Lark's Eggs (14 page)

No one questioned that it was too mournful a play for Christmas;
there were many funny scenes, wakes, fights, horse-stealing and the final speech, words of which flowed from Liam's mouth, had a beauty, an elegance which made young men from Roscommon who were accustomed to hefty Irish showband singers stop and be amazed at the beauty of language.

Towards the night the play was to run Sister Sarah became a little irritated, a little tired. She'd been working too hard, teaching during the day. She didn't talk to Liam much and he felt hurt and disorganized. He didn't turn up for rehearsal for two nights running. He rang and said he was ill.

He threw a party. All his former friends arrived and Marion's friends. The flat churned with people. Records smashed against the night. People danced. Liam wore an open-neck collarless white shirt. A silver cross was dangling, one picked up from a craft shop in Cornwall.

In the course of the party a girl became very, very drunk and began weeping about an abortion she'd had. She sat in the middle of the floor, crying uproariously, awaiting the arrival of someone.

Eventually, Liam moved towards her, took her in his arms, offered her a cup of tea. She quietened. ‘Thank you,' she said simply.

The crowds went home. Bottles were left everywhere. Liam took his coat, walked to an all-night café and, as he didn't have to work, watched the dawn come.

She didn't chastise him. Things went on as normal. He played his part, dressed in ridiculous clothes. Sister Sarah was in a lighter mood. She drank a sherry with Liam one evening, one cold December evening. As it was coming near Christmas she spoke of festivity in Kerry. Crossroad dances in Dún Caoin, the mirth of Kerry that had never died. She told Liam how her father would take her by car to church on Easter Sunday, how they'd watch the waters being blessed and later dance at the crossroads, melodious playing and the Irish fiddle.

There had been nothing like that in Liam's youth. He'd come from the Midlands, dull green, statues of Mary outside factories. He'd been privileged to know defeat from an early age.

‘You should go to Kerry some time,' Sister Sarah said.

‘I'd like to,' Liam said, ‘I'd like to. But it's too late now.'

Yet when the musicians came to rehearse the music Liam knew
it was not too late. He may have missed the West of Ireland in his youth, the simplicity of a Gaelic people but here now in London, melodious exploding, he was in an Ireland he'd never known, the extreme west, gullies, caves, peninsulas, roads winding into
desecrated
hills and clouds always coming in. Imagine, he thought, I've never even seen the sea.

He told her one night about the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 revolution, which had occurred before he left, old priests at school fumbling with words about dead heroes, bedraggled tricolours flying over the school and young priests, beautiful in the extreme, reciting the poetry of Patrick Pearse.

‘When the bombs came in England,' Liam said, ‘and we were blamed, the ordinary Irish working people, I knew they were to blame, those priests, the people who lied about glorious deeds.
Violence
is never, ever glorious.'

He met her in a café for coffee one day and she laughed and said it was almost like having an affair. She said she'd once fancied a boy in Kerry, a boy she was directing in
All My Sons.
He had bushy blond hair, kept Renoir reproductions on his wall, was a bank clerk. ‘But he went off with another girl,' she said, ‘and broke my heart.'

He met her in Soho Square Gardens one day and they walked together. She spoke of Africa and the States, travelling, the mission of the modern church, the redemption of souls lost in a mire of nonchalance. On Tottenham Court Road she said goodbye to him.

‘See you next rehearsal,' she said.

He stood there when she left and wanted to tell her she'd
awakened
in him a desire for a country long forgotten, an awareness of another side of that country, music, drama, levity but there was no saying these things.

When the night of the play finally arrived he acted his part well. But all the time, all the time he kept an eye out for her.

Afterwards there were celebrations, balloons dancing, Irish bankers getting drunk. He sat and waited for her to come to him and when she didn't rose and looked for her.

She was speaking to an elderly Irish labourer.

He stood there, patiently, for a moment. He wanted her to tell him about Christmas lights in Ireland long ago, about the music of
Ó Riada and the southern-going whales. But she persevered in speaking to this old man about Christmas in Kerry.

Eventually he danced with her. She held his arm softly. He knew now he was in love with her and didn't know how to put it to her. She left him and talked to some other people.

Later she danced again with him. It was as though she saw something in his eyes, something forbidding.

‘I have to go now,' she said as the music still played. She touched his arm gently, moved away. His eyes searched for her afterwards but couldn't find her. Young men he'd acted with came up and started clapping him on the back. They joked and they laughed. Suddenly Liam found he was getting sick. He didn't make for the lavatory. He went instead to the street. There he vomited. It was raining. He got very wet going home.

At Christmas he went to midnight mass in Westminster
Cathedral
, a thing he had never done before. He stood with women in mink coats and Irish charwomen as the choir sang ‘Come All Ye Faithful'. He had Christmas with an old aunt and at midday rang Marion. They didn't say much to one another that day but after Christmas she came to see him.

One evening they slept together. They made love as they had not for years, he entering her deeply, resonantly, thinking of Galway long ago, a river where they swam as children.

She stayed after Christmas. They were more subdued with one another. Marion was pregnant. She worked for a while and when her pregnancy became too obvious she ceased working.

She walked a lot. He wondered at a woman, his wife, how he hadn't noticed before how beautiful she looked. They were passing Camden Town one day when he recalled a nun he'd once known. He told Marion about her, asked her to enter with him, went in a door, asked for Sister Sarah.

Someone he didn't recognize told him she'd gone to Nigeria, that she'd chosen the African sun to boys in black jerseys. He wanted to follow her for one blind moment, to tell her that people like her were too rare to be lost but knew no words of his would convince her. He took his wife's hand and went about his life, quieter than he had been before.

She burned down half her house early that summer and killed her husband. He'd been caught upstairs. It was something she'd often threatened to do, burn the house down, and when she did it she did it quietly, in a moment of silent, reflective despair. She had not known he'd been upstairs. She'd put a broom in the stove and then tarred the walls with the fire. The flames had quickly explored the narrow stairway. A man, twenty years older than her, had been burned alive, caught when snoozing. Magella at his funeral seemed charred herself, her black hair, her pale, almost sucrose skin. She'd stooped, in numbed penitence. There was a
nebulous
, almost incandesced way her black curls took form from her forehead as there was about all the Scully girls. They made an odd band of women there, all the Scully girls, most of them respectably married. Magella was the one who'd married a dozy publican whose passion in life had been genealogy and whose ambition seemed
incapacitated
by this passion. She'd had a daughter by him. Gráinne. That girl was taken from her that summer and sent to relatives in Belfast. Magella was not interned in a mental hospital. The house was renovated. The pub reopened. People supposed that the shock of what she'd done had cured her and in a genuinely solicitous way
they thought that working in the pub, chattering to the customers, would be better for her than an internment in a mental hospital. Anyway there was something very final about internment in a mental hospital at that time in Ireland. They gave her a reprieve. At the end of that summer Boris came to the village.

Stacks of hay were piled up in the fields near the newly opened garage outside the village which he came to manage, little juggling acts of hay in merrily rolling and intently bound fields. All was smallness and precision here. This was Laois. An Ascendancy demesne. The garage was on the top of a hill where the one, real,
village
street ended, and located at a point where the fields seemed about to deluge the road. The one loss of sobriety in the landscape and heaviness and a very minor one. Boris began his career as garage manager by putting up flags outside the garage, and bunting, an American, an Italian, a French, a Spanish, a German and an Irish flag. He was half-Russian and he'd been raised in an orphanage in County Wexford in the south-eastern tip of Ireland.

Boris Cleary was thin, nervously thin, black-haired, a blackness smoothing the parts of his face which he'd shaved and the very first thing Magella noticed about him, on coming close, under the bunting, was that there was a smell from the back of his neck, as from wild flowers lost in the deep woods which lay in the immediate surroundings of the village. A rancid, asking smell. A smell which asked you to investigate its bearer. Magella, drawn by the rancid smell from the back of a nervous, thin neck, sought further details. She asked Boris about his Russianness which was already, after a few weeks, a rampant legend, over her counter. His father had been a Russian sailor, his mother a Wexford prostitute; he'd been dumped on the Sisters of Mercy. They had christened him and one
particular
nun had reared him, cackling all the time at this international irony, calling him ‘little Stalin'. Boris had emerged, his being, his presence in the world, had emerged from an inchoate night on a ship in the port of Wexford Town.

How a September night, the last light like neon on the gold of the cornfields, led so rapidly to the woods partly surrounding the village they later lost track of; winter conversations in the pub, glasses of whiskey, eventually glasses of whiskey shared, both their
mouths going to a glass, like a competition—a series of reciprocal challenges. Eventually, all the customers gone one night as they tended to be gone when Magella and Boris got involved in
conversation
, their lips met. An older woman, ascribed a demon by some, began having an affair with a young, slackly put-together man.

The woods in early summer were the culminative platform for their affair. These woods that were in fact a kind of garden for bygone estates. Always in the woods, oases, you'd find a garden house—a piece of concrete—a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Church of Ireland chapel. Much prayer had been done on these estates. Laois had particularly been a county in bondage. Now
rhododendrons
fulminated and frothed all over the place. And there were berries to admire, right from the beginning of the summer. They found a particular summer house where they made love on the cold, hard, almost penitential floor and soon this was the only place where they made love, their refuge.

In September, just over a year after Boris had come to the
village
, they got a taxi and visited Magella's daughter in Belfast. She lived off the Falls Road, in a house beside a huge advertisement on a railway bridge for the
Irish Independent
. Gráinne dressed in an odious brown convent uniform. She had long black hair. She looked at Boris. From the look in her eyes Magella afterwards realized she'd fallen in love with Boris at that meeting.

What were they flaunting an affair for? At first they were flaunting it so openly no one believed it was happening. Such things didn't happen in Laois in the 1950s. People presumed that the young Russian had taken a priestly interest in the older possessed woman. And when they brought their affair to Belfast, Boris in a very natty dark suit and in a tie of shining dark blue, a gaggle of relatives thought that there was something comic going on, that Magella had got a clown to chaperone her and prevent her from acts of
murderous
madness. They brought glasses of orange onto the street for the pair—it was a very sunny day—and oddly enough there was a spark of bunting on the street, the ordination of a local priest recently celebrated. A bulbous-cheeked, Amazon-breasted woman spluttered out a comment: ‘Sure he reminds me of the King of
England
.' She was referring to the King who'd resigned, the only member
of royalty respected in nationalist Belfast.

But behind the screen of all the presumptions—and it was a kind of smokescreen—something very intense, very carnal, very complex was going on. Magella was discovering her flesh for the first time and Boris was in a way discovering a mother. She'd always been the licentious one in her family but flailing her flesh around
cornfields
at night when she'd been young brought her no real pleasure. In the carnality, in love-making now, she'd found lost worlds of youth and lost—yes, inchoate—worlds of Russia. She was able to travel to Boris's origins and locate a very particular house. It was a house in a wood away from the dangers of the time. In this house she put Boris's forebears. In this house, in her sexual fantasies, she made love to Boris, his forebears gone and only they, random lovers, left in it, away from the dangers and the onslaught of the time. There was a
tumultuous
excitement about being lovers in a house in a wood with many dangers outside the borders of that wood. There was a titillation, a daring, and even a brusqueness about it. But those dangers eventually slipped their moorings in the world outside the wood.

Early in the second summer of their affair someone saw them making love in the summer house. A little boy. Tremulous though he later was about the event he was matter of fact enough to wait for a good view of Magella's heavy white thighs. He was the butcher's son. A picture was soon contrived all over the village, Magella and Boris in an act of love that had a Bolshevik ferocity. Killing your husband was one thing but making love to a young Russian was another. Within the month Magella was in a mental hospital.

The funny thing was that she'd had a premonition that all this was going to happen some weeks before the little boy saw them. Fondling some budding elderberries in the woods she remarked to Boris, looking back at the visible passage they'd made through the woods, that they, she and him, reminded her of the legendary Irish lovers, Diarmaid and Gráinne, who'd fled a king into the woods, feeding on berries. They'd invested Irish berries with a sense of doomed carnality, the berries which had sustained them, right down to the last morsels of late autumn. Here in these woods many of the berries had been sown as parts of gardens and it was difficult to
distinguish
the wild berries from the descendants of a Protestant bush—the 
loganberry, redcurrant, raspberry. These woods had been a testing ground for horticulture and parts of the woods had been cultivated at random, leaving a bed of mesmeric flowers, an apple tree among the wildness. Diarmaid and Gráinne would have had a ball here, Magella said. But for her and Boris the climate was already late autumn when the trees were withered of berries. Their days were up. She remembered the chill she'd felt at national school when the teacher had come to that part of the story of Diarmaid and Gráinne, reading it from a book which had an orange cover
luminous
as warm blood.

Boris tried to call on her in the mental hospital. He was
wearing
a suit. But there was a kind of consternation among nuns and nurses when they saw him—they weren't sure what to do—he stood, shouldering criminality, for a few minutes in the waiting room and then he turned on his heels and left. But there was a despatch from his childhood here. A statue of a frigid white Virgin as there'd been in the lounge of the orphanage. Magella had entered the house, all grey and fragmented with statues of Mary like falling crusts of snowflakes, of his childhood.

The years went by and the garage prospered. Gráinne came down from Belfast, having graduated from the convent. Her keen eye on Boris at their first meeting in Belfast led now, after all these years, to a romance. There'd been an unmitigated passion in between. Gráinne started walking out the roads with Boris, her hair cut short and the dresses of a middle-aged woman on her, dour, brown, her figure too becoming somewhat lumpy and, in a middle-aged way, becoming acquiescent. She was very soon linking Boris's arm. She and Boris went to see her mother who sat in a room in the mental hospital, a very quiet Rapunzel but without the long, golden hair of course. Boris, armed with Magella's daughter, was allowed in now. He approached Magella, who was seated, as if there'd been no
carnality
between them, as if he couldn't remember it, as though this woman was his mother and had been in a mother relationship with him. The affair with her, memory of it, had, in this Catholic village, evacuated his mind. Beside Gráinne he looked like a businessman, as someone who'd been operated on and had his aura of passion removed. He drooped, a lazily held puppet. There was a complete
change in him, a complete reorganization of the state of his being, a change commensurate with collectivization in Stalinist Russia. Only very tiny shards of his former being remained, littered on the railway tracks of it, the thoroughfare of it. He didn't so much deny Magella as hurt her with an impotent perception of her. At the core of her love-making with him there'd been a child searching for his mother and now, the memory of passion gone, there was only the truth of his findings. A mother. The mother of a weedy son at that. The rancid smell at the back of his neck had turned to a sickly-sweet one. But Magella still ached for the person who would be revived as soon as she got her hands on Boris again. That person tremored somewhere inside Boris, at the terribleness of her ability.

The romance between Boris and Gráinne lapsed and Gráinne went off to work in a beauty parlour in Bradford where relatives of her father lived. A few months after her departure, Boris—there'd been tiffs between them—repented of his irascibility in the weeks before her decision to leave and he went looking for her. He ended up beside a slime heap in Bradford, a house beside a slime heap, exiled Irish people. The beauty parlour was a few streets away. People in Bradford called Boris Paddy which further confused his sense of identity and he went home without resolving things with Gráinne to find Magella out of the mental hospital and having reopened the pub which Gráinne had tentatively opened for a while. Everything was ripe for a confrontation between them but Magella kept a quietness, even a dormancy in that pub for months until one night she raged out to the garage, wielding a broom, a like
instrument
to that of her husband's death. He met her at the door of his little house alongside the garage that was closed for the night. ‘You scut,' she said. ‘You took two dogs from me once and never gave them back.'True, Boris had taken two ginger-coloured, chalk cocker spaniels for his mantelpiece on the condition he'd return them when he found something suitable for the mantelpiece himself. ‘I want them back,' she said. He let her in. The dogs were there. She stood in front of him, not looking at the dogs. Where there had been black hair there was now mainly a smoke of grey. She stood in front of him, silently, broom inoffensively by her side, as if to show him the wreck of her being, a wreck caused by involvement with him. ‘Come
down for a drink some night,' she said and quietly went off.  

He did go down for a drink in her pub. He fiddled with drinks on the counter. Then Gráinne came back and Magella burned the whole house down, everything, leaving only a charred wreck of a house. She was put back into the mental hospital. There'd been no money left in the bank. Everything was squandered now and
everything
had been amiss anyway before Magella had burned the house down. Maybe that's why she'd burned the house down. But this wreck, this cavity in the street was her statement. It was her
statement
before Boris and Gráinne announced plans for marriage.  

What Gráinne did not know when she was earnestly proposed marriage to was that Boris and Magella had slipped away together for a honeymoon of their own in Bray, County Wicklow, the
previous
June. They stayed in a cascade of a hotel by the sea. The mountains, Bray Head, were frills on the sea. The days were very blue. Women walked dogs, desultory Russian émigrés in pinks,
purples
, with hats pushed down over their ears. You never saw their faces. Boris and Magella slept in the same room but in separate beds. There were rhododendrons on hills just over Bray and among the walks on those hills. Boris explained to Magella that she was the real woman in his life, at first a carnal one, then a purified, sublimated one. She'd been the one he'd been looking for. It was difficult for Magella to take this, that physical love was over in her life, but there was affirmation with the pain when she eventually burned down the house, on hearing of Boris's imminent marriage to Gráinne. She'd achieved something.