WE WERE out for a drive, me and the wife, like a proper Mr and Mrs, on Sunday morning, meandering around the coast of north Sligo where all the artists and writers reside, trying to find where a particular painter lives, because we were invited for lunch.
The wife had been there before, because she’s a friend, but it was my first time, although I did remember about 10 years ago, when they were building the house, the painter’s wife went on a lot about terracotta tiles she couldn’t get in Ireland.
We turned left in a small village, and then took another left at a derelict pub, and then went straight on at a sharp bend beside a rusting gate, and through the crossroads.
We were close when the wife said, “I think it’s somewhere here. It’s a big house. But the only big house is that pink thing.”
She stared for a few moments at the pink two-storey house and then said, “No, it couldn’t be that,” and we moved on, and then came back, and after passing the pink thing about three times, she said, “Jesus, I think maybe that is it.”
And it was.
So we shook hands at the door and said, “Your house is only gorgeous.” And I noted the terracotta tiles on the kitchen floor, and said, “I bet you didn’t get them in Ireland.” After a delicious warm cheese salad, and a main course of chicken and beans and roast potatoes, I raised the question. “Why did you paint the house pink?” The painter laughed. “Why not,” he said.
I knew a female student in Maynooth years ago who had a pink Morris Minor, and when a clerical student asked her, in the kitchen at a party one night, why she drove around in such a loud car, she said she did it to annoy little pests like him.
Those were the days when clerical students tried hard not to be pests. They carried Ivan Illich in their back pockets, and hugged women at prayer meetings, and hoped like eejits that the rule of celibacy would be abandoned in a few years, while they were still virile enough to take a mate.
So confident were they that the church was becoming more liberal that some of them conducted affairs in their rooms upstairs in the seminary, having to resort to extraordinary behaviour whenever a dean rapped on the door, such as putting the woman into a large wardrobe, or hiding her under the bed.
The latter was never a safe place because there was a dean who always came to visit with a prayer book in his hand, which invariably fell to the floor at some stage, giving him an opportunity to put his snout to the ground and check for illicit women.
The same dean was found lying on the doormat outside his own door on one occasion, so drunk that he could not get the key in the lock. Intending to doze there for a few moments while he gathered his thoughts, he was found later by a security guard, snoring like a trooper.
Which is what the clergy were – troopers, in every parish in the country, sent in not long after the people got rid of the landlord’s agent, a man who went around the parishes of the nation on a horse, wearing a top hat, looking for money. He wasn’t gone very long when the clergy, sporting their new Roman collars, were galloping about the same little laneways, replete with horses and top hats, looking for more money.
But now the only people on the laneways are young males in old cars, who drive so fast that I was almost hit twice on my way back from the house of the pink painter, with whose beautiful wife I had an intense conversation after lunch about the end of the world.
We talked of over-population, the imbalance of wealth, the coming of the Chinese, and the slow dismemberment of Palestine. And not even a fresh apple tart and real coffee could comfort us as we looked into the abyss that opened up before us at the table.
Me and the wife drove back to Leitrim in time to watch Downton Abbey, where people in dinner jackets and evening dress were waltzing to a gramophone record as they kissed. During an ad break the wife said, "Maybe we should paint the house pink." And I said, "That's a great idea."
