House of Mourning and Other Stories. Desmond Hogan

      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 an amber, welcoming light in Battersea. Young deer talked to children in Battersea Park. I crept around Soho like an escaped prisoner. I knew there was something connecting then and now, yes, a piece of paper, connecting the far-off, starched days of childhood to an adulthood which was confused, desperate but determined to make a niche away from family and all friends that had ensued from a middle-class Irish upbringing. I tiptoed up bare wooden stairs at night, scared of waking those who’d given me lodging. I tried to write to my mother and then I remembered the guilty conscience on her face.

      Gas works burgeoned into the honey-coloured sky, oblivious of the landscape inside me, the dirty avenue cascading on the Forty Steps.

      ‘Why do you think they built it?’

      ‘To hide something.’

      ‘Why did they want to hide something?’

      ‘Because people don’t want to know about some things.’

      ‘What things?’

      Patsy had shrugged, a fawn coat draped on his shoulders that day.

      ‘Patsy, I’ll never hide anything.’

      There’d been many things I’d hidden. A girlfriend’s abortion. An image of a little boy inside myself, a blue and white striped T-shirt on him. The mortal end of a relationship with a girl. Desire for my own sex. Loneliness. I’d tried to hide the loneliness, but Dublin, city of my youth, had exposed loneliness like neon at evening. I’d hidden a whole part of my childhood, the 1950s, but hitting London took them out of the bag. Irish pubs in London, their Jukeboxes, united the 1950s with the 1970s with a kiss of a song. ‘Patsy Fagan.’ Murky waters wheezed under a mirror in a pub lavatory. A young man in an Italian-style duffle coat, standing erect, eddied into a little boy being tugged along by a small fat man.

      ‘Patsy, what is beauty?’

      ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’

      ‘But what is it?’

      He looked at me. ‘Pretending we’re father and son now.’

      I brought Patsy Fogarthy white carnations. It was a sunny afternoon early in November. I’d followed instructions on a piece of paper. Walking into the demesne of the hospital I perceived light playing in a bush. He was not surprised to see me. He was a small, fat, bald man in pyjamas. His face and his baldness were a carnage of reds and purples. Little wriggles of grey hair stood out. He wore maroon and red striped pyjamas. He gorged me with a look. ‘You’re—’ I did not want him to say my name. He took my hand. There was death in the intimacy. He was in a hospital for the mad. He made a fuss of being grateful for the flowers. ‘How’s Georgina?’ He called my mother by her first name. ‘And Bert?’ My father was not yet dead. It was as if he was charging them with something. Patsy Fogarthy, our small-town Oscar Wilde, reclined in pyjamas on a chair against the shimmering citadels of Wandsworth. A white nun infrequently scurried in to see to some man in the corridor. ‘You made a fine young man.’ ‘It was the band I missed most.’ ‘Them were the days.’ In the middle of snippets of conversation—he sounded not unlike an Irish bank clerk, aged though and more graven-voiced—I imagined the tableau of love. Patsy with a young boy. ‘It was a great old band. Sure you’ve been years out of the place now. What age are ye?’ ‘Twenty-six.’ ‘Do you have a girlfriend? The English girls will be out to grab you now!’ A plane noisily slid over Wandsworth. We simultaneously looked at it. An old, swede-faced man bent over a bedside dresser. ‘Do ya remember me? I used to bring you on walks.’ Of course, I said. Of course. ‘It’s not true what they said about us. Not true. They’re all mad. They’re all lunatics. How’s Bert?’ Suddenly he started shouting at me. ‘You never wrote back. You never wrote back to my letters. And all the ones I sent you.’ More easy-voiced he was about to return the flowers until he suddenly avowed. ‘They’ll be all right for Our Lady. They’ll be all right for Our Lady.’ Our Lady was a white statue, over bananas and pears, by his bed.

      3

      It is hot summer in London. Tiger lilies have come to my door. I’d never known Patsy had written to me. I’d never received his letters of course. They’d curdled in my mother’s hand. All through my adolescence. I imagined them filing in, never to be answered. I was Patsy’s boy. More than the drummer lad. He had betrothed himself to me. The week after seeing him, after being virtually chased out of the ward by him, with money I’d saved up in Dublin, I took a week’s holiday in Italy. The trattorias of Florence in November illumined the face of a young man who’d been Patsy Fogarthy before I’d been born. It’s now six years on and that face still puzzles me, the face I saw in Florence, a young man with black hair, and it makes a story, that solves a lot of mystery for me. There’s a young man with black hair in a scarlet tie but it’s not Patsy. It’s a young man my father met in London in 1939, the year he came to study tailoring. Perhaps now it’s the summer and the heat and the picture of my father on the wall—a red and yellow striped tie on him—and my illimitable estrangement from family but this city creates a series of ikons this summer. Patsy is one of them. But the sequence begins in the summer of 1939.

      Bert ended up on the wide pavements of London in the early summer of 1939. He came from a town in the Western Midlands of Ireland whose wide river had scintillated at the back of town before he left and whose handsome façades radiated with sunshine. There were girls left behind that summer and cricket matches. Bert had decided on the tailoring course after a row with an older brother with whom he’d shared the family grocery-cum-bar business. The family house was one of the most sizeable on the street. Bert had his eyes on another house to buy now. He’d come to London to forge a little bit of independence from family for himself and in so doing he forwent some of the pleasures of the summer. Not only had he left the green cricket fields by the river but he had come to a city that exhaled news bulletins. He was not staying long.

      He strolled into a cavern of death for behind the cheery faces of London that summer was death. Bert would do his course in Cheapside and not linger. Badges pressed against military lapels, old dishonours to Ireland. Once Bert had taken a Protestant girl out. They sailed in the bumpers at the October fair together. That was the height of his forgiveness for England. He did not consider playing cricket a leaning to England. Cricket was an Irish game, pure and simple, as could be seen from its popularity in his small, Protestant-built town.

      Living was not easy for Bert in London; an Irish landlady—she was from Armagh, a mangy woman—had him. Otherwise the broth of his accent was rebuffed. He stooped a little under English disdain, but his hair was still orange and his face ruddy in fragments. By day Bert travailed; a dusty, dark cubicle. At evenings he walked. It was the midsummer that made him raise his head a little.

      Twilight rushing over the tops of the trees at the edge of Hyde Park made him think of his dead parents, Galway people. He was suddenly both proud of and