Then he came and took her and placed her on a horse and rode towards their caravans in Camargue. ‘We're going back to Ireland,' he said.

They arrived on a June morning and they set tracks to
Connaught
. The day was fine and on the way they heard that O'Rourke, king of the Tinkers, was dead. ‘You'll be the next king of the
Tinkers
,' Eileen said.

She arranged he fight Crowley his opponent in Mountshannon. Women stood by with Guinness and cider and children paddled among the fresh roses and geraniums. She saw her lover strip to the waist and combat a man his senior and she recalled her father's words, ‘Lucky is the man who wins ye.'

 This man over the others had won her.

She wrapped a shawl about her as they fought and fell to the ground. In the middle of combat her gaze veered from fight to lake where birds dropped like shadows. ‘I have travelled at last,' she said. ‘There's a hunger and a lightness returned to my body. A
grandmother
and mother I'm not no more but a woman.'

After Joseph fought and won they drove off to a pub pushing out from a clump of rhododendrons and celebrated.

‘Jesus, Mother,' said Mary. ‘Have you no sense?'

‘Sense I haven't but I have a true man and a true friend,' she said.

She was held in high esteem now and where she went she was welcomed. Age was creeping up on her but there were ways of sidling away from it.

She'd jump on a horse and race with Joseph. He was a proud man and faithful to her.

Also he was a learned man and conversed with school teachers.

In Cairo he'd had tuition from French Jesuits. He spoke in French and English and Romany and could recite French poets or Latin poets.

When it came to his turn at a feast he'd not play the whistle but sing a song in the French language.

Finally he grew younger before her eyes as she grew older. In France she'd fled because it was a bad match. Here there was nowhere to go.

It was lovely, yes, but her eyes were becoming criss-crossed like potato patches.

‘I have reached an age that leads towards the grave,' she wept to herself one evening, ‘I am an old banshee.' Joseph comforted her, not hearing, but maybe knowing.

She watched him bathe in the Shannon and knew he should be with a woman younger than her but that yet she loved him and would cut her throat for him. She saw in his eyes as he looked from the water the stranger that he was and the stranger that he was going to be.

In 1957 he fell from a horse in the fair green in Ballinasloe and was killed.

She remembered the curse on him in the South of France and knew it to have come true.

 She watched the flames burning and coaxing at the wake and recalled his words in France. ‘Our secrets are the secrets of the
universe
, a child, a woman with child, a casual donkey. We are the sort that Joseph was when he fled with Mary.'He was educated by French Jesuits and held comers in his tongue and twists in his utterances. He was a poet and a Tinker and a child of the earth.

She recalled the lady in the manor long ago who'd befriended her, to whom she'd go with bushels of heather on summer evenings.

Why was it that woman had been haunting and troubling her mind recently?

It had been so long since she'd known her yet she bothered her. Had it been warning of Joseph's death? All her life despite the fact she was just a Tinker she'd met strange people.

From the woman in the manor who'd asked her to tea one day, to the French Gypsy who'd become her lover as old age dawned upon her. He'd been the strangest of all, brown face, eyes that twinkled like chestnuts in open pods. Yes, he'd been a poet as well as a lover. He'd been of the earth, he'd gone back to it now. He'd possessed the
qualities
of the unique like the cockney music-hall girl who'd attracted the attention of an Irish peer and came to live in a manor, finding a friend in a Tinker from a hovel of tents and caravans.

She watched the flames dance and saw again the white horses of Camargue, flurrying in uncertain unison, and would have walked into the fire ablaze had someone not held her and comforted her and satiated her as her moans grew to the sound and shape of seals in bays west of Ballinasloe.

‘Eileen wake up. Do you know what's happened? They've killed an old man.'

Eileen looked at her daughter. ‘Who?'

‘Tinker lads.'

Eileen stared. So death had come at last. They'd killed an old man. ‘May they be cursed,' she said, ‘for bringing bad tidings on our people. May they be forsaken for leaving an old way of life, for doing what no Travelling people have ever done before.'

As it happened the old man was not dead. Just badly beaten up.

Some Tinkers had gone to rob him, took all and hit him with a delft hot-water jar.

 ‘The Travellers have already gone from the green.'

‘Ballinasloe fair week without the Tinkers,' Eileen said. ‘What a terrible sight the green must be.'

She saw more Tinkers than she'd ever seen before.

They came like apostles as a priest rummaged with broken words.

‘Is it dying you think I am? Well, it's not dying I am,' said Eileen.

She saw five children like the seven dwarfs. ‘These too will grow to drink cider outside the Gresham in Dublin,' she thought, as
candles
lit and the priest talked about the devil.

Her great-grandson Owen was living with a rich American woman in an empty hotel in Oughterard. ‘What next?'

Her head sunk back.

She saw Joseph again and the flames and wanted again to enter but knew she couldn't. She woke.