Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

military-shouldered women in white, straw hats on their heads, holding bicycles, in some Edwardian wood of the Dublin mountains.
    24
    ‘And the queer thing is that Gabrielle knew Marty years before in Kiltimagh.’
    Rose was in a Chinese restaurant in Walsingham with the two immigrants who were originally from Mayo. They’d discovered they had an acquaintance in common; a partisan in this tide of menial, immigrant Irish labour. Rose had encountered her in a hotel room once where the carpets had been rolled up after some VIP visitors had spent a lengthy stay. The room, grandiose in proportions, was being renovated. Rose did not know what to dwell on, the conversation with the two odd men or the drama of the encounter years before. Her concentration ultimately flitted between the figment of now and the thought of then. This caused an almost clownish agitation in her features.
    ‘She had the devil of a temper.’
    ‘Oh yes, she’d flare up at you like a snake.’
    ‘There was cuddling in her though.’
    ‘You dirty . . .’
    Rose’s mind had fled the banter between the two men. A woman in a hotel room in London years before, a blue workcoat on her, a conversation, commiseration, companionship then for a few months. But some family tragedy had brought the woman back to Ireland and then Rose never saw her again; no more Friday evenings over a candle-lit, hard-as-a-horseshoe pizza in Hammersmith.
    ‘Go on out of that. Don’t be disparaging a woman’s reputation. She’s not around to defend herself.’
    Rose’s mind had drifted. She could see the sea, the grey sea such as it was piled up, a mute and undemonstrative statement, around Dublin and longed for it as though it had the confessional’s power of absolution.
    25
    Miles stumbled by the sea. A few boats there, backs up. Now it was grey again, an overall grey. Walking done, the group went to a seaside café.
    26
    Words, they’re my story, they’re my life. Here by the sea, dusk, the jukebox going, Dusty Springfield, ‘I Just Don’t Know What to do with Myself,’ no song of mine on the jukebox. Chips, a boy, already tanned, looking from behind the counter, mystically, a Spaniard’s or a Greek’s black moustache on him. I’ll make another song, another story. Stories will get me by, words, won’t they, won’t they? The stage, the lights, the mammoth audience. Is this a Nazi dream of power?
    27
    Today the religion they tried to kill. My religion. Remember when Peader and I went to the Church of the English Martyrs in Tyburn and we, privately, consecrated our marriage there on the site where the head of Oliver Plunkett, the Irish martyr, was chopped off, the nuns all singing, white on them. What will it be like to be dead?—back in that dream of a hymn sung in unison by nuns in white where Irish bishops in the long ago met their deaths.
    28
    Lally went obsessively, again and again, to the jukebox, standing over it, putting on more songs as though lighting candles in a bed of church candles. Midsummer dusk was out there, the strangeness of it. A woman soon to die looked at it. Lally’s backside was very blue.
    29
    Loneliest of all was Miles, the stranger here, the one picked up and talked to as if being picked up was favour enough or as if he was supposed to sit in silent wonderment. He was an oddity from the sea of fans. He was an orphan among these people who, in a strange, unknowing way, patronized him.
    30
    The strangeness, the awkwardness became more evident as the number of coffees coming to the table multiplied, each set of coffees being ushered in more frenetically than the last. No one told their story aloud or was asked to.
    31
    Rose, though, was telling her story very loudly indeed not many miles away. Sweet and sour chicken, a plate of it, went by as she got to the part about leaving Ireland. Her immediate listeners were enthralled but their wonderment was more at how gauche exiles very often hid the most amazing secrets, how they hid horror, terror and great magnitudes of sin—incest, homosexuality, lesbianism, prostitution, now, rare enough, nymphomania. England dusted off the sins and made people just foolish—just foolish Irish folk.
    ‘The child? The little lad?’
    ‘Sure he’s grown now. He wouldn’t want to see me.’
    32
    O Mother of God, Star of the Sea, pray for us, pray that we find loved ones. Someone’s limbs to get caught up with in a mildly comfortable bed.
    Lally remembered, from childhood, a Sacred Heart picture