for life but here it was, one marriage dissolved and nights to fill, a body to shelter, a life to lead.
A young man with curly blond hair entered. He was looking for Sister Sarah. He stopped when he saw Liam, taken aback. These boys were like a special battalion of guards in their black jerseys. He was an intruder, cool, English almost, his face, his features relaxed, not rough or ruddy. The young man said he was from Roscommon. That was near Liam’s home.
He spoke of farms, of pigs, said he’d had to leave, come to the city, search for neon. Now he’d found it. He’d never go back to the country. He was happy here, big city, many people, a dirty river and a population of people that included all races.
‘I miss the dances though,’ the boy said, ‘the dances of Sunday nights. There’s nothing like them in London, the cars all pulled up and the ballroom jiving with music by Big Tom and the Mainliners. You miss them in London but there are other things that compensate.’
When asked by Liam what compensated most for the loss of fresh Sunday night dancehalls amid green fields the boy said, ‘The freedom.’
Sister Sarah entered, smiled at the boy, sat down with Liam. The boy questioned her about a play they were intending to do and left, turning around to smile at Liam.
Sarah—her name came to him without the prefix now—spoke about the necessity of drama in schools, in education.
‘It is a liberating force,’ she said. ‘It brings out—’ she paused ‘—the swallow in people.’
And they both laughed, amused and gratified at the absurdity of the description.
Afterwards he perceived her in a hallway alone, a nun in a short outfit, considering the after-effects of her words that evening, pausing before plunging the place into darkness.
He told her he would return and this time he did, sitting among boys from Roscommon and Tipperary, improvising situations. She called on him to be a soldier returning from war and this he did, embarrassedly, recalling that he too was a soldier once, a boy outside a barracks in Ireland, beside a bed of crocuses. People sintled at his shattered innocence, at this attempt at improvisation. Sister Sarah reserved a smile. In the middle of a simulated march he stopped.
‘I can’t. I can’t,’ he said.
People smiled, let him be.
He walked to the bus stop, alone. Rain was edging him in, winter was coming. It hurt with its severity tonight. He passed a sex shop, neon light dancing over the instruments in the window. The pornographic smile of a British comedian looked out from a newsagent’s.
He got his bus.
Sleep took him in Shepherd’s Bush. He dreamt of a school long ago in County Galway which he attended for a few years, urns standing about the remains of a Georgian past.
At work people noticed he was changing. They noticed a greater serenity. An easiness about the way he was holding a cup. They virtually chastised him for it.
Martha McPherson looked at him, said sarcastically, ‘You look hopeful.’
He was thinking of Keats in the canteen when she spoke to him, of words long ago, phrases from mouldering books at school at the beginning of autumn.
His flat was tidier now; there was a space for books that had not hitherto been there. He began a letter home, stopped, couldn’t envisage his mother, old woman by a sea of bog.
Sister Sarah announced plans for a play they would perform at Christmas. The play would be improvised, bit by bit, and she asked for suggestions about the content.
One boy from Leitrim said, ‘Let’s have a play about the Tinkers.’
Liam was cast for a part as Tinker king and bit by bit over the weeks he tried, tried to push off shyness, act out little scenes.
People laughed at him. He felt humiliated, twisted inside. Yet he went on.
His face was moulding, clearer than before, and in his eyes was a piercing darkness. He made speeches, trying to recall the way the Tinkers spoke at home, long lines of them on winter evenings, camps in country lanes, smoke rising as a sun set over distant steeples.
He spoke less to colleagues, more to himself, phrasing and rephrasing old questions, wondering why he had left Ireland in the first place, a boy, sixteen, lonely, very lonely on a boat making its way through a winter night.
‘I suppose I left Ireland,’ he told Sister Sarah one night, ‘because I felt ineffectual, totally ineffectual. The priests at school despised my independence. My mother worked as a char. My father was dead. I was a mature youngster who liked women, had one friend at school, a boy who wrote poetry.
‘I came to England seeking reasons for living. I stayed with my older brother who worked in a factory.
‘My first week in England a Greek homosexual who lived upstairs asked me to sleep with him. That ended my innocence. I grew up somewhere around then, became adult very, very young.’
1966, the year he left Ireland.
Sonny and Cher sang ‘I Got You, Babe.’
London was readying itself for blossoming, the Swinging Sixties had attuned themselves to Carnaby Street, to discotheques, to parks. Ties looked like huge flowers, young hippies sat in parks. And in 1967, the year Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared, a generation of young men and horned-rimmed glasses looking like John Lennon. ‘It was like a party,’ Liam said, ‘a continual party. I ate, drank at this feast.
‘Then I met Marion. We married in 1969, the year Brian Jones died. I suppose we spent our honeymoon at his funeral. Or at least in Hyde Park where Mick Jagger read a poem in commemoration of him. “Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!”’
Sister Sarah smiled. She obviously liked romantic poetry too, she didn’t say anything, just looked at him, with a long slow smile. ‘I understand,’ she said, though what she was referring to he didn’t know.
Images came clearer now, Ireland, the forty steps at school, remnants of a Georgian past, early mistresses, most of all the poems of Keats and Shelley.
Apart from the priests, there had been things about school he’d enjoyed, the images in poems, the celebration of love and laughter by Keats and Shelley, the excitement at finding a new poem in a book.
She didn’t say much to him these days, just looked at him. He was beginning to fall into place, to be whole in this environment of rough and ready young men.
Somehow she had seduced him.
He wore clean, cool, casual white shirts now, looked faraway at work, hair drifting over his forehead as in adolescence. Someone noticed his clear blue eyes and remarked on them, Irish eyes, and he knew this identification as Irish had not been so absolute for years.
‘ “They came like swallows and like swallows went,” ’ Sister Sarah quoted one evening. It was a fragment from a poem by Yeats, referring to Coole Park, a place not far from Liam’s home, where the legendary Irish writers convened, Yeats, Synge, Lady Gregory, O’Casey, a host of others, leaving their mark in a place of growth, of bark, of spindly virgin trees. And in a way now Liam associated himself with this horde of shadowy and evasive
