Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

machine guns during the War of Independence.
    Pancake Ward, in a pearl-white waistcoat, held a party for the players. A man who sold football colours in crêpe paper at matches mimed to ‘Champagne Charlie,’ ‘Not for Joseph,’ ‘I’ll Send You Some Violets’ on a horn gramophone and one of the players did a Highland dance on a table, lifting his royal tartan kilt to show his bare backside.
    Bran Ahearne, a Jesse boy with a waxed moustache, could be heard telling an English player on a sofa with an antimacassar patterned with mice in friar robes: ‘People on Tay Lane love taking opposite sides, during the Boer War some were Connaught Rangers and went into battle, only a couple coming back. Others were Boers and kissed the Tricolour by firelight on the Transvaal.’
    On the canal side of Tay Lane lived a man with goat-whiskers who used his front garden as a lavatory and grabbed passing Rhode Island chicks as toilet paper.
    Thomasine Solan and her mother, Tay Lane’s courtesans, both in backless dresses, feathered boas and strings of bugle-beads, were present and were seated beside a flowering cactus in an Edward VII and Queen Alexandra coronation mug.
    When she was a girl Thomasine’s mother used to accompany the Connaught Rangers to the station in the evenings with a cresset lantern.
    When wings were falling from the sycamore, maple and ash trees outside the Protestant church, my father and Miss Husaline had gone to Dublin to see Douglas Fairbanks in Mark of Zorro at the O’Connell Street Picture House and afterwards they did the foxtrot at Mitchel’s Tea Rooms before getting the train home.
    In Miss Husaline’s house was a soapstone elephant from India on which she put a mouse. Beside it, in an oxidized frame, a photograph of a Protestant orphan, Hyacinth Connmee, with a pudding-bowl haircut, against sea pools with submerged bunches of thrift. Hyacinth Connmee had been sent to a Protestant orphanage in North Connemara. A hotel owner there converted to the Church of Ireland and the Protestant orphans came back from England, from their houses with Margaret Hartness roses outside, and stayed in the hotel.
    Beside the photograph was a postcard, ‘The Lark’s Song’ by Margaret W Tarrant, Hyacinth had sent from England.
    My father and Miss Husaline had discovered larks’ eggs on the Hill of Down by the Suck, pointed oval, greenish-white, mottled with pale lavender, with markings of rufous.
    Miss Husaline’s father, who wore a cricket shirt winter and summer, had been at a wedding in The Park as a child when there’d been a pyrotechnic display—a golden fuschia tree in blossom, snowdrops in bloom, rose blossoms in violet stars, immense sheafs of wheat downfalling on the East Galway country.
    Miss Husaline always served an aurora borealis of white-iced queen cakes or Boston sponge she made herself on a powder-blue Worcester plate that showed a Ho-Ho bird on a rock.
    The bishop’s palace used to be in the town but it moved to a town where a priest wrote a book which caused a great outcry, and the priest went to live in London where he was photographed in the English papers with women in flapper dresses who wore monocles. There was a doctor in town, who drove an Auto Carrier Aceca Six, who was a champion rugby player and one day, knocked out during a game on the mental hospital grounds, when some Campbeltown Malt Scotch whisky was poured down his throat, he leapt up, shouting: ‘I am a teetotaller!’
    There was rumoured to have been a homosexual orgy in the changing rooms in the mental hospital grounds that winter, men whose genitals smelt of young mushrooms—the blame put on a few bottles of Canada brandy bought by a cross-border team with carp-rugby features who wore cloth caps during the game—and the orgy went down in town lore but all the participants married, except Éanna Geraghty who worked in the London brick-orange bank, rolled his own cigarettes with Wills’ Capstan tobacco, and wore an Inverness cape.
    He had a rendezvous with one of the Northern players, a youth with nougat-coloured hair, sheepdog-fringe, butcher-lie eyes, who wore an old Portoran tie, in Lyon’s Corner House in London just before the War, having sallyslung and coffee with him.
    In his flat opposite the house with an ivy-coloured door where Theobald Wolfe Tone had stayed, where the town makes a parabola and then a glissade towards Galway City, there was a print of Antonio Pollaluolo’s Battle of Naked Men . He