Nora Webster: A Novel

by Colm Toibin

  “Why are we going there?”

  “Una invited us.”

  “Why have we been invited?” he asked.

  Because of the way he asked questions, it was often difficult to tell Conor a half-truth. Immediately on arrival, he sensed that there was something wrong and that this was not a casual visit. She could see his mind working, going through the possibilities. She could not tell him that they were worried about Aine, and that she had not been in her bedsit since Tuesday, the day before the burning of the Embassy. When Nora went to the bathroom, Fiona followed her to say that she had called Aine’s number again but the phone was answered by someone from another bedsit who had gone to check and found the note still pinned to Aine’s door. She had to meet Paul Whitney, she said, and she would ask his advice about what to do.

  “He’d know if there were people arrested at the Embassy march,” Fiona said.

  “Was Aine on the march?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’ll phone tonight.”

  When, by ten o’clock, only one person had phoned, who said that she had not seen Aine, Nora and Conor walked back from Una’s house. Later, as she heard Fiona coming in, Nora tiptoed downstairs so that Conor would not hear her.

  “Paul says that he was thinking of going to Dublin anyway tomorrow, so we can go around to Aine’s and find her.”

  “Are you sure she was on the march?”

  “I know she has been going on marches and this was such a big one, she wouldn’t have missed it.”

  Nora did not want to spend the day in Una’s, waiting for a phone call.

  “I’ll go too in my own car.”

  “There’s no need.”

  She saw that Fiona was on the point of suggesting that if she really did want to travel, she could do so with them, and then deciding that she would not ask her.

  “We’ll meet in the Shelbourne Hotel at two o’clock,” Nora said firmly. “I’ll ask Una to go and see Donal in St. Peter’s. And I’ll call around to Aine’s as soon as I arrive in Dublin. It’s probably nothing. She’s probably just staying with someone, and she’ll be home then.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Fiona said. “Which is why I wonder if we all need to go.”

  “I can do some shopping,” Nora said.

  “What will Conor do?”

  “I’ll deal with him when I’ve had a night’s sleep.”

  In the morning, she found Conor in the kitchen.

  “What were you and Fiona whispering about last night?” he asked.

  “Oh, I woke when she came in and I went and had a cup of tea with her.”

  When Una appeared, Conor became even more suspicious. Nora signalled to Una not to say anything in front of him. No matter what room they went into, however, he followed them, at one stage pretending he was looking for something and then finding a chair near the window in the front room when they were there. Eventually, Nora went upstairs to her bedroom and waited for Una to follow.

  “A friend of hers rang, she seemed very nice,” she whispered, “and she said that they all usually meet in a pub in Leeson Street on a Saturday night, either Hourican’s or Hartigan’s.”

  She agreed to take Conor and visit Donal, bringing him what supplies he had asked for.

  As Nora came out of her bedroom she found Conor hovering on the landing. They had not heard him coming up the stairs.

  “Has Aine gone missing?” he asked.

  “Who said that?”

  “Maybe Aine was one of the ones who burned the Embassy,” he said. “Uncle Jim said that the Special Branch would be after them all. Maybe she’s trying to escape.”

  “Don’t be silly!” Nora said.

  “Why are you all whispering then?”

  “Because Aine has a new boyfriend, and myself and Fiona are going to Dublin to meet him, but she didn’t want you or Donal to know because she didn’t want the two of you jeering her and asking her nosey questions when she came home. And she was going to tell you in her own good time.”

  “What’s his name?

  “Declan.”

  Conor seemed to think about the name for a moment and then he nodded.

  “So you can go to Una’s,” Nora said, “and then go and visit Donal. And then we’ll be home later.”

  She drove to Dublin sure that, wherever Aine was, she had not been arrested. Had anything happened to her, Nora was certain that they would have been notified. She did not want to spend the day waiting to have all this confirmed, that was all; nor did she want Fiona and Paul taking over the role that she and Maurice would have played. Aine was her responsibility, but Aine was, she thought, like Nora herself. From an early age she had been able to take care of herself.

  When she found the house where Aine had her bedsit in Raglan Road, she did not know which bell to ring, so she rang all of them. A sleepy-looking young woman came to the door in a dressing-gown.

  “Oh yes, she’s Flat Four,” she said. “Did you get no answer for that bell?”

  “Do you mind if I come in and knock on the door of the flat?”

  “Are you the woman that’s been ringing all the time looking for her?”

  She pointed to a pay-phone in the hall beside the open door into her flat.

  “I have been looking for her, yes.”

  “Well, I went and checked last night and the note I pinned to the door is still there. You can go and check yourself now, but if you rang her bell and she didn’t answer, then she isn’t there. All the bells work perfectly.”

  Fiona and Paul Whitney were in the lounge of the Shelbourne Hotel when she arrived.

  “I phoned a friend of mine who’s a Guard,” Paul said. “He’s in the Branch a good while and he knows his way around. He says it’s a very unsettled time. The thing is there were a lot of the Officials in Merrion Square on Wednesday as well as the Provisionals.”

  “The Officials?” Nora asked.

  “The Official IRA,” Fiona said.

  “Oh dear,” Nora said. “I’m sure Aine is not in any IRA.”

  “There are so many new organisations now, it’s hard to keep track of them,” Paul said.

  “We’re going to go up to Earlsfort Terrace,” Fiona said, “because Aine often studies there, and then we’re going to go to Belfield.”

  “If she hasn’t turned up by the end of the day,” Paul said, “it would do no harm to put in a missing person report on her. The Guards would find her quickly enough, I’d say.”

  “Let’s wait until later,” Nora said.

  They arranged to meet at the Shelbourne again at six o’clock.

  Nora walked down Grafton Street and looked at the records in McCullough Pigott’s, and then drove again to the house in Raglan Road. She rang the bell for Flat 4 and, on getting no reply, she went and sat in the car and waited until it was time to meet Fiona and Paul.

  Paul liked the Shelbourne Hotel and appeared to enjoy ordering tea and sandwiches for all three of them in the lounge.

  “I’d say,” he said, “that this is one week in Dublin when people have been moving around a lot and staying in all sorts of places. So, I’d say that’s it.”

  “Yes, but it is strange,” Fiona said, “that she has not been back to the house in Raglan Road.”

  “When I was a student,” Paul said, “I went to the Cheltenham races every year. God, if anyone had come looking for me that week, they would not have found me. And one year a few of us got lucky and we went on from there to Paris.”

  “And what about your studies?” Nora asked.

  “You could do it all in one month. Certainly, in the law you could,” he replied. “Even the medical students did nothing much until April.”

  “I’m sure Aine is studying very hard,” Nora said, “and hasn’t gone to Cheltenham, not to speak of Paris.”

  “The Chelten
ham races are actually in March,” Paul said. “So she wouldn’t have gone there.”

  Nora looked at Fiona, who seemed as aware as she that Paul lacked a sense of humour. As he stretched and put his right ankle resting on his left knee, Nora noticed his socks. They were red and woollen and had obviously been carefully chosen. Looking at them made her wonder not only what she was doing with him and Fiona in the hotel, but what she was doing in Dublin. She thought back over everything that had led her here; the more she went over it the more she came to see it as a series of misjudgements, triggered by Aine’s appearance on The Late Late Show a year earlier, but triggered more intensely by the shootings in Derry and the funerals and the burning of the Embassy, and maybe too, she thought, by a lingering unease in the house that they had all become used to, but that any crisis, even one that they watched on television, could bring to the fore.

  She wanted to say that she was going home now and she was sure that Aine would get in touch with them in her own good time. And even if she really was missing, there was nothing that being in Dublin could do to help. If they did not hear from Aine soon, they would have to make some decision and she would rather make it on her own, or with Una, than in the company of Paul Whitney or anyone else who could make informal phone calls to members of the Special Branch. As she thought about this, it occurred to her to ask Fiona if she had phoned Una.

  “I should do that all right,” Fiona said.

  “I’ll come with you,” Nora said.

  They had to wait for the receptionist to put the call through to Una. When the phone was engaged, they waited by the desk, Nora presuming that the receptionist would re-dial the number.

  “We’re going to stay the night in Dublin,” Fiona said.

  “Where?”

  “Oh, Paul has friends and we’re going to stay with them.”

  “I think I might drive back home now,” Nora said.

  “Are we not going to go to Leeson Street to see if Aine is in one of those bars?”

  “There’s no need for all of us to do that. You can phone Una and let us know if she’s there.”

  Fiona turned away. Nora was going to say to Fiona that she had been married to a teacher and that teachers’ ways of expressing annoyance were not new to her. Instead, she asked the receptionist to phone the number again. When the call was put through to one of the booths, Nora indicated to Fiona that she should be the one to speak to Una. Once Fiona had closed the glass door, however, she was sorry that she had done this. Clearly, there was some news and she felt that Fiona should convey it to her the second she had it. But Fiona left her waiting outside and ignored her when she rapped her knuckles on the glass. The urge came to her again to walk out, find her car and drive home. She would spend the next day, once she had gone to mass and made sure that Conor was all right, listening to music. If there was any news about Aine, they could come and find her.

  Nonetheless, by the time Fiona came out of the phone booth, Nora had decided to steel herself and stand there and listen. She realised that she was desperately worried.

  “Marian O’Flaherty phoned Una and said that as far as she knew Aine would be on the Dublin Housing Action Committee protest in O’Connell Street today, and then they would be in a pub called the Bachelor Inn on Bachelor’s Walk and that later they might go to one of those bars in Leeson Street.”

  “Has Marian seen her?”

  “Yes, she thinks she’s been at lectures all week.”

  “So she’s not missing?” Nora asked.

  “Will you come with us to that pub on Bachelor’s Walk?”

  “I’m going home.”

  “Well, we should see if Aine is there,” Fiona said.

  “There’s no need for all of us to do that,” Nora replied.

  Fiona and Nora went back to the lounge.

  “Paul,” Nora said, standing in front of him, “we are all so grateful to you for everything you have done. I am going home now to look after Conor, so I would really appreciate if you and Fiona phoned my sister to let her know when you have seen Aine.”

  He nodded. He seemed for a second almost afraid of her. She nodded to Fiona and left them.

  When Nora arrived at Una’s, she learned that Fiona had phoned to say that they had found Aine with a placard in her hand on O’Connell Street Bridge and that she was safe and sound. She had not been to her bedsit because she was staying with a friend whose parents were away.

  “I hope it’s all for a good cause,” Nora said.

  “Well, isn’t she a little minx for worrying us so much,” Una said.

  When Conor appeared he was smiling. Una, he told her, had made him chips for his tea.

  “And what’s Declan like?” he asked. “I bet he’s small. And is he a socialist too?”

  “He’s very nice,” Nora said.

  “Who’s Declan?” Una asked.

  “You remember. I told you this morning. He’s Aine’s new boyfriend.”

  “Oh, yes,” Una said. “I believe he’s very nice.”

  Conor studied the two of them.

  “I don’t think she has a new boyfriend at all,” he said.

  One morning in late February, when she was walking to work, Nora noticed Phyllis’s car parked in John Street. As she got closer, she saw that Phyllis herself was in the driver’s seat reading a newspaper. For a second she thought to tap on the window, but then decided it would be better if she slipped by. The second morning, however, when the car was there again, Phyllis spotted her approaching and pulled down the window.

  “I’ll tell you the whole story at the Gramophone Society,” she said, “but I am here keeping guard in case Mossy Delaney, who is painting my house, decides to go to paint someone else’s house, leaving mine half done. He knows I’m here, so he’ll just have to come with me when he deigns to get out of bed. Oh, the trouble I have had!”

  On Thursday evening during the tea break at the Gramophone Society, Phyllis told her that when, on the first day, Mossy had failed to turn up, she had driven all around the town but had failed to find him. And then she had called to his house in John Street to be met with impertinence by his wife. She had then roamed the countryside, asking anyone she saw if they had seen Mossy’s van, which was painted green and looked like a wreck. Eventually, she said, she had found him at Deacon’s grand house near the road to Bunclody. She had gone into the house unannounced and found him halfway up a ladder painting a wall.

  “I shook the ladder and let a roar and frightened the life out of him,” Phyllis said, “and then was escorted out of the house by Mrs. Deacon, but not before I had told Mossy that I meant business. So the only way I can be sure to get the work done is by sitting outside his house every morning. I won’t tell you what his wife said to me yesterday. She is someone who is in full command of the vernacular.”

  Nora became interested when Phyllis mentioned that Mossy was painting over her wallpaper, using a new type of paint that the wallpaper could absorb. The last time when she had the back room of her own house re-papered she had sworn that she would never do it again. With Fiona and Aine, she had to strip all the old paper off with a scraper. No matter what they did, the scraper cut into the plasterwork. And then she thought that she had chosen the wrong wallpaper; it was too fussy, with too many flowers in a repeated pattern. She had trained herself to ignore it, but sometimes she found that it held her eye and that she was doing nothing else but looking at it.

  Phyllis assured her that, once Mossy finally arrived, he was a perfectionist; she described how he began with large strokes of the brush that looked as though they were going to allow the paint to go everywhere. Mossy explained, Phyllis said, that it was important that the paint be applied thinly and quickly so that it would not soak too heavily into the paper.

  Nora was not sure that she wanted to spend money on a painter. Also, the idea of someone disrupting the house, not comi
ng when he was meant to come, and leaving work unfinished for a long time, was not something she could face. She began to study the wallpaper in the back room, however, and wondered if she herself could paint over it, wondering also what the room would look like if it were painted white or cream. Everything else would look shabby, she concluded. The lino was worn and the tiles in the fireplace were chipped and the pelmet over the window was made of some thin piece of wood that looked flimsy. The curtains had never been changed in all the years, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to close them at night without them sagging.

  The idea of what she might do with the rooms downstairs kept her awake. She had to remind herself that she was free now, that there was no Maurice who would be cautious about costs, and grumpy about anything that would cause disruption to his routine. She was free. She could make any decision she liked about the house. She felt almost guilty as it occurred to her now that she could do whatever pleased her. It could all be done, anything she wanted, as long as she could afford it. If Jim and Margaret disapproved, or her sisters or daughters came with advice, she could ignore all of them.

  She would have to be careful with the boys. They were suspicious of everything, and watched her with nervous attention if she mentioned money. Conor had formed the habit of checking the price of things, and commenting on her purchases. If he were to find her looking at carpets in Dan Bolger’s, he would worry; it might be best if a new carpet arrived before he knew that she had bought it.