‘I walk into the city.’
‘God, I love walking.’
The fingers, in a hurry, would layer a gum with cotton-wool; sharply, they’d jab a hypodermic needle home. She’d talk to you when your mouth was full of implements; she’d tell you to have a wash-out with the pink stuff, and say she was nearly finished. Fahy said she had an eye on a bungalow out on the Cappoquin road. ‘Wouldn’t the two of you be snug in a bed there?’ Fahy had said.
‘I have a few friends coming in, Saturday fortnight. Would you care to join us, Mr Condon?’
He felt a tightening in the atmosphere. Both Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane were aware of the implication of what had just been said. An attempt was being made to develop the casual acquaintanceship that existed between Justin and the dentist in Mrs Keane’s house; the relationship was to be extended to Dublin. Fahy would be told; so would Father Grennan and Father Reedy. ‘Sure, if some girl like Thomasina Durcan doesn’t do something about it that fellow’ll be a bachelor at seventy’: he could hear Mrs Keane saying that, or his father or his mother. Fahy would put it differently.
‘Saturday fortnight?’
‘About a quarter to eight. You know Clontarf? 21 Dunlow Road. Just a few friends and a bit of dancing.’
‘I don’t dance at all.’
‘I’m not much at it myself.’
Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane were pleased. They had enjoyed this flutter of excitement. They would think about the party at 21 Dunlow Road, and discuss it. They would be unpleasantly agog after it had taken place.
‘21 Dunlow Road,’ Thomasina Durcan repeated, writing it clearly on a piece of paper she’d found in her handbag.
‘You might ask him that,’ requested Garda Bevan. ‘Does he consider inflation beat? If there’s one man in Ireland would know, it’s your father.’
Justin nodded again, finishing the fried food on his plate. He promised to discuss the matter with his father and to obtain his father’s opinion. He wouldn’t turn up at 21 Dunlow Road, he said to himself. When he next spent a night at Mrs Keane’s he’d say he’d lost the address.
When he was ten she had asked him if he’d like to learn how to play the piano and when he’d said yes she’d arranged for Father Finn to give him lessons in her sitting-room. She had paid for them and when she’d asked him not to tell his family he had eagerly agreed because apparently his family would have laughed at the idea of a boy playing a musical instrument. ‘It’s a great thing for him,’ Father Finn later reported. ‘And hasn’t he a rare aptitude for it?’ In the circumstances Father Finn wasn’t averse to keeping the knowledge of the lessons from the Condons, and after a while he refused to accept any fee for the tuition. ‘Well, that’s one thing at any rate he’s not useless at,’ he remarked, later still.
God had arranged it, she often thought during those years that went by. God had arranged for the child to come by her gate that first afternoon, and for the music she played him on her gramophone to delight him. God had arranged a way for the three of them, Father Finn and herself and Justin. When the Condons had eventually discovered about the piano lessons they’d been bewildered but not cross, mainly because it was Father Finn who was giving them. And as well as for the lessons every Wednesday, Father Finn began to come round on Sunday afternoons, when they all three listened to John Count McCormack or the operatic arias. It was a natural thing for the priest to do since everyone knew now of the musical aptitude of Justin Condon and how it needed to be fostered and encouraged.
The sun warmed his exposed chest; beside him his shirt was laid out on the grass; his eyes were closed. Faintly the sound of the river by which he lay penetrated his sleep.
He dreamed of the queen who had inspired the choral symphony he was attempting to write. In his dream she led wolfhounds on leather thongs through her garden and listened to the spirits of the otherworld. From among them one took visible form: a young girl rose from the mists and the flowers and warned the queen of her folly.
Two flies tormented Justin’s plump chin. Their tickling silenced music that had the resonance of music composed by Mahler. He smacked at his face but already the flies had gone.
The symphony told of a journey from the royal palaces in the West to the territory of Cúchulainn in Ulster. The queen’s great army, fattened with the soldiers of her allies, with the long line of camp followers, with druids and jesters, storytellers, soothsayers, military men and servitors, travelled into heroic battle, while the mystical hero awaited their arrival. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Justin hired a piano cubicle in a music shop and spent the morning there, advancing his composition. Shortly after the death of Father Finn the piano in his Aunt Roche’s sitting-room had gone hopelessly out of tune and apparently couldn’t be much improved.
Justin reached for his shirt. When he had buttoned it he neatly tightened the knot of his tie. Since breakfast-time in Mrs Keane’s dining-room he had visited sixteen drapers in seven different towns. He had O’Leary’s and Callaghan’s to call on yet, and then that would be that for the day. He drove on and did the business he had to do. He spent the night in Dungarvan in a room above a fish-and-chip café. The smell of the frying wafted up and through his open window. From his bed he listened to people talking about the film they had been to, and to a drunk man who proclaimed that he intended to stand no nonsense from his wife. He fell asleep at half past eleven and dreamed of the journey in his symphony, of the queen in her magnificence, and the chorus of otherworld spirits.
‘Wait now till I get the brother,’ said Mr McGurk, the joint proprietor of McGurk’s Arcade, the following day. He left the shop and called up through the house. In a moment the older Mr McGurk appeared.
Justin’s samples were laid out on the counter. Some were familiar to the McGurks and presented no problem when it came to deciding the size of the order. Others, lines that were new this spring, had to be considered with care.
‘Would a woman of this area dress herself in that?’ inquired the younger Mr McGurk, poking at a black garment trimmed flimsily with lace of the same colour.
‘I don’t know would she.’
‘The gusset is strong,’ Justin pointed out, since it said so on his sales sheet. ‘A man-made fibre.’
‘It isn’t the gusset would sell that article,’ replied the older Mr McGurk. ‘What I’m thinking is, is it too ritzy for this area?’
‘Will we call down Elaine?’ suggested his brother.
‘I’d say we would.’
Elaine, wife of the older Mr McGurk, was summoned from the house. She picked up the garment in question and meticulously examined it.
‘Would you wear it?’ her husband demanded.
‘I would in a shade of peach. Does it come in a peach?’
Justin said it did, and in a shade of coffee.
‘Order it in the peach,’ advised Mrs McGurk. ‘Black’s not the tone for stuff the like of that.’
‘Too ritzy,’ agreed her husband. ‘I’m just after saying it.’
‘How’s your father?’ Mrs McGurk asked Justin.
‘He’s grand.’
‘Has he still got the hilarious way with him?’
Justin replied that he supposed his father had. One after the other, the McGurk brothers said they’d never laughed at any traveller’s jokes the way they’d laughed at Justin’s father’s. Justin could feel them thinking that he himself wasn’t half the man his father was, that he didn’t enter into the spirit of things, that all he seemed concerned with was writing down orders in his book. ‘I’ll tell you a thing about Thomasina Durcan,’ Fahy had said. ‘She has a notion of making a man of you. There’s women like that around.’
He left the McGurks’ shop and drove out to the estuary. He walked by the green, seaweedy water, wondering if Mahler would have composed a note if he’d been incarcerated in a bungalow on the Cappoquin road, listening every night to talk about cavity linings.
‘Now, there never was,’ she remembered Father Finn saying when Justin was thirteen, ‘a g
reat man of music that came out of Ireland.’
He made the pronouncement while eating a slice of buttered toast she had prepared for him. She had loved doing that, toasting the bread and spreading the butter on it, arranging blackcurrant jam in a glass dish. Blackcurrant was Father Finn’s favourite, raspberry was Justin’s.
‘We had singers and harpists. We had all classes of instrumentalists. We have a proud tradition, but we never yet had a composer that could rank with the Germans. To this day, Justin, we have to turn to Germany for musical composition.’
Pouring tea for both of them, she mentioned Italy and the priest agreed that the Italians had made a contribution. He told the story of Puccini’s life. He referred to the burden of a musical gift and to the reward it brought in time. ‘A precious freedom of the spirit. A most glorious thing.’
She had delighted in listening to him. She was never happier than on those Sunday afternoons when he and Justin sat together by her fire or on the Wednesdays when she made a cup of tea after the piano lesson. No admission of affection had ever been made by the priest or by herself; no admission could be. Until Justin arrived in her life there had been no way of creating a relationship that went beyond that of priest and parishioner.
‘There’s a little thing Justin composed for me,’ Father Finn said one Sunday, ‘A short little piece, but I’d say it displayed promise.’
‘We had a complaint, Mr Condon,’ Miss Murphy reported in Castlemartyr.
‘We had this slip brought back to us after it fell into holes.’
Only Thomasina Durcan and Miss Murphy called him Mr Condon, Thomasina Durcan because any other mode of address might have sounded forward, Miss Murphy for reasons he had never been able to fathom.
‘Would it be the way it was washed, Miss Murphy? Was it put into a machine?’
‘Oh, it would have been washed all right, Mr Condon. Naturally you’d expect it to have been washed.’
‘No, I mean in a machine though. Or maybe it got boiled in error. It’s all tinged with blue, look. Some blue garment has run into it.’
‘It would save an argument with the customer, Mr Condon, if you replaced it. It’s good for business when something gets replaced.’
Justin made a note in his order book and said that Miss Murphy would have a replacement within a fortnight. He had a new line he wanted to show her, he added, and displayed for her the sample he had displayed for fifty-seven other drapers, including the McGurks, since he’d left Dublin. Miss Murphy picked it up gingerly.
‘It comes in a peach, Miss Murphy, and a coffee. The gusset is guaranteed sturdy. Man-made fibre.’
‘I never saw that type of cut before.’
‘It’s the fashion in Dublin.’
Miss Murphy shook her head. She folded the piece of clothing in a professional manner and Justin returned it to the suitcase in which he carried his samples. Miss Murphy ordered a supply of summer vests and made arrangements to replenish her stock of first-communion stockings. ‘Is your father fit?’ she asked as Justin closed his order book, and for the first time since he had known Miss Murphy it idly occurred to him that she and his father might have had the same relationship as Fahy claimed to have with Mrs Keane. Miss Murphy was elderly now, a woman with a face like an arrow, with spectacles on a chain. Once she might have been pretty; it was odd that she had never married.
‘He’s grand,’ Justin said.
‘Remember me to him, will you?’
Her tone was different from Garda Bevan’s when he mentioned Justin’s father, different from the McGurks’ and all the other drapers’. Had there always been a hint of bitterness in Miss Murphy’s voice when she sent this message to his father? He looked up from the suitcase he was fastening and found her eyes upon him. They held his own until he felt embarrassed. He had noticed before that there was a similarity between his father and Fahy. They were both small men, rotund, bald-headed, pink-skinned, given to banter. He snapped the clasps on his suitcase and Miss Murphy turned away to attend another customer.
She made a cake, the banana cake he liked. Usually she wrapped in tinfoil what remained of it after their Sunday tea and he took it away to eat during the week, on his travels. She enjoyed thinking of him eating the cake, sitting out in the sunshine as he liked to do, in some quiet place.
Slowly she chopped up two bananas. He had belonged to them as he never had to his parents. On Sunday afternoons and again on Wednesdays they had been a family. She left the kitchen and in her sitting-room she delicately placed the needle on the same worn record of John Count McCormack singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’. Soon she would die, as the old priest had, six months ago. She would fall down, or she would die in her sleep. And before any of it happened she might become muzzy in her thoughts, unable to explain to Justin Condon and properly to ask for his forgiveness. Father Finn had known also in the end, death banishing his illusions. ‘We did a terrible thing,’ the old priest had said, sending for her specially.
The record came to an end and she sat there for a moment longer, listening to the scratchy sound of the needle. She had once, long before the child had come into her life, tried to become Father Finn’s housekeeper. ‘Ah no, no,’ he had murmured, gently rejecting her because it wouldn’t have done.
‘Arid how were things in West Waterford?’ his father inquired. ‘Has Joe Bolger retired from Merrick’s?’
Glistening, as if he had just scrubbed his face with a nailbrush, Mr Condon held a glass of whiskey in his right hand. As well as his face, the backs of his hands glistened, as did his glasses, his even false teeth, the dome of his hairless head. Justin imagined him with Miss Murphy in her shop, telling a joke, driving out into the country with Miss Murphy when it was dark, the way Fahy said he’d had to with some woman in Claremorris before he got going with Mrs Keane.
‘I didn’t see Joe Bolger,’ Justin said. ‘I think maybe he’s retired.’
‘I always liked West Waterford.’
They were in the sitting-room. His father was standing in front of a coal fire that was too hot for the time of year. In the kitchen Justin’s mother was frying their evening meal. Recently Mr Condon had taken to giving himself a glass of whiskey at a quarter to six in the evening instead of making his usual journey to McCauley’s at the corner. When he’d eaten his food he returned to the sitting-room and occupied the chair nearest the television, pouring himself another glass of whiskey at a quarter past seven. Justin’s mother said the whiskey was bad for him but he said it was doctor’s orders. ‘It’s ready for you,’ she shouted from the kitchen, reminding Justin of Thomasina Durcan calling out in Mrs Keane’s that the breakfast was ready.
‘I could eat an elephant,’ said Mr Condon, swallowing the last of his whiskey.
Between them, his brothers and sisters had brought thirty-seven children into existence: Justin often thought of that. At Christmas they all crowded into the house, shouting and quarrelling and reminding Justin of what the house had been like in his childhood. On Saturdays there were visits from one or another of those families, and on Sundays also.
‘There was a time I was below in Dungarvan,’ Mr Condon recalled in the kitchen, ‘the day Golden Miller won at Fairyhouse. Joe Bolger was footless behind the counter.’
Mrs Condon cut slices of loaf bread, and pushed the butter past her husband in Justin’s direction. Mr Condon had never been known to pass anyone anything.
‘God, you’d have died laughing.’ As if to lend greater verisimilitude to this claim, Mr Condon laughed rumbustiously himself, exposing egg and bread partially chewed. ‘He was handing out skeins of wool and not charging for it. He gave a gross of safety-pins to a farmer’s wife by the name of Mrs Quinn. “Sure, aren’t they always handy,” he said, “in case you’d have something falling down?” ’
Mrs Condon, who did not always care for her husband’s humour, asked what the weather had been like down the country. Justin replied that it had been fine.
‘There was another time,’ Mr Condon went o
n, ‘when the boys in the digs took poor Joe’s clothes when he was asleep in bed. I didn’t see it myself but didn’t he have to descend the stairs with the sheets on him?’
‘It rained on Wednesday,’ Mrs Condon said. ‘It didn’t cease the whole day.’
‘There Wasn’t a drop down the country.’
‘Well, isn’t that strange?’
‘It’s often that way.’
‘They say it’s settled in Dublin for the weekend.’
Mrs Condon was as thin as his Aunt Roche, with a worried look that Justin couldn’t remember her ever having been without. She wore flowered overalls even when she went shopping, beneath her black coat.
‘The wildest lads in West Waterford was in Joe Bolger’s digs,’ continued Mr Condon. ‘There wasn’t a trick they didn’t have knowledge of.’
Justin, who had heard about these exploits in West Waterford before, nodded. Mrs Condon poured more tea.
‘They went into the Bay Hotel one night when a pile of boxes containing young chicks had just come off the bus. Your men had them released in the hall before anyone could lift a hand. They had them flying up and down the stairs and into the dining-room, knocking down the sauce bottles. The next thing is, didn’t they have them fluttering about the bedrooms?’
‘You told us, Ger,’ Mrs Condon said.
‘I did of course. Didn’t I come back that Friday and go through the whole thing? It could kill you stone dead to wake up in your bedroom and find chickens squawking all over you.’
‘It must have been unpleasant certainly.’
‘Well, that’s West Waterford for you. Are you still telling that story, Justin?’
Justin nodded again. He wouldn’t have known how to begin telling such a story, and he had never attempted to. He thought about the symphony, hearing the theme that the queen and her consort in their palace bed had inspired. A slow movement, lyrical in tone.
‘Is that girl still stopping at Mrs Keane’s?’ his mother inquired. ‘The dentist.’
He’d once mentioned Thomasina Durcan in order to fill a gap in some conversation; he wished he hadn’t because his mother had somehow sensed his apprehension and appeared to have mistaken it for interest.