The Collected Stories

  ‘Why don’t you let me drive you back in the rain?’

  ‘There’s the bike.’

  ‘That’s no problem. I can dump it on the back.’

  An evening suit hung in the back of the car, a scarf of white silk draped round the shoulders. On the seat lay an old violin-case.

  ‘You play the fiddle?’ the Sergeant noticed, glad to be in out of the rain beating on the windscreen.

  ‘Indeed I do. The violin travels with me everywhere. Do you have much taste for music?’

  ‘When I was young. At the dances. “Rakes of Mallow”. “Devil Among the Tailors”, jigs and reels.’

  ‘I had to choose once, when I was at university, between surveying and a career in music. I’m afraid I chose security.’

  ‘We all have to eat.’

  ‘Anyhow, I’ve never regretted it, except in the usual sentimental moments. In fact, I think if I had to depend on it for my daily bread it might lose half its magic.’

  ‘Is it old, the fiddle? The case looks old.’

  ‘Very old, but I have had it only four years. It has its story. I’m afraid it’s a longish story.’

  ‘I’d like to hear it.’

  ‘I was in Avignon in France an evening an old Italian musician was playing between the café tables, and the moment I heard its tone I knew I’d have to have it. I followed him from café to café until he’d finished for the evening, and then invited him to join me over a glass of wine. Over the wine I asked him if he’d sell. First he refused. Then I asked him to name some price he couldn’t afford not to take. I’m afraid to tell you the price, it was so high. I tried to haggle but it was no use. The last thing he wanted was to sell, but because of his family he couldn’t afford to refuse that price if I was prepared to pay it. With the money he could get proper medical treatment – I couldn’t completely follow his French – for his daughter, who was consumptive or something, and he’d do the best he could about the cafés with an ordinary violin. I’m afraid I paid up on the spot, but the experts who have examined it since say it was dead cheap at the price, that it might even be a genuine Stradivarius.’

  Streets of Avignon, white walls of the royal popes in the sun, glasses of red wine and the old Italian musician playing between the café tables in the evening, a girl dying of consumption, and the sweeping rain hammering on the windscreen.

  ‘It was in Avignon, wasn’t it, if I have the old church history right,’ the Sergeant said slowly, ‘that those royal popes had their palaces in the schism? Some of them, by all accounts, were capable of a fandango or two besides their Hail Marys.’

  ‘The papal palaces are still there. Avignon is wonderful. You must go there. Some of those wonderful Joe Walsh Specials put it within all our reaches. The very sound of the name makes me long for summer.’

  ‘I’d love to hear you play on that fiddle.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s easily arranged. After all, there’s only a few more petty things to check, and then our work is done for the day.’

  ‘We can play in the barracks, then. There’s no one there. Biddy can get us something to eat, and then you can play.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter at all.’

  ‘Still, the inner man has to be seen to too. Biddy’s my housekeeper. She’s a good soul, but I must warn you she’s deaf as a post and shouts.’

  ‘Let that be the least of our worries.’ The young Surveyor smiled indulgently as the car ground to a stop on the barracks’ gravel. ‘Do you find time hard to kill in this place?’ he asked as he got out of the car.

  ‘It’s no fun in this weather but in the summer it’s fine,’ the Sergeant answered while they unroped the bicycle. ‘I take out the old boat you see upside down there under the sycamore. Row it up into the mouth of the Gut and drop the radiator over the side. Time runs like lightning then, feeling the boat sway in the current, a few sandwiches and stout or a little whiskey, and unless there’s a bad east wind you’re always sure of fish. It’s great to feel the first chuck and see the line cut for the lake.’

  ‘You grill these fish, then?’

  ‘Sometimes Biddy cooks them but mostly I give them away. I don’t care about the eating. It’s the day in the good weather, and the fishing. I’ve often noticed that the people mad about fishing hardly ever care about the eating.’

  Biddy was turning the handle of the metal sock-machine clamped to the corner of the table when they came into the big kitchen. Its needles clacked. The half-knit sock, weighted with small pieces of lead, hung close to the cement. She didn’t turn around. When the Sergeant placed a hand on her shoulder she did not start. She began to shout something to him. Then she saw the Surveyor with the violin-case in his hand at the door, and drew back.

  ‘This is Biddy. She knits socks for half the countryside. More to pass the time than for the few pence it brings her. She’s proud as punch of her machine. Pay no attention to her for she’ll not hear a word you say.’

  The Surveyor changed the violin from his right hand to his left before taking Biddy’s hand. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’ As she released his hand she shouted, ‘You’re very welcome.’ The Sergeant went and took a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers from a black press in the corner, its glass covered with a faded curtain, joking uncomfortably, ‘I call it the medicine-press,’ as the Surveyor opened the violin-case on the table. Biddy stood vacantly by the machine, not sure whether to return to her knitting or not; and as the Sergeant was asking the Surveyor if he would like some water in his whiskey she eventually shouted, ‘Would yous be wanting anything to ate now, would yous?’ ‘Yes. In a minute,’ the Sergeant mouthed silently. As soon as he poured the water in the whiskey and placed it beside the Surveyor, who had taken the violin from its case and was lovingly removing its frayed black silk, he apologized, ‘I won’t be a minute,’ and beckoned Biddy to follow him into the scullery. The door was opened on to a small yard, where elder and ash saplings grew out of a crumbling wall. Three hens were perched on the rim of a sawn barrel, gobbling mashed potatoes. As soon as Biddy saw the hens she seized a broom.

  ‘Nobody can take eyes off yous, for one minute.’

  She struck with the broom so that one hen in panic flew straight to the window, rocking the shaving mirror.

  ‘Oh Jesus.’ The Sergeant seized the broom from Biddy, who stood stock-still in superstitious horror before the rocking shaving mirror, and then he quietly shooed the frightened hen from the window and out the door. He banged the door shut and bolted it with its wooden bolt.

  ‘We’d have had seven years without a day’s luck,’ she shouted, as she fixed the mirror in the window.

  ‘Never mind the mirror.’ He turned her around by the shoulders.

  ‘Never mind the mirror,’ she shouted, frightened, to show him that she had read his lips.

  ‘Keep your voice down.’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ she shouted back.

  ‘We want something to eat.’

  ‘We want something to eat,’ she shouted back, but she was calming. ‘There’s eggs and bacon.’

  ‘Get something decent from the shop. Cheddar and ham. There’s salad still in the garden.’

  ‘Cheddar and ham,’ she shouted. ‘What if his ham is crawling and the price he charges? Not the first time for him to try to pass off crawling ham on me.’

  ‘Go,’ the Sergeant said and forced her into a coat he took from the scullery wall.

  ‘Will I pay cash or get it put on the Book?’ she shouted.

  ‘The Book.’ He handed her a small notebook covered with old policeman’s cloth from where it hung from a nail in the wall and rushed her out the door. After he bolted it he whispered, ‘Jesus, this night,’ and drew his sleeve slowly across his forehead, feeling the braided coarseness of the three silver stripes of his rank, before facing back into the kitchen.

  ‘If you live like pigs you can’t expect sweet airs and musics all the time,’ the Sergeant said in shame and exasperation as he swallowed his glass of whiskey. The S
urveyor hadn’t touched his whiskey. He was tuning the strings.

  ‘It’d never do if we were all on the side of the angels,’ the Surveyor answered absently.

  The Sergeant filled his glass again. He drew up his chair to the fire and threw on a length of ash. The whiskey began to thaw away his unease. He raised his glass to the Surveyor and smiled. He was waiting.

  ‘The Italian street-musician was playing Paganini that first evening in Avignon.’

  The bow flowed on the strings, the dark honey of the wood glowing in the early evening. Wind gently rustled the leaves of a Genoan olive grove. Metallic moonlight shone on their glistening silver as a man and a woman walked in the moonlight in a vague sweet ecstasy of feeling.

  ‘Wonderful. I’ve never heard better, not even on the radio.’ The Sergeant downed another glass of whiskey as the playing ended.

  ‘Isn’t the tone something?’

  ‘It’s priceless, that fiddle. You got a bargain.’

  ‘I’m sure the experts are not far out when they say it most probably is a genuine Stradivarius.’

  ‘The experts know. You go to the priest for religion. You go to the doctor for medicine. Who are we to trust if we can’t trust the experts? On the broad of our backs we’d be without the experts.’

  A man of extraordinary interest was Paganini, the Surveyor started to explain. He was born in Genoa in 1782, of a poor family, but such was his genius and dedication that he brought the world to his feet. In London, the mob used to try to touch him, in the hope that some of his magic might pass over to them, in the way they once tried to touch the hem of Christ’s garments – like pop stars in our own day – but nothing could divert him from his calling. Even the last hours given to him in life were spent in marvellous improvisations on his Guarnerius. The Church proved to be the one fly in the ointment. She had doubts as to his orthodoxy, and refused for five years to have him buried in consecrated grounds. In the end, of course, in her usual politic fashion, she relented, and he was laid to rest in a village graveyard on his own land.

  ‘And the Church bumming herself up all the time as helping musicians and painters out,’ the Sergeant declaimed fervently when the Surveyor finished. ‘It’d make a jackass bray backwards. But why don’t you drink up? You have more than earned it.’

  Apologetically, the Surveyor covered his glass with his palm. ‘It’s the driving, the new laws.’

  ‘Well, I’m the law in these parts, for what it’s worth. And there’s the CWA party tonight. You could play there. It’d give the ignoramuses there a glimpse past their noses to hear playing the like of the Paganini. You could stay the night here in the barracks, there’s tons of room.’

  ‘No. I have to drive to Galway tonight.’

  ‘Well, what’s one man’s poison. I was never a one for the forcing but that’s no reason to stint my own hand,’ he said as he filled his own glass again.

  ‘It’s your turn now to play, those lovely jigs and reels,’ the Surveyor demanded.

  ‘Not since the dances have I played, not for ages.’

  ‘Can’t you take the case down anyhow? You never know where the inspiration may come from.’ The Surveyor smiled.

  The case lay on the long mantel above the fire between a tea-box and a little red lamp that burned before a picture of the Sacred Heart in a crib bordered by fretted shamrocks. Clumsily he got it down. It was thick with dust. His hands left tracks on the case, and the ashes or dust scattered in a cloud when he started to beat it clean with an old towel. The Surveyor coughed in the dust and the Sergeant had to go to the scullery to wash his hands in the iron basin before the mirror. When he came in and finally got the case open, one string of the plain little fiddle was broken. The bow had obviously not been used for years, it was so slack.

  ‘It’s no Strad, but it would play after proper repairing. It would be a fine pastime for you on the long nights.’

  ‘Play to old deaf Biddy, is it now. It had a sweet note too in its day though, and I had no need of the old whiskey to hurry the time then, sitting on the planks between the barrels, fiddling away as they danced past while they shouted up to me, “Rise it, Jimmy. More power to your elbow, Jimmy Boy!” ’

  Going back with the fellows over the fields in the morning as the cold day came up, he remembered; and life was as full of promise as the smile the girl with cloth fuchsia bells in her dark hair threw him as she danced past where he played on the planks. The Surveyor looked from the whiskey bottle to the regret on the sunken face with careless superiority and asked, ‘Would you like me to play one of the old tunes?’

  ‘I’d like that very much.’

  ‘Is there anything in particular?’

  ‘ “The Kerry Dances.” ’

  ‘Can you hum the opening part?’

  The Sergeant hummed it and confidently the Surveyor took up the playing. ‘That’s it, that’s it.’ The Sergeant excitedly beat time with his boots till a loud hammering came on the door.

  ‘Oh my God, it’s that woman again.’ He pushed his hand through his grey hair, having to go to the scullery door to draw back the bolt.

  She was in such a state when she came in that she did not seem to notice the Surveyor playing. ‘Wet to the skin I got. And I tauld him his ham was crawling, or if it wasn’t crawling it was next door to crawling if I have a nose. Eight-and-six he wanted,’ she shouted.

  The Surveyor broke off his playing. He watched her shake the rain from her coat and scarf.

  ‘Yous will have to do with bacon and eggs, and that’s the end all,’ she shouted.

  ‘A simple cup of tea would do me very well,’ the Surveyor said.

  ‘But you’ve had nothing for the inner man,’ the Sergeant said as he filled his own glass from the whiskey bottle.

  ‘I’ll have to have a proper dinner this evening and I’d rather not eat now.’

  ‘You can’t be even tempted to have a drop of this stuff itself?’ He offered the bottle.

  ‘No thanks, I’ll just finish this. Is there anything else you’d like me to play for you?’

  ‘ “Danny Boy”, play “Danny Boy”, then.’

  ‘Is it bacon and eggs, then?’ Biddy shouted.

  ‘Tea and brown bread,’ the Sergeant groaned as he framed silently the speech on his lips.

  ‘Tea and brown bread,’ she repeated, and he nodded as he gulped the whiskey.

  The Surveyor quietly moved into ‘Danny Boy’, but as the rattle of a kettle entered ‘When Summer’s in the Meadows’, his irritated face above the lovely old violin was plainly fighting to hold its concentration as he played.

  ‘Maybe we might be able to persuade you to stay the night yet after all?’ the Sergeant pressed with the fading strength of the whiskey while they drank sobering tea at the table with the knitting-machine clamped to its end. ‘It’d be a great charity. Never before would they have heard playing the like of what you can play. It might occupy their minds with something other than pigs and hens and bullocks for once. Biddy could make up the spare room for you in no time and you could have a good drink without worry of the driving.’

  ‘There’s nothing I’d like better than to stay the night and play.’

  ‘That’s great. You can stay, then?’

  ‘No, no. It’s unfortunately impossible. I have to be at the Seapoint Hotel in Galway at six.’

  ‘You could use the barrack phone to cancel.’

  ‘No. Every time I get a case in the west I stay at the Seapoint. Eileen O’Neill is manageress there, and she is the best accompanist I know. She could have been a concert pianist. She has already taken the evening off. I’ll have a bath when I get to the hotel and change into the evening suit you saw hanging in the car. We’ll have dinner together and afterwards we’ll play. We’ve been studying Kreisler and I can hardly wait to see how some of those lovely melodies play. Some day you must meet her. This evening she’ll probably wear the long dress of burgundy velvet with the satin bow in her hair as she plays.’

  ‘I??
?m sorry I tried to force you. If I’d known I wouldn’t have tried to get the CWA function between you and that attraction.’

  ‘Otherwise I’d be delighted. I consider it an honour to be invited. But I suppose,’ he said, glancing at his watch, ‘that if I intend to be there by six I better be making the road shorter.’ He wrapped the violin in its frayed black silk and carefully returned it to its case. ‘What’s nice, though, is it’s not really goodbye,’ he said as they shook hands. ‘We’ll meet on the court day. And I can’t thank you enough for those drawings you made of the accident.’

  ‘They’re for nothing, and a safe journey.’

  At the door the Surveyor paused, intending to say goodbye to Biddy, but she was so intent on adjusting the needles of the machine to turn the heel of the sock that he decided not to bring his leaving to her notice.

  The lighting of the oil-lamp dispelled the increasing blood-red gloom of the globe before the Sacred Heart after he had gone, as dusk deepened into night and Biddy placed suit and white shirt and tie on the chair before the fire of flickering ash.

  ‘Will you be wanting anything to ate before the Function?’ she shouted.

  ‘No, Biddy.’ He shook his head.

  ‘Well, your clothes will be aired for you there and then when you want to change out of your uniform.’

  ‘Thanks, Biddy,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll leave your shoes polished by the table. I’ll not wait up for you as no doubt it’ll be the small hours. I’ll put your hot waterjar in the bed.’

  ‘Thanks, thanks, Biddy.’

  Quietly he rose and replaced the cheap fiddle in the case, fingering the broken string before adding the slack bow. He shut the case and replaced it between the tea-box and the red globe of the Sacred Heart lamp on the mantel.

  The smell of porter and whiskey, blue swirls of cigarette smoke, pounding of boots on the floorboards as they danced, the sudden yahoos as they swung, and the smile of the girl with the cloth fuchsia bells in her hair as he played, petrified for ever in his memory even as his stumblings home over the cold waking fields.

  Tonight in Galway, in a long dress of burgundy velvet, satin in her hair, the delicate white hands of Eileen O’Neill would flicker on the white keyboard as the Surveyor played, while Mrs Kilboy would say to him at the CWA, ‘Something will have to be done about Jackson’s thieving ass, Sergeant, it’ll take the law to bring him to his senses, nothing less, and those thistles of his will be blowing again over the townland this year with him dead drunk in the pub, and is Biddy’s hens laying at all this weather, mine have gone on unholy strike, and I hear you were measuring the road today, you and a young whipper-snapper from Dublin, not even the guards can do anything unknownst in this place, and everybody’s agog as to how the case will go, the poor woman’s nerves I hear are in an awful condition, having to pass that wooden cross twice a day, and what was the use putting it up if it disturbs her so, it won’t bring him back to life, poor Michael, God rest him, going to Carrick for his haircut. The living have remindedness enough of their last ends and testaments without putting up wooden crosses on the highways and byways, and did you ever see such a winter, torrents of rain and expectedness of snow, it’ll be a long haul indeed to the summer.’