Nora Webster: A Novel

by Colm Toibin

  “That would be very nice,” Fiona said and smiled. “I’ll check the times of the ferries.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Nora watched from the front window as Phyllis reversed her car, navigating the narrow space with confidence. She was not expecting her, but thought it might seem friendly and welcoming if she opened the front door and stood there waiting for her.

  “Now, I won’t come in,” Phyllis said. “I hate people who drop in without warning and I have no intention of barging in anywhere unannounced.”

  “You’re very welcome,” Nora said.

  “All I wanted to say to you is that there’s a choir in Wexford, and there might be vacancies. I don’t know what they are planning to do, but it would be a marvellous experience and I know the choirmaster and he’s very good, or at least he is when he’s in good humour, and so I have a place automatically. Now, I spoke to Laurie O’Keefe and she says that she is ready to prepare you so that you have a few pieces ready. For an audition.”

  Nora nodded. She did not want to say that both Fiona and Aine had gone to Laurie O’Keefe for piano and they had both come home after the first lesson swearing never to return.

  “Is she not . . . ?”

  “Quite,” Phyllis said. “She is not for everybody, yours truly included. But if she likes you, she’s very good, and she’s very fond of you.”

  “She doesn’t know me.”

  “Billy, her husband, does, or so he said, and they both insisted that they would do anything for you. Don’t ask me now to go into the details of what they said, but they were full of enthusiasm when I mentioned your name.”

  “What would I do?”

  “Call over to her and make an arrangement, and just let her hear your voice. And then maybe you could learn two or three pieces for Wexford.”

  “Would it take long?”

  “Well, knowing Laurie . . .”

  Nora wondered if she should make a quick decision and ask Phyllis to tell the O’Keefes that she was desperately busy. As she hesitated, she saw that Phyllis was watching her.

  “Don’t leave it too long,” Phyllis said. “I wouldn’t like to offend her. She is very talented, you know, or she was. I’d say she finds the town a bit dull.”

  Nora remembered a night in the new assembly hall of the Presentation Convent when Maurice and herself and Jim had gone to a fund-raising concert for the St. Vincent de Paul Society. Laurie O’Keefe was conducting an orchestra. As her style grew more vigorous and expressive, Maurice and Jim began to laugh quietly and she had nudged Maurice in disapproval. Halfway through the concert Jim had to make his way to the toilet, all the while silently shaking with laughter. Nora had given Maurice a fierce look before he had to follow Jim. Neither of them returned to their seats. Afterwards, she remembered, she had found them both standing sheepishly at the back of the hall.

  Before Phyllis left, Nora agreed that she would make contact with Laurie O’Keefe, but over the next few days, as she postponed doing so, she wondered why she was so open to unexpected visits from people who seemed to know better than she did how she should live and what she should do. She supposed that Phyllis was trying to help her, but wondered also if it might be a good idea to keep her door closed to all newcomers, spend her time making sure that Donal and Conor were well looked after, and letting memories of Maurice come to her at will throughout the day, and allowing them to linger until they might fade of their own accord.

  As she thought about singing, the sound of her mother’s singing voice came vividly to her, so proud and confident on high notes. Even when her mother was old, Nora was able to distinguish her voice from the other voices in the choir in the cathedral. And she liked it when people told her that when her mother was young her voice could fill the whole space and people would come to eleven-o’clock mass to hear her.

  In that great sleepless time when Maurice was dying and she knew that she was facing a life alone with the children, she remembered half-thinking that her mother was close by, or waiting for her somewhere, or that her mother knew a prayer that would work and change things. She had an image now of her mother as a calm hovering force there in the hospital room.

  It made sense, or at least it made sense in those days in the hospital, that her mother, despite all the coldness between her and Nora, would want to be there, be close to Maurice. Her mother had gone ahead of him by only seven years. In her urge to be as far away as she could from that time in the hospital, Nora had tried to keep her mother out of her mind since then; her mother’s dream-presence had not pursued her into the life without Maurice she was living now.

  When she was downtown a few days after Phyllis’s visit, having walked up Weafer Street to the Back Road, she realised that she was close to the O’Keefes’ house. She wondered if it would be best to turn and walk home and go there another time, but she steeled herself, thinking that if she did it now, then it would be over. Laurie O’Keefe, she knew, had lived in France and had been a nun at some point. She was Billy’s second wife. The first wife was dead and the children from that marriage were grown up and gone. There was something about his first wife that Nora could not remember; she had been frugal, she was sure of that, and she vaguely remembered hearing that she had always gone to seven-o’clock mass on a Sunday so that no one could see how badly dressed she was, and how poor she looked, despite the fact that her husband had a good business.

  She pushed open the gate to the O’Keefes’ house, noticing how well tended the garden was, and how shiny all the windows of the old house were and how unusual, almost grand, it looked. Billy was retired now; he had owned an insurance company, or been involved in insurance, and she knew, as she knew so much about people in the town, that he went each evening at the same time for a bottle of Guinness in Hayes in Court Street, a walking-stick in his hand. As she went up the steps to the front door of the house, she remembered something that Maurice had once told her—Billy hated music, and he had the room where Laurie played and gave her lessons soundproofed, and he wore earplugs whenever there was a threat of music in the house. It was the sort of detail Maurice enjoyed.

  Billy opened the door to her and immediately asked her in, holding back a Labrador dog by the collar. The hallway was wide and dark, with old pictures on the wall. There was a smell of polish. Billy began to call downstairs for his wife but as there was no reply he shut the dog in the room on the left and walked down the creaking staircase to the basement, motioning to Nora to remain in the hall.

  “She never hears me,” he said, and seemed amused at the idea.

  Soon, Billy O’Keefe appeared again.

  “She says you are to come down,” he said.

  He led her down the narrow book-lined staircase and into a small tiled hallway. He opened a door in a bright space that had clearly been added to the back of the old house. Laurie O’Keefe stood up from the piano.

  “Now, Billy will make us tea, unless you want coffee,” she said. “And biscuits, Billy, the nice ones I bought.”

  She smiled at him as he closed the door.

  “It’s only a baby grand,” she said, as though Nora had asked her about the piano, “and of course I have another one there, just a plain old upright, for the students to bang on.”

  There was no other furniture in the room except a few old chairs. There was a rug on the floor and sheet music strewn about. The walls were painted white with prints of abstract paintings hanging at different heights.

  “We’ll have our tea in here.” Laurie led her into another room which had two armchairs, a stereo record player and speakers, and a case from floor to ceiling full of records.

  “No one has any pity for a woman married to a man who is tone-deaf,” Laurie said. “No one!”

  Nora did not know what this meant, or if she was expected to reply.

  “You know, there’s something we have been meaning to say to you,” Laurie went on. �
�I almost wrote you a letter when we sent you the Mass card but then I thought no, I’d say it to you when I saw you.”

  They sat down on the armchairs. Nora looked out at the garden for a moment and then back at Laurie.

  “We were driving down from Dublin, we’d been away. Oh cousins and nieces and all that! And then we were driving back into the town and all the traffic was stopped. I don’t know how long we had to wait in Blackstoops. We thought that there might have been an accident. It never struck us that it was a funeral. I don’t know why. And eventually I pulled down the window and asked someone what it was. Oh, we were shocked when they told us. We knew Maurice was sick. But we were very shocked. And Billy said how good Maurice had been to his boys in school and what a great teacher he was. And we thought then that if we could do anything for you . . .”

  “You’re very kind,” Nora said.

  “And then Phyllis said—”

  “I’m not sure my voice is up to much,” Nora interrupted.

  “There is no better way to heal yourself than singing in a choir,” Laurie said. “That is why God made music. You know I had my own troubles. Coming out of a convent at fifty and hardly a friend in the world. And it was the choir that got me started again. That was the one thing I had, my voice, and the piano, although I trained first on the harpsichord. That was my first love.”

  Billy came into the room with a tray.

  “And this,” Laurie said, pointing to Billy, “I suppose will be my last.”

  “Do you mean me, Laurie?” he asked.

  “I do, but you can leave us now. We have things to talk about.”

  Billy smiled at Nora and tiptoed out of the room.

  “You know I sang for Nadia Boulanger,” Laurie continued, “and one thing she said was that singing is not something you do, it is something you live. Wasn’t that wise?”

  Nora nodded, doing nothing to indicate that she did not know who Nadia Boulanger was. She tried to remember the name so she could mention it to Phyllis.

  “But I do have to get a feel for your voice before we set to work. Can you read music?”

  “Yes, I can,” Nora said. “Not well, mind you, but I learned years ago at school.”

  “It might be best to start with something you know.”

  She went into the other room and came back with books of sheet music.

  “Drink your tea and look through these and pick a song you are familiar with. I’ll go into the other room and play the piano. I can’t think what to play, but something that I know from memory and maybe the sound will warm us up. And I don’t have a pupil until four so there’s plenty of time.”

  Nora sipped the tea and put down the cup and rested her head against the back of the chair. The music Laurie was playing was too fast and cluttered, she thought; whoever wrote it had put in too many notes. It was a virtuoso piece, and she sensed that Laurie was showing off and felt almost sorry for her that she would need to do this. It could hardly be what she did for relaxation. If Maurice were alive now, she would delight in telling him what had happened and he would say how right Billy O’Keefe was to have earplugs. Imagine being married to a former nun who played the piano! She could hear Maurice’s dry tone and see the look of pure amusement on his face.

  She flicked through the books of sheet music; most of them were German songs she had never heard of, and she wondered now if Phyllis had given Laurie the impression that she knew more than she did. When she came to a book of Irish songs, they seemed all too silly and old-fashioned and stage-Irish, songs that no one sang anymore. At the bottom of a pile were a few single sheets with some of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies. She looked at “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms,” but thought it was too stilted. Then she found “The Last Rose of Summer”; she began studying the notes and was humming the familiar tune when Laurie returned to the room.

  “You found something then?”

  “Well, I found this.” She handed her the sheet for “The Last Rose of Summer.”

  “I had an old novice mistress from the Alsace and she used to call me the last rose of summer even if I was on time. Oh, she was an old battle-axe. Close to God, I suppose, but an old battle-axe nonetheless.”

  Laurie went back to the other room and sat at the piano. Nora followed her.

  “Now, this is bad for your voice,” Laurie said. “We should do exercises to warm it up and not go straight into a song. But there’s something about you now that might not be there in a while. I saw it when you came in the door. You have . . .”

  “What?”

  “You have been close to the other side, haven’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t talk now. Let me hear your voice. Let me go through the melody first.”

  She played and then stopped.

  “I’ll go down into a lower key and see where that takes us.”

  Laurie played, concentrating on the music, slowing the melody as she went along.

  “I think I have it now. We really shouldn’t be doing this, but your voice might never be as good as it is today. Let me play for a while again, and when I signal, you come in.”

  She held her hands over the keys but did not touch them. The silence in the room was so intense that Nora presumed it must really be soundproofed. Nora felt uneasy, almost alarmed by the quality of the silence, by the need Laurie appeared to have for high drama.

  Laurie gently touched the keys, working the pedals so that a new low sound came from the piano. She played very softly and then she made a sign and Nora, looking at the words of the song, began:

  “’Tis the last rose of summer

  Left blooming alone.”

  She did not know that her voice could be so deep; and whatever way Laurie was stretching out the notes, she found herself moving much more slowly than she had meant to. She had no trouble with her breathing and no fear now of the higher notes. She felt that the piano was controlling her and pulling her along, and the pace meant that she gave each word its full weight. Because of the gaps Laurie left, she felt that she was singing into silence; she was aware of the silence as much as she was of the notes. A few times she faltered because Laurie was adding flourishes and she was unsure what to do until Laurie lifted her hand and then swiftly lowered it to indicate that she was to end the lines more sharply and let the piano do the grace notes.

  When the song was finished Laurie did not speak for a while.

  “Why didn’t you train your voice?” she asked eventually.

  “My mother was a better singer always,” Nora said.

  “If we had got you young enough—”

  “I never liked singing, and then I got married.”

  “Did he ever hear you singing?”

  “Maurice? Once or twice on holidays. But not for years.”

  “And the children?”

  “No.”

  “You kept it to yourself. You saved it up.”

  “I never thought about it.”

  “I can train you to sing for an audition, and the choir might need contraltos, they often do, but I can do nothing more for you. You’ve left it too late, but you don’t mind that, do you?”

  “No.”

  “We can all have plenty of lives, but there are limits. You never can tell what they are. If someone had told me I’d be seventy and living in a town in Ireland with an insurance man! But here I am. And I know when we started a few minutes ago you didn’t want ever to come back here, but you do now. I know you do now. And you will, won’t you?”

  “Yes, I will,” Nora said.

  Over the following weeks, she went to Laurie O’Keefe’s on Tuesdays at two o’clock, sometimes dreading the thought of it when she woke on the morning of the lesson and dreading it even more as she set out to walk along the Back Road to Weafer Street. She hoped that neither Phyllis nor the O’Keefes
had told people that she was learning to sing. And she told no one at work, not even Elizabeth. There would be people in the town, including Jim and Margaret, who would wonder what she was doing taking lessons when she should be looking after her job and her house and minding her children.

  For the first hour of the class Laurie would not let her sing; she made her lie on the floor and breathe, or stand and hold a note for as long as she could, or go up and down the scales. She concentrated then on the first line of “The Last Rose of Summer,” and Laurie made her not take in a breath after “summer” as she had been doing, but carry on to the end of the second line and then make it natural, as though she was speaking or telling a story.

  It was a way of spending Tuesday afternoon, she thought sometimes, a way of doing something new, getting out of the house into a hidden world, soundproofed from what was really happening. It was when Laurie propped two small framed abstract paintings on the top of the piano and asked her to look at them, insisted that she do nothing except look at them, that the real change came, not in her voice, but in something else that she could not be sure about.

  “You must look at them!” Laurie commanded. “Look at them as though you will need to remember them.”

  “Who did them?”

  Laurie smiled but did not reply.

  “Is it just a pattern?” Nora asked. “What do they mean?”

  “You must look, that’s all.”

  One had nothing but lines; the other had squares. The lined one was brown; the other was blue. Some of the lines were raised, as though embossed.

  “Don’t think, just look,” Laurie said.

  She could not be sure about the colours, as both were filled with shadow as much as colour. She looked at the shadows, studied the darker end of each of them, and then let her eye move from right to left, following a line towards brightness, or some beginning.

  “What I want you to do now,” Laurie said, “is sing and only look at the colours and don’t think about the words or me or anything else. Make the sound from what you look at.”