‘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.
Events at Drimaghleen
Nothing as appalling had happened before at Drimaghleen; its people had never been as shocked. They’d had their share of distress, like any people; there were memories of dramatic occurrences; stories from a more distant past were told. In the 1880s a woman known as the Captain’s wife had run away with a hunchbacked pedlar. In 1798 there’d been resistance in the hills and fighting in Drimaghleen itself. During the Troubles a local man had been executed in a field by the Black
and Tans. But no story, and no long memory, could match the horror of the tragedy that awaited the people of Drimaghleen on 22 May 1985, a Wednesday morning.
The McDowds, that morning, awoke in their farmhouse and began the day as they always did, McDowd pulling on his shirt and trousers and lifting down a black overcoat from the pegs beside the kitchen door. He fastened it with a length of string which he kept in one of its pockets, found his socks in his gum-boots and went out with his two sheepdogs to drive the cows in for milking. His wife washed herself, put the kettle on the stove, and knocked on her daughter’s door. ‘Maureen!’ she called. ‘Come on now, Maureen!’
It was not unusual that Maureen failed to reply. Mrs McDowd re-entered her bedroom and dressed herself. ‘Get up out of that, Maureen!’ she shouted, banging again on her daughter’s door. ‘Are you sick?’ she inquired, puzzled now by the lack of movement from within the room: always at this second rousing Maureen yawned or spoke. ‘Maureen!’ she shouted again, and then opened the door.
McDowd, calling in the cattle, was aware that there had been something wrong in the yard as he’d passed through it, but an early-morning torpor hindered the progression of his thoughts when he endeavoured to establish what it was. His wife’s voice shouting across the field at him, and his daughter’s name used repeatedly in the information that was being inadequately conveyed to him, jolted him into an awareness that what had been wrong was that Maureen’s bicycle had not been leaning against the kitchen window-sill. ‘Maureen hasn’t come back,’ his wife repeated again when he was close enough to hear her. ‘She’s not been in her bed.’
The cows were milked because no matter what the reason for Maureen’s absence they had to be. The breakfast was placed on the kitchen table because no good would come of not taking food. McDowd, in silence, ate with an appetite that was unaffected; his wife consumed less than usual. ‘We will drive over,’ he said when they had finished, anger thickening his voice.
She nodded. She’d known as soon as she’d seen the unused bed that they would have to do something. They could not just wait for a letter to arrive, or a telegram, or whatever it was their daughter had planned. They would drive over to the house where Lancy Butler lived with his mother, the house to which their daughter had cycled the evening before. They did not share the thought that possessed both of them: that their, daughter had taken the law into her own hands and gone off with Lancy Butler, a spoilt and useless man.
McDowd was a tallish, spare man of sixty-two, his face almost gaunt, grey hair ragged on his head. His wife, two years younger, was thin also, with gnarled features and the hands of a woman who all her life had worked in the fields. They did not say much to one another, and never had; but they did not quarrel either. On the farm, discussion was rarely apt, there being no profit in it; it followed naturally that grounds for disagreement were limited. Five children had been born to the McDowds; Maureen was the youngest and the only one who had remained at home. Without a show of celebration, for that was not the family way, her twenty-fifth birthday had passed by a month ago.
‘Put your decent trousers on,’ Mrs McDowd urged. ‘You can’t go like that.’
‘I’m all right the way I am.’
She knew he would not be persuaded and did not try, but instead hurried back to her bedroom to change her shoes. At least he wouldn’t drive over in the overcoat with the string round it: that was only for getting the cows in from the field when the mornings were cold. He’d taken it off before he’d sat down to his breakfast and there would be no cause to put it on again. She covered up her own old skirt and jumper with her waterproof.
‘The little bitch,’ he said in the car, and she said nothing.
They both felt the same, anxious and cross at the same time, not wanting to believe the apparent truth. Their daughter had ungratefully deceived them: again in silence the thought was shared while he drove the four miles to the Butlers’ house. When they turned off the tarred road into a lane, already passing between the Butlers’ fields, they heard the dog barking. The window of the Volkswagen on Mrs McDowd’s side wouldn’t wind up, due to a defect that had developed a month ago: the shrill barking easily carried above the rattle of the engine.
That was that, they thought, listening to the dog. Maureen and Lancy had gone the night before, and Mrs Butler couldn’t manage the cows on her own. No wonder the old dog was beside himself. Bitterly, McDowd called his daughter a bitch again, though only to himself. Lancy Butler, he thought, my God! Lancy Butler would lead her a dance, and lead her astray, and lead her down into the gutters of some town. He’d warned her a thousand times about Lancy Butler. He’d told her the kind of fool he was.
‘His father was a decent man,’ he said, breaking at last the long silence. ‘Never touched a drop.’
‘The old mother ruined him.’
It wouldn’t last long, they both thought. Lancy Butler might marry her, or he might wriggle out of it. But however it turned out she’d be back in six months’ time or at any rate a year’s. There’d probably be a baby to bring up.
The car turned into the yard, and neither McDowd nor his wife immediately saw their daughter lying beside the pump. For the first few moments of their arrival their attention was claimed by the distressed dog, a black-and-white sheepdog like their own two. Dust had risen from beneath the Volkswagen’s wheels and was still thick in the air as they stepped from the car. The dog was running wildly across a corner of the yard, back and forth, and back and forth again. The dog’s gone mad, Mrs McDowd thought, something’s after affecting it. Then she saw her daughter’s body lying by the pump, and a yard or so away her daughter’s bicycle lying on its side, as if she had fallen from it. Beside the bicycle were two dead rabbits.
‘My God,’ McDowd said, and his wife knew from his voice that he hadn’t seen his daughter yet but was looking at something else. He had walked to another part of the yard, where the dog was. He had gone there instinctively, to try to calm the animal.
She knelt down, whispering to Maureen, thinking in her confusion that her daughter had just this minute fallen off her bicycle. But Maureen’s face was as cold as stone, and her flesh had already stiffened. Mrs McDowd screamed, and then she was aware that she was lying down herself, clasping Maureen’s dead body. A moment later she was aware that her husband was weeping piteously, unable to control himself, that he was kneeling down, his hands on the body also.
Mrs McDowd did not remember rising to her feet, or finding the energy and the will to do so. ‘Don’t go over there,’ she heard her husband saying to her, and saw him wiping at his eyes with the arm of his jersey. But he didn’t try to stop her when she went to where the dog was; he remained on his knees beside their daughter, calling out to her between his sobs, asking her not to be dead.
The dog was crouched in a doorway, not barking any more. A yard or so away Mrs Butler lay with one of her legs twisted under her, blood on the ground already turned brown, a pool of it still scarlet. Looking down at her, Mrs McDowd thought with abrupt lucidity: Maureen did not fall off her bicycle. She went back to where her daughter lay and behind the two tin barrels that stood by the pump she saw the body of Lancy Butler, and on the ground not far from it the shotgun that must have blown off Mrs Butler’s face.
O’Kelly of the Garda arrived at a swift conclusion. Old Mrs Butler had been as adamant as the McDowds in her opposition to the match that her son and Maureen McDowd had planned for themselves. And there was more to it than that: Mrs Butler had been obsessively possessive, hiding from no one her determination that no other woman should ever take her son away from her. Lancy was her only child, the single one to survive years of miscarrying. His father had died when Lancy was two years old, leaving mother and child to lead a lonely life on a farm that was remote. O’Kelly knew that Mrs Butler had been reputed to be strange in the head, and given to furious jealousies where Lancy was concerned. In the kind of rage that people who’d known her were familiar with she had shot her son’s sweetheart rather
than suffer the theft of him. He had wrenched the shotgun from her and by accident or otherwise it had exploded. A weak man at the best of times, he had turned it upon himself rather than face the reality of what had happened. This deduction, borne out by the details in the yard, satisfied O’Kelly of the Garda; the people of Drimaghleen arrived themselves at the same conclusion. ‘It was always trouble,’ McDowd said on the day of the funerals. ‘The minute she went out with Lancy Butler it was trouble written down for poor Maureen.’
Drimaghleen was a townland, with nothing to mark it except a crossroads that was known as Drimaghleen Crossroads. The modest farms that comprised it, each of thirty or so acres, were scattered among bogland, one separated from the next by several miles, as the McDowds’ and the Butlers’ were. The village of Kilmona was where the people of Drimaghleen went to Mass, and where they confessed to Father Sallins. The children of the farms went to school in the small town of Mountcroe, driven each morning in a yellow bus that drove them back to the end of their lanes or farm tracks in the afternoon. Milk churns were collected in much the same way by the creamery lorry. Bread and groceries were bought in the village; fresh meat in Mountcroe. When the men of Drimaghleen got drunk they did so in Mountcroe, never in the village, although often they took a few bottles of stout there, in the bar beside the grocery counter. Hardware and clothes were bought in Mountcroe, which had had a cinema called the Abbey Picture House until the advent of television closed it in the early 1960s. Drimaghleen, Kilmona and Mountcroe formed a world that bounded the lives of the people of the Drimaghleen farms. Rarely was there occasion to venture beyond it to the facilities of a town that was larger – unless the purpose happened to be a search for work or the first step on the way to exile.
The Collected Stories Page 147
