House of Mourning and Other Stories. Desmond Hogan

come young to this country; from County Clare. Just before the War. Lived the first year in Ilford. Had shoals of local children pursue her and her brothers and sisters with stones because they were Irish. She’d been a maid in a vast hotel. Met Peader Tierney, a bus driver for London Transport, had a proposal from him at a Galwaymen’s ball in a West London hotel and married him. Had two children by him. Was independent of him in that she opened a grocery store of her own. He’d died in the early 1970s, long before he could see his son become famous.

      7

      Who am I? Lally had thought on the procession. The question boggled him now. He was very famous. Frequently on television. A spokesman for a new generation of the Irish in England. A wearer of nightgown-looking shirts. He felt odd, abashed here, among the nuns and priests, beside his mother. But he strangely belonged. He’d make a song from Walsingham.

      8

      Who am I? Áine had thought as she’d walked. A failure. A red-haired woman in a line of Clare women. Beside that young brother of hers nothing: a point of annihilation, no achievement.

      9

      It occurred to Lally that Miles had come here because he knew that he, Lally, would be here. Lally welcomed him as a particularly devoted fan.

      ‘Where are you from?’

      ‘Dublin.’

      ‘Dublin?’

      ‘Dublin.’

      The hair over Miles’s grin was askew. Miles waited a few minutes, grin fixed, for a further comment from Lally.

      ‘We’re driving to the sea. Will you come with us?’

      10

      The flat land of Norfolk: not unlike the sea. The onward Volkswagen giving it almost an inconsequential, disconnected feel; a feel that brought dreams and memories to those sitting, as if dumbstruck, silently in the car. Mrs Tierney in front, her face searching the sky with the abstracted look of a saint who had his hands joined in prayer. Walsingham was left behind. But the spirit of Walsingham bound all the car together, this strangeness in a landscape that was otherwise yawning, and to Irish people, alien, unremarkable—important only in that it occasionally yielded an odd-looking bird and that the glowering sweep of it promised the maximum benefit of the sea.

      That they all considered it flat and boundless like the sea never occurred to them as being ironic; a sea of land was something almost to be feared. Only by the sea, in landscape, they felt safe.

      Or in a small town like Walsingbam which took full control over its surroundings and subjugated them.

      The people of Britain had called the Milky Way the Walsingham Way once. They thought it had led to Walsingham. The Virgin Mary was reckoned to have made an appearance here in the Middle Ages. The young Henry VIII had walked on foot from the slipper chapel to her shrine to venerate her. Later he’d taken her image from the shrine and had it publicly burned in Chelsea to the jeers of a late-medieval crowd. Centuries had gone by and an English lady convert started the process of reconstruction, turning sheds back into chapels. To celebrate the reconsecration of the slipper chapel vast crowds had come from all over England on a Whit Monday in the 1930s. Ellie remembered the Whit Monday gathering here in 1946, the crowds on the procession, the prayers of thanksgiving to Mary, the nuns with head-dresses tall as German castles, pictures of Mary in windows in Walsingham and the flowers on doorsteps—a gaggle of nuns in black, but with palatial white headdresses, standing outside a cottage, nudging one another, waiting for the Virgin as if she was a military hero who’d won the war. The statue of Mary had come, bedecked with congratulatory pink roses. For Ellie the War had been a war with England, English children chasing her and brutally raining stones on her.

      Her head slumped in the car a little now: she was tired. Her son, Lally, the driver, looked sidelong at her, anxiously, protectively. Her memories were his this moment: the stuff of songs, geese setting out like rebel soldiers in a jade-green farm in County Clare.

      11

      Lally was the artist, the pop star, the maker of words. Words came out of him now, these days, like meteors; superhuman ignitions of energy. He was totally in command: he stood straight on television. He was a star. He was something of Ireland for a new generation of an English pop audience. He wheedled his songs about Ireland into a microphone, the other members of his group standing behind him. His face was well known in teenybop magazines, the alacrity of it, the uprightness of it.

      How all this came about was a mystery to his mother; from a shambles in a shed, a pop group practising, to massive concerts—a song in the charts was what did it. But a song with a difference. It was a song about Ireland. Suddenly Ireland had value in the media. Lally had capitalized on that. His sore-throat-sounding songs had homed in on that new preoccupation. Without people realizing it he had turned a frivolous interest into an obsession. He remembered—through his parents. His most famous song was about his father, how his father, who’d fled Galway in his teens, had returned, middle aged, to find only stones where his parents were buried, no names on the stones. It had never occurred to him that without him, the son of the family, there’d been no one to bury his parents. He had a mad sister somewhere in England who talked to chickens. Lally’s father had deserted the entire palette of Ireland for forty years, never once writing to his parents when they were alive, trying to obliterate the memory of them, doing so until he found his way home again in the late 1960s.

      That song had been called ‘Stones in a Flaxen Field.’

      Words; Lally was loved for his words. They spun from him, all colours. They were sexual and male and young, his words. They were kaleidoscopic in colour. But they spoke, inversely, of things very ancient, of oppression. A new generation of young English people learnt from his songs.

      And only ten years before, Ellie often thought, her grocery store was stoned, one night, just after bombs went off in Birmingham, the window all smashed.

      Ah well; that was life. That was change. One day scum, the next stars. Stars . . .Ellie looked up from her dreams for the Milky Way or the Walsingham Way but it was still very much May late-afternoon light.

      12

      Her father told her how they used to play hurling in the fields outside his village in County Galway in May evening light, ‘light you could cup in your hand it was so golden.’ There are holes in every legend. There were two versions of her father. The man who ran away and who never went back until he was in his fifties. And the man who’d proposed to her mother at a Galwaymen’s ball. ‘But sure he was only there as a spy that day,’ Áine’s mother would always say. Even so it was contradictory. Áine resented the lyricism of Lally’s version of her father; she resented the way he’d used family and put it into song, she resented this intrusion into the part of her psyche which was wrapped up in family. More than anything she resented the way Lally got away with it. But still she outwardly applauded him. But as he became more famous she became older, more wrecked looking. Still her hair was very red. That seemed to be her triumph—even at school. To have this almost obscenely lavish red hair. She got on well at school. She had many boyfriends. Too many. She was involved on women’s committees. But wasn’t there something she’d lost?

      She did not believe in all this: God, pilgrimage. Coming to Walsingham almost irked her. She’d come as a duty. But it did remind her of another pilgrimage, another journey, almost holy.

      13

      It had been when Lally was a teenager. She’d gone for an abortion in Brighton. A clinic near the sea. In winter. He’d accompanied her. Waiting for the appointment she’d heard the crash of the winter sea. Lally beside her. He’d held her hand. She’d thought of Clare, of deaths, of wakes. She’d gone in for her appointment. Afterwards, in a strange way, she realized he’d become an artist that day. By using him as a solace when he’d been too young she’d traumatized him into becoming an artist. She’d wanted him to become part of a conspiracy with her, a narrow conspiracy: but instead she’d sent him out on seas of philosophizing, of wondering. He’d been generous in his interpretation of her from out on those seas. His purity not only had been reinforced but immeasurably