Lark's Eggs (15 page)

In Bray before they used to go to sleep Boris would light a candle in the room and sit up in bed thinking. ‘What are you thinking of?' she asked. But he'd never answered. Nuns in Wexford, gulls streaming over an orphanage, poised to drop for crusts of bread on a grey playing area, sailors on the sea, migrations on foot by
railroads
in Russia, heavy sun on people in rags, a grandmother pulling a child by the hand, the only remaining member of her family.  

‘You've got to go through one thing to get to the other,' Boris said sagely as he sat up in bed one night, the lights still on,
impeccable
pyjamas of navy and white stripes on him which revealed a bush of the acrid black hair on his chest, he staring ahead, zombie-like.

 In this statement he'd meant he'd gone through physical love with Magella to fish up a dolorous, muted ikon of a Virgin, of the untouchable but all-protecting woman. To get this holy protection from a woman you had to make her untouchable, sacred. For the rest of his life Magella would provide the source of sanity, of resolve, of belief in his life. She was the woman who'd rescued him from the inchoate Wexford night.

Magella was, of course, pleased to hear this but still restive. She did not sleep well that night. She longed, despite that
statement
, to have Boris, his nimble legs and arms, his pale well of a crotch, in her bed.

The marriage took place in July the following year. There was a crossroads dance the night before a mile or two outside the village. Rare enough in Ireland at that time, even in West Kerry and in
Connemara
, they still happened in this backwater of County Laois. People stepped out beside a few items of a funfair, a few coloured lights strung up. An epic, a tumultous smell of corn came from the fields. A melodion played the tune ‘Slievenamon'. ‘My love, o my love, will I ne'er see you again, in the valley of Slievenamon?' Lovers sauntered through the corn. Magella was packing her things in the mental hospital to attend the wedding the following day.

On their second last day in Bray, by the sea, he'd suddenly hugged her and she saw all the mirth again in his face and all the dark in his hair. An old man nearby, his eye on them, quickly wound up a machine to play some music. There was a picture of Sorrento on a funfair caravan, pale blue lines on the yellow ochre caravan, cartoon Italian mountains, cartoon-packed Italian houses, cartoon operatic waves. Magella had looked to the sea, beyond the straggled funfair, and seen the blue in the sea which was tangible, which was ecstatic.

Magella danced with Boris at the wedding reception. She was wearing a brown suit and a brown hat lent to her by her sister in Tihelly, County Offaly. She looked like an alcoholic beverage, an Irish cream liqueur. Or so a little boy who'd come to the wedding thought. She danced with him in a room where ten-pound notes, twenty-pound notes and, of course, many five-pound notes were pinned on the walls as was the custom at weddings in Ireland. The little boy had come a long way that morning. His granny, on the
other side of his family, whom he called on on the way, in her little house, had given him a box of chocolates that looked like a navy limousine. He still had it now as he watched Boris and Magella dance, the couple, a serenity between them, an understanding. They'd been looking for different things from one another, their paths had crossed, they'd gone different ways but in this moment they created a total communion, a total marriage, an understanding that only a child could intuit and carry away with him, enlightened, the notes on the walls becoming Russian notes with pictures of Tsars and dictators and people who'd changed epochs on them, the walls burning in a terrible fire in the child's mind until only a note or two was left, a face or two, sole reminders of an enraptured moment in history.

At such moments the imagination begins and someone else, someone who did not live through the events, remembers and, later, counts the pain.

A little boy walked away from the wedding, box of chocolates still under his arm, not wanting to look back at the point where a woman was dragged away, screaming, at a certain hour, to a solitary room in a mental hospital.

Years later he returned, long after Magella's death in the
mental
hospital, to the woods, at the time of year when rhododendrons spread there. He bent and picked up a decapitated tiara of
rhododendron
. There was a poster for Paris in the village, a Chinese
restaurant
run by a South Korean, a late night fish-and-chip takeaway. The garage was still open at the top of the village. The only change was that Boris had put up a Russian flag among the others. It was his showpiece. He'd gotten it from the Legion of Mary in Kilkenny who'd put on a show about imprisoned cardinals behind the Iron Curtain. But it was his pride. It demonstrated, apart from his roots, the true internationalism of the garage. There were no boundaries here. A bald man, lots of children scampering around him for years, would come out to fill your car and his face would tell you these things, a brown, anaemic work coat on him, a prosperous but also somewhat cowed grin on his face.

At her funeral in 1959 Boris had carried lilies, and there, in the graveyard, thought of his visit to Bradford, the exiled Irish there, a
cowed, depressed people, the legacy of history, and of the woman who'd tried to overthrow that legacy, for a while. He'd put the lilies on the grave, Magella's lover, no one denying that day the exact place of the grief in his heart.

Everybody walked away except the boy and Boris and then Boris walked away, but first looking at the boy, almost in annoyance, as if to say, you have no right to intrude on these things, flashing back his black hair and throwing a boyish, almost a rival's look from his black eyes that were scarred and vinegary and blazingly alive from tears. In those eyes was the wound, the secret, and the boy looked at it, unreproached by it.

Years later he returned to find that there was no museum to that wound, only a few brightly painted houses, a ramshackle
cramming
of modernity. He took his car and drove out by the garage and the bunting and the flags to the fields where you could smell the first, premature coming of the epic, all-consuming,
wound-oblivionizing
harvest.

Our mad aunts, the young man thought, our mad selves.

Lady of Laois, ikon from this incumbent, serf-less, but none the less, I expect, totally Russian storybook blinding harvest, pray for the night-sea, neon spin-drift, jukebox-beacon café wanderer.

The Forty Steps led nowhere. They were grey and wide, shadowed at the sides by creeper and bush. In fact it was officially declared by Patsy Fogarthy that there were forty-four steps. These steps were erected by an English landlord in memorial to some doubtful subject. A greyhound, a wife? If you climbed them you had a view of the recesses of the woods and the places where Patsy Fogarthy practised with his trombone. Besides playing—in a navy uniform—in the brass band Patsy Fogarthy was my father's shop assistant. While the steps were dark grey the counter in my father's shop was dark and fathomless. We lived where the town men's Protestant society had once been and that was where our shop was too. And still is. Despite the fact my father is dead. My father bought the house, built the shop from nothing—after a row with a brother with whom he shared the traditional family grocery-
cumbar
business. Patsy Fogarthy was my father's first shop assistant. They navigated waters together. They sold silk ties, demonstrating them carefully to country farmers.

Patsy Fogarthy was from the country, had a tremendous welter of tragedy in his family—which always was a point of distinction—deranged aunts, a paralysed mother. We knew that Patsy's house—cottage—was in the country. We never went there. It was just a picture.
And in the cottage in turn in my mind were many pictures—
paintings
, embroideries by a prolific local artist who took to embroidery when she was told she was destined to die from leukaemia. Even my mother had one of her works. A bowl of flowers on a firescreen. From his inception as part of our household it seems that Patsy had allied himself towards me. In fact he'd been my father's assistant from before I was born. But he dragged me on walks, he described linnets to me, he indicated ragwort, he seated me on wooden benches in the hall outside town opposite a line of sycamores as he puffed into his trombone, as his fat stomach heaved into it. Patsy had not always been fat. That was obvious. He'd been corpulent, not fat. ‘Look,' he said one day on the avenue leading to the Forty Steps—I was seven—‘a blackbird about to burst into song.'

Patsy had burst into song once. At a St Patrick's night concert. He sang ‘Patsy Fagan'. Beside a calendar photograph of a woman at the back of our shop he did not sing for me but recited poetry. ‘The Ballad of Athlone'. The taking of the bridge of Athlone by the Williamites in 1691 had dire consequences for this area. It implanted it forevermore with Williamites. It directly caused the Irish defeat at Aughrim. Patsy lived in the shadow of the hills of Aughrim.
Poppies
were the consequence of battle. There were balloons of defeat in the air. Patsy Fogarthy brought me a gift of mushrooms once from the fields of Aughrim.

Patsy had a bedding of blackberry curls about his cherubic face; he had cherubic lips and smiled often; there was a snowy sparkle in his deep-blue eyes. Once he'd have been exceedingly good-looking. When I was nine his buttocks slouched obesely. Once he'd have been as the man in the cigarette advertisements. When I was nine on top of the Forty Steps he pulled down his jaded trousers as if to pee, opened up his knickers and exposed his gargantuan balls. Delicately I turned away. The same year he tried to put the same penis in the backside of a drummer in the brass band, or so trembling, thin members of the Legion of Mary vouched. Without a murmur of a court case Patsy was expelled from town. The boy hadn't
complained
. He'd been caught in the act by a postman who was one of the church's most faithful members in town. Patsy Fogarthy crossed the Irish Sea, leaving a trail of mucus after him.

 I left Ireland for good and all 11 October 1977. There'd been many explanations for Patsy's behaviour: an aunt who used to have fits, throwing her arms about like seven snakes; the fact he might really have been of implanted Williamite stock. One way or the other he'd never been quite forgotten, unmentioned for a while, yes, but meanwhile the ecumenical movement had revived thoughts of him.

My mother attended a Protestant service in St Matthias's church in 1976. As I left home she pressed a white, skeletal piece of paper into my hands. The address of a hospital where Patsy
Fogarthy
was now incarcerated. The message was this: ‘Visit him. We are now Christian (we go to Protestant services) and if not forgiven he can have some alms.' It was now one could go back that made people accept him a little. He'd sung so well once. He smiled so cheerily. And sure wasn't there the time he gave purple Michaelmas daisies to the dying and octogenarian and well-nigh crippled Mrs Connaughton (she whose husband left her and went to America in 1927).

I did not bring Patsy Fogarthy purple Michaelmas daisies. In the house I was staying in in Battersea there were marigolds. Brought there regularly by myself. Patsy was nearby in a Catholic hospital in Wandsworth. Old clay was dug up. Had my mother recently been speaking to a relative of his? A casual conversation on the street with a country woman. Anyway this was the task I was given. There was an amber, welcoming light in Battersea. Young deer talked to
children
in Battersea Park. I crept around Soho like an escaped prisoner. I knew there was something connecting then and now, yes, a piece of paper, connecting the far-off, starched days of childhood to an adulthood which was confused, desperate but determined to make a niche away from family and all friends that had ensued from a middle-class Irish upbringing. I tiptoed up bare wooden stairs at night, scared of waking those who'd given me lodging. I tried to write to my mother and then I remembered the guilty conscience on her face.

Gas works burgeoned into the honey-coloured sky, oblivious of the landscape inside me, the dirty avenue cascading on the Forty Steps.

‘Why do you think they built it?'

‘To hide something.'  

‘Why did they want to hide something?'  

‘Because people don't want to know about some things.'  

‘What things?'  

Patsy had shrugged, a fawn coat draped on his shoulders that day.  

‘Patsy, I'll never hide anything.'  

There'd been many things I'd hidden. A girlfriend's abortion. An image of a little boy inside myself, a blue and white striped
T-shirt
on him. The mortal end of a relationship with a girl. Desire for my own sex. Loneliness. I'd tried to hide the loneliness, but Dublin, city of my youth, had exposed loneliness like neon at evening. I'd hidden a whole part of my childhood, the 1950s, but hitting London took them out of the bag. Irish pubs in London, their jukeboxes, united the 1950s with the 1970s with a kiss of a song. ‘Patsy Fagan'. Murky waters wheezed under a mirror in a pub lavatory. A young man in an Italian-style duffle coat, standing erect, eddied into a little boy being tugged along by a small fat man.  

‘Patsy, what is beauty?'  

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.'  

‘But what is it?'  

He looked at me. ‘Pretending we're father and son now.'  

I brought Patsy Fogarthy white carnations. It was a sunny
afternoon
early in November. I'd followed instructions on a piece of paper. Walking into the demesne of the hospital I perceived light playing in a bush. He was not surprised to see me. He was a small, fat, bald man in pyjamas. His face and his baldness were a carnage of reds and purples. Little wriggles of grey hair stood out. He wore maroon and red striped pyjamas. He gorged me with a look. ‘You're—' I did not want him to say my name. He took my hand. There was death in the intimacy. He was in a hospital for the mad. He made a fuss of being grateful for the flowers. ‘How's Georgina?' He called my mother by her first name. ‘And Bert?' My father was not yet dead. It was as if he was charging them with something. Patsy Fogarthy, our small-town Oscar Wilde, reclined in pyjamas on a chair against the shimmering citadels of Wandsworth. A white nun infrequently scurried in to see to some man in the corridor. ‘You
made a fine young man.' ‘It was the band I missed most.' ‘Them were the days.' In the middle of snippets of conversation—he sounded not unlike an Irish bank clerk, aged though and more
graven-voiced
—I imagined the tableau of love. Patsy with a young boy. ‘It was a great old band. Sure you've been years out of the place now. What age are ye?' ‘Twenty-six.' ‘Do you have a girlfriend? The
English
girls will be out to grab you now!' A plane noisily slid over Wandsworth. We simultaneously looked at it. An old, swede-faced man bent over a bedside dresser. ‘Do ya remember me? I used to bring you on walks.' Of course, I said. Of course. ‘It's not true what they said about us. Not true. They're all mad. They're all lunatics. How's Bert?' Suddenly he started shouting at me. ‘You never wrote back. You never wrote back to my letters. And all the ones I sent you.' More easy-voiced he was about to return the flowers until he suddenly avowed. ‘They'll be all right for Our Lady. They'll be all right for Our Lady.' Our Lady was a white statue, over bananas and pears, by his bed.

It is hot summer in London. Tiger lilies have come to my door. I'd never known Patsy had written to me. I'd never received his letters of course. They'd curdled in my mother's hand. All through my adolescence. I imagined them filing in, never to be answered. I was Patsy's boy. More than the drummer lad. He had betrothed himself to me. The week after seeing him, after being
virtually
chased out of the ward by him, with money I'd saved up in Dublin, I took a week's holiday in Italy. The trattorias of Florence in November illumined the face of a young man who'd been Patsy
Fogarthy
before I'd been born. It's now six years on and that face still puzzles me, the face I saw in Florence, a young man with black hair, and it makes a story that solves a lot of mystery for me. There's a young man with black hair in a scarlet tie but it's not Patsy. It's a young man my father met in London in 1939, the year he came to study tailoring. Perhaps now it's the summer and the heat and the
picture
of my father on the wall—a red and yellow striped tie on him—and my illimitable estrangement from family but this city creates a
series of ikons this summer. Patsy is one of them. But the sequence begins in the summer of 1939.

Bert ended up on the wide pavements of London in the early summer of 1939. He came from a town in the Western Midlands of Ireland whose wide river had scintillated at the back of town before he left and whose handsome facades radiated with sunshine. There were girls left behind that summer and cricket matches. Bert had decided on the tailoring course after a row with an older brother with whom he'd shared the family grocery-cum-bar business. The family house was one of the most sizeable on the street. Bert had his eyes on another house to buy now. He'd come to London to forge a little bit of independence from family for himself and in so doing he forwent some of the pleasures of the summer. Not only had he left the green cricket fields by the river but he had come to a city that exhaled news bulletins. He was not staying long.

He strolled into a cavern of death for behind the cheery faces of London that summer was death. Bert would do his course in Cheapside and not linger. Badges pressed against military lapels, old dishonours to Ireland. Once Bert had taken a Protestant girl out. They sailed in the bumpers at the October fair together. That was the height of his forgiveness for England. He did not consider playing cricket a leaning to England. Cricket was an Irish game, pure and simple, as could be seen from its popularity in his small, Protestant-built town.

Living was not easy for Bert in London; an Irish landlady—she was from Armagh, a mangy woman—had him. Otherwise the broth of his accent was rebuffed. He stooped a little under English
disdain
, but his hair was still orange and his face ruddy in fragments. By day Bert travailed; a dusty, dark cubicle. At evenings he walked. It was the midsummer that made him raise his head a little.

Twilight rushing over the tops of the trees at the edge of Hyde Park made him think of his dead parents, Galway people. He was suddenly both proud of and abstracted by his lineage. A hat was vaunted by his red hands on his waist. One evening, as perfumes and colours floated by, he thought of his mother, her tallness, her
military
posture, the black clothes she had always been stuffed into. In marrying her husband she declared she'd married a bucket. Her face looked a bit like a bucket itself.

 Bert had recovered his poise. The width of his shoulders breathed again. His chest was out. It was that evening a young man wearing a scarlet tie stopped and talked to him under a particularly dusky tree by Hyde Park. ‘You're Irish,' the young man had said. ‘How do you know?' ‘Those sparkling blue eyes.'The young man had worn a kind of perfume himself. ‘You know,' he said—his accent was very posh—‘there's going to be a war. You would be better off in Ireland.' Bert considered the information. ‘I'm here on a course.' Between that remark and a London hotel there was an island of nothing.
Masculine
things for Bert had always been brothers pissing, the spray and the smell of their piss, smelly Protestants in the cricket changing rooms. That night Bert—how he became one he did not know—was a body. His youth was in the hands of an Englishman from Devon. The creaminess of his skin and the red curls of his hair had attained a new state for one night, that of an angel at the side of the Gothic steeple at home. There was beauty in Bert's chest. His penis was in the fist of another young man.

Marriage, children, a drapery business in Ireland virtually
eliminated
it all but they could not quite eliminate the choice colours of sin, red of handkerchiefs in men's pockets in a smoky hotel lounge, red of claret wine, red of blood on sheets where love-making was too violent. In the morning there was a single thread of a red hair on a pillow autographed in pink.