Lark's Eggs (27 page)

It was 1958. He turned twenty-six that December. On the night of his birthday Libby allowed him to make love to her under a bush on the cold ground in St Stephen's Green, the two of them, like winos, having skirted the railings. But there was a backlog of
experience
Lucien had not coped with. He'd tried to make love to other girls since Libby went and failed. Somehow the armoury of his body didn't work with anyone else, such had been the intensity of what had happened between him and Libby. Word quickly gets around Dublin and it was this word that killed the revival of his relationship with Libby. Full of masculinity, at a New Year's party, 1959, he was
suddenly
confronted by Ethel Bannion. Immediately he caught sight of her he knew there would be trouble. She approached him, an almost tangible smell of disuse off her. ‘You're incapable. Incapable of
physical
relations with anyone except Libby Lazurus.' He was wearing a white jersey. He stopped dead. ‘You're a Jewish lesbian. You can't get it up. You're a sexual failure. A wimp. Come on, show us what a
circumcised
prick that doesn't work looks like.' Her face, drunk, was an aurora borealis of bitterness. The skin of her face like heaps and heaps of dead porridge. This was her moment. Her speech. Then she withdrew. He couldn't believe it. This was the Third Reich, the Tsarist oppressions manifesting themselves at a Dublin theatrical party where, if the revellers were not actors, they were ex-Trinity students. There was silence. Ethel had made her impact.

He could not make love to Libby after that. In Ethel Bannion's words he could not ‘get it up'. She had destroyed something in him. Not just his sexuality, but his belief in the steadiness of human nature. He lost his innocence the night Ethel had attacked him. Shortly after that, his ignominy with Libby and her quick
withdrawal
from him, he left Ireland.

Yes, he gave up his pretensions to the theatre about the same time. Was it a coincidence? Anyway he'd married the daughter of a failed, rural Tory parliamentary candidate a few years later. She'd brought him back to sexual life; she'd conquered, by her quietness, the deadness in him. He was working for an insurance company in the city by then and extravagantly successful at what he was doing. ‘The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.'

In the late 1970s he had occasion to visit Beirut for business
reasons
. He stood on a street in this city with evening hitting a few high-rise buildings with a sun which was a perfect orange and thought: nothing in this city, for all its carnage, can be worse than what Ireland tried to do to me; it tried systematically to take the flesh from the bone; it tried to eliminate me. He stood, perilously still, a professional briefcase in his right hand.

By then, of course, Ireland was just a memory. His father died in 1967. The burial was nostalgically Jewish. Clay from a black desert in the Wicklow mountains under his head, his head tentatively
turned to the east—the verge of the Hill of Howth on the
opposite
side of the bay. Lucien recited the Hebrew prayers at Dolphin's Barn Jewish Cemetery among a gaggle of half-embarrassed men in heavy, charcoal coats. His father had always lit two candles on Friday evenings in Dun Laoghaire so that often the candles were reflected on the image of the sea; his father had inserted the Scrolls of the Law back into the Ark of the Covenant in Adelaide Road
Synagogue
; his father had led the Jews of Dublin out of the old year often as the Bridegroom of the Torah and brought them back to Lebanon Lodge for festivities.

Lucien watched the silver bells tinkle on the Scrolls of the Law the following Saturday in Adelaide Road Synagogue as he would have as a child. But more than years separated him from then. He was not really his father's son. He was not an heir. He wanted to get away quickly from brothers who were forcing familial obligations on him. He didn't want any of these arabesques. When his mother died the house was sold and the money portioned among the family. There was no house in Ireland now for him to bring his children back to. But still it haunted him, Lebanon Lodge, a house become more ghostly with the years. It was the house of the dead. Ironic that Ethel Bannion, now grown fat, had married a member of the ruling party in the Irish parliament, another parliamentary representative of the same party having purchased the house. But political parties come and go, especially in Ireland. Irish politics as everyone knows are quixotic. But the house in Lucien's mind had a steadiness, a ghostly permanence. It lived in a world of night in Maida Vale. His relationship with his brothers was, as it had always been, negligible. They were Dublin businessmen, intent on keeping the idea of family up. He had an English accent now. The Irish connections had come to nothing. One of his brothers kept the factory going and another hovered around it. They were forever making overtures to him, those overtures having begun as soon as he had thrown in the theatre for business. But he suspected them. He had done with them. Yet
something
nagged him. About Ireland. About his youth there. He entered the front door of Lebanon Lodge in his dreams and the whole of a history of a Jewish family revealed itself to him, a history since their arrival in Ireland. They had married Jewish history with Irish history
and made a covenant out of which he'd been born. He'd been the Jewish boy who'd vacantly written an essay entitled ‘A House Tells Its Story' in a Christian Brothers' school in Dun Laoghaire. He fidgeted with the pen again in his mind and put the last strokes on the essay. It was the 1980s and his children were grown. His daughter worked in the theatre. She brought theatrical friends to his party on Christmas night in Maida Vale each year. Girls with short dresses and striped woollen stockings. Striped marionettes in Southern Bohemia? By default they'd become a kind of aristocracy. The
children
of the rich came to the party. Fenella, the heiress, of the long legs in the brief dress and of the little mirthful fountain of a head. Even the daughter, herself Jewish, of a man who made long and boring speeches in the Houses of Parliament, a girl with salient,
tangerine
lips. But for some reason he had to admit that his children, for all their easy artistic pursuits, were somewhat boring to him. They were beyond a border of understanding. Try as hard as they could they'd never be able to go back on that border. They were somewhat soulless, like their friends. People complimented him at the party for being so young-looking, as young-looking as his sons, his dark hair still shining and his skin pristine, that skin that had been married to Libby Lazurus's radiating skin once in a moment of total forgetfulness. But his lingering youthfulness made him oddly alone-looking there, standing among the hubbub of a Christmas night party in Maida Vale as he had stood on a street in Lebanon when the sun was going down and the high-rise buildings were aflame with meteors of colour, the tokens of the tired sun on them, and his mind had been shot through with an awareness of how close to extinction he'd come, whether extinction in Dublin during the War when the Germans were thinking of invading or extinction at a theatrical party in Dublin, not far from Kelly's Corner, when a woman had breathed her own brand of genocide into his body.

He would come early winter every year in his caravan to Kerry from a town in Tipperary where there is now a nude swim in the swimming pool the third Saturday of every month and swim on the different beaches, parking his caravan alongside them. He came when the barnacle geese arrived and he would explain to the boys on the beaches how barnacle geese got their names, that it had been believed they were born from ship barnacles.

Features smooth as a sea-stone, hare-lip, glass-grey eyes, sienna brows, Prussian crew cut.

He'd always stop at the Stella Café in Limerick on his way where the waitress had a steeple-beehive. Villages of flamingo-dolloped cakes under the casing on the formica counter. Toffee banana ice cream advertised. The speciality being Al Capone scoops.

There was a photograph on the wall of Willie Bevill in
bermuda-length
gym shorts. He'd used chest weights and spring grips before anybody was using them and he'd jump off the bridge at Parteen to swim in winter and he'd break the ice at Corbally Baths to swim.

On this stop he'd always have a cup of coffee and a slice of angel two-tone cake.

He'd swim in carnation-red underpants rather than a swimming togs and he'd carry his towel in a carpet bag.

In one village, after kicking up a peacock's tail of spray against
the sunset on a beach where there were greyhounds' footprints like a little girl's acorn earrings, he'd have pig's head in a pub called Grunter's.

In the same village there was a sixteen-stone German man, brown as a picking berry, he'd join in a swim. The German came after the races every autumn and swam through the winter. People would come from all over to look at him.

But his favourite beach was Chapeltown where the swans gather on the sea before making journeys and after making journeys, and he'd swim out on winter evenings among the swans.

In his caravan were two photographs of a woman, one in a
half-cup
bra top, jersey trousers, shoes with high wedge heels, the other in a swimming suit with a key opening.

A picture of Alan Ladd in a yellow check waistcoat.

And a reproduction of Rubens'
Prometheus Bound
torn out of a library book. An eagle tearing at Prometheus. He turned
downwards
. His pubic parts just covered. Despite the savagery of his
situation
the clothes on his left side luxuriant—silvery and a deep
twilight
blue. The eagle chiaroscuro—some of his features gilded. The sky a mourning one—mauve, yellowy white.

When visiting boys would ask ‘Who painted that?' and he'd say ‘Rubens', they'd ask ‘Was he a queer?'

In Killarney mental hospital there's a jigsaw reproduction of a Veronese painting in the corridor—Christ philosophically blessing wine in a tapered Venetian glass at Emmaus, little girls with spun gold hair, in décolletage, salmon petals on their silver brocade, playing with dogs at His feet, a little boy with a patina of hair fondling his own dog, a blonde woman with strawberry cheeks holding an infant, inevitably the masonry of the Renaissance—and his story was like a jigsaw picture.

‘I lived with a woman. Then she took a heart attack. And I came to live in this caravan.'

Before her there'd been a boy.

‘Slept out among the hop poles in Kent. Slept in a football field in Stepney Green. Used swim out to the coots' nest on
Highgate
Ponds.

‘I met Bador. He was a good boy. But he liked the drink. What's this sex? An old cuddle and tickle. Sometimes he wouldn't come to
me. He'd be out drinking with other candidates. He was sick. A bit of mental illness.

‘Then we stopped seeing one another. He bent his head when he saw me.'

Silence is a tall order, the abandonment of a certain desire. At a street window in a town in Tipperary, gold clouds over a church spire like a wedding canopy in a synagogue, he remembered a Turkish bath in the East End that had a black and white portrait of Edward
VII
and Queen Alexandra at the burnt umber entrance.

He went to Dublin for a while and broke stones in Kilmainham for a living, and he'd swim from a shelter in South Dublin that had been built by British soldiers so they could get away from the wars, the turmoil, before they left Ireland.

He told the boys who visited his caravan that there was a place in Dublin called the Boys' Bathing Place. A ship called the Inverisk was shipwrecked just out from there in 1915 and boys used to swim out to it. There were rats on it so they'd bring dogs to protect themselves.

Before the woman in the photograph there'd been a few years in the
FCA
Barracks in Clonmel. There was a humpbacked Protestant businessman in another town in Tipperary, whose premises was stoned during the War of Independence, who rode his Harley Davidson every year to a Twelfth of July parade in a town just this side of the border, a town of almost all platinum-haired Protestants, where, wearing a sash, he'd march with the Orangemen, and he'd sit in Hearn's Hotel in Clonmel in the evenings with young soldiers in boat-necked jerseys.

He'd stay in Fenit for a few weeks and swim with the sidling blue light of the lighthouse in the evenings and the burning blanch light of the lighthouse in the early mornings.

On one beach, just before dark, as if in answer to his swim, dolphins would approach the shore speaking in short barks an almost human language. They'd play a kind of Ring Around the Rosie, going around in a circle, surfacing and submerging in the combers. Then they'd head out to sea again. It was as if they'd been telling a story.

Sometimes he could be seen pulling a small boy, whose freckled face looked like a wren's egg, speckled white, over and over again by
the feet, down a chute of sand alongside a beach, rainbows playing like cubs on the sea.

There was a man near Ballinskelligs Beach who wore a
trenchcoat
, winter and summer, and farmed marijuana.

On Inch Strand cobalt, violet and cerulean mountains were painted on the wet sands when the tide was out.

In one town, where he'd found a dead calf whale on the beach, there was a pub, an advertisement for whiskey with the four provinces of Ireland on it in the window, whose proprietress had once had a play performed at the Abbey Theatre and there was a photograph of her on the wall on stage on her opening night in a trapeze-line
cocktail
dress with a silk flower under her bust, sling-back, high-heel
sandals
, drop earrings, her hair in a high curled fringe. People would meet here at night and tell stories. It was cited in this pub by a
Pick-wickian-faced
man how in Ancient Ireland it was the storyteller's task to tell a story for each night from the beginning of November—
Samhain
—to the beginning of May.

The exploits of the Emperor Tiberius were related here, who had little boys he called ‘minnows' nibble at him when he was swimming.

Sometimes people would repair from the pub to a ship in the harbour and one New Year's Eve on a Russian ship he saw Russian soldiers writing wishes on scraps of paper, setting fire to their wishes with candle flame, mixing the ash with champagne and drinking it.

A garda sergeant, in a jersey with a jacquard chequerboard design, who'd been interned in the Curragh during the Second World War for his Bolshevik sympathies, where the World's Classics were passed between prisoners, remarked that the French writer Stendhal was not only one of the few survivors of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, but was always impeccably groomed on the way back to France. Outside there were flecks of snow in the sea air.

The proprietress of the pub stood on the deck in the snow in a chintzy boa.

He always called on a boy with a face nimbused by acne, a face that had known Killarney mental hospital, who lived in a fuschine house on one of the peninsulas, with a palm tree that had suffered in shape outside it, and who managed a garage that had an
advertisement
for Coca-Cola that had faded to salmon beside it. This boy had been brought up in an orphanage in a big town in Kerry by the Brothers, a picture of a Penal Days mass on the wall, and his penis had always been beaten when he'd wet the bed.

He spent the summer days now, when he wasn't working, driving up and down the west coast, hoping to have his body franked by swimmers—Bundoran, Strandhill, the changing huts on Glin Pier in West Limerick.

He'd stand beside lifeguards' perches.

He'd never been to the East of Ireland and he never wished to go. That was the way he'd spend his life; endlessly wandering the West of Ireland.

Only on the west coast would touching have any meaning for him.

When frost came he'd urinate on the gas cylinder in the
mornings
to get the gas flowing.

He'd kick a football in the evenings with the boys in a
Blackburn
Rovers jersey, barnacle geese with their white faces, black caps and black markings running from bill through the eye, scampering in play or after a foe along the beach.

In the town in Tipperary he coached soccer and frequently on Sundays he travelled with the boys in a coach to Armagh when the Troubles were just breaking out, where a boy with shorn hair holding the hand of a little girl in a long tartan dress with an Eton collar and button-up patent boots might look towards the bus. In the Middle Ages it was Malachy the anchorite, who, as Bishop of Armagh, brought repute again to the city that had the blood of Peter and Paul, Stephen and Laurence.

On Kilkee Strand, he'd tell the boys in Kerry, the Connaught Rangers used to doff their scarlet trousers piped in green and play naked football.

Inside the caravan he would often obsessively mention a film to the boys he'd seen once in Tipperary. ‘It's about these fellas who race cars on cliffs. And one of them goes over the cliff. And the fellow he was racing is blamed for telling the police about the lot of them.'

He'd spend the evening telling them football stories; of the Old Handsel Monday Football Match played in Scotland in the Middle
Ages; of how football took over from bull-baiting and
badger-baiting
in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century; of how pupils of Rugby School where rugby began and pupils of Eton where soccer began used hurl abuse at one another; of how the first soccer star, Lord Kinnaird, who had a fiery beard to his waist, used to play in a quartered cap and long white trousers and would be pulled in his coach by fans to the players' entrance; of how
Doncaster
FC
was formed as a team to play Yorkshire Institute for the Deaf; of how Arsenal got its name from a munitions factory in Woolwich; of how Moscow Dynamos was founded by Lancashire textile-men in pre-revolutionary Russia; of the confusion in the Irish soccer team, who were featured on a set of cigarette cards, when
Partition
took place; of Dixie Dean who captained Everton at the age of eighteen; of the Manchester United Team killed in the Munich air crash on a freezing February day.

‘In Liverpool there's a lot of touching, but no homosexuality,' a boy said to him in England, whom he slept alongside one night, peach pubic hair, a small amount of it, a ruche of a backside, pressing his body as a child in Ireland would press a missal with
giltedged
leaves and a cover of pearl with a picture of St Patrick with a grandee-beard inset in it.

But here no one was touched and no one touched.

In Fenit a marine worker from Achill had once told him how the prophecy that the last train from Scotland to Achill would bring the body of a dead young man had come true.

Other prophecies come true too: ‘And the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail.'

The boys would go home, walking with the aid of a flashlight.

The last beach he'd visit, before returning to Tipperary when the peacock-green fields were brimming with black lambs and the barnacle geese were about to return to Greenland, was Beal, where the sea cabled in towards Limerick and the river came out, the ribs of a wrecked trawler here and there, a landscape like a cowled monk.

The garda sergeant in the pub with the playwright proprietress had told him, as the North of Ireland Troubles had intensified, how the Book of Kells, the Book of Ardagh, were written in centuries of early Christian peace in Ireland. But then the Vikings came and
monasteries began to war with one another—there were abbot and monk soldiers—and the art form was stone crosses with embossments.

Before leaving, in his caravan, in a Mao jacket, he'd sing a song for the boys who were visiting him.

When asked what happened to him someone might shake their head and say, like the barnacle geese that fly so high no one can see them, ‘He vanished off the face of the firmament.'