Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

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 he’d like some, apologizing for not offering him some earlier. She made quite a ceremony of cutting it, dishing it up on a blue-rimmed plate.
    He picked at it.
    ‘And you,’ she said, ‘what part of Ireland do you come from?’
    He had to think about it for a moment. It had been so long. How could he tell her about limestone streets and dank trees? How could he convince her he wasn’t lying when he spun yarns about an adolescence long gone?
    ‘I come from Galway,’ he said, ‘from Ballinasloe.’
    ‘My father used to go to the horse fair there,’ she said. And then she was off again about Kerry and farms, until suddenly she realized it should be him that should be speaking.
    She looked at him but he said nothing.
    ‘Ten years.’
    He was unforthcoming with answers.
    The aftermath of drink had left his body and he was sitting as he had not sat for weeks, consuming tea, peaceful. In fact, when he thought of it, he hadn’t been like this for years, sitting quietly, untortured by memories of Ireland but easy with them, memories of green and limestone grey.
    She invited him back and he didn’t come back for days. But as always in the case of two people who meet and genuinely like one another they were destined to meet again.
    He saw her in Camden Town one evening, knew that his proclivity for Keats and Byron at school was somehow justified. She was unrushed, carrying vegetables, asked him why he had not come. He told her he’d been intending to come, that he was going to come. She smiled. She had to go she said. She was firm.
    Afterwards he drank, one pint of Guinness. He would go back, he told himself.
    In fact it was as though he was led by some force of persuasion, easiness of language that existed between him and Sister Sarah, a lack of embarrassment at silence.
    He took a bus from his part of Shepherd’s Bush to Camden Town. Rain slashed, knifing the evening with black. The first instinct he had was to get a return bus but unnerved he went on.
    Entering the centre the atmosphere was suddenly appropriated by music, Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake. He entered the hall to see a half-dozen young men in black jerseys, blue trousers, dying, quite genuinely like swans.
    She saw him. He saw her. She didn’t stop the procedure, merely acknowledged him and went on, her voice reverberating in the hall, to talk of movement, of the necessity to identify the real lines in one’s body and flow with them.
    Yes, he’d always recall that, ‘the real lines in one’s body.’ When she had stopped talking she approached him. He stood there, aware that he was a stranger, not in a black jersey.
    Then she wound up the night’s procedure with more music, this time Beethoven, and the young men from Roscommon and Mayo behaved like constrained ballerinas as they simulated dusk.
    Afterwards they spoke again. In the little kitchen.
    ‘Dusk is a word for balance between night and day,’ she said. ‘I asked them to be relaxed, to be aware of time flowing through them.’
    The little nun had an errand to make.
    Alone, there, Liam smoked a cigarette. He thought of Marion, his wife gone north to Leeds, fatigued with him, with marriage, with the odd affair. She had worked as a receptionist in a theatre.
    She’d given up her job, gone home to Mummy, left the big city for the northern smoke. In short her marriage had ended.
    Looking at the litter bin Liam realized how much closer to accepting this fact he’d come. Somehow he’d once thought marriage to be 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.