Nora Webster (27 page)

“What?”

“You have been close to the other side, haven’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t talk now. Let me hear your voice. Let me go through the melody first.”

She played and then stopped.

“I’ll go down into a lower key and see where that takes us.”

Laurie played, concentrating on the music, slowing the melody as she went along.

“I think I have it now. We really shouldn’t be doing this, but your voice might never be as good as it is today. Let me play for a while again, and when I signal, you come in.”

She held her hands over the keys but did not touch them. The silence in the room was so intense that Nora presumed it must really be soundproofed. Nora felt uneasy, almost alarmed by the quality of the silence, by the need Laurie appeared to have for high drama.

Laurie gently touched the keys, working the pedals so that a new low sound came from the piano. She played very softly and then she made a sign and Nora, looking at the words of the song, began:

“’Tis the last rose of summer

Left blooming alone.”

She did not know that her voice could be so deep; and whatever way Laurie was stretching out the notes, she found herself moving much more slowly than she had meant to. She had no trouble with her breathing and no fear now of the higher notes. She felt that the piano was controlling her and pulling her along, and the pace meant that she gave each word its full weight. Because of the gaps Laurie left, she felt that she was singing into silence; she was aware of the silence as much as she was of the notes. A few times she faltered because Laurie was adding flourishes and she was unsure what to do until Laurie lifted her hand and then swiftly lowered it to indicate that she was to end the lines more sharply and let the piano do the grace notes.

When the song was finished Laurie did not speak for a while.

“Why didn’t you train your voice?” she asked eventually.

“My mother was a better singer always,” Nora said.

“If we had got you young enough—”

“I never liked singing, and then I got married.”

“Did he ever hear you singing?”

“Maurice? Once or twice on holidays. But not for years.”

“And the children?”

“No.”

“You kept it to yourself. You saved it up.”

“I never thought about it.”

“I can train you to sing for an audition, and the choir might need contraltos, they often do, but I can do nothing more for you. You’ve left it too late, but you don’t mind that, do you?”

“No.”

“We can all have plenty of lives, but there are limits. You never can tell what they are. If someone had told me I’d be seventy and living in a town in Ireland with an insurance man! But here I am. And I know when we started a few minutes ago you didn’t want ever to come back here, but you do now. I know you do now. And you will, won’t you?”

“Yes, I will,” Nora said.

Over the following weeks, she went to Laurie O’Keefe’s on Tuesdays at two o’clock, sometimes dreading the thought of it when she woke on the morning of the lesson and dreading it even more as she set out to walk along the Back Road to Weafer Street. She hoped that neither Phyllis nor the O’Keefes had told people that she was learning to sing. And she told no one at work, not even Elizabeth. There would be people in the town, including Jim and Margaret, who would wonder what she was doing taking lessons when she should be looking after her job and her house and minding her children.

For the first hour of the class Laurie would not let her sing; she made her lie on the floor and breathe, or stand and hold a note for as long as she could, or go up and down the scales. She concentrated then on the first line of “The Last Rose of Summer,” and Laurie made her not take in a breath after “summer” as she had been doing, but carry on to the end of the second line and then make it natural, as though she was speaking or telling a story.

It was a way of spending Tuesday afternoon, she thought sometimes, a way of doing something new, getting out of the house into a hidden world, soundproofed from what was really happening. It was when Laurie propped two small framed abstract paintings on the top of the piano and asked her to look at them, insisted that she do nothing except look at them, that the real change came, not in her voice, but in something else that she could not be sure about.

“You must look at them!” Laurie commanded. “Look at them as though you will need to remember them.”

“Who did them?”

Laurie smiled but did not reply.

“Is it just a pattern?” Nora asked. “What do they mean?”

“You must look, that’s all.”

One had nothing but lines; the other had squares. The lined one was brown; the other was blue. Some of the lines were raised, as though embossed.

“Don’t think, just look,” Laurie said.

She could not be sure about the colours, as both were filled with shadow as much as colour. She looked at the shadows, studied the darker end of each of them, and then let her eye move from right to left, following a line towards brightness, or some beginning.

“What I want you to do now,” Laurie said, “is sing and only
look at the colours and don’t think about the words or me or anything else. Make the sound from what you look at.”

When the lesson was over, Nora felt free of Laurie and looked forward to the six days ahead when she would not have to stand at the piano obeying orders. She arranged to meet Phyllis that Saturday in the lounge of Murphy Floods Hotel, and asked her about Laurie.

“Either she knew everyone, including de Gaulle and Napoleon Bonaparte,” Phyllis said, “or she knew no one and lived in a convent. I can never work out which. And either it was a silent order in perpetual adoration, or they spent their time singing and chattering.”

“She makes me do all sorts of exercises,” Nora said.

“She is a law unto herself. And she landed on her feet. Billy built her those rooms and bought her the piano,” Phyllis said. “And she really can play. And one day I heard her speaking in French on the phone, so at least that part is true.”

“Why did you send me to her?”

“Because she asked me to. She says that on the day of the funeral she promised that she would do anything for you if she could. She has a very good heart. I think all ex-nuns have good hearts, it’s such a relief for them being out of the convent. Or maybe that’s a wrong thing to say.”

“She made me look at these two paintings she has.”

“While you were singing?”

“Yes.”

“She does that for very few people. Has she said yet that singing is not something you do, it is something you live?”

“She has.”

“She told me one day that I could sing all I liked, but it would be no use. I didn’t have it, she said.”

“Have what?”

“Something quite essential. But I don’t know what it’s called.”

At the next lesson Laurie told Nora to look again at the colours in the frame and try to imagine them coming into being.

“Not there at all, and then slowly there, tone by tone. Emerging. Emerging.”

Laurie almost whispered these last words and then she watched Nora sharply as Nora looked at the shadows and the grades of colour.

She went to the piano and played the introduction. Nora had learned to wait until the end of each phrase to breathe, and to follow the tone of the piano, and find a pace from the pace of the playing. Her singing voice now was much deeper than her speaking voice, and this led her towards a greater confidence as she allowed the voice to vibrate darkly on end notes. She knew Laurie was checking regularly to see that she was watching the colours, and she learned to trust Laurie’s playing, her tact, her ability to respond.

As she sang, she concentrated hard on one small square of colour. Something stirred within the depths of it; something she could see clearly for a second, and then when she blinked it had gone. When the playing stopped and the song had ended, Laurie did not move. Nora stayed still too.

It was only after a month, when she had had four or five lessons, that she realised that the music was leading her away from Maurice, away from her life with him, and her life with the children. But it was not merely that Maurice had no ear for music, and that music was something they had never shared. It was the intensity of her
time here; she was alone with herself in a place where he would never have followed her, even in death.

When Phyllis mentioned the Gramophone Society again, Nora nodded and tried to look serious. Of all of the things that happened in the town, it was the weekly event that Maurice and Jim, and by extension Margaret, thought funniest. One of its leading lights was Thomas P. Nolan and it was regularly attended by a man from Glenbrien, M. M. Roycroft, who had an old house, Phyllis said it was Georgian, and a large farm. He lived alone there, it was reported, with two thousand records and several rooms full of books. Calling Thomas P. Nolan “Tom Piss Nolan” and M. M. Roycroft “Madman Roycroft” gave Maurice and Jim infinite pleasure. The two men would laugh, and Margaret too, and the two girls, if they were in the room, would look at Nora, relishing the fact that she never found this funny. She knew Thomas P. Nolan and liked how courteous he was, and she had seen M. M. Roycroft a number of times driving a strange old car and had wondered about his life in Glenbrien and if he went to Dublin to buy the books and records, or if he sent away for them.

Phyllis now wanted her to come to the meetings of the society every Thursday in Murphy Floods Hotel. Each week, she said, one of the members chose the music they listened to.

“So you know everyone’s taste, including, of course, their bad taste. And that Dr. Radford has the worst taste, big long modern German things that would knock you into the middle of next week. But the best of all is Canon Kehoe, he only plays sopranos. He knows more about sopranos than any priest in the western world.”

“I don’t have any records,” Nora said. “Or none that I have listened to in years.”

“That’s all the more reason to come, and they love a new member.”