Lark's Eggs (10 page)

Those like Tom, his brother-in-law, who hated him, resented
his presence. ‘I sat here once with Johnny,' Jimmy told Emily one day on the Connemara coast. ‘He said he needed something from life, something Ireland could not give him. So he went to the States.'

‘Wise man.'

‘But he was killed.'

‘We were the generation expecting early and lucid deaths,' he told Emily.

Yes. But Jimmy's death had been his parents' mortification with him, his friends' disavowal of him, Emily's silence in her eyes. He'd gone, dispirited, rejected. He'd gone, someone who'd deserted his own agony.

‘You're back,' Emily said to him cheerily. ‘That's the most
important
thing.'

His brother, George, came back from Brussels, a burly man in his forties.

He was cheerful and gangly at encountering Jimmy. He
recognized
integrity, recalled Jimmy reading him
The Happy Prince
, embraced the old man.

Over gin in Emily's he said, ‘The
EEC
is like everything else, boring. You'll be bored in Tokyo, bored in Brussels, bored in Dublin.' Emily saw that Jimmy was not bored.

In the days he walked through town, wondering at change, unable to account for it, the new buildings, the supermarkets. His hands were held behind his back. Emily often watched him, knowing that like de Valera he represented something of Ireland. But an
element
other than pain, fear, loneliness. He was the artist. He was the one foregone and left out in a rush to be acceptable.

They attended mass in the pro-cathedral. Jimmy knelt, prayed; Emily wondered, were his prayers sincere? She looked at Christ,
situated
quite near the mosaic of President Kennedy, asked him to leave Jimmy, for him not to return. She enjoyed his company as though that of an erstwhile lover.

Sheila threw a party one night.

The reasoning that led to this event was circumspect. George was home. He did not come home often. And when he did he stayed only a few days.

It was spring. The house had been spring-cleaned. A new carpet
now graced the floor. Blossom threatened; lace divided the carpet with its shadows.

All good reasons to entertain the local populace.

But deep in Sheila, that aggravated woman's mind, must have been the knowledge that Jimmy, being home, despite his exclusion from all ceremony, despite his rather nebulous circumstances, his
homecoming
had by some decree to be both established and celebrated.

So neighbours were asked, those who'd borne rumour of him once, those who rejected him and yet were only too willing to accept his legend, young teacher in love with blond boy, affair discovered, young teacher flees to the gutters of London, blond boy ends up in a head-on collision in Pacifica, a town at the toe of San Francisco, California.

The first thing Jimmy noticed was a woman singing ‘I Have Seen the Lark Soar High at Morn' next to a sombre ancient piano.

Emily had driven him from Galway, she beside him in a
once-in-a-lifetime
cape saw his eyes and the shadow that crossed them. He was back in a place which had rejected him. He had returned, bearing no triumph but his own humility. Emily chatted to Mrs Conaire and Mrs Delaney. To them, though a spinster, she was a highly erudite member of the community and as such acknowledged by her peers.

Emily looked about. Jimmy was gone. She thrust herself through the crowd and discovered Jimmy after making her way up a stairway hung with paintings of cattle-marts and islands, in a room by
himself
, the room in which he had once slept.

‘Jimmy.' He turned.

‘Yes.'

‘Come down.'

Like a lamb he conceded.

They walked again into the room where a girl aged seventeen sang ‘The Leaving of Liverpool'.

It was a party in the old style with pots of tea and whiskey and slender elegant cups.

George said, ‘It's great to see the country changing, isn't it? It's great to see people happy.'

Emily thought of the miles of suburban horror outside Galway and thought otherwise.

 Tom slapped Jimmy's back. Tom, it must be stated, did not desire this party, not at least until Jimmy was gone. His wife's
intentions
he suspected but he let it go ahead.

‘It's great having you,' he said to Jimmy, bitter and sneering from drink. ‘Isn't it you that was the queer fellow throwing up a good job for a young lad?'

Emily saw the pain, sharp, smitten, like an arrow.

She would have reached for him as she would have for a child smitten by a bomb in the North of Ireland but the crowd churned and he was lost from sight.

Tom sang ‘If I Had a Hammer'. Sheila, plagued by the social success of her party, wearing earrings like toadstools, sang ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco'.

A priest who'd eyed Jimmy but had not approached him sang ‘Lullaby of Broadway'.

George, Jimmy's young brother working in the
EEC
, got steadily drunker. Tom was slapping the precocious backsides of young women. Sheila was dancing attendance with cucumber sandwiches.  

Jimmy was talking to a blond boy who, if you stretched memory greatly, resembled Johnny Fogarthy.  

The fire blazed.  

Their parents might have turned in their grave, hating Jimmy their child because he was the best of their brood and sank the lowest.  

Emily sipped sherry and talked to neighbours about cows and sheep and daughters with degrees in medicine and foreign countries visited.  

She saw her brother and mentally adjusted his portrait, he was again a young man very handsome, if you like, in love in an idle way with one of his pupils.  

In love in a way one person gives to another a secret, a share in their happiness.  

She would have stopped all that was going to happen to him but knew that she couldn't.  

Tom, her brother-in-law, was getting drunker and viler.  

He said out loud, ‘What is it that attracts men to young
fellows
?' surprising Jimmy in a simple conversation with a blond boy.  

The party ceased, music ceased. All looked towards Jimmy,
looked away. The boy was Mrs McDonagh's son, going from one pottery to another in Ireland to learn his trade, never satisfied, always moving, recently taken up with the Divine Light, some
religious
crowd in Galway.

People stared. The image was authentic. There was not much sin in it but a lot of beauty. They did not share Tom's prejudice but left the man and the boy. It was getting late. The country was changing and if there had been wounds why couldn't they be forgotten?

Tom was slobbering. His wife attended him. He was slobbering about Jimmy, always afraid of that element of his wife's family, always afraid strange children would be born to him but none came anyway. His wife brought him to the toilet where presumably he got sick.

George, drunk on gin, talked about the backsides of secretaries in Brussels and Jimmy, alone among the crowd, still eloquent with drink, spoke to the blond teenager about circuses long ago.

‘Why did you leave Ireland?' the boy asked him.

‘Searching,' he said, ‘searching for something. Why did you leave your last job?'

‘Because I wasn't satisfied,' the boy said. ‘You've got to go on, haven't you? There's always that sense that there's more than this.'

The night was rounded by a middle-aged woman who'd once met Count John McCormack singing ‘Believe me if all those endearing young charms'.

On the way back into Galway Emily felt revered and touched by time, recalled Jimmy, his laughter once, that laughter more
subdued
now.

She was glad he was back, glad of his company and despite everything clear in her mind that the past was a fantasy. People had needed culprits then, people had needed fallen angels.

She said goodnight to Jimmy, touched him on the cheek with a kiss.

‘See you in the morning,' she said.

She didn't.

She left him asleep, made tea for herself, contemplated the spring sky outside.

She went to college, lectured on Celtic crosses, lunched with Mrs Carmichael, drove home in the evening, passing the sea, the
Dublin train sounding distantly in her head. The party last night had left a strange colour inside her, like light in wine or a reflection on a saxophone.

What was it that haunted her about it, she asked herself?

Then she knew.

She remembered Jimmy on a rain-drenched night during the War coming to the house and his parents turning him away.

Why was it Sheila had thrown the party? Because she had to requite the spirit of the house.

Why was it Jimmy had come back to the house? Because he needed to reassert himself to the old spirits there.

Why was it she was glad? Because her brother was home and at last she had company to glide into old age.

She opened the door. Light fell, guiltily.

Inside was a note.

‘Took the Dublin train. Thanks for everything. Love Jimmy.'

The note closed in her hand like a building falling beneath a bomb and the scream inside her would have dragged her into
immobility
had not she noticed the sky outside, golden, futuristic, the colour of the sky over their home when Easter was near and she a girl in white, not fat, beautiful even, walked with her brother, a boy in a sleeveless white jersey, by a garden drilled in daffodils, expecting nothing less than the best life could offer.

He lived in a little room in Shepherd's Bush. There was a bed for himself and above a little compartment for
visitors
. One climbed by ladder to this area. A curtain separated it from the rest of the room. It was this area he'd reserved for Moira.

Around the walls were accumulated Italian masterpieces, pieces of Titian, pieces of Tintoretto, arms by Caravaggio, golden and brusque. Dominating all was a Medici face by Botticelli. Above the fireplace a young man, stern, glassy eyes, his lips satisfied, his stare resigned to the darkness of the room, a darkness penetrated by the light of one window.

Jackie worked on a building site. He'd worked on one since he'd come over in February. Previously he'd been a chef in a café in
Killarney
, riding to and from work on a motorbike. But something made him go, family problems, spring, lust.

The room had been conveniently vacated by two Provisional Sinn Féin members from Kerry. He'd scraped Patrick Pearse from the wall. They were gone to another flat.

He'd risen early on mornings when Shepherd's Bush had been suffocated in cold white fog, a boy from Ireland hugging himself into a donkey jacket. He'd been picked up in a lorry, driven to diverse sites. Now the mornings were warm. Blue crept along the corners of high-rise flats, lingering bits of dawn. Jackie was enclosed
in a routine, last night's litter outside country and western pubs. Guinness bottles, condoms, the refuse of Ireland in exile. The work was hard but then there was Moira to think of. At odd moments when life was harsh or reality pressing her image veered towards him; as he sat in the lorry, tightening his fists in the pockets of his donkey jacket, as he sat over a mug of tea in the site office. Moira Finnerty was his sister, at present in a mental hospital in Limerick but shortly to be released. She was coming to London to stay with him.

Jackie and Moira had grown up on a lowly farm in the Kerry mountains. Their parents had been quiet, gruff, physically in love with one another until their sixties. A grandfather lived with them, always telling indecent stories. There'd been many geese, cows, a mare always looking in the direction of the ocean, a blizzard of gulls always blowing over the fields. Life had been hard. Jackie had gone to school in Killarney. Moira had attended a convent in Cahirciveen.

Jackie had peddled dope at fifteen in the jukebox cafés of
Killarney
. His first affair had been at sixteen with the daughter of a rich American businessman, sent to the convent in Killarney by way of a quirk. After all Killarney was prettier than Lucerne or Locarno and it was possessed of its own international community. Sarah was from Michigan, randy, blonde, fulsome. She'd always had money, a plethora of nuns chasing her. However, she'd avoided the nuns, sat in jeans, which always looked as though they were about to explode, in cafés, smoking French cigarettes, smattering the air with French fumes.

Sex for Jackie until now was associated with the sea; recalling Sarah he thought more of an intimacy with the sea, with beaches near Ballinskelligs, inlets with the spire of Skellig Michael in the
distance
, an odd mound in the sea where monks once sang ‘Deus Meus', the chants of Gaelic Ireland before Elizabethan soldiers sailed westwards on currachs.

Sarah had gone. There'd been many girls, Killarney was full of girls. He did his Leaving Certificate twice which led to nights lounging in cafés in Killarney, Valentine cards circulating from year to year, and one ice-cream parlour in Killarney where a picture of a Spanish poet stood alongside pictures of Powerscourt House, County Wicklow, and Ladies'View, Killarney, one tear dropping out
of his eye, rolling up in a little quizzical ball and a bullet wound in his head. It was an odd cartoon to show in a café but then the owners were Portuguese so one accepted the odd divergence more easily.

Jackie had gone to Dublin, worked on building sites, peddled dope; lived like a prince in Rathmines. However, the arm of the law fell upon him. He was imprisoned for six months, returned to Kerry. A good cook, he got a job in a café in a world of provincial Irish cafés, always the jukebox pounding out the bleeding heart of
provincial
Ireland, songs about long-distance lorry drivers and tragic deaths in Kentucky.

His sister emerged from convent school about this time, got a job in a hospital in Limerick. It was supposed to be temporary but she stayed there. Moira, when she hadn't been at school, had spent her adolescence wandering the hills about their home. There'd been few trees so one could always pick her out. She'd rarely gone to dances and when she had she'd always left early before the other girls, thumbing home.

They rarely spoke, but there was always something there, a mirror-like silence. Jackie saw himself in Moira, saw the inarticulate disparate things, a moment of high on an acid trip in Rathmines, a moment of love in a café in Killarney, a moment of reverie by the sea in Ballinskelligs. The West of Ireland for all its confusion was full of these things and it was these people Jackie veered towards, people who spoke a secret language like the Tinkers' Shelta.

You discerned sensitivity in people or you didn't. Jackie was an emotional snob. He was a snob in clothes, in cigarettes, in brands of dope even. But one thing he never minded was working and wending his way among the semi-literate.

Moira had spent two years in Limerick when she had an affair with an older married man. The usual. He made love to her, took every advantage of her shy, chubby body. Then returned to the
suburbs
. It was more than that which made Moira crack up. Her parents seemed content to leave her, not to expect anything remarkable of her. By solicitude they condemned her to a life of non-achievement.

Jackie had gone by the time Moira was put in the mental
hospital
in Limerick. Her face pressed on him. At first he thought to go back and rescue her. But he relied on time and patience. Moira was
to be let out in June. He wrote and asked her to come and stay with him. For a while.

Early June in Shepherd's Bush, the young of London walked along the street. Bottles flew. Bruce Lee continually played in the cinema. Irish country and western singers roared out with increasing desperation and one sensed behind the songs about Kerry and Cavan, mothers and luxuriant shamrock, the foetus of an unborn child urging its way from the womb of a girl over for a quick abortion.

Sometimes Jackie allowed himself to be picked up. He'd long lost interest sexually in women. The last girl he'd actually wanted to make love to had been in Dublin, a blonde who ran away to a group in California, mystical and foreign to the Irish experience. Walking in Shepherd's Bush was like walking among the refuse of other people's lives, many bins in the vicinity. He read many paperbacks. On colder days he lit fires in his room and sat over them like a Tinker. Above the door was a St Brigid's cross, which traditionally kept away evil. He'd bought it at the Irish tourist office in Bond Street. There was a desk in his room on which he wrote letters home. He thought of his mother with her giant chamber pot that had emerald patterns of foliage on it. She'd bought it in an antique shop in Listowel. He thought of his father, a randy look always in his eye. As children they'd hear their parents making love like people in far-off cities in a far-off time were supposed to. He could still distinguish his mother's orgasms, a cry in the air, a siren which was sublimated into the sound of a gull, the sound of a train veering towards Tralee.

They'd only had one another, he and Moira. They'd made the most of it.

Now he wrote to her. 

She arrived unexpectedly one morning. The doorbell exploded. He jumped up. Oddly enough he was on the upper tier. He'd gone up there for a change. He climbed down the ladder, went to the door.
He'd overslept. She was there, with two cases, scarf on her head, something more moderate about her face, less of the mysticism.

They kissed. Her breath smelt of Irish mints.

As there was no coffee he made her tea which they had on the floor. He was late for work but he decided to go anyway as he was on a nearby site. She'd sleep. He'd be back later. He bid her goodbye. She lay asleep in the upper bed. Before closing the door he looked around this den of loneliness. Moira's slip lay over a chair.

She had the room tidy when he returned and she herself looked refreshed, having bathed in the grotty bath with its reverential gas flame bursting into life. Her scent had changed. There were
perfumes
of two kinds of soap in it.

This time she made tea and they sat down. He didn't want to ask her about the mental hospital so instead he queried her about home. Moira didn't want to talk about home so instead she imparted gossip about
DJS
on Irish radio.

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.