white chrysanthemums. They’d strolled to the temple-like building nearby where two helmeted soldiers stood guard by the flame to the unknown soldier, the lime trees lit up, in the late afternoon August sunshine, in biblical incandescence.
With Radvj I dreamt of tinkers on a cart passing a shield of oak trees just outside our town in County Galway and shouting after them a customary tinker farewell, ‘See you in Clare-morris.’ My eyes consumed then in a colour like the pink T-shirt of my guest, who left abruptly early in the morning.
The Prodigal leaving his father’s house, corn being loaded distantly, a glimpse, just as it was in a photograph, of an ancestor in a cloche hat bending over the grave of my mother’s youngest sister.
Rest in peace, O dearest Una
Thou art happy
Thou art blest
Earthly cares and sorrows ended.
The headstones are splattered with lichen and meadow barley grows in profusion in the graveyard.
Women bearing baskets of redcurrants across fields that were lime-coloured, poppies on stalks that had seized up in the field, men raking lime hay, an azure tooth of a small mountain above them.
A pudgy, slightly obese Christ child in a see-through gauze dress, the edges of the dress gilded.
Lambeth Palace, the foreign painter having endowed a pearly light to Westminster Bridge, a tiny figure in a red swallow coat supporting himself against a privet hedge, back turned. The main character in the little film I made was dressed like that. An Irish poet in London at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. His favourite song had been ‘Lillibullero’ and he’d drunk himself to death in Catford. On his tombstone in Lewisham you can read ‘Let fall a holy tear.’
An uncle of mine, my mother’s half-brother, had worked in a jeweller’s shop near Lambeth Palace in the mid-nineteen-forties. When he was a teenager he’d joined the army in Mullingar; the Twenty-seventh Infantry Battalion. Then he’d moved to England. Wrote a card home, ‘Rotten lonely here.’ A grey embankment scene with painted wallflowers on it. Fought in Egypt, wore a hat like a funny-shaped brioche and desert shorts. Returning to England he worked in the jeweller’s shop in Lambeth and became engaged to an English girl with lavish ginger-blonde hair. One night, when they were dancing in Forest Hill, just after the compère announced, ‘Please take your partners for the last waltz’, and the band started up with, ‘Who’s the lucky man who’s going home your way?’, the hall was hit by a doodlebug and the place confounded. He’d wandered through all the nearby hospitals looking for her, and eventually heard her screaming in one of them. But it was because she had toothache. He died a few years after the war. No one really knew why.
His sister, my mother’s half-sister, the woman who wrote to my mother on my birth, also died young. She died of tuberculosis two weeks after my birth.
An open-air dance in Prague. Two old ladies dancing together, one with white hair, the other black. The black-haired one is the taller, she wears dark glasses and her mouth grins like that of an American tough guy. There are men in suits, and men in white shirts and casual trousers. A gipsy woman, in white bobby socks, black high heels, black dress with a white belt on it, is the proudest dancer. She wears a white braid through her long, flattened black hair. The white-haired woman, who is quite frail, is almost throttled in an embrace by the black-haired woman. There is a wood of lime trees around the dance area. I had a black-haired aunt who wouldn’t behave herself when I was a child, dancing at the crossroads, especially with young men. Dances which were periodically interrupted by a ferocious display of Irish dancing by girls in dark emerald dresses and cloaks, in black tights. A few funfair swings near the crossroads.
She married a radio expert from Sligo. They opened a pub, but she drove him off. When my grandmother died my aunt wanted to look after my grandfather, in his little town house with the gipsy vardo in the front window, but my mother took him. My aunt became unruly and she died, in one of her reprieves from mental hospital, in her pub.
My first summer in London I stayed a few days with her husband. Walked down the Uxbridge Road on a Saturday afternoon, past a black people’s wedding, hair in cornrows, white roses in lapels, to a flat where there were beds in the kitchen. There was a mass card for my aunt, a camellia in her hair, beside a picture of St Bonaventure.
‘We put towels over the mirrors the day she died,’ a young man who had his shirt off told me.
The old lady in the ginger wig sat at the table across from me tonight, in sailor trousers, sailor top, sailor cap with gold braid around the peak, platform high heels, and kept nodding to me. The orchestra played ‘Hong Kong Blues’, ‘Jeepers Creepers’, ‘Two Sleepy People’, ‘You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby’, ‘La Mer’, ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Someone had told me that the old lady had owned a hotel on Wenceslas Square which was confiscated in the early fifties, when high-ranking officials were being thrown downstairs to their deaths in Czechoslovakia, when there had been mass rallies in Wenceslas Square, with people like tornado clouds, when trams ran up and down the square, when there was a rendezvous with Stalin’s profile around every corner, alongside posters of faded, aquatic-coloured cherries, for even then the Czechs had a fondness for communicating in pictures on the walls.
There was puce-violet kohlrabi in the little shop windows in Prague that summer, and peppers that looked like snoods. Some of the shop windows were mainly yellow, like a Dutch painting, with a few items in them. There were window displays of red hats with ladybird spots on them, and mauve trilbies. Men with satchels full of vodka beside them throwing bread at swans; old men huddling past alabaster-faced Marys with alabaster-coloured lilies, sequined in gold, in front of them. There was a poster for ‘The Mikado’ everywhere, a poster for Dvorak’s ‘Requiem’, a girl with one eye on it. There was a poster for a Goya exhibition with a man with a letter in one hand which he seemed to be giving you, the word ‘Expulsis’ on it, his other hand missing. Tram number seventeen brought you to Podolí, where naked men waited in the lemon light of a sauna as if for a ceremony, and where a jubilant body-building life-guard congratulated me on being Irish against the dazzle of a pool.
It was part of a journey East, a journey which had begun in Berlin the previous summer.
From the eighth floor of a high-rise, gauze curtains ruffling, it was a look back. It was a city which grew out of little tales I’d written, not knowing where they’d come from, whence a hotel, a crossroads.
It was a city which grew out of the punitive damp of a little flat in Catford. But in coming out of those things it also showed an alternative truth – that life is humbler than art and more loving.
Sometimes, early in the mornings especially, I spoke to her: Amsterdam, you woke crying. I did not know why you were crying.
She was looking at a painting of a huddle of women with hats like geese on them in the Van Gogh Museum and suddenly she turned to me and smiled.
Later that autumn I journeyed to Italy alone, to Florence. Walked along a street where there were salmon-coloured hearts with lace borders under a statue of Mary. I got accommodation in a dormitory in a monastery. There was a broom hanging on the wall at the end of the row of beds on the opposite side to the door.
She started having an affair in Dublin with a boy who came from the countryside near our town, a house with lily of the valley wallpaper in the sitting-room, a house always visited by the tinkers at the same time in spring. He had rooster-orange hair and the same colour was rumoured to be elsewhere on his body.
The following summer she left for the United States.
