Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

gallery and its world—young men in collarless suits, young lords named Meriwether or Redvers or Egerton who addressed you as Lord Emsworth might his pig, the Empress of Blandings.
    One of these young lords said that Tamar looked like a London marchesa who used to make herself up to look like a corpse.
    I taught in a comprehensive in South Kensington.
    I brought them to Hampton Court, children from the stucco villas of Holland Park and the faubourgs of White City. Sad, adult-faced boys with pommelled hairstyles who cycled junior bicycles on the walkways of White City; blond, troubador-haired boys with slightly stooped shoulders who smote your fists with their fingers.
    A boy with kibbled hair called Elidore after a boy of Welsh legend told me how his mother, who was active in the Troops Out movement, living in a commune where she wore a floating evening gown patterned with double-humped camels, had disowned him, banging the door on him when he called to see her.
    In early summer I brought them to Brighton beach and Tamar came too.
    One of them—an Arab boy—wouldn’t go into the water so I lifted him in his black silk shirt, napped black trousers, and dropped him into the sea, which that day was Medici blue.
    She seemed to be forever going off on holidays to far-off places and she sent me postcards—flowering peach in Virginia; a bougainvillaea esplanade in Famagusta; a skiing slope in the Lebanon.
    She even went to visit her father in Northern Ireland and sent me a postcard of William Conor’s wax-crayon Belfast jaunting car; bowler-hatted jarvey, woman with deep-terracotta scarf holding a child wrapped in cinnabar red; little boy with girl-length hair, in army-green jersey, at the back, naked legs dangling.
    Towns with no evangel but the Union Jack; a soldier who jogged every day by Lough Neagh with a backpack of bricks; Sunday service at Campbell College where William Conor, walking entirely in black through Belfast, was recalled; a young soldier doing a sailor’s hornpipe in green hunting tartan; a swan on Irish waters.
    Then she threw up her job in the art gallery and went to Cambridge as a late pupil for four years.
    I visited her on a day trip.
    As a student she had strangely become more conservative in her dress. She wore two-tone shoes, blue and cream, a deep-flared peplum jacket, divided skirt. There was a vintage rose in her cheeks.
    In her flat in an isolated ivy-overgrown house by the River Cam she sat under a reproduction of Lucas Cranach’s The Virgin and Child Under an Apple Tree .
    Outside Cambridge station a man in Morris costume, bucket in hand, had been busking for the striking miners.
O eat your cherries, Mary,
O eat your cherries now,
O eat your cherries, Mary,
That grow upon the bough.

    We had tea and almond-and-amaretto Madeira cake in a café near a cinema painted Reckitt’s blue with posters for fifties British films in the foyer— The Belles of St Trinian’s, Carry on Sergeant, Dracula —served by a waitress with pillar-box-red lipstick and afterwards in a church we listened to an Anglican canticle: ‘There is no Health in Me.’ In March 1985 the miner’s strike ended.
    After Cambridge she went to teach in a girls’ public school near her family home in East Sussex, for which she donned half-moon rimless spectacles, and I was invited to her house for a weekend.
    The baronial house with Tudor gables, dormer windows, had a lake beside it, a herringbone path leading there.
    Dog wagons had once drawn wood from the nearby forest to this house and Gypsy children, with hair the colour of sunlit chestnuts, had come looking for partridge eggs in the hedgerows bordering the forest—olive and ochre, occasionally blueish-white, blotched with red ochre.
    The white blossom of the wild service tree, the barren strawberry in spring; the blue pimpernel; the true fox sedge in summer; red berries of the butcher’s broom in the forest in autumn—the Flora Annie Steel Fairy Tales of my childhood could have happened here.
    I met Lady Tamar’s mother.
    Hair dressed away from her face, in vicuña slacks, mules.
    With Bobbly, her cat, on her lap, seated on a scroll-ended sofa, Lady Tamar’s mother, who was a winter swimmer—on winter weekdays she swam in the carpet of gold leaves in the Ladies’ pond in Highgate with Jewish women who were survivors of Auschwitz, or in Leg of Mutton Pond in Hampstead—named feast days in her conversation to mark the year as a Russian might—St Lucy’s Day,