things from one another, their paths had crossed, they’d gone different ways but in this moment they created a total communion, a total marriage, an understanding that only a child could intuit and carry away with him, enlightened, the notes on the walls becoming Russian notes with pictures of Tsars and dictators and people who’d changed epochs on them, the walls burning in a terrible fire in the child’s mind until only a note or two was left, a face or two, sole reminders of an enraptured moment in history.
At such moments the imagination begins and someone else, someone who did not live through the events, remembers and, later, counts the pain.
A little boy walked away from the wedding, box of chocolates still under his arm, not wanting to look back at the point where a woman was dragged away, screaming, at a certain hour, to a solitary room in a mental hospital.
Years later he returned, long after Magella’s death in the mental hospital, to the woods, at the time of year when rhododendrons spread there. He bent and picked up a decapitated tiara of rhododendron. There was a poster for Paris in the village, a Chinese restaurant run by a South Korean, a late night fish-and-chip takeaway. The garage was still open at the top of the village. The only change was that Boris had put up a Russian flag among the others. It was his showpiece. He’d gotten it from the Legion of Mary in Kilkenny who’d put on a show about imprisoned cardinals behind the Iron Curtain. But it was his pride. It demonstrated, apart from his roots, the true internationalism of the garage. There were no boundaries here. A bald man, lots of children scampering around him for years, would come out to fill your car and his face would tell you these things, a brown, anaemic work coat on him, a prosperous but also somewhat cowed grin on his face.
At her funeral in 1959 Boris had carried lilies, and there, in the graveyard, thought of his visit to Bradford, the exiled Irish there, a cowed, depressed people, the legacy of history, and of the woman who’d tried to overthrow that legacy, for a while. He’d put the lilies on the grave, Magella’s lover, no one denying that day the exact place of the grief in his heart.
Everybody walked away except the boy and Boris and then Boris walked away, but first looking at the boy, almost in annoyance, as if to say, you have no right to intrude on these things, flashing back his black hair and throwing a boyish, almost a rival’s look from his black eyes that were scarred and vinegary and blazingly alive from tears. In those eyes was the wound, the secret, and the boy looked at it, unreproached by it.
Years later he returned to find that there was no museum to that wound, only a few brightly painted houses, a ramshackle cramming of modernity. He took his car and drove out by the garage and the bunting and the flags to the fields where you could smell the first, premature coming of the epic, all-consuming, wound-oblivionizing harvest.
Our mad aunts, the young man thought, our mad selves.
Lady of Laois, ikon from this incumbent, serf-less, but none the less, I expect, totally Russian storybook blinding harvest, pray for the night-sea, neon spin-drift, jukebox-beacon café wanderer.
1
The Forty Steps led nowhere. They were grey and wide, shadowed at the sides by creeper and bush. In fact it was officially declared by Patsy Fogarthy that there were forty-four steps. These steps were erected by an English landlord in memorial to some doubtful subject. A greyhound, a wife? If you climbed them you had a view of the recesses of the woods and the places where Patsy Fogarthy practised with his trombone. Besides playing—in a navy uniform—in the brass band Patsy Fogarthy was my father’s shop assistant. While the steps were dark grey the counter in my father’s shop was dark and fathomless. We lived where the town men’s Protestant society had once been and that was where our shop was too. And still is. Despite the fact my father is dead. My father bought the house, built the shop from nothing—after a row with a brother with whom he shared the traditional family grocery-cum-bar business. Patsy Fogartliy was my father’s first shop assistant. They navigated waters together. They sold silk ties, demonstrating them carefully to country farmers.
Patsy Fogarthy was from the country, had a tremendous welter of tragedy in his family—which always was a point of distinction—deranged aunts, a paralysed mother. We knew that Patsy’s house—cottage—was in the country. We never went there. It was just a picture. And in the cottage in turn in my mind were many pictures—paintings, embroideries by a prolific local artist who took to embroidery when she was told she was destined to die from leukaemia. Even my mother had one of her works. A bowl of flowers on a firescreen. From his inception as part of our household it seems that Patsy had allied himself towards me. In fact he’d been my father’s assistant from before I was born. But he dragged me on walks, he described linnets to me, he indicated ragwort, he seated me on wooden benches in the hall outside town opposite a line of sycamores as he puffed into his trombone, as his fat stomach heaved into it. Patsy had not always been fat. That was obvious. He’d been corpulent, not fat. ‘Look,’ he said one day on the avenue leading to the Forty Steps—I was seven—‘a blackbird about to burst into song.’
Patsy had burst into song once. At a St Patrick’s night concert. He sang ‘Patsy Fagan.’ Beside a calendar photograph of a woman at the back of our shop he did not sing for me but recited poetry. ‘The Ballad of Athlone.’ The taking of the bridge of Athlone by the Williamites in 1691 had dire consequences for this area. It implanted it forevermore with Williamites. It directly caused the Irish defeat at Aughrim. Patsy lived in the shadow of the hills of Aughrim. Poppies were the consequence of battle. There were balloons of defeat in the air. Patsy Fogarthy brought me a gift of mushrooms once from the fields of Aughrim.
Patsy had a bedding of blackberry curls about his cherubic face; he had cherubic lips and smiled often; there was a snowy sparkle in his deep-blue eyes. Once he’d have been exceedingly good-looking. When I was nine his buttocks slouched obesely. Once he’d have been as the man in the cigarette advertisements. When I was nine on top of the Forty Steps he pulled down his jaded trousers as if to pee, opened up his knickers and exposed his gargantuan balls. Delicately I turned away. The same year he tried to put the same penis in the backside of a drummer in the brass band, or so trembling, thin members of the Legion of Mary vouched. Without a murmur of a court case Patsy was expelled from town. The boy hadn’t complained. He’d been caught in the act by a postman who was one of the church’s most faithful members in town. Patsy Fogarthy crossed the Irish Sea, leaving a trail of mucus after film.
2
I left Ireland for good and all 11 October 1977. There’d been many explanations for Patsy’s behaviour: an aunt who used to have fits, throwing her arms about like seven snakes; the fact he might really have been of implanted Williamite stock. One way or the other he’d never been quite forgotten, unmentioned for a while, yes, but meanwhile the ecumenical movement had revived thoughts of him.
My mother attended a Protestant service in St Matthias’s church in 1976. As I left home she pressed a white, skeletal piece of paper into my hands. The address of a hospital where Patsy Fogarthy was now incarcerated. The message was this: ‘Visit him. We are now Christian (we go to Protestant services) and if not forgiven he can have some alms.’ It was now one could go back that made people accept him a little. He’d sung so well once. He smiled so cheerily. And sure wasn’t there the time he gave purple Michaelmas daisies to the dying and octogenarian and well-nigh crippled Mrs Connaughton (she whose husband left her and went to America in 1927).
I did not bring Patsy Fogarthy purple Michaelmas daisies. In the house I was staying in in Battersea there were marigolds. Brought there regularly by myself. Patsy was nearby in a Catholic hospital in Wandsworth. Old clay was dug up. Had my mother recently been speaking to a relative of his? A casual conversation on the street with a country woman. Anyway this was the task I was given. There was
