Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

birth that would unite father and son but couldn’t think of anything to say. He stopped by a tree and looked to the river. An odd car went by towards Dublin.
    Why this need to run? Even as he was thinking that, a saying of his father returned: ‘Idleness is the thief of time.’ That statement had been flayed upon him as a child but with time as he lived in England among fields of oak trees that statement had changed; time itself had become the culprit, the thief.
    And the image of time as a thief was forever embroiled in a particular ikon of his father’s, that of a pacifist who ran through Dublin helping the wounded in 1916, was arrested, was shot dead with a deaf and dumb youth. And that man, more than anybody, was Liam’s hero, an Irish pacifist, a pacifist born of his father’s revolution, a pacifist born of his father’s state.
    He returned home quickly, drew the door on his father. He sat down.
    ‘Remember, Daddy, the story you told me about the pacifist shot dead in 1916 with a deaf and dumb youth, the man whose wife was a feminist?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well, I was just thinking that he’s the sort of man we need now, one who comes from a revolution but understands it in a different way, a creative way, who understands that change isn’t born from violence but intense and self-sacrificing acts.’
    His father understood what he was saying, that there was a remnant of 1916 that was relevant and urgent now, that there had been at least one man among the men of 1916 who could speak to the present generation and show them that guns were not diamonds, that blood was precious, that birth most poignantly issues from restraint.
    Liam went to bed. In the middle of the night he woke muttering to himself, ‘May God have mercy on your soul,’ although his father was not yet dead, but he wasn’t asking God to have mercy on his father’s soul but on the soul of Ireland, the many souls born out of his father’s statelet, the women never pregnant, the cruel and violent priests, the young exiles, the old exiles, those who would never come back.
    He got up, walked down the stairs, opened the door of his father’s room. Inside his father lay. He wanted to see this with his own eyes, hope even in the persuasion of death.
    He returned to bed.
    His wife turned away from him but curiously that did not hurt him because he was thinking of the water rising, the moon on the water, and as he thought of these things the geese clanked over, throwing their reflections into the water grazed with moon which rimmed this town, the church towers, the slate roofs, those that slept now, those who didn’t remember.

Memories of Swinging London

    Why he went there he did not know, an instinctive feel for a dull façade, an intuition borne out of time of a country unbeknownst to him now but ten years ago one of excessive rain, old stone damaged by time, and trees too green, too full.
    He was drunk, of course, the night he stumbled in there at ten o’clock. It had been three weeks since Marion had left him, three weeks of drink, of moronic depression, three weeks of titillating jokes with the boys at work.
    Besides it had been raining that night and he’d needed shelter.
    She was tired after a night’s drama class when he met her, a small nun making tea with a brown kettle.
    Her garb was grey and short and she spoke with a distinctive Kerry accent but yet a polish at variance with her accent.
    She’d obviously been to an elocution class or two, Liam thought cynically, until he perceived her face, weary, alone, a makeshift expression of pain on it.
    She’d filled that evening with her lesson, she said. Nothing had happened, a half-dozen boys from Roscommon and Leitrim had left the hall uninspired.
    Then she looked at Liam as though wondering who she was speaking to anyway, an Irish drunk, albeit a well-dressed one. In fact he was particularly well dressed this evening, wearing a neatly cut grey suit and a white shirt, spotless but for some dots of Guinness.
    They talked with some reassurance when he was less drunk. He sat back as she poured tea.
    She was from Kerry she said, West Kerry. She’d been a few months in Africa and a few months in the United States but this was her first real assignment, other than a while as domestic science teacher in a Kerry convent. Here she was all of nurse, domestic and teacher. She taught young men from Mayo and Roscommon how to move; she had become keen on drama while going to college in Dublin.