Nora Webster: A Novel

by Colm Toibin

  “Terrified of meeting me? No, he was not!”

  “That’s what Ray said. He said that your sister had told Seamus that he was not to talk golf to you, that he was to think of something more sensible to discuss as you were highly intelligent. And then Seamus got so nervous that golf is all he talked about and you now think he is a total gobshite.”

  “A gobshite?” Nora had never heard Elizabeth use such a word before. “I’m sure he’s very nice,” Nora said. “But I’m glad to hear he was terrified. He has a funny way of showing it, mind you.”

  Elizabeth did not suspect that Ray had, in fact, been in the golf club with his fiancée, but, as she began the morning’s work, Nora saw no reason to tell her.

  As Christmas approached, Nora was relieved to hear that Una was going to spend Christmas Day with Catherine and then the days afterwards with Seamus. The idea of having to entertain Una and Seamus in the company of Jim and Margaret was more than she was ready for. She did not know if Jim, during his days as a rebel, had tried to blow up the golf club but she was sure that he had his sights on some of its more prominent members. And Seamus’s account of the progress of one of his games of golf would not be entertained with any enthusiasm by Jim.

  There was much excitement when Fiona and Aine came home for the holidays; they both had been invited to parties, and went out with their friends to a lounge bar in the town. When Nora protested that Aine was too young for lounge bars and needed, in any case, to study her Latin, Aine responded sharply, wondering if she and Fiona, after their hard term’s studying, were to be confined to the back room with Nora and Donal and Conor and the TV set. It left Nora silent. Aine had never spoken to her like this before and she was almost amused. On one of the nights when she heard the girls coming in at four, she was tempted to go downstairs and find out where they had been, but instead decided to go back to sleep and ask them the next day when she came home from work.

  On the Sunday before Christmas she invited Jim and Margaret to tea. As soon as they arrived, Margaret went into the front room to talk to Donal, as she usually did, leaving Nora to deal with Jim, who hardly responded to her efforts at making conversation. He brightened up, however, when he saw Fiona and Aine.

  Nora could not remember how the conversation about Northern Ireland developed. She knew that Aine was in the debating society in school and had seen her speak once, but she did not think that they had debates about politics.

  “There’s a girl in school,” Aine said, “who has a cousin in Newry and she says it’s a disgrace. I don’t know how we let it happen. I think a society that lets that happen has a lot to answer for.”

  “It was funny,” Jim said, “when I was interned in the Curragh, we didn’t like the Limerick fellows at first because they wanted to organise a soccer league, but then we saw that they didn’t mean any harm. We never got used to the Northerners, though. It was the Northerners who stood out.”

  “But that’s just prejudice,” Aine said. “A country like Ireland is too small to be divided.”

  When Margaret came into the room she asked what they were talking about.

  “Northern Ireland, if you don’t mind,” Nora said. “As if we don’t have enough of it on the television.”

  “Oh, God,” Margaret said. “We went there on a bus tour. I don’t know what part of the North we were in but the people threw stones at the bus. I was delighted when we got back safely over the border. A crowd of Protestants, I’d say.”

  On Christmas Eve, Una dropped off the presents to the house before going to Kilkenny. She had bought Fiona and Aine the same expensive make-up she was wearing herself and the two girls were busy all afternoon trying on the make-up and choosing clothes for Fiona to wear on a date that evening that Nora, as she prepared things for the next day, was not supposed to know about.

  When Jim and Margaret arrived with presents for the children, Donal and Conor had to go to Margaret’s car to help carry the packages. It took everyone a while to spot that there was nothing for Donal except a Selection Box. Nora noticed that Margaret sounded oddly nervous as she explained.

  “Well, it will be a nice surprise for everyone,” she said.

  “But what is it, Aunt Margaret?” Fiona asked.

  “I know,” Conor said.

  “Tell us,” Aine said.

  “It’s a darkroom,” he said.

  Over the previous months, it emerged, Margaret had converted the small storeroom off the corridor between her kitchen and bathroom into a darkroom. When Nora discovered that this involved the installing of cold running water and a sink as well as equipment, she realised that Margaret and Jim had gone to considerable expense. This was what was happening in the front room as Margaret stopped by each time to have a talk with Donal. He had worked on her sympathy enough for her to decide, without consulting Nora, who would have prevented it, to build him a special room where he could develop photographs. Fiona and Aine were as puzzled as she was by what had happened. Later, when the boys had gone to bed, and Fiona had gone out on her date, Aine asked Nora if she had really not known about the darkroom.

  “He could grow out of that interest,” Aine said. “And what would Margaret do with her darkroom then?”

  “They talk all the time and he must have told her that was what he wanted,” Nora said.

  “No one has a darkroom in their house,” Aine said.

  “Well, Donal has one now,” Nora said, “and it will be a good excuse for leaving his own house. Maybe that’s what he needs to do as much as anything else.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  After much argument, she had finally been granted a second pension, and both pensions had been increased in the previous year’s budget. She had not been aware at first that the extra money had been back-dated by six months and she was surprised to get cheques in the post for what she thought were large sums of money. When she mentioned this to Jim and Margaret, Jim responded by saying that Charlie Haughey had been a hard-working minister for justice though a terrible minister for agriculture, but, if he could keep his head, he would go down in the books as a great minister for finance.

  She remembered, years before, being in the hallway of Dr. Ryan’s house in Delgany with Maurice. It was an engagement party for Dr. Ryan’s daughter. Dr. Ryan was minister for finance then. She was surprised by the opulence of the house itself, and the fact that waiters and caterers had been hired. All of the guests, except those who had come from Wexford, wore evening clothes. Dr. Ryan exuded a sort of nobility and she was surprised at how Maurice and Shay Doyle, who had also come from Enniscorthy with them, seemed cowed and nervous in his presence. As they stood by the minister in all his considered grace in the hallway, they became less than themselves. She was surprised too at the ease with which the minister dismissed Haughey, saying he was a young pup in too big a hurry, with no roots in Fianna Fáil.

  “He joined us because we were in power,” she remembered Dr. Ryan saying, “and that is all he wants, power.”

  She remembered the silence in the car for the first half hour as they drove home, and then, a few days later, the gravity with which Maurice imparted what the minister had said to Jim. She noticed afterwards, when the subject of politics came up with others, including Catherine and Mark, or her aunt Josie, Maurice never repeated what he had heard from Dr. Ryan, or alluded to it. It was private information and was not to be shared.

  Only one other time had she seen Maurice cowed like that. It was a meeting of a Catholic lay group in the town, with Dr. Sherwood of St. Peter’s College in the chair, when some theologian spoke about change in the church. He then insisted that the power of the church itself took precedence and came before all other powers, including law, or politics, or human rights. For members of the church, he said, the church must come first not merely in religious questions but in all questions. This did not mean, he said, that it was the only power and that civil law did not matter, but
it was the primary power. Nora nudged Maurice when it came to the time for questions and comments because she knew that he did not agree with what the theologian had said, as she certainly did not. But standing up in public to question a theologian was not something he would do. She never forgot the look on Maurice’s face, not only puzzled or powerless, but also intimidated, as he had been by Dr. Ryan in the hallway in Delgany.

  While Jim spoke warmly of Haughey’s prospects, she knew that he actually disapproved of him, as he did of most of the young ministers. She herself liked Haughey, or what she knew of him; she admired his ambition and his interest in changing things. She liked him even more now when she read his latest budget speech and saw that he mentioned widows. Once more he increased the pension, also back-dating the increase. If she had known that these increases were going to come, she thought, she might not have sold the house in Cush. Once the latest back-dated money arrived, she decided she would put it into the account in the bank where she had put some of the money she got for the house in Cush, but she did not know what she would do with it.

  When Jim and Margaret came to visit, she spoke of Haughey again. Jim was not impressed.

  “Courting popularity, that’s all he is doing now, and I saw a picture of him up on a horse, like a lord.”

  “Oh, that was ridiculous all right,” Margaret said.

  “Nothing good will come of him,” Jim said.

  “Well, he’s the only politician I know who has bothered about widows,” Nora said.

  “Jim heard about him in Courtown,” Margaret said.

  “Drinking champagne,” Jim said, “and ordering more, with all sorts of Flash Harrys and builders and barristers and fellows on the make. And everyone watching him. Like a big performance it was.”

  “I have no problem with him enjoying himself,” Nora said.

  If Maurice were here now, he would defend Haughey, she thought. Unlike Jim, he had thought it was wrong that men in their seventies should be in positions of power in a country, and he supported change.

  Jim tapped the arm of the chair with the index finger of his right hand and whistled under his breath. He was not used to women disagreeing with him, and she smiled at the thought that he might, if he was to continue visiting her house, have to learn to tolerate it.

  One evening in March she answered a knock to the door herself and saw a man whom she recognised as the lorry driver in Gibney’s who had spoken about the riots in Derry. As she invited him into the front room, she thought for a moment that something had happened to one of the children and went through them in her mind one by one. Donal was down in Margaret’s developing photographs, Conor was in the back room. It was unlikely that this man would know Fiona or Aine, or indeed Una or Margaret or Jim. He seemed nervous.

  “I don’t think I know your name,” she said.

  “I’m Mick Sinnott. I knew your father well. We were neighbours in the Ross Road. And the bossman Mr. Webster, God rest him, taught me.”

  “You knew my father?”

  “It was years ago all right. There wouldn’t be many left who knew him. We were in and out of one another’s houses. It was that way.”

  Suddenly, he was at ease, but she could not think why he had come to the house.

  “And what can I do for you?” She tried not to sound too imperious.

  “I’ll tell you now. The others told me I was not to come up, but it was only when I went home and told my own missus and we discussed it. You see, the whole staff of Gibney’s, barring a few, are joining the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union and we are going to do it in secret tomorrow night in Wexford town. If they find out about it, they’ll stop it, they’ll divide us, make better offers to people who won’t be able to say no. The others thought that they would leave you out of this, seeing as you are friends with the family and only part-time and new in the place. But I decided I’d let you know. I have seen you all my life. I remember you getting married and everything. Anyway, the long and short of it is that we are all joining the union. And I know you well enough to be sure that you won’t say anything to the daughter when you go to work tomorrow, and if you want to come with us, there will be a lift for you, and if you don’t, no one will be any the wiser that I spoke to you.”

  “What time are you going?”

  “We have to be there at eight.”

  “Would someone collect me?”

  “They would, they would be delighted to.”

  “Are all the office workers joining?” she asked.

  “All the ones we asked,” he replied.

  She said nothing for a moment.

  “Do you need time to think?” he asked.

  “No, I was wondering how long we’ll be down there for.”

  “To be honest, none of us have ever done this before, and all I know is that they want every one of us there. They want no one saying they’ll join and then telling the Gibneys that they didn’t really mean it.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll get someone to look after the boys.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting that you would be one of the ones who would say one thing and mean another,” he said.

  “I know you weren’t.”

  “Your father would be proud of us now. He had no time for the bosses of this town. He wasn’t a diehard or anything, but he was decent.”

  “I was the oldest, so I remember him best,” she said and smiled. “He would be eighty this year if he were alive. That’s hard to imagine, isn’t it?”

  “It is all right,” he replied.

  “So I’ll be here tomorrow at half seven waiting.”

  “There will be some of them surprised when I tell them that. We tried to do it years ago, just a few of us, and the old fellow threatened to sack us. He said he’d close the place and we had to back down because we had no support. But with this son of his, the efficiency expert, and the idea that no one’s job is safe, then I think we have support this time. And there’s a great man in Wexford by the name of Howlin, Brendan Corish’s right-hand man. I know that’s not your party now, but there could be changes coming, that’s what they say. Anyway, this man in Wexford will make the Gibneys mind their manners, especially the little pup.”

  Nora opened the door for him.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, missus,” he said as he went down the steps.

  When he had gone, Nora felt light, almost happy for a moment. There was something about Mick Sinnott’s tone—how oddly confident he was, and talkative, and how perfect his manners were—that reminded her of years before, years when she was young and went to dances. But it was not just that, it was the idea that she had made a decision for herself, the idea that she had asked no one’s advice. It was the first time since she had sold the house in Cush that such a chance had come so easily, and she was glad she had taken it. Perhaps it was not wise; perhaps it made more sense to be grateful to the Gibneys. But it pleased her now to be grateful to no one.

  She arranged with Donal and Conor once more that they would not need a baby-sitter and that Donal would be home from Aunt Margaret’s by seven.

  She did not know what to wear and thought it was funny that no one, certainly not her sisters, or her daughters, or her aunt, would be able to advise her on how to dress at a meeting of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union. Dowdy, she thought. Clothes that no one would notice.

  As she walked down the stairs wearing a plain skirt and blouse and a warm pullover, she liked the idea of how little the Gibneys could imagine what was happening. She was not sure that being a member of a trade union would make any difference to anyone working in Gibney’s, and the family would, in time, get used to it. But the fact that it was done behind their backs would irritate them, maybe even shock them. Peggy Gibney, she thought, would never speak to her again when she heard that she was part of it, and that gave her a strange satisfaction.

/>   She had thought it would be Mick Sinnott himself who would collect her and was surprised when the knock came to the door and it was Walk-like-a-duck. And waiting in the back seat of the car was the young bookkeeper who had been told by Miss Kavanagh to cut up the files.

  On the journey to Wexford, she was surprised by how much they seemed to dislike the Gibneys, especially Thomas and Elizabeth.

  “He follows us everywhere,” Walk-like-a-duck complained about Thomas. “One day I had to take in orders in Blackwater and Kilmuckridge and then in Riverchapel and then in Gorey. So since it was a nice summer’s day I brought Rita and the kids with me and the plan was to leave them in Morriscastle and then call for them at the end of the day and have a dip myself. As we were driving through The Ballagh I noticed a car right behind me and who was in it but Thomas Gibney and he followed me the whole way. He never mentioned it when he saw me, but that’s what he spent the day doing.”

  “And Elizabeth,” the young bookkeeper said, “never even looks at us, let alone speaks to us.”

  “I find her very nice to work with,” Nora said.

  “I don’t mind Miss Kavanagh at all,” the bookkeeper said. “I mean it takes time to get used to her. She knows every detail of what happens in the office, and she never forgets anything. You know, she was going to be an accountant, and then her father died and she had to come home.”

  “No,” Nora said, “she has always been in Gibney’s. She was there when I worked there before.”

  “Yes, but she got a placement in Dublin when she had been in Gibney’s a while, and she spent a year there, but then she had to come home. And her mother is still alive and she has to mind her.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Nora said.

  “My father,” the bookkeeper went on, “works for the Armstrongs, and he says it’s better to work for Protestants. But I don’t know. The Armstrongs said that if their crowd joined a union, they’d close up and leave the town. I don’t think the Gibneys will do that.”