Lark's Eggs (16 page)

When my father opened his drapery business he ran it by
himself
for a while but on his marriage he felt the need for an assistant and Patsy was the first person who presented himself for the job. It was Patsy's black hair, his child's lips, his Roman sky-blue eyes that struck a resonance in my father. Patsy came on an autumn day. My father was reminded of a night in London. His partnership with Patsy was a marital one. When I came along it was me over my brothers Patsy chose. He was passing on a night in London. The young man in London? He'd worn a scarlet tie. My father specialized in ties. Patsy wore blue and emerald ones to town dos. He was
photographed
for the
Connaught Tribune
in a broad, blue, black-speckled one. His shy smile hung over the tie. Long years ago my mother knew there was something missing from her marriage to my father—all the earnest hot-water jars in the world could not obliterate this
knowledge. She was snidely suspicious of Patsy—she too had
blackberry
hair—and when Patsy's denouement came along it was she who expelled him from the shop, afraid for the part of her husband he had taken, afraid for the parcel of her child's emotions he would abduct now that adolescence was near. But the damage, the violation had been done. Patsy had twined my neck in a scarlet tie one sunny autumn afternoon in the shop, tied it decorously and smudged a patient, fat, wet kiss on my lips.
 

For the week they were in town each year they changed the quality of life in the town; everybody submitted to them, shopkeepers, bankers, the keepers of the law. There was a
certain
light-headedness in puritans and moral flexibility in bigots. They were the players, the people who came to town, performers of the works of Shakespeare ever since the distant, Eamon de Valera mists of the 1930s.

The Mahaffy family gave their name to the players and Ultan Mahaffy commandeered the players. He looked much frailer than before in October 1958 when they came to town; one local woman, a businessman's wife in a perennial scarf, referred to him, in passing, in a conversation on the street as looking now ‘like a sickly
snowdrop
'. Ultan Mahaffy should have been happy because 1958 was the first year his only son Cathal had played in the plays since he'd been assigned the roles of little princes, doomed to be smothered, when he was a child. Cathal had rebelled against the artistic aurora of his family and fled this emanation when he was seventeen to work as a mechanic in a factory in Birmingham. On his return you could see what a strange-looking lad he was: when he had been a child it had been suppressed in him, squashed down, but now he was an
albino-like
twenty-two-year-old, the whites of his eyes pink roses, the chicken bones of his pale chest often exposed by a loose shirt, his
hair shooting up, a frenetic cowslip colour.

This mad-looking creature had been given the parts of Laertes in
Hamlet
and Hotspur in
Henry IV Part
One
in 1958. The prodigal son had returned and conformed to the family notion of the inevitability of talent in all its members.

The week before they came the nuns had put on a show in the Town Hall; really a deaf and dumb show, schoolgirls in tights, berets on their heads, rifles by their sides—borrowed from the local army—standing immobile in front of a small cardboard prison that housed a cardinal (you could see the cardinal's meditative and
lowered
head through a window, a red bulb behind the cardinal's head).

There had been a bunting, made by a nun, of tiny hammer and sickle flags above the stage and this, more than anything, had excited gasps from the women in the audience and a round of applause. You weren't sure if it was the cardinal they were applauding for his endurance or the clever idea of the bunting. But with the coming of the Mahaffys there was one thing you could be sure of: that the bleeding church behind the Iron Curtain could be forgotten for a week. Only the Lenten missions united people in such common excitement. Immediately prior to the Lenten missions it was the excitement caused by the anticipation of so many sins due to be expunged. Immediately prior to a performance by the Mahaffys it was the excitement of knowing that you were going to be deliciously annihilated for a night by the duress of a play.

Mr and Mrs Mahaffy stayed by tradition in Miss Waldren's hotel at the top of O'Higgins Street. This hotel boasted a back garden inspired by the gardens of the local Ascendancy mansion, the garden full, for all its smallness, of walks and willow trees and little ponds drenched by willow trees.

This atmosphere was considered appropriate for the heads of the company but all other players stayed as usual with the two Miss Barretts in a more humble bed and breakfast house on Trophy Street. One of the Barrett sisters was about thirty, the other was near forty, the younger bright, exuberant, bristling with the thought of
continual
chores to be accomplished, the older usually seated,
meditative
, lank and arched of cheek.

The younger, Una, was small, pudgy, her head powdered with
anthracite black and celestial vague hair. The older, Sheona, was, by contrast, tall, demure, red-haired, the fluff of her red hair gripping her ears and her neck like forceps. They'd been parentless for a long time, running a bed and breakfast house since their parents died when Una had just entered her teens. They kept the circus people and the theatre people: many disreputables came to the house, of salesmen only licentious-looking ones, of lorry drivers only those continually drunk. Their family origins had become a mystery for many in town; it was as if they'd had no parents and stepped out of another planet very alien to this town because their manners and their decorum were different.

Of the two, Sheona was the most faraway. It was as if she'd spent a time in another country and was continually thinking of it as she sat by the natty peat fires that Una had prepared. She was queenly, erect, but was now nearing, without the sign of a man, the explosive age of forty.

Much satisfaction was expressed with this year's performances: Cathal Mahaffy, with his mad, upshooting blond hair, was
particularly
singled out; the redness in the whites of his eyes seemed to be the redness at the bottom of the sky in the evening after they'd gone, the sky over the fair green where the marquee had been. But Cathal hadn't really gone with the show. He came back again and again between performances of the plays elsewhere and it took some weeks before the people of town realized that he was having an affair with Sheona Barrett.

The realization came in a week of tender weather in November when he was seen again and again bringing Miss Barrett on the back of his motorbike on the backroads between wavering, stone-walled fields in the countryside outside town. The sky was very blue that week, the weather warm, and Miss Barrett, the near forty-year-old, often wore a summer dress under a cardigan and nothing other than the cardigan for warmth.

How did it happen? What had been going on among the crowd at the guesthouse? More and more women peeped through the
curtains
and saw the giant tableau on the sitting-room wall of Kylemore Abbey, Connemara, the tableau painted on to the wall by a destitute painter from Liverpool once, this work done in lieu of payment of
rent. The painter had a red scarf around his neck and women in the town muttered that you'd have to be careful of his piglet fingers, where they went. Now they knew where Cathal Mahaffy's fingers went. They knew only too well. Sheona Barrett had shed
forty-year-old
skin and become a young woman.

It was Christmas that riled the women most though, Sheona Barrett going up to Dublin to attend a dinner dance with Cathal Mahaffy, at which the lord mayor of Dublin was present. She'd walked to the station, not got a taxi, and some people had caught sight of her on that frosty morning, of the erectness of her bearing and the pink box she carried in one hand. What had been in that pink box? And she still stood straight. People now, mainly women, wanted to knock her off balance. It was fine as long as the theatre came only once a year but now that it had been detained people were disconcerted. Superintendent Scannell, who always dressed in the same withered-looking, yellow ochre civilian coat, was seen chasing his civilian hat along O'Higgins Street one morning. A soldier's trousers suddenly fell down as the soldiers stood to alert in the square outside the church one Sunday morning. A teacher in the boys' national school suddenly started uttering a pornographic poem in the middle of a mathematics lesson. This man was swiftly taken to the mental hospital. A celibate, he'd obviously been
threatened
by a nervous breakdown for years.

But some other people were not so fortunate to get such an easy way out. The theatre had stayed in town and upset people, to the very pegs of their being, those pegs that held their being to the ground just as the players' tent was held to the verdant ground of the fair green by pegs.

Sheona Barrett did not seem even aware that she was upsetting people. That's maybe what upset them the most, that austere bearing of hers. It was a scandal but because it was a scandal that came from the theatre the scandal was questioned. This was the stuff of theatre after all, that people sat comfortably looking at. Now that it had been let loose on the streets you had to ask yourself: was the theatre not an intoxicating thing, like whiskey at a dinner dance? Did it not block out realities? In a way they envied Sheona Barrett for having taken something from a night of Shakespeare in a fair green and
made it part of her life. They all dabbled with the thought of ensnaring some permanence from the theatre and when they realized it was impossible they decided, en masse, to destroy Sheona Barrett's relationship so they could have the theatre back for what it had been, a yearly festive balloon in their lives.

A Texan millionaire had come to live in a mansion outside town in 1957, a mansion in which the caretaker, who'd been there since the rich owners had departed to take up residence in Kensington, London, had murdered his half-wit brother. The millionaire was a divorcee and the parish priest had blocked the entrance to the
mansion
with his car one morning and stopped the millionaire's
tomato-coloured
American car from coming out. The priest had got out of his car and approached the millionaire whose head was cautiously inside the car under a wide cowboy hat and informed him that divorcees were not welcome here. The millionaire departed
forthwith
, leaving his Irish roots.

The same trick was got up with Miss Barrett but with less
success
because the parish priest was ill and his stand-in, Father Lysaght, a plump, berry-faced man with his black hair perpetually oiled back, was addicted to sherry, saying mass and giving sermons when drunk on sherry, mouthing out the usual particularities of Catholicism but given new accent on sherry. He was dispatched to pull back Sheona Barrett from her affair, arriving already drunk, was given more drink and spent the night on a sofa with Cathal Mahaffy, discussing the achievements of Cathal's father.

Eventually the priest began talking Greek because he thought that was appropriate, quoting poetry about carnal subjects from his seminary days, digging his snout-like nose into the air as he recited, and then he wavered and snortled his way home. The final agreement had been that only the theatre mattered, nothing else did, and the church and its sacraments palled in comparison to a good theatrical performance. The priest got to the presbytery gates, jolting out a refrain from
The Mikado
remembered from his days at boys' boarding school, boys in merry dress and many in ladies' wigs lined up to daunt the 1930s with colour and the smell of grease paint.

The relationship of Cathal Mahaffy and Sheona Barrett had been given a safe passage by the church. Sheona Barrett, by her
association with theatre people, had been elevated to the status of an artistic person and as such was immune from the church's laws. You had to titillate people through the arts with a sense of sin so as to reaffirm all the church stood for. A thread united Sheona Barrett to the artistic establishment of the country now and she knew this, becoming so faraway looking she looked almost evanescent, as if she was part of the clouds and the fields.

Cathal Mahaffy invoked her to many parts of the country and she went swiftly. The townspeople knew now that the girls had been left money they'd never spent much of before. That was evident from the way Sheona Barrett could so readily draw on those funds to get herself around the country. There'd never been any need of that money very much before. Una Barrett groomed her sister,
settling
her hair. A taxi was often called to speed to some desolate town in the Midlands, past derelict mill houses and past weirs and houses that handed on an emblem for brandy on their fronts, to one another, like a torch.

In August 1959 Sheona Barrett attended the Galway races with Cathal Mahaffy. Her photograph was in the
Connaught Tribune
. She looked like a new bride. In late September they spent a few days together, again in Galway. They sauntered together by the peaceful blue of the sea, holding one another's hands. Most of the
holiday-makers
had gone and they had Salthill to themselves. The sea was blue, it seemed, just for them. The blue rushed at their lovers'
figures
. There was a happiness for them in Galway that late September. Sheona's hair was a deeper red and often there was red on both her cheeks, ‘like two flowerpots', one bitter woman remarked.

Cathal Mahaffy's body must have been lovely. He was so lithe and pale. In bed with her he must have been like a series of twigs that would seem almost about to break making love to this tall woman. He looked like a boy still. He had this intensity. And he challenged you with his pale appearance, his albino hair, his direct smile. You always ended up for some reason looking to his crotch as his shoulders sloped in his act of looking at you directly.

It was also clear that Cathal's parents approved of the
relationship
or at least didn't object to it. They were broad-minded people. They were glad to have their son with them and he could
have been making love to a male pigmy for all they cared it seemed. They had seen many sexual preferences in their time and a lifetime in theatre qualified them to look beyond the land of sex, to see things that transcended sex: comradeship, love, devotion to art. Art had guided their lives and because of this they themselves
transcended
the land of Ireland and saw beyond it, to the centuries it sometimes seemed from the look on Mrs Mahaffy's face as she stood on a green in a village, the light from a gap in the tent falling on her face. But there was always some tragedy at the end of the route of tolerance in this country.

Shortly before the players arrived in Sheona's town in 1959 Sheona was set upon in a routine walk by the railway station, near a bridge over a weir, and raped. No one could say who raped her but it was known that it had been a gang. She had been physically
brutalized
apart from being raped and mentally damaged. When she was brought to hospital it was clear that some damage was
irrevocable
in her. There was a trail of stains like those of tea leaves all across her face when she sat up in bed and her eyes stared ahead, not seeing what she'd seen before. Una Barrett was there, holding a brown scapular she'd taken from its covert place around her neck.