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. He stopped when he saw Liam, taken aback. These boys were like a special battalion of guards in their black jerseys. He was an intruder, cool, English almost, his face, his features relaxed, not rough or ruddy. The young man said he was from Roscommon. That was near Liam’s home.
He spoke of farms, of pigs, said he’d had to leave, come to the city, search for neon. Now he’d found it. He’d never go back to the country. He was happy here, big city, many people, a dirty river and a population of people that included all races.
‘I miss the dances though,’ the boy said, ‘the dances of Sunday nights. There’s nothing like them in London, the cars all pulled up and the ballroom jiving with music by Big Tom and the Mainliners. You miss them in London but there are other things that compensate.’
When asked by Liam what compensated most for the loss of fresh Sunday night dancehalls amid green fields the boy said, ‘The freedom.’
Sister Sarah entered, smiled at the boy, sat down with Liam. The boy questioned her about a play they were intending to do and left, turning around to smile at Liam.
Sarah—her name came to him without the prefix now—spoke about the necessity of drama in schools, in education.
‘It is a liberating force,’ she said. ‘It brings out—’ she paused ‘—the swallow in people.’
And they both laughed, amused and gratified at the absurdity of the description.
Afterwards he perceived her in a hallway alone, a nun in a short outfit, considering the after-effects of her words that evening, pausing before plunging the place into darkness.
He told her he would return and this time he did, sitting among boys from Roscommon and Tipperary, improvising situations. She called on him to be a soldier returning from war and this he did, embarrassedly, recalling that he too was a soldier once, a boy outside a barracks in Ireland, beside a bed of crocuses. People sintled at his shattered innocence, at this attempt at improvisation. Sister Sarah reserved a smile. In the middle of a simulated march he stopped.
‘I can’t. I can’t,’ he said.
People smiled, let him be.
He walked to the bus stop, alone. Rain was edging him in, winter was coming. It hurt with its severity tonight. He passed a sex shop, neon light dancing over the instruments in the window. The pornographic smile of a British comedian looked out from a newsagent’s.
He got his bus.
Sleep took him in Shepherd’s Bush. He dreamt of a school long ago in County Galway which he attended for a few years, urns standing about the remains of a Georgian past.
At work people noticed he was changing. They noticed a greater serenity. An easiness about the way he was holding a cup. They virtually chastised him for it.
Martha McPherson looked at him, said sarcastically, ‘You look hopeful.’
He was thinking of Keats in the canteen when she spoke to him, of words long ago, phrases from mouldering books at school at the beginning of autumn.
His flat was tidier now; there was a space for books that had not hitherto been there. He began a letter home, stopped, couldn’t envisage his mother, old woman by a sea of bog.
Sister Sarah announced plans for a play they would perform at Christmas. The play would be improvised, bit by bit, and she asked for suggestions about the content.
One boy from Leitrim said, ‘Let’s have a play about the Tinkers.’
Liam was cast for a part as Tinker king and bit by bit over the weeks he tried, tried to push off shyness, act out little scenes.
People laughed at him. He felt humiliated, twisted inside. Yet he went on.
His face was moulding, clearer than before, and in his eyes was a piercing darkness. He made speeches, trying to recall the way the Tinkers spoke at home, long lines of them on winter evenings, camps in country lanes, smoke rising as a sun set over distant steeples.
He spoke less to colleagues, more to himself, phrasing and rephrasing old questions, wondering why he had left Ireland in the first place, a boy, sixteen, lonely, very lonely on a