Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

parents. He had a mad sister somewhere in England who talked to chickens. Lally’s father had deserted the entire palette of Ireland for forty years, never once writing to his parents when they were alive, trying to obliterate the memory of them, doing so until he found his way home again in the late 1960s.
    That song had been called ‘Stones in a Flaxen Field.’
    Words; Lally was loved for his words. They spun from him, all colours. They were sexual and male and young, his words. They were kaleidoscopic in colour. But they spoke, inversely, of things very ancient, of oppression. A new generation of young English people learnt from his songs.
    And only ten years before, Ellie often thought, her grocery store was stoned, one night, just after bombs went off in Birmingham, the window all smashed.
    Ah well; that was life. That was change. One day scum, the next stars. Stars . . .Ellie looked up from her dreams for the Milky Way or the Walsingham Way but it was still very much May late-afternoon light.
    12
    Her father told her how they used to play hurling in the fields outside his village in County Galway in May evening light, ‘light you could cup in your hand it was so golden.’ There are holes in every legend. There were two versions of her father. The man who ran away and who never went back until he was in his fifties. And the man who’d proposed to her mother at a Galwaymen’s ball. ‘But sure he was only there as a spy that day,’ Áine’s mother would always say. Even so it was contradictory. Áine resented the lyricism of Lally’s version of her father; she resented the way he’d used family and put it into song, she resented this intrusion into the part of her psyche which was wrapped up in family. More than anything she resented the way Lally got away with it. But still she outwardly applauded him. But as he became more famous she became older, more wrecked looking. Still her hair was very red. That seemed to be her triumph—even at school. To have this almost obscenely lavish red hair. She got on well at school. She had many boyfriends. Too many. She was involved on women’s committees. But wasn’t there something she’d lost?
    She did not believe in all this: God, pilgrimage. Coming to Walsingham almost irked her. She’d come as a duty. But it did remind her of another pilgrimage, another journey, almost holy.
    13
    It had been when Lally was a teenager. She’d gone for an abortion in Brighton. A clinic near the sea. In winter. He’d accompanied her. Waiting for the appointment she’d heard the crash of the winter sea. Lally beside her. He’d held her hand. She’d thought of Clare, of deaths, of wakes. She’d gone in for her appointment. Afterwards, in a strange way, she realized he’d become an artist that day. By using him as a solace when he’d been too young she’d traumatized him into becoming an artist. She’d wanted him to become part of a conspiracy with her, a narrow conspiracy: but instead she’d sent him out on seas of philosophizing, of wondering. He’d been generous in his interpretation of her from out on those seas. His purity not only had been reinforced but immeasurably extended. While hers was lost.
    There’d been a distance between them ever since. Lally was the one whose life worked, Lally was the one with the pop star’s miraculous sweep of dark hair over his face, Lally was the one with concise blue eyes that carried the Clare coast in them.
    Toady she saw it exactly. Lally was the one who believed.
    14
    Miles was so chuffed at being in this company that he said nothing; he just grinned. He hid his head, slightly idiotically, in his coat. The countryside rolled by outside. All the time he was aware of the journey separating him from his quest for his mother. But he didn’t mind. When it came to the point it had seemed futile, the idea of finding her in that crowd. And romantic. When he looked out from a porch, near a pump, at the sea of faces, it had seemed insane, deranged, dangerous, the point of his quest. There’d been a moment when he thought his sanity was giving way. But the apparition of Lally had saved him. Now he was being swept along on another odyssey. But where was this odyssey leading? And as he was on it, the car journey, it was immediately bringing him to thoughts, memories. The landscape of adolescence, the stretched-out skyline of Dublin, a naked black river bearing isolated white lights at night as it meandered drunkenly to the