“We left one sore Christian Brother down in the monastery,” Val Dempsey said.
“He said he wouldn’t be bullied or ordered around,” John Kerrigan said. “We told him how much you were respected in the town, and all your family. But he still wouldn’t budge.”
“Then we had to tell him,” Val Dempsey said, “that he and the other brothers would be on their own in the school, because no teacher would pass the picket. He went mad when he heard about the picket. No one had told him what was in your letter.”
“He said a few things that I wouldn’t repeat,” John Kerrigan said. “A bit surprising coming from a Christian Brother.”
She smiled at the sound of this, and at how earnest the two teachers seemed. But she became serious as Val Dempsey spoke.
“So we sat down and informed him that we weren’t leaving until it was sorted out. God, he was very red in the face. He said it was his school and he would do what he liked. So we just sat there looking at him.”
“I made clear to him eventually,” John Kerrigan said, “that he could settle this simply and easily. And he asked how and I told him fair and square that he could put the young fellow back into the other class and no one would think any the worse of him.”
“He told me he wouldn’t be threatened, but that if we left it with him he would consider what to do.”
“So we told him no, that we needed a decision now. And he walked up and down the room and eventually he stopped and said that he would do nothing tomorrow, he would not be bullied about tomorrow, but some day during the week he would move the lad back into the A-class. And we told him that would be fine and we decided to get out of there while the going was good.”
“So I hope that’s all right with you?” Val Dempsey asked.
“It is better than all right, it is perfect,” she said. “And I am very grateful to the two of you.”
She was almost going to apologise for invoking the curse, but decided not to. It might make it seem as though she had not meant everything else she had said. She accompanied them to the hall and wished them good night then went into the front room and watched them driving away. She was not sure how to feel. No one would believe her, she thought, if she told them that she had the materials to make a placard upstairs in her bedroom and that she had threatened all the teachers in the Christian Brothers school with a curse.
When Conor came home for dinner on Wednesday he found her in the kitchen.
“I got moved back into the A-class,” he said.
“That’s great,” she replied.
“There was a big cheer when I came in. Brother Herlihy called me out of the other class and told me to get my school bag, that I was moving. I thought he was going to put me in the C-class.”
“But there isn’t a C-class,” Nora said.
“Well, they could invent one,” he said. “Anyway, he came into the A-class with me and asked me who I was sitting beside last year and so I am back sitting beside Andy Mitchell.”
The next day when he came home from school he sought her out again.
“Did you have anything to do with me being moved back into the A-class?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because I saw Feargal Dempsey’s da up here on Sunday night, and today after a break when Brother Barrett had been in a bad mood all morning Feargal said that we’d have to send Webster’s ma down after him.”
“I don’t know what he meant,” Nora said.
When Fiona went out with a group of teachers on the following Friday night, she was shown the letter which Nora had written. On Saturday morning Nora was in the front room reading the newspaper when Fiona came in.
“It was your handwriting all right,” she said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have believed it.”
“Well, it’s all resolved now,” Nora said.
“It might be resolved for you, but some of them think that I had something to do with it.”
“Well, I hope you told them that you didn’t.”
“I might be applying for another job in the future and the letter would be on my file.”
“I think it will all be forgotten about.”
“And I hear you cursed all the teachers in the Christian Brothers school.”
“I threatened to curse anyone who passed my picket.”
“Well, I have to live here and work here.”
“Yes, and I had to make sure that Conor was back in the A-class.”
“I think I should have been consulted.”
“You would have told me not to send the letter.”
“I certainly would.”
“I’m lucky that I didn’t consult you then, aren’t I?”
She remembered that years ago Fiona had a cross nun called Sister Agnes teaching her who became crosser by the day so that Fiona was afraid to go to school. Nora had disguised her handwriting and written a number of anonymous letters to Sister Agnes and her reverend mother threatening the law on them unless the nun quietened down and stopped slapping the girls for no reason. The reverend mother had shown the letters to one of the lay teachers, who had shown them to Maurice, saying that they believed they had been written by a woman called Nancy Sheridan whose husband owned a supermarket in the Market Square and who had a daughter in Sister Agnes’s class. When Maurice told Nora what had happened, in a tone of deep disapproval, Nora said nothing. But Sister Agnes had become quieter and nicer, Fiona soon reported.
She was tempted now to tell Fiona about the letters she wrote to Sister Agnes, but did not think that Fiona would find that funny. She was also going to tell her that she was becoming just like her father and her uncle Jim, but thought better of that too. It occurred to her that Fiona might have said more had she not wanted the car that evening to go to the dance in White’s Barn in Wexford.
The fight with Brother Herlihy had given her strength. She found herself, on waking in the morning, thinking of the day ahead with a sort of ease. She did not wish she could go back to sleep. She began to add up all the money she had saved, and, since it would soon be her turn to present her choice of records to the Gramophone Society, she thought that she should really buy a stereo record player and even some records. She decided to ask Phyllis to come with her to Cloke’s so they could choose a record player.
Phyllis brought a number of her own records so she could sample the sound using music with which she was familiar. There were two stereo systems reduced in price. Having listened to a record of Maria Callas singing Verdi, she dismissed both of them. Nora had warned her that she did not want to buy anything that was too expensive, and as Phyllis studied what was on display she said several times that she was keeping the price in mind. There would be no extravagance, she said, but at the same time it would be better not to buy something that you would have to replace in a few years. In the corner she spotted a turntable and two very small speakers, which was only slightly more expensive than the two whose price had been marked down.
“I have a hunch about this one. I think it’s the one my sister has and she swears by it. Don’t mind the small speakers.”
When the assistant played a record for them on this machine, Nora was not sure she could judge the sound. Phyllis, on the other hand, could talk with certainty about depth of sound, and about bass and treble. Even though this one, she said, was more expensive than the other two, whose prices had been reduced, she was certain it was much better.
Phyllis came home with Nora and helped her to set the system up in the back room. She left the Maria Callas record and another one she had brought, of piano music. They would all see it now, all of her visitors, Nora thought, and they would think her extravagant. She would have to steel herself, no matter what comments they made, not to care. She had wanted this and now she had it.
One Saturday a few weeks later, she went on the train with Fiona and the boys to Dublin. They met Aine in The C
ountry Shop for a late lunch, and then she asked the girls if they would look after their brothers for an hour or so, as she needed to go shopping on her own. She said that she would meet Fiona and the boys at Amiens Street station to catch the train home. Phyllis had given her the names of three record shops. One, she said, was small and would be easy to miss; it was opposite a pub called Doheny & Nesbitt in Baggot Street. Another was called May’s, and it was on Stephen’s Green, near the top of Grafton Street; and the third, which she had heard the Radfords mention, was McCullough Pigott’s in Suffolk Street at the bottom of Grafton Street.
She had decided to buy ten records. The excitement she felt was new, like something she had felt after she married when she bought a dress or a coat. Phyllis had advised her against compilations, unless the record contained songs and arias by a single singer whose name she knew. She would be better, Phyllis told her, to buy records that had a full concerto, or a symphony, or a trio or quartet. After recitals at the Gramophone Society she had written down names of composers and names of individual pieces that she liked. But she would never have enough time to search for all of them.
When she found the shop in Baggot Street, she realised that she wanted almost everything. She would have to move fast and make choices. If she bought three or four records here and then three each in the other two shops, that would be enough.
In the background there was choral music playing and she thought it was beautiful. She almost asked the man behind the counter what it was and then decided not to. In the end, although she was sure she was making the wrong choices, she selected two Beethoven symphonies, the Brahms Hungarian Rhapsodies and a record of Maria Callas singing. In May’s she thought she would buy more records with singing, maybe even with opera highlights, despite Phyllis’s advice, and then in McCullough Pigott’s she would buy chamber music.
As she was leaving McCullough Pigott’s she noticed a pile of records that had no prices on them. They looked as though they had just been taken from the manufacturer’s box. At the top of the pile was the album she had heard at Dr. Radford’s, which she had taken home and later given back, the Archduke Trio, and it had the photograph on the sleeve that had stayed in her mind, the young woman with the strong, shy smile and blue eyes and blond hair. She brought the record over to the counter and asked how much it was.
“Oh, they’re not priced yet,” the assistant said.
“I don’t have long,” Nora said, “but I’d buy it if it wasn’t too dear.”
“A lot of people have come in looking for it,” the assistant said. “We had to re-order it.”
The excitement of buying the records brought with it, she now saw, an ability to be downcast, easily disappointed.
“The manager has gone now,” the assistant said, “but he’ll be back on Monday.”
“I’m going home on the train today to Wexford,” Nora replied.
She tried to appear both humble and persistent. It was clear what the price range of the record was. She looked through a stack of records and found one which had the same label, EMI His Master’s Voice, and she brought it over to the assistant, indicating the price.
“I think the price has gone up,” the assistant said. “I’m sorry, now I’ll have to check.”
It was close to half past five and Nora knew she would soon have to start walking towards Amiens Street station. But she was determined to buy the record.
“I come to Dublin often,” she called towards the assistant, who was going through catalogues, “and if it is more than the other EMI record then I’ll pay the difference the next time I am here.”
When the assistant looked up, the expression on her face seemed to soften.
“What I’ll do is I’ll let you have it for one pound, and then the next time you are here, if you could ask me, and I’ll reimburse you if it’s less, and if it’s more, which I think it is, then you can pay me.”
Nora fished a pound note from her purse, thanked the woman and left the shop, making her way quickly to the railway station.
On Sunday morning when the boys were at mass and Fiona was still in bed, she put the record on and studied the photograph on the sleeve, looked at the men with their dark good looks and then at the young woman between them, who seemed happier the more Nora looked at her. She listened to the first movement over and over, relishing the uncertainty of it, as though someone was making an effort to say something even deeper and more difficult, and hesitating and then giving in to a simpler melody before moving out of it again into strange sudden lonely moments that the violin or the cello played with a sadness that she wondered how these three young people could know about.
From then into the New Year she played the records whenever she had time, or when she was alone in the back room. For Christmas, the two boys and the two girls and Una gave her three Beethoven symphonies that she did not have, Aine buying them in Dublin. Margaret phoned Phyllis and found out that Nora might prefer something quieter and she bought her the Brahms cello sonatas played by Janos Starker. This meant that she had enough to choose from for her own first recital at the Gramophone Society.
Jim and Margaret came to the house often on Saturday nights and, when Fiona left for the dance in White’s Barn and Conor went to bed, they watched The Late Late Show with Nora and Donal. The show featured discussions about Northern Ireland week after week, in between discussions about women’s liberation and changes in the Catholic church. Jim developed a great dislike for a number of panellists on the show, but Nora often agreed with the ones who were making the case for change, as she felt that Maurice would have done.
One Saturday night in February, when the argument began to centre on the lack of civil rights in the Republic as much as in Northern Ireland, Jim was so enraged that he seemed on the verge of asking her to turn off the television.
When a break came for advertisements, she went to the kitchen and made tea and was coming into the room with a tray as the programme resumed.
Gay Byrne, the host, had clearly been talking to the audience during the break and the camera was focussed on a group of women in the front row. Nora recognised some of them, feminists who were often panellists on the show. As Nora put down the tray on the coffee-table, one of them was talking about slum housing conditions in Dublin and the march that day by the Dublin Housing Action Committee which had ended in a sit-in on O’Connell Bridge.
“What would you say to the ordinary people of Dublin,” Gay Byrne asked, “who were stuck in traffic for hours because of your sit-in?”
The camera moved to the next woman, whom Nora recognised immediately as Aine. Donal shouted out her name, but it took Jim and Margaret a few seconds more to register that it was her.
“Oh, good God,” Margaret said.
“Turn it up,” Nora shouted.
Aine was in mid-sentence explaining that if the people of the South cared so much about discrimination against Catholics in the North, maybe they should get their own house in order.
“Instead of running guns,” she went on, “they might be better to put in proper sewage systems and proper water supplies in the tenements of Dublin.”
She ended by saying that she was proud to be involved in the sit-in and would invite people from the North to come down and see the miserable conditions of working people in Dublin. As she was about to add another sentence, Gay Byrne put his hand up and moved the microphone to somebody else.
“Oh, good God,” Margaret said again. “Our Aine!”
“I-is sh-she in one of th-those organisations?” Donal asked.
“I’m sure she is studying very hard during the week,” Nora said.
“Sh-she sh-hould have t-told us. We m-might have m-missed her,” Donal said.
What was strange now, Nora saw, was Jim. He was almost smiling.
“‘Instead of running guns, they might be better to put in proper sewage systems,’” he said. “Th
ey are my sentiments exactly. I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
“She speaks very well,” Margaret said. “And she must have been nervous. I heard that it is very hard to talk on television.”
“And sitting beside all those feminists,” Nora said. “I’d say there’ll be a lot of talk about her after mass tomorrow.”
“She’ll be on the panel next,” Margaret said. “But I didn’t know that she had any interest in housing. Maybe it’s on her course.”
Nora looked at Margaret and poured the tea. It was clear how surprised she was, and that she disapproved, but Nora loved how ready she was to disguise her feelings.
They watched the rest of the programme in case Aine spoke again and saw once, when there was a shot of her side of the audience, that she had her hand up to speak, but the microphone did not go to her.
“There we are now,” Margaret said when the show had ended. “Wasn’t that a good one?”
“Is sh-she a s-socialist?” Donal asked.
“I don’t know,” Nora said. “Maybe she’ll tell us when she comes down the next time.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Week by week, Laurie began to work with her further on “The Last Rose of Summer,” and suggested adding a German song.
“It should be something that would surprise them in an audition, maybe a Schubert song which will show your voice to its best effect. You know, I was in France when the Germans came and they even took the convent, and we had to move into a farmhouse, but I never stopped admiring Schubert and listening to his music. Now, I think I know a song that will make a difference to you.”
She rummaged through her records.
“Now, I have it. And I’m going to play it. Just this song and I want you to listen, let it sink in, and then we’ll look at the words in English and then we’ll do the German line by line.”