by Colm Toibin
“But it can’t be proved,” she said. “You can only sense it.”
“Yes, b-but he says it’s not like p-proof. It’s n-not adding two and two, but more like adding light to w-water.”
“That sounds very deep.”
“No, it’s simple really. It explains things.”
She noticed that he had not stammered on the last sentence.
“You must have s-something first,” he went on. “I suppose th-that is what he is saying.”
“And if you don’t?”
“That is the atheist position.”
She looked down at the roofs of houses and the spires of churches and the calm light over the harbour beyond them. Donal was sixteen and she thought how less certain everything would seem as the years went on for him, and how important it was for her to say nothing that might cause him to know that, since he did not need to know it yet.
Since she had come early, he made it clear that he understood she had something to do, and he told her that if he had an hour free now, when many of the others were playing hurling or football or walking around the field surreptitiously smoking, he would have the darkroom to himself, and there was a new sort of photographic paper, not glossy, which he wanted to experiment with. She could not work out whether he was dismissing her because he wanted her to go, or whether he was making it easy for her. She sat in the car and watched him through the side mirror walking confidently back into the school.
At home, she sat listening to Victoria de los Angeles singing Schubert and Fauré and then to a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, waiting for Catherine and Una to arrive.
She hoped that when they had finished the work they would leave; they would take Maurice’s clothes, she hoped, and not tell her what they were going to do with them. Once they had gone, she would have some hours alone, with the fire lighting and music. She would maybe find a book that had belonged to Maurice and keep it close to her. And she would wait for Conor to come in, and then go to bed soon after he did. She would make Catherine and Una tea so that they would not complain about her too much to Josie and to their husbands, but she would not, she decided, give them anything to eat. That might encourage them not to linger once they had finished what they had come to do. She was sure that they were somewhere together now with much to say about her and about Josie and about having their Saturday filled up in this way.
When they came, she met them at the front door and did not invite them into the back room.
“All his things are in that wardrobe beside the window,” she said. “There’s nothing else in that wardrobe.”
They looked at her, expecting her to follow them upstairs, but instead she returned to the back room, adding more logs and briquettes to the fire and changing the violin concerto for some calmer piano music and turning the sound down low. What they had come to do was easy; it was a question only of piling everything from the wardrobe into the bags and boxes and taking them downstairs and then to the car. She had not opened the wardrobe since soon after he died, when she had put the rest of his clothes into it. Moths may well have eaten holes in the wool, but the shoes would be as they were, the laces as he had left them, and there might even be chalk from the classroom in the pockets of some of the jackets. She almost felt sorry that she was letting it all go, or that she had not done it gradually herself over time. She wished now that they would do it more quickly. She could hear their feet on the floorboards above. They seemed to be moving around too much.
When they had the bags and boxes full and in the hall and had gone back upstairs to check the wardrobe one last time, a knock came at the door. Nora was very surprised to see Laurie O’Keefe. Laurie had never come to the house before. For a second, Nora could not think what to do. Somehow, the world of Laurie would not match in any way with the world Catherine and Una inhabited; they would think Laurie was mad. She was almost going to say to Laurie that this was a very bad time, but she was prevented by Laurie’s eagerness and friendliness. Laurie also seemed out of breath. She put her sitting in the back room as Catherine and Una came downstairs and she introduced them. She made tea while she wondered how long Laurie and her sisters might now stay.
“I don’t like calling unannounced on anyone,” Laurie said. “Do you?”
She looked at Catherine and Una and then at Nora.
“I wish Nora would get a phone,” Catherine said.
“Well, there’s that,” Laurie said. “But some people don’t like phones.”
“And others can’t afford them,” Nora said as she sat down.
“Or they prefer buying records,” Una said.
“Indeed,” Nora said.
“Well, I have good news,” Laurie said when the tea was poured, “and I wanted to let you know. I know it’s a hard day for you, Nora, so I weighed it up and thought good news would not be any harm on a day like today.”
“How did you know about today?” Nora asked.
“I hate mysteries so I’ll tell you. Your aunt told Sister Thomas and she told me, and it was she who advised me to come.”
“She’s an awful busybody,” Una said.
“That’s one way of putting it all right,” Laurie said. “Anyway, what happened is that someone died and we don’t know who it is but she left some money in her will for a recital of religious music in Wexford or Kilkenny or Carlow. Whoever it is, she must have had a lovely soul to have such a thought, as well as the money, of course. So they approached Frank Redmond and, even though I am not speaking to him, he approached me to organise the choir, as he is too busy for that, and it occurred to me that it was all a gift from God.”
She stopped and looked at all three women as though they would understand. Nora saw that Catherine, who was the most religious of them, was watching Laurie intently.
“It is the twenty-fifth anniversary,” Laurie spoke very dramatically, “of the convent being re-opened and the church re-consecrated after the war. The Nazis took it from us and unspeakable things happened there.”
“Laurie was a Sacred Heart nun in France during the war,” Nora said.
“And we had a great reverend mother,” Laurie said. “She was from a very old family in France. It was 1947 and she said we were going to put on a concert to thank the Lord for the end of the war and to celebrate the re-opening of our church and our return to the old building. We had a marvellous choir even then, although we had lost so many men in the war, and women too. She wanted to perform Brahms’s German Requiem, she said, as both a thanksgiving and an expiation, and she would play the piano and she chose the best soprano and baritone to do the lead parts, and then the nuns and the people of the village would be the choir. Oh, the people protested and there were nuns too who wanted to protest, but of course we had sworn a vow of obedience. But it was hard, even for the nuns. The German language had been a nightmare for all of Europe, and it was the one thing that no one wanted to hear, let alone sing in. And, on top of that, it’s not a Catholic piece, but that was part of her dream too, to reach out to the other side. None of the men would come until Mère Marie-Thérèse went to one of them, the one she knew best. He had a beautiful voice but he had lost his two sons in the war, one of the bodies was never found, and his wife had died and his own heart was very hard. And she asked him to come to the newly consecrated chapel and pray with her. She asked him to pray, that’s all she did. She asked him to pray.”
Laurie stopped, as though she had now said enough.
“And what did he do?” Catherine asked.
“He implored her to sing a Catholic requiem in French for the French dead, but she refused. We will sing to honour God Who is all-forgiving, that’s what she said, and we will sing in German to show that we come made in God’s likeness, and we too can forgive. She went every day to the man’s house and prayed with him. She brought two novices with her.”
“And did he agree?” Catherine asked.
A log slipped and sank in the fire and began to burn brightly. No one said anything for a minute.
“And you were in France in those years?” Catherine asked.
“And now, to mark the twenty-five years, I’m going to put together a choir and we’ll rehearse the German Requiem in Wexford town and Frank Redmond will organise a small orchestra or two pianos and the two lead singers. And your sister Mrs. Webster is the first person I want in my choir.”
“Nora?” Catherine asked.
“Yes, she’s my best pupil.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something now,” Catherine said, “if my mother was alive she would be amazed because she was a wonderful singer and she knew Nora was too, but Nora would never sing.”
“We all change, Catherine,” Laurie said.
Catherine looked at her sceptically.
“Now, I must go,” Laurie said. “I just came over to tell you that.”
When she had gone, Catherine and Una returned with Nora to the back room.
“Is she for real?” Catherine asked.
“Oh, I’ve heard about her, and she is for real,” Una said. “She’s very well thought of.”
“She has been a very good friend,” Nora said.
“And are you really going to sing in a choir?” Catherine asked.
“I’ll do my best,” Nora said.
They carried all the boxes to the car while Nora stood in the hallway keeping the door open for them. When everything was done, Una went upstairs one more time and came down with a small wooden box which was locked.
“This was at the bottom of the wardrobe,” she said. She shook it but there was no sound.
Nora shuddered. She knew what it was.
“I don’t have the key anymore,” she said. “Can one of you help me to open it?”
“It needs to be prised open, but that will ruin the box,” Catherine said.
“That’s fine,” Nora said.
Catherine tried using a metal tool she found in the kitchen, but it did not work.
“I need it opened,” Nora said.
“Well, I can’t do it.”
“Una,” Nora said, “would you take it next door to Tom O’Connor? He has every tool under the sun.”
When Una had gone, Catherine went to the bathroom. Nora could see that she was upset by having to handle Maurice’s clothes and she understood that her sister did not want to be alone with her. Catherine did not come downstairs again until Una had returned.
“He found it hard enough to open,” she said. “He had to split the wood.”
Nora put it on the table beside her and went back to the hall where her sisters were.
“Will you be all right now on your own?” Catherine asked.
“Conor will be back soon,” she said.
As they both found their coats, she waited for them.
“I could never have done that myself,” she said.
“If we’d known about it, we would have done it before,” Una said.
She stood at the door then and watched them go, watched Catherine carefully reversing the car, and all of Maurice’s clothes, each item bought without any knowledge of what would happen to him, being taken somewhere to be thrown out, or given away. She closed the front door and went into the back room again and emptied the contents of the wooden box.
All of Maurice’s letters to her in the years before they married were there. She had kept them in the box, locked away. She remembered how shy his tone was when he wrote to her. The letters were often short, just suggesting a place in the town where they might meet, and a time.
She did not have to look at them; she knew them. He often talked about himself as though he were someone else, saying that he had met a man who had told him how fond he was of a certain girl, or how he had a friend who walked home from seeing his girlfriend and all he thought was how much he would like to see her again soon, or how he would like to go to Ballyconnigar with her and walk along the cliffs at Cush and maybe have a swim with her if the weather was good.
She knelt down and slowly fed the letters into the fire. She thought about how much had happened since they were written and how much they belonged to a time that was over now and would not come back. It was the way things were; it was the way things had worked out.
When Conor came home he noticed the half-burned wooden box in the grate among the logs and the coal and the briquettes. He asked what it was.
“Just something I was clearing out,” she said.
He looked at it suspiciously.
“I am going to be in a choir,” she said.
“In the cathedral?”
“No, in a different choir. In Wexford.”
“I thought that man didn’t like you.”
“Well, they have changed their minds.”
“And what are you going to sing?”
“Brahms’s German Requiem.”
“Is that a song?”
“It’s a series of songs, but for a lot of voices.”
He seemed to think about this, weighing it up, and then he nodded. He smiled at her, satisfied, and then he went upstairs to his room. She sat alone by the fire and thought that she would put on music, something she particularly liked. She hoped that he would sit with her for a while before he went to bed. In the meantime, the house was quiet, the silence broken only by the faint noises from Conor upstairs and the crackling of wood burning slowly in the fire.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© Brigitte Lacombe
Colm Tóibín is the author of seven novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award; and The Testament of Mary, as well as two story collections. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Colm-Toibin
ALSO BY COLM TÓIBÍN
Fiction
The South
The Heather Blazing
The Story of the Night
The Blackwater Lightship
The Master
Mothers and Sons
Brooklyn
The Empty Family: Stories
The Testament of Mary
Nonfiction
Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border
Homage to Barcelona
The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe
Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar
Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush
All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families
Plays
Beauty in a Broken Place
Testament
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014008519
ISBN 978-1-4391-3833-5
ISBN 978-1-4391-4985-0 (ebook)
Contents
* * *
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen