The Music Lesson (2 page)

“With that fuchsia hedge all overgrown at the junction because the county council didn’t trim it yet, though I couldn’t say why that is at all, they should have trimmed it in September, but the council cut more corners than hedges in this village, that eejit flyin’ down the road in the bread van almost took the nose off ye, miss. Better mind that road—ye were very nearly a black spot just now. I was watchin’ out the window, just havin’ a peep to see if there was any chance of the rain liftin’ a bit. Which there isn’t. Aren’t ye afraid out there all by yer lonesome in the cottage with just old Denny’s ghost to talk to? Thinkin’ of leavin’ us in another few days’ time, I’d say? Ye’ve stuck it out a fortnight, isn’t that right? Willy, the postman, was sayin’ yesterday. He had a letter for ye from the States. Did ye get that all right? He was on his way to ye when we met at the church cross, and when I saw him later, he said ye weren’t at home at all and he’d left the post on a chair. I think he said on a chair, but more likely it wasn’t a chair at all, but a stool, the creepie by the door Denis used to sit on to pull off his
wellies. Had enough of yer own company, then? January is no time a’tall for tourists. No time at all. Come back in May. Now that’s the season for ye. Ye come back when the air is soft. That’s the thing. On a Sunday after Mass when the air is soft and ye go out for a bit of a spin—my sister and myself, we like to take a bit of a rug to spread against the damp and she makes the sangwitches and we have our tea in the sun in my cousin John’s field on the cliff out your way when the grass is sweet and clovery—that can be mighty altogether.”

“I’m just fine, thanks, Mr. O’Mahoney. Do you have any more of that Wexford cheddar?”

“No, no, no, not a bit, not a bit—yer little lump was left from Christmas and I was happy enough to sell the last of it to ye, and I won’t be havin’ it again until the summer months. The locals don’t have any truck with fancy grub, like. The tourist season’s when ye’ll be findin’ the high-class sorts of bits and pieces a person like yerself would want to be havin’. The tourist season, like. Which this is not, in case ye haven’t noticed.”

I have yet to decide if Kieran O’Mahoney with his downturned smile that isn’t a smile is even specifically interested in me, or slightly hostile to American tourists, or if his inquisitive stream of chatter is just his usual line of talk on a gray January day. I also have yet to decide exactly when he draws breath.

The only other shop in Ballyroe is across the street,
farther down, at the bottom of the village. It’s even more sparsely stocked, with little more than single rows of dusty tins of beans, obscure brands of cleaning products, dog-eared Maeve Binchy paperbacks, and last summer’s flypaper.

I am loyal to O’Mahoney’s. As if it mattered, as if I have lived here all my life and plan to go on living here for the rest of my life, I have a preference. I don’t frequent the other shop, Dunne’s. I don’t give them my custom.

The proprietress there is a snoopy woman, Annie Dunne, who has half of Kieran O’Mahoney’s charm and twice his energy for sly, presumptive interrogatives. She’s somewhere between forty and sixty is my best guess. I suppose she’s pleasant-looking from a distance, in an ordinary pale Irish sort of way. But, up close, her eyes are cold, her skin has the secret age and fine wrinkles of an elderly nun, and the set of her lips is cruel. Annie Dunne gives me the creeps.

She sits in the window by the till on a high stool so she can keep an eye on the whole village. I’m sure she monitors my visits to O’Mahoney’s. Unfortunately, she’s a skilled baker of scones, a basket of which is usually sitting on her counter beside a stack of sticky little wooden frames of comb honey from her own bees.

Tempted thus on very wet days when I have been reluctant to turn around immediately and start the walk back to the cottage, I have stopped into Dunne’s on three
separate occasions, telling myself each time that I’m not really giving her my business, that I’m just buying some scones. And the one time, some honey. Though after my first encounter with Annie, I meant for it to be my last. She affects friendliness, but there’s something really sinister about her; she might not mind baking me some special thumbtack scones just for the hell of it.

Not that I would give Kieran O’Mahoney the satisfaction of agreeing, I have indeed noticed that I seem to be the only tourist, so-called. There are few people at large of any description. Ballyroe has only about sixty year-round inhabitants, hardly any children (which suits me), and today, as on most days, I never met a car the entire two-mile walk back along the undulating lane out to Gortbreac Cove, above which the cottage is perched. In the drumming rain, with the thin straps of the carrier bag cutting through my soaked gloves into my numb fingers, I tried to figure how it could possibly be that each route, both into the village and out again, seems predominantly uphill.

The pockets of the “waterproof” I bought last week from Mr. O’Mahoney—it had lain in a filmy plastic sack on a low shelf in the back of the shop with a strange assortment of goods (a tub of stove black, a giant sheep thermometer, and extraterrestrial-looking bits of hardware for milking machines) for such a long time that its price was marked in shillings and he let me have it for
four pounds—filled with water before I had gone halfway. When I got to the cottage, I undressed and dropped my sodden clothes just inside the door, in the mudroom.

I believe that walking in a windy Irish downpour wearing a porous mackintosh over an Irish sweater over a flannel shirt and blue jeans is to be wetter than when you stand naked in a shower. Now I’m in a change of clothes with a pot of tea and some chocolate digestive biscuits in front of the fire, drying my boots (and a wadded ten-pound note from my jeans pocket) on the warm hearth slates at my feet.

These are not complaints. I am happy here. At forty-one, I have never had fewer creature comforts and yet I have not been this content in a long time. This rough alien place feels like home. I have come here with a passionate commitment. For the first time in years, I wake up each day with a purpose. And, of course, I am not alone. I am never alone, whatever the village may think. Because she is here. And that is why I am here.

Everything I have ever thought I knew about the rest of my life has shifted in the last two months.

I’ve just lived through some agonizingly suspenseful days. How, in such a short space of time, have I come to alter my life so radically and in so many ways?

She’s here. I can hardly believe it after all the waiting. There’s nothing for me to do now but wait for further word from Mickey. So I’m at a standstill for the moment, in a timeless, motionless vacuum like the eye of a hurricane when the sun comes out for a brief moment. Of course, it’s not yet safe to go out, because the other half of the storm is coming. What have I done?

This account is not meant for anyone’s eyes. No, I don’t suppose I could really mean that. Of course I imagine these words being read someday. But when I say it isn’t meant for anyone’s eyes, I don’t mean it in the sense of one of those novel manuscripts people keep in a drawer, insisting they don’t care if anyone else ever reads it or not.

The people I have known who do that, I am convinced, have no faith in themselves as writers and know, deep down, that the novel is flawed, that they don’t know how to tell the story, or they don’t understand what the story is, or they haven’t really got a story to tell. The manuscript in the drawer
is
the story.

My
story
is the story, not writerly ambitions. Because I don’t think of myself as a writer at all; I am free of anxiety that the words I choose must be the very best words. My mind is far more attuned to the visual world; I’m an art historian who has a basic skill at writing, at the art of describing artlessly. That’s all.

My motive is primarily that of an art historian
reporting on events, cataloging a sequence of facts, making a scholar’s record. Though I know, logically, it’s impossible to attempt objectivity—I’m
inside
this—I am nevertheless compelled, by my training and by my nature, to try. Is it grandiose of me to imagine that it’s important that my observations, my
explanation
, should exist in the world?

It is not my intention for this notebook to come to light in my lifetime. It is possible that the day may come when I myself feel that it is necessary to destroy these pages—and that day may be as soon as next week. But if it seems reasonable for this account to survive me, by the time these words are ever read by those who might be interested, it will be when the events described herein will have played out to the end, one way or another.

My name is Patricia Dolan. It’s an Irish name, something people here keep pointing out to me, as if my being an American means that I might not have a clue that my forebears were ever from anywhere else and my presence here is entirely random coincidence. It’s the part I play, albeit with reluctance. The amiable American tourist possessing neither curiosity nor a sense of history. There’s an Irish fascination with the quotidian American lack of consciousness of history and context. I mean the way most Americans have a cultural amnesia for personal family history.

The United States is a conceited nation with shallow roots, and what happened before living memory doesn’t seem to interest most people I know at home. We like living in our new houses with our new furniture, on our new streets in new neighborhoods. Everything is disposable and everything is replaceable. Personal family history can feel simply irrelevant in our new world, beyond the simplest national identifications, and even those can get sort of vague for people. I remember a boy in high school who told the history teacher that he was “half Italian, half Polish, half English, half German, and one-quarter Swedish.” I think one of the reasons so many of us are disconnected from our histories is because none of it happened where we live in the present; the past, for so many, is a faraway place across an ocean.

So what do the people here in the village make of me? Not much, I hope. I imagine that most of the Ballyroe locals have encountered numerous American tourists in possession of an Irish name that they can’t pronounce correctly and who don’t even know with certainty from what county in Ireland their ancestors fled just two or three generations back. Tourists like that don’t begin to understand the way history is still playing out today in the six counties in the North.

They don’t bother to comprehend how it’s been these past few hundred years, or, more to the point, these last couple of decades. They come to Ireland to have fun
in the pubs and see the beautiful landscape and buy a nice sweater and carry home a souvenir shillelagh and some Waterford crystal, and they don’t know what’s going on. That’s all the Ballyroe natives expect of me.

But I do know what’s going on. There’s an irony at work here. I’m in Ireland for the first time, right at the heart of my Dolan and O’Driscoll origins, and instead of throwing open my arms to embrace my own—possibly every other farmer in this village—I have to keep to myself and stay hidden, camouflaged as an ordinary tourist.

It feels now as if my whole life has been a preparation for what I am doing. But I must keep the lowest of profiles. I have managed to do this in part by the simple act of staying out of the village pubs. Since I don’t go to Mass, either, I’m left out of village life.

Too much conversation is the last thing I would need, and I’m not a drinker anyway. A woman alone here is likely to be speculated about no matter what, according to Mickey, so I shouldn’t give anyone anything to ponder. It doesn’t take much for the imaginative Irish to start thinking up stories to go with people and their circumstances.

Anyway, I have no desire to venture into any of the three pubs in the village. They’re all so dark-looking, and they aren’t exactly inviting to an outsider, with curtains
muffling the windows as if for an imminent air-raid exercise.

I am in awe of the perpetual tumult of the sea. I am moved by the still place on the horizon where the sky begins. I am stirred by the soaring and dipping fields that make the landscape into a rumpled green counterpane. I thought I would never have such powerful feelings again. I thought I would live through the rest of my life having experiences, and thoughts, but I never thought I would again feel deeply—I was convinced that my wounds had healed and become thick scars, essentially numb.

In a way, she’s incongruous here. But the contrast of her elegance with these simple surroundings isn’t really jarring, because tranquillity and timelessness transcend everything else.

T
HE FIRST TIME
I heard Mickey’s voice on the telephone, it was midafternoon on November the twelfth, the day after Veteran’s Day. I thought it was somebody calling to tell me something had happened to Pete. When your father is a policeman, even a crotchety retired one, you always worry that someday you’ll pick up the phone and it’s going to be a strange voice with the news you never want to hear. I was in the slide room of the Frick Art Reference Library where I work, sorting through an unexpectedly jumbled Fragonard drawer, when the call was put through to me from the reference desk where I usually sit.