Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

somehow calling Christ to mind, calling penance to mind, instilling a sense of winter in him that went back a long time, a river in flood around a limestone town.
    Liam offered to cook the Christmas dinner but his mother scoffed him. He was a good cook, Susan vouched. Once Liam had cooked and his father had said he wouldn’t give it to the dogs.
    They walked, Liam, Susan, Gerard, in a town where women were hugged into coats like brown paper accidentally blown about them. They walked in the grounds of Liam’s former school, once a Georgian estate, now beautiful, elegant still in the East Galway winter solstice.
    There were Tinkers to be seen in the town, and English hippies behaving like Tinkers. Many turkeys were displayed, fatter than ever, festooned by holly.
    Altogether one would notice prosperity everywhere, cars, shining clothes, modern fronts replacing the antique ones Liam recalled and pieced together from childhood.
    But he would not forfeit England for his dull patch of Ireland, Southern England where he’d lived since he was twenty-two, Sussex, the trees plump as ripe pears, the rolling verdure, the odd delight of an Elizabethan cottage. He taught with Susan, with Gerard, in a free school. He taught children to paint. Susan taught them to play musical instruments. Gerard looked after younger children though he himself played a musical instrument, a cello.
    Once Liam and Susan had journeyed to London to hear him play at St Martin-in-the-Fields, entertaining ladies who wore poppies in their lapels, as his recital coincided with Remembrance Day and paper poppies generated an explosion of remembrance.
    Susan went to bed early now, complaining of fatigue, and Gerard and Liam were left with one another.
    Though both were obviously male they were lovers, lovers in a tentative kind of way, occasionally sleeping with one another. It was still an experiment but for Liam held a matrix of adolescent fantasy. Though he married at twenty-two, his sexual fantasy from adolescence was always homosexual.
    Susan could not complain. In fact it rather charmed her. She’d had more lovers since they’d married than fingers could count; Liam would always accost her with questions about their physicality; were they more satisfying than him?
    But he knew he could count on her; tenderness between them had lasted six years now.
    She was English, very much English. Gerard was English. Liam was left with this odd quarrel of Irishness. Memories of adolescence at boarding school, waking from horrific dreams nightly when he went to the window to throw himself out but couldn’t because window sills were jammed.
    His father had placed him at boarding school, to toughen him like meat.
    Liam had not been toughened, chastened, ran away twice. At eighteen he left altogether, went to England, worked on a building site, put himself through college. He ended up in Sussex, losing a major part of his Irishness but retaining this, a knowledge when the weather was going to change, a premonition of all kinds of disasters and ironically an acceptance of the worst disasters of all, death, estrangement.
    Now that his father was near death, old teachers, soldiers, policemen called, downing sherries, laughing rhetorically, sitting beside the bed covered by a quilt that looked like twenty inflated balloons.
    Sometimes Liam, Susan, Gerard sat with these people, exchanging remarks about the weather, the fringe of politics or the world economic state generally.
    Mrs Fogarthy swept up a lot. She dusted and danced around with a cloth as though she’d been doing this all her life, fretting and fiddling with the house.
    Cars went by. Geese went by, clanking terribly. Rain came and church bells sounded from a disparate steeple.
    Liam’s father reminisced about 1916, recalling little incidents, fights with British soldiers, comrades dying in his arms, ladies fainting from hunger, escape to Mayo, later imprisonment in the Curragh during the Civil War. Liam said: ‘Do you ever connect it with now, men, women, children being blown up, the La Mon Hotel bombing, Bessbrook killings, Birmingham, Bloody Friday? Do you ever think that the legends and the brilliance built from your revolution created this, death justified for death’s sake, the stories in the classroom, the priests’ stories, this language, this celebration of blood?’
    Although Liam’s father fought himself once, he belonged to those who deplored the present violence, seeing no connection. Liam