Hilary still thought the Irish language sounded Germanic, or even like Arabic with its deeply guttural sounds. It didn’t sound like the lilting silver tongue you’d expect, redolent of soft rain and melancholy. It sounded determined, confident, at heart deeply humorous, as if the speaker were about to burst out laughing at any moment.
Vianney said the fact that Hilary heard humour in the tonal nuances of the Irish language was due to her deeply ingrained, possibly genetically encoded, WASP belief that the Irish were in themselves amusing. The comic objects of Empire.
Yet he knew, they both knew, the sounds of Irish had once enchanted her – when she had first heard it, on a warm fragrant Sydney evening, at a harbour side party, where the golden haired maiden had met the raven-haired prince. Mó ghrá thu agus mo rún! My love and my secret Thou!
‘Vianney?’
‘Mmm?’
‘Lolly wants to invite Xavier to the party’.
‘Well he can,’ he said, the very voice of reason, not looking up.
‘He doesn’t know where he is. And he hasn’t got an email for him -not since Xavier’s last one got hacked.’
‘Oh come on, Xavier’s around.’ Vianney took another slug of his beer and frowned with even greater intensity, as if the iPod was being very cryptic . ‘He’s just very busy working on his book.’
‘But where exactly around?’ Her voice was giving it away.
‘As far as I know, Xavier is still shacked up with that woman, down the South Coast. What’s her name? Rosie!’
Vianney returned to his study, as if he had answered all questions. Thugas léim go tairsigh; my first leap reached the threshold. She saw that he was barricading himself inside the Lament . His knees were drawn up, his whole body was silently emitting warnings, like the cat, William O’Brien. One more loud noise, one more rude interruption to my peace and quiet, and I’m gone.
But Hilary had promised Lolly that she would try. Xavier, contrary as ever, didn’t even have a mobile phone. Or not one they knew about. But everyone knew he kept in touch somehow with Vianney. The two youngest Ryan brothers had always been as thick as thieves.
‘Don’t you have any contact details for Xavier? Just an email?’
Vianney leaped from the couch like a man driven to the edge. An dara léim go geata; My second reached the gateway. ‘Jesus!’
‘We just thought -,’ she said hurriedly, cowardly.
His answer was to stand at the door, dark eyed. ‘Haven’t you worked it out yet Hilary? It’s not Lolly who wants it.’ His tone was full of accusation. ‘It’s Kate. She’s trying to nail Xavier down, as per bloody usual.’
And then, in a graceful, lithe and seriously offended swish, he was gone.
***
Kate Ryan, the Snow Queen of Lithgow, patron saint of tough love, mother of Loyola, Aquinas (RIP), Vianney, Xavier and Siena Ryan, had featured from their first courtship conversations.
In Hilary’s mind, she had heard the Ryan family story on the first night, the night of the famous Parsley Bay party, although Vianney always disputed this. ‘You were very hot’ he said, ‘Goldilocks in her little party dress. Why on earth would I have told you about my mother on the first fucking night? Give me some credit!’
But Hilary hadn’t been put off by the story of his tough-minded mother, the difficult asthmatic childhood, the family deaths – the little brother in the dam, the charismatic father lost in the bush. Far from it. She had been reeled in by the stories.
It may not have been on that night, but it was at a very early stage in their relationship, she would swear, that Vianney asked her if she had read Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men. She had not. So he told her the story of the bright peasant boy in an isolated area of China; his family's, indeed his entire village’s great hope that his cleverness would bring them out of their poverty and powerlessness. They all hoped and dreamed that the boy would become a mandarin, part of the great Imperial bureaucracy of power and patronage. And the boy had studied very hard, for years, for the privilege of sitting the gruelling three-day examinations. And he had passed them. Rejoice, honour, wonder and congratulations.
But the Qing dynasty was in reality dead. The examination was the last one ever held. Really it had only just rolled on from centuries of habit, the last twitches of the corpse of Imperial China. There was to be no marvellous career for him. Maxine Hong Kingston’s father emigrated instead, illegally, to America – to work in a laundry.
Ever since he’d read China Men, Vianney told Hilary, he’d understood his own story, and the deep delusions that his own village community – an isolated enclave of Irish Catholic Australia – had suffered under. They too had believed in a cultural greatness, a future as dramatic and glorious as the past. They had cherished this idea of greatness, of nobility and sacrifice. They had ignored all the signs around them of a new, meaner empire.
The Ryans had been a special family when they arrived in Lithgow, not just with their fancy names. Not just because of the little brother who had died. Or the mystique of their father, the one who had given them the surnames of saints for their first names. Those facts would have been enough to make them legends at St Patrick’s School. But there was another element adding to the family glamour.
The Ryans were descendants of Michael Davitt, father of the Irish Land League, protector of the poor, saviour of the starving 19th century Irish. Child of the Great Famine, evicted from his ancestral lands, maimed further by the dark satanic mills, Michael Davitt had yet turned his life and his country around - leading an unarmed revolution of the poor, the dispossessed, labourers and farmers, women and men. This was more than glamour. This was mythic Irishness, mystical Irishness.
Michael Davitt, Brother Joseph had told the class, was the inspirer of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King, of the Australian Labor movement. Davitt had included everyone in his vision of a new world of justice and peace. He had even included the English, which was possibly one of the main reasons he was not as honoured in his own country as he should be. But to the diaspora, he was a prophet and a saint.
Brother Joseph had been an enthusiast, a young liberation theologian, concerned with all the terrible suffering of this rotten world. The boys would have admired him more perhaps, if he had not sprayed so much spittle as he spoke. People fought to sit away from the front row in his class. Once Peter Hurley had boldly said they wanted the news, not the weather, and all the boys had laughed. Peter Hurley had been sent out of class. Brother Joseph was not, apparently, for the liberation of children.
It might seem hard to believe now, Vianney had smiled at Hilary, but he himself had been a very religious child. Sickly, sensitive, and deeply interested in questions of theology. He had had many fascinating discussions with Brother Joseph. He laughed as he told her this, but his blue eyes had darkened. Something had come in, or floated up from the depths. Memory or feeling intensifying their colour.
She held her breath until he came through, out of the enchanted forest, little boy blue. Most handsome prince.
‘When I was a boy I had constant colds and flus, bronchitis, breathing problems,’ he told her. It was those early days of confession and sharing, the vulnerability and the volubility of lovers. ‘I think it was my psychosomatic response to our move to Lithgow. To Dad going. To the coal in the air, to being on the dark side of the mountains. I was always coughing and blowing and gasping.’
Hilary had practically cooed in sympathy. His brothers, however, Vianney said, had found it all very annoying. It was hard for them sharing with a cougher and splutterer. On particularly bad nights his mother let him into her and Siena’s