Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

but we took advantage of the cordoned-off beaches around the Excelsior. Last effigies of beauty on these beaches in the faltering sunshine of Fall—boys in hi-waist bathing togs.
    On the way back we took a tram through the narrow streets of La Spezia, then walked by the apricot, papaya, yellow-ochre-coloured houses of Portovenere to the rocky place where the Harrow mutineer, Byron, used to swim.
    Perhaps it was the light or the lack of sleep but I saw a child there, a little boy in a blue-and-white striped T-shirt.
    Rena went back to Dublin from London. I stayed in a house in Hanwell with a reproduction of Arthur Rackham’s young Fionn on the wall.
    Later in the Fall I ventured to Italy again. Mustard-coloured leaves were reflected in the front mirror of a truck heading towards Florence.
    In the Uffizi a Japanese girl with bobbed hair, in a long skirt and high heels with bevelled undersides paused in front of Botticelli’s young man in a skullcap holding a honey-coloured medallion.
    On a day trip to Siena I sent a postcard reproduction to Dublin of a self-portrait Dürer did at twenty-two, red tasselled cap, carrying field eryngo in his hand. Mannstreu in German meaning man’s fidelity.
    I saw the turbaned ancient Eygptian Hermes Trismegistus in a pavement mosaic at the entrance to the cathedral.
    In Viareggio where the drowned Shelley was cremated with salt and frankincense in the flame, the sky was grey, there were tankers at sea, gold lace on the combers. I swam on the beach there. The grey lifted shortly after Viareggio.
    In Rome the skies were cerulean. I paused in front of Pope John XXIII’s pilgrim door, I saw the statue of a young, early Christian shepherd with corkscrew curls, I saw a mural Mussolini had commissioned depicting Odysseus embracing his son Telemachus, I sat in the sunshine near the persimmon throat of a fountain, I listened to Bob Dylan’s ‘A Satisfied Mind’ under the statue of Giordano Bruno.
    That statue spoke years later. I read somewhere that he’d said: ‘Through the light which shines in the crocus, the daffodil, the sunflower, we ascend to the life that presides over them.’
    One night when I slept in a train by Rome’s pre-war brown station I was beaten up and everything I had robbed. I had to return to England with a document the Irish embassy gave me and some money my father sent me.
    An English girl on the train gave me a jersey of kingfisher blue. The sea was harebell blue at Folkstone. I was stopped by the police. The English girl stood with me.
    Back in Dublin at Christmas I found Rena was having an affair with a boy with a Henry-VIII horseshoe beard.
    I started teaching in the New Year in a school where a boy brought an Alsatian dog one day, where a prostitute used to come into the yard and sing a Dublin courtship song: ‘. . . And I tied up me sleeve to buckle her shoe.’
    At Easter Rena and I were travelling again together. We had a camera and in Cork, outside Frank O’Connor’s cottage, where a woman neighbour had chased an anti-Parnellite priest with a stick, we were photographed and little boys, many of them, arrived out of nowhere and posed behind us, cheering. It was as if they were cheering on my own stories. The roll of film was lost.
    The previous Easter we’d stayed in a cottage one weekend in Ballinskelligs with a photograph of a young man in a zoot suit, kipper tie, wingtip shoes, on the wall.
    The following weekend, Easter weekend, I returned to Kerry alone and swam in olive-drab underpants in the turquoise water at Clogher Strand.
    In the summer we camped near a cliff-side barracks in Duncannon in County Wexford and mutually flirted with the soldiers.
    Rena had gone to school in the west of Ireland in a school with a picture of a Penal Days’ Mass on the wall, and bits of information from an erudite old nun there were always breaking through her conversation.
    ‘Lord Cornwallis who suppressed the Rising of 1798 had previously lived in Yorktown—New York.’
    Near Enniscorthy we picked up a boy in a tiger-stripe tank top and hipster jeans and he slept in the tent with us and after I’d made love to Rena my hand touched his chest.
    Some weeks after our trip to Cork bombs went off in Dublin and shortly afterwards Rena went to California.
    In October 1976 I went to California from Dublin to see her. In the evening at San Francisco airport her eyes were the blue of a bunch of chicory. She wore a long scarlet skirt surviving from Connemara days. I