Lark's Eggs (19 page)

My children looked as students put up barricades. The state was coming. Charred beams stuck out where the winos' house had been. The battering of hammers went on through the night. The local population of prostitutes, students, heroin merchants was threatened with eviction. The house I shared with Raymond was the only one without barricades. The state was welcome. We knew all about the state.

‘Blood, blood in the gutters, blood on white-washed house fronts. Blood on an old lady's handbag. She looked at her bag with sudden disapproval as if the only appropriate thing was that it should fly away. The blood encircled her feet. It eddied under her. She started to scream and then I tried to scream and I couldn't and I woke and I found a rat peering out a hole with much curiosity at me.' Raymond was rambling. There was still an odd quiet hammer
going. I'd brought him cocoa. I'd brought it right to his lips. A candle threw panoramic shadows in an Edwardian room. I'd had dreams like that as a girl in Mayo. I'd woken, gone to a window, tried to throw myself out. There seemed no returning from a state of madness. You had broken forever with the laws of logic. The laws that govern and make up everyday living. You had crossed some border into a hell. I suddenly looked into Raymond's pale blue eyes—they were the same colour as the walls in parts of this house—and saw he had broken forever with the logic that governs everyday living and sustains even the vaguest cohesion of a will for everyday survival.

Mícheál, hands behind his back, in a short blue coat, on a black and white day stood beside the charred beams of the winos' house; I went out to retrieve him from a photograph of Leningrad after the siege I'd seen in a book in Maida Vale library.

‘Something's drumming in my head. Something's beating it in. I don't own it anymore. It's not mine. Once when I felt like this I used think of my granny as a girl in a red tartan skirt—she kept evil away—but it doesn't work any more. I'll have to think of something different. I can't. I'll think of you, Mary.'

Mary was preparing for Christmas; she was travelling to the perimeter of her mind, shores in West Mayo where mountains were hidden in the evening reflections. Mary in a yellow ochre cardigan began to say a kind of prayer, a prayer different from the ones she was taught. She said prayers for her children, for Raymond. She grappled again for words that were sacred as a child. London revived the glint of evening on mother-of-pearl beads. She found things she thought she had lost forever; it was Advent in London and mistletoe was brought for rides on the Circle line. A black man holding mistletoe opposite her as the tube was drawing towards Westbourne Park told her to cheer up, that Christmas was coming. She looked at him. She had not been doleful. She'd been thinking of anterooms of her existence darkened for years and now lighted by a strange and probing grey light.

Raymond became nervous, shivering. He carried trays about him with teapots on them. He began to act like a manservant, bringing tea to me as I lay in bed on Saturday mornings—the bed had been
transported in from a skip by four friendly West Indians. ‘Leave it there,' I'd ordered him. Then I'd search out his face. Every day I looked into it I saw something new crashing in it.

‘I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell you something. But I couldn't find the words. Words are strange aren't they? They've declared a war on my words. They've tried to take my vocabulary from me.'

The state did not come. The state did not show much interest as yet in the decrepit houses. Students hitched home for Christmas. Prostitutes put their legs up and watched their little yelping
TV
s.

‘I wanted to tell you something. I wanted to tell you something. I wanted to tell you something.' Raymond managed to scream one night but when I tried to put my arms about him he began
shuddering
; he did not want me to hold him.

Why wasn't he hitching home for Christmas? Why was I
devoting
so much time to him? I started becoming annoyed with the idea of him. There were some days I wanted to shake him but I was restrained by the presence of a dream: a boy in white and a girl in a red tartan skirt. This house was one I'd visited before. I was familiar with its rooms as I was familiar with its pain; I had come to relieve some of the pain from its big old walls.

Shortly before Christmas a new woman arrived on the street and she made speeches outside at night about the coming of doom; the judgment; the nuclear bomb. She was from Wexford. Somehow forebodings of the nuclear bomb got mixed up one night as she stood in the middle of the road with her autobiography. She was a Protestant. Her father was a vicar in Wexford. Someone had given her a large bottle of whiskey for Christmas and she raised it in the air and shouted, ‘Does anyone have any holly? I'm itchy.'

I didn't see Raymond much before Christmas. I was working hard. London, its sea of Christmas, swept about me. Nigerian girls sang carols outside St Martin-in-the-Fields. I wanted to stop and thank them but the crowd was too thick and too onward rushing.

Two days before Christmas a boy in white who looked the image of Raymond passed. His face was tanned. He'd obviously been South. He was all in white except for an Afghan coat. He passed a bird who was snipping at a whole packet of white sliced
bread thrown out into a dustbin.

‘Hello. How are you?' I entered Raymond's room. He was just sitting there, saying nothing. ‘Well Merry Christmas.' Christmas was a day off. Raymond did not want to talk and I closed the door, saying, ‘We'll all be having turkey tomorrow night.'

I pushed around London that day; I floated on the crowd, I had no more shopping to do but I just wanted to be part of this
intimacy
. I belonged now, I was a member of this metropolis and I wanted to share with the crowd the day before Christmas.

Where do Cormac Fitzmaurices and drunk vicars' daughters go for Christmas? There was no one on the street that night. Just a youth passed. A pink chiffon scarf around his neck and his hands enveloped in his pockets and his head worriedly bent over.

I didn't go to midnight mass. With the children I stood at the window and looked in the direction of the church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven in Queensway. I knew I would not be going home again, except for their funerals, not for their marriages. ‘Leave father, mother, sisters, brothers, and come follow me.'The half-remembered text of Christ in my mind. I had crossed a border now. There was no going back. My appearance had changed. My face had changed. I had no need of mother or father or sisters or brothers. Or husband. They'd tried to do me in. This city, this unkind sprawl, had given me back a modicum of self-respect and had pointed me on a road again. In the middle of the family-planning clinics and the abortion
stopping
points Christ was tucked into his crib in a church where winos snoozed and snortled now during midnight canticles.

I'd never been a very extravagant cook but I'd bought the
Times
cookbook and in its pages found the most elaborate Christmas dishes.

Sugar glazed gammon.

Slow roast turkey with chestnut stuffing.

Duchesse potatoes.

Purée of Brussels sprouts.

Apricots with brandy and cream.

Plum pudding with brandy butter.

And something called ‘the bishop' on which we all got merry. Hot port with sugar, cloves, lemon and mixed spice.

Raymond in a three-piece dark suit I'd picked up for him hid 
and spluttered with laughter behind a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau. A fire blazed obligingly. I was wearing a white sleeveless blouse I'd presented to myself for Christmas. Daddy Christmas had
abandoned
ruminative toys under the Christmas tree. Wooden lorries from Norway. Dolls from Tibet. A reproduction of a Michelangelo print was now tacked uncertainly on the wall, Christ in the nude, rising. Mícheál bawled out a song in the Irish language. Tibby gave us a nursery rhyme in an English accent. Tomás yelled that he wanted more turkey after the final helping of the pudding. In our state of merriment we had party games and party games led to a play
Raymond
and I did together.

He took off his suit and played me, putting on a dress. I put on his suit. The children loved it. My whole life had been waiting for a play. There'd always been an imminent play. The mass. Ragged, scrawny pageants at school. To perform, to dramatize, the need to do these things, was always in my nature. This was an improvisation. There were no ready-made lines. But the script had been arranged.

Raymond: ‘Well now, Mr. What's it you're after?'

Me: ‘A nice young lady.'

Raymond: ‘Haven't you found one yet?'

Me: ‘I've been looking in all kinds of places. I fell in love with a nun but she up and slipped away when she was in my arms. She left a holy medal though.'

The children howled with laughter. But there was also another play taking place.

I have met you before in another time. This city brings other times, past lives together. I know your face. You're part of a shared guilt. We did it together.

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.

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 been 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.