Lark's Eggs by Desmond Hogan Page A

snowdrops like hankies in front of it.
    Jimmy had gone to Dublin to study English literature. She had followed him in a year to study history. They were respectable children of a much-lauded solicitor and they approached their lives gently. She got a job in the university in Galway. He got a job teaching in Galway city.
    Mrs Carmichael, lecturer in English, approached.
    Mrs Carmichael wore her grandmother’s Edwardian clothes because though sixty, she considered it in keeping with what folkwere wearing in Carnaby Street in London.
    â€˜Emily, I had trouble today,’ she confessed. ‘A youngster bit a girl in class.’
    Emily smiled, half from chagrin, half from genuine amusement.
    Mrs Carmichael was a bit on the Anglo–Irish side, taut, upper-class , looking on these Catholic students as one might upon a rare and rather charming breed of radishes.
    â€˜Well, tell them to behave themselves,’ Emily said. ‘That’s what I always say.’
    She knew from long experience that they did not obey, that they laughed at her and that her obesity was hallmarked by a number of nicknames. She could not help it, she ate a lot, she enjoyed cakes in Lydons and more particularly when she went to Dublin she enjoyed Bewleys and Country Shop cakes.
    In fact the Country Shop afforded her not just a good pot of tea and nice ruffled cream cakes but a view of the green, a sense again of student days, here in Dublin, civilized, parochial. She recalled the woman with the oval face who became famous for writing stories and the drunkard who wrote strange books that now young people read.
    â€˜I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Mrs Carmichael said, leaving.
    Emily watched her. She’d sail in her Anglia to her house in the country, fleeing this uncivilized mess.
    Emily put her handkerchief into her handbag and strolled home.
    What was it about this spring? Since early in the year strange notions had been entering her head. She’d been half-thinking of leaving for Paris for a few days or spending a weekend in West Cork.
    There was both desire and remembrance in the spring.
    In her parents’ home her sister, Sheila, now lived. She was married . Her husband was a vet.
    Her younger brother, George, was working with the European Economic Community in Brussels.
    Jimmy alone was unheard of, unlisted in conversation.
    He’d gone many years ago, disappearing on a mail train when the War was raging in the outside world. He’d never come back; some said he was an alcoholic on the streets of London. If that were so he’d be an eloquent drunkard. He had so much, Jimmy had, so much of his race, astuteness, learning, eyes that danced like GalwayBay on mornings when the islands were clear and when gulls sparkled like flecks of foam.
    She considered her looks, her apartment, sat down, drank tea. It was already afternoon and the Dublin train hooted, shunting off to arrive in Dublin in the late afternoon.
    Tom, her brother-in-law, always said Jimmy was a moral retrograde , to be banished from mind. Sheila always said Jimmy was better off gone. He was too confused in himself. George, the youngest of the family, recalled only that he’d read him Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince once and that tears had broken down his cheeks.
    The almond blossom had not yet come and the War trembled in England and in a month Jimmy was gone and his parents were glad. Jimmy had been both a nuisance and a scandal. Jimmy had let the family down.
    Emily postured over books on Celtic mythology, taking notes.
    It had been an old custom in Ireland to drive at least one of your family out, to England, to the mental hospital, to sea or to a bad marriage. Jimmy had not fallen easily into his category. He’d been a learned person, a very literate young man. He’d taught in a big school, befriended a young man, the 1930s prototype with blond hair, went to Dublin one weekend with him, stayed in Buswells Hotel with him, was since