Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

pulled-down woollen cap and cream chinos, drives me to the ocean after class in his Malibu Chevrolet.
    He is a Chinese boy, a karate champion, born in Toronto, his parents from Taiwan. They moved to the Bay Area when he was a child and later to southern California.
    Lowden visited Taiwan recently when the pearl cherries were ripe, and despite the fact he speaks Chinese they asked who the American was.
    He feels lost, lonely in the States, he says. And he adds:
    ‘We live in an evil time.’
    He’s got to meet his American girlfriend who wears orange-brick lipstick and I say I’d like to stay on the beach and go for a swim.
    He leaves and I swim.
    A drunken man in an ox-blood lumber jacket, chaperoned by two young sons, one in bermudas with a pattern of golfing appendages, the other in bermudas with chickens on bicycles on them, looks on.
    ‘You’ll freeze your ass.’
    ‘Dad, come on.’ His children lead him away.
    ‘Give peace in our time, O Lord,’ goes a prayer in the Book of Common Prayer and, as a sandpiper flies against the biblical papaya of the sky, I think of Lady Tamar Strathnairn and how she tells of the time I live in.
    I was sitting at a terrace table on Museum Street in the summer of 1977 when she approached me in a white shift dress and dark-cherry ballet slippers.
    Her jaw-length hair was japanned-black and her skin ultra-white.
    A Boadicea with a beehive was arranging vegetables at the British Museum side of the street as Lady Tamar spoke to me.
    I’d just come back from southern Europe and I was wearing the knee-high boots I’d bought in an Ottoman alley in Hania.
    In Marktplatz in Heidelberg on my way back I’d bumped into a friend from Cork who, in an Elizabethan Irishwoman’s cloak, fastened with a fibula and falling in folds to the ground, was husking with her guitar, and I bottled for her in sea-cerulean dungarees.
    The song she sang most frequently was ‘Only Our Rivers Run Free.’
    An American lady, with saffron-rinsed hair, in black trouser-suit and peep-toe cut-out sandals, wept.
    My friend and I had an Italian meal beside Heidelberger Schloss with the proceeds.
    ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ she whispered by candlelight so she looked like Correggio Zingarella’s ‘Gypsy Girl.’
    I attended Lady Tamar’s supper in a flat near the Russian embassy for which Lady Tamar wore a stretch-lamé tube dress with a caterpillar brooch on it, which had purple stone eyes.
    Her other guest was a youth in an Orator Hunt red neckerchief and red Stuart tartan trousers.
    He was an official in the Troops Out movement.
    Her father was a high-ranking officer who moved between Ebrington Barracks, Derry; Gough Barracks, Armagh; Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, Omagh.
    Her mother worked for the administration of the Church of England.
    Tamar had a job as a secretary in an art gallery in Mayfair.
    On the wall was a reproduction of Venus and Adonis by Christiaen van Couwenbergh; Adonis with hippie-length hair, Venus with parure in her strawberry-blonde hair.
    At the beginning of my travels in the summer I’d stopped at Plâs Newydd at Llangollen in Wales to visit the home of Lady Eleanor Butler, who’d run away with Sarah Ponsonby from the banks of the Nore in County Kilkenny in 1778, Eleanor aged thirty-nine, Sarah aged twenty-three; black-and-white marble-stoned floor, coloured oriel window, Gothic-crossed timber outside—where I met a boy in a multi-coloured woollen jersey.
    ‘If you’re a Taffy and wearing a pendant you’re alright,’ he said to me.
    Lady Eleanor used to wear the Bourbon Croix de Saint-Louis around her neck.
    A fat girl, who frequently wore a lady’s horned medieval hat, and a thin boy who said he was from West Mercia—western midlands—were having a bath together on the street of squats I lived in, lit by a scented candle, to John McLaughlin’s ‘Swan on Irish Waters,’ reading passages of George Borrow’s Lavengro to one another, from a copy stolen from Wandsworth Library, when the ceiling fell down.
    ‘There’s a great sadness in you,’ a fellow squatter, with a palmer’s haircut, in Robin Hood hose stockings, said to me, by candlelight so he looked like Gerrit van Honthorst’s Christ Before the High Priest I’d just seen at the National Gallery.
    There were boys in the squat who played Little John and William Scathelock to this Robin Hood.
    Some of them left the squat to go to a commune of screamers on an island off County Mayo—people who screamed for