Lark's Eggs by Desmond Hogan

and she observed that the leaves were pushing through the railings. She thought of a city faraway where trees were saved from being destroyed by the response of the people and she knew that because they stood, those trees, something was alive that neither her death, nor the death of others, her sadness, nor the sadness of others, could destroy. They buried her without much ceremony.
    Her daughter wept. Her son stood as though paralysed.
    The figures walked away. One figure stood alone, that of her daughter, her ears still ringing with the memory of a punch from her mother long ago.
    But the occasion moved her to wait.
    She walked away minutes later. They sold her house, the cats were sent to a cats’ home and people ultimately were relieved.
    It was as though by closing her off they were putting a seal forever on all of life’s misfortunes.

Jimmy
    Her office overlooked the college grounds; early in the spring they were bedecked with crocuses and snowdrops. Looking down upon them was to excel oneself. She was a fat lady, known as ‘Windy’ by the students, her body heaved into sedate clothes and her eyes somehow always searching despite the student jibes that she was profoundly stupid and profoundly academic.
    She lectured in ancient Irish history, yearly bringing students to view Celtic crosses and round towers marooned in spring floods. The college authorities often joined her on these trips, one administrator who insisted on speaking in Irish all the time. This was a college situated near Connemara, the Gaelic-speaking part of Ireland . Irish was a big part of the curriculum; bespectacled, pioneer-pin-bearing administrators insisted on speaking Irish as though it was the tongue of foolish crows. There was an element of mindlessness about it. One spoke Irish because a state that had been both severe and regimental on its citizens had encouraged it.
    Emily delayed by the window this morning. It was spring and foolishly she remembered the words of the blind poet Raftery: ‘Now that it’s spring the days will be getting longer. And after the feast of Brigid I’ll set foot to the roads.’There was that atmosphere of instinct abroad in Galway today. Galway as long as she recalled was a city of Travelling people, red-petticoated Tinkers, clay-pipe-smoking sailors, wandering beggars.
    In Eyre Square sat an austere statue of Pádraic Ó Conaire, an Irish scribe who’d once walked to Moscow to visit Chekhov and found him gone for the weekend.
    In five minutes she would lecture on Brigid’s crosses, the straw symbols of renewal in Ireland.
    There was now evidence that Brigid was a lecher, a Celtic whore who was ascribed to sainthood by those who had slept with her but that altered nothing. She was one of the cardinal Irish holy figures, the Isis of the spring-enchanted island.
    Emily put words together in her mind.
    In five minutes they’d confront her, pleased faces pushing forward . These young people had been to New York or Boston for their summer holidays. They knew everything that was to be known. They sneered a lot, they smiled little. They were possessed of good looks, spent most of the day lounging in the Cellar bar, watching strangers, for even students had the wayward Galway habit of eyeing a stranger closely, for it was a city tucked away in a corner of Ireland, peaceable , prosperous, seaward-looking.
    After class that day she returned to the college canteen where she considered the subject of white sleeveless jerseys. Jimmy used to have one of those. They’d gone to college in the 1930s, Earlsfort Terrace in Dublin, and Jimmy used to wear one of those jerseys. They’d sit in the dark corridor, a boy and a girl from Galway, pleased that the trees were again in bloom, quick to these things by virtue of coming from Galway where nature dazzled.
    Their home was outside Galway city, six miles from it, a big house, an elm tree on either side of it and in spring two pools of