Collected Stories

by Bernard Maclaverty

They worked hard all though that summer, the boy in shirtsleeves at the piano, Miss Schwartz, despite the heat, still in her silk dressing-gown. One day Danny discovered that she wore nothing beneath it because when she bent over to point out some complexity in the score the overlap of her gown rumpled and he saw cradled there the white pear shape of one of her breasts. He pretended not to understand the notation but when she bent over again her dressing-gown was in order.

  ‘The black marks, Danny. Pay attention to the black marks.’

  He felt his knees shaky and could not concentrate to play any more.

  After the lesson they would go out to the small garden and have tea beneath the apple tree, tea with no milk but a slice of lemon in it – a thing Danny had never heard of. Miss Schwartz had pointed out to him when the flowers had fallen off the tree and each week they inspected the swelling fruit. Lying back in striped deck chairs they both watched the flickering blue of the sky as it dodged between the leaves.

  Miss Schwartz had resurrected from the attic an ancient wind-up gramophone on which she played records outdoors. Danny came to know many pieces. Sometimes if there was a concert on the wireless she would open the kitchen window, turn the volume up full and point the set towards the garden. One day, during a performance of Mahler’s ‘Kindertotenlieder’, she said,

  ‘You know, Danny, the reason I bought this house was because of the garden. We had one just like it when I was a girl. I was about your age when we had to leave it.’

  ‘Where was it?’

  ‘In Poland. A place called Praszka. I remember it as beautiful.’

  ‘Why don’t you go back?’

  She laughed. ‘Because I am too long away. The longer you are away the more you want to go back. And yet you realise the longer you are away the more impossible it is to return. The early monks had a phrase for it – what you suffer. If you died for God, that was simple. That was red martyrdom. If you left your country for God and lived in isolation, that was white martyrdom. To be an exile, to be cut off from your country is a terrible thing.’ She smiled. ‘I left, not for God, but for convenience. It was a time of fear.’ She shuddered and looked up into the apple tree.

  Danny sat stripped except for his shorts. He glanced up to where the music was coming from and saw himself reflected brightly in the window. His hair had grown longer and darker. Light from a spoon on the tray lying on the grass reflected into his face.

  ‘But it is not so bad. There are compensations,’ she said, smiling at him.

  Many times on his way home Danny would stop off at the forge, if it was open, and listen to the blacksmith. He loved the way the man did not shave often and had black bristles on his chin like the baddies in cowboy comics. He was always joking and talking. ‘Am I right or am I wrong?’ was his favourite phrase. One day, sitting astride his anvil, he talked about Miss Schwartz.

  ‘She’s a rum bird, isn’t she?’

  Danny nodded.

  ‘Why do you agree with me? The nod of the head is the first sign of a yes-man. Well, are you just a yes-man?’

  ‘No,’ said Danny and laughed.

  ‘This bloody country is full of yes-men and the most of them’s working class.’ He dismounted from the anvil and began to rake the fire to life. ‘Yes, your honour, no, your honour. Dukes and bloody linen lords squeezing us for everything we’ve got, setting one side against the other. Divide and conquer. It’s an old ploy and the Fenians and Orangemen of this godforsaken country have fallen for it again.’ He began to work the bellows himself and the centre of the fire reddened. Danny loved the colour of blue that the small flames took on when the fire was heating up. He could feel the warmth of the fire on the side of his face and his bare arm. The smith was now talking into the fire.

  ‘But a change is coming, Danny Boy. We must be positive. Prepare the ground. Educate the people. Look to the future the way Connolly and Larkin did in 1913.’

  He threw the poker down among the fire-irons with a clang and turned to Danny. His face changed and he smiled.

  ‘You haven’t a baldy notion what I’m talking about, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But am I right or am I wrong?’

  ‘You’re right,’ was always Danny’s answer.

  It was about this time that Danny began to notice a change in Miss Schwartz. She became moody and did not smile or laugh as much as she used to. One day when he arrived early for his lesson, panting from running most of the mile, it was a long time before she opened the door. When she did she was thrusting a handkerchief up her sleeve and she had obviously been crying. Her eyes were heavy-lidded and red.

  When she went in, she said, ‘Get your breath back,’ and began to water her plants from a small Japanese tea-pot, turning her back on him. She talked to the plants the way other people would talk to a pet. She said it encouraged them to grow.

  ‘Lavish love and attention on growing things and they will not let you down.’

  ‘What about your apple tree? Do you talk to it?’

  ‘It hears music from the house.’ She smiled weakly at her own answer.

  ‘But I know houses . . .’

  ‘Your piece, Danny. I want to hear it.’

  Danny gave a small, knowing smile. Miss Schwartz half reclined on the sofa at the bay window, her feet gathered beneath her. She turned to face the light and waited. Danny set his music on the chair and began to play. It was the opening movement of the Beethoven C sharp minor Sonata. She disliked calling it, ‘The Moonlight’. Danny looked round to see if she had noticed, but her eyes were closed. He played on, trying to feel the music as she would have felt it. Sunlight slanted into the room and Danny thought her face looked haggard. Some of her tight hair had come adrift and hung down by her throat.

  When he finished Miss Schwartz opened her eyes and they were glassy with tears.

  ‘How beautiful, Danny,’ she said in a whisper.

  ‘You didn’t notice,’ he said, his feet swinging on the stool.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I played it without the music.’

  Miss Schwartz came to him.

  ‘How utterly superb,’ she said, taking his face in her hands. She put her arms around his head and gave him a tight squeeze of joy. Danny sensed the huge softness of her breasts against his cheek, enveloping his face, the faded scent of her, the goosefleshy wedge at her throat.

  ‘Oh Danny, how superb.’ This time she held him at arm’s length, watching his blushes rise. Danny tried to dismiss it.

  ‘I practised it –

  all week end,’ he said.

  ‘Oh Danny,’ Miss Schwartz let a gasp out of her. ‘Say that again.’

  ‘I prac –

  -tised it all week end.’

  ‘Danny, your voice is breaking.’ She put one hand over her mouth, a look of disbelief in her eyes. She sat down at the piano and asked him to sing some of the notes she played. His voice was accurate but kept flicking an octave down. She sat at the piano, her fingers poised above the keyboard, touching it but not heavily enough to depress the keys. Her head was bowed.

  ‘The purest thing in the world is the voice of a boy before it breaks,’ she said, ‘before he gets hair. Before he begins to think things – like that.’ Her face looked the same way as when he played badly.

  ‘But I hardly even notice it, Miss.’

  ‘I do and that is sufficient,’ she said. ‘Today in the garden I will play you purity.’

  The kitchen was full of a mute bustling as she made the tea. Danny carried the tray out, she the record. It was a boy soprano singing Latin. A blackbird from the ridge-tiles of the roof sang loud enough to drown certain passages. When the music was finished Danny said,

  ‘My Mum says to tell you that I’m going to Grammar School.’

  ‘You passed your Qualifying!’ Danny nodded. ‘Oh, I’m delighted. Which school?’

  ‘Our Lady’s High.’

  ‘Hm.’ She thought for a moment and then smiled. ‘They don’t have a music teacher
as yet.’

  Danny sat in the school yard eating his cheese piece, a bottle of milk in his hand. He saw Mingo coming across to him, his white hair weaving through the crowd. He had started the Grammar in September as well, but everybody knew that his father was paying for him.

  ‘Hiya, piss face,’ said Mingo. ‘You still going out to that black bitch for music?’ Danny looked at him but could not answer because the tacky cheese had stuck to the roof of his mouth.

  ‘Sucker,’ said Mingo. ‘I don’t have to go any more. Haw-haw-haw.’ He spoke the laughter in words.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because my old woman just stopped me. She was talking to Schwartzy in town and she came home and said, “That’s it, no more music for you, my lad.” Haw-haw-haw. McErlane the sucker still has to go.’

  ‘It’s O.K. She’s not bad.’

  ‘She has a good pair of tits on her,’ said Mingo, groping the air before him. ‘She likes you, McErlane. You’re her pet. Does she ever let you feel her?’ Danny looked at Mingo’s flickering white eyelashes – he was constantly blinking behind his tinted glasses. He wanted to punch him in his foul mouth. Instead Danny said,

  ‘I saw them one day.’

  ‘Her tits?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What were they like?’

  ‘Just ordinary.’ Danny gestured with his hands.

  ‘How did you see them?’

  ‘She opened her dressing-gown one day and she wasn’t wearing a . . . thingy.’

  ‘Liar. I don’t believe you.’

  Danny shrugged and threw his crusts into the wastebasket.

  ‘Were they nice bloopy ones?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Danny sucked the bluish watery milk through a straw until it was finished. It made a hollow rattling sound at the bottom of the bottle. He asked Mingo,

  ‘Are you going to music to anybody else?’

  ‘There isn’t anybody for miles, thank God.’

  ‘I don’t think I’d want to go to anybody else.’

  ‘Aye, not if she shows you her tits, I don’t blame you.’

  There was a pause. Danny laced the used straw into a knot of angles.

  ‘She shows them to more than you,’ said Mingo.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She’s a ride.’

  ‘What’s a ride?’

  ‘Haw-haw-haw, he doesn’t know.’ Mingo folded up with mock laughter. ‘She’s going to have a baby.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So she’s a ride.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘My Mum says.’

  ‘Your Mum’s . . . a ride,’ said Danny.

  Mingo suddenly reached out and grabbed Danny by the ear, digging his nails into it shouting,

  ‘Nobody says that about my Mum.’

  Danny yelled out in pain and punched. He struck Mingo on the nose and dislodged his glasses. Mingo let go of Danny’s ear and turned and ran, clutching his glasses to his chest, a trickle of blood on his white upper lip. He stopped at the far side of the playground and made a large ‘up ya’ sign with two fingers. It began at the ground and ended above his head. He kept doing it, jumping up and down to exaggerate the gesture. Danny turned away in disgust and slotted the empty milk bottle into the crate.

  The road to Miss Schwartz’s place was ankle-deep in brown scuffling leaves. The apples on the tree had become ripe and she had given Danny one. He bit into it and a section of its white flesh came away with a crack. Juice wet his chin.

  ‘It must be the music,’ he said crunching.

  Now he practised with real determination, getting up with his father and doing an hour before school. He had to wait until his father went out because he said he couldn’t stand the racket first thing in the morning. He did another hour in the evening before his father came in. His mother didn’t seem to mind. She slept through the morning session and she would be out in the kitchen making Harry’s dinner for most of the evening practice. She was glad to see the piano used so much. One evening Danny’s mother came in to lay the table and stood watching him play.

  ‘Your hair is getting darker. I thought the sun would have helped,’ she said. Danny stopped playing.

  ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘Miss Schwartz wants to know if you could pay her in advance for this term.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. Look at the money I had to lay out for your uniform for the High.’ She went to the cupboard and looked in the jar on the top shelf.

  ‘No, tell her I’m sorry but I just can’t do it.’

  ‘A whole lot of her pupils are leaving.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Danny, closing the lid of the piano.

  It was shortly after this that the biscuits stopped. Miss Schwartz apologised and said that she was getting too fat. However, they still had tea together.

  Danny’s father, being a bus driver, got the pick of all the papers left in his bus, but the only one he would bring home was the Daily Express. He had a great admiration for it.

  ‘First with everything,’ he said, ‘and no dirt.’

  From his armchair he read a piece to Danny that said that the Russians had launched a satellite into space and that it would be possible to see it for the next few evenings if conditions were right.

  ‘It’s wonderful too,’ he said nodding his head. ‘At one end of the world the Russians is firing things into outer space and we still have a blacksmith in the town shoeing horses.’

  ‘He says he knows you,’ said Danny.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The blacksmith.’

  ‘When were you talking to him?’ His father’s voice had risen in pitch.

  Danny shrugged.

  ‘After music,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you’ll just stop it. You hear me? If I catch you in that forge I’ll take my belt off to you.’

  The loud voice brought Danny’s mother out from the kitchen. Her head was cocked to one side with curiosity and concern.

  ‘Who’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘You know who – the blacksmith. If he’s pouring the same poison into your ear, son, as he’s been spewing out in the pub, he’s a bad influence. He’d have you into guns and God knows what. Denying religion at the top of his voice.’

  ‘God forgive him,’ said Mrs McErlane.

  ‘Aye, and what’s more he said they weren’t serious in 1922 because they didn’t shoot a single priest.’

  ‘Did he say that?’

  ‘Do you hear me, Danny, steer clear of vermin like that or you’ll feel the weight of my hand.’

  The next lesson Danny had he told Miss Schwartz of the satellite. She agreed that they should go out at six and try to see it.

  The night was cold, black and clear as a diamond. A swirl of stars covered the sky so that it seemed impossible to put a finger between two of them. And they stood and waited, their necks craned.

  ‘Isn’t it marvellous,’ Miss Schwartz said. Danny said nothing. His eye was searching for the satellite.

  ‘Can you see it?’ he asked.

  When they stopped walking, the crackling underfoot ceased and the silence seemed enormous. In the frost nothing moved. Then Miss Schwartz whispered,

  ‘Look. Look there.’ It was as if she had seen an animal and to speak would frighten it.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Follow my finger.’

  In the darkness Danny had to get close to look along the line of her arm. He smelt her perfume and the slightest taint of her own smell, felt his face brush the texture of her clothing.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘can you see it? Like a moving star. A little brighter than the rest.’

  ‘Oh yes. I can see it now.’

  They stood in silence, close to each other, watching the pin-point of light threading its way up the sky from the horizon. To their left was the faint orange dome of light from the town. When the satellite was directly above them it paused, or seemed to pause, and they held their breath, their f
aces dished to the sky. Miss Schwartz put her hand round Danny’s shoulder.

  ‘How utterly lonely,’ she said. ‘The immensity of it frightens me.’

  They were silent for a long time, watching its descent down the other side of the sky, moving yet hardly moving. Some miles away a dog barked. A car’s headlights fanned into the sky and they heard its engine as soft as breathing. Miss Schwartz said in a whisper,

  ‘The music of the spheres. Do you hear it, Danny?’

  ‘No. What is it?’

  ‘It’s a sort of silence,’ she said and in the darkness he knew that she was smiling. Suddenly she returned to her normal voice.

  ‘What I don’t understand, Danny,’ her fingers began to knead his shoulder, ‘is how it stays up there. I’m very silly about these things. Why does it not fall down?’

  ‘It’s kind of suspended. Outside earth’s gravity. I think the moon pulls it one way and the earth pulls the other and nobody wins – so it just stays up there. Something like that anyway. The papers say it will fall back to earth after a few months.’

  ‘Caught between the heavens and the earth. How knowledgeable you are, Danny.’

  ‘The science teacher told us today at school.’ He began to tremble with the cold.

  ‘Oh, but you are shivering. We must go in or your mother will be angry with me. If you catch a chill she will have my life.’

  Inside Miss Schwartz made tea while Danny waited, sitting on his stool by the fire, listening to a record he had chosen himself.

  ‘I’m glad that you picked that one,’ she said when she came into the room. ‘On Sunday at church I will play you your favourite.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘The Bach. “Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier”.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘“Jesus we are here”.’

  ‘Seems a funny thing to say. You’d think he’d know that.’

  ‘Sometimes I wonder,’ she said, approaching her tea with her mouth because it was so hot without milk or a slice of lemon.

  On his way home Danny followed the wobbling yellow disc his torch made on the ground. He was not afraid of the dark but felt protected by it in some way. He noticed from a distance that light was coming from the forge. The door was open and a slice of the roadway in front of it visible. The blacksmith must have heard him because when Danny stopped outside he began to sing ‘Oh Danny Boy’.