Lark's Eggs (21 page)

Midge had gone. He'd left a month before. Having come to England in his early twenties he'd driven back to Poland. His mother was still in Warsaw and Warsaw, before his planned marriage in Edinburgh, got the better of him. He had to return there. He'd take it all, soldiers, police, everything for the sake of wholeness missing in his life for twenty-five years and for a kind of harvest-dream of Warsaw. He bade goodbye to Joly and the children and drove a
company
truck east to Warsaw, on an authorized errand, but this time he was going to stay. All that was left of Poland now were obsessive jars The Vicar's
and jars of paprika and a picture of a Polish Christ. That picture made Colin think his wife and children were fervent Catholics now.

A working-class Edinburgh woman looked at a daintily dressed Dublin teacher. The social chasm was even wider and more
perplexing
than when they'd married. Colin looked like a harmless, over-trained chimpanzee now, all bones and angles. A woman,
standing
, looked at him, amazed at the scene that was happening. The children stared at him with convoluted stares as if they'd been expecting him all their lives and now that he'd arrived the epiphany was a curiosity more than a major event. Each time Colin opened his mouth now he shut it very quickly again, without saying anything. Joly suddenly remembered the seas of flagrant furze in the fields around the vicarage in spring.

It was her family she'd had to fight more than Colin then. They'd never imagined she'd made any really
fundamental
decision without consulting them, without involving them—they saw her as irritating them, driving them into furies. But when the moment came when Joly parted from them and became a
Protestant
they became petrified in their speech. It was unheard of, an Irish Catholic girl becoming a Protestant. An Irish Catholic girl acting on her own volition. An Irish person breaking from the rules, the taboos of their family. An Irish person going it alone, without their tribe. You could have tiffs, yes, but fleeing your family … May God forgive her.

Joly had shaped a solitude inside herself in a society not made for solitude. She could hear their rancour in the vicarage gardens, their screams of bellicose outrage came to her ears. But she left these things some way outside her and resolved on going further on her own way, on plunging deeper into her perdition. Perdition took her to Scotland, to Edinburgh, to a kitchen where she'd tried to lock up all the pain of Ireland and throw it away. But she couldn't help arguing with them, taking them on in a mental wrestling match during an afternoon women's programme on radio, venting her opinions of them on them. They'd done everything in their power to
destroy her, to strip her of her sensibility and make her one of them. This was what was left of the battle, this still outraged shell, this shell through which visible shivers of anger often went. They'd tried to divest her of everything that was her personality, besieging her in the vicarage. Yes she knew they were out there. And perhaps that sense of siege added unsteadiness to Colin's unhinged state. The vibrations going between Joly and her family, the smoke signals of livid argument. Something of what had happened in the vicarage was Joly's fault. There was a battle pressed inside her, a battle she couldn't share with him because he was one of the main reasons for the battle. She couldn't give them any success by having him drawn into the argument. They thought, ultimately, she was less than him. She couldn't let him know she feared that also. She couldn't let their stinking thoughts pollute her relationship with him. But in resisting them, in keeping them at bay, in the frozen stance she adopted any time she considered anything to do with them she offset something in Colin; whining choirs of his own hereditary demons. Their mutual demons met in the vicarage and created an abysmal furore, sometimes at the top of the stairs when, late at night, she and Colin looked in one another's eyes. The aspect of her blame, blame for what she'd brought to the vicarage, was one she'd always ignored. She too had an insanity caused by family. There had been a hole in her head, too. A transfixed void in her eyes. Two mad people couldn't have gone on living together and she left Colin, not without first having driven him to beat her, to flail his arms at her. She just hadn't been capable of response to his demons. So preoccupied and, in a way, in love had she been with her own. She'd failed the trusting Teddyboy. She'd gone away, carrying a further retinue of
self-righteous
wounds, from Ireland, edified by her own sense of wounds. Now, the wounds had come full circle and encountered his wounds again. This time she knew she'd made the central wound in his life. She'd failed, totally, to drive away the dark in him. She'd been a bit of blonde mischief that had failed to understand the trust he was
putting
in her. He'd totally surrendered himself to her and all she'd done was look over his shoulder, arguing with the spectres of her family. The arms, legs, torso of a Teddyboy vicar, naked then, had counted for nothing, this show of tenderness, as against confrontation with
a tribe, drawn up in battle ranks by a bedroom door. Privacy had been impossible between Colin and Joly. History and family had not allowed them privacy. But at least they'd stolen one or two pages from an epoch and danced together, before marriage, at an October fair, a couple, a marriage of opposites, beauty queen and vicar, an ikon—the ikon warmed by browns and golds, taking a bronze light from a marquee floor, shelving an image in a village mind, in a
perpetuity
of images. Together, ironically, Colin and Joly enhanced
history
. They were, that night, dancing to Buddy Holly, an atavistic
reference
point to which people would always return, in spite of
themselves
. They were a source of mystery, something of history and yet that broke with history. They were initiators. What came after didn't matter so much. They'd broken new ground together and as such would always have an odd craving for one another, be in default without one another. They were, in a strange way, one.

How he could have done those things to her he didn't know. They were all a strange dream in him now. In her arms, in bed, all the people he'd been since spiralled through him, the roles. The only reality was her face and body. He touched that face and body. His hands were no longer anointed hands. They had no special powers. They were no longer cursed. They retreated from her with a sense of redemption. He looked at them in amazement, as if he was seeing them for the first time. They, he and Joly, were starting right from the beginning. No demon in his past was telling him he had to be a vicar, was entrancing him into perpetuating this role in the family. He'd shed the need for this role. Joly was no longer the vicar's wife.

A new term in Dublin; a new direction in Colin's thoughts, a new countenance on him. He meditated more. He slumped into meditation at school, a chestnut-coloured jacket still on him. He'd journeyed from a Protestant, middle-class, Dublin experience to a house in Edinburgh where there was a woman he'd created in a way, a strange product of Ireland. There were so many lines on her face, so many. Lines further emphasized by a cloth she'd worn on her head a few times; amid the lines an always fresh swipe
of strawberry lipstick. This had been his spouse. And his children? They were more like a brother and sister to the mellifluous-looking hulk of a man who'd crossed forty with an adolescent haze still around him. He had to deal with the new image of Joly, Joly with a penetratingly direct stare in her eyes. Joly as a very lonely woman, a sentinel of a woman in the middle of a kitchen.

Colin dragged his feet around Dublin; crimson autumn suns over the Ha'penny Bridge temporarily immobilized him. The way he dragged one of his feet that autumn he looked lame. And he also looked a bit hunch-backed. He was weighed down. Weighed down by what he'd done. By the rather awesome vision of Joly standing in the middle of a kitchen, something grandiose about her, something haunting, like the way a lighthouse on the west coast of Ireland, during early-winter twilight, haunted. Joly was total unto herself. She created a sense of scenery wherever she went. And it was this loneliness that made him love her again, made him want her, maybe out of guilt, made him want to protect the wounded frame of her, reach his arms about it. So correspondence began again and, from Dublin, supplications. They wrote to one another like teenage
penpals
, from two totally different backgrounds and aware of the
different
backgrounds. Except now the different backgrounds were Dublin middle class and Edinburgh downbeat working class. Joly agreed to visit Colin. She came at Christmas, a year and a half after he visited her, and stayed with him in the flat in Terenure, sleeping with him, a rather distant, very erect, somewhat pinched-looking middle-aged woman whom he met on a railway platform after she'd come from Belfast, lots of make-up on her and her hands on a handbag in front of a claret coat. She looked initially like some child's aunt from Barna Craugh; she was, ironically, a face from the main street of that town but with the days the reserve, the austerity, the fear even went and something trying to get out of Joly for years re-emerged, at first tokens, a Barna Craugh rasp in the accent, the desert-storm of freckles on the face becoming suddenly plainer—it was the beauty queen. With passion Joly became younger, vulnerable. She was going into marriage with Colin Lysaght again. In a state of vulnerability, of protective layers thrown away, she was stepping out of her world and going into Colin's again. She was leaving children
and the intermediary years of exile, of flight behind. She was returning to a country that had changed, exposing herself to that country again.

She didn't know what she was doing with this man who had in a way ruined her life, walking down O'Connell Street with him, but there seemed to be an inevitability, an order about them being together; this time he was the protector, he was the guide of an innerly crippled person; he was bound to her by guilt. Such were the vicissitudes of life she thought, passing a go-go dancing model in Clery's window, that people should merge into a marriage again, brought about by guilt in one partner, now healed and whole, over the last marriage. Such was the ongoing nature of a lunatic marriage and maybe they had to find love in it to make it easier for both of them. The beauty queen and the vicar might not prove such a bad match after all.

But what immediately kept Joly going, down O'Connell Street, was fascination with the person beside her, the difference in him, the wholeness. A hurricane had gone through him and created a new person. There was ultimately, as in the first marriage, amazement and humility that this person should be interested in her. A recognition of her roots in Bin Lane and a renewed vision of them breaking from her in a flurry of distraught Easter doves, which made everything all right, pain, exile, solitude. Ultimately she was the little girl from Bin Lane who broke the rules and won, however it was done, however afflicted was the course in doing it, the heart of the obese and beaming town councillor. For the renewed hallucination of doves tearing away from an inchoate source, for the life-reinvigorating
sensation
of it—probably the same sensation young people in
Edinburgh
got from sniffing glue—she returned to Ireland. She groped her way back blindly. And the person who met her again was equally blind in guilt and in grief, looking over her shoulder at Amiens Street Station and seeing the person he knew she would obliterate forever this time, his father hanging from a roof beam. Or would she? Either way that image was subdued now, like an old war-flag in a Protestant church. He kissed her and asked her about the children she'd left in Scotland. It was spring. Three months since he'd last seen her. He took her baggage and carried it towards their new life together, an arc
of light in the rainy sky you could see through the station bar window, like a strand of grey hair over the eye.

Colin gave up his job and purchased a
gate-lodge
in the countryside near the vicarage, with money left over from selling the vicarage and the Lysaght town house. He got a job, after some training, on a forestry near the gate-lodge. A new job for him, one that initially amazed the locals. Then they let him be. Joly went back to live near the town she grew up in, still very much a
Protestant
, growing nasturtiums, geraniums, chrysanthemums, goldenrod, marrows, braving the country that tried to destroy her. She didn't let it destroy her again. She didn't let it in on her. A new flush came to Colin's cheek. They seemed happy, an odd pair who didn't mix much, alone in a gate-lodge in a countryside of ghosts, ghosts of rural vicarages, of eccentric, set-back Ascendancy mansions that now looked out on thriving Free State forestry plantations, on the cars that sped on these backroads, bringing young couples to discos, on the nerve of change at last in this atavistic and laden green air.

When a statue of the Virgin Mary by a roadway was reckoned to have moved there was no hullabaloo, just smiles, and Joly was reminded of the time as a child she dressed up as Our Lady of Fatima for local children and played that part, in a shed, appearing on a stage of fragile boards. When this image returned to her she knew she'd changed once more; it was autumn, the nasturtiums ran through the garden in glittering rivers; a sort of miracle had
happened
; the Catholic and Protestant parts of her had merged as she remembered a very jocose Our Lady of Fatima, her veil slipping off, her hands joined in prayer and redcurrant, gleaming lipstick smeared on her lips that, try as they could, couldn't hold back a luscious, cherubic smile.

‘Miles from here.' A phrase caught Miles's ear as he took the red bus to the North Wall. Someone was shouting at someone else, one loud passenger at an apparently half-deaf
passenger
, the man raising himself a little to shout. The last of Dublin's bright lights swam by. What took their place was the bleak area of dockland. Miles took his small case from the bus. He had a lonely and unusual journey to make.

Miles was seventeen. His hair was manically spliced on his head, a brown tuft of it. He was tall, lean; Miles was a model. He wore his body comfortably. He moved ahead to the boat, carrying his case: foisting his case in an onward movement.

Miles had grown up in the Liberties in Dublin. His mother had deserted him when he was very young. She was a red-haired legend tonight, a legend with a head of champion chestnut hair.

She had gone from Ireland and insinuated herself into England, leaving her illegitimate son with her married sister. The only thing known of her was that she turned up at the pilgrimage to
Walsingham
, Norfolk, each year. Miles, now that he was a spare-featured seventeen-year-old, a seventeen-year-old with a rather lunar face, was going looking for her. That lunar face was even paler now under the glare of lights from the boat.

The life Miles lived now was one of bright lights, of outlandish clothes, of acrobatic models wearing those clothes under the glare of acrobatic lights; more than anything it was a life of nightclubs, the later in the night the better, seats at lurid feasts of mosaic ice cream and of cocktails. Dublin for Miles was a kind of Pompeii now: on an edge. He was doing well, he was living a good life in a city
smouldering
with poverty. Ironically he'd come from want. But his good looks had brought him to magazines and to the omnipotent
television
screen. He was taking leave of all that for a few days for a
pilgrimage
of his own. There were few signs of garishness on him. The clothes he slipped out of Ireland in were black and grey. Only the articulate outline of his face and the erupting lava tuft of his hair would let you know he worked in the world of modelling.

The night-boat pulled him towards England and the world of his mother.

She'd come to Walsingham each year, Ellie, and this year there was a difference about her coming. She was dying. She came with her daughter Áine and with her son Lally. She walked, propped between them, on the pilgrimage, the procession of foot from slipper chapel to town ofWalsingham. Áine was a teacher. Lally was a pop star.

Miles was in fact late for the procession. He arrived in the town when the crowds were jumbled together. He looked around. He looked through the crowd for his mother.

Afterwards you could almost say that Lally recognized him, rather than he recognized Lally. Lally was
discomfited
by lack of recognition here. Miles recognized him immediately. ‘How are you? You're Lally.' A primrose and white religious banner made one or two demonstrative movements behind Miles.

 ‘Yeah. And who are you?'

Who am I? Who am I? The question coming from Lally's lips, funnelled mesmerically into Miles's mind on that street in Walsingham.

 Miles was an orphan, always an orphan, always made to feel like an orphan. He was, through childhood and adolescence, rejected by his cousins with whom he lived, both male and female, rejected for his beauty. Nancy-Boy they called him. Sop. Sissy. Pansy. Queer, Gay-Boy, Bum-Boy. The ultimate name—
Snowdrop
. His enemy cousins took to that name most, considering it
particularly
salacious and inventive. Miles was none of these things. He looked unusually pretty for a boy. The names for him and the brand of ostracization gave him a clue as to his direction in life though. He found an easy entrance into the world of modelling. He was hoisted gracefully into that world you could say. At seventeen Miles had his face right bang on the front of magazine covers. He'd become an aura, a national consciousness arrangement in his own right. This success allowed him to have a flat of his own and, supreme revenge, wear suits the colour of the undersides of mushrooms down the Liberties. Miles sometimes had the blank air of a drifting, unpiloted boat in these suits in the Liberties. There must be more to life than bright suits his mind was saying; there must be more things beyond this city where boys in pink suits wandered under slender cathedral steeples. There must be more to life than a geography that got its kicks from mixing ancient grey buildings with doses of alarmingly dressed and vacant-eyed young people. His mother, the idea of her, was something beyond this city and Miles broke with everything he was familiar with, everything that bolstered him, to go looking for her, to stretch his life: to endanger himself. He knew his equilibrium was frail, that his defences were thin, that he might inflict a terrible wound on himself by going, that he might remember what he'd been trying to forget all his life, what it was like as a little child to have your mother leave you, to have a red-haired woman disappear out the door, throwing a solitary backward glance at you, in a house not far from the slender cathedral steeple, and never coming back again.

Who am I? Ellie Tierney had asked herself as she walked on the procession. Who am I, she wondered, now that she was on the verge of dying, having cancer of the bone marrow. An immigrant. A mother of two children. A widow. A grocery store owner. A dweller of West London. A Catholic.

She'd come young to this country; from County Clare. Just before the War. Lived the first year in Ilford. Had shoals of local children pursue her and her brothers and sisters with stones because they were Irish. She'd been a maid in a vast hotel. Met Peader Tierney, a bus driver for London Transport, had a proposal from him at a Galwaymen's ball in a West London hotel and married him. Had two children by him. Was independent of him in that she opened a grocery store of her own. He'd died in the early 1970s, long before he could see his son become famous.

Who am I? Lally had thought on the
procession
. The question boggled him now. He was very famous.
Frequently
on television. A spokesman for a new generation of the Irish in England. A wearer of nightgown-looking shirts. He felt odd, abashed here, among the nuns and priests, beside his mother. But he strangely belonged. He'd make a song from Walsingham.

Who am I? Áine had thought as she'd walked. A failure. A red-haired woman in a line of Clare women. Beside that young brother of hers nothing: a point of annihilation, no achievement.

It occurred to Lally that Miles had come here because he knew that he, Lally, would be here. Lally welcomed him as a particularly devoted fan.

 ‘Where are you from?'

‘Dublin.'

‘Dublin?'

‘Dublin.'

The hair over Miles's grin was askew. Miles waited a few
minutes
, grin fixed, for a further comment from Lally.

‘We're driving to the sea. Will you come with us?'

The flat land of Norfolk: not unlike the sea. The onward Volkswagen giving it almost an inconsequential,
disconnected
feel; a feel that brought dreams and memories to those sitting, as if dumbstruck, silently in the car. Mrs Tierney in front, her face searching the sky with the abstracted look of a saint who had his hands joined in prayer. Walsingham was left behind. But the spirit of Walsingham bound all the car together, this strangeness in a landscape that was otherwise yawning, and to Irish people, alien, unremarkable—important only in that it occasionally yielded an odd-looking bird and that the glowering sweep of it promised the maximum benefit of the sea.

That they all considered it flat and boundless like the sea never occurred to them as being ironic; a sea of land was something almost to be feared. Only by the sea, in landscape, they felt safe.

Or in a small town like Walsingham which took full control over its surroundings and subjugated them.

The people of Britain had called the Milky Way the
Walsingham
Way once. They thought it had led to Walsingham. The Virgin Mary was reckoned to have made an appearance here in the Middle Ages. The young Henry
VIII
had walked on foot from the slipper chapel to her shrine to venerate her. Later he'd taken her image from the shrine and had it publicly burned in Chelsea to the jeers of a late-medieval crowd. Centuries had gone by and an
English
lady convert started the process of reconstruction, turning sheds back into chapels. To celebrate the reconsecration of the slipper chapel vast crowds had come from all over England on a Whit Monday in the 1930s. Ellie remembered the Whit Monday
gathering here in 1946, the crowds on the procession, the prayers of thanksgiving to Mary, the nuns with head-dresses tall as German castles, pictures of Mary in windows in Walsingham and the flowers on doorsteps—a gaggle of nuns in black, but with palatial white headdresses, standing outside a cottage, nudging one another, waiting for the Virgin as if she was a military hero who'd won the war. The statue of Mary had come, bedecked with congratulatory pink roses. For Ellie the War had been a war with England, English children chasing her and brutally raining stones on her.

Her head slumped in the car a little now: she was tired. Her son, Lally, the driver, looked sidelong at her, anxiously, protectively. Her memories were his this moment: the stuff of songs, geese
setting
out like rebel soldiers in a jade-green farm in County Clare.

Lally was the artist, the pop star, the maker of words. Words came out of him now, these days, like meteors; superhuman ignitions of energy. He was totally in command: he stood straight on television. He was a star. He was something of
Ireland
for a new generation of an English pop audience. He wheedled his songs about Ireland into a microphone, the other members of his group standing behind him. His face was well known in
teeny-bop
magazines, the alacrity of it, the uprightness of it.

How all this came about was a mystery to his mother; from a shambles in a shed, a pop group practising, to massive concerts—a song in the charts was what did it. But a song with a difference. It was a song about Ireland. Suddenly Ireland had value in the media. Lally had capitalized on that. His sore-throat-sounding songs had homed in on that new preoccupation. Without people realizing it he had turned a frivolous interest into an obsession. He remembered—through his parents. His most famous song was about his father, how his father, who'd fled Galway in his teens, had returned, middle aged, to find only stones where his parents were buried, no names on the stones. It had never occurred to him that without him, the son of the family, there'd been no one to bury his parents. He had a mad sister somewhere in England who talked to chickens. Lally's father had
deserted the entire palette of Ireland for forty years, never once writing to his parents when they were alive, trying to obliterate the memory of them, doing so until he found his way home again in the late 1960s.

That song had been called ‘Stones in a Flaxen Field'.

Words; Lally was loved for his words. They spun from him, all colours. They were sexual and male and young, his words. They were kaleidoscopic in colour. But they spoke, inversely, of things very ancient, of oppression. A new generation of young English people learnt from his songs.

And only ten years before, Ellie often thought, her grocery store was stoned, one night, just after bombs went off in Birmingham, the window all smashed.

Ah well; that was life. That was change. One day scum, the next stars. Stars … Ellie looked up from her dreams for the Milky Way or the Walsingham Way but it was still very much May late-afternoon light.

Her father told her how they used to play hurling in the fields outside his village in County Galway in May evening light, ‘light you could cup in your hand it was so golden'. There are holes in every legend. There were two versions of her father. The man who ran away and who never went back until he was in his fifties. And the man who'd proposed to her mother at a
Galwaymen's
ball. ‘But sure he was only there as a spy that day,' Áine's mother would always say. Even so it was contradictory. Áine resented the lyricism of Lally's version of her father; she resented the way he'd used family and put it into song, she resented this
intrusion
into the part of her psyche which was wrapped up in family. More than anything she resented the way Lally got away with it. But still she outwardly applauded him. But as he became more famous she became older, more wrecked looking. Still her hair was very red. That seemed to be her triumph—even at school. To have this almost obscenely lavish red hair. She got on well at school. She had many boyfriends. Too many. She was involved on women's committees. But wasn't there something she'd lost?

 She did not believe in all this: God, pilgrimage. Coming to Walsingham almost irked her. She'd come as a duty. But it did remind her of another pilgrimage, another journey, almost holy.

It had been when Lally was a teenager. She'd gone for an abortion in Brighton. A clinic near the sea. In winter. He'd accompanied her. Waiting for the appointment she'd heard the crash of the winter sea. Lally beside her. He'd held her hand. She'd thought of Clare, of deaths, of wakes. She'd gone in for her
appointment
. Afterwards, in a strange way, she realized he'd become an artist that day. By using him as a solace when he'd been too young she'd traumatized him into becoming an artist. She'd wanted him to become part of a conspiracy with her, a narrow conspiracy: but instead she'd sent him out on seas of philosophizing, of wondering. He'd been generous in his interpretation of her from out on those seas. His purity not only had been reinforced but immeasurably extended. While hers was lost.