Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

Ember Day, the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, Midsummer’s Day, when garlands of St John’s wort are put on the door in East Sussex and you draw a circle around yourself with a rowan stick and poles of herbs are hoisted.
    In the morning in the garden she showed me, beside the yellow calceolarias, a bed of sweet marjoram, and told me the story of Amaracus, a Greek youth at the court of the kings of Cyprus who, with a chaplet of vine leaves in his hair and in all’antica sandals, accidentally dropped a vessel containing perfume.
    His terror on realizing the magnitude of his crime caused him to faint.
    The gods, sparing him dire punishment, transformed him into a sweet-smelling plant named after him.
    She plucked a bunch of burnt-orange chrysanthemums and gave them to me.
    Shortly afterwards I was invited to the southern States.
    In the southern States I lived in a carpenter’s Gothic house, a weeping-fig tree outside it.
    My first memory is of crossing water on a train. Yachts on the water. Was it somewhere near Bray, County Wicklow? Had it been a dream?
    The only similar experience in my life, apart from the lagoon train to Venice, was the train that crosses the bridge over Lake Pontchartrain.
    Strange the feeling of returning over that bridge in winter from New Orleans where troupes of boys in rubber shorts with the backs cut out did the cancan, where the Ursuline Sisters who delivered New Orleans by prayers to Our Lady of Prompt Succour during the Battle of New Orleans in 1815 still had the reward of free passage on the public transport system, to the winter Bible country—Covenanters’ bungalows with dogtrots.
    An Amaracus of a boy, with a Titus crop, in linted jeans, briefly told me his story.
    He’d belonged to the wrong family. He’d travelled in a Ford Ranger with the American flag in front on dirt roads, on fire roads, from California.
    Now he was with the right family.
    On my return, London no longer seemed home.
    I spent a few years going back and forth between London and Berlin, from which I sent Lady Tamar Martin Schongauer’s Nativity —Rhinemaiden Madonna, cow with elk-like antlers—and she and I didn’t meet and when those transits ceased and we did meet she had a pug-royal look.
    There was grey in front of her hair the way Lady Eleanor Butler had put powder in front of her hair, her lipstick rose of Lancaster red.
    She was living in London again, teaching there.
    She was getting bad attacks again, wandering the streets in a scarlet coat dress and unstructured hat with wide turned-back brim, studying the pagodas in a travel poster or standing on benches in churches to examine the plaques.
    Aristocratic ancestors, she told me, by way of explanation, had the task of carrying news of their coming executions to fellow aristocrats.
    Screech owls, bloodhounds . . .
    In Berlin, just before I left, I saw a production of Schiller’s Mary Stuart , in which Maria Stuart mounted the scaffold at the end:
    ‘Constancy becomes all folks well, and none better than princes . . .’
    A stone came through my French windows in south-east London, where I’d lived for twelve years, shattering the glass over a mosaic of postcards from The Hermitage in St Petersburg—Luca Giordano’s beefcake Forge of Vulcan ; Veronese’s Pietà with a red-headed man taking Christ’s hand; Correggio’s Portrait of a Lady —black dress, jewel in her hair, brown scapular of a Franciscan tertiary on her bosom . . .
    Portrait of a Lady . . .
    Lady Tamar often visited me in my last six months in London, in a room overlooking a noisy throughfare in Hampstead, and, just as when I first arrived, she brought cheese from Paxton and Whitfield’s and Elizabeth Shaw Peppermint Creams.
    Sometimes we went to swim in Highgate ponds. She’d go to the Ladies’ pond and I’d go to the Men’s.
    On Saturdays and Sundays there were three boy late swimmers—Dominic, Ben and Stephen—who liked to stand around naked after their swim.
    ‘Safe Des.’
    ‘When parents break up who gets the custody of the hamster? The mother gets hold of it on weekdays. And the father at weekends.’
    Afterwards, Lady Tamar and I would sit on a bench just above the Men’s pond, dedicated to the memory of a young man, she in a thistle-printed crêpe-de-Chine blouse or a knitted jersey with appliqué kingfishers.
    Anglican bells for the dead occasionally rang from St Anne’s Church whose grounds abounded in ladybird-infested pyracantha.
    When Keats,