Nora Webster (43 page)

“You don’t believe in anything . . . ?”

“I get through the day, Nora. That’s all I do. And I leave everything else to itself.”

“Conor, he said—”

“He said nothing, Nora. Conor is perfect now, but he has an eye and ear for trouble so don’t trouble him.”

Nora suddenly felt trapped. She wondered where the car keys were and the keys of the house and thought that, if she could find
them, as soon as Josie went away, she would leave the house and drive home.

“Oh and make sure you take the painkillers before you go asleep,” Josie said. “Poor Fiona was very worried about you, and she’s glad you are out here. Those two girls are a credit to you. And Aine is gone all political. She got that from the Webster side. Our side had none of that. And Fiona showed me the back room and it’s beautiful. It will be a lovely room for you.”

“Maurice asked if there was not one other, but I couldn’t think of anyone else. I don’t know what he meant. But you believe I dreamed it all?”

“I do.”

“But it was real. I mean, he was real.”

“Of course he was. But he is gone. You have to make yourself understand that he is gone and he will not be back.”

The wine made her drowsy again and, as she settled back into the bed, she could not imagine that she would ever return to normal and not want to sleep all the time. She took the sleeping-pill and the painkiller before she turned out the lamp.

When she woke again the room was bright and she could hear the sound of a radio and dishes clattering and crows battling around one of the old trees. She looked at the bedside table but there was no clock. She lay back and sighed.

All day she moved between the sitting-room and the bedroom. Josie came and went; since it was a fine day she wanted to do some planting in her garden. In the afternoon, John and his wife came but they did not stay long. Josie had brought fresh clothes for her from
the house in case she wanted to dress but she stayed in the nightgown and the dressing-gown and her bare feet.

As the light began to wane Josie came and sat with her.

“I know this is none of my business,” she said, “but yesterday when I was looking for clothes for you I was shocked to see that the wardrobe is full of Maurice’s clothes. Jackets and trousers and suits and ties and shirts, and even his shoes.”

“I didn’t have the heart to throw them out. I just couldn’t do it.”

“Nora, he is more than three years dead. You will have to do it soon.”

“That will be the end then, will it?”

“Do the children know his clothes are still there?”

“The children don’t snoop in my wardrobe, Josie.”

“Your mother would smile now if she heard you.”

“My mother?”

“An ungrateful child is like a serpent’s tooth, that’s what she used to say.”

“And that was on a good day,” Nora laughed.

Nora lay on the sofa and slept. When she woke it was dark. She went downstairs and found that Josie was setting the table for four.

“Who else is coming?” she asked.

“I asked Catherine to come. She should be here soon.”

“I don’t want to see Catherine.”

“Well, what you want or don’t want doesn’t matter. Do something to your hair and put on fresh clothes because I invited your friend Phyllis as well. You can’t sleep all the time.”

When the four of them had finished their main course, another car pulled up outside. Nora went to the window and saw Una.

“It’s Una. She’s meant to be with Conor,” she said.

“She said she would leave Conor with Fiona so as not to worry him,” Josie said. She poured more wine when Una joined them at the table.

Nora moved to one of the armchairs and began to doze, comforted by the animated sounds of the voices around her. When she woke, she found that they were talking about her.

“She was a demon,” Catherine said. “That’s all I have to say about her.”

“Was she?” Phyllis asked.

“And then she met Maurice. From the first time she went out with him she was a new person. I mean, she didn’t exactly become meek and mild. But she changed.”

“I suppose she was happy,” Una said.

“Maurice was the love of her life,” Catherine said.

“Oh, that’s true all right,” Josie interjected.

“She could still be a demon, though,” Una said. “Do you remember the time she wouldn’t speak to my mother? We all lived in the house and she wouldn’t speak to her or look at her.”

“Oh, I remember it well,” Josie said. “Myself and your aunt Mary, God rest her, were at our wits’ end about it.”

“And why wouldn’t she speak to her?” Phyllis asked.

“Maurice had a brother who died of TB,” Catherine said. “He was a lovely boy and it was a very sad thing and I don’t know who our mother said it to, but she said to someone when Nora started going out with Maurice that she was afraid that Maurice might have TB as well. Or something anyway about Maurice and TB. And then the person told someone who told Nora. And she got it into her head
that our mother was going around the town talking about Maurice and his family and TB and she just stopped talking to her.”

“Nothing would bring her down from her high horse,” Catherine said.

“And then,” Una went on, “Father Quaid found out. He was very friendly with our mother because she was in the choir and often sang in the cathedral. And he asked her about it and she confirmed it. So he waylaid Nora one day when it was coming up to Christmas and he instructed her to stop all the nonsense and they agreed that she would wish her mother a happy Christmas on Christmas Day and that would be the end of it.”

“We were relieved,” Una said. “I think the whole town was relieved, or the ones who knew us.”

“And what happened?” Phyllis asked.

“She waited,” Catherine said, “until my mother was bending over to take the turkey out of the oven and she leaned over and wished her a happy Christmas, but it looked as though she was wishing a happy Christmas to her backside.”

“I remember I nearly burst,” Una said.

Nora began to laugh.

“Look, she’s awake,” Phyllis said.

“We were just talking about you,” Catherine said.

“I heard every word,” Nora replied.

Once she went back to work, Nora began to sleep through the night. Slowly, the pains went away. She told no one else what had happened in the bedroom. She supposed that it had been, as Josie said, a dream. But it seemed stronger than a dream. At night, when she turned off the light, it comforted her to think that Maurice had
recently been in this room, and vividly so. She tried not to whisper to him, but she could not stop herself and this, she felt, made her sleep more easily and got her through the night.

At work, she looked forward to going home and spending time alone in the room she had decorated. She borrowed books from the library and, with the fire lit and the lamps all on in the evening, she read or left her mind empty. She liked it when Fiona went out and she was alone in the house, with Conor in the front room doing his homework until he would come in and sit on the sofa in the back room and look through his photographs or read the magazines and manuals that Donal had let him have. Unlike Fiona, who often found the music irritating, Conor barely noticed it. She felt that he associated it with ease or comfort or lack of tension, but sometimes she found that he was studying her, and his look was still worried and unsettled. He would always be like this, she thought; he would become a man who worried about things, who watched the world for signs that something would go wrong.

In Dublin one day, she found there was a sale in May’s record shop on Stephen’s Green; a large collection of Deutsche Grammophon had been reduced to less than a pound each. She bought as many as she could carry. When she met Aine and Fiona in the National Gallery, they selected prints from the gift shop that she could hang in the back room. When she went home she sent them to be framed. Someone else could hammer in the nail and hang them when they came back, she thought.

Josie arranged that Catherine and Una would come with boxes and empty out the wardrobe where she kept Maurice’s clothes. She waited until a weekend when Fiona was gone to Dublin with Paul
and she was sure that Aine was not coming home. She arranged with Margaret that Conor would have his tea with her and stay late. In the early afternoon, she drove to Wexford. She had written to Donal to say that she would be early. She bought him chicken and chips in the chip shop closest to the school and also a few bottles of Miranda lemon, which was his favourite. He preferred, she knew, if she came with Conor or Fiona or Aine, so they would talk and argue among themselves when he wanted to be silent. When he was on his own with her, there was always a strain. He resented it if she gave him advice.

“D-do you know about the p-paradox of f-faith?” he asked her when he was finished eating.

“I’m not sure I do,” she said.

“F-father Moorehouse gave us a sermon on it. J-just a s-small g-group who are d-doing special re-re-religious s-studies.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“In order to b-believe, you have to b-believe,” he said. “Once you have faith, then you can b-believe more, but you c-can’t b-believe until you b-begin to b-believe. That f-first b-belief is a mystery. It is like a g-gift. And then the r-rest is r-rational, or it c-can be.”

“But it can’t be proved,” she said. “You can only sense it.”

“Yes, b-but he says it’s not like p-proof. It’s n-not adding two and two, but more like adding light to w-water.”

“That sounds very deep.”

“No, it’s simple really. It explains things.”

She noticed that he had not stammered on the last sentence.

“You must have s-something first,” he went on. “I suppose th-that is what he is saying.”

“And if you don’t?”

“That is the atheist position.”

She looked down at the roofs of houses and the spires of churches and the calm light over the harbour beyond them. Donal was sixteen and she thought how less certain everything would seem as the years went on for him, and how important it was for her to say nothing that might cause him to know that, since he did not need to know it yet.

Since she had come early, he made it clear that he understood she had something to do, and he told her that if he had an hour free now, when many of the others were playing hurling or football or walking around the field surreptitiously smoking, he would have the darkroom to himself, and there was a new sort of photographic paper, not glossy, which he wanted to experiment with. She could not work out whether he was dismissing her because he wanted her to go, or whether he was making it easy for her. She sat in the car and watched him through the side mirror walking confidently back into the school.