Nora Webster: A Novel

by Colm Toibin

  “You’re almost a contralto,” Phyllis said.

  “No, I’m a soprano,” Nora said.

  “No, no, you’re a mezzo now, but it’s bordering on contralto. Your voice is much deeper than mine.”

  “I was always a soprano. My mother was a soprano.”

  “It can happen. Your voice can deepen over time.”

  “I haven’t sung for years.”

  “Well, it was happening while you were silent, and with a bit of practice your voice would be very good, quite unusual.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They do auditions sometimes for the choir in Wexford. It’s a lovely choir. We usually sing a Mass.”

  “I’m not sure I’d have time.”

  “Well, I’ll tell them about you and we can see. And maybe you could come to the Gramophone Society? We meet every Thursday in Murphy-Flood’s. We each make a choice of records.”

  Nora did not want to tell her that she did not own any records and that the old record player was used only by the children for pop records. Phyllis started the lullaby again, this time going more slowly and leaving space for Nora to come in under her voice and then holding the last note of each line as long as Nora could.

  They sang until they reached Enniscorthy, and even as they drove through the town Phyllis still hummed the tune. Somehow, the singing had steeled her nerve, calmed her and made her concentrate on the road so that as she navigated the narrow streets, Phyllis, in her driving and her general demeanour, did an imitation of a perfectly sober woman driving her friend home. As she got out of the car, having been driven to her door, Nora thanked Phyllis and said that she, too, hoped that they would meet one another again soon.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On the first morning, in the caravan she had rented for two weeks in Curracloe, Nora had to wake Donal and Conor and give them notice that they had half an hour to vacate their beds so she could fold them away and fix the table in between the seats. At the other end of the small caravan, where she and Fiona and Aine slept, she set out the breakfast things, and went to the shop for bread or milk and the morning paper. When she came back they were still dozing. No matter what she said they would not get up until she told them that she would pull the blankets from them and put the table in place while they lay there. Even then they moved with reluctance. Within a few minutes, however, Conor was cheerful, but Donal did not speak as they had breakfast; he found the newspaper and read the latest account of the moon voyage and the astronauts with fierce attention, eating without even looking at the food.

  Then he lay back on the cushions and stared at the ceiling. After a while he took his camera out and pointed it at objects, focussing carefully and narrowing his eyes, framing a shot with deliberation, often of the smallest, slightest object. He appeared to be thinking, but she wondered also if he was not just trying to annoy her.

  She knew that there were two things that preoccupied him. First, he wondered when they would go to the strand so that he could be left alone in the caravan; he watched in case they were taking a picnic, which meant they would not be back at all during the day. When she suggested that he come with them, he shrugged and said that he might come later. Nora knew that he would spend the morning brooding over his photographic magazines, the ones that came every month, that Aunt Margaret paid for, or ones he bought out of his pocket money; they would cheer him up for at least a few hours, after which he would return to poring over the large manual on photography that Una had given him.

  Also, he was watching the time, since coverage of the moon voyage began at different times each day. As soon as they arrived he had gone to the television room of the Strand Hotel. Immediately, he had taken photographs of the television set itself, using the wide-angled lens he had got for Christmas from Nora, or long-exposure shots that she did not fully understand. She knew how deeply involved he was in this, and how easily he could become irritated by any questions about its purpose.

  Nora had watched him explain it with too much eagerness and intensity when Una and Seamus had stopped by on that first evening, his stammer becoming even worse than usual. And she had noticed how puzzled they had seemed.

  It was hard for Donal to accept that most people brought cameras on their holidays so that they could take snapshots on the beach. There was a box at home under the bed full of black-and-white photographs from holidays in the past, from the fields behind the cliff at Cush and from the strand there, all of them in pouches in folders with the negatives on the other side. When Seamus asked Donal why he couldn’t just take snaps of them all enjoying themselves, Donal almost winced at the word “snap” and stammered badly at the beginning as he tried to explain again that he was only interested in the television at the hotel and the images of space which might appear on it. And then he spoke too quickly as he explained how he would frame each shot to capture the surface of the television screen and within that the images of space, and that he would work out a special way of developing these photographs in the darkroom in his aunt Margaret’s when he got home.

  “Would you not be better all the same,” Seamus asked, “to take photographs of people?”

  Donal shrugged in a mixture of boredom and open contempt.

  “Donal!” Nora said.

  “I—” Donal began, but his stammer would not let him go much further. They all became silent as he tried. Then he lifted his head and looked brave and determined.

  “I don’t take photographs of people anymore,” he said calmly.

  On the next morning, there was a haze over everything. They found a place in the sand dunes where they could spread two rugs and lie out under the pale sun. Nora made Donal come with them so that he could help them carry the picnic basket and so that he would know where they were if he needed to find them.

  “The water is beautiful,” she said. “At least it was yesterday.”

  “You can see n-nothing,” Donal said. “Is it like this all d-day? I want to take p-pictures of this.”

  “The haze will be gone in an hour or two.”

  He went back to the caravan to fetch his camera. They made jokes when he appeared again, Fiona and Aine insisting that he could not take photographs of them until their suntan had improved. Donal walked away without speaking and moved towards the sea.

  “He’ll get nothing in this light,” Aine said. “Sure, you can see nothing.”

  “That’s what he wants,” Fiona said. “Have you not seen the pictures he developed? The big ones? They’re almost blank.”

  “Where are they?” Nora asked.

  “He has them with him in a sort of folder.”

  “Well, he didn’t show them to me.”

  “He didn’t show them to anyone,” Fiona said. “But they all fell out on the floor the other day and I started to help him pick them up. He nearly bit me. I think he’s still learning how to develop them but he says it’s deliberate.”

  Nora watched as Donal moved down the strand towards the shoreline. She smiled to herself as she saw him taking his pullover off and tying it around his waist, while still holding the camera like a precious object. As he moved further towards the water, she could no longer make him out clearly.

  The sea was rougher than she ever remembered it. She wondered if there was more shelter at Cush and if the waves there broke more gently. Also, the strand there was shorter and there were stones at the edge of the shore. Here there were sand dunes and the long strand, no stones, no shelter, no cliffs made of marl. She looked north towards Keatings’ but she could see nothing and was glad of that, and glad, too, that, no matter how great the visibility, Cush could never be seen from here. It was probable, she thought, that on a morning like this there would be no one at all in Cush, people would not venture down the cliff there until the haze had lifted.

  The girls had changed into their bathing costumes and slowly she did too.

  “D
id you not bring a book?” Nora asked Conor.

  “I’m fed up reading.”

  “I hope you don’t think you’re going to spend the day sitting there looking up in our faces,” Fiona said.

  “And listening to our conversation,” Aine added.

  “All about your boyfriends?” Conor asked. “Mammy, you should have heard them last night, it was all about Adamstown and White’s Barn.”

  “I hate Adamstown,” Aine said.

  “Fiona likes it,” Conor said.

  “Shut up, Conor,” Fiona said.

  “Conor, maybe someday if it rains we’ll go into Wexford and get you some books,” Nora said.

  “He has his tennis racquet,” Fiona said.

  “Leave him alone,” Nora replied.

  Fiona went down on her own to test the water.

  “The waves are high,” she said when she came back. “And they’re breaking right in close so you don’t have a choice about getting wet.”

  Once they had persuaded Conor to change into his togs, all four of them walked down the strand towards the water. Suddenly, from the distance, a foghorn boomed.

  “It must be Rosslare,” Nora said. “I’ve never heard it this loud before.”

  The waves were powerful enough to knock her over. Leaving Conor in the care of his sisters, she tried to swim into one of the waves as it broke, attempting to get beyond it, but it toppled her over so that for a moment she was completely powerless in the water. She moved out before the next one broke and then swam out further again to where it was almost calm, finding a sandbank. She stood and signalled to the others, but they were too busy waiting for the next wave to crash, Conor running back to the shoreline, shouting to his sisters and laughing.

  They would have twelve more days, she thought. And if the weather stayed like this then the girls might even forget that they had made her promise to drive them in to the town and deposit them home at the first sign of boredom or bad weather. Just before they had bought the house in Cush, before Donal and Conor were born, they had rented Kerr’s hut above the river at Keatings’. It had rained every day. It had rained so much that eventually she had no dry clothes for Fiona and Aine, nothing at all. And there was no electricity in the hut and no heater, just a couple of gas rings for cooking. For a day, maybe more, none of them could go out. She had taught the girls a number of card games and they had played Scrabble, but, when they tired of these games, there was nothing for them to do. They could not go home, because this was their only holiday. How strange and distant those days seemed now, all of them cooped up in a two-room hut with the damp seeping in, and clothes everywhere spread out to dry.

  Conor had become excited by the water. She watched him taking the full force of a wave and being dragged back to the shoreline. He had looked for a second as though he was going to cry as he picked himself up and stood there in shock, but then she saw him smile and call to his sisters a warning that an even bigger wave was coming. He moved between them, holding their hands as it broke. Nora watched them from the sandbank, noticing the heavier boom of the foghorn coming from Rosslare. She could feel the chill of mist in the air as the power of the sun seemed to weaken. If it began to rain, and if the rain did not lift, they would all go home and she would forget about the money they had paid for the caravan.

  In the days that followed, however, the weather did not change much. Sometimes in the morning the sun burned through the haze more quickly; other times, the day settled into a sort of windless greyness. It was always mild enough to stay on the strand and they never changed the spot they had found in the dunes on the first day. Sometimes Donal came to find them, and walked down along the strand with his camera. All their efforts to encourage him to get into the water, however, failed.

  Each day he made his way to the television lounge of the Strand Hotel. There were always a number of people, he said, watching the news of the approach of the astronauts to the moon. Sometimes they brought their children with them, children who wanted to talk and shout so that Kevin O’Kelly’s commentary could not be heard. He wished that there was somewhere else he could watch television without interruption; one man from Dublin kept giving him advice about how to focus his camera and how to get the best shots.

  “Nothing is ever perfect,” Nora said to him. “The world is made up of men like that. Just thank him and smile and ignore him.”

  Fiona had already done interviews and secured a job in a school in the town on the condition that she pass her final exams. When she phoned the training college from the call-box in the village, she learned that she had done so and was now qualified as a teacher. She arranged for a friend to come to collect her and borrowed money from Nora, promising to give it back when she got her first pay cheque. Although she said that she would come back to stay with them in the caravan before the holiday was over, Nora did not expect to see her.

  She was now alone with the other three. Using her library card and the cards of her two brothers, Aine had borrowed a stack of books about history and politics, the sort of books that Maurice might have been interested in. She acquired a cheap fold-up chair from the shop in the village one day and began to carry it and her books to the strand. She came swimming with Nora and Conor and managed to be polite, but, with her sister gone, she was oddly distant. When she was not reading she was mainly silent and Nora did not think she wanted her thoughts interrupted. When they passed the tennis court, Nora asked Aine if she might want to go there even to watch a game, as there were boys and girls her own age there, but she was not interested.

  One night Donal got special permission to stay late in the hotel, as it was possible that the moon walk would begin and he wanted to be sure he did not miss it. He had already taken four rolls of film which he kept in a special bag and Nora knew that he would spend the rest of the summer in the darkroom developing them. It was agreed that Nora could collect him at two in the morning. Although the caravan park was close enough to the hotel, she did not want him walking back there on his own so late at night.

  It took a while, as she waited outside the hotel, ringing the bell at intervals, to alert the night porter who came to the door with a manager. As they opened the door, they seemed suspicious of her; the manager asked her what she wanted. She explained gently that she had come to collect her son, who was in the television room watching the moon landing. The night porter stayed with her in the lobby while his colleague fetched Donal. The manager and the night porter seemed unfriendly, but she presumed that this was because she had disturbed them sleeping.

  The next day, when all three were settled in their usual place on the strand, she had gone down to the water on her own, leaving Aine reading and Conor looking through the pages of a comic book he had bought with money his uncle Jim had given him. The waves were still high. When Conor was with her she had to watch out for him and did not feel relaxed swimming on her own into deeper water. Now she could swim out beyond the waves where the water was calmer and she could float and look at the sky and try the backstroke, which she had learned years before but never perfected.

  She was paying no attention to anything, but as she was turning to change to the breast-stroke she saw Aine, at the edge of the water waving to her. Where was Conor, she thought? Where had Conor gone? She began to swim towards Aine, who was clearly in some distress. Since there were other people on the strand she could not fathom why Aine was not calling on them to help.

  She swam in, gasping.

  “It’s Donal,” Aine said. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”

  “Did he have an accident?”

  “No, but something happened at the hotel.”

  Aine explained that they had told Donal at the hotel that, since he was not a resident, then he could not use the television lounge.

  “But is that all that’s wrong with him?”

  “You should see him.”

  “I thought
someone was drowning.”

  “He is kind of hysterical, or he was when I left him.”

  Donal was sitting on a rug, away from Conor, who watched her cautiously when she arrived. He was rocking back and forth, his hands joined around his knees, the camera on a strap around his neck.

  “What happened?”

  “The m-manager who was th-there last n-night was waiting for me t-today. He s-said the lounge was only for r-residents and it was not for p-people from the caravan p-park. Until l-last night, he th-thought I was a r-resident.”

  “Do you not have enough photographs?” she asked.

  “I am g-going to miss the l-landing,” he said and began to sob. “All the photographs I had were j-just l-leading up to that.”

  “Donal, you can’t have everything,” she said.

  “I d-don’t want everything,” he replied.

  She took a towel and began to dry herself. If Maurice were alive, she thought, Donal would not have become so obsessive about his camera. He would certainly not have a darkroom at his disposal. She tried to remember what he was like before it all happened. It came to her now how attached he was to Maurice, how he would go over from the primary school to the secondary school and find Maurice’s classroom and sit at the back and wait for his father, or draw on the blackboard if he was allowed. He knew Maurice’s timetable by heart, what days he finished early and what days he taught a Leaving Cert class and could not be disturbed.

  She sighed as she changed out of her wet bathing costume. Her sisters would tell her not to do this, and Josie probably too, and her mother would have sharp words for her, were she alive. But she was sure, despite all of them, that it was the right thing to do. Fiona, she thought, was at home. This meant that Nora could drive Donal into the town and leave him in Fiona’s charge. He would hardly be any trouble, since the only things that interested him now were the television and the darkroom. She knew that Fiona would be annoyed, that she wanted to have the house to herself and invite her friends around. But she felt that she had no choice. She would go first into the village and phone Margaret at work, and Margaret would, she knew, be delighted to make Donal his tea in the evening and watch the moon landing on television with him. But he could not sleep in Margaret’s house; there was not room for him. He would have to sleep in his own bed. Nora would make him promise to be tidy and not make a nuisance of himself. She thought of phoning Tom O’Connor next door and asking him to speak to Fiona, let her know that they were coming, but she decided that it would be better just to drive Donal home and deposit him there. She hoped that it would not be too much of a surprise for Fiona, but she could object all she wanted, Nora thought. It would be only until the coverage of the moon landing ended.