Nora Webster (26 page)

That afternoon the weather was cold with a sky that threatened rain. As she sat at the front window reading the newspaper, she noticed Donal approaching the house carrying a large box. She had trained herself not to ask any of the children too many questions. If she came home with a parcel of any kind when she was growing up,
her mother would need to know what was in the parcel, or if a letter came for her, her mother would need to know who it was from and what news it contained. Nora had found this constantly irritating, and tried with her own children not to intrude.

Later, when she looked into the back room, she saw Aine and Donal on their knees with a pile of photographs on the floor beside the box she had seen Donal carrying.

“These are photographs Donal took of the riots in Derry and the burnings in Belfast,” Aine said.

Donal was so involved in studying his own work that he did not even look up.

“But how did he take them?” Nora asked.

“From the television,” Aine said.

The photographs were very large. She looked at them for a second and then knelt down closer. It was difficult to work out what was happening in them, although she could see traces of fire and figures running. They were blurred, almost smudged.

“This is where I superimposed,” Donal said, as though he was talking to himself. She noticed that he had not stammered, and was so grateful for this that she decided to be very careful not to criticise.

“You should put the dates on the back of each one,” Aine said, “even if there are two different dates.”

“I’ll get some stickers in Godfrey’s,” he said.

Nora tiptoed out of the room to the kitchen. She wondered if Margaret or Jim had seen these photographs and had thought about the cost of the paper and all the time that Donal spent in the darkroom they had made for him.

That evening they watched the nine-o’clock news. Even Conor sat still and seemed sombre as the news showed film from Derry and Belfast. Nora had not watched any news coverage during the
week. Now, people in Belfast were running down streets, escaping from burning houses, it was like something she had seen years ago on newsreel from the war or after the war in the Astor Cinema. But this was happening now and it was happening close by.

“Do you think it will start happening down here?” Fiona asked.

“What?” Nora asked.

“The violence, the riots.”

“I hope not,” she said.

“What are those people who have left their houses going to do?” Fiona asked.

“They’re going to come over the border,” Aine said.

Donal had his camera out and was pointing it at the television.

Nora invited Jim and Margaret and Una and Seamus to tea the following Sunday to celebrate Fiona’s finishing her training and Aine’s results. The extended family sat down for tea at six, the leaves of the table having been pulled out as though it was Christmas. Seamus sat beside Conor and engaged him in conversation, discussing the rules of soccer. Nora noticed that he hardly spoke to anyone else and concluded that Seamus must be nervous. The girls had made salads and there was cold meat and chutney, and fresh brown bread that she had baked herself. Una was the first to raise the subject of what was happening in the North.

“I think it’s terrible,” she said. “Those poor people burned out of their own houses.”

Everyone nodded in agreement and there was silence.

“I think our government is as responsible as the British government,” Aine said. “I mean, we let it happen.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Jim said.

“We did nothing all the years,” Aine said.

“It must have been very hard to know what to do,” Margaret said.

“I think that we gave the Protestants signal after signal that they could do what they liked,” Aine said. “I mean, there is every type of discrimination, including gerrymandering.”

“What’s gerrymandering?” Conor asked.

“It’s a way of drawing electoral boundaries so some people’s votes don’t matter as others,” Aine said.

Conor looked puzzled.

“I remember that Dr. Devlin was from Cookstown,” Una said, “and he told me that a Catholic couldn’t get a proper job there. Even if you were a doctor. That’s why he came south.”

“They still can’t get jobs,” Aine said. “I think it’s time our government made a stand.”

“What could we do?” Una asked.

“What’s our army for?” Aine asked. “Who would stop them marching into Derry? It’s just a few miles over the border.”

“Ah, now,” Seamus interjected.

“I don’t think that would be wise,” Jim said.

“What has wise got to do with it when people are living in fear of their lives?” Aine asked.

“Oh, I think we down here should be very cautious about what we do,” Margaret said.

“While people are being killed?” Aine asked.

“It’s a bad business all right,” Jim said.

“Well, it’s funny, isn’t it?” Aine asked. “The Irish Army can go to the Congo and to Cyprus, but it can’t go into Derry to help our own people.”

Nora tried to catch Aine’s eye and indicate that they might best
drop the subject, but Aine would not look at her. She had her eyes fixed on her uncle Jim.

“Well, I don’t know how it will all end,” Una said.

“Ah, it’ll end soon enough,” Seamus said.

“Well, I wouldn’t be sure about that,” Margaret said. “It’s really dreadful. Jim and myself watched it on the news last night. It was hard to believe that it was happening in our own country.”

Aine seemed about to say something and then stopped. There was silence at the table for a few minutes.

“Fiona is going to London,” Conor said and, looking around, sought approval for his remark.

“Conor!” Fiona said.

Jim and Margaret and Una and Seamus looked at Fiona. It was clear from her response that what Conor had said was true.

“London,” Margaret said softly. “Are you, Fiona?”

“I was thinking of going again this year for just a few days before I start teaching,” she said, “and this little creep must have been listening to one of my conversations.”

“There’ll be plenty of Protestants in London,” Conor said. “They’ll burn you out and make you run down the street.”

“They’re not r-real P-protestants in London,” Donal said.

“London is very nice,” Margaret said. “And where will you stay, Fiona? You know, I have it written down somewhere the name of the place where we stayed. It’s a hotel where Irish people are very welcome, a small hotel. Or maybe you will stay in the same place as last year.”

“A lot of girls from the training college went there for the summer to work in hotels and they have a flat,” Fiona said.

“It would be lovely for a few days,” Una said.

Fiona had won whatever battle they had been fighting about the
money. Somehow or other, as the discussion went on about London and places to stay and the need to look after yourself there, Fiona’s going to London became a definite plan, and it was agreed on by Jim and Margaret and Una and Seamus that she deserved the trip after all her studying and that she would be glad she had made it once she started teaching.

At the end of the evening, Jim had an envelope with notes in it for Fiona and for Aine, and he gave ten shillings each to the boys. Later, as they cleaned up, Nora told Fiona that she would get the money out of the bank on her way home from work the next day and she would drive her to Rosslare if that was how she was going to travel.

“That would be very nice,” Fiona said and smiled. “I’ll check the times of the ferries.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

N
ora watched from the front window as Phyllis reversed her car, navigating the narrow space with confidence. She was not expecting her, but thought it might seem friendly and welcoming if she opened the front door and stood there waiting for her.

“Now, I won’t come in,” Phyllis said. “I hate people who drop in without warning and I have no intention of barging in anywhere unannounced.”

“You’re very welcome,” Nora said.

“All I wanted to say to you is that there’s a choir in Wexford, and there might be vacancies. I don’t know what they are planning to do, but it would be a marvellous experience and I know the choirmaster and he’s very good, or at least he is when he’s in good humour, and so I have a place automatically. Now, I spoke to Laurie O’Keefe and she says that she is ready to prepare you so that you have a few pieces ready. For an audition.”

Nora nodded. She did not want to say that both Fiona and Aine had gone to Laurie O’Keefe for piano and they had both come home after the first lesson swearing never to return.

“Is she not . . . ?”

“Quite,” Phyllis said. “She is not for everybody, yours truly included. But if she likes you, she’s very good, and she’s very fond of you.”

“She doesn’t know me.”

“Billy, her husband, does, or so he said, and they both insisted that they would do anything for you. Don’t ask me now to go into the details of what they said, but they were full of enthusiasm when I mentioned your name.”

“What would I do?”

“Call over to her and make an arrangement, and just let her hear your voice. And then maybe you could learn two or three pieces for Wexford.”

“Would it take long?”

“Well, knowing Laurie . . .”

Nora wondered if she should make a quick decision and ask Phyllis to tell the O’Keefes that she was desperately busy. As she hesitated, she saw that Phyllis was watching her.

“Don’t leave it too long,” Phyllis said. “I wouldn’t like to offend her. She is very talented, you know, or she was. I’d say she finds the town a bit dull.”

Nora remembered a night in the new assembly hall of the Presentation Convent when Maurice and herself and Jim had gone to a fund-raising concert for the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Laurie O’Keefe was conducting an orchestra. As her style grew more vigorous and expressive, Maurice and Jim began to laugh quietly and she had nudged Maurice in disapproval. Halfway through the concert Jim had
to make his way to the toilet, all the while silently shaking with laughter. Nora had given Maurice a fierce look before he had to follow Jim. Neither of them returned to their seats. Afterwards, she remembered, she had found them both standing sheepishly at the back of the hall.

Before Phyllis left, Nora agreed that she would make contact with Laurie O’Keefe, but over the next few days, as she postponed doing so, she wondered why she was so open to unexpected visits from people who seemed to know better than she did how she should live and what she should do. She supposed that Phyllis was trying to help her, but wondered also if it might be a good idea to keep her door closed to all newcomers, spend her time making sure that Donal and Conor were well looked after, and letting memories of Maurice come to her at will throughout the day, and allowing them to linger until they might fade of their own accord.

As she thought about singing, the sound of her mother’s singing voice came vividly to her, so proud and confident on high notes. Even when her mother was old, Nora was able to distinguish her voice from the other voices in the choir in the cathedral. And she liked it when people told her that when her mother was young her voice could fill the whole space and people would come to eleven-o’clock mass to hear her.

In that great sleepless time when Maurice was dying and she knew that she was facing a life alone with the children, she remembered half-thinking that her mother was close by, or waiting for her somewhere, or that her mother knew a prayer that would work and change things. She had an image now of her mother as a calm hovering force there in the hospital room.

It made sense, or at least it made sense in those days in the hospi
tal, that her mother, despite all the coldness between her and Nora, would want to be there, be close to Maurice. Her mother had gone ahead of him by only seven years. In her urge to be as far away as she could from that time in the hospital, Nora had tried to keep her mother out of her mind since then; her mother’s dream-presence had not pursued her into the life without Maurice she was living now.

When she was downtown a few days after Phyllis’s visit, having walked up Weafer Street to the Back Road, she realised that she was close to the O’Keefes’ house. She wondered if it would be best to turn and walk home and go there another time, but she steeled herself, thinking that if she did it now, then it would be over. Laurie O’Keefe, she knew, had lived in France and had been a nun at some point. She was Billy’s second wife. The first wife was dead and the children from that marriage were grown up and gone. There was something about his first wife that Nora could not remember; she had been frugal, she was sure of that, and she vaguely remembered hearing that she had always gone to seven-o’clock mass on a Sunday so that no one could see how badly dressed she was, and how poor she looked, despite the fact that her husband had a good business.

She pushed open the gate to the O’Keefes’ house, noticing how well tended the garden was, and how shiny all the windows of the old house were and how unusual, almost grand, it looked. Billy was retired now; he had owned an insurance company, or been involved in insurance, and she knew, as she knew so much about people in the town, that he went each evening at the same time for a bottle of Guinness in Hayes in Court Street, a walking-stick in his hand. As she went up the steps to the front door of the house, she remembered
something that Maurice had once told her—Billy hated music, and he had the room where Laurie played and gave her lessons soundproofed, and he wore earplugs whenever there was a threat of music in the house. It was the sort of detail Maurice enjoyed.

Billy opened the door to her and immediately asked her in, holding back a Labrador dog by the collar. The hallway was wide and dark, with old pictures on the wall. There was a smell of polish. Billy began to call downstairs for his wife but as there was no reply he shut the dog in the room on the left and walked down the creaking staircase to the basement, motioning to Nora to remain in the hall.

“She never hears me,” he said, and seemed amused at the idea.

Soon, Billy O’Keefe appeared again.

“She says you are to come down,” he said.

He led her down the narrow book-lined staircase and into a small tiled hallway. He opened a door in a bright space that had clearly been added to the back of the old house. Laurie O’Keefe stood up from the piano.

“Now, Billy will make us tea, unless you want coffee,” she said. “And biscuits, Billy, the nice ones I bought.”

She smiled at him as he closed the door.

“It’s only a baby grand,” she said, as though Nora had asked her about the piano, “and of course I have another one there, just a plain old upright, for the students to bang on.”

There was no other furniture in the room except a few old chairs. There was a rug on the floor and sheet music strewn about. The walls were painted white with prints of abstract paintings hanging at different heights.

“We’ll have our tea in here.” Laurie led her into another room which had two armchairs, a stereo record player and speakers, and a case from floor to ceiling full of records.

“No one has any pity for a woman married to a man who is tone-deaf,” Laurie said. “No one!”

Nora did not know what this meant, or if she was expected to reply.

“You know, there’s something we have been meaning to say to you,” Laurie went on. “I almost wrote you a letter when we sent you the Mass card but then I thought no, I’d say it to you when I saw you.”

They sat down on the armchairs. Nora looked out at the garden for a moment and then back at Laurie.

“We were driving down from Dublin, we’d been away. Oh cousins and nieces and all that! And then we were driving back into the town and all the traffic was stopped. I don’t know how long we had to wait in Blackstoops. We thought that there might have been an accident. It never struck us that it was a funeral. I don’t know why. And eventually I pulled down the window and asked someone what it was. Oh, we were shocked when they told us. We knew Maurice was sick. But we were very shocked. And Billy said how good Maurice had been to his boys in school and what a great teacher he was. And we thought then that if we could do anything for you . . .”

“You’re very kind,” Nora said.

“And then Phyllis said—”

“I’m not sure my voice is up to much,” Nora interrupted.

“There is no better way to heal yourself than singing in a choir,” Laurie said. “That is why God made music. You know I had my own troubles. Coming out of a convent at fifty and hardly a friend in the world. And it was the choir that got me started again. That was the one thing I had, my voice, and the piano, although I trained first on the harpsichord. That was my first love.”

Billy came into the room with a tray.

“And this,” Laurie said, pointing to Billy, “I suppose will be my last.”

“Do you mean me, Laurie?” he asked.

“I do, but you can leave us now. We have things to talk about.”

Billy smiled at Nora and tiptoed out of the room.

“You know I sang for Nadia Boulanger,” Laurie continued, “and one thing she said was that singing is not something you do, it is something you live. Wasn’t that wise?”

Nora nodded, doing nothing to indicate that she did not know who Nadia Boulanger was. She tried to remember the name so she could mention it to Phyllis.

“But I do have to get a feel for your voice before we set to work. Can you read music?”

“Yes, I can,” Nora said. “Not well, mind you, but I learned years ago at school.”

“It might be best to start with something you know.”

She went into the other room and came back with books of sheet music.

“Drink your tea and look through these and pick a song you are familiar with. I’ll go into the other room and play the piano. I can’t think what to play, but something that I know from memory and maybe the sound will warm us up. And I don’t have a pupil until four so there’s plenty of time.”

Nora sipped the tea and put down the cup and rested her head against the back of the chair. The music Laurie was playing was too fast and cluttered, she thought; whoever wrote it had put in too many notes. It was a virtuoso piece, and she sensed that Laurie was showing off and felt almost sorry for her that she would need to do this. It could hardly be what she did for relaxation. If Maurice were alive now, she would delight in telling him what had happened and he would say how right Billy O’Keefe was to have earplugs. Imagine being married to a former nun who played the piano! She could hear Maurice’s dry tone and see the look of pure amusement on his face.

She flicked through the books of sheet music; most of them were German songs she had never heard of, and she wondered now if Phyllis had given Laurie the impression that she knew more than she did. When she came to a book of Irish songs, they seemed all too silly and old-fashioned and stage-Irish, songs that no one sang anymore. At the bottom of a pile were a few single sheets with some of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies. She looked at “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms,” but thought it was too stilted. Then she found “The Last Rose of Summer”; she began studying the notes and was humming the familiar tune when Laurie returned to the room.

“You found something then?”

“Well, I found this.” She handed her the sheet for “The Last Rose of Summer.”

“I had an old novice mistress from the Alsace and she used to call me the last rose of summer even if I was on time. Oh, she was an old battle-axe. Close to God, I suppose, but an old battle-axe nonetheless.”

Laurie went back to the other room and sat at the piano. Nora followed her.

“Now, this is bad for your voice,” Laurie said. “We should do exercises to warm it up and not go straight into a song. But there’s something about you now that might not be there in a while. I saw it when you came in the door. You have . . .”