House of Mourning and Other Stories. Desmond Hogan

easily be forgotten with the imprint of things creative, children’s drawings, oak trees in blossom. Tudor cottages where young women in pinafores served tea and cakes home made and juiced with icing.

      He’d had no children. But Gerard now was both a twin, a child, a lover to him. There were all kinds of possibility. Experiment was only beginning. Yet Ireland, Christmas, returned him to something, least of all the presence of death, more a proximity to the prom, empty laburnum pods and hawthorn trees naked and crouched with winter. Here he was at home with thoughts, thoughts of himself, of adolescence.

      Here he made his own being like a doll on a miniature globe. He knew whence he came and if he wasn’t sure where he was going, at least he wasn’t distraught about it.

      They walked with his mother that afternoon. Later an aunt came, preened for Christmas and the imminence of death. She enjoyed the tea, the knowledgeable silences, looked at Susan as though she was not from England but a far-off country, an Eastern country hidden in the mountains. Liam’s father spoke to her not of 1916 but of policemen they’d known, irascible characters, forgetting that he had been the most irascible of all, a domineering man with a wizened face ordering his inferiors around.

      He’d brought law. He’d brought order to the town. But he’d failed to bring trust. Maybe that’s why his son had left.

      Maybe that’s why he was pondering the fate of the Irish revolution now, men with high foreheads who’d shaped the fate of the Irish Republic.

      His thoughts brought him to killings now being done in the name of Ireland. There his thoughts floundered. From where arose this language of violence for the sake and convenience of violence?

      Liam strode by the prom alone that evening, locked in a donkey jacket.

      There were rings of light around distant electric poles.

      He knew his father to be sitting up in bed; the policeman he’d been talking about earlier gone from his mind and his thoughts on 1916, on guns, and blazes, and rumination in prison cells long ago.

      And long after that thoughts on the glorification of acts of violence, the minds of children caressed with the deeds of violence.

      He’d be thinking of his son who fled and left the country.

      His son now was thinking of the times he’d run away to Dublin, to the neon lights slitting the night, of the time he went to the river to throw himself in and didn’t, of his final flight from Ireland.

      He wanted to say something, urge a statement to birth that would unite father and son but couldn’t think of anything to say. He stopped by a tree and looked to the river. An odd car went by towards Dublin.

      Why this need to run? Even as he was thinking that, a saying of his father returned: ‘Idleness is the thief of time.’ That statement had been flayed upon him as a child but with time as he lived in England among fields of oak trees that statement had changed; time itself had become the culprit, the thief.

      And the image of time as a thief was forever embroiled in a particular ikon of his father’s, that of a pacifist who ran through Dublin helping the wounded in 1916, was arrested, was shot dead with a deaf and dumb youth. And that man, more than anybody, was Liam’s hero, an Irish pacifist, a pacifist born of his father’s revolution, a pacifist born of his father’s state.

      He returned home quickly, drew the door on his father. He sat down.

      ‘Remember, Daddy, the story you told me about the pacifist shot dead in 1916 with a deaf and dumb youth, the man whose wife was a feminist?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Well, I was just thinking that he’s the sort of man we need now, one who comes from a revolution but understands it in a different way, a creative way, who understands that change isn’t born from violence but intense and self-sacrificing acts.’

      His father understood what he was saying, that there was a remnant of 1916 that was relevant and urgent now, that there had been at least one man among the men of 1916 who could speak to the present generation and show them that guns were not diamonds, that blood was precious, that birth most poignantly issues from restraint.

      Liam went to bed. In the middle of the night he woke muttering to himself, ‘May God have mercy on your soul,’ although his father was not yet dead, but he wasn’t asking God to have mercy on his father’s soul but on the soul of Ireland, the many souls born out of his father’s statelet, the women never pregnant, the cruel and violent 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.

Memories of Swinging London

      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