‘Cheddar and ham,’ she shouted. ‘What if his ham is crawling and the price he charges? Not the first time for him to try to pass off crawling ham on me.’
‘Go,’ the Sergeant said and forced her into a coat he took from the scullery wall.
‘Will I pay cash or get it put on the Book?’ she shouted.
‘The Book.’ He handed her a small notebook covered with old policeman’s cloth from where it hung from a nail in the wall and rushed her out the door. After he bolted it he whispered, ‘Jesus, this night,’ and drew his sleeve slowly across his forehead, feeling the braided coarseness of the three silver stripes of his rank, before facing back into the kitchen.
‘If you live like pigs you can’t expect sweet airs and musics all the time,’ the Sergeant said in shame and exasperation as he swallowed his glass of whiskey. The Surveyor hadn’t touched his whiskey. He was tuning the strings.
‘It’d never do if we were all on the side of the angels,’ the Surveyor answered absently.
The Sergeant filled his glass again. He drew up his chair to the fire and threw on a length of ash. The whiskey began to thaw away his unease. He raised his glass to the Surveyor and smiled. He was waiting.
‘The Italian street-musician was playing Paganini that first evening in Avignon.’
The bow flowed on the strings, the dark honey of the wood glowing in the early evening. Wind gently rustled the leaves of a Genoan olive grove. Metallic moonlight shone on their glistening silver as a man and a woman walked in the moonlight in a vague sweet ecstasy of feeling.
‘Wonderful. I’ve never heard better, not even on the radio.’ The Sergeant downed another glass of whiskey as the playing ended.
‘Isn’t the tone something?’
‘It’s priceless, that fiddle. You got a bargain.’
‘I’m sure the experts are not far out when they say it most probably is a genuine Stradivarius.’
‘The experts know. You go to the priest for religion. You go to the doctor for medicine. Who are we to trust if we can’t trust the experts? On the broad of our backs we’d be without the experts.’
A man of extraordinary interest was Paganini, the Surveyor started to explain. He was born in Genoa in 1782, of a poor family, but such was his genius and dedication that he brought the world to his feet. In London, the mob used to try to touch him, in the hope that some of his magic might pass over to them, in the way they once tried to touch the hem of Christ’s garments — like pop stars in our own day — but nothing could divert him from his calling. Even the last hours given to him in life were spent in marvellous improvisations on his Guarnerius. The Church proved to be the one fly in the ointment. She had doubts as to his orthodoxy, and refused for five years to have him buried in consecrated grounds. In the end, of course, in her usual politic fashion, she relented, and he was laid to rest in a village graveyard on his own land.
‘And the Church bumming herself up all the time as helping musicians and painters out,’ the Sergeant declaimed fervently when the Surveyor finished. ‘It’d make a jackass bray backwards. But why don’t you drink up? You have more than earned it.’
Apologetically, the Surveyor covered his glass with his palm. ‘It’s the driving, the new laws.’
‘Well, I’m the law in these parts, for what it’s worth. And there’s the CWA party tonight. You could play there. It’d give the ignoramuses there a glimpse past their noses to hear playing the like of the Paganini. You could stay the night here in the barracks, there’s tons of room.’
‘No. I have to drive to Galway tonight.’
‘Well, what’s one man’s poison. I was never a one for the forcing but that’s no reason to stint my own hand,’ he said as he filled his own glass again.
‘It’s your turn now to play, those lovely jigs and reels,’ the Surveyor demanded.
‘Not since the dances have I played, not for ages.’
‘Can’t you take the case down anyhow? You never know where the inspiration may come from.’ The Surveyor smiled.
The case lay on the long mantel above the fire between a tea-box and a little red lamp that burned before a picture of the Sacred Heart in a crib bordered by fretted shamrocks. Clumsily he got it down. It was thick with dust. His hands left tracks on the case, and the ashes or dust scattered in a cloud when he started to beat it clean with an old towel. The Surveyor coughed in the dust and the Sergeant had to go to the scullery to wash his hands in the iron basin before the mirror. When he came in and finally got the case open, one string of the plain little fiddle was broken. The bow had obviously not been used for years, it was so slack.
‘It’s no Strad, but it would play after proper repairing. It would be a fine pastime for you on the long nights.’
‘Play to old deaf Biddy, is it now. It had a sweet note too in its day though, and I had no need of the old whiskey to hurry the time then, sitting on the planks between the barrels, fiddling away as they danced past while they shouted up to me, “Rise it, Jimmy. More power to your elbow, Jimmy Boy!”’
Going back with the fellows over the fields in the morning as the cold day came up, he remembered; and life was as full of promise as the smile the girl with cloth fuchsia bells in her dark hair threw him as she danced past where he played on the planks. The Surveyor looked from the whiskey bottle to the regret on the sunken face with careless superiority and asked, ‘Would you like me to play one of the old tunes?’
‘I’d like that very much.’
‘Is there anything in particular?’
‘“The Kerry Dances.”’
‘Can you hum the opening part?’
The Sergeant hummed it and confidently the Surveyor took up the playing. ‘That’s it, that’s it.’ The Sergeant excitedly beat time with his boots till a loud hammering came on the door.
‘Oh my God, it’s that woman again.’ He pushed his hand through his grey hair, having to go to the scullery door to draw back the bolt.
She was in such a state when she came in that she did not seem to notice the Surveyor playing. ‘Wet to the skin I got. And I tauld him his ham was crawling, or if it wasn’t crawling it was next door to crawling if I have a nose. Eight-and-six he wanted,’ she shouted.
The Surveyor broke off his playing. He watched her shake the rain from her coat and scarf.
‘Yous will have to do with bacon and eggs, and that’s the end all,’ she shouted.
‘A simple cup of tea would do me very well,’ the Surveyor said.
‘But you’ve had nothing for the inner man,’ the Sergeant said as he filled his own glass from the whiskey bottle.
‘I’ll have to have a proper dinner this evening and I’d rather not eat now.’
‘You can’t be even tempted to have a drop of this stuff itself?’ He offered the bottle.
‘No thanks, I’ll just finish this. Is there anything else you’d like me to play for you?’
‘“Danny Boy”, play “Danny Boy”, then.’
‘Is it bacon and eggs, then?’ Biddy shouted.
‘Tea and brown bread,’ the Sergeant groaned as he framed silently the speech on his lips.
‘Tea and brown bread,’ she repeated, and he nodded as he gulped the whiskey.
The Surveyor quietly moved into ‘Danny Boy’, but as the rattle of a kettle entered ‘When Summer’s in the Meadows’, his irritated face above the lovely old violin was plainly fighting to hold its concentration as he played.
‘Maybe we might be able to persuade you to stay the night yet after all?’ the Sergeant pressed with the fading strength of the whiskey while they drank sobering tea at the table with the knitting-machine clamped to its end. ‘It’d be a great charity. Never before would they have heard playing the like of what you can play. It might occupy their minds with something other than pigs and hens and bullocks for once. Biddy could make up the spare room for you in no time and you could have a good drink without worry of the driving.’