Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

The Last Time

    The last time I saw him was in Ballinasloe station, 1953, his long figure hugged into a coat too big for him. Autumn was imminent; the sky grey, baleful. A few trees had become grey too; God, my heart ached. The tennis court beyond, silent now, the river close, half-shrouded in fog. And there he was, Jamesy, tired, knotted, the doctor’s son who took me out to the pictures once, courted me in the narrow timber seats as horns played in a melodramatic forties film.
    Jamesy had half the look of a mongol, half the look of an autistic child, blond hair parted like waves of water reeds, face salmon-colour, long, the shade and colour of autumnal drought. His father had a big white house on the perimeter of town—doors and windows painted as fresh as crocuses and lawns gloomy and yet blanched with perpetually new-mown grass.
    In my girlhood I observed Jamesy as I walked with nuns and other orphans by his garden. I was an orphan in the local convent, our play-fields stretching by the river at the back of elegant houses where we watched the nice children of town, bankers’ children, doctors’ children, playing. Maria Mulcahy was my name. My mother, I was told in later years, was a Jean Harlow-type prostitute from the local terraces. 1, however, had hair of red which I admired in the mirror in the empty, virginal-smelling bathroom of the convent hall where we sat with children of doctors and bankers who had to pay three pence into the convent film show to watch people like Joan Crawford marry in bliss.
    Jamesy was my first love, a distant love.
    In his garden he’d be cutting hedges or reading books, a face on him like an interested hedgehog. The books were big and solemn looking—like himself. Books like War and Peace , I later discovered.
    Jamesy was the bright boy though his father wanted him to do dentistry.
    He was a problem child, it was well known. When I was seventeen I was sent to a draper’s house to be a maid, and there I gathered information about Jamesy. The day he began singing ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ in the church, saying afterwards he was singing it about his grandmother who’d taken a boat one day, sailed down the river until the boat crashed over a weir and the woman drowned. Another day he was found having run away, sleeping on a red bench by the river where later we wrote our names, sleeping with a pet fox, for foxes were abundant that year.
    Jamesy and I met first in the fair green. I was wheeling a child and in a check shirt he was holding a rabbit. The green was spacious, like a desert. Duel in the Sun was showing in town and the feeling between us was one of summer and space, the grass rich and twisted like an old nun’s hair.
    He smiled crookedly.
    I addressed him.
    ‘I know you!’ I was blatant, tough. He laughed.
    ‘You’re from the convent.’
    ‘I’m working now!’
    ‘Have a sweet!’
    ‘I don’t eat them. I’m watching my figure!’
    ‘Hold the child!’
    I lifted the baby out, rested her in his arms, took out a rug and sat down. Together we watched the day slip, the sun steadying. I talked about the convent and he spoke about War and Peace and an uncle who’d died in the Civil War, torn apart by horses, his arms tied to their hooves.
    ‘He was buried with the poppies,’ Jamesy said. And as though to remind us, there were sprays of poppies on the fair green, distant, distrustful.
    ‘What age are you?’
    ‘Seventeen! Do you see my rabbit?’
    He gave it to me to hold. Dumb-bells, he called it. There was a fall of hair over his forehead and by bold impulse I took it and shook it fast.
    There was a smile on his face like a pleased sheep. ‘I’ll meet you again,’ I said as I left, pushing off the pram as though it held billy-cans rather than a baby.
    There he was that summer, standing on the bridge by the prom, sitting on a park bench or pawing a jaded copy of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons .
    He began lending me books and under the pillow I’d read Zola’s Nana or a novel by Marie Corelli, or maybe poetry by Tennyson. There was always a moon that summer—or a very red sunset. Yet I rarely met him, just saw him. Our relationship was blindly educational, little else. There at the bridge, a central point, beside which both of us paused, at different times, peripherally. There was me, the pram, and he in a shirt that hung like a king’s cloak, or on cold days—as such there often were—in a jumper which made him look like a polar bear.
    ‘I hear