The Ikon Maker

by Desmond Hogan

  They spoke, the Irish contingent.

  Two women, one Mrs O’Hallrahan. Two men. One who’d played the fiddle, the other who’d sung. They spoke.

  Voices roaring about them, waves turning.

  The other lady began.

  Her nose had the intense look of a hen; crooked glasses on it. Her dress was flavoured with a sort of very dark colour.

  ‘My son was eighteen when he left home. He was a dark-haired country lad.

  My only son, his father hoped he’d take over the farm. He didn’t want to. He went to London and became a bus conductor. Then he got tired of that; joined the navy. Went to foreign parts. Sometimes we’d hear from him. Sometimes months would go by without word.

  And all the time I’d pray.

  Then eventually he got fed up of that, too; bought a business in London, settled down. He married a West Indian girl. She left him after a month. This we found out. Strangely enough on a visit to the north of England our only son killed himself from the top of a gas-works. From a railing or something.’

  It was a strange story. One which made little sense to Susan.

  They all began to talk about death then; about brothers and sisters and uncles who’d committed suicide.

  The woman apparently was going to settle up some business of her late son’s. A sad task.

  One of the men was going to retrieve a daughter who’d run away from home. The other was quietly seeking a wife who’d left him. All the same story. Closely bound up.

  They seemed drawn together by a mandate.

  All seemed to be looking at Susan to know why she was going to England.

  She said nothing at first.

  She looked from one to the other and said simply, ‘My son is lost to me, too. Just eighteen. He’s over in England, too. He won’t write to me.

  But I’m worried.

  Sometimes I’m afraid lest something will happen to him. It’s funny. I know you shouldn’t think like that but I can’t help it. I need to find him soon before it’s too late.’

  ‘Too late?’ the woman questioned her.

  ‘Too late. Yes. Before he’s gone from me forever.’ That said, Susan relaxed. She’d spoken more forthrightly than ever she’d spoken before.

  Like a balloon burst at a maidenly party long ago. There was nothing else to be said.

  2

  Her company was strange.

  This she realized.

  Formal – like a sacrament – the people sat around. The men played cards. A flower on the other woman’s hat drooped. Like an angel in retirement.

  All was not lost, Susan told herself. Yet as dawn blurred she experienced strangeness beyond belief.

  As though this was not happening now. As though it had happened long ago. There was something graceful, yet something sinister about it.

  It was like a dance of death.

  Afterwards she had no idea how she got into those people’s company, but as she walked out of Euston Station she remembered how the man with the fiddle had played a reel towards seven o’clock in the morning and shouted: ‘Never let it get you down, Ma’am.’ Slapping Susan’s knee. ‘This is a world built of sorrow, but there’s no need to give in to sorrow.

  What’s here today is gone tomorrow.

  So forget about it all.’

  And when people were drifting off the boat he was still eulogizing his native Clare and the gulls over a castle built by the Spaniards and destroyed – with the burning of a few bishops – by Cromwell’s men.

  That morning London was cold. It rained. Sombrely.

  Susan had no wish to think.

  She got a taxi to her sister in Ladbroke Grove.

  3

  She had to press a bell. Her sister – or rather her sister-in-law (sister was a more desirable term) – Bridget, answered.

  ‘Darling.’ She had big lips. Like an umbrella. Red.

  A cigarette hung from her fingers. ‘Sweetheart.’

  They kissed.

  Embraced.

  Like two prostitutes.

  ‘Well you’re looking great, Bridget.’

  ‘You’re lovely yourself, Susan.’

  Bridget picked up Susan’s hair.

  ‘I remember George once saying you had hair like blackberries.

  Well you still have. And sure you’ve a face like a star.

  What have you been doing?’ Bridget touched Susan; her finger probed Susan’s left breast like a magic wand. Her voice rang with devilment, as they would say at home.

  ‘Have you been having an affair?’

  Susan was seated on a red chair under a picture of a Geisha girl.

  Sherry was produced. It flavoured the room.

  ‘You’re so worried about Diarmaid, aren’t you. He sometimes comes here – looking like God only knows what.

  I haven’t seen him for a while, but I know his address because he was expecting a letter here from some friend in the North.’

  Susan’s lips opened. She was only delighted as she would have said herself. Thrilled to know that she would soon see her son.

  Bridget prepared lunch. She worked as a charlady – part-time. She wasn’t working today and she prepared a meal. Roast potatoes floated before Susan, pork chops. A little canister of apple sauce. It was such a good meal that Susan forgot about time and soon it was evening.

  Too late to look for Diarmaid, Susan realized. So half-gladly Susan drifted into conversation. Over sherry. The sherry had a twilit, faraway look in it. Faintly it glowed. She talked about Diarmaid, Susan did. How she loved him and worried about him. What was he doing? What was he up to? And she voiced the fear that he might be on drugs. Bridget listened intently.

  ‘Yes. He has that look,’ Bridget said. As though trying to arouse more fear. Though basically Susan couldn’t have cared less. She wasn’t worried about drugs. It was more a worry that Diarmaid had gone from her forever. Drifted off as sheep did in spring from the hills in east Galway. Going before nightfall to some untold destination. And as the image of sheep filled her mind so also the often maimed sheep-like expression of Diarmaid, pale, fleshless, wounded.

  The look on his face weeks after Derek O’Mahony had killed himself. The look of hurt. Of dismay. Sometimes almost even of revenge. His eyes narrowing to the memory of Derek O’Mahony. Like burnt-out buildings. Some day she often felt then he was going to do something terrible, though what terrible thing he could do she didn’t know.

  Bridget persisted in talking. Talking on and on. The sleeve of her dress drooped a little.

  She was a lonely woman. Never married. Living life in the parlours of rich Londoners, paid to mind children, to peel tomatoes. Once a child she was very attached to was burned in a hotel fire in Portugal, and in a way she never recovered from that. She continued, bore up, a sort of postscript in her family.

  George, she spoke of him, now forgetting how long dead he was.

  Her words flowed. Quickly.

  She spoke of growing up with him, the toys her father would bring home from a fair in Mullingar.

  And it occurred to Susan how passionately sad a person George had been, fleeing from place to place, landing himself in a war, eventually landing himself in an elevator in Chicago.

  The misfortunes of war had had little effect on him; he was fearless she often thought, guarded totally against the world, its way, heading along to an inevitable death. And she felt sometimes – now even – that he was a stranger to her, lost in the web of her solitude, brusquely forgotten.

  Diarmaid was much nearer, like the cracked bit in a mirror. One’s own reflection, a broken commodity, something that reflected her, her images, world, dreams, much closer than a far-forgotten death approximate to a Saint Patrick’s Day in 1954 when girls marched in the rain, shamrocks swollen like hankies about their breasts.

  ‘George.’ She tried to sum up his name that night. His sister bore some resemblance to him. The long face, cordial expression, chin that stuck out. As though pinching something.

  Her
lipstick faded now, Bridget talked on.

  Her knowledge of Diarmaid was obviously slight. She pretended distress but obviously there was little she could identify with in a boy who sometimes came, went, disappeared probably without a word of thanks for lunch.

  Curtains were pulled; London shut out.

  Bit by bit the conversation petered out.

  Perhaps because Susan was contemplating the fact that Bridget knew so little.

  In fact she, Bridget, probably expected that Susan was only here on a weird, fifty-year-old womanish holiday.

  That wasn’t the truth. No one knew the truth as much as she when she confronted the mirror that night. Light cracked through. Hoarsely.

  In the mirror she saw herself. Her face old, forehead pale with light but still there the freshness George had loved her for. She stood – like something she’d just conjured herself – the light still off.

  Then offsetting the romanticism and the last few moments with Bridget she put on the light but the effect was even more tender. Rouge the lamp lit.

  She was seized, almost infuriated by the glow. She was alive, well, on the eve of what, a visit to her son.

  She was going to seek him out. ‘He’s in very strange company,’ Bridget had said at one stage. ‘He arrived here one day with a strange-looking lady. A girl with red lipstick and eyes that were painted all colours.’ Susan hadn’t thought about it. Now she did.

  Was Diarmaid in love again? Was he thinking of her, Susan, or engaging in some adolescent love affair? The more she thought of it the more she wanted to cry.

  Diarmaid, her son, was living apart from her. Away. She pronounced the word. Mentally.

  What had happened? Why was she here? What was she pursuing?

  Nothing.

  Blankly she looked towards the London street. Outside figures trouped; no end to loneliness.

  George. Like a mask she accepted the memory of his face, George, her young man of the late thirties. And yet what was real about their relationship but a nostalgic moment? And the disturbed tragic happening on his face in the fifties when he knew it was over, pursuit.

  In a way Diarmaid revived reality in a more forceful way in her; he was of the grim earth.

  She knew this. From his ikons she knew his compassion and his need to construct. Away somewhere in a County Galway night he’d been struck with wonder. Held on to that amazement.

  Life indeed for him was amazing. Even if Bridget didn’t understand it; didn’t understand the love affair of a young boy with himself.

  4

  That night she didn’t sleep very well. In fact she slept rather badly and it occurred to her that Bridget was continually going to the toilet, her ghost trailing out.

  Usually a friend slept in the room Susan was sleeping in. That other lady, ex-Irish too, was now on a holiday in Cornwall, St Ives.

  A postcard hung over the Sacred Heart in the kitchen, a view of churches sweeping down to the sea.

  Sometimes, too, Diarmaid had slept in this bed, the lady away with friends in the country.

  Susan imagined him arriving at the door; hair washed over his forehead, telling her he saw a boy die from heroin, and she wondering simply. Tonight she was glad of Bridget’s company, but nothing was understood of broken statues of the Blessed Virgin in east Galway and the need for a son.

  She obviously had a sick stomach, Bridget had. Continually the toilet flushed and in the small hours, hauntingly Susan glimpsed Diarmaid walking past a chip shop, and in her mind his image was confused with her young friend of the late thirties, a grocer’s assistant, the one who’d died in Durham, grounded there in the late forties, working as a gardener. Diarmaid had always reminded her of him, this white-headed boy who’d fleeted in and out of her life and whom she remembered, when small, and completing transfers from halfpenny lucky bags.

  He’d lived near her, only going to Galway when he was seventeen. Cabbages, rainbows on cauliflowers; they returned from his grocery shop in Galway when she woke.

  She thought of him; intensely, just a boy who was a friend in between the love relationship with George.

  She went to the window. An old lady passed. Trampishly hair sticking out. Blue. Even in the night light.

  And she wondered what she was doing. Picking up bits and pieces of life, mending them – like wounded crows. George, this boy, David, in Galway in the late thirties, Diarmaid. Snatching some intensity from people’s eyes; going about a life as aimless and as driftless as geese. What had happened to her? Where was the security and the peace of mind which once had been? Gone with Diarmaid’s entry into the world; his whole questioning position had wrought havoc on her. She stood now like a stupid virgin on a dance-hall floor.

  Nowhere really to go. Tomorrow – Friday in fact – she was going to raid Diarmaid’s life. For what? Maybe – sincerely – just to know how he was.

  5

  Buses crept past; London’s red buses. Bridget called her. ‘Get up, love. I’ve your breakfast ready.’

  It was a lovely breakfast; toast, marmalade, apple jelly. There was a look of pain on Bridget’s brow and it occurred to Susan that she genuinely suffered; somewhere in the night fear took her.

  Fear of what, Susan didn’t know. Over breakfast remarks continued from the previous night; Bridget discovered a bottle of wine, opened it. ‘Wine for breakfast.’ Her voice was shrill. Susan was aghast. Something was happening in Bridget’s head. This Susan was sure of now.

  They cleaned up things. Both were slightly drunk and apparently none the worse for it.

  The address Bridget had given Susan was Endsleigh Gardens. Bridget directed her as to how to get there. She took it, Susan did, in a sort of stupor, Bridget going to a late rendezvous with some woman for whom she cleaned up.

  A red bus took Susan to Euston Square. From there she walked to Endsleigh Gardens. The door was white. No one was in. She knocked many times.

  Last night’s roses came back; some perched on a shining table in Bridget’s sitting-room, a statue of the Blessed Virgin, a picture of Pope Pius the Tenth; saintly, haloed in gold. All these bits of Irishness, random bits of emigration, singular in Susan’s mind now.

  Bits of disillusion. She walked away.

  But not before she concentrated on the image of a cat she once used to maul as a child. She felt so empty, so lifeless, so much the prey of others.

  For a moment it was as though there was nothing to the world, nothing to life; that one always had to become just another person.

  A bag of disillusion, emptiness. So she wanted to concentrate desperately on some image of importance to her; so she thought of the cat, far back.

  A cat. She held the whole world close to her in the image of that cat.

  She wanted so much to love things. Yet here she was walking down a street called Fitzroy Street. Crying almost.

  ‘Are you lonesome tonight? Do you miss me tonight?’ Words from a jaded song returned; the remarks on radio at home. Nights when Galway welled about her and she felt like ascending, levitating, doing anything to get away, feel apart. She walked slowly.

  As one walked at a funeral at home. God.

  An old lady picked up a paper and read the headlines.

  Something about a bomb in Belfast.

  That ended her day. She sat in a restaurant, drank coffee.

  Her eyes poured out, questioned the paradise of moments outside. Lovely people, stately legs, dream-blue jeans. Summer in progress, the light moments. And here was she, Susan O’Hallrahan, widow, deeply wanting in common sense, sitting on board at a tragedy. For that’s the way she felt it now. It was all tragic, dimensionless, drifting.

  She had no home. No future. She was so alone, deserted, betrayed by death, by her son, even now by her ordinary day-to-day common sense.

  ‘Red pepper soup,’ a woman beside her ordered. Time to go. She rose and left – with such punch to make young men look at her. A picture postcard of Mick Jagger swept by her – her son’s hero, notable in a trance.
r />   Home that evening Bridget was crying.

  ‘I’m dead worried,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid sometimes I have cancer.’

  ‘Cancer.’ The word went back in Susan’s mind. ‘Where?’

  ‘In my left breast.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Nights. Sleepless nights and a pain here that couldn’t be anything else. It feels like cancer. Even if I don’t know what cancer is.’

  Susan took her hand.

  ‘Bridget, love, don’t worry. We’ll go to a doctor tomorrow to dispel your fears.’

  They did. But the doctor wasn’t hopeful. Within a few days it was confirmed. She had all the marks of cancer. They did many things together, went to the ballet. June, July merged; summer was a feeling that travelled quickly and remotely through London thoroughfares.

  At the end of these days though Susan trudged again to Euston Square and Endsleigh Gardens.

  This time music moved inside; loud sounds; a girl opened the door. Liquid hair dangled, tenuous golds and brown. She admitted Susan.

  ‘I’m Diarmaid O’Hallrahan’s mother,’ she said. ‘Is he here?’

  Over the fireplace a young boy fondled a kitten. Susan recognized Christ dangling. But the picture was remote; Susan recognized it as a mockery of the event, felt obliged to feel some sort of distaste. But it was short-lived.

  Here was a sitting Buddha.

  There was a picture of an Indian temple. And a girl singer’s photograph hung over the mantelpiece, small.

  ‘He’s not here. He went north yesterday. Take a seat.’

  These are the voices she heard. She took no notice of them. She felt her heart throbbing. This was unreal to her; these were the young people who traipsed past her window, in blue jeans, to destinations in Connemara. ‘God.’ She sat down. After a minute she recovered her voice.

  ‘Could you turn down the music, please?’

  Promptly they obeyed. She sounded tougher than ever she had before. She felt like addressing them as brats.

  Then she wanted more information.

  ‘Gone north with who?’

  ‘A guy,’ the girl said.

  Susan peered. Yes, this girl had been Diarmaid’s lover.