Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

therapy.
    Lady Tamar frequently visited me now that I was back in London, still in my knee-high boots from Crete.
    I shared a room with a boy with a ruby-auburn cockscomb from County Kerry, whose father used to bathe him in the Smearla—blackberry—River, whose National School teacher used to give him the ass’s bite—clench in the groin.
    We slept on mattresses on the floor.
    Late one night he told me about a friend.
    A boy who was an electrician from Athlone, Correggio’s shepherdboy, Ganymede, or Murillo’s young St Thomas of Villanueva, who’s distributing his clothes to poor boys, in hipster jeans and pip necklace.
    On the way to Berlin from Ireland, he’d slept in a house of labourers in Dollis Hill. He had to share a bed with one of the labourers and he touched the labourer’s penis. For him a sacrosanct gesture. But the labourer went around telling everyone:
    ‘He touched my Seán Thomas.’
    The basking shark and the porbeagle shark and the blue shark would draw in sight of my room-mate’s part of Kerry in the autumn after shoals of herring.
    ‘Can I sleep with you?’ he asked one night, displaying his mouse’s nest pubic area. He got into bed beside me.
    In bed he told me this story:
    Near his home in Kerry were sea caves.
    During the Civil War a group of Irregulars hid in them. The Free Staters smoked them out by throwing down burning bales of hay. Subsequently they cut a rope and three of the Irregulars were drowned in the rising tide.
    But a survivor turned out to be a young Englishman, a deserter from the British army.
    Next morning Lady Tamar arrived in a black kaftan and top hat, with a pile of scarlet-rose blankets and Elizabeth Shaw Peppermint Creams.
    When I was in Scotland in February, where I heard a cinnamon-haired boy in Barra sing ‘The Gypsy Laddie,’ she came looking for me and slept with my friend.
    They drove around London in her chocolate-and-cream Sun Singer convertible and went to a church hall near the squat to see a boy from Hayling Island do a thaumaturgic dance, with bare chest, in Turkish trousers, watched by white witches from Rochester, Sand-gate, Havant, Herne Bay.
    Shortly afterwards the boy from Kerry went to live in Milwaukee where some of his fellow county people still speak Irish.
She gave them the good wheat bread,
And they gave her the ginger,
But she gave them a far better thing,
The gold ring off her finger.

    In May, when I lived in a room near St Paul’s, Hammersmith, Lady Tamar sat with me through the night before I took a plane to New York.
    She asked me why I never made love to her, was I gay?
    Under a postcard of Goya’s The Forge , full of biceps and male décolletage, I told her I’d been in love with a girl with narcissus-coloured hair, that a woman had attacked me at a party in Dublin and accused me of impotence.
    Sexual harmony was ruptured; the hose of a Japanese ballet dancer in Madrid as it pressed on his genitals.
    Against a postcard of Renoirs Alexander Thurneyssen as a young shepherd—rag hat, sheepskin, flute—Lady Tamar confided to me that a few years before she’d been in and out of mental hospitals.
    She got these attacks sometimes.
    Something hit her.
    She took to walking the streets in a trance, in her mother’s flat Second World War hat tilted to one side, studying shop signs or the numbers and manufacturers’ names on pavement lids.
    She was much better now.
    A small group of young men with yeminis—painted handkerchiefs—around their necks playing Jewish violins in Central Park; then a Greyhound bus down Roman roads in Wyoming.
    In the Patio Café on Castro Street, San Francisco, which was frequented by a red-breasted American house finch, my friend from Dublin told me she was getting married to a man who wore a blue ombré headband.
    I went to Yosemite National Park after she told me, and halfway up Tuolumne Meadows, in a grove of blossoming bear garlic, I repeated to myself a bit of Native American history:
    ‘Black Elk returned to Wounded Knee to mourn the butchered women and children.’
    Autumn that year was a bunch of marigolds on a cabinet table under the glowing and sidelong face of Rembrandt’s Nicolaes Bruyning , 1652.
    Black Elk put on his ghost shirt before the Battle of Wounded Knee and in the next few years in London a ghost shirt was necessary.
    Lady Tamar occasionally sent me At Home cards.
    At these gatherings, which resembled John Tenniel’s Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, were guests from the art