Collected Stories

Music

At thirty-three Justin Condon was a salesman of women’s undergarments, regularly traversing five counties with his samples and his order book in a Ford Fiesta. He had obediently accepted this role, agreeing when his father had suggested it to him. His father in his day had been a commercial traveller also and every Friday Justin returned to the house his father had returned to, arriving at much the same hour and occupying a room he had in childhood shared with his three brothers. His mother and his father still lived in the house, in the Dublin suburb of Terenure, and were puzzled by their youngest son because he was so unlike their other children, both physically and in other ways. His dark-haired head was neat; remote, abstracted eyes made a spherical, ordinary face seem almost mysterious. At weekends Justin took long walks on his own, all the way from Terenure to the city, to St Stephen’s Green, where he sat on a seat or strolled among the flowerbeds, to Herbert Park, where he lay in the sunshine on the grass: people had seen him and remarked upon it. He had never in his life been known to listen to the commentary on a hurling match or a Gaelic match, let alone attend such an event. When he was younger he had come back one Friday with a greyhound, an animal he had proceeded to rear as a pet, apparently not realizing that such creatures had been placed in the world for the purpose of racing one another. ‘Ah, poor Justin’s the queer old flute,’ his father had more than once privately owned in McCauley’s public house. His mother wished he’d get married.

Justin’s reason for remaining in his parents’ house had not been shared with them, although it was a simple one: he considered that any other dwelling would be of a temporary nature and not worth the nuisance of moving to because one day he would leave, not just the suburb of Terenure but Dublin, and Ireland, for ever. He would leave his samples in the Ford Fiesta; he would leave the Ford Fiesta in a lay-by. He was not truly a purveyor of garments in imitation silk, his destiny was not the eternal entering of drapers’ shops. He would escape as others had escaped before him; James Joyce he thought of particularly in this respect, and Gauguin. He liked the photograph of James Joyce in the broad-brimmed black hat, with the black coat reaching to his ankles; Gauguin had been a businessman. When Joyce had left Ireland he’d had to borrow a pair of boots. Later he’d tried to sell tweed to the Italians.

Dwelling on such matters, Justin watched the light of a May morning from a bed in Co. Waterford. There wasn’t much to see: streaks of brightness along the edges of the drawn curtains, the ceiling of the bedroom mistily illuminated through rosy fabric. A man called Fahy, travelling in fertilizers, had assured him that when he stayed in this house he occupied the bed of Mrs Keane, its widowed landlady. When Garda Bevan, who lodged on a more permanent basis in the house, drank his eleven o’clock Bournville and stated his intention of retiring for the night, Fahy would rise from the kitchen table also, saying he’d had a long day. He would mount the stairs a few paces behind Garda Bevan and in full view of the policeman would enter the bedroom known as the ‘overnight room’ because it was set aside by Mrs Keane for her casual trade among commercial travellers. Garda Bevan, long since retired from the force, a lifelong bachelor, was a moral presence in Mrs Keane’s house, a man who could be relied upon by Father Grennan or Father Reedy, selflessly working behind the scenes for the Pioneer cause and organizing the tug of war at the Nore Fête every Whit. Fahy said he gave him a quarter of an hour and then listened on the landing to the depth of his snoring. He smoked a final cigarette in the overnight bedroom, taking a good ten minutes over it, before listening again at the panels of Garda Bevan’s door. If the rhythm of sleep had not altered, he made his way to the bed of Mrs Keane.

Justin supposed it was true. With some precision, Fahy had described the body of the widow, a woman of fifteen stone and in her sixty-first year. The hair that was grey about her head sprouted blackly and abundantly, according to the traveller in fertilizers, on other areas of her. Buttocks and stomach were vast; Hail Marys were repeated after sinning.

In the overnight room Justin imagined without pleasure the scenes Fahy described. Fahy was a little runt of a Dublin man, married with five or six children, always sticking his elbow into you to make a point. Sometimes in his ramblings he mentioned Thomasina Durcan, the dentist, who was the only other lodger in Mrs Keane’s house. She had a great notion of Justin, Fahy insisted, the implication being that Justin could easily arrive at the same arrangement with Thomasina Durcan as he himself had arrived at with Mrs Keane. No man was an island was a repeated observation of Fahy’s.

Justin rose in order to break his train of thought, and crossed to the window. He drew back the curtains and stood in his pyjamas looking out at the line of houses across the street. No blind had yet been released, no curtain or shutter opened. A cat crept along the grey pavement, interested in the empty bottles outside each door. The houses themselves were colourwashed in pink or cream, in yellow, grey or blue, their hall doors painted in some contrasting shade, or grained. The street was wide, with lampposts between every second house, and a single visible telegraph pole. Just visible also, where the street met another as it curved away to the left, was Hayes’s shop, which traded in newspapers, tobacco and confectionery. The sight of it, with its hanging Players Please sign, reminded Justin that he was in need of a cigarette himself. He left the window and crossed to the bedside table.

Inhaling, he slipped out of his pyjamas and dressed himself in shirt and trousers, preparatory to making his way to Mrs Keane’s bathroom. Still intent on keeping Fahy’s reports and innuendoes at bay, he dwelt upon his earliest memory, which was the leg of a chair. That same chair was still in the house in Terenure and he often found himself looking at it, his eye travelling down one particular leg, to the rings cut into the timber, the varnish worn partially away. With three brothers and three sisters, he had grown up the baby of the family, surrounded by people who shouted more than he did, who were for ever arguing and snatching. At school the textbooks were inkstained and dirty, the blackboards so pitted you could hardly read the chalk marks on them, the desk-tops slashed with messages and initials. ‘Come here and I’ll show you,’ Shay McNamara used to whisper; and forcibly he’d insist, no choice about it, on displaying the promise of his sexuality. Ikey Breen had been paid a threepenny piece by a woman under cover of darkness in the Stella cinema. All Riordan’s jokes had to do with excrement.

Justin shaved in Mrs Keane’s bathroom, hurrying to finish before Garda Bevan came rattling at the door. Long before he began to go to school he remembered his father driving away from the house in Terenure on a Monday morning. His father had taught him how to strike a match, and would let him hold it over the tobacco in his pipe while he sucked at the smoke, making a bubbling noise. His father used to take him on to his knee and ask him if he’d been a good boy, but Justin always had to turn his head away because of the whiff on his father’s breath. The stench of stout, his mother said it was, bottle after bottle of stout that made the whole house stink like a brewery. He associated his father particularly with Sundays, with leading the family into Mass, with saying he was starving on the walk home. Sunday dinner was different from ordinary dinner, always meat and a pudding. Afterwards his father had his bath, with the door of the bathroom open so that he could listen to whatever sporting commentary there was on the radio. Justin’s sisters were forbidden to go upstairs at this time in ease they’d catch a glimpse from the landing. His brothers roller-skated in the yard.

Justin washed the remains of the shaving foam from his face. It was on a Sunday that his Aunt Roche had first put a record on her gramophone: John Count McCormack singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’. After that he had begun to visit her sitting-room regularly, a room full of ferns in pots and framed embroideries. It was she and Father Finn who had given him faith in himself and in his musical aptitude, who hadn’t laughed when he’d hinted that Mahler was his hero.

He dried his face and left the bathroom. Somewhere in the house he could hear the heavy tread of Garda Bevan. The smell of frying rashers and the chatty voice of a radio disc-jockey drifted from the kitchen.

‘Mr Condon!’ called Thomasina Durcan. ‘Mr Condon, Mrs Keane has the breakfast ready.’

In her tiny sitting-room she dusted the ornaments on the mantelpiece: the brass gondola, the tuskless elephants, the row of trinket containers, the framed photograph of Justin as a child, specially taken by Mr Boland the insurance man, whose hobby was photography. She was not really his aunt: when he was six he had stood by the railings of her front garden, staring at her while she cut the grass. ‘What’s your name?’ she’d asked, and he’d said it was Justin Condon. ‘Ah now, isn’t that a great name?’ She’d smiled at him, knowing he was shy. Her face had been damp with perspiration due to the exertion of pushing the lawn-mower. He had watched her closely while she took her glasses off and wiped them on her apron.

She was a slight, frail woman of seventy-nine, with thin hands, and hair the colour of the ashes she now carried in a cardboard box from her sitting-room. She moved slowly, suffering a little from arthritis in one of her knees and in her arms. ‘I think I have some Mi-Wadi,’ she’d said that first day. ‘D’you like Mi-Wadi lemonade, Justin?’

He had followed her into the house and in the kitchen she had poured an inch or two of Mi-Wadi into two glasses and filled them with water from the cold tap. She’d found some biscuits, raspberry wafers she’d bought for the weekend. He had three brothers and three sisters, he said; his father was in business and was never at home during the week. When he was older he told her about the Christian Brothers’ school, the white-painted windows and the rowdy, concrete playground. He said that Brother Walsh had picked him out as someone who was useless.

The Sunday when she’d wound up the gramophone and put on the record of John Count McCormack was a special memory for her because she always thought of the occasion as marking the beginning of his interest in music. Later she had played him her selected arias from La Traviata and Carmen and Il Trovatore – on the same Sunday in September when he had posed for Mr Boland in the garden. He’d had to stand in front of the laurel bushes but Mr Boland hadn’t been happy with that so he’d had to sit on a chair on the front-door step. In the end the photograph had been taken against the rose trellis.

‘Well, that’s disgraceful!’ Father Finn had said on another Sunday, when he heard how a Christian Brother had described the child as useless.

‘That’s a right bit of bacon,’ Garda Bevan complimented Mrs Keane. ‘Isn’t bacon in this country a greatly improved commodity?’

Neat as a napkin across the table from him, Thomasina Durcan smiled shyly at Justin, as if they shared some private opinion. Justin pretended not to notice. He bent his head over the bacon on his plate, over the slices of black pudding and the fried bread and the egg. Garda Bevan would think Stravinsky was the name of a racehorse, and so would Mrs Keane. ‘Ah, sure, I knew all right,’ Thomasina Durcan would protest, lying because she couldn’t help herself. Her two prominent front teeth were like an advertisement for her trade; her eyes were prominent also, her nose and chin slight. She wore clothes in pastel shades, pale blues and pinks and greens. Like himself, she returned every weekend to Dublin, to stay with her parents.

‘It’s a sign of the advance the country has made,’ continued Garda Bevan, ‘the way the bacon is better these days.’

‘The price of it would murder you,’ Mrs Keane reminded him.

He nodded and continued to nod, dwelling on that. ‘Well, isn’t it another sign in that case,’ he suggested eventually, ‘the way the people would have the means for it?’

‘Nearly a pound a pound. Sure, it’s a holy disgrace.’

Mrs Keane’s dining-room was heavy with furniture: rexine-covered chairs, a large ornate sideboard, a great mahogany dining-table, wax fruit on occasional tables, armchairs with antimacassars, pictures of forest scenes. Bottles of sauce stood on the sideboard, and empty decanters, and a pile of tablemats. Shells decorated the mantelpiece, and small cups and saucers, gifts from Tramore and Youghal.

‘Well, it’s the same way that’s, in it with everything.’ The policeman’s delivery of this statement was ponderous, the words punctuated by the munching of his jaws. He was a match for Mrs Keane in size, his rounded hill of a stomach tightly engaging the buttons of his waistcoat. A bulbous nose was set carelessly in a crimson countenance, short hair was as spiky as a hedgehog’s.

‘Wouldn’t you say the prices is shocking?’ Mrs Keane inquired of Thomasina Durcan, in a voice that insisted women knew best.

‘Ah, they are of course.’

Garda Bevan turned to Justin, a piece of egg, already dipped in mustard, on the end of his fork. ‘Have they inflation beat? Fahy was here last week and said inflation was beat.’

Justin shook his head. He didn’t know, he said. He’d heard somewhere that, far from being defeated, inflation was gaining ground.

‘Has your father a word to say on it? I remember a thing about your father when he used to stay with us here. He had a keen sense of politics.’

‘I don’t think I heard him mention inflation.’

‘Give him a message from me, will you? Tell him Garda Bevan was asking for him.’

‘I will of course.’

‘Oh, Mr Condon, I meant to tell you: I saw you in Stephen’s Green on Sunday.’ Thomasina Durcan’s two large teeth announced interest in him; the eyes blinked rapidly. Her pastel-green suit was trim on her trim form; he imagined her fingers, trim also, in a patient’s mouth.

‘I’m often in Stephen’s Green.’

‘I thought you lived in Terenure, Mr Condon.’

‘I walk into the city.’

‘God, I love walking.’

The fingers, in a hurry, would layer a gum with cotton-wool; sharply, they’d jab a hypodermic needle home. She’d talk to you when your mouth was full of implements; she’d tell you to have a wash-out with the pink stuff, and say she was nearly finished. Fahy said she had an eye on a bungalow out on the Cappoquin road. ‘Wouldn’t the two of you be snug in a bed there?’ Fahy had said.

‘I have a few friends coming in, Saturday fortnight. Would you care to join us, Mr Condon?’

He felt a tightening in the atmosphere. Both Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane were aware of the implication of what had just been said. An attempt was being made to develop the casual acquaintanceship that existed between Justin and the dentist in Mrs Keane’s house; the relationship was to be extended to Dublin. Fahy would be told; so would Father Grennan and Father Reedy. ‘Sure, if some girl like Thomasina Durcan doesn’t do something about it that fellow’ll be a bachelor at seventy’: he could hear Mrs Keane saying that, or his father or his mother. Fahy would put it differently.

‘Saturday fortnight?’

‘About a quarter to eight. You know Clontarf? 21 Dunlow Road. Just a few friends and a bit of dancing.’

‘I don’t dance at all.’

‘I’m not much at it myself.’

Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane were pleased. They had enjoyed this flutter of excitement. They would think about the party at 21 Dunlow Road, and discuss it. They would be unpleasantly agog after it had taken place.

‘21 Dunlow Road,’ Thomasina Durcan repeated, writing it clearly on a piece of paper she’d found in her handbag.

‘You might ask him that,’ requested Garda Bevan. ‘Does he consider inflation beat? If there’s one man in Ireland would know, it’s your father.’

Justin nodded again, finishing the fried food on his plate. He promised to discuss the matter with his father and to obtain his father’s opinion. He wouldn’t turn up at 21 Dunlow Road, he said to himself. When he next spent a night at Mrs Keane’s he’d say he’d lost the address.

When he was ten she had asked him if he’d like to learn how to play the piano and when he’d said yes she’d arranged for Father Finn to give him lessons in her sitting-room. She had paid for them and when she’d asked him not to tell his family he had eagerly agreed because apparently his family would have laughed at the idea of a boy playing a musical instrument. ‘It’s a great thing for him,’ Father Finn later reported. ‘And hasn’t he a rare aptitude for it?’ In the circumstances Father Finn wasn’t averse to keeping the knowledge of the lessons from the Condons, and after a while he refused to accept any fee for the tuition. ‘Well, that’s one thing at any rate he’s not useless at,’ he remarked, later still.

God had arranged it, she often thought during those years that went by. God had arranged for the child to come by her gate that first afternoon, and for the music she played him on her gramophone to delight him. God had arranged a way for the three of them, Father Finn and herself and Justin. When the Condons had eventually discovered about the piano lessons they’d been bewildered but not cross, mainly because it was Father Finn who was giving them. And as well as for the lessons every Wednesday, Father Finn began to come round on Sunday afternoons, when they all three listened to John Count McCormack or the operatic arias. It was a natural thing for the priest to do since everyone knew now of the musical aptitude of Justin Condon and how it needed to be fostered and encouraged.

The sun warmed his exposed chest; beside him his shirt was laid out on the grass; his eyes were closed. Faintly the sound of the river by which he lay penetrated his sleep.

He dreamed of the queen who had inspired the choral symphony he was attempting to write. In his dream she led wolfhounds on leather thongs through her garden and listened to the spirits of the otherworld. From among them one took visible form: a young girl rose from the mists and the flowers and warned the queen of her folly.

Two flies tormented Justin’s plump chin. Their tickling silenced music that had the resonance of music composed by Mahler. He smacked at his face but already the flies had gone.

The symphony told of a journey from the royal palaces in the West to the territory of Cúchulainn in Ulster. The queen’s great army, fattened with the soldiers of her allies, with the long line of camp followers, with druids and jesters, storytellers, soothsayers, military men and servitors, travelled into heroic battle, while the mystical hero awaited their arrival. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Justin hired a piano cubicle in a music shop and spent the morning there, advancing his composition. Shortly after the death of Father Finn the piano in his Aunt Roche’s sitting-room had gone hopelessly out of tune and apparently couldn’t be much improved.

Justin reached for his shirt. When he had buttoned it he neatly tightened the knot of his tie. Since breakfast-time in Mrs Keane’s dining-room he had visited sixteen drapers in seven different towns. He had O’Leary’s and Callaghan’s to call on yet, and then that would be that for the day. He drove on and did the business he had to do. He spent the night in Dungarvan in a room above a fish-and-chip café. The smell of the frying wafted up and through his open window. From his bed he listened to people talking about the film they had been to, and to a drunk man who proclaimed that he intended to stand no nonsense from his wife. He fell asleep at half past eleven and dreamed of the journey in his symphony, of the queen in her magnificence, and the chorus of otherworld spirits.

‘Wait now till I get the brother,’ said Mr McGurk, the joint proprietor of McGurk’s Arcade, the following day. He left the shop and called up through the house. In a moment the older Mr McGurk appeared.

Justin’s samples were laid out on the counter. Some were familiar to the McGurks and presented no problem when it came to deciding the size of the order. Others, lines that were new this spring, had to be considered with care.

‘Would a woman of this area dress herself in that?’ inquired the younger Mr McGurk, poking at a black garment trimmed flimsily with lace of the same colour.

‘I don’t know would she.’

‘The gusset is strong,’ Justin pointed out, since it said so on his sales sheet. ‘A man-made fibre.’

‘It isn’t the gusset would sell that article,’ replied the older Mr McGurk. ‘What I’m thinking is, is it too ritzy for this area?’

‘Will we call down Elaine?’ suggested his brother.

‘I’d say we would.’

Elaine, wife of the older Mr McGurk, was summoned from the house. She picked up the garment in question and meticulously examined it.

‘Would you wear it?’ her husband demanded.

‘I would in a shade of peach. Does it come in a peach?’

Justin said it did, and in a shade of coffee.

‘Order it in the peach,’ advised Mrs McGurk. ‘Black’s not the tone for stuff the like of that.’

‘Too ritzy,’ agreed her husband. ‘I’m just after saying it.’

‘How’s your father?’ Mrs McGurk asked Justin.

‘He’s grand.’

‘Has he still got the hilarious way with him?’

Justin replied that he supposed his father had. One after the other, the McGurk brothers said they’d never laughed at any traveller’s jokes the way they’d laughed at Justin’s father’s. Justin could feel them thinking that he himself wasn’t half the man his father was, that he didn’t enter into the spirit of things, that all he seemed concerned with was writing down orders in his book. ‘I’ll tell you a thing about Thomasina Durcan,’ Fahy had said. ‘She has a notion of making a man of you. There’s women like that around.’

He left the McGurks’ shop and drove out to the estuary. He walked by the green, seaweedy water, wondering if Mahler would have composed a note if he’d been incarcerated in a bungalow on the Cappoquin road, listening every night to talk about cavity linings.

‘Now, there never was,’ she remembered Father Finn saying when Justin was thirteen, ‘a great man of music that came out of Ireland.’

He made the pronouncement while eating a slice of buttered toast she had prepared for him. She had loved doing that, toasting the bread and spreading the butter on it, arranging blackcurrant jam in a glass dish. Blackcurrant was Father Finn’s favourite, raspberry was Justin’s.

‘We had singers and harpists. We had all classes of instrumentalists. We have a proud tradition, but we never yet had a composer that could rank with the Germans. To this day, Justin, we have to turn to Germany for musical composition.’

Pouring tea for both of them, she mentioned Italy and the priest agreed that the Italians had made a contribution. He told the story of Puccini’s life. He referred to the burden of a musical gift and to the reward it brought in time. ‘A precious freedom of the spirit. A most glorious thing.’

She had delighted in listening to him. She was never happier than on those Sunday afternoons when he and Justin sat together by her fire or on the Wednesdays when she made a cup of tea after the piano lesson. No admission of affection had ever been made by the priest or by herself; no admission could be. Until Justin arrived in her life there had been no way of creating a relationship that went beyond that of priest and parishioner.

‘There’s a little thing Justin composed for me,’ Father Finn said one Sunday, ‘A short little piece, but I’d say it displayed promise.’

‘We had a complaint, Mr Condon,’ Miss Murphy reported in Castlemartyr.

‘We had this slip brought back to us after it fell into holes.’

Only Thomasina Durcan and Miss Murphy called him Mr Condon, Thomasina Durcan because any other mode of address might have sounded forward, Miss Murphy for reasons he had never been able to fathom.

‘Would it be the way it was washed, Miss Murphy? Was it put into a machine?’

‘Oh, it would have been washed all right, Mr Condon. Naturally you’d expect it to have been washed.’

‘No, I mean in a machine though. Or maybe it got boiled in error. It’s all tinged with blue, look. Some blue garment has run into it.’

‘It would save an argument with the customer, Mr Condon, if you replaced it. It’s good for business when something gets replaced.’

Justin made a note in his order book and said that Miss Murphy would have a replacement within a fortnight. He had a new line he wanted to show her, he added, and displayed for her the sample he had displayed for fifty-seven other drapers, including the McGurks, since he’d left Dublin. Miss Murphy picked it up gingerly.

‘It comes in a peach, Miss Murphy, and a coffee. The gusset is guaranteed sturdy. Man-made fibre.’

‘I never saw that type of cut before.’

‘It’s the fashion in Dublin.’

Miss Murphy shook her head. She folded the piece of clothing in a professional manner and Justin returned it to the suitcase in which he carried his samples. Miss Murphy ordered a supply of summer vests and made arrangements to replenish her stock of first-communion stockings. ‘Is your father fit?’ she asked as Justin closed his order book, and for the first time since he had known Miss Murphy it idly occurred to him that she and his father might have had the same relationship as Fahy claimed to have with Mrs Keane. Miss Murphy was elderly now, a woman with a face like an arrow, with spectacles on a chain. Once she might have been pretty; it was odd that she had never married.

‘He’s grand,’ Justin said.

‘Remember me to him, will you?’

Her tone was different from Garda Bevan’s when he mentioned Justin’s father, different from the McGurks’ and all the other drapers’. Had there always been a hint of bitterness in Miss Murphy’s voice when she sent this message to his father? He looked up from the suitcase he was fastening and found her eyes upon him. They held his own until he felt embarrassed. He had noticed before that there was a similarity between his father and Fahy. They were both small men, rotund, bald-headed, pink-skinned, given to banter. He snapped the clasps on his suitcase and Miss Murphy turned away to attend another customer.

She made a cake, the banana cake he liked. Usually she wrapped in tinfoil what remained of it after their Sunday tea and he took it away to eat during the week, on his travels. She enjoyed thinking of him eating the cake, sitting out in the sunshine as he liked to do, in some quiet place.

Slowly she chopped up two bananas. He had belonged to them as he never had to his parents. On Sunday afternoons and again on Wednesdays they had been a family. She left the kitchen and in her sitting-room she delicately placed the needle on the same worn record of John Count McCormack singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’. Soon she would die, as the old priest had, six months ago. She would fall down, or she would die in her sleep. And before any of it happened she might become muzzy in her thoughts, unable to explain to Justin Condon and properly to ask for his forgiveness. Father Finn had known also in the end, death banishing his illusions. ‘We did a terrible thing,’ the old priest had said, sending for her specially.

The record came to an end and she sat there for a moment longer, listening to the scratchy sound of the needle. She had once, long before the child had come into her life, tried to become Father Finn’s housekeeper. ‘Ah no, no,’ he had murmured, gently rejecting her because it wouldn’t have done.

‘Arid how were things in West Waterford?’ his father inquired. ‘Has Joe Bolger retired from Merrick’s?’

Glistening, as if he had just scrubbed his face with a nailbrush, Mr Condon held a glass of whiskey in his right hand. As well as his face, the backs of his hands glistened, as did his glasses, his even false teeth, the dome of his hairless head. Justin imagined him with Miss Murphy in her shop, telling a joke, driving out into the country with Miss Murphy when it was dark, the way Fahy said he’d had to with some woman in Claremorris before he got going with Mrs Keane.

‘I didn’t see Joe Bolger,’ Justin said. ‘I think maybe he’s retired.’

‘I always liked West Waterford.’

They were in the sitting-room. His father was standing in front of a coal fire that was too hot for the time of year. In the kitchen Justin’s mother was frying their evening meal. Recently Mr Condon had taken to giving himself a glass of whiskey at a quarter to six in the evening instead of making his usual journey to McCauley’s at the corner. When he’d eaten his food he returned to the sitting-room and occupied the chair nearest the television, pouring himself another glass of whiskey at a quarter past seven. Justin’s mother said the whiskey was bad for him but he said it was doctor’s orders. ‘It’s ready for you,’ she shouted from the kitchen, reminding Justin of Thomasina Durcan calling out in Mrs Keane’s that the breakfast was ready.

‘I could eat an elephant,’ said Mr Condon, swallowing the last of his whiskey.

Between them, his brothers and sisters had brought thirty-seven children into existence: Justin often thought of that. At Christmas they all crowded into the house, shouting and quarrelling and reminding Justin of what the house had been like in his childhood. On Saturdays there were visits from one or another of those families, and on Sundays also.

‘There was a time I was below in Dungarvan,’ Mr Condon recalled in the kitchen, ‘the day Golden Miller won at Fairyhouse. Joe Bolger was footless behind the counter.’

Mrs Condon cut slices of loaf bread, and pushed the butter past her husband in Justin’s direction. Mr Condon had never been known to pass anyone anything.

‘God, you’d have died laughing.’ As if to lend greater verisimilitude to this claim, Mr Condon laughed rumbustiously himself, exposing egg and bread partially chewed. ‘He was handing out skeins of wool and not charging for it. He gave a gross of safety-pins to a farmer’s wife by the name of Mrs Quinn. “Sure, aren’t they always handy,” he said, “in case you’d have something falling down?” ’

Mrs Condon, who did not always care for her husband’s humour, asked what the weather had been like down the country. Justin replied that it had been fine.

‘There was another time,’ Mr Condon went on, ‘when the boys in the digs took poor Joe’s clothes when he was asleep in bed. I didn’t see it myself but didn’t he have to descend the stairs with the sheets on him?’

‘It rained on Wednesday,’ Mrs Condon said. ‘It didn’t cease the whole day.’

‘There Wasn’t a drop down the country.’

‘Well, isn’t that strange?’

‘It’s often that way.’

‘They say it’s settled in Dublin for the weekend.’

Mrs Condon was as thin as his Aunt Roche, with a worried look that Justin couldn’t remember her ever having been without. She wore flowered overalls even when she went shopping, beneath her black coat.

‘The wildest lads in West Waterford was in Joe Bolger’s digs,’ continued Mr Condon. ‘There wasn’t a trick they didn’t have knowledge of.’

Justin, who had heard about these exploits in West Waterford before, nodded. Mrs Condon poured more tea.

‘They went into the Bay Hotel one night when a pile of boxes containing young chicks had just come off the bus. Your men had them released in the hall before anyone could lift a hand. They had them flying up and down the stairs and into the dining-room, knocking down the sauce bottles. The next thing is, didn’t they have them fluttering about the bedrooms?’

‘You told us, Ger,’ Mrs Condon said.

‘I did of course. Didn’t I come back that Friday and go through the whole thing? It could kill you stone dead to wake up in your bedroom and find chickens squawking all over you.’

‘It must have been unpleasant certainly.’

‘Well, that’s West Waterford for you. Are you still telling that story, Justin?’

Justin nodded again. He wouldn’t have known how to begin telling such a story, and he had never attempted to. He thought about the symphony, hearing the theme that the queen and her consort in their palace bed had inspired. A slow movement, lyrical in tone.

‘Is that girl still stopping at Mrs Keane’s?’ his mother inquired. ‘The dentist.’

He’d once mentioned Thomasina Durcan in order to fill a gap in some conversation; he wished he hadn’t because his mother had somehow sensed his apprehension and appeared to have mistaken it for interest.

‘Yes, she’s still there.’

‘Sounds a nice type of girl.’

Fortunately, Mr Condon had begun to laugh in anticipation of some further antics on the part of the lodgers in Joe Bolger’s digs. When his laughter ceased he retailed them, as he had many times done in the past. Obediently Justin and his mother laughed in turn.

‘There was a curate from Milecross,’ Mr Condon said, ‘a Father Dolan. Well, the lads in the digs had him tied in knots.’

‘You told us about Father Dolan, Ger.’

‘He was down at his tea and when he went upstairs there wasn’t a stick of furniture left in the room. They had the bed and the wardrobe carried out, and the pictures off the walls. They took the wash-stand, and the Holy Mother off of the mantelpiece. The poor man thought he’d gone insane.’

The music was different now: brassy and wild as the journey across Ireland began. While it echoed, Justin saw for a moment his favourite picture of James Joyce, in the broad-brimmed hat and the long black coat. He wondered what Mahler had been like.

‘Another time those eejits drew a sideboard across the entrance to the Gents, the day of Slip Hennessy’s wedding. There wasn’t a man in the place knew what to do with himself.’ Mr Condon threw his head back and laughed, permitting his teeth to move about in his open mouth. When he’d finished, Mrs Condon said:

‘Didn’t you say the dentist was a Dublin girl?’

‘I think she is,’

‘It’s nice she’s at Mrs Keane’s.’

He did not reply. His father said again that you’d have died laughing, and his mother rose from the table. Justin began to gather up the dishes, resolving that tomorrow he would spend the morning in the piano cubicle of the music shop. Afterwards he’d walk out to Herbert Park and lie in the sun, with a new bit of music lingering the way it always did.

On Sunday afternoon he told her about his time in West Waterford and East Cork, about the McGurk brothers and all the other drapers he had visited. He mentioned Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane and Miss Murphy. He spoke of Thomasina Durcan’s party at 21 Dunlow Road, but he didn’t go into details and he didn’t retail what had passed through his mind concerning any of these people. He’d spent four hours yesterday in the piano cubicle, he said, and he’d lain down in Herbert Park.

‘It’s nice to get the sun,’ she said, offering him a piece of the banana cake.

‘Sure, we don’t get enough of it.’

She nodded and then, to his astonishment, she spoke of his simplicity. It was that, she said, that the priest and she should have pointed out to him; it was that that was notable.

He sipped his tea, wondering if she was rambling in her elderliness. She never had done so before, she’d always been as sharp as a needle.

‘Simplicity?’ he said. ‘Are you feeling yourself?’

‘Father Finn liked to come here on a Sunday. He liked it particularly and I liked it myself. With the piano lessons on a Wednesday it was the same.’

He frowned, then nodded. He’d watched the tennis-players in Herbert Park, he said, after it had become too chilly to go on lying on the grass. It would be a long time yet, he said, before the symphony was complete; there’d be years in the piano cubicle and years lying out in the sun, letting the music run through his head. It was no good being in a hurry; you knew instinctively the pace that suited you.

‘You were like a child to us all those years, Justin.’

‘Ah, sure, it was enjoyable all round.’

He reached for another slice of cake. His teacup was empty and he wondered why she didn’t fill it. He looked at her closely and saw that she had begun to weep, something she had never done in his presence before.

‘My father was telling us last night,’ he said, ‘about a time some lads let a crate of chickens loose in the Bay Hotel, Dungarvan.’

He spoke in desperation: he wanted to stop her talking about Father Finn and about his own simplicity, how he’d been a child to them all those years. Her voice had a peculiar note in it.

‘It’s gone now,’ he said, ‘the old Bay Hotel.’

He knew she had no interest in a hotel she’d never seen nor heard of before; why should she have? Yet he went on talking about it, about the barricading of the Gents at the time of Slip Hennessy’s wedding, and the removal of the furniture from Father Dolan’s bedroom while he was having his tea. He spoke hurriedly, his words tumbling and juddering. Urgently they rushed from him, preventing her from speaking. But when he paused for breath she said:

‘We damaged you between us, Justin. We took advantage of your simplicity.’

‘Ah no, no.’

Again he spoke swiftly, endeavouring to convey through his agitation that he did not want to hear; that once she had spoken, the words could not be undone. For a long time now he had known he could play the piano in a tidy, racy way, that possibly he possessed no greater gift. It was his longing to walk away from his Ford Fiesta, from his parents’ house and from Ireland, that made him different from his father, not his modest musical aptitude. And yet his fantasy sprang from a lingering sliver of hope, from words that had once been spoken in his Aunt Roche’s sitting-room. He had clutched at the straw they had offered him and it had kept him going. He had played his part, not knowing what it was, offering them a straw also: for the first time, he realized that.

‘Father Finn couldn’t die guilty,’ she said. ‘No more than I can. He asked me to tell you the truth before he went, Justin, and I have to do that. No harm or damage was ever intended.’

Justin put down his teacup and saucer on a round, glass-topped table as familiar to him as any piece-of furniture in his parents’ house. She was right to have mentioned his simplicity: she might as easily have called him a fool. He felt ashamed of being in the room with her since she knew so much about his foolishness; she might even have guessed that he had seen himself in the broad-brimmed hat and the long black overcoat, or on an island with Gauguin’s dark-skinned girls.

‘I’d have deprived you of the piano and the gramophone if I’d sent you away.’

He stared at her. She should have sent him away all the same, she said, she should have sent him off to play with other children; and in time she should have urged him to embark on a friendship with a girl.

He stood up. ‘That’s a nice little piece you composed for me,’ Father Finn had said, and he saw again the priest’s face as he spoke those words, seeing it differently now. He saw his Aunt Roche’s differently also, with anxiety twitching in it as the priest murmured his praise and his encouragement, both of them fearful for the safety of their Wednesday and Sunday afternoons.

‘Don’t go, Justin. Don’t go.’

But there was no point in staying, any more than there was a point in saying he would end by marrying Thomasina Durcan. His Aunt Roche, who had seemed to understand so much, wouldn’t understand that such things happened when you had nothing to keep you going. He had thought the world of her, just as he had of Father Finn, but she wouldn’t understand if he said that in time he would acquire his father’s bonhomie, even his popularity with the drapers of the provinces. A woman like Miss Murphy might enter his life, or a woman like Mrs Keane.

He did not look again at the frail presence in the room he had come to know so well. She cried out at him, only repeating that she’d had to tell the truth, that the truth was more important than anything. She caught at the sleeve of his jacket, begging him to forgive her for the past. He pushed her hand away, and swore at her before he went.