Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

ceiling that was in fact the imaginative ceiling of Irish society.
    It was a phase. It hit her, like a moonbeam, in her late teens, and it lasted until her mid-twenties. She got a son out of it, Miles, and the son made her recondite, for a while, and then she went back to her old ways, the streets. But this time each man she had seemed tainted and diseased after her, a diseased, invisible mucus running off him and making him curl up with horror at the awareness of this effect. He had caught something incurable and he hated himself for it. He drifted away from her, trying to analyse what felt different and awful about him. Sex had turned sour, like the smell of Guinness sometimes in the Dublin air.
    But Rose, even living with her sister, could not give it up; her whole body was continually infiltrated by sexual hunger and one day, feeling sick in herself, she left. The day she left Dublin she thought of a red-haired boy, the loveliest she had, who’d ended up spending a life sentence in Mountjoy, for a murder of a rural garda sergeant, having hit him over the head one night in the Liberties, with a mallet. He’d been half a Tinker and wore mousy freckles at the tip of his nose—like a tattoo.
    London had ended all her sexual appetite: it took her dignity; it made her middle aged. But it never once made her want to return. She held her child in her head, a talisman, and she went to Walsingham once a year as a reparation, having sent a postcard from there once to her sister, saying: ‘If you want to find me, find me in Walsingham.’ That had been at a moment of piqued desperation. She’d written the postcard on a wall beside a damp telephone kiosk and the postcard itself became damp; people, happy people, sauntering, with chips, around her.
    For a few years she found a companion for her trip to Walsingham, a Mr Coneelly, a bald man from the hotel, a hat on his head on the pilgrimage, a little earthenware leprechaun grin on his face under his hat. He had an amorous attachment to her. There was always a ten-pound note sticking from his pocket and a gold chain trailing to the watch in that pocket. But the romance ended when white rosary beads fell out of his trousers pocket as he was making love to her once on a shabby, once lustrous gold sofa, she doing it to be obliging, and he taking the falling rosary as a demonstration by his dead mother against the romance. In fact he found a much younger girl after that and he made sure no rosary fell from his pocket in the middle of making love. He had been company, for a while.
    Rose had geared herself for a life of loneliness. Today in Walsingham it rained a little and she stood to the side, on a porch and watched.
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    Sometimes Áine’s feelings towards her brother came to hatred. She never pretended it. She was always courteous, even decorous with him: the worst and the most false of her, ‘schoolmistressy.’ She resented his strident, bulbous shirts, the free movements of those shirts, the colours of them. She resented what he did with experience, turning it into an artifact. Artifacts weren’t life and yet, for him, they created a life of their own: those Botticelli angels looking at him from an audience, full of adulation. Áine wanted reports on life to be factual, plain; Lally, the Irish artist, threw the facts into tumults of colour where they got distorted. Eventually the words took on a frenzy, a life of their own. They were able to change the miserable facts—rain over a desultory, praying horde at Walsingham, crouched in between Chinese takeaways—and turn themselves into something else, a miracle, a transcendence, an elevation and an obliviscence: wine turned into the blood of Christ at mass. A mergence with all the Irish artists of the centuries. Of course Lally was only a pop star and yet his words, she had to admit sometimes, were as truthful as any Irish writer’s. His words exploded on concert stages, on television, and told of broken Irish lives, red-haired Irish women immigrants who worked in hotels in West London.
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    Miles had stood not very far away from his mother that day and Lally had noticed Miles’s mother, when there was rain, as she stood talking to two men from Mayo. There was a hullabaloo of Irish accents between Rose and the two men from Mayo. Lally paused; a story. Then he went on. Miles didn’t tell Lally in the car that he’d come in search of a red-haired woman. He said very little and was asked very little.
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    Rose,