The fingers, in a hurry, would layer a gum with cotton-wool; sharply, they’d jab a hypodermic needle home. She’d talk to you when your mouth was full of implements; she’d tell you to have a wash-out with the pink stuff, and say she was nearly finished. Fahy said she had an eye on a bungalow out on the Cappoquin road. ‘Wouldn’t the two of you be snug in a bed there?’ Fahy had said.
‘I have a few friends coming in, Saturday fortnight. Would you care to join us, Mr Condon?’
He felt a tightening in the atmosphere. Both Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane were aware of the implication of what had just been said. An attempt was being made to develop the casual acquaintanceship that existed between Justin and the dentist in Mrs Keane’s house; the relationship was to be extended to Dublin. Fahy would be told; so would Father Grennan and Father Reedy. ‘Sure, if some girl like Thomasina Durcan doesn’t do something about it that fellow’ll be a bachelor at seventy’: he could hear Mrs Keane saying that, or his father or his mother. Fahy would put it differently.
‘Saturday fortnight?’
‘About a quarter to eight. You know Clontarf? 21 Dunlow Road. Just a few friends and a bit of dancing.’
‘I don’t dance at all.’
‘I’m not much at it myself.’
Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane were pleased. They had enjoyed this flutter of excitement. They would think about the party at 21 Dunlow Road, and discuss it. They would be unpleasantly agog after it had taken place.
‘21 Dunlow Road,’ Thomasina Durcan repeated, writing it clearly on a piece of paper she’d found in her handbag.
‘You might ask him that,’ requested Garda Bevan. ‘Does he consider inflation beat? If there’s one man in Ireland would know, it’s your father.’
Justin nodded again, finishing the fried food on his plate. He promised to discuss the matter with his father and to obtain his father’s opinion. He wouldn’t turn up at 21 Dunlow Road, he said to himself. When he next spent a night at Mrs Keane’s he’d say he’d lost the address.
When he was ten she had asked him if he’d like to learn how to play the piano and when he’d said yes she’d arranged for Father Finn to give him lessons in her sitting-room. She had paid for them and when she’d asked him not to tell his family he had eagerly agreed because apparently his family would have laughed at the idea of a boy playing a musical instrument. ‘It’s a great thing for him,’ Father Finn later reported. ‘And hasn’t he a rare aptitude for it?’ In the circumstances Father Finn wasn’t averse to keeping the knowledge of the lessons from the Condons, and after a while he refused to accept any fee for the tuition. ‘Well, that’s one thing at any rate he’s not useless at,’ he remarked, later still.
God had arranged it, she often thought during those years that went by. God had arranged for the child to come by her gate that first afternoon, and for the music she played him on her gramophone to delight him. God had arranged a way for the three of them, Father Finn and herself and Justin. When the Condons had eventually discovered about the piano lessons they’d been bewildered but not cross, mainly because it was Father Finn who was giving them. And as well as for the lessons every Wednesday, Father Finn began to come round on Sunday afternoons, when they all three listened to John Count McCormack or the operatic arias. It was a natural thing for the priest to do since everyone knew now of the musical aptitude of Justin Condon and how it needed to be fostered and encouraged.
The sun warmed his exposed chest; beside him his shirt was laid out on the grass; his eyes were closed. Faintly the sound of the river by which he lay penetrated his sleep.
He dreamed of the queen who had inspired the choral symphony he was attempting to write. In his dream she led wolfhounds on leather thongs through her garden and listened to the spirits of the otherworld. From among them one took visible form: a young girl rose from the mists and the flowers and warned the queen of her folly.
Two flies tormented Justin’s plump chin. Their tickling silenced music that had the resonance of music composed by Mahler. He smacked at his face but already the flies had gone.
The symphony told of a journey from the royal palaces in the West to the territory of Cuchulainn in Ulster. The queen’s great army, fattened with the soldiers of her allies, with the long line of camp followers, with druids and jesters, storytellers, soothsayers, military men and servitors, travelled into heroic battle, while the mystical hero awaited their arrival. Sometimes, on Saturdays, Justin hired a piano cubicle in a music shop and spent the morning there, advancing his composition. Shortly after the death of Father Finn the piano in his Aunt Roche’s sitting-room had gone hopelessly out of tune and apparently couldn’t be much improved.
Justin reached for his shirt. When he had buttoned it he neatly tightened the knot of his tie. Since breakfast- time in Mrs Keane’s dining-room he had visited sixteen drapers in seven different towns. He had O’Leary’s and Callaghan’s to call on yet, and then that would be that for the day. He drove on and did the business he had to do. He spent the night in Dungarvan in a room above a fish-and-chip cafe. The smell of the frying wafted up and through his open window. From his bed he listened to people talking about the film they had been to, and to a drunk man who proclaimed that he intended to stand no nonsense from his wife. He fell asleep at half past eleven and dreamed of the journey in his symphony, of the queen in her magnificence, and the chorus of otherworld spirits.
‘Wait now till I get the brother,’ said Mr McGurk, the joint proprietor of McGurk’s Arcade, the following day. He left the shop and called up through the house. In a moment the older Mr McGurk appeared.
Justin’s samples were laid out on the counter. Some were familiar to the McGurks and presented no problem when it came to deciding the size of the order. Others, lines that were new this spring, had to be considered with care.
‘Would a woman of this area dress herself in that?’ inquired the younger Mr McGurk, poking at a black garment trimmed flimsily with lace of the same colour.
‘I don’t know would she.’
‘The gusset is strong,’ Justin pointed out, since it said so on his sales sheet. ‘A man-made fibre.’
‘It isn’t the gusset would sell that article,’ replied the older Mr McGurk. ‘What I’m thinking is, is it too ritzy for this area?’
‘Will we call down Elaine?’ suggested his brother.
‘I’d say we would.’
Elaine, wife of the older Mr McGurk, was summoned from the house. She picked up the garment in question and meticulously examined it.
