Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

spaciously open in the cemetery. There’d be a red rose in his black lapel. The sun would be gruesomely hot. Áine would be crying for a country she never really knew, a country for which her red hair was an emblem.
    Miles would start losing his soul that summer, if soul you could call it; his sensitivity, vulnerability, belief in something. Walsingham and Wells-next-the-Sea would have been the last stops for his openness. After that, though still in media terms outrageously beautiful, he’d start becoming hard, calculating, eyes, those brown eyes of his, focused on attainment. All he’d want to do would be to be a star and oblivionize, kill anything else in him. There’d be no sign of Rose in this Italian suit dolled-up boy.
    36
    Rose let herself in the hall door. 14 Bolingbroke Road, Shepherd’s Bush, London. Inside the light wasn’t working. The smell of urine came from the first-floor toilet. She was a little drunk still. Her drunken form merged with the darkness. The smell of urine was aquatic in the air the further she walked in. But the darkness was benign to her. It shrouded her unhappiness, the unhappiness which had suddenly come on her in the bus as she remembered what she’d been trying to forget for years, what she’d been successfully putting Walsingham between it and her for years. Now pilgrimages, trips to Walsingham, the cabbalistic charades of them and the inexact hope they gave off didn’t work any more and all she could see, right in front of her, was the greyness, the no-hope, the lethargy land of it .
    37
    The lights of a motorway going back to London and the lights rearing up at you, daisy trails of them. Four silent people in the car, one sleeping, the strange boy, a phrase coming to Lally’s head as he drove, a phrase he wouldn’t use in a song, an unwelcome phrase even. It came from a prayer of his mother’s he remembered from childhood.
    ‘And after this our exile.’

Martyrs

    Ella was an Italian woman whose one son had been maimed in a fight and was now permanently in a wheelchair, still sporting the char-black leather jacket he’d had on the night he’d been set upon. Ella’s cream waitress outfit seemed to tremble with vindication when she spoke of her son’s assailants. ‘I’ll get them. I’ll get them. I’ll shoot them through the brains.’ The formica white walls listened. Chris’s thoughts were set back that summer to Sister Honor.
    The lake threw up an enduring desultory cloud that summer—it was particularly unbudging on Indiana Avenue—and Chris sidled quickly by the high-rise buildings which had attacked Mrs Pajalich’s son. Sister Honor would have reproached Ella with admonitions of forgiveness but Chris saw—all too clearly—as she had in Sister Honor’s lucid Kerry-coast-blue eyes the afternoon she informed her she was reneging on convent school for state high school that Sister Honor would never forgive her, the fêted pupil, for reneging on a Catholic education for the streams of state apostacy and capitalistic indifference. Chris had had to leave a Catholic environment before it plunged her into a lifetime of introspection. She, who was already in her strawberry and black check shirt, orientated to a delicate and literary kind of introspection. Sister Honor’s last words to her, from behind that familiar desk, had been ‘Your vocation in life is to be a martyr.’
    The summer before university Chris worked hard—as a waitress—in a cream coat alongside Mrs Pajalich. Beyond the grey gravestone citadels of the city were the gold and ochre cornfields. At the end of summer Chris would head through them—in a Greyhound bus—for the university city. But first she had to affirm to herself, ‘I have escaped Sister Honor and her many mandates.’
    Ella Pajalich would sometimes nudge her, requesting a bit of Christian theology, but inevitably reject it. Ella had learnt that Chris could come out with lines of Christian assuagement. However, the catastrophe had been too great. But that did not stop Ella, over a jam pie, red slithering along the meringue edges, from pressing Chris for an eloquent line of heaven-respecting philosophy.
    Rubbing a dun plate that was supposed to be white Chris wondered if heaven or any kind of Elysium could ever touch Ella’s life; sure there were the cherry blossoms by the lake in a spring under which she pushed her son. But the idea of a miracle, of a renaissance, no. Mrs Pajalich was determined to stick the café