Second Fiddle (10 page)

“Town,” my mother said. “If you call Ballymore a village, you won't be very popular around here. You aren't even allowed to call Ballybeg a village, and goodness knows.…”

Ballybeg is the place we live on the outskirts of (“Of which we live on the outskirts” is more correct, but I thought you might find it hard to get your head around that.).

“Bally
beg
is definitely a village,” I said to Don. “Two streets and a SuperValu. And twenty-five pubs, of course.”

“Seven,” said my mother, “one of which is really more a restaurant, and a new housing estate over beyond the woods, and a bus stop.”

“So you can get out of it,” I murmured.

“But Ballymore is positively sophisticated by comparison,” my mum went on. “It has an
arts
center, Don, and two gasoline stations, and there's a patisserie opening in the autumn. Plus a primary school
and
a secondary.”

“As you see,” I said to Don, “I was wrong. It's clearly a town, Ballymore. Practically a city. The patisserie pushes it up a class, I'd say.”

Don smiled. He looked too old to be anyone's boyfriend, but even so, I thought I'd better make quite sure.

“Did you know my dad in the olden days?” I asked.

“We were in college together,” said Don. “All three of us. He and I and your mother.” He put on a solemn face. “I was very shocked to hear of his death. I'm sure you miss him terribly.”

“We do,” I said. “Especially Mum. It's very sad for her. She's desperate for a new baby.”

Don looked embarrassed. “Oh dear,” he murmured, and dabbed his mouth with his napkin.

“Mags!” said my mum loudly. “That's not true. And even if it were.…”

“Well, you went totally soppy over Lorna,” I retorted. “That's next-door's baby,” I explained to Don.

“I didn't. She's a lovely baby, I like babies. It doesn't mean … what you said.”

I looked at Don and shrugged. “Sorry. I take it back,” I said. “She's perfectly normal, really. I didn't mean she'd be the type to steal babies out of their prams outside supermarkets.”

“Mags!”

“
Now
what have I said?”

“Get the dessert, please,” said my mother weakly.

“And then may I go? I have an important meeting.”

Don tittered.

“Do you think children can't have important meetings?” I challenged him when I came back into the dining room, carefully carrying a plate with a magnificent summer pudding on it, leaking delicious-looking purple juices. I adore summer pudding. If your parents don't know how to make it, I suggest you find a cookbook with a recipe for this fabulous dessert in it and give it to them for Christmas. I wouldn't recommend you learn to make it yourself, because once you start on that, you are on a slippery slope that ends with you taking out the dustbins and scrubbing the kitchen floor.

“Oh, I'm sure they can,” he blustered; Don, I mean. “I'm sure they can.”

“My friend has been called to an audition for the Yahooey-Manooey school,” I went on haughtily. “She needs some assistance with her plans.”

“The Yehudi
Menuhin
school? My goodness, that
is
important.”

“You've heard of it?” I was surprised. I'd been half thinking Gillian might have made up the whole thing. I'm not calling her a liar, more a fantasist.

“It's world-famous. Your friend must be a star musician.”

“She's fabulous,” I said proudly. “She can really make that fiddle sing.”

“I thought she wasn't your friend,” my mother intervened. “I thought you didn't even like her.”

“She takes getting to know. She's a bit off-putting at first. Terribly serious. And her face is too small.”

“Ah yes,” said Don, “talented people can be rather distant.”

“Exactly,” I said gravely. “And they expect you always to play second fiddle to them. They seem to think other people are only sausage-eaters.”

“Nothing wrong with eating sausages,” said Don stoutly.

I cheered up at that. Maybe he wasn't so bad. He's obviously a big summer pudding fan too, so he must have his priorities right.

“And besides,” Don said, “even the most talented performers in the world are nothing without an audience. Have you ever thought of it that way? Somebody has to appreciate their performance, or it's wasted. They might as well grow potatoes or whittle sticks if nobody cares to listen.”

“Well then,” I said.

I hadn't thought of it that way, as it happens, but he is so right, when you think about it. He's a remarkably intelligent fellow, really, all told.

Gillian

I couldn't believe it when Mags told me what she'd said to her mother's friend. She gets away with it because she's such a child, I suppose.

“You
didn't!
” I squealed. “Why did you say that about your mother?”

Did I mention before about Mags's deficiencies in the tact and diplomacy department? Possibly not. But believe me, she could learn a thing or two from a crab about keeping your mouth shut and your eyes open.

“To warn him off, of course,” she said, tossing her hair, only with that new hairstyle, it doesn't work so well. “Men are always terrified of women who want babies. And anyway, it's true.”

What does she know about what men are afraid of? She's only eleven. (Oooh, that's so not true! I'm twelve and a quarter. She's always trying to make me sound much younger than her. It's just so she can boss me around. Signed:
Mags
)

“But why would you want to warn him off?” I asked. “Why shouldn't your mother have a boyfriend if she wants one?”

I wish someone would be
my
mum's boyfriend. Then we might start to have something like a life in our family.

“I would have thought that was obvious,” Mags said pompously. She can be quite a pompous little madam when she wants.

“It's not obvious at all,” was all I said. I didn't want to provoke her.

“But my dad.…”

“Is dead,” I said flatly.

I didn't mean it to come out rudely. I just meant to shake her out of her haughty mood, but as soon as I'd said it, I realized I'd gone too far. You have to be careful around people who have had a death in the family. They're sort of fragile and spiky at the same time.

There was a moment of complete silence between us. The stream gurgled complacently on.

“Well,” Mags said stiffly, at last, “I suppose I shouldn't have expected much sympathy from
you,
with your violin and your snooty mother and your wandering father and your precious audition.”

I gasped. Now she was the one who was going too far.

“I thought you were on my side,” I said.

“And I thought you were on mine.”

We glowered at each other, our elbows on the flat rock she claims is a table, our chins resting on our hands. The silence between us stiffened. You could almost taste the anger in the air. She was plainly the one in the wrong. OK, I'd been a bit insensitive, but she was the one who'd attacked me and my family. But I'm older, so I thought the best thing was to resist the impulse to snarl at her.

“Your dress is pretty,” I said at last, for something friendly to say.

“It doesn't fit,” she said, but she looked as if she might be thawing out a bit. There was silence again for a while, but it was a slightly friendlier silence. “Sorry,” she added eventually.

“Yeah, same here,” I muttered. “Sorry.”

I didn't mind apologizing, once she said it first. She was the one who'd insulted me, after all.

Then she changed the subject. She asked me if I'd told the people at the school that I was coming for the audition.

“Today's the deadline,” she said, as if I didn't know.

I had accepted, of course.

“It's in two weeks,” I said, “and I still don't see how I'm going to get there.”

“We'll think of something,” she said. Alarm bells started to ring for me. She was off on her quest again. “We'll just have to fall back on our own resources, is all. There are lots of things we can try.”

“But I have
so
much practice to do,” I wailed. “I should be working six or seven hours a day, and all I do is sit around sending text messages and working out ways to contact Dad.”

“Six or seven hours!” she gasped in amazement. “That's torture!” You see what I mean. People just don't understand.

“No, it isn't,” I said. “It's what you do if you are a real musician. I do three, sometimes four. But it's not enough before an audition.”

“OK,” said Mags. “Tell you what. You concentrate on your practicing, I'll do the rest.”

I shook my head, but what could I say? I couldn't very well stop her, and besides, it would be useful if she found him for me and delivered him like a trout in a net. A trout with a check for a hundred euro in its mouth!

“I have an idea,” she said.

I don't like Mags's ideas. They are all half-baked and come out of books, as far as I can tell. She thinks she's Hercule Poirot or the Secret Seven or someone.

Mags

“Brendan Regan?” said Grandpa, leaning back in his armchair and giving his toes a delighted wiggle. He loves to be consulted. “Of course I know him. Obviously, I know the locals—I've lived here all my life. The Regans, now let me see. Yes, they used to live a mile or two out the road, they had a dairy farm, but after the old man died—terrible farmer he was—they sold up and moved into town, into that new estate over the other side of the woods. Brendan was never interested in farming. Just as well, if he was going to turn out as bad a farmer as his father. He's in computers, something like that. He has his own business, very successful I believe. Drives a flash car. Married a foreigner, I think. Or maybe she's from Dublin. What do you want to know for?”

I hugged myself. “Oh, just making inquiries,” I said.

My grandfather laughed. “You're up to something, aren't you?”

“I wouldn't say that,” I said mysteriously. “Is he separated?”

“From his wife? Hmm, I heard that, yes. She's peculiar, I believe. An opera singer, if you don't mind.”

“Really?” I said, remembering Zelda's beautiful speaking voice. An opera singer was certainly a bit unusual in Ballybeg, but even if she'd been a bank clerk, people would have called Zelda peculiar. “And where does he live now?”

“How should I know?” Grandpa was turning grumpy again. He only liked questions that he knew the answers to.

I thought carefully before my next move. There was no point in saying anything that would make Grandpa even grumpier. The thing was not to make him uncomfortable by asking a question he couldn't answer.

“I bet you could find out, though,” I said at last. “I'm sure you have contacts. You know everything that happens around here, I'd say.”

“Oh, I could find out if I really wanted to know,” he agreed.

I said no more. No point in pushing my luck. I'd wait and see.

Grandpa came up with the goods, as I had known he would. It was two days later. I was making a jam sandwich in his kitchen. Grandpa always has a good range of jams to choose from. Raspberry today, I thought, though I don't like the tiny raspberry pips. They stick in your teeth. Someone told me once that the jam people had the pips made specially out of wood to put in the jam, so people would think it was really made of raspberries, but I didn't believe that. It was obviously made of raspberries, because it tasted of raspberries. Besides, there was a picture of raspberries on the front of the jar. That clinched it, in my view.

The door creaked open. I wasn't surprised. My grandfather always opens doors by pushing at them with his stick. I knew he'd shuffle in after the door in a moment, and he did.

“That Brendan Regan you were asking about,” he said.

“Hmm?” I said, not looking at him, pretending not to be all that interested. I carefully lined up the top slice over the bottom slice and reached for a bread knife.

“He's living over in Ballymore, on the main street, in a flat over the dry cleaner's.”

“Is he?”

“He is. Why do you want to know?”

“Oh, it's just that … Hey! There's a wasp! They love jam, don't they? Bit early, though, for wasps, isn't it?”

There was no wasp. I just didn't want to have to answer my grandfather's awkward questions, so I went hunting around the kitchen with a rolled-up newspaper and whooshed the imaginary wasp out the window.

Gillian

“Over the dry cleaner's!” I said. My nose curled up when Mags told me what she'd found out. “It must be smelly!”

“Yes,” she said. “But that's not important. The point is, we know where to find him. Will we pay him a little visit?”

I didn't answer. Mags looked up from the hole she'd been digging with a dessert spoon by the side of the “table” rock. She was hollowing out a shallow depression in its shade. It would be a good place to keep her lunch, she'd said, in the cool of the rock's shadow, and with the bottom of the lunch box nestled into the damp earth. Not that she owned a lunch box, but I suppose she could acquire one, now that she was going to have a woodland larder to keep it in. Quite the little Maid Marian, she is.

“We could go tomorrow,” she said after a few moments.

Tomorrow! Well, there was no point in postponing it indefinitely, I suppose, and I did still need the money.

“I suppose so,” I said.

“I thought you'd be pleased!” she said, and gave another ferocious dig with her spoon. “Do you not
want
to see him?”

“I do, yeah,” I said, though I didn't exactly want to see
him.
I wanted to get the money so I could go to the audition. Mags didn't seem to get that. I think she thought this was all about bringing father and daughter together. Some hope of that!