Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

you into it.’
    She was wearing flared pants with spotted hyenas on them and large hoop earrings.
    ‘I came back to be mediocre again, to re-establish that part of myself. Now look at me. Having an abortion with a man who sweats too much.’
    I was moved by her and without warning she was in my arms, weeping, feeling the width and breadth of my shoulders as I conquered her waist, a little package in a blouse as white as an Arlésienne’s Holy Communion dress.
    ‘Do not forget to go to see Rodin’s La Pensée ,’ she told me, as if making her last will and testament.
    She gave me a gift of a bloater tie intended for Jerome, with a pattern of Camberwell butterflies, deep yellow with purple borders, telling me how Princess Mathilde, Napoleon’s niece, gave Proust some silk from one of her dresses to make a cravat.
    The sycamore blossomed and the oak, the chestnut trees that could have been planted, like Stendhal’s in the days of the Sforzas, when, in a blue-and-white fleck suit, Miss Ó Cóileáin drove away in a cherry-red Renault, after a gala day in the convent—when an extract from Racine’s Bérénice was enacted as it first had been by the young ladies of Madame de Maintenon’s Academy attached to the court of Louis XIV—skedaddling off to Kerry, thence to London.
    ‘A sad example of the Sleights of Love.’
    For the performance I had worn a Sergeant Pepper shirt patterned with black-eyed Susans my mother had bought for me in Dublin.
    Ailve wrote to me in Parts that summer.
    16 Bolingbroke Road ,
    London W14 ,
    23 August 1968
    Desmond, a Chara ,
    It is the Feast of St Rose of Lima .
    Had my abortion. It was like a butterfly slipping away ,
    I went to the Church of the Benedictine Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre in Marble Arch afterwards .
    It’s very hot here, scorching. The dustbins are overflowing. Stendhal said the soul goes down in price in England .
    Jerome plays Radio Luxembourg late into the night .
    I put a PG tips historical card of Mary Stuart, one-time Queen of France, on the mantlepiece .
    Ronsard said her fingers were like the branch of a tree. He also wrote a poem about her opponent, Elizabeth I, who sent him a gold sovereign for his efforts .
    I’m alone here, thinking of a Kerryman who was educated in France .
    ‘The freedom of Ireland is not worth the shedding of a single drop of blood.’
    I feel I’ve killed something for Ireland, the baby within me. There’s a space within me they can’t fill, the nuns, the schoolgirls, the statues of St Rose of Lima .
    It will go on and on, gathering force like a huge wave. I wish you were here .
    I know you’d understand but even you couldn’t stop it .
    I’ve murdered a part of myself and buried it under the floor of a classroom .
    Lots of kisses ,
    Ailve
    On Alive’s recommendation I went to see Édouard Manet’s portrait of his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot in the Musée d’Orsay but was dismayed to find the entire face was covered with a fan.
    I also went to see Rodin’s La Pensée .
    In a wet and grey summer, staying in a suburb, nearby factories emitting flames that burned into the mind, it was the highlight, this wonder of marble.
    Looking at it I confronted a fragment of myself, a boy in a white shirt with a peaked collar who had complimented a girl in a white blouse.
    I wondered if it had been real, her affair in Paris, but knew that it didn’t matter because we’d been real, we’d touched, my head had sunk into hers and our mutual tremor would shake our lives, going on and on when guns raged in another part of Ireland.
    When I returned to Ireland that autumn she was nowhere to be seen. Jerome Denmyr was back, excelling himself on the rugby pitch.
    In Buenos Aires Manchester United’s Nobby Stiles was back-headed in the face by an Estudiantes player, and El Beatle, George Best, at the height of his pudding-bowl pompadour, took appropriate reprisals.
    Peter Sarstedt sang ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?’ from Enzo’s Café.
    I wondered what had happened to her. Had she died from the after-effects of abortion?
    Had she returned to Paris as she said she might?
    In either case I was determined on going on, the shadow of a Rodin sculpture inside, the knowledge gained from art that life is worth holding on to, that if you keep fighting it will come, freedom.
    Ailve had given me the first lesson in freedom.
    It was up to me to go on, rung by rung, until I met someone or something that touched me again as deeply