Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

autographed the Book of Kells.
    The Guards Band on the terrace of Windsor Castle were one day playing one of the music-hall songs the Belle used to sing, ‘Come where the Booze is Cheap,’ when Queen Victoria, who was taught singing by Mendelssohn, sent Lady Antrim to find out what the wonderful music was.
    The Belle’s colleague Kate Vaughan’s marriage broke up with Colonel Arthur Frederick Wellesley and she went to Johannesburg where, in elbow gloves on bare arms and a corsage of wild gardenias, she became the Belle of the Gaiety Theatre there. Shortly after she wrote to the Belle about the mauve raintree and the coral tree with cockatoo flowers, she died on a night when Gertie Millar, who was to marry the Earl of Dudley, was playing in one of her roles in Ali Baba in London. The Belle had a photograph of her disembarking at Cape Town in a matinée hat.
    The owl-like Catholic landlord in neighbouring Loughrea, renowned for promoting boys’ choirs, decided to build a new cathedral and the Belle and Bracebridge would often take a brougham there and watch the stained-glass windows being put in, most often speedwell blues, and sometimes at evening the Belle would stand under windows depicting the Ascension and the Last Judgment and recall visits before shows with the French music-hall artiste, Madame Desclause, in her black Second Empire dress, to the Royal Bavarian Church in Piccadilly.
    On late-autumn afternoons as they returned from Loughrea the beeches would be old gold and the bushes assaulted to misshape.
    A music-hall poster, which depicted a chorus girl holding up a short dress edged in chinchilla-like material, caused clerical outrage in Cork but the clergy were appeased by the king’s frequent visits to the music hall, very often in a kilt with a cockade on his stockings. A Dublin music hall caused all-round offence by featuring Admiral Nelson from Nelson’s Pillar in Sackville Street with Lady Hamilton in a negligée. The king visited Galway, for the second time in his reign, in gaiters, the Queen in pillar-box red with a Spanish riding hat, a group of Connaught Rangers singing a music-hall song, ‘Tara-ra-boom-de-ay,’ as an anthem for them.
    The Belle read Jane Eyre bound in red morocco, by Charlotte Brontë, who’d died while pregnant, married to a parson, Arthur Bell Nicholls, and was remembered for walking alone in a barège dress by the Shannon.
    On the terrace the Belle and Bracebridge would incessantly play on a horn gramophone a Gramophone & Typewriter record of Joseph O’Mara singing ‘Friend and Lover,’ as they had their hot chocolate from a tray with the rose, the thistle, the shamrock. Bracebridge sometimes took an opera hat to Kilkee in the summer where they had listened to the German band on the boardwalk. The gilt and cranberry theatres of Dublin magneted with pantomimes— Jack and the Beanstalk , Puss in Boots , Aladdin and Princess Badroulbadour .
    There was a brief visit to Belgium where they looked at a Rubens painting. Auburn moustachio. Watermelon-pink cleavage. Plumed hat. Boy with peach slashings on his arms. Cirrus horse. Despite the smiles the sky tells you that war is near.
    The Belle was one of the ladies’ committee who saw the Con-naught Rangers off from the North Wall in August 1914, with chocolates and madeleines.
    The swallows in the eaves had a second brood that year and didn’t leave until October. When the alders were in white, pulpy berry on either side of the Forty Steps at the end of the Long Walk she’d go there, stand on top of the steps, sing her music-hall songs lest they be stamped out in her.
    Soldiers camped in the demesne and at night sang ‘lt’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ which the Melbourne music-hall girl, Florrie Forde, who ran away when she was fourteen, used to sing, the words printed an inch high at the footlights so thousands could join in.
    A late Indian summer visit to Kilkee—dramatic mare’s tails in the morning sky, a dense fruit of bindweed flowers on the bushes, ladybirds doing trapeze acts on withered fleabane, the late burnet roses becoming clusters of black berries, a dolphin thrashing in the horseshoe bay, a coloratura rendition of ‘Take, Oh Take Those Lips Away’ from The Bohemian Girl at an evening get-together by a man with a Vandyke beard when news came that the mail boat was sunk just after leaving Kingston Harbour, with the loss of five hundred lives.
    During the War of Independence, from a window, over