‘Would you wear it?’ her husband demanded.
‘I would in a shade of peach. Does it come in a peach?’
Justin said it did, and in a shade of coffee.
‘Order it in the peach,’ advised Mrs McGurk. ‘Black’s not the tone for stuff the like of that.’
‘Too ritzy,’ agreed her husband. ‘I’m just after saying it.’
‘How’s your father?’ Mrs McGurk asked Justin.
‘He’s grand.’
‘Has he still got the hilarious way with him?’
Justin replied that he supposed his father had. One after the other, the McGurk brothers said they’d never laughed at any traveller’s jokes the way they’d laughed at Justin’s father’s. Justin could feel them thinking that he himself wasn’t half the man his father was, that he didn’t enter into the spirit of things, that all he seemed concerned with was writing down orders in his book. ‘I’ll tell you a thing about Thomasina Durcan,’ Fahy had said. ‘She has a notion of making a man of you. There’s women like that around.’
He left the McGurks’ shop and drove out to the estuary. He walked by the green, seaweedy water, wondering if Mahler would have composed a note if he’d been incarcerated in a bungalow on the Cappoquin road, listening every night to talk about cavity linings.
‘Now, there never was,’ she remembered Father Finn saying when Justin was thirteen, ‘a great man of music that came out of Ireland.’
He made the pronouncement while eating a slice of buttered toast she had prepared for him. She had loved doing that, toasting the bread and spreading the butter on it, arranging blackcurrant jam in a glass dish. Blackcurrant was Father Finn’s favourite, raspberry was Justin’s.
‘We had singers and harpists. We had all classes of instrumentalists. We have a proud tradition, but we never yet had a composer that could rank with the Germans. To this day, Justin, we have to turn to Germany for musical composition.’
Pouring tea for both of them, she mentioned Italy and the priest agreed that the Italians had made a contribution. He told the story of Puccini’s life. He referred to the burden of a musical gift and to the reward it brought in time. ‘A precious freedom of the spirit. A most glorious thing.’
She had delighted in listening to him. She was never happier than on those Sunday afternoons when he and Justin sat together by her fire or on the Wednesdays when she made a cup of tea after the piano lesson. No admission of affection had ever been made by the priest or by herself; no admission could be. Until Justin arrived in her life there had been no way of creating a relationship that went beyond that of priest and parishioner.
‘There’s a little thing Justin composed for me,’ Father Finn said one Sunday, ‘A short little piece, but I’d say it displayed promise.’
‘We had a complaint, Mr Condon,’ Miss Murphy reported in Castlemartyr.
‘We had this slip brought back to us after it fell into holes.’
Only Thomasina Durcan and Miss Murphy called him Mr Condon, Thomasina Durcan because any other mode of address might have sounded forward, Miss Murphy for reasons he had never been able to fathom.
‘Would it be the way it was washed, Miss Murphy? Was it put into a machine?’
‘Oh, it would have been washed all right, Mr Condon. Naturally you’d expect it to have been washed.’
‘No, I mean in a machine though. Or maybe it got boiled in error. It’s all tinged with blue, look. Some blue garment has run into it.’
‘It would save an argument with the customer, Mr Condon, if you replaced it. It’s good for business when something gets replaced.’
Justin made a note in his order book and said that Miss Murphy would have a replacement within a fortnight. He had a new line he wanted to show her, he added, and displayed for her the sample he had displayed for fifty- seven other drapers, including the McGurks, since he’d left Dublin. Miss Murphy picked it up gingerly.
‘It comes in a peach, Miss Murphy, and a coffee. The gusset is guaranteed sturdy. Man-made fibre.’
‘I never saw that type of cut before.’
‘It’s the fashion in Dublin.’
Miss Murphy shook her head. She folded the piece of clothing in a professional manner and Justin returned it to the suitcase in which he carried his samples. Miss Murphy ordered a supply of summer vests and made arrangements to replenish her stock of first-communion stockings. ‘Is your father fit?’ she asked as Justin closed his order book, and for the first time since he had known Miss Murphy it idly occurred to him that she and his father might have had the same relationship as Fahy claimed to have with Mrs Keane. Miss Murphy was elderly now, a woman with a face like an arrow, with spectacles on a chain. Once she might have been pretty; it was odd that she had never married.
‘He’s grand,’ Justin said.
‘Remember me to him, will you?’
Her tone was different from Garda Bevan’s when he mentioned Justin’s father, different from the McGurks’ and all the other drapers’. Had there always been a hint of bitterness in Miss Murphy’s voice when she sent this message to his father? He looked up from the suitcase he was fastening and found her eyes upon him. They held his own until he felt embarrassed. He had noticed before that there was a similarity between his father and Fahy. They were both small men, rotund, bald-headed, pink-skinned, given to banter. He snapped the clasps on his suitcase and Miss Murphy turned away to attend another customer.
She made a cake, the banana cake he liked. Usually she wrapped in tinfoil what remained of it after their Sunday tea and he took it away to eat during the week, on his travels. She enjoyed thinking of him eating the cake, sitting out in the sunshine as he liked to do, in some quiet place.
Slowly she chopped up two bananas. He had belonged to them as he never had to his parents. On Sunday afternoons and again on Wednesdays they had been a family. She left the kitchen and in her sitting-room she delicately placed the needle on the same worn record of John Count McCormack singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’.
