Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

ankle-length ladies’ pants, zip-fastened jackets, ski socks, scarlet armlets on First Holy Communicants, Chanel lipstick.
    Her own lipstick was usually tiger-lily red.
    In Paris she never stopped thinking of Daniel O’Connell, who witnessed the bloodbath of the Revolution and henceforth vowed himself to peaceful means, dying of heartbreak in Genoa, May 1847, on his way to Rome to pray for famine-stricken Ireland.
    Bonfires had lit all over Ailve’s peninsula in 1829 for Catholic Emancipation as bonfires were still lit in east Galway near Offaly, on Midsummer’s Night, groups of young men, shirts off, holding hands, jumping over them in unison to airs on a squeezebox like ‘Seán South of Garryowen.’
    ‘For he fell beneath a Northern sky, brave Hanlon at his side.’
    After two lessons Ailve told me about her affair with an Austrian novelist called David. He was inquisitive about her because so many of the Wild Geese—Irish soldiers who’d fled the Jacobite Wars—had gone to Austria.
    Maria Theresa, who had Goldkette the rope dancer and bareback rider perform at her coronation ceremony and had emancipated Gypsies, appointed Count Browne of Limerick as commander-in-chief of her armies.
    Ailve had a Polaroid photograph of David, taken at a terrace café in Italian sunglasses, jacket with a Persian-lamb collar.
    She was adamant that theirs had not been primarily a sexual relationship but spiritual, an elevating of things into a vision.
    Mutually looking at Rodin’s sculpture La Pensée —a woman’s head in deep thought—Ailve had been struck by its totality, the way it expressed the coming together of things, adolescence and adulthood, a moment when one was self-aware and self-welcoming.
    Ailve and David touched, they briefed one another in their individual pain but he faded into the romanticism of other flesh—male as well as female.
    She finished at the Sorbonne, returned to Kerry, but not before, like St Gobnait, she showed her legs, making love to American GIs with skin felted like the wild raspberry, hair blond as canary grass, who had the mock orange of Idaho or the flowering dogwood of North Carolina embroidered on their uniforms; Japanese tourists who wore Jean-Paul Sartre jackets; not to mention wealthy Parisian bachelors who wore glove-fitting jeans, in apartments on the boulevard des Italiens, avenue de l’Opéra, boulevard Montmartre.
    Ailve and I had tea and tipsy cake—pink icing, sponge base with chocolate fondant, jam syrup and sherry.
    ‘Oh God,’ she cried. ‘Where are they? The painters, the writers, the musicians, more than anything the young, the young in spirit?’
    She began having an affair with Jerome Denmyr, an engineer with collar-length hair, who was from a town where an Irish revolutionary’s handcuffs were kissed by his mother as he was taken away in 1918. On Sundays she went to the mental-hospital grounds to see him play rugby. Mental-hospital patients stared from behind iron bars. The heron was the totem of this town and there was always one making a journey along the nearby river. After the rugby marches Jerome always smelled of American Bay Rum.
    People stood around the gallery during dances in the local ballroom they went to together—the artistes were Maisie McDaniels in bootlace tie, miniskirt, Edwardian pantomime-boy boots; Butch Moore with silver-dollar crew cut and polo-neck shirt; Joe Dolan in mauve jacket; Eileen Reid in air-hostess’s outfit; Dickie Rock and the Miami Showband in plum-coloured blazers and trousers with knife-sharp creases—various laps to the evening until eventually lights lowered, red, girls’ arms intricated around men’s shoulders.
    Alternatively they went in his Volkswagen Beetle to the Prince of Wales Hotel in Athlone, which I always imagined to be called after the Duke of Windsor, who, in his pancake cap and smoking a shag cigarette, on a visit to the United States in 1922, when asked by a hostess who he wanted on the guest list, picked the Dolly Sisters as his first choice, which gave enormous joy to the gossip columnist Cholly Knickerbocker.
    Ailve wore a black silk brocade dress when she was with him, a cotton Watteau dairymaid dress, or a dress with multi-coloured paisley design.
    Balzac, she said by way of explanation, had one of his heroines wear a different dress for every meeting with her lover.
    On a sojourn back in Paris from Tatilti, on his walks home with his adolescent girlfriend Judith Molard, Gauguin nightly