by Colm Toibin
Over the years he had heard her voice on the radio, the same few songs always from her old album, now released on CD, two of them in Irish, all of them slow and haunting, her voice possessing a depth and sweetness, a great confidence and fluency. He knew her face from the cover of the album and from memory, of course, but also from an interview done in London maybe ten years earlier for the Sunday Press. He had watched his father burn that week’s edition but had surreptitiously bought another copy himself and cut out the interview and the large photograph which had been printed alongside it. What had struck him hardest was the news that his grandmother in Galway was still alive. His father, he later learned, had banned her visits as well, and visits to her, once his wife had fled to England with another man. His mother told the interviewer that she often returned to Ireland and travelled to Galway to see her mother and her aunts, from whom she had learned all the songs. She did not mention that she had a son.
Over the months that followed he often studied the photograph, noting her witty smile, her ease with the camera, the dazzling life in her eyes.
When he had begun to sing in his late teens, and the quality of his voice was recognized, he was used on a number of albums as harmony and backing vocals. His name was printed with the names of the other musicians. He always looked at the CD covers as though he were his mother, wondering if she would ever buy these recordings, and imagining her idly glancing at the names listed on the back, and finding his name, and stopping for a second, and remembering what age he must be, and asking herself about him.
He bought another soda water and lime and turned from the bar and faced the company, trying to work out where he should stand. Suddenly, he found that his mother was staring directly at him. In the dim light, she seemed not much older than her photograph in the Sunday Press had made her appear. She was in her early fifties now, he knew, but with her long fringe and her auburn hair she could have been ten or fifteen years younger. He took her in calmly, evenly, not smiling or offering any hint of recognition. Her gaze was almost too open and curious.
He glanced towards the door and the dwindling summer light; when he looked back at her she was still watching him. She was with a group of men; some of them, by their dress, he judged to be local, but at least two of them were outsiders, probably English, he thought. And then there was also an older woman whom he could not place, sitting in their company.
Suddenly, he noticed that the music had stopped. He looked over in case his friends were packing up their instruments, but saw that they were facing him as though waiting for something. He was surprised to see that the owner’s wife Statia Kielty had appeared in the bar. It was a rule she explained to all comers that she never stood behind the bar after six in the evening. She smiled at him, but he was not sure that she knew him by name. He was, for her, he thought, one of the boys who came down from Dublin a few times each summer. Yet you could never tell with her; she had a sharp eye and missed nothing.
She motioned him to move aside so she could get a better view of the company. As he did so, she called across to his mother, seeking her attention.
‘Eileen! Eileen!’
‘I’m here, Statia,’ his mother replied. There was a faint English edge to her accent.
‘We’re all ready, Eileen,’ Statia said. ‘Will you do it now before it gets too crowded?’
His mother lowered her head and lifted it again, her expression serious. She shook her head gravely at Statia Kielty as if to say that she did not think she could do it, even if she was ready to try. John Kielty and young John, by now, had stopped serving, and all the men at the bar were facing towards Noel’s mother. She offered them a girlish smile, pushed her fringe back and lowered her head once more.
‘Silence now!’ John Kielty shouted.
Her voice when it rose seemed to come from nowhere. It was more powerful, even on the low notes, than the voice on the recording. Most people in the bar would know, Noel thought, one or two versions of the song she sang which were plainer, and some might also know his mother’s version. Now, however, this rendition was wilder, all grace notes and flourishes and sudden shifts of tone. As she moved into the second verse, she lifted her head, her eyes wide open, and she smiled at Statia, who stood behind the bar with her arms folded.
Noel believed that she had started too intensely, that it would be impossible to get through the eight or nine verses without losing something, without being forced to bring the voltage down. As she carried on, however, he knew he was wrong. Her control of her breathing for the high grace notes was astonishing, but it was also her naturalness with the language which made the difference; it was her first language, as it must have been his, but his Irish was half-forgotten now. Her style was the old style, with electricity added, almost declamatory at times, with hardly any interest in the sweetness of the tune.
He had not intended to shift from where he stood, but he found that he had come closer to her and stood alone between her group and the bar. The song, like many of the old songs, was about unrequited love, but it was different from most of them in its increasing bitterness. Soon, it became a song about treachery.
She had her eyes closed as she worked on trills and long notes. At times she left half a second between lines, not to catch her breath but to take the measure of the bar and its inhabitants, let them hear their own stillness as the song began its slow and despairing conclusion.
As she started these stanzas of pure lament, his mother was now staring straight at him once more. Her voice became even wilder than before, but never too dramatic or striving too much for effect. She did not take her eyes from Noel as she came to the famous last verse. He, in turn, had worked out in his head a way of singing above her. He imagined fiercely how it could be done, how her voice would evade such accompaniment, and perhaps deliberately wrong-foot it, but he believed if he was ready to move a fraction more up or down as she did that it could be managed. However, he knew to remain silent and watch her quietly as she looked into his eyes; he was aware that everyone was watching her as she sang of her love who took north from her and south from her, east from her and west from her, and now – she lowered her head again and almost spoke the last words – her love had taken God from her.
When she finished, she nodded at John Kielty and Statia and turned modestly to her friends, not acknowledging the applause. When Noel noticed Statia Kielty looking at him, and smiling warmly and familiarly, he believed that she knew who he was. And he realized then that he could not stay. He would have to summon the others, try to exude a natural impatience; he would have to make it look normal that his mother would remain with her friends and that he would leave with his.
‘God, that was powerful,’ one of them said when he approached the recess at the window.
‘She’s a fine voice all right,’ Noel replied.
‘Are we going to stay or what?’ his friend asked.
‘I told the others that I’d transport you to Cusshane as soon as I could. They’ll be waiting for you.’
‘We’ll drink up so,’ his friend said.
As they slowly prepared themselves for departure he kept an eye on Statia Kielty. She had moved from behind the bar, and was accosted by a few drinkers for polite banter, but she was clearly on her way to speak to his mother. It could take Statia a while to mention that Noel was in the bar. Indeed, she might not mention it at all. It could, on the other hand, be the first thing that she mentioned. And it might be enough to make his mother stand up and search for him or she might smile softly, half indifferently, and not move from her seat or change the expression on her face. He did not want either of these things to happen.
He turned and noticed that his friends still had not finished their drinks; they had barely put away their instruments.
‘I’m going out to the car,’ he said. ‘You’ll find me out there. Make sure you grab Jimmy up at the bar. I’m taking him too.’
When one of them looked at him puzzled, he knew that he had spoken falsely and too
fast. He shrugged and made his way past the drinkers at the front door of the pub, making sure not to look at anybody. Outside, as the first car of the evening with its full headlights on approached, he was shaking. He knew he would have to be careful to say nothing more, to pretend that it had been an ordinary evening. It would all be forgotten; they would play and sing until the small hours. He sat in the car and waited in the darkness for the others to come.
The Name of the Game
AS SHE CAME DOWN the stairs, Nancy glanced at the photograph; she wondered when it would be right to take it down. The wallpaper had been there for years, and she knew the space behind the frame would stand out. It reminded her even more sharply than the traces all around – the few pieces of heavy dark furniture, the plasterwork in the hall, the two or three oil paintings – that these floors over the old spirit grocer’s in the Monument Square had once housed George’s family in what had passed for splendour. The hallway was full of boxes now, and the plasterwork had not been painted and the old furniture had been left in rooms over the storehouse next door, and George was dead, and his mother, sitting nobly in a large chair in the old photograph, was long gone to her grave. There was no need any more, Nancy thought, for a photograph of a teenage George, overdressed, standing behind his mother. Some day, she thought, she would take it down and put it in the storehouse.
That morning, alone at the cash register, while Catherine who worked with her was on her break, she had caught a woman stealing. She had noticed the woman standing in the centre aisle with no wire basket, merely a dishevelled shopping bag; she had begun to look through a catalogue of frozen food but had kept an eye all the time on her. And as the woman made a dart for the door, Nancy moved quickly and stood in front of her blocking the way.
‘Leave it down here.’ Nancy pointed at the ledge beside the cash register.
The woman stood motionless as Nancy turned and locked the door.
‘Quickly, now, quickly.’
The woman took two packets of shortbread biscuits from her bag. She dropped them on the floor.
‘In future,’ Nancy said, ‘you can do your stealing up in Dunne’s Stores. They have plenty of biscuits up there. Open your bag to make sure you’ve nothing else.’
‘You think you’re great,’ the woman said, opening out her bag for inspection. ‘With your little feck of a supermarket. You’ve nothing at all in it.’
‘Go on,’ Nancy said, unlocking the door.
‘Sure, you’re only a huckster, the same as your oul’ mother.’
‘If you don’t leave this instant,’ Nancy said, ‘I’ll call the Guards.’
‘Oh, do you hear her? She got all posh in the Square.’
‘Go home now,’ Nancy said.
‘Are you still selling the Woodbines in ones and twos?’ the woman asked. She was ready to go. Her face was red with rage.
There was one other customer, a woman, moving quietly in the centre aisle of the supermarket, pretending not to listen.
‘Not one of you wiped your arse up there. I don’t know how the Sheridans ever put up with you,’ the woman shouted.
Nancy moved towards her and pushed her out into the Monument Square.
‘Go on now,’ she said. ‘Go on up to the Hill with you where you belong.’
Nancy closed the door and went back quietly to the cash register as though she had an urgent task in hand. She noticed the packets of shortbread biscuits on the ground and walked over to pick them up; some of the biscuits were broken and the packets could not be sold. She put them aside and picked up the catalogue of frozen food again and studied it with fierce concentration. No one in the town was interested in frozen food, she thought, except for fish fingers. Still, she flicked through the pages of the catalogue, waiting for her lone customer to come to the cash register. When the woman finally put her basket down on the ledge, her posture suggested that something deeply offensive had been said to her. Nancy hoped that she was not from the Hill, or had not heard her closing remarks to the shoplifter. She had not seen this woman in the shop before. There seemed no point in trying to humour her. Silently, Nancy keyed in the price of each object as her customer emptied the wire supermarket basket and filled her own shopping bag with slow gestures. The woman was wearing a green knitted cap. As Nancy gave her the change, the woman kept her eyes down and her mouth tightly closed. When she had gone, Nancy stood at the window and watched her walking briskly across the square.
Gerard, when he arrived from school, wanted to drop his school-bag by the side of the cash register and leave immediately without speaking.
‘You can’t leave your bag down here,’ she said. ‘Go upstairs with it.’
‘They’re all waiting,’ he pointed to a group of boys standing by the monument.
‘Go upstairs with it,’ she repeated.
‘Where are the girls?’ he asked.
‘Music.’
He made a face and then went out of the shop door and opened the door into the hall. She could hear him running up the stairs and then thumping back down again. When she heard the hall door bang, she went to the window to see which direction he was going in; she noticed a young woman with a pram who was standing staring at her as though she were a dummy or a model wearing the latest fashions. The young woman was chewing gum, and slowly her stare became cheeky, almost malicious. Nancy turned away from her, whoever she was, and walked to the back of the shop.
THE SCENE at the bank had remained with her, like a rash, or the side effect of some strong medicine. She knew that George had left no money because just a month before the accident when she had mentioned that they might change the station wagon he had told her bluntly – ‘bluntly’ was one of his words – that they had no money. Whatever tone he had used, it did not leave her free to suggest that he go to the bank and ask for a loan. He would not, she knew now, have been offered a loan at the bank, because he had mortgaged the shop and the living quarters above it, and the store beside it, and the payments equalled or sometimes exceeded the income from the shop.
Mr Roderick Wallace, the manager, having written to her, had agreed to see her. She liked his neat moustache and his easy smile. She had never spoken to him before, merely been greeted by him warmly as he walked a Pekinese dog around the square when the bank had finished its business. He apologized several times as she came into his office for keeping her waiting. When she sat down he apologized again.
‘No, no,’ she protested. ‘I’ve just arrived this second. I wasn’t waiting.’
He looked at her with sudden interest and then stared away towards the high windows which gave onto the square.
‘Whoever made time did not make enough of it,’ he said.
‘Oh, that’s true all right,’ she said.
He continued to look towards the window, closely examining its upper reaches, as though about to come to a conclusion about something. Nancy saw that his desk was completely bare except for a blotting pad and a pen. There was no paper or file, and there was no telephone to be seen.
He began by mumbling words that she was so used to hearing.
‘I’m so sorry now for your trouble. It must have been a dreadful shock. I could not believe it when I heard it. And so sudden, so sudden. That is a dreadful bend in the road. I’ve observed it myself. But I never thought … Oh I never thought … Anyway, I’m very sorry for your trouble.’
‘Thank you,’ she said and looked down at her handbag and her high-heeled shoes.
Mr Wallace studied the wall behind her for a few moments before he spoke again.
‘I suppose you are busy now and would like to get down to business.’
‘Yes,’ she said and smiled.
‘Now,’ he said, still looking towards the wall, ‘I received the cheque from the car dealers, Messrs Rowe. You seem to have bought a second-hand car.’
He said the words with an emphasis which she thought strange. He pursed his lips. His eyebrows, she felt, were too bushy.
‘Well, we’re going
to honour that cheque. I should let you know that.’
She tried to think if she had written any other cheques recently. Two or three, she thought, in the past few days. Mr Wallace puckered up his face and knitted his brow as though a difficult thought had occurred to him. She watched him, waiting to see what he was going to say, but he turned his face towards the window again and said nothing. Later, she wished she had spoken to him about what was needed or what she was going to do, and a few times over the days that followed she wished she had stealthily tiptoed out of his office at this point of their interview and closed the door behind her, leaving him to his thoughts.
He straightened himself in his chair.
‘The problem we have is that the repayments are not coming in. Instead, we are getting cheques, written on the account, and there’s no money in the account, there’s less than no money.’
He stopped and smiled as if the thought of less than no money amused him.
‘And if we were a charity,’ he went on, ‘of course, it would be a lovely situation, because then we’d dole out the money to our hearts’ content.’
He took her in, watching her response as he covered his mouth with his hand.
‘That’s right about the cheques,’ she said. ‘You see, I have to keep the business going.’
‘Oh, it’s going all right,’ Mr Wallace said drily.
She made an effort to sound more businesslike.
‘I mean if I were to sell it, it would be better to sell as a going concern.’
The longest silence was now. She reverted to something she had not done for years. She had done it when her mother had irritated her, and she had done it when she went to work first, and she had done it also to George, but not since the first year or two of their marriage. She traced the word FUCK on her skirt with her finger, quietly, unobtrusively, but deliberately. And then she did it again. And when she had finished, she traced other words, words that she had never in her life said out loud. She kept her eyes firmly on the bank manager as, unnoticed, she continued to write these words, invisibly, with her finger.