but one which, generation after generation, had produced genius, and observation of an extraordinary kind.
Sister Sarah made people do extraordinary things, dance, sing, boys dress as girls, grown men jump over one another like children. She had Liam festoon himself in old clothes, with paper flowers in his hat.
The story of the play ran like this:
Two Tinker families are warring. A boy from one falls in love with a girl from the other. They run away and are pursued by Liam who plays King of the Tinkers. He eventually finds them but they kill themselves rather than part and are buried with the King of the Tinkers making a speech about man’s greed and folly.
No one questioned that it was too mournful a play for Christmas; there were many funny scenes, wakes, fights, horse-stealing and the final speech, words of which flowed from Liam’s mouth, had a beauty, an elegance which made young men from Roscommon who were accustomed to hefty Irish showband singers stop and be amazed at the beauty of language.
Towards the night the play was to run Sister Sarah became a little irritated, a little tired. She’d been working too hard, teaching during the day. She didn’t talk to Liam much and he felt hurt and disorganized. He didn’t turn up for rehearsal for two nights running. He rang and said he was ill.
He threw a party. All his former friends arrived and Marion’s friends. The flat churned with people. Records smashed against the night. People danced. Liam wore an open-neck collarless white shirt. A silver cross was dangling, one picked up from a craft shop in Cornwall.
In the course of the party a girl became very, very drunk and began weeping about an abortion she’d had. She sat in the middle of the floor, crying uproariously, awaiting the arrival of someone.
Eventually, Liam moved towards her, took her in his arms, offered her a cup of tea. She quietened. ‘Thank you,’ she said simply.
The crowds went home. Bottles were left everywhere. Liam took his coat, walked to an all-night café and, as he didn’t have to work, watched the dawn come.
She didn’t chastise him. Things went on as normal. He played his part, dressed in ridiculous clothes. Sister Sarah was in a lighter mood. She drank a sherry with Liam one evening, one cold December evening. As it was coming near Christmas she spoke of festivity in Kerry. Crossroad dances in Dún Caoin, the mirth of Kerry that had never died. She told Liam how her father would take her by car to church on Easter Sunday, how they’d watch the waters being blessed and later dance at the crossroads, melodious playing and the Irish fiddle.
There had been nothing like that in Liam’s youth. He’d come from the Midlands, dull green, statues of Mary outside factories. He’d been privileged to know defeat from an early age.
‘You should go to Kerry some time,’ Sister Sarah said.
‘I’d like to,’ Liam said, ‘I’d like to. But it’s too late now.’
Yet when the musicians came to rehearse the music Liam knew it was not too late. He may have missed the West of Ireland in his youth, the simplicity of a Gaelic people but here now in London, melodious exploding, he was in an Ireland he’d never known, the extreme west, gullies, caves, peninsulas, roads winding into desecrated hills and clouds always coming in. Imagine, he thought, I’ve never even seen the sea.
He told her one night about the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 revolution, which had occurred before he left, old priests at school fumbling with words about dead heroes, bedraggled tricolours flying over the school and young priests, beautiful in the extreme, reciting the poetry of Patrick Pearse.
‘When the bombs came in England,’ Liam said, ‘and we were blamed, the ordinary Irish working people, I knew they were to blame, those priests, the people who lied about glorious deeds. Violence is never, ever glorious.’
He met her in a café for coffee one day and she laughed and said it was almost like having an affair. She said she’d once fancied a boy in Kerry, a boy she was directing in All My Sons. He had bushy blond hair, kept Renoir reproductions on his wall, was a bank clerk. ‘But he went off with another girl,’ she said, ‘and broke my heart.'
He met her in Soho Square Gardens one day and they walked together. She spoke of Africa and the States, travelling, the mission of the modern church, the redemption of souls lost in a mire of nonchalance. On Tottenham Court Road she said goodbye to him.
‘See you next rehearsal,’ she said.
He stood there when she left and wanted to tell her she’d awakened in him a desire for a country long forgotten, an awareness of another side of that country, music, drama, levity but there was no saying these things.
When the night of the play finally arrived he acted his part well. But all the time, all the time he kept an eye out for her.
Afterwards there were celebrations, balloons dancing, Irish bankers getting drunk. He sat and waited for her to come to him and when she didn’t, rose and looked for her.
She was speaking to an elderly Irish labourer.
He stood there, patiently, for a moment. He wanted her to tell him about Christmas lights in Ireland long ago, about the music of Ó Riada and the southern-going whales. But she persevered in speaking to this old man about Christmas in Kerry.
Eventually he danced with her. She held his arm softly. He knew now he was in love with her and didn’t know how to put it to her. She left him and talked to some other people.
Later she danced again with him. It was as though she saw something in his eyes, something forbidding.
‘I have to go now,’ she said as the music still played. She touched his arm gently, moved away. His eyes searched for her afterwards but couldn’t find her. Young men he’d acted with came up and started clapping him on the back. They joked and they laughed. Suddenly Liam found he was getting sick. He didn’t make for the lavatory. He went instead to the street. There he vomited. It was raining. He got very wet going home.
At Christmas he went to midnight mass in Westminster Cathedral, a thing he had never done before. He stood with women in mink coats and Irish charwomen as the choir sang ‘Come All Ye Faithful.’ He had Christmas with an old aunt and at midday rang Marion. They didn’t say much to one another that day but after Christmas she came to see him.
One evening they slept together. They made love as they had not for years, he entering her deeply, resonantly, thinking of Galway long ago, a river where they swam as children.
She stayed after Christmas. They were more subdued with one another. Marion was pregnant. She worked for a while and when her pregnancy became too obvious she ceased working.
She walked a lot. He wondered at a woman, his wife, how he hadn’t noticed before how beautiful she looked. They were passing Camden Town one day when he recalled a nun he’d once known. He told Marion about her, asked her to enter with him, went in a door, asked for Sister Sarah.
Someone he didn’t recognize told him she’d gone to Nigeria, that she’d chosen the African sun to boys in black jerseys. He wanted to follow her for one blind moment, to tell her that people like her were too rare to be lost but knew no words of his would convince her. He took his wife’s hand and went about his life, quieter than he had been before.
