Nora Webster (24 page)

“A very old friend came by today

’Cause he was telling everyone in town

About the love that he just found

And Marie’s the name of his latest flame.”

There were roars of approval and whistles from the crowd as Philomena strummed louder on the guitar and Tim sang. Nora put her head back and closed her eyes, enjoying the luxury in the tone of the song, the urgent sound of it, and she remembered the summer that song came out, or maybe the summer after when it arrived in Cush, and at night someone would bring out a record player to a table in front of the Treacys’ bus, which had been moored and cemented down to make a summer house. They would use a long lead from one of the houses around that had electricity.

She remembered coming back along the lane from the Kavanagh’s house from her nightly walk with Maurice and finding all the children standing around in the twilight as the teenagers danced to Elvis. She could see some boys there, shy, and Fiona maybe dancing and Patricia Treacy and Eddie Breen and some of the Murphys and
Carrolls and Mangans. That was not even ten years ago, it might have been six or seven years ago, and if anyone had told her that she would be standing here now listening to this song and all the things that had happened between then and now, she would not have believed them.

Tom Darcy approached her when the song was over. He was holding Phyllis, whose face was flushed, by the hand.

“He says you can sing,” Phyllis said.

“Of course she can sing. That’s when we met her first and she was staying at the Gallaghers’ and there used to be parties.”

“I haven’t sung since then,” she said.

“Oh, come on,” Phyllis said. “What songs do you know?”

“My mother was a singer,” Nora said as though she were talking to people who had known her mother.

“Nora is a great singer,” Tom Darcy said. “Or she was then.”

“What do you know?” Phyllis asked again.

Nora thought for a moment.

“Brahms’s Lullaby, I think I know that.”

“In German?”

“I used to know it in German, but I know it in English.”

Phyllis put her drink on the counter of the bar.

“Now, we have to do this properly. I’ll write out the last verse in German and we can both sing that. I’ll sing the first in German, you sing the first in English and we’ll sing the last verse in German and then in English together.”

Phyllis, she could see, was excited.

“Could we not make it more simple?” she asked. “I haven’t sung for years. I haven’t sung since just after we were married.”

“Give me a sheet of paper and I’ll write out the German words. They’re really easy.”

From the opposite corner of the pub, a man was singing “Boolavogue” in a shaky voice. Phyllis was now writing furiously in a clear hand, and making Nora watch her as she wrote each word, humming the tune as she went along, while taking sips of the brandy.

By the time the man had finished singing all the verses of “Boolavogue,” Nora noticed a restlessness in the bar. The singing had offered colour and excitement and now people wanted to go back to drinking quietly and chatting to each other. There was also, she knew, a distrust of showiness down here, a feeling that anyone who would expose themselves by singing out loud in public should be mocked maybe, or gently laughed at later.

But Phyllis was determined. She had the verse written out in German and was ready to move to the centre of the bar where she and Nora could be seen. Nora knew that there were people in the bar who would recognise her and would wonder why she was singing in a pub when Maurice was not even a year dead.

Tom clapped his hands and called for silence and then, as Phyllis and Nora watched him, expecting to be introduced, he shrugged and made his way quickly back to where he had been, leaving them alone with everyone watching them.

When Phyllis in a loud voice announced that she and Mrs. Webster were going to sing a duet, there was laughter. This caused Phyllis to put her shoulders back and appear even more combative than during the quiz. Nora was glad that Phyllis was going to start alone, as she had no idea how to pitch her voice. As Phyllis began in a quivering German, it was clear to Nora that her voice had been trained either too much or too little. She could see the unforgiving faces around them. Any display made them uncomfortable, even a new car or a new combine harvester, or the first pair of slacks on a woman. But bad singing, high-pitched bad singing in a foreign lan
guage, would never be forgotten. It would be a cause of comment for years to come. If Phyllis had not made her mark on Blackwater during the quiz then she was certainly doing so now.

Nora concentrated as hard as she could. She was aware that there were people in the pub who knew the melody, or at least had heard it, and therefore she thought that she should make it sound like an ordinary song when she took over from Phyllis for the verse in English. She thought that she should bring her voice down, not allow any high-soprano sounds to emerge but still sing loud enough to be heard.

When the company saw that Phyllis was going to hand over to her, as though this was some sort of rehearsed party piece, she could see that some of the older men were unsettled and embarrassed. This was not what they had come out for this evening. But a group in the corner, which included a number of women, seemed to think it was hilarious.

“Lullaby and good night,” she began, surprised herself at how loud her voice was. She looked over at the group in the corner; they were nudging each other and laughing at her. She tried as she went on to soften her voice, to make the melody as close to a real lullaby as she could, a song she might sing to a child. She knew that if she did not get this group on her side by the end of this verse, then they would not be able to control themselves when she and Phyllis sang together in German. As she came to the last line, she kept her eyes on them and them only, but two or three of them were still laughing.

For the next verse she let Phyllis lead and tried to follow her, at first singing with her and then trying gently to move below her, but she gave this up when they hit one disastrous note together, both of them out of tune. As Phyllis looked at her almost in fear, she let Phyllis sing the last line on her own, not daring even to glance over
at the corner, keeping her eyes on the floor, praying that this would be over soon.

She knew the last verse in English best; when she heard that Phyllis was slowing down, letting her voice quieten, she felt more confident, she moved closer and tried for the last two lines to let her voice merge with Phyllis’s, keeping under still, but letting her voice loosen and become louder as Phyllis’s did. She did not dare look in the direction of the corner, but saw that those in front of her were listening carefully as the song came to an end.

The applause came more from a sense of relief than from any pleasure and she vowed never to do this again as long as she lived. She glared at the group in the corner, one of whom was now doing an imitation of a soprano voice gone wildly out of tune, to the delight of all the others.

As the bar got ready to close and last orders were called, Phyllis insisted on buying a drink for Tom Darcy and a number of his friends, and for Nora. Tom tried to stop her from paying, going so far as to take the money from her hand, but in the end she prevailed. Nora watched as she gulped down the glass of brandy and soda that she had on the counter while waiting for another one to be served. She wondered if it would be safe for her to drive home. She could see from Phyllis that it would not take much for her to sing another song, and she thought she might make herself most useful in the next few minutes by doing everything she could to prevent that.

In the car, when they had finally said good night to everyone, Nora realised that Phyllis was so drunk that she was almost fully sober. She concentrated hard as she reversed the car and seemed to be driving competently until Nora noticed that she had not turned
the headlights on. Once alerted, she appeared unable to remember where the switch for the headlights was. Eventually, she remembered, and Nora thought that if she could hold Phyllis’s attention in conversation all the way back to the town, then Phyllis might be more likely to concentrate also on the road ahead and not allow her mind wander or let herself fall asleep.

By the time they reached the crossroads at Castle Ellis, Phyllis had said a number of times how much she liked Tom Darcy and what a gentleman he was, and how much she liked Etchingham’s pub and how after the quiz in Monageer she and Nancy were offered no hospitality. She thought that Dick, her husband, might, once the quiz season was finished, come down to Etchingham’s on a Saturday night and said how nice it would be if Nora would come with them. When she was saying this for the third time, Nora realised that she was going to drive across the main Gorey-to-Wexford road without looking to see if anything was coming. She wondered what she could say to make Phyllis concentrate more on the road, if there was a single topic that might force her to slow down and drive with caution.

When they were safely on the narrow road that led from Castle Ellis through The Ballagh to Finchogue, Nora began Brahms’s Lullaby again. She let her own voice go even deeper so that when Phyllis joined in they were doing harmony, but she was leading. They sang the two verses in English.

“You’re almost a contralto,” Phyllis said.

“No, I’m a soprano,” Nora said.

“No, no, you’re a mezzo now, but it’s bordering on contralto. Your voice is much deeper than mine.”

“I was always a soprano. My mother was a soprano.”

“It can happen. Your voice can deepen over time.”

“I haven’t sung for years.”

“Well, it was happening while you were silent, and with a bit of practice your voice would be very good, quite unusual.”

“I don’t know.”

“They do auditions sometimes for the choir in Wexford. It’s a lovely choir. We usually sing a Mass.”

“I’m not sure I’d have time.”

“Well, I’ll tell them about you and we can see. And maybe you could come to the Gramophone Society? We meet every Thursday in Murphy-Flood’s. We each make a choice of records.”

Nora did not want to tell her that she did not own any records and that the old record player was used only by the children for pop records. Phyllis started the lullaby again, this time going more slowly and leaving space for Nora to come in under her voice and then holding the last note of each line as long as Nora could.

They sang until they reached Enniscorthy, and even as they drove through the town Phyllis still hummed the tune. Somehow, the singing had steeled her nerve, calmed her and made her concentrate on the road so that as she navigated the narrow streets, Phyllis, in her driving and her general demeanour, did an imitation of a perfectly sober woman driving her friend home. As she got out of the car, having been driven to her door, Nora thanked Phyllis and said that she, too, hoped that they would meet one another again soon.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

O
n the first morning, in the caravan she had rented for two weeks in Curracloe, Nora had to wake Donal and Conor and give them notice that they had half an hour to vacate their beds so she could fold them away and fix the table in between the seats. At the other end of the small caravan, where she and Fiona and Aine slept, she set out the breakfast things, and went to the shop for bread or milk and the morning paper. When she came back they were still dozing. No matter what she said they would not get up until she told them that she would pull the blankets from them and put the table in place while they lay there. Even then they moved with reluctance. Within a few minutes, however, Conor was cheerful, but Donal did not speak as they had breakfast; he found the newspaper and read the latest account of the moon voyage and the astronauts with fierce attention, eating without even looking at the food.

Then he lay back on the cushions and stared at the ceiling. After
a while he took his camera out and pointed it at objects, focussing carefully and narrowing his eyes, framing a shot with deliberation, often of the smallest, slightest object. He appeared to be thinking, but she wondered also if he was not just trying to annoy her.

She knew that there were two things that preoccupied him. First, he wondered when they would go to the strand so that he could be left alone in the caravan; he watched in case they were taking a picnic, which meant they would not be back at all during the day. When she suggested that he come with them, he shrugged and said that he might come later. Nora knew that he would spend the morning brooding over his photographic magazines, the ones that came every month, that Aunt Margaret paid for, or ones he bought out of his pocket money; they would cheer him up for at least a few hours, after which he would return to poring over the large manual on photography that Una had given him.

Also, he was watching the time, since coverage of the moon voyage began at different times each day. As soon as they arrived he had gone to the television room of the Strand Hotel. Immediately, he had taken photographs of the television set itself, using the wide-angled lens he had got for Christmas from Nora, or long-exposure shots that she did not fully understand. She knew how deeply involved he was in this, and how easily he could become irritated by any questions about its purpose.

Nora had watched him explain it with too much eagerness and intensity when Una and Seamus had stopped by on that first evening, his stammer becoming even worse than usual. And she had noticed how puzzled they had seemed.

It was hard for Donal to accept that most people brought cameras on their holidays so that they could take snapshots on the beach. There was a box at home under the bed full of black-and-white pho
tographs from holidays in the past, from the fields behind the cliff at Cush and from the strand there, all of them in pouches in folders with the negatives on the other side. When Seamus asked Donal why he couldn’t just take snaps of them all enjoying themselves, Donal almost winced at the word “snap” and stammered badly at the beginning as he tried to explain again that he was only interested in the television at the hotel and the images of space which might appear on it. And then he spoke too quickly as he explained how he would frame each shot to capture the surface of the television screen and within that the images of space, and that he would work out a special way of developing these photographs in the darkroom in his aunt Margaret’s when he got home.

“Would you not be better all the same,” Seamus asked, “to take photographs of people?”

Donal shrugged in a mixture of boredom and open contempt.

“Donal!” Nora said.

“I—” Donal began, but his stammer would not let him go much further. They all became silent as he tried. Then he lifted his head and looked brave and determined.

“I don’t take photographs of people anymore,” he said calmly.

On the next morning, there was a haze over everything. They found a place in the sand dunes where they could spread two rugs and lie out under the pale sun. Nora made Donal come with them so that he could help them carry the picnic basket and so that he would know where they were if he needed to find them.

“The water is beautiful,” she said. “At least it was yesterday.”

“You can see n-nothing,” Donal said. “Is it like this all d-day? I want to take p-pictures of this.”

“The haze will be gone in an hour or two.”

He went back to the caravan to fetch his camera. They made
jokes when he appeared again, Fiona and Aine insisting that he could not take photographs of them until their suntan had improved. Donal walked away without speaking and moved towards the sea.

“He’ll get nothing in this light,” Aine said. “Sure, you can see nothing.”

“That’s what he wants,” Fiona said. “Have you not seen the pictures he developed? The big ones? They’re almost blank.”

“Where are they?” Nora asked.

“He has them with him in a sort of folder.”

“Well, he didn’t show them to me.”

“He didn’t show them to anyone,” Fiona said. “But they all fell out on the floor the other day and I started to help him pick them up. He nearly bit me. I think he’s still learning how to develop them but he says it’s deliberate.”

Nora watched as Donal moved down the strand towards the shoreline. She smiled to herself as she saw him taking his pullover off and tying it around his waist, while still holding the camera like a precious object. As he moved further towards the water, she could no longer make him out clearly.

The sea was rougher than she ever remembered it. She wondered if there was more shelter at Cush and if the waves there broke more gently. Also, the strand there was shorter and there were stones at the edge of the shore. Here there were sand dunes and the long strand, no stones, no shelter, no cliffs made of marl. She looked north towards Keatings’ but she could see nothing and was glad of that, and glad, too, that, no matter how great the visibility, Cush could never be seen from here. It was probable, she thought, that on a morning like this there would be no one at all in Cush, people would not venture down the cliff there until the haze had lifted.

The girls had changed into their bathing costumes and slowly she did too.

“Did you not bring a book?” Nora asked Conor.

“I’m fed up reading.”

“I hope you don’t think you’re going to spend the day sitting there looking up in our faces,” Fiona said.

“And listening to our conversation,” Aine added.

“All about your boyfriends?” Conor asked. “Mammy, you should have heard them last night, it was all about Adamstown and White’s Barn.”

“I hate Adamstown,” Aine said.

“Fiona likes it,” Conor said.

“Shut up, Conor,” Fiona said.

“Conor, maybe someday if it rains we’ll go into Wexford and get you some books,” Nora said.

“He has his tennis racquet,” Fiona said.

“Leave him alone,” Nora replied.

Fiona went down on her own to test the water.

“The waves are high,” she said when she came back. “And they’re breaking right in close so you don’t have a choice about getting wet.”

Once they had persuaded Conor to change into his togs, all four of them walked down the strand towards the water. Suddenly, from the distance, a foghorn boomed.

“It must be Rosslare,” Nora said. “I’ve never heard it this loud before.”

The waves were powerful enough to knock her over. Leaving Conor in the care of his sisters, she tried to swim into one of the waves as it broke, attempting to get beyond it, but it toppled her over so that for a moment she was completely powerless in the
water. She moved out before the next one broke and then swam out further again to where it was almost calm, finding a sandbank. She stood and signalled to the others, but they were too busy waiting for the next wave to crash, Conor running back to the shoreline, shouting to his sisters and laughing.

They would have twelve more days, she thought. And if the weather stayed like this then the girls might even forget that they had made her promise to drive them in to the town and deposit them home at the first sign of boredom or bad weather. Just before they had bought the house in Cush, before Donal and Conor were born, they had rented Kerr’s hut above the river at Keatings’. It had rained every day. It had rained so much that eventually she had no dry clothes for Fiona and Aine, nothing at all. And there was no electricity in the hut and no heater, just a couple of gas rings for cooking. For a day, maybe more, none of them could go out. She had taught the girls a number of card games and they had played Scrabble, but, when they tired of these games, there was nothing for them to do. They could not go home, because this was their only holiday. How strange and distant those days seemed now, all of them cooped up in a two-room hut with the damp seeping in, and clothes everywhere spread out to dry.

Conor had become excited by the water. She watched him taking the full force of a wave and being dragged back to the shoreline. He had looked for a second as though he was going to cry as he picked himself up and stood there in shock, but then she saw him smile and call to his sisters a warning that an even bigger wave was coming. He moved between them, holding their hands as it broke. Nora watched them from the sandbank, noticing the heavier boom of the foghorn coming from Rosslare. She could feel the chill of mist in the air as the power of the sun seemed to weaken. If it began to rain, and
if the rain did not lift, they would all go home and she would forget about the money they had paid for the caravan.

In the days that followed, however, the weather did not change much. Sometimes in the morning the sun burned through the haze more quickly; other times, the day settled into a sort of windless greyness. It was always mild enough to stay on the strand and they never changed the spot they had found in the dunes on the first day. Sometimes Donal came to find them, and walked down along the strand with his camera. All their efforts to encourage him to get into the water, however, failed.

Each day he made his way to the television lounge of the Strand Hotel. There were always a number of people, he said, watching the news of the approach of the astronauts to the moon. Sometimes they brought their children with them, children who wanted to talk and shout so that Kevin O’Kelly’s commentary could not be heard. He wished that there was somewhere else he could watch television without interruption; one man from Dublin kept giving him advice about how to focus his camera and how to get the best shots.

“Nothing is ever perfect,” Nora said to him. “The world is made up of men like that. Just thank him and smile and ignore him.”

Fiona had already done interviews and secured a job in a school in the town on the condition that she pass her final exams. When she phoned the training college from the call-box in the village, she learned that she had done so and was now qualified as a teacher. She arranged for a friend to come to collect her and borrowed money from Nora, promising to give it back when she got her first pay cheque. Although she said that she would come back to stay with them in the caravan before the holiday was over, Nora did not expect to see her.

She was now alone with the other three. Using her library card
and the cards of her two brothers, Aine had borrowed a stack of books about history and politics, the sort of books that Maurice might have been interested in. She acquired a cheap fold-up chair from the shop in the village one day and began to carry it and her books to the strand. She came swimming with Nora and Conor and managed to be polite, but, with her sister gone, she was oddly distant. When she was not reading she was mainly silent and Nora did not think she wanted her thoughts interrupted. When they passed the tennis court, Nora asked Aine if she might want to go there even to watch a game, as there were boys and girls her own age there, but she was not interested.

One night Donal got special permission to stay late in the hotel, as it was possible that the moon walk would begin and he wanted to be sure he did not miss it. He had already taken four rolls of film which he kept in a special bag and Nora knew that he would spend the rest of the summer in the darkroom developing them. It was agreed that Nora could collect him at two in the morning. Although the caravan park was close enough to the hotel, she did not want him walking back there on his own so late at night.

It took a while, as she waited outside the hotel, ringing the bell at intervals, to alert the night porter who came to the door with a manager. As they opened the door, they seemed suspicious of her; the manager asked her what she wanted. She explained gently that she had come to collect her son, who was in the television room watching the moon landing. The night porter stayed with her in the lobby while his colleague fetched Donal. The manager and the night porter seemed unfriendly, but she presumed that this was because she had disturbed them sleeping.

The next day, when all three were settled in their usual place on the strand, she had gone down to the water on her own, leaving
Aine reading and Conor looking through the pages of a comic book he had bought with money his uncle Jim had given him. The waves were still high. When Conor was with her she had to watch out for him and did not feel relaxed swimming on her own into deeper water. Now she could swim out beyond the waves where the water was calmer and she could float and look at the sky and try the backstroke, which she had learned years before but never perfected.

She was paying no attention to anything, but as she was turning to change to the breast-stroke she saw Aine, at the edge of the water waving to her. Where was Conor, she thought? Where had Conor gone? She began to swim towards Aine, who was clearly in some distress. Since there were other people on the strand she could not fathom why Aine was not calling on them to help.

She swam in, gasping.

“It’s Donal,” Aine said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

“Did he have an accident?”

“No, but something happened at the hotel.”

Aine explained that they had told Donal at the hotel that, since he was not a resident, then he could not use the television lounge.