Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

to see him.
    One evening they slept together. They made love as they had not for years, he entering her deeply, resonantly, thinking of Galway long ago, a river where they swam as children.
    She stayed after Christmas. They were more subdued with one another. Marion was pregnant. She worked for a while and when her pregnancy became too obvious she ceased working.
    She walked a lot. He wondered at a woman, his wife, how he hadn’t noticed before how beautiful she looked. They were passing Camden Town one day when he recalled a nun he’d once known. He told Marion about her, asked her to enter with him, went in a door, asked for Sister Sarah.
    Someone he didn’t recognize told him she’d gone to Nigeria, that she’d chosen the African sun to boys in black jerseys. He wanted to follow her for one blind moment, to tell her that people like her were too rare to be lost but knew no words of his would convince her. He took his wife’s hand and went about his life, quieter than he had been before.

A Marriage in the Country

    She burned down half her house early that summer and killed her husband. He’d been caught upstairs. It was something she’d often threatened to do, burn the house down, and when she did it she did it quietly, in a moment of silent, reflective despair. She had not known he’d been upstairs. She’d put a broom in the stove and then tarred the walls with the fire. The flames had quickly explored the narrow stairway. A man, twenty years older than her, had been burned alive, caught when snoozing. Magella at his funeral seemed charred herself, her black hair, her pale, almost sucrose skin. She’d stooped, in numbed penitence. There was a nebulous, almost incandesced way her black curls took form from her forehead as there was about all the Scully girls. They made an odd band of women there, all the Scully girls, most of them respectably married. Magella was the one who’d married a dozy publican whose passion in life had been genealogy and whose ambition seemed incapacitated by this passion. She’d had a daughter by him. Gráinne. That girl was taken from her that summer and sent to relatives in Belfast. Magella was not interned in a mental hospital. The house was renovated. The pub reopened. People supposed that the shock of what she’d done had cured her and in a genuinely solicitous way they thought that working in the pub, chattering to the customers, would be better for her than an internment in a mental hospital. Anyway there was something very final about internment in a mental hospital at that time in Ireland. They gave her a reprieve. At the end of that summer Boris came to the village.
    Stacks of hay were piled up in the fields near the newly opened garage outside the village which he came to manage, little juggling acts of hay in merrily rolling and intently bound fields. All was smallness and precision here. This was Laois. An Ascendancy demesne. The garage was on the top of a hill where the one, real, village street ended, and located at a point where the fields seemed about to deluge the road. The one loss of sobriety in the landscape and heaviness and a very minor one. Boris began his career as garage manager by, putting up flags outside the garage, and bunting, an American, an Italian, a French, a Spanish, a German and an Irish flag. He was half-Russian and he’d been raised in an orphanage in County Wexford in the south-eastern tip of Ireland.
    Boris Cleary was thin, nervously thin, black-haired, a blackness smoothing the parts of his face which he’d shaved and the very first thing Magella noticed about him, on coming close, under the bunting, was that there was a smell from the back of his neck, as from wild flowers lost in the deep woods which lay in the immediate surroundings of the village. A rancid, asking smell. A smell which asked you to investigate its bearer. Magella, drawn by the rancid smell from the back of a nervous, thin neck, sought further details. She asked Boris about his Russianness which was already, after a few weeks, a rampant legend, over her counter. His father had been a Russian sailor, his mother a Wexford prostitute; he’d been dumped on the Sisters of Mercy. They had christened him and one particular nun had reared him, cackling all the time at this international irony, calling him ‘little Stalin.’ Boris had emerged, his being, his presence in the world, had emerged from an inchoate night on a ship in the port of Wexford Town.
    How a