Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

looked at it. An old, swede-faced man bent over a bedside dresser. ‘Do ya remember me? I used to bring you on walks.’ Of course, I said. Of course. ‘It’s not true what they said about us. Not true. They’re all mad. They’re all lunatics. How’s Bert?’ Suddenly he started shouting at me. ‘You never wrote back. You never wrote back to my letters. And all the ones I sent you.’ More easy-voiced he was about to return the flowers until he suddenly avowed. ‘They’ll be all right for Our Lady. They’ll be all right for Our Lady.’ Our Lady was a white statue, over bananas and pears, by his bed.
    3
    It is hot summer in London. Tiger lilies have come to my door. I’d never known Patsy had written to me. I’d never received his letters of course. They’d curdled in my mother’s hand. All through my adolescence. I imagined them filing in, never to be answered. I was Patsy’s boy. More than the drummer lad. He had betrothed himself to me. The week after seeing him, after being virtually chased out of the ward by him, with money I’d saved up in Dublin, I took a week’s holiday in Italy. The trattorias of Florence in November illumined the face of a young man who’d been Patsy Fogarthy before I’d been born. It’s now six years on and that face still puzzles me, the face I saw in Florence, a young man with black hair, and it makes a story, that solves a lot of mystery for me. There’s a young man with black hair in a scarlet tie but it’s not Patsy. It’s a young man my father met in London in 1939, the year he came to study tailoring. Perhaps now it’s the summer and the heat and the picture of my father on the wall—a red and yellow striped tie on him—and my illimitable estrangement from family but this city creates a series of ikons this summer. Patsy is one of them. But the sequence begins in the summer of 1939.
    Bert ended up on the wide pavements of London in the early summer of 1939. He came from a town in the Western Midlands of Ireland whose wide river had scintillated at the back of town before he left and whose handsome façades radiated with sunshine. There were girls left behind that summer and cricket matches. Bert had decided on the tailoring course after a row with an older brother with whom he’d shared the family grocery-cum-bar business. The family house was one of the most sizeable on the street. Bert had his eyes on another house to buy now. He’d come to London to forge a little bit of independence from family for himself and in so doing he forwent some of the pleasures of the summer. Not only had he left the green cricket fields by the river but he had come to a city that exhaled news bulletins. He was not staying long.
    He strolled into a cavern of death for behind the cheery faces of London that summer was death. Bert would do his course in Cheapside and not linger. Badges pressed against military lapels, old dishonours to Ireland. Once Bert had taken a Protestant girl out. They sailed in the bumpers at the October fair together. That was the height of his forgiveness for England. He did not consider playing cricket a leaning to England. Cricket was an Irish game, pure and simple, as could be seen from its popularity in his small, Protestant-built town.
    Living was not easy for Bert in London; an Irish landlady—she was from Armagh, a mangy woman—had him. Otherwise the broth of his accent was rebuffed. He stooped a little under English disdain, but his hair was still orange and his face ruddy in fragments. By day Bert travailed; a dusty, dark cubicle. At evenings he walked. It was the midsummer that made him raise his head a little.
    Twilight rushing over the tops of the trees at the edge of Hyde Park made him think of his dead parents, Galway people. He was suddenly both proud of and abstracted by his lineage. A hat was vaunted by his red hands on his waist. One evening, as perfumes and colours floated by, he thought of his mother, her tallness, her military posture, the black clothes she had always been stuffed into. In marrying her husband she declared she’d married a bucket. Her face looked a bit like a bucket itself.
    Bert had recovered his poise. The width of his shoulders breathed again. His chest was out. It was that evening a young man wearing a scarlet tie stopped and talked to him under a particularly dusky tree by Hyde Park. ‘You’re Irish,’ the young man had said. ‘How do you know?’ ‘Those sparkling blue eyes.’ The young man had worn