Nora Webster (44 page)

At home, she sat listening to Victoria de los Angeles singing Schubert and Fauré and then to a recording of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, waiting for Catherine and Una to arrive.

She hoped that when they had finished the work they would leave; they would take Maurice’s clothes, she hoped, and not tell her what they were going to do with them. Once they had gone, she would have some hours alone, with the fire lighting and music. She would maybe find a book that had belonged to Maurice and keep it close to her. And she would wait for Conor to come in, and then go to bed soon after he did. She would make Catherine and Una tea so that they would not complain about her too much to Josie and to their husbands, but she would not, she decided, give them anything to eat. That might encourage them not to linger once they had fin
ished what they had come to do. She was sure that they were somewhere together now with much to say about her and about Josie and about having their Saturday filled up in this way.

When they came, she met them at the front door and did not invite them into the back room.

“All his things are in that wardrobe beside the window,” she said. “There’s nothing else in that wardrobe.”

They looked at her, expecting her to follow them upstairs, but instead she returned to the back room, adding more logs and briquettes to the fire and changing the violin concerto for some calmer piano music and turning the sound down low. What they had come to do was easy; it was a question only of piling everything from the wardrobe into the bags and boxes and taking them downstairs and then to the car. She had not opened the wardrobe since soon after he died, when she had put the rest of his clothes into it. Moths may well have eaten holes in the wool, but the shoes would be as they were, the laces as he had left them, and there might even be chalk from the classroom in the pockets of some of the jackets. She almost felt sorry that she was letting it all go, or that she had not done it gradually herself over time. She wished now that they would do it more quickly. She could hear their feet on the floorboards above. They seemed to be moving around too much.

When they had the bags and boxes full and in the hall and had gone back upstairs to check the wardrobe one last time, a knock came at the door. Nora was very surprised to see Laurie O’Keefe. Laurie had never come to the house before. For a second, Nora could not think what to do. Somehow, the world of Laurie would not match in any way with the world Catherine and Una inhabited; they would
think Laurie was mad. She was almost going to say to Laurie that this was a very bad time, but she was prevented by Laurie’s eagerness and friendliness. Laurie also seemed out of breath. She put her sitting in the back room as Catherine and Una came downstairs and she introduced them. She made tea while she wondered how long Laurie and her sisters might now stay.

“I don’t like calling unannounced on anyone,” Laurie said. “Do you?”

She looked at Catherine and Una and then at Nora.

“I wish Nora would get a phone,” Catherine said.

“Well, there’s that,” Laurie said. “But some people don’t like phones.”

“And others can’t afford them,” Nora said as she sat down.

“Or they prefer buying records,” Una said.

“Indeed,” Nora said.

“Well, I have good news,” Laurie said when the tea was poured, “and I wanted to let you know. I know it’s a hard day for you, Nora, so I weighed it up and thought good news would not be any harm on a day like today.”

“How did you know about today?” Nora asked.

“I hate mysteries so I’ll tell you. Your aunt told Sister Thomas and she told me, and it was she who advised me to come.”

“She’s an awful busybody,” Una said.

“That’s one way of putting it all right,” Laurie said. “Anyway, what happened is that someone died and we don’t know who it is but she left some money in her will for a recital of religious music in Wexford or Kilkenny or Carlow. Whoever it is, she must have had a lovely soul to have such a thought, as well as the money, of course. So they approached Frank Redmond and, even though I am not speaking to him, he approached me to organise the choir,
as he is too busy for that, and it occurred to me that it was all a gift from God.”

She stopped and looked at all three women as though they would understand. Nora saw that Catherine, who was the most religious of them, was watching Laurie intently.

“It is the twenty-fifth anniversary,” Laurie spoke very dramatically, “of the convent being re-opened and the church re-consecrated after the war. The Nazis took it from us and unspeakable things happened there.”

“Laurie was a Sacred Heart nun in France during the war,” Nora said.

“And we had a great reverend mother,” Laurie said. “She was from a very old family in France. It was 1947 and she said we were going to put on a concert to thank the Lord for the end of the war and to celebrate the re-opening of our church and our return to the old building. We had a marvellous choir even then, although we had lost so many men in the war, and women too. She wanted to perform Brahms’s
German Requiem
, she said, as both a thanksgiving and an expiation, and she would play the piano and she chose the best soprano and baritone to do the lead parts, and then the nuns and the people of the village would be the choir. Oh, the people protested and there were nuns too who wanted to protest, but of course we had sworn a vow of obedience. But it was hard, even for the nuns. The German language had been a nightmare for all of Europe, and it was the one thing that no one wanted to hear, let alone sing in. And, on top of that, it’s not a Catholic piece, but that was part of her dream too, to reach out to the other side. None of the men would come until Mère Marie-Thérèse went to one of them, the one she knew best. He had a beautiful voice but he had lost his two sons in the war, one of the bodies was never found, and his wife
had died and his own heart was very hard. And she asked him to come to the newly consecrated chapel and pray with her. She asked him to pray, that’s all she did. She asked him to pray.”

Laurie stopped, as though she had now said enough.

“And what did he do?” Catherine asked.

“He implored her to sing a Catholic requiem in French for the French dead, but she refused. We will sing to honour God Who is all-forgiving, that’s what she said, and we will sing in German to show that we come made in God’s likeness, and we too can forgive. She went every day to the man’s house and prayed with him. She brought two novices with her.”

“And did he agree?” Catherine asked.

“No, he never did, but enough of the others did. She went to see all of them. And then in October 1947 we performed the concert. I always believe that day was the beginning of the peace. When it was hard to forgive, we sang in German and our words went up, they went up. That is where they went.”

A log slipped and sank in the fire and began to burn brightly. No one said anything for a minute.

“And you were in France in those years?” Catherine asked.

“And now, to mark the twenty-five years, I’m going to put together a choir and we’ll rehearse the
German Requiem
in Wexford town and Frank Redmond will organise a small orchestra or two pianos and the two lead singers. And your sister Mrs. Webster is the first person I want in my choir.”

“Nora?” Catherine asked.

“Yes, she’s my best pupil.”

“Well, I’ll tell you something now,” Catherine said, “if my mother was alive she would be amazed because she was a wonderful singer and she knew Nora was too, but Nora would never sing.”

“We all change, Catherine,” Laurie said.

Catherine looked at her sceptically.

“Now, I must go,” Laurie said. “I just came over to tell you that.”

When she had gone, Catherine and Una returned with Nora to the back room.

“Is she for real?” Catherine asked.

“Oh, I’ve heard about her, and she is for real,” Una said. “She’s very well thought of.”

“She has been a very good friend,” Nora said.

“And are you really going to sing in a choir?” Catherine asked.

“I’ll do my best,” Nora said.

They carried all the boxes to the car while Nora stood in the hallway keeping the door open for them. When everything was done, Una went upstairs one more time and came down with a small wooden box which was locked.

“This was at the bottom of the wardrobe,” she said. She shook it but there was no sound.

Nora shuddered. She knew what it was.

“I don’t have the key anymore,” she said. “Can one of you help me to open it?”

“It needs to be prised open, but that will ruin the box,” Catherine said.

“That’s fine,” Nora said.

Catherine tried using a metal tool she found in the kitchen, but it did not work.

“I need it opened,” Nora said.

“Well, I can’t do it.”

“Una,” Nora said, “would you take it next door to Tom O’Connor? He has every tool under the sun.”

When Una had gone, Catherine went to the bathroom. Nora
could see that she was upset by having to handle Maurice’s clothes and she understood that her sister did not want to be alone with her. Catherine did not come downstairs again until Una had returned.

“He found it hard enough to open,” she said. “He had to split the wood.”

Nora put it on the table beside her and went back to the hall where her sisters were.

“Will you be all right now on your own?” Catherine asked.

“Conor will be back soon,” she said.

As they both found their coats, she waited for them.

“I could never have done that myself,” she said.

“If we’d known about it, we would have done it before,” Una said.

She stood at the door then and watched them go, watched Catherine carefully reversing the car, and all of Maurice’s clothes, each item bought without any knowledge of what would happen to him, being taken somewhere to be thrown out, or given away. She closed the front door and went into the back room again and emptied the contents of the wooden box.

All of Maurice’s letters to her in the years before they married were there. She had kept them in the box, locked away. She remembered how shy his tone was when he wrote to her. The letters were often short, just suggesting a place in the town where they might meet, and a time.

She did not have to look at them; she knew them. He often talked about himself as though he were someone else, saying that he had met a man who had told him how fond he was of a certain girl, or how he had a friend who walked home from seeing his girlfriend and all he thought was how much he would like to see her again soon, or how he would like to go to Ballyconnigar with her and
walk along the cliffs at Cush and maybe have a swim with her if the weather was good.

She knelt down and slowly fed the letters into the fire. She thought about how much had happened since they were written and how much they belonged to a time that was over now and would not come back. It was the way things were; it was the way things had worked out.

When Conor came home he noticed the half-burned wooden box in the grate among the logs and the coal and the briquettes. He asked what it was.

“Just something I was clearing out,” she said.

He looked at it suspiciously.