Sunrise with Sea Monster (4 page)

So where are they? she asked, her face invisible under the towel.

Dry yourself first, said Maisie. Plenty of time. She drew her inside the kitchen as I came down the stairs. When I reached
the ground floor the door was shut. I could hear voices from inside it, Maisie with her high Wicklow whine and hers, which
seemed to have the softness of the west coast about it. I opened the door slowly with my foot, wanting to see but not wanting
to be seen yet, and saw Maisie wrapping one of my father's coats around her, her skirt and stockings hanging round the stove.

So I should have known, I suppose, even then: the drizzle-filled accent, her head bent so her straw-coloured hair could catch
the heat, wearing my father's coat. I should have foreseen, with the instinct which, if it were given to any of us, would
save all manner of trouble, would let us know which door to open and which to leave closed, which corridor to walk down and
blunder towards the light. But I doubt if it would have made any difference, maybe only made the possibilities more alluring,
more forbidden, and besides, how could I have connected him with this easily natural creature, running her fingers through
her dampened hair, turning to greet me with a wry, cracked smile and saying, and you must be Donal.

I blushed at the mention of my name. Every child hates their name, I discovered later, hates the present they have been given,
imagines others far more potent and alluring. Then I saw the stockings and thought my embarrassment might be misinterpreted
so blushed again.

He's a shy one, she said, walking towards me, wrapping my father's coat around her waist.

Still waters run deep, said Maisie.

They do, she said, and held out her hand. I'm Rose.

I shook her hand and smiled and said, hello Rose, and with the sound of my own voice gathered mastery of myself once more.
You've come to teach us piano.

That I have, Donal, she said. When do I start?

I would have said now, but Maisie shooed me out, told me Miss de Vrai needed time to make herself respectable, whereupon Rose
laughed as if such words hardly applied to her and Maisie shut the kitchen door.

I walked back up the stairs and sat in the living-room. I could see the waves crashing down the length of the promenade. I
decided only someone exceptional would let themselves get that wet. Only someone exceptional would wrap a man's coat around
them, dry their hair in front of me by the stove and smile even though her stockings were drying on it. I heard footsteps
below then and the tinkle of a cascade of scales, light and rapid, the waves outside thrusting up in some odd counterpoint.
I became aware, slowly, that some new principle had entered the household, some new element that made me apprehensive and
excitable all at once. After a time the music stopped and Maisie's feet trudged up the stairs and I understood I had been
summoned.

You behave yourself, Maisie said, ushering me downwards.

Why wouldn't I? I asked her.

When I came down my father's coat was draped round the wicker chair and she was sitting by the piano in a flower-patterned
dress, rippling up and down it like a concert pianist, her head thrown back and her damp hair hanging down her shoulders.
She looked up when I entered, but kept playing. She smiled, said my name silently, and gestured with her head for me to sit
beside her. I sat down as close as was comfortable and imagined I got the smell of roses from her, but that could have been
her name.

Rose, I said.

That's my name, she said, still playing.

Where are you from, Rose? I asked her.

A place near Sligo, she said. Strandhill.

What's it like?

Like here, she said. Only the waves are bigger.

So I understood the way she stood on the promenade when the water ran its fingers down her. She was used to hurricanes.

Where did you learn to play like that Rose?

School of Music, she said. In Chatham Street.

That in Dublin?

Yes. She still played.

You live in Dublin, Rose?

Unfortunately.

Where's your family then?

Aren't you the curious one, Donal.

Must be.

Then her fingers stopped.

So show me, she said.

I played "The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls." I was inordinately proud of my mastery of it, so was stunned when I finished
and she said nothing.

Well? I asked her. I looked up and saw her staring out the window.

Good, Donal, she said. Good. She opened her bag and took a small metronome out and set it clicking on the piano. Try it again
and watch the timing.

There was light rain falling when she left, the kind that created a veil over the head, and the waves had died down. I assumed
the tide had changed. She put her music case over her head again and walked through it, in her newly dry gabardine coat. I
saw a figure come down the promenade towards her, carrying a briefcase, and knew it was my father, coming home from work.
I saw her walk towards him, oblivious, about to pass him when she stopped, summoned by him I suppose. They talked for a moment
then she went on. I assumed he must have known her, searched out an ad in the
Irish Times,
walked to the Music School in Chatham Street, questioned her credentials from the way they spoke. I allowed myself to be jealous
for a moment, a warm feeling, creating both need and sadness, with the rain falling round them, her stopping, raising her
head from under the music case, a moment of recognition, him stiff against the railings, the sea moving in big slow swells
behind them. Then she smiled, placed the case over her head again and walked on. He watched her go, I watched the two of them,
then he turned, allowed his cane to rattle off the railings as he walked.

Confiteor Deo omnipotent,
he says and the wind and the hammering carry away his words, but I hardly have to hear them, I know them so well the litany
carries on regardless.
Beatae Mariae, semper Virgini.
I could confess that I wanted her then, but that would be an untruth, or a truth after the fact, a retrospective lie. I was
too young to know such things, was glad of a feminine presence other than Maisie in the house, wished to reinvent the mother
I had lost perhaps, wished to complete this household in a way I'd never known. So maybe that would be the retrospective truth,
the posthumous truth that when I saw them greet each other on the promenade through the patina of rain I hoped that something
in her would gladden him. In the way that children have, their knowledge that something is important, beyond their comprehension,
but they cling to it and build upon it and work to fill the gaps they feel are missing.

She came regularly, on Tuesdays and on Thursdays, and the music was secondary to the feel of her hair brushing off my cheek,
the half-attentive way she listened, the way when I'd finished a piece I'd turn, see her sitting by the window, quite forgetful
of the fact that I was there at all. Then she'd come to and whisper, good, Donal, good, better every day, talk of the left
hand or the right and once, or if I was lucky twice, during a lesson would come behind me, grip one hand and show me how to
hold my wrist. There were no rings on her fingers, which I knew was significant. Much more significant was the smell of her
hair as it brushed off my cheeks, the feel of her breasts pushing into the small of my back. There was an eroticism there
which was undefined, which I would always connect with the stark glory of a Bach prelude, which even now I could not call
desire. It gave me balance and poise, completed me, or more properly, completed the house. That cold structure, perched on
the edge of the Irish Sea seemed warmer for it. I allowed myself to wonder would my mother have been like this, had she lived.
I lost the memory of the bed surrounded by crumpled paper, the cold imagined grave at the bottom of the sea. I remembered
a younger woman now, unencumbered by sickness, hair with a hint of red, in a gabardine coat. They were the happiest days,
looking back on it, me, him and her, twice a week. He took to coming home early on the days of her lessons. He would ask about
our progress, hold her coat for her as she went to the door, sometimes walk her to the station.

The way it goes, said Mouse, as we followed their silhouetted figures on the promenade from the shore below, is that the gentleman
takes the lady's hand.

How? I asked him.

Like this, he said, slipping his arm through mine. I could see my father's hand above though, wrapped chastely round her music
case, a gap of blue air between his shape and hers. Perhaps the feel of the scuffed leather gave him the same pleasure as
ran through me when Mouse's fingers curled into mine.

It's called stepping out, he said. Courting. The bit before the other bit begins.

And what's the other bit? I asked, though I already suspected.

The gentleman, he said, gathers the courage to kiss the lady.

Aha, I said. Try as I would, I could never imagine my father's lips on hers.

He blushes, said Mouse, coming to a halt. And the lady's heart flutters. Then he goes for it.

He placed his red lips on mine, not blushing at all. I could feel the breath from his nostrils on my cheek. Then his tongue
came through them and played with mine.

What's the tongue for? I asked, squirming away.

That leads to the next bit, he said.

There's even more bits? I asked.

Bit after bit after bit, he said, one leading to the other till the gentleman gets his bit.

His bit, I said.

Yeah, but that comes much later.

I looked up and saw their figures vanishing under the bridge.

Come on, I said. Let's see what bit they get to.

I followed him up the broken stone steps with a heavy heart. We climbed the footbridge and saw their figures vanish behind
the railway station, then emerge by the tracks, standing under the dripping eaves. The thought of his lips on hers made me
feel sadder than I had ever felt. Then the train came in and enveloped them in steam. We saw him standing stiffly, bowing
slightly as he handed her the case. The thought came again, of his lips on hers, but nothing in his body suggested it. I felt
sorry for him suddenly, realising he'd never get to the first bit, even. Then the other sorrow came back to me at the thought
that he might. The sorrow rattled between us, like the doors of the train as it shuddered into movement. Then it drew off
slowly and he turned to watch it go and Mouse dragged me down beneath the rail to hide. The train trundled beneath us, enveloping
us in a cloud of smoke.

No go, whispered Mouse.

He had gone when the smoke cleared and the wisps of it vanished from the tracks like the sadness.

Misereatur vestri omnipotens Deus,
the priest intones and the wind whips the surplice of the kneeling altar-boys and I can see two pistols stuck behind two leather
belts. That walk of theirs became a regular occurrence, whenever he was home early enough to meet her, and when the rains
came he would carry an umbrella. His courtship, if that's what it was, would progress to holding her arm when the winds were
high and the waves crashed over the railings. I watched every gesture, sometimes from my bedroom window, sometimes from the
beach below. Mouse would design appropriate futures for them both. The day would come, he would tell me, when some cataclysm
would prevent the train from arriving and they would wait at the station till the light went. He would walk her back, all
hope of the journey to Dublin vanished, back along the promenade to the front door. And then? I asked him. Then, Mouse said,
Maisie, acting on some instinct for such disasters, would have a tea ready. A tea for three. You, her and him, Mouse said.
I tried to imagine the scene, with a catch in my throat. You would eat boiled eggs on the table by the kitchen range and she
would stay the night. Where? I asked, with an unerring eye for such details. It doesn't matter where, he told me. On the contrary,
I said, it matters a lot. On the couch by the piano, I said, preferring to keep her near my element. A lady can't sleep on
a couch. On the contrary, I told him, echoing his diction, a lady can, on that couch. It pulls out into a settee. And then?
he asked. Then, I said, we would have breakfast the next morning. More boiled eggs, he said. Fried ones, I told him. Fried
ones with bacon. Then, he said, the sun would be up and they'd walk down to the station again. But nothing would be as it
seems. Why not? I asked. During the night, he told me, everything would have changed. He walks down the promenade with no
need to protect her from the wind but yet with his arm around her. Why would it have changed? I asked him. And he must have
sensed my disturbance, for he didn't reply.

The train would never come, I told him. The tide would go out and never come back. They would wait hours by the station and
come back that night and I'd pull out the couch for her and she'd sleep on the settee once more. She'll teach me the next
morning and every morning after till I can play like Chopin. Who was he? asked Mouse. A Pole, I told him, with long fingers
who had a way with the ladies. And where's your father? Out, I said. Always out, trying to find where the sea has gone.

You're lying, said Mouse. How'm I lying? I asked him. You'll be the one out there, trying to find where the sea is gone. No,
I said, you're the one who's lying. How? he asked. You know, I said, that the train always comes.

Though their walk remained as chaste as ever, as the hot days came down on us Mouse and I invented an erotic history for them.
We would swim in the afternoons, then lie naked on the rocks before the Head, see their tiny figures on the promenade below.
We would twine bodies, as he told me they one day would, our pricks hard against each other's legs. We'd kiss and go through
the inventory of gestures men went through with women. It was fine to imagine Mouse as her and him as me and I'd scour the
roof of his mouth with my tongue to keep the sadness at bay. I could imagine an erotic thread interlacing the four of us like
a necklace, stretching the length of the hot promenade. I wanted him outside of it, yet somehow part of it, an arbiter of
the affections and pleasures I knew were properly mine.