Nora Webster (36 page)

As they waited for the food, she thought to break the silence, but stopped herself. When the sandwiches came, they ate them without speaking. Donal barely nodded when she asked him if he wanted
more. She could see that he was suffering, that his life at home had been destroyed and he could not have it back, but there was an element of rudeness, even aggression, in what he was doing now. Perhaps he was doing his best not to cry or call on her to help him by taking him home. Perhaps he knew that there was nothing she could say in reply to the list of complaints he could make, or any account of how he felt.

Suddenly, she thought of something.

“I will come down every Saturday,” she said, “and even if we can’t go downtown you can come and sit in the car or I can come into the parlour. And I’ll bring supplies for the week, whatever you need. And there’s also visiting on Sundays, and I know that Margaret will come and make sure you’re all right. So that’s Saturday and Sunday. And I think there are a few days when you might be able to come home for the afternoon. And if you just take it week by week you won’t know it until it’s the Christmas holidays, and then you can go down to the darkroom in Margaret’s every day.”

He looked at her seriously and nodded. For a few seconds he seemed to be thinking about what she had said. Then he nodded again. It struck her that he had been waiting to see what she would do, and he had now registered that she had not come down to tell him that he could come home with her if he wanted. Everything that she said implied that he was staying at St. Peter’s. He glanced at her sharply, as if to make sure that she was not going to offer him release, that she was not about to say that these promised visits were merely one option, and there were other options that they might consider. She tried to seem sympathetic but also to make clear that she had nothing more to add, that he would have to return to St. Peter’s and make the best of it.

She went to the bathroom and when she came back she noticed a subtle change in him. He seemed less blank, less dark in his mood.

“Do you know what I would like?” she asked. “I would like a letter from you sometime during the week, or even a photograph you have printed. And if there’s anything I can do to improve things, let me know. And if anything gets better, I would like to know too, so I won’t worry as much. Do you think you could do that?”

Her speaking about herself, her own needs, her own worry, made him appear even more alert. It occurred to her that he had thought more closely about her over the previous few years than she had about him. She wondered if that could be true. She knew that how she felt affected him, and now, for the first time, how he felt seemed more urgent, more worthy of attention than any of her feelings. All she could do was to let him know and make him believe that she would do everything she promised to do.

When they were sitting in the car, she spoke again.

“Every Saturday without fail,” she said. “And write and let me know what food you want us to bring. Or anything else you need.”

He nodded and then looked away. She saw that he was going to cry and thought it might be easier for him if she said nothing more, just started the car and drove towards St. Peter’s. If he needed her to stop along the way, then she would. They did not have to be back until five o’clock, so they still had fifteen minutes. But he did not speak again until she had parked the car in front of the school.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

B
y the time Conor asked her if he could have a camera for Christmas, she knew he had been looking at Donal’s photography magazines. He seemed to understand when she explained to him that it was essential that he leave them back exactly as he found them. She had noticed him changing now that Donal was no longer in the house. He went to bed before she told him to, or got coal from the shed for the fire before he was asked. When Margaret and Jim came to the house, he would sit in the back room for a while and listen to the conversation, although he would never go to their house on his own as Donal did. Instead, he would often go to Una’s house, where she would make him banana sandwiches.

Even though his school report had him ahead of everybody else, he was not satisfied. Some evenings, he would ask Fiona to take him through his Irish grammar, Fiona remarking to Nora afterwards that she only had to tell him something once and then he remem
bered. Because he listened to everything and forgot nothing, Nora had to be careful what she said in front of him. He always worried. If the car did not start immediately, he became concerned that they would need a new car. When they went to collect Aine from the train, Conor would walk up and down the platform worried that the train would not come, or that Aine might have missed it. He knew what time Aine had her lectures and what she thought about different professors, just as he found out everything he could from Fiona about where she went with Paul Whitney. So, too, he knew all about the Gibneys and the people who worked there, especially Mick Sinnott, who had come up to him at a hurling match and asked him if he was young Webster and told him that his mother was a great woman. Conor took more interest in the family, Nora joked, than she did, and knew more about everyone than they did themselves.

On her visits to St. Peter’s, Nora did not mention to Donal how much better he seemed to be. He told her more about his activities in the school and the different teachers and priests than he had ever told her about the Christian Brothers and the teachers there. She was so relieved that he had settled down in the school that she did not mind when she discovered that he told Margaret even more than he ever told her. She worked out a system of nodding in recognition when Margaret mentioned some detail of Donal’s life that she did not know. She wondered if Donal did this deliberately or if he was merely responding, when Margaret visited him regularly on Sundays, to her keener questioning about every single aspect of his life and every opinion that he had.

She knew she could not manage things between Donal and Conor when Donal came home for the Christmas holidays. Donal could not stop Conor wanting a camera, although he could undermine him by refusing to share any of his knowledge or by ignoring
his brother. Conor had more need for approval from others than did Donal, who often seemed oblivious to everyone except himself. And now, if Donal decided not to encourage him, Conor would make every effort to get Donal to change his mind. She smiled to herself one Saturday as she and Conor visited Donal in St. Peter’s.

“Donal, I’m thinking of getting a camera for Christmas,” Conor said.

“What sort of c-camera?”

Donal was in the front passenger seat and looked behind at his brother.

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll sell you mine. I was th-thinking of r-replacing it.”

“Is there something wrong with yours?”

“No, it’s g-good,” Donal said. “B-but I w-wanted a b-better one.”

She wondered if she should interrupt and either tell Donal that Conor wanted a brand-new camera, or tell Conor that what Donal had meant to say was that, since he was finding out more and more about photography, then he would need a different camera, but the one he was using now would be perfect for someone starting.

“How much?” Conor asked.

“I’ll s-sell it to you for t-two p-pounds.”

“What do you think, Mammy?” Conor asked.

“I think what he really means is that he will sell it to you for one pound ten, but if anything goes wrong with it in the first year, he’ll give you the money back.”

“Nothing will g-go wrong with it,” Donal said.

“Will you show me how to make prints if I buy the camera?” Conor asked.

“I’ll show you how to d-develop p-pictures in Auntie Margaret’s d-darkroom. I’ve learned a whole lot of new things d-down here.”

“When will you show me?” Conor asked.

“When I am home for C-christmas,” Donal said.

Conor, she knew, would go over every word of this conversation in his mind for days.

When the Christmas holidays came, Fiona went to Dublin to stay with Aine in her bedsit in Raglan Road. Donal took Conor down to Margaret’s house every day. This meant that, as she prepared the house for Christmas, Nora was alone most of the time. She could listen to records without having to worry about any of the others. She kept the recording of the
Archduke
Trio as something special; she did not listen to it every day. But if she was annoyed by anyone at work, she would think about this music and promise herself that she would play it as soon as she came in the door. She would listen to it carefully, never using it, as she did with other records, as background music while she was working in the kitchen.

What she had told no one, because it was too strange, was how much this music had come to stand for. It was her dream-life, a life she might have had if she had been born elsewhere. She allowed herself to live for a time each day in a pure fantasy in which she could have learned the cello as a child and then been photographed as this young woman was, eager and talented and in full possession of her world, with men beside her who depended on her to come in with her deeper, darker sound. It almost made her wince in embarrassment when she thought of her own mornings in Gibney’s working with figures and dockets and invoices, and her own morning walk across the town, and her own return home each day, and how meagre were the things she looked forward to, and how far these were from a recording studio, a concert platform, a name
that was known, how far from the spirited authority of this young woman’s playing. She wondered if she was alone in having nothing in between the dullness of her own days and the sheer brilliance of this imagined life.

It was agreed that she would not take any more singing lessons until early January. Thus in the time leading to Christmas, Nora had nothing new to worry about and Christmas itself was easier than it had been in any of the other festive seasons since Maurice died. Her relationship with Jim and Margaret was warm and casual; she even enjoyed the visits that Una and Seamus made, and almost looked forward to seeing Catherine and Mark and their family in Una’s house on St. Stephen’s Day. The idea came into her mind that this might have been what Maurice dreaded most when he was dying, that there would come a time when he would not be missed, that they would all manage without him. He would be the one left out. But she forced herself to believe that he would want them to be happy, or feel a semblance of happiness, and that there was no other way for them to live. Still, she wondered if she should try to mention his name at the table while they were having their Christmas dinner, but then she thought it would make them too sad, or sound too forced.

On a Sunday night at the end of January, with Aine back at university and Donal returned, without any obvious difficulty, to school, Nora was ironing clothes upstairs in her bedroom, when Conor shouted up to her to come down and look at the news.

“But what is it?” she asked.

“Just come down and look,” he replied.

“They shot a whole lot of Catholics,” he said when she came downstairs.

“Who?”

“The British.”

Soon, Fiona came in and the three of them sat together watching the reports from Derry.

“I hope Aine is all right,” Fiona said.

“What do you mean?” Nora asked. “She wasn’t planning on going to Derry, or anything?”

“No, but she’ll be upset by this.”

The British Army had shot into the crowd at a peaceful demonstration in Derry and had killed more than a dozen people. When the television news finished they turned on the radio; they heard tape of people screaming and then the sound of shots and then there were interviews with witnesses and with politicians. Nora watched Conor weighing up each word, and saw that Fiona, too, was listening closely to everything that was said.

She found it strange that as she walked to work the following morning only one man stopped her and said how terrible it was what had happened in Derry. Thomas Gibney seemed even more vigilant about the time, and who might be late. When Elizabeth came in, she barely mentioned it, and only when Elizabeth went for morning coffee with her mother did Nora feel free to wander out into the larger office, where a few people huddled around a newspaper spread out on a desk. When Mick Sinnott joined them, he said, “That’s it, then. No more waiting around, the whole lot of us should just go over the border. Take the place back.”

“You’d look well,” one of the girls said. “They’d shoot you too.”

“We’d all be well armed,” he said. “And we wouldn’t be anywhere we could be easily found.”

“You couldn’t even shoot a dead rabbit stuck in a gap,” another of the girls said.

In Slaney Street on her way home Nora saw two women she knew. They stopped when they saw her approach.

“Oh,” one of them said, “the mother of one of the boys shot was on the radio and she said he was only seventeen and he was shot in the back.”

“All we can do is pray for them,” the other woman said.

“It was very shocking,” Nora said. “Very shocking.”

“And after all the burnings they have been through,” one woman replied.

“There’s evil in those soldiers,” the other said. “Evil. You can see it in them.”