Father's Music

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘Give us a story, Proinsías,’ a man as old as himself asked. The fiddler raised his bow as though he hadn’t heard him. He played a few bars, bending them as if to disguise the notes before asking if anyone recognised the tune.

  ‘Casadh an tSúgáin,’ an old woman close to me said and the fiddler nodded, lowering the bow.

  ‘The Twisting of the Rope, it’s called in English.’ He lowered the fiddle so that it rested on his knee, his back straight on the hard chair as he looked around. ‘And it’s not many miles from here that the tune was written by a wandering fiddler on a night as wild as this.’

  He paused as the till rang but I heard Mrs Cunningham use her hand to stop it springing open. There was the sound of a glass being placed down and then the room lapsed into silence.

  ‘One time a fiddler was crossing these hills towards dark after playing at a house party in the glen,’ the old man began. ‘It was a lonesome night with storms coming in and the man was feared to travel on. Only one light did he see and when he made for it he found a girl herding animals in from the storm. And when he told her he’d have more courage to journey on in the morning if there might be a bed of straw somewhere, she promised to ask her mother, for she spied the fiddle inside his great coat and she had a liking for music always.’

  The fiddler’s eyes travelled the room but seemed to keep coming back to me.

  ‘So pleased was she at the thought of music that she forgot her mother’s fear of neighbours whispering. Because the women lived alone, the father being off in Scotland working. When her mother saw her lead the fiddler to the house, and the cut of his clothes and his age she was for running him from the door. The fiddler could sense her black eyes, but if he hadn’t felt tired before, then his legs grew weary as he saw the fire lit and the shining house.

  ‘The girl’s legs were itching to dance. But the old hag was having none of it and no bad talk brought down by a man staying in the house. Well, she tried every trick to coax him out into the rain, but says he; ‘It wasn’t you invited me here. I’m a God-fearing man and I’ll give my word I’ll do you no harm to either of yous this side of morning.’

  ‘The mother saw there was no shifting him, but she was a crafty old one. “Is fiddling all you’re good for,” says she, “or would you know an honest hour’s work?” He told her he was no slacker and she sent the daughter to fetch armfuls of hay, saying; “There’s a long grass rope needed in this house”. So didn’t the fiddler take up the trawhook and set to twisting away at the straw the daughter held, being hell bent on showing how his arms were still strong, for he’d taken as much a liking to the daughter as she had to himself. Soon he had a rope twisted the length of the room, but the old hag was after more and she held the door open for him to work on. Out he went into the yard, twisting the finest straw rope until he fell back with a jerk, for hadn’t she cut the rope with a knife, half way between him and the girl before slamming the door in his face. Well, he picked himself up and catching hold of his fiddle this is the tune he made.’

  As the laughter died down he picked up the fiddle from his lap and raised it to his chin.

  ‘You never told the story that way before,’ the woman said.

  ‘Well, if I told it different before, it wasn’t a lie then either. Casadh an tSúgáin,’ he announced and began to play with his eyes still watching me. I felt angry suddenly. Our lives couldn’t be explained away by a simple folk tale, which made no reference to the girl being left with a child. No matter what disgust the girl’s mother felt, the fiddler had no right to compose his tune and simply wander off to sing about his rollicksome, frolicsome boys, until somebody had to track the man down to tell him about his bride’s death.

  I decided that I had seen my father and I had seen enough. I would write from London and tell him he was a widower in crisp impersonal sentences. I wanted to be back in that city now, but I had to go through the charade of having Detective Brennan find me first. I would know nothing. Luke and I had quarrelled and I had run away from him, shaken. I had heard no assassin and seen no motor bike.

  I stood up to leave but the lady beside me thought I was looking for the toilet and pointed towards a door at the end of the room. My movements were attracting attention and people were making space for me in that direction, so that I felt too awkward to head for the front door instead. I passed close to the fiddler who didn’t look up, and then lifted the latch to go out into the back yard. I hoped there might be a way to escape without being forced to go back to the bar again. A light high up on the back wall lit the gravel yard. A dog rose and padded over to lick my hand. I rubbed his neck and he wagged his tail, acknowledging the attention before retreating back to his corner. A sign saying Ladies was pinned to the door of what had once been a sort of cow-byre. There was a stream coming off the hillside which seemed to disappear beneath the shed.

  I remembered being cuddled in bed as a child and how my mother had laughed about a pub somewhere where the ladies toilet was just a plank with a hole in it across an open stream. The toilet door was open and I could see that the floor was concreted and a modern toilet was there, perfectly plumbed with a wash-basin and towel. But I knew this had to be the same place, with the stream now piped underground. An open gate at the end of the yard led out to an unploughed field with a low stone wall, where only thistles seemed to grow. I saw lights from bungalows at the end of it and knew that I could flee back on to the road. I’m not sure how long I was being watched until I turned to find Mrs Cunningham standing there.

  ‘It is Tracey, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It seems strange calling you that after him having his own name for you always.’

  ‘How do you know my name?’ I was frightened by her presence.

  ‘Trish, he wanted to call you, for Patricia. They changed it to Tracey. They thought it was a nicer name, I suppose.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I felt trapped. ‘You don’t know me.’

  ‘Not at first, I didn’t. The shaved head is very different. It’s only when you were sitting down that I placed you. You’ve still got your mother’s features. I know Trish was only a pet name but it’s hard to think of you as anything else. It’s what he called you sometimes late at night.’

  ‘He knows I’m here, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Don’t be too harsh on him.’

  ‘He hasn’t written or shown his face in over twenty years. We’re the flesh and blood he left behind for his ramblings.’

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘and he knows that too, although he doesn’t say it. When he gets out of that chair he rarely says anything. But I know there isn’t a day goes by when he doesn’t think of you.’

  ‘Thoughts are no use,’ I said. ‘He would have come to London if he really cared.’

  ‘God knows, he cared,’ she said. ‘He doted on you. He cared too much, but he didn’t know how to mind you, no matter how hard he tried.’

  ‘For six lousy months in London,’ I retorted.

  ‘And six terrible weeks here,’ she replied.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘They never told you?’

  ‘Told me what?’

  Mrs Cunningham glanced up at the unlit bedroom above her head. ‘It was madness,’ she said. ‘Proinsías knew it himself afterwards. He was ashamed of what he did but your mother’s family, well, they treated him like a beggar. I think they just didn’t understand. Proinsías never talked about it but I could see it in your grandfather’s face when he came here.’

  ‘My Grandad was never here in his life,’ I said. Then I remembered Grandad Pete going to say something in Harrow and how he had stopped, as if afraid to lose me again.

  ‘I’m not saying a word against your grandfather,’ she said. ‘He seemed a nice man. A less patient one would have called the police in, but he traipsed around Donegal till he finally tracked your father down. It wasn’t easy. Proinsías was scared because of what he’d done, staying only in the most remote places. There weren’t that many phon
es back then and it was all little local exchanges. He could have vanished for months, but he had to come down here to me in the end. You see, all that time he’d been hoping your mother would follow him back here. Proinsías was never practical. He thought life could go on for the three of yous, just as it had for him. I don’t blame your grandparents for being scared of him. He was old and even here locals looked bad on the marriage. But what he did to you was never kidnapping. I suppose they were worried he’d do something crazy again, but they were wrong to threaten him with jail if he ever set foot in England. All the man wanted was to bring you home.’

  I looked back up the dark hillside where the wind was blowing. There was no way I could have remembered it, but I could see the pair of us in my mind crossing a dark expanse of bog leading down to an unlit mountain road by the sea. My father wore a long greatcoat with a fiddle hung inside it and I was cradled against his chest strapped in a baby harness. He had a large peddler’s pack on his back and he was stumbling under the weight of it, and from tiredness and fear.

  ‘He ran away with me?’ I said. ‘Are you saying I slept here?’

  ‘For four nights in that room up there.’ She pointed to the unlit window above our heads. ‘You had nappy rash, I remember. I fed you myself. You loved the sound of his music, I remember that too. It was better than any soother for you. You must have slept in half a dozen houses like this in Donegal, places where there were women your father could trust to mind you. I’m surprised they never said, but maybe they thought it would frighten you as a girl.’

  Some man opened the door and stood for a moment looking back at my father playing.

  ‘Why has he never made a proper record?’ I asked.

  ‘I suppose nobody cared for the music when he was at his peak,’ she said. ‘It’s only in recent years that Irish people stopped being ashamed of their own music. He says he isn’t good enough any more, that he can’t play like when he was a young man. But I think he wants it all to die with him. He has no one left here to pass it on to.’

  The men at the doorway turned and walked out past us with a nod, making for the gents in the corner. I looked back through the open door and saw the room spell-bound by his playing.

  ‘Do you think he could teach me to play?’

  ‘I don’t know, but you have the hands for it,’ Mrs Cunningham said. She looked through the doorway. ‘He knows you’re out here. I can hear it in the way he’s playing. He can’t seem to stop. That’s nerves. He doesn’t know whether you’re gone out this door for good or if you’re coming back inside to him.’

  ‘I didn’t know myself.’

  ‘Does your mother know you’re here?’

  ‘She died sixteen months ago,’ I said. ‘That’s all I came to tell him. Would you do it for me?’

  ‘I’m desperately sorry to hear that news, child,’ Mrs Cunningham said. ‘Your mother lit up this place like a flame the time she came. They met in this pub. None of us knew what was going on, except that Proinsías had never stayed so long. She kept putting off going home. They’d walk for miles out of the glen before meeting up. They were as silly as each other, thinking nobody would spy them. But, God knows, she made Proinsías smile like I’ve never seen before or since.’

  She stopped and listened to his playing. ‘It was cruel, the way his father beat the music into him till his fingers bled from the strings. He taught him little of the world beyond highlands and reels, because music was all the Mac Suibhnes had. Your father told me that even when he had to stand in Letterkenny at twelve, and hire himself out to some farmer who hit him and fed him nothing but sour milk and salty spuds, he’d still spend hours practising with a stick, imagining he could hear the tunes. Any time there was trouble that’s what he’d do, vanish into a world of his own. Your mother was the only woman to take him out of himself. It was like a cloud lifting, the pair of them whispering and laughing as he tried to show her how to hold a bow. They were the oddest couple and yet I never saw a pair as well matched.’ She looked through the doorway again. ‘Proinsías always hoped she’d come back, even just to visit. I told him often to go across to London, there was no law stopping him. But they had made him feel like a tramp and all you Mac Suibhnes were proud and stubborn always.’

  He stopped playing and put the fiddle down. He ignored the applause and looking right out to where the pair of us were framed in the light.

  ‘He’s stuck in that chair,’ Mrs Cunningham said. ‘He doesn’t know what to do. You’ve come this far to tell him your news and you’ve more than that to say to him. I know there’s so much he wants to tell you. Will you not talk to him now?’

  I nodded, not to her but slowly towards him. After a moment he rose. I could hear voices in the bar talking among themselves, thinking he was taking a break. He seemed very slow on his feet and careful how he walked. He put his hand on the door frame for support as he stepped on to the gravel, cradling the fiddle in the crick of his elbow. These words were not going to be without pain. He waited until I took a step towards him, then let go the door frame and grasped the arm I held out. His fingers were strong and warm and longer than any that I had ever seen. I touched them with a child’s silent curiosity, then looked up and returned his silent smile. We both went to speak at the same time, neither of us knowing what we would say.

  About the Author

  Dermot Bolger

  was born in Dublin in 1959. His often controversial novels of Irish life, Night Shift, The Woman’s Daughter, The Journey Home, Emily’s Shoes and A Second Life, have received many awards. His plays, amongst them The Lament for Arthur Cleary, In High Germany and April Bright, have been broadcast on radio and television, received many prizes, including the Samuel Beckett Award, and have been performed in Ireland, Britain, Australia, Canada, Japan, America and Europe. The author of six volumes of poetry, he also writes for the screen.

  An editor and publisher, Dermot Bolger was the founder of the Raven Arts Press in Dublin, which he ran from 1977 until 1992. He went on to set up New Island Books, of which he is the Executive Editor.

  The author is indebted to three excellent books: Sean O Boyle’s The Irish Song Tradition which provided the text of ‘The Knight on the Road’; Paddy Tunney’s The Stone Fiddle which provided the text of ‘The Rollicking Boys Around Tandragee’ (written by his uncle Michael, a shoemaker in the townland of Tunnyoran) and which also provides a far longer and more accurate account of the story of ‘Casadh an tSúgáin’ (as narrated to him by the travelling fiddle-player, Mickie Doherty), along with his own superb translation of the original song. Caoimhín MacAoidh’s Between the Jigs and the Reels: The Donegal Fiddle Tradition (also containing details of the Dohertys’ version of ‘Casadh an tSúgáin’) proved as invaluable a written source on Donegal as Mr Anthony Glavin (of Glencolmcille and Dublin) proved to be an oral one.

  The author especially wishes to thank those who provided the rooms and space within which this book was written.

  Praise

  From the reviews of Father’s Music:

  ‘Dermot Bolger’s profound chronicling of Irish life continues with his tautly written and compellingly plotted Father’s Music. A lonely young girl gets picked up in a London club by a much older man with family links to high crime in Dublin. Does this man represent a sinister threat to her well-being, or is he a kind of saviour who will help her to make sense of her own desperate situation? The novelist’s great strength lies in the fact that he manages with considerable skill to withhold the answer to that question until the closing pages of the novel.’

  Economist

  ‘This is an immensely ambitious work, whose sweeping scope … gives it an almost mythical resonance. A hugely entertaining book. Few writers can capture the pulse of city life so well.’

  EAMONN SWEENEY, Literary Review

  ‘A nailbiting thriller which reads at times like an intricate Irish reel.’

  Belfast Telegraph

  ‘This is compulsive reading from the first line … Luke
Duggan has to be one of the most complex and compelling characters created by a modern day novelist.’

  IT magazine

  By the Same Author

  Novels

  NIGHT SHIFT

  THE WOMAN’S DAUGHTER

  THE JOURNEY HOME

  EMILY’S SHOES

  A SECOND LIFE

  Plays

  THE LAMENT FOR ARTHUR CLEARY

  BLINDED BY THE LIGHT

  IN HIGH GERMANY

  THE HOLY GROUND

  ONE LAST WHITE HORSE

  A DUBLIN ROSE (ADAPTATION OF ULYSSES)

  APRIL BRIGHT

  Poetry

  THE HABIT OF FLESH

  FINGLAS LILIES

  NO WAITING AMERICA

  INTERNAL EXILES

  LEINSTER STREET GHOSTS

  Films

  THE DISAPPEARANCE OF FINBAR

  EDWARD NO HANDS

  Editor

  THE PICADOR BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY IRISH FICTION

  THE BRIGHT WAVE: AN TONN GHEAL

  Copyright

  Flamingo

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road,

  Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

  First published in Great Britain by

  Flamingo 1997

  Copyright © Dermot Bolger 1997

  Dermot Bolger asserts the moral right to be

  identified as the author of this work

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,

  characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of

  the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.