House of Mourning and Other Stories. Desmond Hogan

she had to admit sometimes, were as truthful as any Irish writer’s. His words exploded on concert stages, on television, and told of broken Irish lives, red-haired Irish women immigrants who worked in hotels in West London.

      17

      Miles had stood not very far away from his mother that day and Lally had noticed Miles’s mother, when there was rain, as she stood talking to two men from Mayo. There was a hullabaloo of Irish accents between Rose and the two men from Mayo. Lally paused; a story. Then he went on. Miles didn’t tell Lally in the car that he’d come in search of a red-haired woman. He said very little and was asked very little.

      18

      Rose, sheltering her body from the rain, got into a livid conversation with two men. They were bachelors and they were both looking for wives. They came to Walsingham, Norfolk, from Birmingham each Whit Monday looking for wives and they went to Lisdoonvarna, County Clare, in September looking for wives. So far they’d had no luck and their quest was telling on them: their hair and their teeth were falling out. One bandied a copy of the previous day’s Sunday Press as if it was the portfolio of his life’s work.

      ‘And do you have a husband?’ one of them asked.

      ‘What do you think?’

      ‘You’ve had your share of fellas,’ the other one said grinning. ‘A woman like you wouldn’t have gone without a man for long.’