Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

pictures to throw light on my predicament but even they were of no avail to me; religion was gone in a convent hush. Jamesy now was lost, looking out of a window I’d think of him but like the music of Glenn Miller he was past. His hair, his face, his madness I’d hardly touched, merely fondled like a floating ballerina.
    It had been a mute performance—like a circus clown. There’d been something I wanted of Jamesy which I’d never reached; I couldn't put words or emotions to it but now from a desk in London, staring into a Battersea dawn, I see it was a womanly feeling. I wanted love.
    ‘Maria, you haven't cleaned the lavatory.’ So with a martyred air I cleaned the lavatory and my mind dwelt on Jamesy’s pimples, ones he had for a week in September.
    The mornings were drab and grey. I’d been working a year in Athlone, mind disconnected from body, when I learned Jamesy was studying dentistry in Dublin. There was a world of difference between us, a partition as deep as war and peace. Then one morning I saw him. I had a scarf on and a slight breeze was blowing and it was the aftermath of a sullen summer and he was returning to Dublin. He didn’t look behind. He stared—almost at the tracks—like a fisherman at the sea.
    I wanted to say something but my clothes were too drab; not the nice dresses of two years before, dresses I’d resurrected from nowhere with patterns of sea lions or some such thing on them.
    ‘Jamesy Murphy, you’re dead,’ I said—my head reeled.
    ‘Jamesy Murphy, you’re dead.’
    I travelled on the same train with him as far as Athlone. He went on to Dublin. We were in different carriages.
    I suppose I decided that morning to take my things and move, so in a boat full of fat women bent on paradise I left Ireland.
    I was nineteen and in love. In London through the auspices of the Sisters of Mercy in Camden Town I found work in a hotel where my red hair looked ravishing, sported over a blue uniform.
    In time I met my mate, a handsome handy building contractor from Tipperary, whom I married—in the pleased absence of relatives—and with whom I lived in Clapham, raising children, he getting a hundred pounds a week, working seven days a week. My hair I carefully tended and wore heavy check shirts. We never went back to Ireland. In fact, we’ve never gone back to Ireland since I left, but occasionally, wheeling a child into the Battersea funfair, I was reminded of Jamesy, a particular strand of hair blowing across his face. Where was he? Where was the hurt and that face and the sensitivity? London was flooding with dark people and there at the beginning of the sixties I’d cross Chelsea bridge, walk my children up by Cheyne Walk, sometimes waiting to watch a candle lighting. Gradually it became more real to me that I loved him, that we were active within a certain sacrifice. Both of us had been bare and destitute when we met. The two of us had warded off total calamity, total loss. ‘Jamesy!’ His picture swooned; he was like a ravaged corpse in my head and the area between us opened; in Chelsea library I began reading books by Russian authors. I began loving him again. A snatch of Glenn Miller fell across the faded memory of colours in the rain, lights of the October fair week in Ballinasloe, Ireland.
    The world was exploding with young people—protests against nuclear bombs were daily reported—but in me the nuclear area of the town where I’d worked returned to me.
    Jamesy and I had been the marchers, Jamesy and I had been the protest! ‘I like your face,’ Jamesy once said to me. ‘It looks like you could blow it away with a puff.’
    In Chelsea library I smoked cigarettes though I wasn’t supposed to. I read Chekhov’s biography and Turgenev’s biography—my husband minding the children—and tried to decipher an area of loss, a morning by the station, summer gone.
    I never reached him; I just entertained him like as a child in an orphanage in the West of Ireland I had held a picture of Claudette Colbert under my pillow to remind me of glamour. The gulf between me and Jamesy narrows daily. I address him in a page of a novel, in a chip shop alone at night or here now, writing to you, I say something I never said before, something I’ve never written before.
    I touch upon truth.

The Mourning Thief

    Coming, through the black night he wondered what lay before him, a father lying dying. Christmas, midnight ceremonies in a church stood up like a gravestone, floods