whom I lived in Clapham, raising children, he getting a hundred pounds a week, working seven days a week. My hair I carefully tended and wore heavy check shirts. We never went back to Ireland. In fact, we’ve never gone back to Ireland since I left, but occasionally, wheeling a child into the Battersea funfair, I was reminded of Jamesy, a particular strand of hair blowing across his face. Where was he? Where was the hurt and that face and the sensitivity? London was flooding with dark people and there at the beginning of the sixties I’d cross Chelsea bridge, walk my children up by Cheyne Walk, sometimes waiting to watch a candle lighting. Gradually it became more real to me that I loved him, that we were active within a certain sacrifice. Both of us had been bare and destitute when we met. The two of us had warded off total calamity, total loss. ‘Jamesy!’ His picture swooned; he was like a ravaged corpse in my head and the area between us opened; in Chelsea library I began reading books by Russian authors. I began loving him again. A snatch of Glenn Miller fell across the faded memory of colours in the rain, lights of the October fair week in Ballinasloe, Ireland.
The world was exploding with young people—protests against nuclear bombs were daily reported—but in me the nuclear area of the town where I’d worked returned to me.
Jamesy and I had been the marchers, Jamesy and I had been the protest! ‘I like your face,’ Jamesy once said to me. ‘It looks like you could blow it away with a puff.’
In Chelsea library I smoked cigarettes though I wasn’t supposed to. I read Chekhov’s biography and Turgenev’s biography—my husband minding the children—and tried to decipher an area of loss, a morning by the station, summer gone.
I never reached him; I just entertained him like as a child in an orphanage in the West of Ireland I had held a picture of Claudette Colbert under my pillow to remind me of glamour. The gulf between me and Jamesy narrows daily. I address him in a page of a novel, in a chip shop alone at night or here now, writing to you, I say something I never said before, something I’ve never written before.
I touch upon truth.
Coming, through the black night he wondered what lay before him, a father lying dying. Christmas, midnight ceremonies in a church stood up like a gravestone, floods about his home.
With him were his wife and his friend Gerard. They needn’t have come by boat but something purgatorial demanded it of Liam, the gulls that shot over like stars, the roxy music in the jukebox, the occasional Irish ballad rising in cherished defiance of the sea.
The night was soft, breezes intruded, plucking hair, thread living loose in many-coloured jerseys. Susan fell asleep once while Liam looked at Gerard. It was Gerard’s first time in Ireland. Gerard’s eyes were chestnut, his dark hair cropped like a monk’s on a bottle of English brandy.
With his wife sleeping Liam could acknowledge the physical relationship that lay between them. It wasn’t that Susan didn’t know, but despite the truism of promiscuity in the school where they worked there still abided laws like the Old Testament God’s, reserving carnality for smiles after dark.
A train to Galway, the Midlands frozen in.
Susan looked out like a Botticelli Venus, a little worried, often just vacuous. She was a music teacher, thus her mind was penetrated by the vibrations of Bach even if the place was a public lavatory or a Lyons café.
The red house at the end of the street; it looked cold, pushed away from the other houses. A river in flood lay behind. A woman, his mother, greeted him. He an only child, she soon to be a widow. But something disturbed Liam with excitement. Christmas candles still burned in this town.
His father lay in bed, still magically alive, white hair smeared on him like a dummy, that hard face that never forgave an enemy in the police force still on him. He was delighted to see Liam. At eighty-three he was a most ancient father, marrying late, begetting late, his wife fifteen years younger than him.
A train brushed the distance outside. Adolescence returned with a sudden start, the cold flurry of snow as the train in which he was travelling sped towards Dublin, the films about Russian winters.
Irish winters became Russian winters in turn and half of Liam’s memories of adolescence were of the fantasized presence of Russia. Ikons, candles, streets agleam with snow.
‘Still painting?’
‘Still painting.’ As though he could ever give it up. His father smiled as though he were about to grin. ‘Well, we never made a policeman out of you.’
At ten, the day before he would have been inaugurated as a boy scout, Liam handed in his uniform. He always hated the colours of the Irish flag, mixing like the yolk in a bad egg.
It hadn’t disappointed his father that he hadn’t turned into a military man but his father preferred to hold on to a shred of prejudice against Liam’s chosen profession, leaving momentarily aside one of his most cherished memories, visiting the National Gallery in Dublin once with his son, encountering the curator by accident and having the curator show them around, an old man who’d since died, leaving behind a batch of poems and a highly publicized relationship with an international writer.
But the sorest point, the point now neither would mention, was arguments about violence. At seventeen Liam walked the local hurling pitch with petitions against the war in Vietnam.
Liam’s father’s fame, apart from being a police inspector of note, was fighting in the GPO in 1916 and subsequently being arrested on the republican side in the Civil War. Liam was against violence, pure and simple. Nothing could convince him that 1916 was right. Nothing could convince him it was different from now, old women, young children, being blown to bits in Belfast.
Statues abounded in this house; in every nook and cranny was a statue, a statue of Mary, a statue of Joseph, an emblem perhaps of some saint Mrs Fogarthy had sweetly long forgotten.
This was the first thing Gerard noticed, and Susan who had seen this menagerie before was still surprised. ‘It’s like a holy statue farm.’
Gerard said it was like a holy statue museum. They were sitting by the fire, two days before Christmas. Mrs Fogarthy had gone to bed.
‘It is a museum,’ Liam said, ‘all kinds of memories, curious sensations here, ghosts. The ghosts of Irish republicans, of policemen, military men, priests, the ghosts of Ireland.’
‘Why ghosts?’ Gerard asked.
‘Because Ireland is dying,’ Liam said.
Just then they heard his father cough.
Mr Fogarthy was slowly dying, cancer welling up in him. He was dying painfully and yet peacefully because he had a dedicated wife to look after him and a river in flood around, somehow calling Christ to mind, calling penance to mind, instilling a sense of winter in him that went back a long time, a river in flood around a limestone town.
Liam offered to cook the Christmas dinner but his mother scoffed him. He was a good cook, Susan vouched. Once Liam had cooked and his father had said he wouldn’t give it to the dogs.
They walked, Liam, Susan, Gerard, in a town where women were hugged into coats like brown paper accidentally blown about them. They walked in the grounds of Liam’s former school, once a Georgian estate, now beautiful, elegant still in the East Galway winter solstice.
There
