Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

you again, in the valley of Slievenamon?’ Lovers sauntered through the corn. Magella was packing her things in the mental hospital to attend the wedding the following day.
    On their second last day in Bray, by the sea, he’d suddenly hugged her and she saw all the mirth again in his face and all the dark in his hair. An old man nearby, his eye on them, quickly wound up a machine to play some music. There was a picture of Sorrento on a funfair caravan, pale blue lines on the yellow ochre caravan, cartoon Italian mountains, cartoon-packed Italian houses, cartoon operatic waves. Magella had looked to the sea, beyond the straggled funfair, and seen the blue in the sea which was tangible, which was ecstatic.
    Magella danced with Boris at the wedding reception. She was wearing a brown suit and a brown hat lent to her by her sister in Tihelly, County Offaly. She looked like an alcoholic beverage, an Irish cream liqueur. Or so a little boy who’d come to the wedding thought. She danced with him in a room where ten-pound notes, twenty-pound notes and, of course, many five-pound notes were pinned on the walls as was the custom at weddings in Ireland. The little boy had come a long way that morning. His granny, on the other side of his family, whom he called on on the way, in her little house, had given him a box of chocolates that looked like a navy limousine. He still had it now as he watched Boris and Magella dance, the couple, a serenity between them, an understanding. They’d been looking for different things from one another, their paths had crossed, they’d gone different ways but in this moment they created a total communion, a total marriage, an understanding that only a child could intuit and carry away with him, enlightened, the notes on the walls becoming Russian notes with pictures of Tsars and dictators and people who’d changed epochs on them, the walls burning in a terrible fire in the child’s mind until only a note or two was left, a face or two, sole reminders of an enraptured moment in history.
    At such moments the imagination begins and someone else, someone who did not live through the events, remembers and, later, counts the pain.
    A little boy walked away from the wedding, box of chocolates still under his arm, not wanting to look back at the point where a woman was dragged away, screaming, at a certain hour, to a solitary room in a mental hospital.
    Years later he returned, long after Magella’s death in the mental hospital, to the woods, at the time of year when rhododendrons spread there. He bent and picked up a decapitated tiara of rhododendron. There was a poster for Paris in the village, a Chinese restaurant run by a South Korean, a late night fish-and-chip takeaway. The garage was still open at the top of the village. The only change was that Boris had put up a Russian flag among the others. It was his showpiece. He’d gotten it from the Legion of Mary in Kilkenny who’d put on a show about imprisoned cardinals behind the Iron Curtain. But it was his pride. It demonstrated, apart from his roots, the true internationalism of the garage. There were no boundaries here. A bald man, lots of children scampering around him for years, would come out to fill your car and his face would tell you these things, a brown, anaemic work coat on him, a prosperous but also somewhat cowed grin on his face.
    At her funeral in 1959 Boris had carried lilies, and there, in the graveyard, thought of his visit to Bradford, the exiled Irish there, a cowed, depressed people, the legacy of history, and of the woman who’d tried to overthrow that legacy, for a while. He’d put the lilies on the grave, Magella’s lover, no one denying that day the exact place of the grief in his heart.
    Everybody walked away except the boy and Boris and then Boris walked away, but first looking at the boy, almost in annoyance, as if to say, you have no right to intrude on these things, flashing back his black hair and throwing a boyish, almost a rival’s look from his black eyes that were scarred and vinegary and blazingly alive from tears. In those eyes was the wound, the secret, and the boy looked at it, unreproached by it.
    Years later he returned to find that there was no museum to that wound, only a few brightly painted houses, a ramshackle cramming of modernity. He took his car and drove out by the garage and the bunting and the flags to the fields where you could smell the first, premature coming of the epic,