Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

worked in a factory.
    ‘My first week in England a Greek homosexual who lived upstairs asked me to sleep with him. That ended my innocence. I grew up somewhere around then, became adult very, very young.’
    1966, the year he left Ireland.
    Sonny and Cher sang ‘I Got You, Babe.’
    London was readying itself for blossoming, the Swinging Sixties had attuned themselves to Carnaby Street, to discotheques, to parks. Ties looked like huge flowers, young hippies sat in parks. And in 1967, the year Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared, a generation of young men and horned-rimmed glasses looking like John Lennon. ‘It was like a party,’ Liam said, ‘a continual party. I ate, drank at this feast.
    ‘Then I met Marion. We married in 1969, the year Brian Jones died. I suppose we spent our honeymoon at his funeral. Or at least in Hyde Park where Mick Jagger read a poem in commemoration of him. “Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!”’
    Sister Sarah smiled. She obviously liked romantic poetry too, she didn’t say anything, just looked at him, with a long slow smile. ‘I understand,’ she said, though what she was referring to he didn’t know.
    Images came clearer now, Ireland, the forty steps at school, remnants of a Georgian past, early mistresses, most of all the poems of Keats and Shelley.
    Apart from the priests, there had been things about school he’d enjoyed, the images in poems, the celebration of love and laughter by Keats and Shelley, the excitement at finding a new poem in a book.
    She didn’t say much to him these days, just looked at him. He was beginning to fall into place, to be whole in this environment of rough and ready young men.
    Somehow she had seduced him.
    He wore clean, cool, casual white shirts now, looked faraway at work, hair drifting over his forehead as in adolescence. Someone noticed his clear blue eyes and remarked on them, Irish eyes, and he knew this identification as Irish had not been so absolute for years.
    ‘ “They came like swallows and like swallows went,” ’ Sister Sarah quoted one evening. It was a fragment from a poem by Yeats, referring to Coole Park, a place not far from Liam’s home, where the legendary Irish writers convened, Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, O’Casey, a host of others, leaving their mark in a place of growth, of bark, of spindly virgin trees. And in a way now Liam associated himself with this horde of shadowy and evasive figures; he was Irish. For that reason alone he had strength now. He came from a country vilified in England but one which, generation after generation, had produced genius, and observation of an extraordinary kind.
    Sister Sarah made people do extraordinary things, dance, sing, boys dress as girls, grown men jump over one another like children. She had Liam festoon himself in old clothes, with paper flowers in his hat.
    The story of the play ran like this:
    Two Tinker families are warring. A boy from one falls in love with a girl from the other. They run away and are pursued by Liam who plays King of the Tinkers. He eventually finds them but they kill themselves rather than part and are buried with the King of the Tinkers making a speech about man’s greed and folly.
    No one questioned that it was too mournful a play for Christmas; there were many funny scenes, wakes, fights, horse-stealing and the final speech, words of which flowed from Liam’s mouth, had a beauty, an elegance which made young men from Roscommon who were accustomed to hefty Irish showband singers stop and be amazed at the beauty of language.
    Towards the night the play was to run Sister Sarah became a little irritated, a little tired. She’d been working too hard, teaching during the day. She didn’t talk to Liam much and he felt hurt and disorganized. He didn’t turn up for rehearsal for two nights running. He rang and said he was ill.
    He threw a party. All his former friends arrived and Marion’s friends. The flat churned with people. Records smashed against the night. People danced. Liam wore an open-neck collarless white shirt. A silver cross was dangling, one picked up from a craft shop in Cornwall.
    In the course of the party a girl became very, very drunk and began weeping about an abortion she’d had. She sat in the middle of the floor, crying uproariously, awaiting the arrival of someone.
    Eventually, Liam moved towards her, took her in his arms, offered her a cup of tea. She quietened. ‘Thank you,’ she said