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.
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. She’d pursued this interest while teaching domestic science in Kerry, an occupation she was ill-qualified for, having studied English literature in Dublin.
‘I’m a kind of social worker,’ she said, ‘I’m given these lads to work with. They come here looking for something. I give them drama.’
She’d directed Eugene O’Neill in West Kerry, she’d directed Arthur Miller in West Kerry. She’d moulded young men there but a different kind of young men, bank clerks. Here she was landed with labourers, drunks.
‘How did you come by this job?’ Liam asked.
She looked at him, puzzled by his directness.
‘They were looking for a suitable spot to put an ardent Sister of Mercy,’ she said.
There was a lemon iced cake in a corner of the room and she caught his eye spying it and she asked him if he’d like some, apologizing for not offering him some earlier. She made quite a ceremony of cutting it, dishing it up on a blue-rimmed plate.
He picked at it.
‘And you,’ she said, ‘what part of Ireland do you come from?’
He had to think about it for a moment. It had been so long. How could he tell her about limestone streets and dank trees? How could he convince her he wasn’t lying when he spun yarns about an adolescence long gone?
‘I come from Galway,’ he said, ‘from Ballinasloe.’
‘My father used to go to the horse fair there,’ she said. And then she was off again about Kerry and farms, until suddenly she realized it should be him that should be speaking.
She looked at him but he said nothing.
‘Ten years.’
He was unforthcoming with answers.
The aftermath of drink had left his body and he was sitting as he had not sat for weeks, consuming tea, peaceful. In fact, when he thought of it, he hadn’t been like this for years, sitting quietly, untortured by memories of Ireland but easy with them, memories of green and limestone grey.
She invited him back and he didn’t come back for days. But as always in the case of two people who meet and genuinely like one another they were destined to meet again.
He saw her in Camden Town one evening, knew that his proclivity for Keats and Byron at school was somehow justified. She was unrushed, carrying vegetables, asked him why he had not come. He told her he’d been intending to come, that he was going to come. She smiled. She had to go she said. She was firm.
Afterwards he drank, one pint of Guinness. He would go back, he told himself.
In fact it was as though he was led by some force of persuasion, easiness of language that existed between him and Sister Sarah, a lack of embarrassment at silence.
He took a bus from his part of Shepherd’s Bush to Camden Town. Rain slashed, knifing the evening with black. The first instinct he had was to get a return bus but unnerved he went on.
Entering the centre the atmosphere was suddenly appropriated by music, Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake. He entered the hall to see a half-dozen young men in black jerseys, blue trousers, dying, quite genuinely like swans.
She saw him. He saw her. She didn’t stop the procedure, merely acknowledged him and went on, her voice reverberating in the hall, to talk of movement, of the necessity to identify the real lines in one’s body and flow with them.
Yes, he’d always recall that, ‘the real lines in one’s body.’ When she had stopped talking she approached him. He stood there, aware that he was a stranger, not in a black jersey.
Then she wound up the night’s procedure with more music, this time Beethoven, and the young men from Roscommon and Mayo behaved like constrained ballerinas as they simulated dusk.
Afterwards they spoke again. In the little kitchen.
‘Dusk is a word for balance between night and day,’ she said. ‘I asked them to be relaxed, to be aware of time flowing through them.’
The little nun had an errand to make.
Alone, there, Liam smoked a cigarette. He thought of Marion, his wife gone north to Leeds, fatigued with him, with marriage, with the odd affair. She had worked as a receptionist in a theatre.
She’d given up her job, gone home to Mummy, left the big city for the northern smoke. In short her marriage had ended.
Looking
