Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

mimickers and could mimic the lamentation of the herring gull.
    ‘I’m an autumn person,’ Ailve told me, over a mug with a ladybird— une coccinelle —on it, at the first French lesson.
    Eyebright, with its lonely flame, grew on the cliffs in August.
    Burnet moths, olive wings stippled with scarlet, on the cliff scabious in September.
    The tree mallow still flourishing in October, where the butcher-businessman dispatched pigeons with gold to England after the Second World War when gold was scarce there.
    The fly agaric mushroom, blood-luminous and yellow, in November, where the storyteller Seán Ó Conaill went from house to house.
    In December necklaces of birds’ footprints on the beaches, the cries of the winter birds like the full-time whistle at a Gaelic football match, tortoiseshell sunshine.
    Ailve had a host of relatives who were nuns in France and at fifteen she was sent to a convent in Paris, where at the end of the war, thanks to the Irish Red Cross, which included some of Ailve’s relatives, Tipperary cheese in a box with a picture of a cow on it had been in vogue.
    Leaving Ireland she had to say goodbye to a Gaelic student who saved the hay with farmers where the kings of Kerry used to booley—leave their permanent residence and graze their cattle for the summer.
    But she had a Kodak colour photograph with a white border, a boy with cranberry-auburn hair.
    At school in Kerry she’d been taught the eighteenth-century Killarney poet, Aogán Ó Rathaille, who lamented he’d got no periwinkles as a child. He wrote of visions, the Beautiful Lady. Ailve found the Beautiful Lady again in a Russian church in Paris—Holy Sophia.
    After a few years she attended the Sorbonne.
    Her beloved Proust saw Queen Alexandra with followers approach a Parisian buffet table in royal procession.
    Ailve saw the Duke of Windsor in linen jacket and white buckskin shoes in the Bois de Boulogne.
    I learnt from her at the first French lesson that Racine had written about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor situation centuries before in Bérénice .
    I was sixteen when I met Ailve, autumn 1967.
    She was teaching French for a year in a convent with a statue of St Rose of Lima, first saint of the Americas, outside it, in the town where I lived.
    I started going to her for French lessons, bringing red Silvine exercise books.
    ‘My little friends,’ she told me Gauguin called the postcards on his wall and her postcards, in a room overlooking the river, were Proust’s friend Robert de Montesquiou in Napoleonic-green coat by Lucien Doucet; Berthe Morisot’s portrait of her sister in ultramarine dog collar and mother in black Second Empire gown; Salome by Delacroix; Lot’s Wife Turning to Salt by Maître François.
    A few years before my father had bought me a set of art books. Loose colour reproductions went with them and one of them had been Dürer’s Lot and his Daughters : a loftily turbaned Lot leaving Sodom with wine slung over his shoulder, which he’s later to drink and lie down with his daughters and have children by them; basket of eggs in hand; one daughter merrily with the family moneybox although her mother has visibly turned into a pillar of salt behind her. When Sodom was burned, Proust noted that a few of those sodomites had managed to escape, Ailve illuminated me.
    She would play arias from Iphigénie en Aulide , which Pauline Viardot used to sing to Flaubert in his Turkish knitted waistcoat with brown-and-red stripes and green oriental slippers.
    Pride of place on her shelf was the Penguin Classic edition of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet with The Farmers of Flagey returning from the fair by Courbet on the cover, and she called the fair that had just ended in the town a ‘pardon.’
    Many Travellers stayed in the countryside near the town for the winter after the fair.
    The Traveller children could indicate the hazelnut and the wild plum for you. The heron was anthropoid for them, and the ferret.
    What really brought Ailve here I never knew.
    Her elfin face was distinctive above a black polo-neck sweater, her legs in lurex-thread stretch tights or ribbed orange tights under a mid-thigh miniskirt, her hair, brown-blonde, a little bucket of it, nearly unkempt, not quite, her eyes the green of the dado on the stairway. But it was her clown’s mouth, her Toulouse-Lautrec Cirque Fernando mouth, that distinguished her most of all.
    She told me about Paris: blue scooters, Brigitte Bardot ponytails,