‘There’s nothing I’d like better than to stay the night and play.’
‘That’s great. You can stay, then?’
‘No, no. It’s unfortunately impossible. I have to be at the Seapoint Hotel in Galway at six.’
‘You could use the barrack phone to cancel.’
‘No. Every time I get a case in the west I stay at the Seapoint. Eileen O’Neill is manageress there, and she is the best accompanist I know. She could have been a concert pianist. She has already taken the evening off. I’ll have a bath when I get to the hotel and change into the evening suit you saw hanging in the car. We’ll have dinner together and afterwards we’ll play. We’ve been studying Kreisler and I can hardly wait to see how some of those lovely melodies play. Some day you must meet her. This evening she’ll probably wear the long dress of burgundy velvet with the satin bow in her hair as she plays.’
‘I’m sorry I tried to force you. If I’d known I wouldn’t have tried to get the CWA function between you and that attraction.’
‘Otherwise I’d be delighted. I consider it an honour to be invited. But I suppose,’ he said, glancing at his watch, ‘that if I intend to be there by six I better be making the road shorter.’ He wrapped the violin in its frayed black silk and carefully returned it to its case. ‘What’s nice, though, is it’s not really goodbye,’ he said as they shook hands. ‘We’ll meet on the court day. And I can’t thank you enough for those drawings you made of the accident.’
‘They’re for nothing, and a safe journey.’
At the door the Surveyor paused, intending to say goodbye to Biddy, but she was so intent on adjusting the needles of the machine to turn the heel of the sock that he decided not to bring his leaving to her notice.
*
The lighting of the oil-lamp dispelled the increasing blood-red gloom of the globe before the Sacred Heart after he had gone, as dusk deepened into night and Biddy placed suit and white shirt and tie on the chair before the fire of flickering ash.
‘Will you be wanting anything to ate before the Function?’ she shouted.
‘No, Biddy.’ He shook his head.
‘Well, your clothes will be aired for you there and then when you want to change out of your uniform.’
‘Thanks, Biddy,’ he said.
‘I’ll leave your shoes polished by the table. I’ll not wait up for you as no doubt it’ll be the small hours. I’ll put your hot waterjar in the bed.’
‘Thanks, thanks, Biddy.’
Quietly he rose and replaced the cheap fiddle in the case, fingering the broken string before adding the slack bow. He shut the case and replaced it between the tea-box and the red globe of the Sacred Heart lamp on the mantel.
The smell of porter and whiskey, blue swirls of cigarette smoke, pounding of boots on the floorboards as they danced, the sudden yahoos as they swung, and the smile of the girl with the cloth fuchsia bells in her hair as he played, petrified for ever in his memory even as his stumblings home over the cold waking fields.
Tonight in Galway, in a long dress of burgundy velvet, satin in her hair, the delicate white hands of Eileen O’Neill would flicker on the white keyboard as the Surveyor played, while Mrs Kilboy would say to him at the CWA, ‘Something will have to be done about Jackson’s thieving ass, Sergeant, it’ll take the law to bring him to his senses, nothing less, and those thistles of his will be blowing again over the townland this year with him dead drunk in the pub, and is Biddy’s hens laying at all this weather, mine have gone on unholy strike, and I hear you were measuring the road today, you and a young whipper-snapper from Dublin, not even the guards can do anything unknownst in this place, and everybody’s agog as to how the case will go, the poor woman’s nerves I hear are in an awful condition, having to pass that wooden cross twice a day, and what was the use putting it up if it disturbs her so, it won’t bring him back to life, poor Michael, God rest him, going to Carrick for his haircut. The living have remindedness enough of their last ends and testaments without putting up wooden crosses on the highways and byways, and did you ever see such a winter, torrents of rain and expectedness of snow, it’ll be a long haul indeed to the summer.’
It would be a long haul to summer and the old tarred boat anchored to the Ford radiator in the mouth of the Gut, the line cutting the water as hooked roach after hooked roach made a last surge towards the freedom of the open lake.
When he had knotted his tie in the mirror his eye fell on the last of the whiskey and he filled the glass to the brim. He shivered as it went down but the melancholy passed from his face. He turned the chair round so that he could sit with his arms on its back, facing Biddy. ‘Do you know what I’ll say to Mrs Kilboy?’ he addressed the unheeding Biddy who was intent on the turning of the heel. ‘It’ll be a long haul indeed until the summer, Mrs Kilboy,’ I’ll say. ‘And now, Mrs Kilboy, let us talk of higher things. Some of the palaces of the royal popes in Avignon are wonderful, wonderful, Mrs Kilboy, in the sun; and wonderful the cafés and wonderful, Mrs Kilboy, the music. Did you ever hear of a gentleman called Paganini, Mrs Kilboy? A man of extraordinary interest is Paganini. Through his genius he climbed out of the filth of his local Genoa to wealth and fame. So that when he came to London, Mrs Kilboy, the crowds there crowded to touch him as they once trampled on one another to get their hands on Christ; but he stuck to his guns to the very end, improvising marvellously, Mrs Kilboy, during his last hours on his Guarnerius. I wonder what Guarnerius myself and yourself, Mrs Kilboy, or Biddy down in the barracks will be improvising on during our last hours before they hearse us across Cootehall bridge to old Ardcarne? Well, at least we’ll be buried in consecrated ground — for I doubt if old Father Glynn will have much doubts as to our orthodoxy — which is more than they did for poor old Paganini, for I was informed today, Mrs Kilboy, that they left him in some field for five years, just like an old dead cow, before they relented and allowed him to be buried in a churchyard on his own land.’
The Sergeant tired of the mockery and rose from the chair, but he finished the dregs of the glass with a flourish, and placed it solidly down on the table. He put on his hat and overcoat. ‘We better be making a start, Biddy, if we’re ever going to put Mrs Kilboy on the straight and narrow.’
Biddy did not look up. She had turned the heel and would not have to adjust the needles again till she had to start narrowing the sock close to the toe. Her body swayed happily on the chair as she turned and turned the handle, for she knew it would be all plain sailing till she got close to the toe.
Gold Watch
It was in Grafton Street we met, aimlessly strolling in one of the lazy lovely Saturday mornings in spring, the week of work over, the weekend still as fresh as the bunch of anemones that seemed the only purchase in her cane shopping basket.
‘What a lovely surprise,’ I said.
I was about to take her hand when a man with an armload of parcels parted us as she was shifting the basket to her other hand, and we withdrew out of the pushing crowds into the comparative quiet of Harry Street. We had not met since we had graduated in the same law class from University College five years before. I had heard she’d become engaged to the medical student she used to knock around with and had gone into private practice down the country, perhaps waiting for him to graduate.
‘Are you up for the weekend or on holiday or what?’ I asked.
‘No. I work here now.’ She named a big firm that specialized in tax law. ‘I felt I needed a change.’