‘And do you know – she’s leaving the material to your discretion!’
Susan smiled.
It was a compliment.
On and on the conversation went until she invited him in to tea and could observe his old Protestant face against the profane colours of a Sacred Heart picture.
4
‘How’s Diarmaid?’
Mrs Conlon touched her arm in the pub one night.
‘Grand.’
Susan jumped slightly.
Mrs Conlon smiled knowingly.
‘That’s good.’
5
She wondered why he didn’t write. Was he that begrudging? And again she wondered at his sullenness.
Obviously he’d found himself betrayed by everything she taught him. Gentleness didn’t match up to life, one was betrayed, one betrayed others.
He probably felt he’d betrayed Derek O’Mahony.
Perhaps he felt she hadn’t really cared for him but had coaxed him into a state where his whole mind was numb and unaware.
Thinking like this her face seemed to harden, become bitter, sad, remorseful.
But she fled the mirror like an enemy until one morning in the hallway mirror she glimpsed a card that showed blue sky.
Hello. Sorry for not writing before. It’s lovely here. We live beside the sea. It’s blue. All the time and the people are lovely. We catch fish. Even in winter.
It feels miles from Galway here.
Michael sends love. Look after yourself.
Always,
Diarmaid
The ‘always’ got her. ‘Always’ what? Always nothing. She felt like cursing him. It was like a slight, just a casual slight.
There wasn’t depth, there wasn’t love in it.
She crumbled the card and was about to put it in the fire when on second thoughts she read it over again and wept.
6
The women’s organization flourished.
Susan headed off to tinker encampments with them where she fed young children on tinned sweets.
The idea was unwise she often thought.
‘Would you like to mind this little boy for a while?’ Mrs Keating asked her one day. A boy whose mother had died and was awaiting an aunt in England.
He wasn’t really a child, about fifteen.
Susan – out of the goodness of her heart she thought at the time – brought him home.
He ate cornflakes with her at night.
‘What’s your ambition in life, Mickey?’
‘What’s ambition?’
‘What do you hope to do?’
‘Become a pilot.’
The usual answer.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’d like to see the rhinoceroses.’
‘What?’
‘The big things you see in the pictures.’
‘But you don’t have to be a pilot to see them.’
‘Mammy said you had.’
And Susan realized his Mammy was dead.
‘She’s right I think.’
After twelve that night Susan caught Mickey sneaking out the back door with a silver table set under his arm in a big box.
‘Where are you going?’
He dropped the box and made off. She never saw him again.
Mrs Keating laughed.
The ladies chuckled.
It was one of those incidents which saved her from going mad.
7
A letter came. She devoured its contents.
Mammy,
It’s getting cold here but it’s still very beautiful. We went on a trip to Venice. It was lovely though it rained a lot. I’ll never forget travelling at night up the Grand Canal.
I thought how you’d really love it. The tourists are gone. We have San Marco’s Square to ourselves. They say the city is sinking. You can feel it.
In a café where men were playing billiards I thought of you.
How are you? Would you like to visit us at Christmas? There are three American girls staying here. They’re a bit silly but I think you’d like them. You could get a plane to Dubrovnik and then you’d get a train here. Michael’s writing a play. An earlier one he wrote had been accepted by the B.B.C. So I don’t think he’s going back to college. It’s very nice here. At the moment the sun is setting and all around us is an immense glow.
You can almost smell fish in the twilight.
Please write soon,
Love,
Diarmaid.
Susan carefully considered the contents.
And then wrote back to say she couldn’t come.
As she posted the letter in a green box a snowflake touched her fingernail.
8
After that there were no letters. The silence lasted over Christmas. It was the loneliest Christmas of her life – mummers went by on Saint Stephen’s Day, calling out their traditional tunes, ‘A penny for the wren. A penny for the wren.’ They wore traditional costumes, old pajama tops and lipstick.
She gave them scones.
Around them east Galway was lit up, the land delved, mountains, distant, were soft.
She’d never felt closer to God, to eternity, to the eternal hue of life that poets must have written about, all that was good and mature in life.
She prayed over the infant in the local crib.
Mrs Conlon had given her a plant for Christmas and she placed it alongside a candle, a traditional Irish act of love, a candle at a window at Christmas to guide stray dogs and angels.
9
Towards the New Year a multitude of young people passed, hitchhikers from Dublin, from London, going west. They hitched outside her door.
One day she noticed a young pair standing for hours.
She went to the door.
‘Hello, out there. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘We’d love one, thanks.’
They were from Birmingham, both going to art school.
She sat them down.
And made tea, cutting enormous slices of Christmas cake for them.
They were glad of her company as she was of theirs.
The girl had blonde hair, was wrapped in an anorak.
About her neck was a blue and white scarf.
‘Who made the ikon?’
Susan was glad she called it an ikon, too.
‘My son.’
‘Your son? Is he in art school?’
‘No. He lives in Yugoslavia.’
‘Oh.’
The girl gazed, fascinated.
The ikon was of a girl with linen-coloured hair – he’d used bits of linen, Diarmaid had, to make the hair.
The girl looked out, a blazing Madonna, the one in the ikon, her eyes bright, bead-like.
‘It’s very unusual,’ the English girl said, ‘halfway between a Russian ikon and a collage some child would make. It’s very, very beautiful.
It really seems to say something.’
No, it’s just a girl, Susan thought, just a girl. But constructed as mediaeval ikons were, to explain a myth.
Susan glimpsed herself in the mirror as she spoke to the young people.
She hadn’t realized it.
She’d grown old and drab, grey hair falling, without sparkle.
She looked like any other Irishwoman, aging ceaselessly, without hope, interest or spectacle left in her life.
‘I hope your son keeps on going with art,’ the girl said.
‘He’ll keep on going anyway,’ Susan smiled, ‘All you young people do.’
She bade them farewell. They got a lift immediately. She watched the landscape take them over in the little car.
10
At nights she watched television now in Mrs Conlon’s pub, Ironside, dreadful American programmes. She drank Guinness and listened to the stories of old men when there were plays on the television and no one was interested.
One night the whole pub watched with fascination as the act of love was shown on screen.
‘Dirt,’ someone murmured, but most watched
in awe.
Someone in the pub must have realized it was no more unwholesome than watching sparrows mate, for the feeling afterwards was one of calm.
11
Often now Susan took a breath from work and sat in the pub during the day.
If Mrs Conlon was busy she’d sit alone. It was veering towards February and she found herself watching the road west as she had been doing a year previously, taking in the road to the Estoria in Galway where she saw Joan Crawford in 1939 and kissed George for the first time.
On bright days she stood outside her door and remembered ladies in scarlet and black in 1938, Galway, boats to Aran, picnics on the beach in Spiddal and nuns who bathed on private beaches.
12
On February 28th, Mrs Conlon died.
Her funeral was in March. Sleet fell, many mourned, her pub bore black ribbons.
‘Requiescat in pace.’
Susan wept louder than anybody.
She bent and touched the grave with her fingers. Sleet became drizzle; the priest read the prayers. Everyone realized a local gossip had passed away, and Susan knew it was over, the solicitude of a pub and a pint of Guinness.
13
‘Good morning, Mrs O’Hallrahan,’ the parson called. ‘Could you make my daughter’s wedding dress?’
‘That would be lovely.’
‘She’d like a blue one. She’s very attracted to the colour blue.’
‘I am, too,’ Susan said. ‘It’s a very nostalgic colour.’
‘That’s it,’ said the parson. ‘Nostalgic. It reminds one of cups of tea in a garden long ago when the days seemed much warmer.’
‘It reminds me of sorrow,’ Susan said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘In the Catholic Church it’s the Virgin Mary’s colour, and she if anyone suffered a great deal.’
‘Come now, Mrs O’Hallrahan, you can’t discriminate. There’s great devotion to Mary in the Church of Ireland.’
‘But your Mary is white. Ours is blue. I don’t mean “ours” in a bigoted sense. I mean in the way you visited churches when you were very small and saw dream-like Blessed Virgins with candles lighting before them. And for me in the small church the blue of the Virgin Mary was the blue of Ireland, the blue of famine and thirst and the terrible ghost stories old ladies would tell.’
The parson was suitably impressed.
‘Indeed you’re right. But I’m sure for Eleanor it’s a different motif. She probably likes blue because it’s fashionable.’
‘That’s right. I’ll buy material in Cullen’s in Ballinasloe. I wonder could she come in and help me.’
‘I hope so.’
‘O.K.’
Just then the doctor’s wife came.
‘Mrs O’Hallrahan, could you make a summer frock for me? I’m going to Yugoslavia for a spring holiday.’
And Susan could only smile, bitterly, silently to herself.
14
In time people ceased asking questions.
They didn’t want to know any more now.
The idea of a boy in an anorak with a Rolling Stones album under his arm which was once revolutionary was now old-hat.
They didn’t need to know about Diarmaid.
Most knew he didn’t write, and if he wrote it was very infrequently, so with time, as Susan’s spirit grew bleaker and her hair greyer, she became among the fields, the houses and the lack of Guinness bottles, just another local tragedy.
AFTERWORD
She then the citties sought from gate to gate
And every one did aske, did he him see.
(Spenser, The Fairie Queene.
An encapsulation of The Ikon Maker.)
Ewan MacColl adapted another line of Spenser into contemporary song:
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
Song was nearly always on my mind when I was writing The Ikon Maker. Maybe a Traveller boy bawling out ‘Spancil Hill’ on Shop Street, Galway, or maybe a song the Johnstons sang, words of which I used at the beginning of the book:
The men in the forest they ask it of me
How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?
Bishop Thomas Percy saved a manuscript of fifteenth-century ballads from being used to light a fire and that song may have been among them.
I started the book after a weekend visit in early June to Galway city.
There was cherry-coloured bunting in Quay Street in Galway city for Corpus Christi, red tulips blown and damascened in front of pictures of Mary, tulips, roses, babies’ breath outside a custard-coloured café where teddy bears were having a tea party in the window.
The bombs had gone off in Dublin a few weeks before and I left for Europe, hitchhiking first to Sweden, and then south to the north of Spain, writing along the sides of motorways.
I saw the fields of Denmark filtered with red of strawberries; I saw the trees they nearly cut down in central Stockholm but which mass protest saved; I slept in a room in the Stockholm archipelago, a reproduction of Carl Larsson’s Breakfast under the Big Birch on the wall, first time I saw that painter’s work – images of happiness.
I saw the Bastille Day fireworks go off in the sky above the sea near Bandol, in the south of France.
I finished the book in a grim London setting some weeks before the Birmingham bombing.
Mr R.R. Zanker, a teacher and poet from Cheshire, who lived now near Burton-on-Trent, who used visit Ballinasloe as a fisherman, typed it for me.
A youth with pitch-black hair in a North seaman’s grey jersey and an Afghan coat pressed Aldous Huxley’s Brief Candles with Augustus John’s sketch, Portrait of Alexandra on the cover, into my hand before I returned to Ireland that Christmas and I stuck the Irish Christmas stamp of that year into it, Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini from the Borghese in Rome.
Surrounded by water in Venice, his figures were placed against landscape, especially landscape with water; ‘the best painter of them all’, Albrecht Dürer called him. And I’d seen the watery Piazza San Marco on a return visit to Europe that autumn.
The young Albrecht Dürer walked from Nuremberg to Colmar once to meet his hero Martin Schongauer and found that he’d been dead for six months.
The Connaught Tribune printed an obituary I wrote for Mr R.R. Zanker when he died the June after he typed The Ikon Maker: ‘For many years he arrived in Ballinasloe in springtime – drawn by the market place, the pike stream …’
‘We seek each other little, but fate takes our lives in her hands,’ wrote Varlam Shalamov, who spent seventeen years in Kolyma, ‘Mine were the berries … and I didn’t die.’
A jettisoned book, it was Ronan Sheehan, a relative of Sarah Curran, the subject of the song sung on a night-crossing in the book, who said The Ikon Maker was good and recommended publication.
Song was never far from my mind when I was writing The Ikon Maker, a Traveller boy bawling out ‘Spancil Hill’ on Shop Street, Galway.
A voice that rose up from the streets,
Singing and dying little by little into the distance,
Seized my heart fiercely, as it seizes still.
Giacomo Leopardi
Desmond Hogan, January 2013
Published in 2013 by
The Lilliput Press
62–63 Sitric Road,
Arbour Hill, Dublin 7
Ireland
www.lilliputpress.ie
Copyright © Desmond Hogan, 1976, 2013
PRINT ISBN 978 1 84351 387 2
EBOOK ISBN 978 1 84351 403 9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced in any form or by any means
without the prior permission of the publisher.
A CIP record for this title is available
from The British Library.
From.Net
The Ikon Maker Page 12
