Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Everything was ripe for a confrontation between them but Magella kept a quietness, even a dormancy in that pub for months until one night she raged out to the arage, wielding a broom, a like instrument to that of her husband’s death. He met her at the door of his little house alongside the garage that was closed for the night. ‘You scut,’ she said, ‘You took two dogs from me once and never gave them back.’ True, Boris had taken two ginger-coloured, chalk cocker spaniels for his mantelpiece on the condition he’d return them when he found something suitable for the mantelpiece himself. ‘I want them back,’ she said. He let her in. The dogs were there. She stood in front of him, not looking at the dogs. Where there had been black hair there was now mainly a smoke of grey. She stood in front of him, silently, broom inoffensively by her side, as if to show him the wreck of her being, a wreck caused by involvement with him. ‘Come down for a drink some night,’ she said and quietly went off.
    He did go down for a drink in her pub. He fiddled with drinks on the counter. Then Gráinne came back and Magella burned the whole house down, everything, leaving only a charred wreck of a house. She was put back into the mental hospital. There’d been no money left in the bank. Everything was squandered now and everything had been amiss anyway before Magella had burned the house down. Maybe that’s why she’d burned the house down. But this wreck, this cavity in the street was her statement. It was her statement before Boris and Gráinne announced plans for marriage.
    What Gráinne did not know when she was earnestly proposed marriage to was that Boris and Magella had slipped away together for a honeymoon of their own in Bray, County Wicklow, the previous June. They stayed in a cascade of a hotel by the sea. The mountains, Bray Head, were frills on the sea. The days were very blue. Women walked dogs, desultory Russian émigrés in pinks, purples, with hats pushed down over their ears. You never saw their faces. Boris and Magella slept in the same room but in separate beds. There were rhododendrons on hills just over Bray and among the walks on those hills. Boris explained to Magella that she was the real woman in his life, at first a carnal one, then a purified, sublimated one. She’d been the one he’d been looking for. It was difficult for Magella to take this, that physical love was over in her life, but there was affirmation with the pain when she eventually burned down the house, on hearing of Boris’s imminent marriage to Gráinne. She’d achieved something.
    In Bray before they used to go to sleep Boris would light a candle in the room and sit up in bed thinking. ‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked. But he’d never answered. Nuns in Wexford, gulls streaming over an orphanage, poised to drop for crusts of bread on a grey playing area, sailors on the sea, migrations on foot by railroads in Russia, heavy sun on people in rags, a grandmother pulling a child by the hand, the only remaining member of her family.
    ‘You’ve got to go through one thing to get to the other,’ Boris said sagely as he sat up in bed one night, the lights still on, impeccable pyjamas of navy and white stripes on him which revealed a bush of the acrid black hair on his chest, he staring ahead, zombie-like.
    In this statement he’d meant he’d gone through physical love with Magella to fish up a dolorous, muted ikon of a Virgin, of the untouchable but all-protecting woman. To get this holy protection from a woman you had to make her untouchable, sacred. For the rest of his life Magella would provide the source of sanity, of resolve, of belief in his life. She was the woman who’d rescued him from the inchoate Wexford night.
    Magella was, of course, pleased to hear this but still restive. She did not sleep well that night. She longed, despite that statement, to have Boris, his nimble legs and arms, his pale well of a crotch, in her bed.
    The marriage took place in July the following year. There was a crossroads dance the night before a mile or two outside the village. Rare enough in Ireland at that time, even in West Kerry and in Connemara, they still happened in this backwater of County Laois.
    People stepped out beside a few items of a funfair, a few coloured lights strung up. An epic, a tumultous smell of corn came from the fields. A melodion played the tune ‘Slievenamon.’ ‘My love, o my love, will I ne’er see