Collected Stories

by Bernard Maclaverty

  ‘Come in,’ he shouted. From the threshold Danny refused.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My Dad says I’m not allowed.’

  The blacksmith laughed and said that he had a fair idea why.

  ‘What would he do if he caught you here?’

  ‘Take his belt off to me.’

  The man snorted and came to Danny in the doorway. He rucked up his leather apron and thrust his hands into his pockets.

  ‘Danny,’ he said and there was a long pause. ‘You’re coming to an age now when you’ve got to think. Don’t accept what people tell you – even your father. Especially your father. And that includes me.’

  Danny eased his hip on to a large tractor tyre propped by the door.

  ‘Your Dad and I have very different views of things. He accepts the mess the world is in whereas I don’t. We’ve got to change it – by force if necessary.’

  ‘Did you see the satellite?’ asked Danny. The blacksmith nodded and laughed.

  ‘It takes the Russians. I bet the Yanks feel sickened. That’s an example of what I’m talking about. Equal shares and equal opportunity leads to progress, Danny. The classless society. It’ll happen in Ireland before long. There’s nothing surer. Am I right or am I wrong?’

  Danny smiled and said that he would have to go. The blacksmith touched him on the shoulder.

  ‘If you want to come back here, Danny, you come. The belt shouldn’t stop you. You’ve got to be your own man, Danny Boy.’

  ‘I’ll maybe see you.’

  On the road Danny waited for the hammer blows so that he could walk in step but none came and he had to choose his own rhythm.

  On Sunday Danny waited to hear the familiar thumping sound of Miss Schwartz taking her place in the organ loft. She was not the same religion as the McErlanes but she had told Danny that she had needed the money and that it was a chance to play regularly on the best organ for a radius of twenty miles. After mass she had taken him up several times into the loft and he had been astonished by the sense of vibration, the wheezes and puffs and clanks of the machinery which he hadn’t heard from the church. He loved the power of the instrument when she opened the stops fully to clear the church.

  He heard the door of the organ loft close and was surprised when he looked round to see a man. He was bald with a horse-shoe of white hair and horn-rimmed spectacles. Throughout the distribution of communion he played traditional hymns with a thumping left hand and a scatter of wrong notes. Afterwards he drove away in a white Morris Minor.

  Outside on the driveway Father O’Neill talked to Danny’s mother. The boy was sent on ahead while they talked. All that Sunday the house was full of whispers. Danny would come into a room and the conversation would stop. He thought Miss Schwartz must be ill.

  The next day, the Monday before Christmas, when he came home from school his mother was sitting at the table writing a letter. He gathered his music and was about to go out when she called him.

  ‘Here’s a note for your music teacher.’ Then she added, ‘Don’t be too disappointed, son.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Never mind. Just you take that to your teacher and maybe she’ll explain.’

  On the road the wind was cold. Some hailstones had fallen and gathered into seams along the side of the road. The wind hurt the lobes of his ears and the tip of his nose.

  He gave Miss Schwartz the note and she opened it jaggedly with a finger. She chinked the money into her hand, then read the letter. She looked as if she was going to cry but she stopped herself by biting her lip. Her teeth were nice and straight and white.

  ‘Play for me,’ she said.

  Danny began to play the Field Nocturne he had been practising. The dark descended slowly. When he had finished she said,

  ‘Let us not have a lesson. Let us play all the best things.’

  ‘You didn’t play the organ on Sunday. Were you sick?’

  ‘Yes. I was indisposed.’ She thought for a while, then put her hand to the back of her head and untied her hair. With a shake she let it fall darkly forward.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. Danny nodded.

  ‘That means I’m going to have a baby.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘They don’t want me any more.’

  ‘Why not? You’re the best organist I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘You can’t have heard many. No more talk, Danny. That’s enough. What are you going to play?’

  ‘Can I have the light on?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Play me the Schubert. You know it well enough to play in the dark. It makes the other senses better. In the dark we are all ears, are we not?’ Her voiced sounded wet, as if she had been crying.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The G flat.’

  Danny began to play. Somehow he felt a sense of occasion, as if she was willing him to play better than he had ever played before. To feel, as she had so often urged him, the heart and soul of what Schubert had heard when he wrote down the music. In the dark he was aware of her slight swaying as he played. Now she sat forward on the sofa, her long hair hanging like curtains on each side of the pale patch of her face. She sat like a man, her knees wide apart, her elbows resting on them. The melody, more sombre than he had played it before, flowed out over the rippling left hand. Then came the heavy base like a dross, holding the piece to earth. The right hand moved easily into the melody again, the highest note seeming never to reach high enough, pinioned by a ceiling Schubert had set on it. Like the black notes he had struck in Uncle George’s room by himself creating a disturbing ache. The piece reached its full development and swung into its lovely main melody for the last time. It ended quietly, dying into a hush. Both were silent, afraid to break the spell that had come with the music. Danny heard Miss Schwartz give a sigh, a long shuddering exhalation and he too sighed. She leaned forward and switched on a small orange lamp which stood on the side table.

  ‘Danny, you are my last pupil. They have taken all the others away from me. But I do not care about them. They are money. But you are the best. You are more than that. You are the best thing I have ever had and when they try to take you away from me . . .’ She stopped and dipped her face into the handkerchief she had rolled in her hand. She looked up at him and began again.

  ‘This is your last lesson. Your mother does not allow you to come here again.’

  ‘Why not?’ Danny’s voice was high and angry. Miss Schwartz raised her shoulders and splayed out her hands.

  ‘I think in our time together we have accomplished much, Danny. There is so much more technique that you have to learn. But your heart must be right. Without it technique is useless. Sometimes I am ungenerous and doubt others’ sensitivity. It is hard to believe that someone can feel as deeply as oneself. It is difficult not to think of oneself as the centre of the universe. But I believe in yours, Danny. I see it in your eyes, in your face. Do you know what a frisson is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It is a feeling that you get. Indescribable. A shivering. Your hair stands on end when you hear or read or know something that is exceptionally beautiful. Did you ever get that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever cried listening to a piece of music – not from sadness but from the sheer beauty of it? Have you ever felt like crying?’

  ‘No. I don’t think I have.’ Danny wanted to please her but she asked the question with such a seriousness, beseeched him, that to tell a lie would have been wrong.

  ‘I can only compare it to something which you have not yet experienced. Something you would not understand. But it will come. I’m sure it will come. That is what is wrong with this world. People are like the beasts of the field. They know nothing of music or tenderness. Anyone whom music has spoken to – really spoken to – must be gentle, must be kind – could not be guilty of a cruelty.’

  She stood up and was walking back and forth with her fists tight.

  ‘Mein Lieber, in the light the pale people
see nothing. The glare blinds them. It is easy to hurt what you cannot see. To drop bombs a million miles away.’ She stopped walking and pointed her finger straight at him. ‘One of your Popes had a great thing to say once. He had been listening to some music by Palestrina with Palestrina himself. He said to him, “The law, my dear Palestrina, ought to employ your music to lead hardened criminals to repentance.” Do you think this,’ and she hissed out the s sound, ‘this town would do this to me if they had truly heard one bar of Palestrina? Listen. Listen to this.’

  She stamped across the room and took out one of the books of records. She put one on and turned the volume up full and announced,

  ‘Palestrina.’

  She sat down on the sofa, rigid with anger, electricity almost sparking from her hair.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ she commanded.

  Danny closed his eyes and let his hands rest on his bare knees. The unaccompanied singing seemed to infuse the room with sanctity. The clear male voices, intricate and contrapuntal, became an abstraction. Stairs of sound ascending and yet descending at the same instant. Danny thought of what she had said, her tirade. He thought of being taken away from this room, never to be allowed back again to talk and work with Miss Schwartz. Never to be allowed to call in on the blacksmith and be talked to as if he were a man. The garden, the sunlight, the tea. Her concern for everything he did and said. The pumping of the bellows and smell of coke. Her perfume and her laugh, her plants, her music. Her bare breast. Am I right or am I wrong, mein Lieber? He thought of being deprived of all this, never to be allowed back to it. And he began silently in his own dark to cry.

  Miss Schwartz saw the tears squeeze from his eyes and she jumped from the sofa, all her anger gone, and rushed to him. In her haste the tail of her dressing-gown caught a pot-plant and it tumbled to the floor. Black loam spilled out and the dislodged plant fell from the pot, displaying its tangled skirt of white roots. She knelt before him, her arms about his waist. She too was crying. She kissed his knees and he felt her long hair tickle his legs as she swung her head back and forth.

  ‘You are one of us, my love.’

  She continued to weep, the tears streaming down her face, wetting her chin. It was only now that Danny felt her fatness through her gown, not soft fatness, but a hard pumped-up bigness pressing against him. She held him so tightly, so closely that after a time he was unsure whether the hardness belonged to him or to her. To stop himself falling off the stool he put his hands around her neck and as she pressed her cheek to his he felt the sliding wetness of it. She smelled beautiful in the darkness of her hair. She began to move in time to the music, crushing his face to hers. He heard and felt her mouth implode small kisses on the side of his face, moving towards his mouth, but he wrenched his head to the side, not knowing what to do. They stayed like that until the record ended with a hiss and the tick-tick-tick of the over-run.

  Miss Schwartz got up from her knees and straightened her dressing-gown. She pushed back her hair and sniffed loudly.

  ‘Go, Danny. Now. At once.’

  He stopped at the door, his hand on the handle. She was kneeling again, sweeping the springy black loam with her hands into a pile on the mat. She knelt on her gown so that it pulled taut over the hump of her stomach and for the first time Danny saw how big it was. Her hands, dirtied with the soil, hung useless from her wrists.

  ‘Promise me one thing before you go,’ she said. ‘Find a good teacher. Bitte, mein Lieber. You might yet be great. Please – for me?’

  Danny, unable to find the right words, nodded and left. Running in the swirling snow, the only thing he could think of was that she had not given him tea.

  When he got home there was the worst row ever. Danny screamed and shouted at his mother, hardly knowing what he was saying. The answers they gave him he could not understand. They called her a slut and spoke of marriage and sin and Our Blessed Lady. He asked to be allowed back, he cried and pleaded, but his father ended it by thrashing him with his belt and threatening to take an axe to the piano.

  Danny ran out into the night, down the garden, where he had built himself a hut of black tarred boards.

  ‘Let him go, let him go,’ he heard his mother scream.

  The snow had lain and was thick under foot. The fields stretched white away from the white garden. Danny crawled into the darkness of his hut and squatted on the floor. He put his arms around his ankles and rested his wet cheek on his knees. He did not know how many hours it was he stayed like that.

  He heard his mother coming out, her feet crunching and squeaking on the frozen snow.

  ‘Danny,’ she called, ‘Danny.’ She bowed down into the hut and took him by the arm. He had lost his will and when she drew him out, he came. The boy walked as if palsied, stiff and angular with the cold, his mother supporting him beneath his arm. He was numb, past the shivering point.

  ‘Come into the heat, love,’ she said, ‘come in from the night. Join us.’

  LIFE DRAWING

  AFTER DARKNESS FELL and he could no longer watch the landscape from the train window, Liam Diamond began reading his book. He had to take his feet off the seat opposite and make do with a less comfortable position to let a woman sit down. She was equine and fifty and he didn’t give her a second glance. To take his mind off what was to come, he tried to concentrate. The book was a study of the Viennese painter Egon Schiele who, it seemed, had become so involved with his thirteen-year-old girl models that he ended up in jail. Augustus John came to mind: ‘To paint someone you must first sleep with them’, and he smiled. Schiele’s portraits – mostly of himself – exploded off the page beside the text, distracting him. All sinew and gristle and distortion. There was something decadent about them, like Soutine’s pictures of hanging sides of beef.

  Occasionally he would look up to see if he knew where he was but saw only the darkness and himself reflected from it. The streetlights of small towns showed more and more snow on the roads the farther north he got. To stretch, he went to the toilet and noticed the faces as he passed between the seats. Like animals being transported. On his way back he saw a completely different set of faces, but he knew they looked the same. He hated train journeys, seeing so many people, so many houses. It made him realise he was part of things whether he liked it or not. Seeing so many unknown people through their back windows, standing outside shops, walking the streets, moronically waving from level crossings, they grew amorphous and repulsive. They were going about their static lives while he had a sense of being on the move. And yet he knew he was not. At some stage any one of those people might travel past his flat on a train and see him in the act of pulling his curtains. The thought depressed him so much that he could no longer read. He leaned his head against the window and although he had his eyes closed he did not sleep.

  The snow, thawed to slush and refrozen quickly, crackled under his feet and made walking difficult. For a moment he was not sure which was the house. In the dark he had to remember it by number and shade his eyes against the yellow glare of the sodium street lights to make out the figures on the small terrace doors. He saw fifty-six and walked three houses farther along. The heavy wrought-iron knocker echoed in the hallway as it had always done. He waited, looking up at the semicircular fan-light. Snow was beginning to fall, tiny flakes swirling in the corona of light. He was about to knock again or look to see if they had got a bell when he heard shuffling from the other side of the door. It opened a few inches and a white-haired old woman peered out. Her hair was held in place by a net a shade different from her own hair colour. It was one of the Miss Harts but for the life of him he couldn’t remember which. She looked at him, not understanding.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Liam,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, thanks be to goodness for that. We’re glad you could come.’

  Then she shouted over her shoulder, ‘It’s Liam.’

  She shuffled backwards, opening the door and admitting him. Inside she tremulously shook his hand, then took his bag
and set it on the ground. Like a servant, she took his coat and hung it on the hall stand. It was still in the same place and the hallway was still a dark electric yellow.

  ‘Bertha’s up with him now. You’ll forgive us sending the telegram to the College but we thought you would like to know,’ said Miss Hart. If Bertha was up the stairs then she must be Maisie.

  ‘Yes, yes, you did the right thing,’ said Liam. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Poorly. The doctor has just left – he had another call. He says he’ll not last the night.’

  ‘That’s too bad.’

  By now they were standing in the kitchen. The fireplace was black and empty. One bar of the dished electric fire took the chill off the room and no more.

  ‘You must be tired,’ said Miss Hart, ‘it’s such a journey. Would you like a cup of tea? I tell you what, just you go up now and I’ll bring you your tea when it’s ready. All right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  When he reached the head of the stairs she called after him,

  ‘And send Bertha down.’

  Bertha met him on the landing. She was small and withered and her head reached to his chest. When she saw him she started to cry and reached out her arms to him saying,

  ‘Liam, poor Liam.’

  She nuzzled against him, weeping. ‘The poor old soul,’ she kept repeating. Liam was embarrassed feeling the thin arms of this old woman he hardly knew about his hips.

  ‘Maisie says you have to go down now,’ he said, separating himself from her and patting her crooked back. He watched her go down the stairs, one tottering step at a time, gripping the banister, her rheumatic knuckles standing out like limpets.

  He paused at the bedroom door and for some reason flexed his hands before he went in. He was shocked to see the state his father was in. He was now almost completely bald except for some fluffy hair above his ears. His cheeks were sunken, his mouth hanging open. His head was back on the pillow so that the strings of his neck stood out.