Nora Webster (33 page)

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. “They 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

W
eek 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.”

Laurie pulled the record from its sleeve and put it on the turntable. Nora closed her eyes and listened.

“Follow the piano first. Then we’ll do the voice.”

At the beginning, the sound the piano made was direct and open. As soon as the woman’s voice, a deep rich contralto, began, however, it quietened and moved with subtlety, hardly there at all sometimes, but always ready to fill the silence, to come back in with more complexity between the verses.

“Now, let’s listen again,” Laurie said. “This time, the voice.”

What she noticed was a lingering tenderness on notes, a way of approaching the melody gently. The tone was neither sweet nor harsh; it hovered strangely between the two. The voice was sincere, she thought, but the singing was perfect and beautiful.

“This is Schubert’s hymn to music,” Laurie said. “The words were written by his poet friend who lived to be old. Imagine the music we would have if Schubert had lived to be old too! But that is the way of things. The German words are beautiful, and it loses a lot in translation. But this is the first verse in English:

“‘Thou lovely art, in how many grey hours

When the wild round of life ensnared me,

Hast thou kindled my heart to warm love

And carried me into a better world.
’
”

“It’s very beautiful how Schubert put these words to music. It was, of course, an act of love. He and the poet were lovers, or so they think.”

“Schubert and another man?” Nora asked.

“Yes, isn’t that marvellous? But sad, too, because Schubert died so young but the other man lived on and on. But we have the song to remember them, a song that came from love of music and love for someone else.”

“Who is the singer? She has a beautiful voice.”

“She’s Kathleen Ferrier. She was from Lancashire and she died young too.”

Laurie made Nora read the German words, made her try to get the pronunciation right. She showed her how, in German, the verb often came at the end of the phrase. They listened to the recording one more time and for the following week Laurie asked her to learn the first of the two verses in German.

Donal bought some records of his own and played them over and over. She did not want to ban his using her record player, but there were times when all she wanted to do was listen to something herself sitting in the armchair in the back room, only to find that Donal was there already.

Both Donal and Conor took a great interest in Fiona’s social life, where she was going and whom she was seeing. Her preparations for outings at the weekend, the clothes she wore and the make-up she used, and the arrival of her friends, had a way of filling the house with something new. When Aine came for her first visit after her appearance on
The Late Late Show
, she pretended that it was nothing, and did not seem to want to discuss it. Fiona found a way of including Aine in her new social life, and they went to a lounge bar in the town that Friday night together.

Close to Easter Fiona met a man named Paul Whitney, who was a solicitor from Gorey, at a dance in Wexford. Nora and Maurice had known his parents, as had Jim and Margaret. He was in his mid-thirties, and when Elizabeth Gibney heard the news, she told Nora that she had heard that he could become a district justice.

“He has a very good practice,” she said, “which he set up on his own, and people speak very highly of him. A friend of Thomas’s
used him in an insurance case and he was delighted with the outcome.”

Fiona began to invite Paul Whitney to the house. On Friday and Saturday evenings and often on Sunday too he would come into the back room and talk to all the family while Fiona was getting ready to go out. He had an opinion on everything; he knew a great deal not only about politics but about the church as well, as he handled legal affairs for a number of parishes and was on first-name terms with the bishop.

“He misses Rome,” he told Nora one evening. “He lived in dread of being made a bishop and being sent back to Ireland. And some of the priests in the diocese are a few kopeks short of a rouble, if you know what I mean. Not the brightest.”

Nora had never heard anyone talking about priests, or indeed bishops, in this way before.

He also knew about music and stereo systems. One evening he promised Nora that he would lend her his box set of Beethoven quartets and she could keep them as long as she liked, as he had gone back to listening to Bach.

“Ah, he was the genius of them all,” Paul said. “If God ever existed in Germany, which I doubt, then he came in the form of Bach.”

With Conor, he spoke of hurling and football, and with Donal, about types of cameras. He was open and friendly; even on Saturdays he came to the house wearing a jacket and tie. Each week the jacket was different, and the tie too. On the subject of Charlie Haughey, he had information that Nora had never heard before.

“If he could stay away from the women,” he said, “that would be the best thing for him and for all of us. But mark my words he has a lot of the party behind him and he’s the coming man.”

One evening in early summer when Jim and Margaret were
there, Paul arrived and began to discuss politics with them. Nora noticed how much at ease he was in the company of older people and could see Jim warming to him. She wondered what he spoke to Fiona about when they were alone.

Nora began to look forward to his visits. A few nights when Donal and Conor were in the other room, and Jim and Margaret not there, Paul sat for a while in the chair opposite hers and told stories and discussed matters of the day with herself and Fiona. Fiona would grow quiet as Paul addressed himself to Nora on the subject of music or religion or politics, matters on which Nora had often something to say as well. He was like Maurice in the way politics interested him, but he knew more, and he was interested in music, of course, which Maurice never was, and also, it emerged, in theatre. He read novels and had opinions on writers. On those nights when Paul and Fiona eventually left together to go to a lounge bar or a dance, Nora found herself sitting alone almost content. She had enjoyed his company and it was clear, she saw, that he had enjoyed talking to her too.

One day in the Market Square, as she was passing Essie’s, she saw a dress in the window that she thought might suit her, and she wondered about the price and if it would fit her. It seemed to be made of a light wool and was red and yellow in colour. She had not worn a dress like this for years. Once she went into the shop, she began to try on other dresses in the same light wool and in colours that she liked even better. She agreed to have three of them sent up to the house on approbation, thinking that she would need to check what they looked like in the light of her own house and to check also if she had the shoes to match them. The price was higher than she had ever paid for a dress before, but she thought that if she waited for the sale these dresses might be gone.

Fiona answered the door when the messenger-boy came with the
parcel of dresses. Later, she mentioned to Nora that Essie had sent up three dresses that she had thought might be for her, as she had been in Essie’s recently looking for a new dress, but these were the wrong size and the wrong look. Nora went into the front room where the parcel lay open and came back and told Fiona that they were, in fact, for her.

“Is it for something special?” Fiona asked.

“No, no,” Nora said. “I was just passing and saw a dress in the window that I liked and then I went in and tried some on.”

“I see,” Fiona said.

Upstairs, when the others had gone to bed, she tried the three dresses on and with each one walked down the stairs and checked herself in the hall mirror and, having carried down various pairs of shoes to see if they would match the dresses, she walked into the back room as though there were other people there and sat down on the armchair she normally used. She liked one of the dresses that had a belt around the waist and brighter colours than the others. She went into the hallway again and looked at her neck in the mirror and saw that the collar of this dress covered her neck better than the other two. She resolved that she would buy this one, and she would also buy new shoes, something more stylish, with a heel, she thought.

She left the other two dresses back with Essie the next day and paid for the one with the belt and the collar, but she did not think she would wear it until she had to go somewhere. It would be a good dress to have in the wardrobe. But on Friday after tea, as she was in her bedroom, she decided that she would wear it there and then. Having put it on, she sat at the mirror and brushed her hair and looked through her make-up bag, finding a light mascara and a black eye-liner. When she heard a car, she went to the window to see who it was and, on seeing it was just two of the neighbours, she went downstairs and made herself a cup of tea and put on some music.

Later, in the kitchen, she bumped into Fiona.

“You look great,” Fiona said. “Are you going out?”

“No,” she said, “I just thought I’d wear the dress since I bought it.”

A few minutes later she heard Fiona going out. She was sitting in the back room listening to a Mozart piano concerto when Fiona returned.

“I’m going to need the car tonight,” Fiona said.

“Are you going to Wexford?”

“I’m not sure where we’re going,” Fiona said.

Nora was about to ask if Paul was having a problem with his car, but there was a sort of briskness in Fiona’s tone that made her stop. Later, she heard the car starting and thought it strange that Fiona had not come in to say goodbye.

Over the next few weeks Fiona was moody, going to bed early on the nights when she did not go out. When Aine came for the weekend, Nora asked her if Fiona’s relationship with Paul Whitney had come to an end.

“No, not at all,” Aine said. “I think it’s going great.”

“But he hasn’t been in the house for weeks.”

“That’s the way she wants it, I think.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think she felt that everybody here was getting too friendly with him.”

“Who’s ‘everybody here’?”

“You had better ask her, but she said that there were a few nights when she felt left out of the conversation.”

“We all just talked to him in the normal way.”

“Don’t ask me. I wasn’t there.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

Aine looked at her sharply.

“One night she saw that you were dressing up.”

“And so?”

“And so she went and phoned Paul and they met in Bennett’s Hotel instead.”

“She thinks I dressed up because he was coming?”

“Don’t ask me. Ask her.”

“But is that what she thinks?”

“You’ll have to ask her.”

“I have more important things to do.”

With Laurie at the piano, she worked hard on her two songs. Sometimes the work was slow and frustrating, as Laurie ensured that she knew what every single German word meant and that her pronunciation was perfect.

Sometimes she wondered about Laurie, about the stories she told and the familiar way she spoke about people whom she did not know, including indeed people long dead. She liked to live in some realm of her own invention, as far away as possible from the small town where she actually found herself. Sometimes, as they worked, Laurie could create the illusion that much depended on the result of this, that they were in Paris or London, and thus, under Laurie’s intense scrutiny, Nora learned the two songs and managed to sing one of them in German as best she could, while Laurie’s concentration did not slacken for a single second.