Lark's Eggs (23 page)

As they neared Wells-next-the-Sea the sky, towards evening, had almost cleared and there were a few white clouds in it—like defeated daisies.

People in the car were mumbling, conversations were going on. Suddenly Miles wanted to go back to Walsingham.

‘Mammy.'

Rose's shadow departed through the back door after her. Miles should have known there was something funny about her going that day. In fact he did know. Memory
consolidated
that fact. Rose's shadow writhed off a yellowy picture showing military-shouldered women in white, straw hats on their heads, holding bicycles, in some Edwardian wood of the Dublin mountains.

‘And the queer thing is that Gabrielle knew Marty years before in Kiltimagh.'

Rose was in a Chinese restaurant in Walsingham with the two immigrants who were originally from Mayo. They'd discovered they had an acquaintance in common; a partisan in this tide of menial, immigrant Irish labour. Rose had encountered her in a hotel room once where the carpets had been rolled up after some
VIP
visitors had spent a lengthy stay. The room, grandiose in proportions, was being renovated. Rose did not know what to dwell on, the
conversation
with the two odd men or the drama of the encounter years before. Her concentration ultimately flitted between the figment of now and the thought of then. This caused an almost clownish
agitation
in her features.

‘She had the devil of a temper.'

‘Oh yes, she'd flare up at you like a snake.'

‘There was cuddling in her though.'

‘You dirty …'

Rose's mind had fled the banter between the two men. A woman in a hotel room in London years before, a blue workcoat on her, a conversation, commiseration, companionship then for a few months. But some family tragedy had brought the women back to Ireland and then Rose never saw her again; no more Friday evenings over a candle-lit, hard-as-a-horseshoe pizza in Hammersmith.

‘Go on out of that. Don't be disparaging a woman's reputation. She's not around to defend herself.'

Rose's mind had drifted. She could see the sea, the grey sea such as it was piled up, a mute and undemonstrative statement, around Dublin and longed for it as though it had the confessional's power of absolution.

 Miles stumbled by the sea. A few boats there, backs up. Now it was grey again, an overall grey. Walking done, the group went to a seaside café.

Words, they're my story, they're my life. Here by the sea, dusk, the jukebox going, Dusty Springfield, ‘I just don't know what to do with myself', no song of mine on the jukebox. Chips, a boy, already tanned, looking from behind the counter,
mystically
, a Spaniard's or a Greek's black moustache on him. I'll make another song, another story. Stories will get me by, words, won't they, won't they? The stage, the lights, the mammoth audience. Is this a Nazi dream of power?

Today the religion they tried to kill. My religion. Remember when Peader and I went to the Church of the English Martyrs in Tyburn and we, privately, consecrated our
marriage
there on the site where the head of Oliver Plunkett, the Irish martyr, was chopped off, the nuns all singing, white on them. What will it be like to be dead?—back in that dream of a hymn sung in unison by nuns in white where Irish bishops in the long ago met their deaths.

 Lally went obsessively, again and again, to the jukebox, standing over it, putting on more songs as though lighting candles in a bed of church candles. Midsummer dusk was out there, the strangeness of it. A woman soon to die looked at it. Lally's backside was very blue.

Loneliest of all was Miles, the stranger here, the one picked up and talked to as if being picked up was favour enough or as if he was supposed to sit in silent wonderment. He was an oddity from the sea of fans. He was an orphan among these people who, in a strange, unknowing way, patronized him.

The strangeness, the awkwardness became more evident as the number of coffees coming to the table
multiplied
, each set of coffees being ushered in more frenetically than the last. No one told their story aloud or was asked to.

Rose, though, was telling her story very loudly indeed not many miles away. Sweet and sour chicken, a plate
of it, went by as she got to the part about leaving Ireland. Her immediate listeners were enthralled but their wonderment was more at how gauche exiles very often hid the most amazing secrets, how they hid horror, terror and great magnitudes of sin—incest,
homosexuality
, lesbianism, prostitution, now, rare enough, nymphomania. England dusted off the sins and made people just foolish—just foolish Irish folk.

‘The child? The little lad?'

‘Sure he's grown now. He wouldn't want to see me.'

O Mother of God, Star of the Sea, pray for us, pray that we find loved ones. Someone's limbs to get caught up with in a mildly comfortable bed.

Lally remembered, from childhood, a Sacred Heart picture over the bed of a dying, bald uncle, a gay uncle who had a festive chamber pot under his deathbed, a chamber pot with crocks of gold running around it. Before
AIDS
was invented, that uncle seemed to be dying of something like
AIDS
. Or maybe merely an overdose of failure, an
overdose
of incohesion. His version of Ireland didn't merge with England.

The harvest fields of Clare didn't get him by here: England scoured him. England debilitated him. England killed his spirit and then killed him. But not before he carried on a kind of maudlin homosexuality. The white hands of a corpse Lally saw, a rosary entwined in them, had been lain on his genitalia when he was a child, a St Stephen's Day Christmas tree behind the merry lecher, other people gone to bed.

Ireland kicked up such stories like sand in your feet on a beach: Ireland was so full of sadness. Ireland fed itself into Lally's songs now. They came out, these stories, renewed, revitalized, pop songs for a generation who swayed and sometimes jived to them and couldn't be unnerved by them.

Star of the Sea, pray for the wanderer, pray for me. Lally's
blue-shirted
wrist wrestled with a bottle of Coke now. He was on to Coke. And he being the pop star, everyone watched the movement of his wrist, everybody's attention had gone to his wrist in alarm,
people realizing that they'd been neglecting Lally for a while and that his wrist was telling them so.

And despite resenting him a little maybe they were glad for the coherence he gave to something of their lives. Even to death.

‘Beach at Brighton, Baby-death.' Áine was looking at her brother in stillness now, not in anger or resentment.

As stars came out they walked on the beach. Lally tried to identify the stars in the sky. The Walsingham Way? Next week he'd be in California. By the Pacific. Watching the sky of stars over the Pacific. But he'd take something from here. Pointers to his mother's life and death. Ellie too saw her life and death in the stars tonight. A constellation of stars like a constellation of wheat fields in County Clare. ‘A time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.' Áine saw London classrooms in the sky, children of many races, rivers of children's faces. Miles, away from the group, dissociated from it, didn't look at the stars but poked the sea with a stick.

‘Goodbye to yis all now.' Drunk,
unpilgrim-like
, Rose tottered out of a pub near the Chinese restaurant in
Walsingham
, looking behind at a constellation of lights in the window of that pub that might have distinguished it as a brothel if it had been in a city. The lovers stood at the door, goodbyes in their eyes. They were bent on returning, getting
stociously
drunk and staying the night in Walsingham. A bus would take Rose home. Her hair down on her shoulders she was a manifestation of Irishness in her dowdy coat. Her back stooped a little: she was an aged pilgrim. The
successive
pilgrimages were gradations, demarcations of age. But there was a wicked youthfulness about the way she stepped on the bus and turned around, shouting back to the men who hadn't yet gone back into the pub. ‘Up Mayo.' Bandy knees afar twitched in response to her salutation: two Mayo bachelors looked suddenly spectral, looked
like a vision in a wash of white light from a turning car. Then they were gone, gone into the album.

In the middle of summer in
Wells-next-the-Sea
there would be boys with faces pugnaciously browned by sun, boys whose crotches would be held in by aerial blue jeans, battalions of these boys unleashed on the place and their eyes, the explosive look in their eyes, turning the nights into a turmoil. Boats would be lined up on the beach. Lanes would meander down to the beach as they did now. The jukeboxes would be more active. England would come here to be loved, ladies from Birmingham, factory boys, boys with backsides tight and fecund as plums. This is where England would take a few weeks off, the boring country of England becoming carnal, becoming daring, becoming poetic. Caution and pairs of cheap nylon stockings would be thrown to the nervy summer breezes. The grey would go for a few weeks, making room for a blue that visited the place from the deep Mediterranean.

Ellie would be dead in July. Her funeral would be in West London on a very hot day. Áine would cry more than anybody. Lally would be silent, a pop star in black and white, no tie, white
fin de siècle
shirt spaciously open in the cemetery. There'd be a red rose in his black lapel. The sun would be gruesomely hot. Áine would be crying for a country she never really knew, a country for which her red hair was an emblem.

Miles would start losing his soul that summer, if soul you could call it; his sensitivity, vulnerability, belief in something.
Walsingham
and Wells-next-the-Sea would have been the last stops for his openness. After that, though still in media terms outrageously beautiful, he'd start becoming hard, calculating, eyes, those brown eyes of his, focused on attainment. All he'd want to do would be to be a star and oblivionize, kill anything else in him. There'd be no sign of Rose in this Italian suit dolled-up boy.

Rose let herself in the hall door. 14
Bolingbroke
Road, Shepherd's Bush, London. Inside the light wasn't working. The smell of urine came from the first-floor toilet. She was a little drunk still. Her drunken form merged with the darkness. The smell of urine was aquatic in the air the further she walked in. But the darkness was benign to her. It shrouded her unhappiness, the unhappiness which had suddenly come on her in the bus as she remembered what she'd been trying to forget for years, what she'd been successfully putting Walsingham between it and her for years. Now pilgrimages, trips to Walsingham, the cabbalistic charades of them and the inexact hope they gave off didn't work any more and all she could see, right in front of her, was the greyness, the no-hope, the lethargy land of
it

The lights of a motorway going back to London and the lights rearing up at you, daisy trails of them. Four silent people in the car, one sleeping, the strange boy, a phrase coming to Lally's head as he drove, a phrase he wouldn't use in a song, an unwelcome phrase even. It came from a prayer of his mother's he remembered from childhood.

‘And after this our exile.'

Ella was an Italian woman whose one son had been maimed in a fight and was now permanently in a
wheelchair
, still sporting the char-black leather jacket he'd had on the night he'd been set upon. Ella's cream waitress outfit seemed to tremble with vindication when she spoke of her son's assailants. ‘I'll get them. I'll get them. I'll shoot them through the brains.' The formica white walls listened. Chris's thoughts were set back that summer to Sister Honor.

The lake threw up an enduring desultory cloud that summer—it was particularly unbudging on Indiana Avenue—and Chris sidled quickly by the high-rise buildings which had attacked Mrs Pajalich's son. Sister Honor would have reproached Ella with admonitions of forgiveness but Chris saw—all too clearly—as she had in Sister Honor's lucid Kerry-coast-blue eyes the afternoon she informed her she was reneging on convent school for state high school that Sister Honor would never forgive her, the fêted pupil, for reneging on a Catholic education for the streams of state
apostacy
and capitalistic indifference. Chris had had to leave a Catholic environment before it plunged her into a lifetime of introspection. She, who was already in her strawberry and black check shirt,
orientated
to a delicate and literary kind of introspection. Sister Honor's last words to her, from behind that familiar desk, had been
‘Your vocation in life is to be a martyr.'

The summer before university Chris worked hard—as a
waitress
—in a cream coat alongside Mrs Pajalich. Beyond the grey
gravestone
citadels of the city were the gold and ochre cornfields. At the end of summer Chris would head through them—in a Greyhound bus—for the university city. But first she had to affirm to herself, ‘I have escaped Sister Honor and her many mandates.'

Ella Pajalich would sometimes nudge her, requesting a bit of Christian theology, but inevitably reject it. Ella had learnt that Chris could come out with lines of Christian assuagement. However, the catastrophe had been too great. But that did not stop Ella, over a jam pie, red slithering along the meringue edges, from pressing Chris for an eloquent line of heaven-respecting philosophy.

Rubbing a dun plate that was supposed to be white Chris
wondered
if heaven or any kind of Elysium could ever touch Ella's life; sure there were the cherry blossoms by the lake in a spring under which she pushed her son. But the idea of a miracle, of a
renaissance
, no. Mrs Pajalich was determined to stick the café bread knife through someone. If only the police officer who allowed his poodle to excrete outside her street-level apartment. Ella had picked up the sense of a father of stature from Chris and that arranged her
attitude
towards Chris; Chris had a bit of the Catholic aristocrat about her, her father an Irish-American building contractor who held his ground in windy weather outside St Grellan's on Sunday mornings, his granite suit flapping, a scarlet breast-pocket handkerchief leaping up like a fish, his black shoes scintillating with his youngest son's efforts on them and his boulder-like fingers going for another
voluminous
cigar. ‘Chris, you have the face of fortune. You'll meet a nice man. You'll be another Grace Kelly. End up in a palace.' Chris saw Grace Kelly's face, the tight bun over it, the lipstick like an even scimitar. She saw the casinos. Yes she would end up living beside casinos in some mad, decadent country, but not Monaco, more likely some vestige of Central or South America.

‘Chris, will you come and visit me at Hallowe'en?'The dreaming Chris's face was disturbed. ‘Yes, yes, I will.'

Summer was over without any great reckoning when Sister Honor and Chris slid south, through the corn, to a city which rose
over the corn, its small roofs, its terracotta museums by the clouded river, its white Capitol building, a centrepiece like a Renaissance city.

Sister Honor had imbibed Chris from the beginning as she would a piece of revealing literature; Chris had been established in class as a reference point for questions about literary complexities. Sister Honor would raise her hand and usher Chris's attention as if she was a traffic warden stopping the traffic. ‘Chris, what did Spenser mean by this?' Honor should have known. She'd done much work in a university in Virginia on the poet Edmund Spenser; her passion for Spenser had brought her to County Cork. She'd done a course in Anglo–Irish literature for a term in Cork University. Red Irish buses had brought her into a countryside, rich and thick now, rich and thick in the Middle Ages, but one incandesced by the British around Spenser's time. The British had come to wonder and then destroy. Honor had come here as a child of five with her father, had nearly forgotten, but could not forget the moment when her father, holding her hand, cigar smoke blowing into a jackdaw's mouth, had wondered aloud how they had survived, how his ancestry had been chosen to escape, to take flight, to settle in a town in the Midwest and go on to creating dove-coloured twentieth-century skyscrapers.

Perhaps it had been the closeness of their backgrounds that had brought Chris and Honor together—their fathers had
straddled
on the same pavement outside St Grellan's Catholic Church, they'd blasted the aged and lingering Father Duane with smoke from the same brand of cigars. But it had been their ever-probing interest in literature which had bound them more strongly than the aesthetic of their backgrounds—though it may have been the
aesthetic
of their backgrounds which drove them to words. ‘
Vocabularies
were rich and flowing in our backgrounds,' Sister Honor had said. ‘Rich and flowing.' And what did not flow in Sister Honor she made up for in words.

Many-shaped bottoms followed one another in shorts over the verdure around the white Capitol building. The atmosphere was one of heightened relaxation; smiles were 1950s-type smiles on girls in shorts. Chris found a place for herself in George's bar. She counted the lights in the constellation of lights in the jukebox and put on a song for Sister Honor. Buddy Holly. ‘You Go Your Way and I'll Go
Mine'. A long-distance truck driver touched her from behind and she realized it was two in the morning.

She had imagined Sister Honor's childhood so closely that sometimes it seemed that Sister Honor's childhood had been her childhood and in the first few weeks at the university—the verdure, the sunlight on white shorts and white Capitol building, the fall, many-coloured evening rays of sun evoking a primal gust in her—it was of Sister Honor's childhood she thought and not her own. The suburban house, hoary in colour like rotten bark, the Maryland farm she visited in summer—the swing, the Stars and Stripes on the
verdant
slope, the first-or second-edition Nathaniel Hawthorne books open, revealing mustard, fluttering pages like an evangelical announcement. In the suburbs of this small city Chris saw a little girl in a blue crinoline frock, mushrooming outwards, running towards the expectant arms of a father. Red apples bounced on this image.

Why had she been thinking of Sister Honor so much in the last few months? Why had Sister Honor been entering her mind with such ease and with such unquestioning familiarity? What was the sudden cause of this tide in favour of the psyche of a person you had tried to dispose of two years beforehand? One afternoon on Larissa Street Chris decided it was time to put up barriers against Sister Honor. But a woman, no longer in a nun's veil, blonde-haired, hair the colour of dried honey, still tried to get in.

Chris was studying English literature in the university—in a purple-red, many-corridored building—and the inspection of works of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature again leisurely evoked the emotion of the roots of her interest in literature, her inclination to literature, and the way Sister Honor had seized on that interest and so thoughts of Sister Honor—in the context of her study of literature—began circulating again. Sister Honor, in her mind, had one of the acerbic faces of the Celtic saints on the front of St Grellan's, a question beginning on her lips, and her face lean, like a greyhound's, stopped in the act of barking.

‘Hi, I'm Nick.'

‘I'm Chris.'

A former chaperon of nuclear missiles on a naval ship, now studying Pascal, his broad shoulders cowering into a black leather
jacket, accompanied Chris to George's bar one Saturday night. They collected others on the way, a girl just back from the People's Republic of China who said she'd been the first person from her country to do a thesis at Harvard—hers was on nineteenth-century feminist writers. George's bar enveloped the small group, its low red, funeral-parlour light—the lights in the window illuminating the bar name were both blue and red.

Autumn was optimistic and continuous, lots of sunshine; girls basked in shorts as though for summer; the physique of certain girls became sturdier and more ruddy and brown and sleek with sun. Chris found a tree to sit under and meditate on her background, Irish Catholic, its sins against her—big black aggressive limousines outside St Grellan's on Sunday mornings unsteadying her childhood devotions, the time they dressed her in emerald velvet, cut in
triangles
, and made her play a leprechaun, the time an Irish priest showed her his penis under his black soutane and she'd wondered if this was an initiation into a part of Catholicism—and her deliverance from it now. The autumn sun cupped the Victorian villas in this town in its hand, the wine-red, the blue, the dun villas, their gold coins of autumn petals.

Chris was reminded sometimes by baseball boys of her acne—boys eddying along the street on Saturday afternoons, in from the country for a baseball match—college boys generally gave her only one to two glances, the second glance always a curious one as she had her head down and did not seem interested in them. But here she was walking away from her family and sometimes even, on special
occasions
, she looked straight into someone's eyes.

What would Sister Honor have thought of her now? O God, what on earth was she thinking of Sister Honor for? That woman haunts me. Chris walked on, across the verdure, under the Capitol building beside which cowboys once tied their horses.

The Saturday-night George's bar group was deserted—Nick stood on Desmoines Street and cowered further into his black leather jacket, muttering in his incomprehensible Marlon Brando fashion of the duplicity of the American government and armed forces—Chris had fallen for a dance student who'd raised his right leg in leotards like a self-admiring pony in the dance studio. The plan to seduce him
failed. The attempted seduction took place on a mattress on the floor of his room in an elephantine apartment block which housed a line of washing machines on the ground floor that insisted on shaking in unison in a lighted area late into the night, stopping sometimes as if to gauge the progress of Chris's and her friend's lovemaking. In the early stages of these efforts the boy remembered he was a homosexual and Chris remembered she was a virgin. They both turned from one another's bodies and looked at the ceiling. The boy said the roaches on the ceiling were cute. Chris made off about three in the morning in a drab anorak, blaming Catholicism and Sister Honor, the autumn river with its mild, off-shooting breeze leading her home. Yes, she was a sexual failure. Years at convent school had ensured a barrier between flowing sensuality and herself. Always the hesitation. The
mortification
. Dialogue. ‘Do you believe we qualify, in Martin Buber's terms, for an I-thou relationship, our bodies I mean?' ‘For fuck's sake, my prick has gone jellified.'

Chris knew there was a hunch on her shoulders as she hurried home; at one stage, on a bend of the river near the road, late,
home-going
baseball fans pulled down the window of a car to holler
lewdnesses
at her. She's never been able to make love—‘Our bodies have destinies in love,' Sister Honor rhetorically informed the class one day—and Chris had been saving her pennies for this destiny. But tonight she cursed Sister Honor, cursed her Catholicism, her Catholic-coated sense of literature and most of anything Sister Honor's virginity which seemed to have given rise to her cruelty. ‘Chris, the acne on your face has intensified over Easter. It is like an ancient map of Ireland after a smattering of napalm.' ‘Chris, your legs seem to dangle, not hold you.' ‘Chris, walk straight, carry
yourself
straight. Bear in mind your great talent and your great
intelligence
. Be proud of it. Know yourself, Chris Gormley.' Chris knew herself tonight as a bombed, withered, defeated thing. But these Catholic-withered limbs still held out hope for sweetening by another person.

Yes, that was why she'd left convent school—because she
perceived
the sham in Sister Honor, that Sister Honor had really been fighting her own virginity and in a losing battle galled other people and clawed at other people's emotions. Chris had left to keep her
much-attacked identity intact. But on leaving she'd abandoned Sister Honor to a class where she could not talk literature to another pupil.

Should I go back there sometime? Maybe? Find out what Honor is teaching. Who she is directing her attentions to. If
anybody
. See if she has a new love. Jealousy told Chris she had not. There could never have been a pair in that class to examine the Ecclesiastes like Honor and herself—‘A time of war, and a time of peace.' Chris had a dream in which she saw Honor in a valley of vines, a biblical valley, and another night a dream in which they were both walking through Spenser's Cork, before destruction, by birches and alders, hand in hand, at home and at peace with Gaelic identity and Gaelic innocence or maybe, in another interpretation of the dream, with childhood bliss. Then Sister Honor faded—the
nightmare
and the mellifluous dream of her—the argument was over. Chris settled back, drank, had fun, prepared for autumn parties.