Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

of Connaught.
    On a beanbag cushion was a book, Cinderella , a palace garden with trees in blossom on the cover.
    Ailve’s children were Segda, a girl, and Breffni, a boy.
    My first impulse was to embrace her but I was restrained by the look on her face.
    Ailve Ó Cóileáin looked at me and I saw myself, for the first time in years—rooms full of little friends, and suddenly as if the little friends went up in flames, having to move on—still trying as she tried, her face white and sunken now but her eyes still burning and alive, repeating themselves over and over in my mind just as the white houses of the republic of Connaught repeated themselves, over and over again, until they reached the sea.

Red Tide

    Tonight is the night of the Red Tide—St Valentine’s Day. Nutrients from inland, with the change of season, after rainy weather, light up the combers, blue and white.
    For some days patisserie windows have been full of pralines—cakes composed of mousse, caramel and pecan nuts. Earlier there were boys on skateboards on the boardwalk, in Bermuda shorts with busbies or traveller’s cheques on them, carrying bunches of Greek windflowers. Groups of old ladies in owl-eye glasses, in the ruby lake of Mickey Mouse or the lemon of Donald Duck, paraded by the ocean.
    An elderly man in a Borsalino hat passed a shaven-headed Chinese boy, with a birthmark on his face like a great burn, who was staring at a flock of plovers, and I thought of shirts I’d worn in London as if they’d been women I’d known—a long-sleeved terracotta shirt with sepia roosters, a short butterfly-sleeved vermilion shirt with coral-grey swallows.
    ‘How do you get to Amsterdam? You take a bus through Ranelagh.’ I had this dream shortly before I went to Amsterdam for the first time.
    I went with Rena. We were going to travel south from there. In London before setting off we went to an Andy Warhol double bill and all the beautiful, naked young men inspired a greater intensity in our love-making.
    We stayed with a Dutch couple we’d met while hitchhiking that summer in north Connemara, on Gerard Doustraat. In the window of the corner café, despite the fact that it was late September, there was a Santa Claus with a hyacinthine beard with little acorns on it.
    The couple gave us kipper soup for supper and the following morning we had breakfast cake. On our one full day in Amsterdam we purchased two dozen or so postcards of Jan Mankes paintings and drawings to send to friends. A few self-portraits of Mankes. One in a tiny Roman collar and smock, with a wing quiff, against a lemon landscape. Hair sometimes brown, sometimes amber. Eyes sometimes blue, sometimes brown. A woman in silhouette tending geese. A woman with head dipped in a gaslit room. Salmon-coloured roofs. An old person with a nose like a root vegetable. Birds in snow. An art-nouveau, besequined turkey. A landscape breaking into water. A bunch of honesty. A mouse in the snow. Geese with their beaks to heaven. Goats looking as if they’re wearing clogs. A rattan chair. A nightingale. A kestrel. A thrush. An owlet. A reading boy. Birch trees.
    It was as if these cards and their images by a painter who’d died young, held together, before being dispatched, on a day when cyclists held golf-sized umbrellas, composed our lives as they had been together.
    In Paris we slept near the statue of Henry IV on Pont Neuf.
    Then we hitchhiked south. We had an ugly row when we reached the warmth but then a truck took us and brought us as far as Marseille where we both had our first sight of the Mediterranean, cerulean-ash.
    The grapes were translucent, hands reaching under them. The hills of Provence were vertigo at evening, little stone walls like the west of Ireland, Roman ruins.
    A truck driver with a moustache took us to Monaco where he put us up for the night in an apartment looking to the sea, gave Rena a T-shirt with Gerd Müller of Bayer Leverkusen soccer team on it.
    Our first day in Italy we had pasta in a workers’ café in the suburbs of Milan, given to us by a blonde waitress in black.
    In Venice Rena’s face, with her silver-blonde hair and starling’s egg-blue eyes, was reflected in glass just blown in a little canalside glass-making place. Her life, her anxieties were in those reflections; a French schoolboy’s cape, autumn leaves in Dublin, mustard-coloured leaves lining the long avenue.
    We did not stay in the Excelsior Hotel on the Lido. We slept in a large cement pipe