Lark's Eggs (12 page)

Liam paused.

‘Well, it's an alternative.'

His father didn't respond, thinking of nationalistic, comradely Irish schoolteachers long ago. Nothing could convince him that the discipline of the old style of education wasn't better, grounding children in basic skills.

 Silence somehow interrupted a conversation, darkness deep around them, the water of the floods shining, reflecting stars.

Liam said goodnight. Liam's father grunted. Susan already lay in bed. Liam got in beside her. They heard a bird let out a scream in the sky like a baby and they went asleep.

Gerard woke them in the morning, strumming a guitar.

St Stephen's Day, mummers stalked the street, children with blackened faces and a regalia of rags collecting for the wren. Music of a tin whistle came from a pub, the town coming to life. The river shone with sun.

Susan divined a child dressed like old King Cole, a crown on her head and her face blackened. Gerard was intrigued. They walked the town. Mrs Fogarthy had lunch ready. But Liam was worried, deeply worried. His father lay above, immersed in the past.

Liam had his past, too, always anxious in adolescence, running away to Dublin, eventually running away to England. The first times home had been odd; he noticed the solitariness of his parents. They'd needed him like they needed an ill-tended dog.

Susan and he had married in the local church. There'd been a contagion of aunts and uncles at the wedding. Mrs Fogarthy had prepared a meal. Salad and cake. The river had not been in flood then. In England he worked hard. Ireland could so easily be
forgotten
with the imprint of things creative, children's drawings, oak trees in blossom. Tudor cottages where young women in pinafores served tea and cakes home made and juiced with icing.

He'd had no children. But Gerard now was both a twin, a child, a lover to him. There were all kinds of possibility. Experiment was only beginning. Yet Ireland, Christmas, returned him to something, least of all the presence of death, more a proximity to the prom, empty laburnum pods and hawthorn trees naked and crouched with winter. Here he was at home with thoughts, thoughts of himself, of adolescence.

Here he made his own being like a doll on a miniature globe. He knew whence he came and if he wasn't sure where he was going, at least he wasn't distraught about it.

They walked with his mother that afternoon. Later an aunt came, preened for Christmas and the imminence of death. She enjoyed the
tea, the knowledgeable silences, looked at Susan as though she was not from England but a far-off country, an Eastern country hidden in the mountains. Liam's father spoke to her not of 1916 but of policemen they'd known, irascible characters, forgetting that he had been the most irascible of all, a domineering man with a wizened face ordering his inferiors around.

He'd brought law. He'd brought order to the town. But he'd failed to bring trust. Maybe that's why his son had left.

Maybe that's why he was pondering the fate of the Irish
revolution
now, men with high foreheads who'd shaped the fate of the Irish Republic.

His thoughts brought him to killings now being done in the name of Ireland. There his thoughts floundered. From where arose this language of violence for the sake and convenience of violence?

Liam strode by the prom alone that evening, locked in a
donkey
jacket.

There were rings of light around distant electric poles.

He knew his father to be sitting up in bed; the policeman he'd been talking about earlier gone from his mind and his thoughts on 1916, on guns, and blazes, and rumination in prison cells long ago.

And long after that thoughts on the glorification of acts of
violence
, the minds of children caressed with the deeds of violence.

He'd be thinking of his son who fled and left the country.

His son now was thinking of the times he'd run away to Dublin, to the neon lights slitting the night, of the time he went to the river to throw himself in and didn't, of his final flight from Ireland.

He wanted to say something, urge a statement to birth that would unite father and son but couldn't think of anything to say. He stopped by a tree and looked to the river. An odd car went by towards Dublin.

Why this need to run? Even as he was thinking that, a saying of his father returned: ‘Idleness is the thief of time.'That statement had been flayed upon him as a child but with time as he lived in England among fields of oak trees that statement had changed; time itself had become the culprit, the thief.

And the image of time as a thief was forever embroiled in a
particular
ikon of his father's, that of a pacifist who ran through Dublin
helping the wounded in 1916, was arrested, was shot dead with a deaf and dumb youth. And that man, more than anybody, was Liam's hero, an Irish pacifist, a pacifist born of his father's revolution, a pacifist born of his father's state.

He returned home quickly, drew the door on his father. He sat down.

‘Remember, Daddy, the story you told me about the pacifist shot dead in 1916 with a deaf and dumb youth, the man whose wife was a feminist?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, I was just thinking that he's the sort of man we need now, one who comes from a revolution but understands it in a different way, a creative way, who understands that change isn't born from
violence
but intense and self-sacrificing acts.'

His father understood what he was saying, that there was a
remnant
of 1916 that was relevant and urgent now, that there had been at least one man among the men of 1916 who could speak to the present generation and show them that guns were not diamonds, that blood was precious, that birth most poignantly issues from restraint.

Liam went to bed. In the middle of the night he woke
muttering
to himself, ‘May God have mercy on your soul,' although his father was not yet dead, but he wasn't asking God to have mercy on his father's soul but on the soul of Ireland, the many souls born out of his father's statelet, the women never pregnant, the cruel and
violent
priests, the young exiles, the old exiles, those who would never come back.

He got up, walked down the stairs, opened the door of his father's room. Inside his father lay. He wanted to see this with his own eyes, hope even in the persuasion of death.

He returned to bed.

His wife turned away from him but curiously that did not hurt him because he was thinking of the water rising, the moon on the water, and as he thought of these things the geese clanked over, throwing their reflections into the water grazed with moon which rimmed this town, the church towers, the slate roofs, those that slept now, those who didn't remember.

His mother sat over the fire warming her palms. She stared, merely stared. Colours furiously froze and spat.

She sat in blue. Her hair now was tinged with grey but still held a marmalade colour; right now it was brightened and delighted with flame. She sat pondering her own beauty. He stood by the door,
lingering
, waiting for her to notice him but she didn't, she continued to stare, continued to ponder, continued to absorb.

‘Mother.' She turned. ‘Damian.' She was not surprised to see him. ‘How are you?'‘Well.' He lay down his books. ‘Tired?' ‘No.' She moved towards the table. ‘I have duckling. I hope you don't mind it being a bit burnt.'

He sat down, ate.

‘Well, how's it going?'

‘Well.'

Two months at art school he was already frittering his time.

Bored, he was drawing nudes without much conviction.

His career was chequered to say the least. His mother's need to move had caused his childhood to be a stream of cities, nucleus of colours, white of desert sands, neon of downtown New York. His mother had been an original New Yorker, a model in the 1940s until she met an Irish poet who fathered him. The poet had died early, of drink. His marriage had been unperturbed by the affair. A woman
had mourned him, his wife. Damian's mother had nourished her own grief quietly, first in New York, then in a variety of places, passing among the rich and the famous.

He'd been sent to school first in Marrakesh, then in Scotland in a free school.

Out of school six months he'd begun at art school, his mother settled now, less than serene, in a London apartment. She hung a picture of herself over the fireplace, one in which the world could see her as pretty. It was a reproduction of a painting by an eminent modern artist housed in a New York art gallery. In the painting her neck swung towards her nape like a swan's neck. Her eyes rang with laughter. Her face was thin and pinched and her lips smote the vision like a paper rose.

‘Damian, did you have a good day?' ‘

‘Yes.'Then he said, ‘No. No I didn't.'

He went to bed early reading Chekhov, sleeping with it on his chest.

The first time he met her was in November. She was late coming to the school, an Irish art teacher. She was about thirty-two, had black hair, carved like a Cretan. ‘She was pretty,' Damian thought to himself. New York expressions still in his head, American gentleness.

She taught him to paint. She hovered across his figure, staring downwards. He enjoyed her closeness and often wondered at her face, being Irish it should have spoken of violence.

Instead it was calm—like the Book of Kells, which Damian had once seen in Dublin, lying open in Trinity College.

She was from Connemara. The name sung in Damian's ears. His father had lived there, a father he'd never met, just heard about.

‘Hi.' He spoke to her one day in the canteen. She approached, looking through him almost.

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 had 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.'