Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

trees in Arthur’s Quay Park at night or sit late at night in the Treaty Café.
    In deference to the goats who were present the garda sergeant sang a bit of his song about the goat:
    ‘“Oh, Mercy Sir,” the goat replied, “and let me tell my story-o.”’
    The Emperor Heliogabalus had been a teenager, he told them, wearing long purple Phoenician garments, embroidered in gold; linen shoes, necklaces, jewels, rouging his cheeks and painting his eyes, appointing actors to the most important posts in the Empire, murdered with his mother Soaemias, by his own soldiers and their bodies thrown into a sewer that ran into the Tiber.
    But it was generally agreed that the garda sergeant’s most beautiful model was a Jewish refugee from Prague with doe-like limbs who lived in the town for a few years during the war.
    ‘This is what we fought and died for,’ the naked garda sergeant greeted the boy on his first arrival at the swimming hole in riding breeches, golf stockings and a thistle dicky bow—a bow with flaps that opened out at both ends—when the comfrey was in white bloom on the sea slopes, before it turned blue.
    Father Coughlin’s broadcasts in the USA against the Jews were famous in Ireland.
    The boy could talk to the garda sergeant about Boccherini, and about Mozart who’d sojourned in a Naples-yellow house in Prague.
    The boy’s family had brought a reproduction of a painting with them from Prague, which they put in the hall of their house where his mother, who wore culottes as she partook in table quizzes with the local women, made plaited challah bread; a little boy in grey and he had the same polo-pony features as the Jewish boy.
    Black bow tie with white polka dots, Eton collar, double-breasted grey suit, straw hat in right hand, toy Pomeranian biting hat, a little greenery behind the boy, left hand in pocket, straw-blond Eton crop, forget-me-not-blue eyes, prince’s apricot smirk.
    The boy’s hand accidentally touched a gull’s egg, light olive with spots of umber, as he was being photographed.
    A boy who had been used to a bathing establishment on the Elbe in an Irish summer; a towel slung over one shoulder like a Roman exomis.
    The chough lived here—the crow with red legs—a raven lived near here, the natterjack toad—yellow stripe down his back—roamed here. Gannets frequently made passage by the swimming hole.
    A light bib-top, which is usually joined with a zip to dark trunks but the trunks removed—fire-red body hair.
    At night the boy would go to the garda station with cherry-and-sultana sponge cakes his mother had made and tea would be served on a tray with the Guinness pelican in the penetralia of the garda station, which was dominated by a framed picture of Venus with Adonis’s naked leg wrapped around her and he and Garda Sergeant Clohessy would listen to ‘Song of the Seats,’ ‘Farewell and Adieu to You,’ ‘Sweet Spanish Ladies,’ ‘So We’ll Go No More A-Roving.’
    As a trainee guard in Dublin, Garda Sergeant Clohessy had heard how a lock of Byron’s hair in a locket had been lost in Kildare Street and he cut off a curl of the Czech boy’s hair as a keepsake.
    Lord Byron had loved John Edleston more than any human being.
    The boy left with his family to live in a house with Virginia creeper on it, which was the red of splodges on a baby’s bottom, in the autumn, when de Gaulle entered Paris, but not before he told a Jewish story to the gathering at the swimming hole, a torch of monbretia on the slope above, about a migratory bird with feathers so beautiful they were never seen before, who came for the winter and built his nest at the top of the tallest cedar, how the king ordered a human ladder to be built to the top of the tree so that the bird and his nest could be brought to him, but the people at the bottom of the ladder grew impatient because it was taking so long and broke away so that the ladder collapsed and the bird was never inspected.
    On his arrival in Dublin the boy sent the garda sergeant a postcard of an Eros with flashing forget-me-not-blue eyes, in a wolfskin surcoat, playing a flute.
    The parenthesis lasted until the end of the war when two nuns picking burnet roses for the Feast of St Colmcille saw a naked man with naked boys washing themselves with Pears’ and Lifebuoy soap.
    A stamp featuring Douglas Hyde, the first Protestant president of Ireland, was omnipresent at the time and Des Fretwell and his Twelve Piece Orchestra played at the