by Colm Toibin
‘Cathal can get his hair cut, but I’m not doing it and that’s that.’
She drove in silence through Rathfarnham and parked in the shopping-centre car park.
‘We’ll have to get a trolley,’ she said.
‘Can I have a Ninety-nine?’
‘After.’
‘After what?’
‘After you behave. How are you going to behave?’
‘Impeccably,’ he said. It was a new big word he had learned. When he looked at her, seeking her approval, she laughed and that forced him to smile.
‘What are we getting?’ he asked as they pushed the trolley through the supermarket.
‘I have it all on a list. Minced meat, onions, beer, salad.’
‘Why do you need me?’
‘To mind the trolley when I’m paying at the checkout.’
‘It’s boring,’ he said.
‘Do you think we should get large cans or small cans of beer?’ Again, she was using an adult tone.
‘It’s boring,’ he repeated.
When she got back, she saw that the tables and chairs were set up in the garden. She checked one of the kitchen drawers for plastic tablecloths. The boys were once more playing aeroplanes.
‘If it rains, we’ll move everything in,’ Hugh said as they both surveyed the garden.
At nine o’clock the first guests, two men and a woman, arrived carrying six-packs of Guinness and a bottle of red wine. The woman was carrying a fiddle case.
‘Are we the first?’ one of the men, tall with spectacles and curly hair, said. They seemed uneasy, as though they were half tempted to turn and go. Helen didn’t know them and didn’t think she had seen them before. Hugh introduced them to her.
‘Sit down, sit down, we’ll get you a drink,’ Hugh said.
They sat in the kitchen and looked out at the tables and the long garden. They said nothing. The two boys came in and examined them and went out again.
‘An bhfuil Donncha ag teacht?’ Hugh began to speak in Irish and one of the men spoke back from the side of his mouth, something funny, almost bitter. The others laughed. Helen noticed how unfashionably long the speaker’s sideburns were.
Hugh handed them drinks, and two of them went into the garden, leaving the one with the long sideburns. It struck Helen for a moment that she had interviewed the woman for a job, or she had worked hours in the school, but she was not sure. Hugh and his friend talked in Irish. Helen wondered if she was wearing the right clothes for the party; she watched the woman from the window, noted her jeans and white top and hennaed hair, how relaxed and natural she looked. Helen moved towards the fridge and checked again that everything was in order: the chilli con carne would simply need to be reheated, the rice boiled; the salads were all ready, the knives and forks and paper napkins set out. She opened some bottles of red wine.
Just then, another group arrived, one of them was carrying a guitar case and another a flute case. She recognised them and they greeted her. There was one woman among them; Helen watched her looking around the kitchen, as though seeking something, a clue, or something she had left behind on a previous visit. When she went to take the six-pack from the man with the guitar, so that she could put it in the fridge, he said he would hold on to it, and smiled at her as if to say that he had been to more parties than she had. He was too warm and direct for her to be offended.
‘If you want more, it’s in the fridge,’ she said to him.
‘If I want more, I’ll ask you,’ he said.
He smiled again. His eyes were a mixture of brown and dark green. His skin was clear; he was very tall. She realised that he was flirting with her.
‘I’m tempted to say something,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘No, nothing.’
‘What? Say it.’
‘I was going to say that you look like someone who might want more.’
He smiled and held her gaze and then reached into his pocket and took out a small bottle opener. He opened a bottle of Guinness and offered it to her. He seemed somewhat taken aback when she refused it, intimidated.
‘It’s too early for me,’ she said.
‘Well, cheers so,’ he said and lifted the bottle.
For the next hour she was busy filling glasses and opening bottles and trying to remember names and faces. As it grew dark, Hugh lit the flares which he had stuck into the grass and these gave off a fitful, glaring light. When she brought the food out and Hugh put on the striped apron to serve it, people were already sitting at the tables. Cathal and Manus and several neighbours’ children had made a small table for themselves and were eating pizzas and drinking Coke.
‘We’d better hold on to a bit of the food,’ Hugh said. ‘There are a few won’t come until after the pubs shut.’
The Indian doctor and his wife had arrived earlier, greeted everyone, accepted a drink of orange juice and left, but their eldest son, who must have been seven or eight, had remained behind and was at the boys’ table. Helen had promised that she would walk him to his door and that he would not be too late. The O’Mearas next door – she was unsure what they did for a living – were sitting alone at a table watching all the laughter and good humour around them. Helen knew she would have to go and sit with them; it was clear that no one else was going to pay them any attention. She was glad that the guard and his wife had not come.
‘God, we don’t have to talk Irish to you, do we?’ Mary O’Meara said to her when she sat down beside them. ‘I was just saying to Martin that we should have listened more in school. God, I haven’t got a word of it. “An bhfuil cead agam dul amach” is all I can remember.’
Helen realised that she did not want them to know that she spoke no Irish either. She was prepared to eat with them, but she was not prepared to join them in being at a loss. She noticed several more people arriving. One of the new arrivals was a friend of Hugh’s called Ciaran Duffy who had a case for uilleann pipes with him. Of all of Hugh’s friends, he was the one she liked best and found easiest to be with. She didn’t think he spoke much Irish either, but he was a well-known piper and she watched a number of others turning to look at him as he arrived. She liked his boyish self-confidence, his clear, open face. He reminded her of Hugh, except he was bigger, stockier. Hugh guided Ciaran Duffy and his friends over to her table. Everybody shook hands and suddenly, she noticed, in just a few seconds, the O’Mearas had lost their forlorn, isolated aura and were busy taking in their new companions. Hugh brought over chilli con carne and rice and salads and went back to get drinks.
As Helen went out to close the front door, which had been left open so that people could walk through, she noticed the six-packs carefully placed everywhere, like parcels of territory. It was something Hugh would never do, she thought; he would never be bad-mannered like that and in time, she reckoned, as his friends became older and more prosperous, they would change too.
When she came back into the kitchen, his friend with the brown and green eyes appeared. He stood in front of her.
‘It’s you again,’ she said.
‘I was wondering where the toilet was, your honour,’ he said in a mock country accent.
‘Anywhere between here and Terenure,’ she said. ‘No, seriously, it’s upstairs, at the top of the stairs, you’ll find it.’
‘Right so. It’s a pleasure being in your house,’ he said and moved away.
She went back and sat with the O’Mearas. Opposite her, Ciaran Duffy caught her eye and winked, as if to say that he had the measure of the O’Mearas, but he would be saying nothing. She smiled at him, as if to say that she knew what he was thinking. He shouted something to her, but she could not hear it for all the noise around.
Before she served the fruit salad and cream she counted the guests at the tables: there were thirty-seven; they had expected four or five more; maybe some of them were, as Hugh had said, in the pub. Closing time was half-past eleven. It was eleven o’clock now and maybe time, she thought, to take the Indian boy home
– she must find out his name. He was laughing with Cathal and Manus and the other boys. She decided to leave them for another while.
The music started in the kitchen while most of the guests were still at tables outside. The man with the six-packs was playing guitar, his friend the flute, and the woman in the jeans and white top a fiddle. Their playing was casual, unselfconscious, almost loose; Helen knew that any move towards intensity would be frowned upon, or indeed mocked. The flute player was leading them, setting the pace; the music had a strange, repetitive gaiety, and the players continued to give the impression that they were playing to please themselves, or each other, but they were not looking for an audience, nor seeking to impress anybody.
Slowly, people began to carry chairs in from the garden; someone turned off the main light in the kitchen, leaving only the light of two lamps to illuminate the room, and others joined in the playing, another fiddle, a mandolin, a squeezebox. Hugh was still busy opening bottles and filling glasses. She knew that he loved the music, the semi-darkness of the room, the company, the drinking. It reminded him of home, of something which was hardly ever possible in Dublin, something that most of his friends here would not be able to manage, being too modest or lazy, too willing to drift and let things happen.
Suddenly, there was silence all around; a woman had begun to sing. Helen knew her, knew that she had made records in the past with her brother and sister and more recently a solo CD which Hugh had listened to over and over and Helen had slowly grown to like. Helen had met the singer on the stairs earlier in the evening and remembered her shy, friendly smile. Now as she stood against the back wall of the room, she sang with ease and authority, and among the guests there was a hush which was almost reverent. The woman did not often sing in public, and if she had been asked to sing – Helen knew the rules – she would have refused, suggesting somebody else, remaining resolute in not singing. Her voice had come from nowhere during a break in the music. Her family, Helen knew, was from Donegal, but Hugh had only met her in Dublin. Her accent in Irish was pure Donegal, but the strength in the rise and fall of the voice was entirely hers, and even the O’Mearas, Helen could see, watched her with awe. When the song was over and the singer sat down, she smiled and sipped her drink as though it were nothing.
The music started again, this time fester than before; someone produced a bodhrán and began to beat it with his eyes closed. Helen went with the O’Mearas to the front door and then remembered the Indian boy and went back in to find him. He was playing around the tables, being chased by Cathal and Manus and another boy who had permission to stay up until the end of the party. As she broke up the game she wished she had secured permission for the Indian boy to stay on as well.
She walked with him up the street to his house.
‘Will your parents not be asleep?’ she asked.
‘My mother will be waiting,’ he said and smiled. She wondered if Cathal and Manus could ever be polite like this.
‘I hope she won’t blame me for keeping you out so late.’
‘No, she will not blame you,’ the boy said gravely.
As Helen walked back to the house, she looked at the road bathed in the eerie yellow light which oozed from the streetlamps, and the cars parked in the drives or the roadway – Nissans, Toyotas, Ford Fiestas; every semidetached house was exactly the same, built for people who wanted quiet lives. She smiled to herself at the idea and stood outside the house as a taxi, flashing its lights, approached. She watched as the driver got out, an electric torch in his hand.
‘We’re looking for Brookfield Park Avenue,’ he said. ‘We’ve found Brookfield everything else. It’s the wild west out here.’ He flashed his torch at a neighbour’s doorway.
‘It’s here. You’re here,’ she said.
The doors of the taxi opened and four passengers got out, each with a bag of cans under his arm. ‘This is the place,’ one of them said. She could not make out any of the faces.
‘It’s Helen,’ one of them said. ‘We’ve been driving around like eejits.’
‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You’re Mick Joyce. Is it not too late for you to be out?’
‘Hold on until I pay this man,’ he said and laughed.
When the taxi drove away, she accompanied the four new guests into the party. Mick Joyce had come to the house several times before; he was a solicitor, he had done all the legal work for Hugh’s school. He was the best solicitor in the country, Hugh said, he knew every trick, he was a great man for detail, but once darkness fell – and she had heard Hugh telling the story several times, using the same words – he’d do anything, go anywhere, he’d go to Kerry and back the same night if he thought there was anything going on there. He had a strong Galway accent.
‘This is the woman of the house,’ he said to the others. They shook her hand. There were no introductions.
‘We kept food for you,’ she said.
‘You’re a great woman,’ he said.
He walked down the hallway to the kitchen and stood in the doorway as though he owned the place, or was the guest of honour. When the music stopped, several people shouted greetings. Hugh got drinks for him and his companions and then the music started up again.
Helen noticed that Ciaran Duffy was assembling his uilleann pipes, being watched carefully by several people. It was slow, meticulous work, and she realised that those still playing were overshadowed by these preparations. She watched Mick Joyce going into the garden, finding Manus and lifting him on his shoulders, making him laugh and shout; Cathal and his friend followed them as they moved around the garden. She remembered that each time Mick had come to the house he had sought Manus out and acted as though he had come to see him specially. Manus loved him; he was the only friend of Hugh’s he ever mentioned.
Mick Joyce and the boys came into the house when the piping began. Some people had already left, but the kitchen was still half-crowded, and there was a silence now which had been there before only for the singer. Those who had been playing left their instruments down: this was, Helen knew, more than anything a world of hierarchies, and no one came near this player’s reputation. They listened, full of respect and deep interest in the technique, the movement of chanter and drone, the sense of control and release. Cathal and Manus had been learning the tin whistle; they sat on the floor listening, Manus making sure that Mick Joyce was sitting on the chair right behind him, and paid attention, even though it was after midnight now, and they should have been asleep three hours earlier.
Helen sat on the floor and relaxed for the first time that evening; she noticed the tunes and rhythms changing, becoming faster, a display of pure virtuosity, full of hints and insinuations, good-humoured twists and turns. The room was half full of cigarette smoke; cans and bottles were being used for ashtrays. All around, people sat or stood and listened to the music. Hugh stood with his shoulder against the wall; he caught her eye and grinned at her.
When the piping stopped, the crowd began to thin out. It was then that someone shouted at Mick Joyce that he hadn’t sung yet, and that the night would not be complete until he did.
‘I’m too drunk to sing,’ he shouted. He stood up and pointed to the man with the guitar and his companion with the mandolin. ‘Don’t try and join in,’ he instructed them. ‘You’ll put me all wrong.’
‘I thought you were too drunk to sing,’ one of them said.
‘I’ll give you singing now, if you want singing,’ he said.
He began ‘The Rocks of Bawn’; this time his voice was even louder than when Helen had heard him before. Cathal and Manus still sat on the floor, fascinated by the sheer passion in his delivery, his face all lit up by the rage of the song, as though at any moment he would start a fight or burst a blood vessel. A few people who were at the front door, about to go, came back to witness the end of the song:
I wish the Queen of England would write to me in time
And place me in some regiment all in my youth and prime.
I’d fight for Ir
eland’s glory from the clear daylight ’til dawn
And I never would return again to plough the Rocks of Bawn.
When he had finished he lifted Manus up and laughed when the child pulled his ears. He looked at Helen as if to say that he had fooled them all again. Helen brought him a cold can of lager; he opened it and offered some to Manus first, but he refused. Manus didn’t like the taste of beer. Cathal put his hand up and asked for some and when Mick Joyce handed him the can he put his head back and drank the beer. He saw Helen watching him. He knew he was allowed to take sips of beer, but he was still uncertain about her reaction.
‘He gave it to me,’ he said as he handed back the can.
‘You’ll be drunk,’ she said and laughed. ‘You’ll have a hangover in the morning.’
Helen closed the doors to the garden. The party was nearly over. She remembered Hugh telling her that Mick Joyce knew only one song, and she was relieved about this. His singing could have been heard by the neighbours on both sides, and possibly further down the street. She wondered about Mick Joyce: since he liked children so much, why he didn’t have children of his own, and how he managed to pretend, in his manners and speech, that he was in the west of Ireland. She wondered what it would be like to be married to someone like that – the mixture of control and anarchy, the unevenness. She turned around and watched as Hugh began to sing in Irish, his voice nasal and thin, but sweet as well and clear. His eyes were closed. There were only about ten people left, and two of these joined the song, softly at first and then more loudly. She stood there and thought about Hugh: how easygoing he was and consistent, how modest and decent. And she wondered – as she often did in moments like this – why he had wanted her, why he needed someone who had none of his virtues, and she felt suddenly distant from him. She could never let him know the constant daily urge to resist him, keep him at bay, and the struggle to overcome these urges, in which she often failed.