Joe Bolger’s digs. When his laughter ceased he retailed them, as he had many times done in the past. Obediently Justin and his mother laughed in turn.
‘There was a curate from Milecross,’ Mr Condon said, ‘a Father Dolan. Well, the lads in the digs had him tied in knots.’
‘You told us about Father Dolan, Ger.’
‘He was down at his tea and when he went upstairs there wasn’t a stick of furniture left in the room. They had the bed and the wardrobe carried out, and the pictures off the walls. They took the wash-stand, and the Holy Mother off of the mantelpiece. The poor man thought he’d gone insane.’
The music was different now: brassy and wild as the journey across Ireland began. While it echoed, Justin saw for a moment his favourite picture of James Joyce, in the broad-brimmed hat and the long black coat. He wondered what Mahler had been like.
‘Another time those eejits drew a sideboard across the entrance to the Gents, the day of Slip Hennessy’s wedding. There wasn’t a man in the place knew what to do with himself.’ Mr Condon threw his head back and laughed, permitting his teeth to move about in his open mouth. When he’d finished, Mrs Condon said:
‘Didn’t you say the dentist was a Dublin girl?’
‘I think she is,’
‘It’s nice she’s at Mrs Keane’s.’
He did not reply. His father said again that you’d have died laughing, and his mother rose from the table. Justin began to gather up the dishes, resolving that tomorrow he would spend the morning in the piano cubicle of the music shop. Afterwards he’d walk out to Herbert Park and lie in the sun, with a new bit of music lingering the way it always did.
On Sunday afternoon he told her about his time in West Waterford and East Cork, about the McGurk brothers and all the other drapers he had visited. He mentioned Garda Bevan and Mrs Keane and Miss Murphy. He spoke of Thomasina Durcan’s party at 21 Dunlow Road, but he didn’t go into details and he didn’t retail what had passed through his mind concerning any of these people. He’d spent four hours yesterday in the piano cubicle, he said, and he’d lain down in Herbert Park.
‘It’s nice to get the sun,’ she said, offering him a piece of the banana cake.
‘Sure, we don’t get enough of it.’
She nodded and then, to his astonishment, she spoke of his simplicity. It was that, she said, that the priest and she should have pointed out to him; it was that that was notable.
He sipped his tea, wondering if she was rambling in her elderliness. She never had done so before, she’d always been as sharp as a needle.
‘Simplicity?’ he said. ‘Are you feeling yourself?’
‘Father Finn liked to come here on a Sunday. He liked it particularly and I liked it myself. With the piano lessons on a Wednesday it was the same.’
He frowned, then nodded. He’d watched the tennis-players in Herbert Park, he said, after it had become too chilly to go on lying on the grass. It would be a long time yet, he said, before the symphony was complete; there’d be years in the piano cubicle and years lying out in the sun, letting the music run through his head. It was no good being in a hurry; you knew instinctively the pace that suited you.
‘You were like a child to us all those years, Justin.’
‘Ah, sure, it was enjoyable all round.’
He reached for another slice of cake. His teacup was empty and he wondered why she didn’t fill it. He looked at her closely and saw that she had begun to weep, something she had never done in his presence before.
‘My father was telling us last night,’ he said, ‘about a time some lads let a crate of chickens loose in the Bay Hotel, Dungarvan.’
He spoke in desperation: he wanted to stop her talking about Father Finn and about his own simplicity, how he’d been a child to them all those years. Her voice had a peculiar note in it.
‘It’s gone now,’ he said, ‘the old Bay Hotel.’
He knew she had no interest in a hotel she’d never seen nor heard of before; why should she have? Yet he went on talking about it, about the barricading of the Gents at the time of Slip Hennessy’s wedding, and the removal of the furniture from Father Dolan’s bedroom while he was having his tea. He spoke hurriedly, his words tumbling and juddering. Urgently they rushed from him, preventing her from speaking. But when he paused for breath she said:
‘We damaged you between us, Justin. We took advantage of your simplicity.’
‘Ah no, no.’
Again he spoke swiftly, endeavouring to convey through his agitation that he did not want to hear; that once she had spoken, the words could not be undone. For a long time now he had known he could play the piano in a tidy, racy way, that possibly he possessed no greater gift. It was his longing to walk away from his Ford Fiesta, from his parents’ house and from Ireland, that made him different from his father, not his modest musical aptitude. And yet his fantasy sprang from a lingering sliver of hope, from words that had once been spoken in his Aunt Roche’s sitting-room. He had clutched at the straw they had offered him and it had kept him going. He had played his part, not knowing what it was, offering them a straw also: for the first time, he realized that.
‘Father Finn couldn’t die guilty,’ she said. ‘No more than I can. He asked me to tell you the truth before he went, Justin, and I have to do that. No harm or damage was ever intended.’
Justin put down his teacup and saucer on a round, glass-topped table as familiar to him as any piece-of furniture in his parents’ house. She was right to have mentioned his simplicity: she might as easily have called him a fool. He felt ashamed of being in the room with her since she knew so much about his foolishness; she might even have guessed that he had seen himself in the broad-brimmed hat and the long black overcoat, or on an island with Gauguin’s dark-skinned girls.
‘I’d have deprived you of the piano and the gramophone if I’d sent you away.’
