Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

pissed in the courtyard.
    Jerome would piss in the courtyard of Ailve’s house at night on his way back from the pub with her.
    Judith Molard bought flowers for Gauguin when he was leaving for Tahiti for the last time, but because the colours were too nondescript for one who was lavish with Veronese greens, she was ashamed and threw them away.
    ‘And where are the flowers here, might I ask?’ Ailve deplored.
    She often quoted Maude Gonne McBride in old age when she was photographed by Horvath with a lioness-face brooch at her throat: ‘My heart is for Ireland and my love for France.’
    The floods grew higher and she was like one of those mental-hospital patients behind iron bars. Her face became thin and papiermâché-like. Her eyes grew large, looming even, and her mouth grew longer, more tragic, an entrée clown’s mouth.
    I wanted to believe everything she told me about her life. Sometimes I doubted. But what one could not easily dispense with was an image, an inspiration, Rodin’s La Pensie —‘The Thought’—self-confrontation, the tentative approach to a work of art that for one moment objectifies our life, arrests its flow, creating something, wonder in the eyes, remorse in the heart, sublimation.
    Ailve saw herself through that sculpture, a girl in Paris, in a short, black, plastic wrapover coat, and scarf with large geometric patterns.
    Her stories about French literature became more prolific.
    How Flaubert was inspired to write Madame Bovary by a woman’s face he saw as a young man in a small town in Brittany. Her Penguin Classic edition featured Madame de Calonne by Gustave Ricard on the cover.
    How George Sands used to jump into icy water to cure herself of illness. How one of the duchesses Proust wrote about died of starvation during the Occupation and was eaten by one of her own greyhounds.
    And she might end with one about Vincent Van Gogh: how he had a print—a little friend—of Irish emigrants on his wall.
    When I mentioned after Christmas I’d seen the pantomime Cinderella in Dublin she retold Charles Perrault’s Cinderella as Seán Ó Conaill might tell a story; the pumpkin turned into a gilded coach; the mice turned into mouse-coloured horses; the rat turned into a coachman; the lizards turned into footmen.
    When I was a child the mother in a family farther up the street had been from Warsaw where her house had been lit by gas lamps in childhood.
    They had a book with an illustration of Charlotte, one of the ugly sisters, in an ultramarine-ash wig and ice-green ruffles.
    They also had a book with illustrations of a fox in scarlet hunting jacket and a woman in a coal-skuttle hat, with peach cape, riding a goose.
    I asked the Little Lord Fauntleroy son if he’d be my friend but he categorically said, ‘No.’
    I felt like Cinderella when addressed by Charlotte as ‘Cinderbreech.’
    Through Ailve’s affair with Jerome Denmyr she was a daily Communicant at Mass, going to the altar in a Cossack hat, a straw boater with Hawaiian ribbon-band, or beret with brooch trim.
    Spring came with bird-cherry blossom on the outskirts of town.
    Ailve wrote a letter to Mr Brezhnev about women political prisoners in the small zone unit at Barashevo in Mordovia.
    Solzhenitsyn got eight years, she reminded me, for referring to Stalin as ‘the whiskered one.’ ‘Be careful what you say.’
    She accompanied me to François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 in the town hall.
    I wore a cravat patterned with orange-coloured prints of a potato-cut done in art class. She wore a suit with polka-dotted Peter Pan collar and decorative polka-dotted handkerchief in breast pocket.
    Literature is banned. Men in boiler suits seize books. Mechanical hounds with needles shoot transgressors. Helicopters drop bombs. People retire to the mountains, light fires, and, to keep them alive, recite aloud, individual people with the task of an individual author, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, the stories of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
    ‘As soon as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there . . .’
    Ailve returned from a weekend in Kerry, where she’d gone to a country-and-western night at the Gleneagle Hotel, Killarney, and told me she was pregnant.
    What would she do?
    Have an abortion, she decided. Like any good Catholic Irish teacher.
    I was due to go to France on a student-exchange scheme but I volunteered to run away and join her in London.
    No, she said, Jerome was going with her.
    ‘No use dragging