The Music Lesson (14 page)

“Is a plaster something you do with bandages?” I repeated. I turned around then, shutting off the water. She wasn’t there. The floorboards creaked overhead. Then I could hear her steps on the stairs, coming back down.

“You should always keep plasters about, Patricia,” Mary admonished as she stepped carefully off the steepish bottom step onto the uneven concrete floor. “Look, I’ve taken an old pillow slip that shan’t be missed out of the hall cupboard. We can use strips of this to cover the burn until you get some plasters at O’Mahoney’s. And some good ointment to keep away infection. That’s important. Och, it’s swelling a bit. Does it pain you, love?”

My heart began to pound. I tried to stammer out a reply. My hand really did hurt, but I was paralyzed by my fear that she had seen the painting. I tried to envision her route upstairs. If she had turned to the right and gone directly to the cupboard outside my bedroom where she found the pillowcase—pillow slip—then she might have seen nothing. But Mary is a snoop, and, like most of the village, she’s curious about Denis’s cottage since the improvements. And it’s very small; only a few steps in any direction and you’ve seen it all.

“Patricia, you’re looking pale. You should sit down. Do you feel faint?” she asked me sharply. We sat down together on the two hard wooden seats (Nora calls them “fool’s chairs”) by the cold fireplace in the sitting room. My fires keep going out. I don’t have the hang of banking the coals at night, though Nora has tried to show me how twice. A downdraft stirred the ashes.

“I think I’m okay, Mary.” I tried to sound like my normal self, whatever that sounds like. My words sounded false, like a lie. “Really. I’m fine.” She was tearing the pillow slip into long, limp white strips in her lap, and when she was done, she wrapped my hand carefully until it was neatly bound. She tied the ends of the bandage with a neat flourish, murmuring, “Matthew Walker should hold it for a while.”

“Who?”

“Och, Matthew Walker. It’s the name of a knot. One of George’s favorite sailing knots. ’Tis what you call it
when you make the knot from the strands at the end of the one rope, love. I used it a great deal for bandages during the war. I drove an ambulance, you know. Had to be handy with the bandages.”

This was momentarily surprising, though, on reflection, I guess it’s not particularly amazing, given her age. Ireland, was, of course, neutral (it would have been impossible to side with the Brits), but Mary wasn’t living here then.

“Were you at the front?”

“Och, no, I didn’t go to war at all; the war came to me. I was in London during the Blitz. Praise God those days are past. Though it’s still possible to get blown to bits if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, I suppose. I’d rather take a coach tour to one of those Arab countries where they’re always squabbling amongst themselves than set foot in Harrods, I’ll tell you that.” She gave a little shake to her head, like a dog distracted by a fly. She looked troubled. I still didn’t know where I was with her, what she had seen during her upstairs tour.

“Now, love, how’s the hand?”

“Well, I’m sure Matthew Walker will see me into the village later, and I will get some antibiotic ointment and some plasters. It hurts. But I’m okay, really. No big deal.”

Mary started to say something and stopped. I realized that I didn’t want to hear her speak about the painting—I was afraid to hear her say anything about it—and I
rushed to speak instead, to keep her from saying she had seen it.

“Thank you, Mary. Really. I appreciate your binding up my wound and all. I feel ridiculous, burning the toast. And now your tea’s cold.” I was flustered, hoping still that I had been lucky, that this was merely a close call.

“ ‘Band-Aids’? Isn’t that what you Yanks call them?” Mary gave it an absurd attempt at an American inflection. We laughed together, and Mary went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for a fresh pot of tea, insisting that I stay in my chair by the dead fire. It made me think of Mickey, and all the little moments between us in those New York days when our conversations had constantly smacked into hair slides or barrettes, face flannels or washcloths, kerbs or sidewalks, strands or beaches, queues or lines.

When one night, in bed, Mickey had reached up and lifted the hair out of my eyes and told me I ought to cut my hair in a fringe, I had laughed, envisioning something on a Victorian lamp shade. But a moment later, “bangs” had made him laugh, as he said, “like a drain,” until he was out of breath, and I couldn’t really defend the logic of such a term.

Thinking of Mickey made me miss him, but then I was fearful again. He would be angry if she had glimpsed the painting. I don’t think he has ever been angry at me. I don’t know what he would do. What would he do? What had she seen?

“It’s a lovely little thing you’ve got up there, Patricia,” Mary said quietly, standing in the doorway to the sitting room, wiping out a tea mug with the singed dish towel. She spoke so softly, it almost registered as a thought inside my head rather than spoken words. “You know, I was presented at court when I was eighteen,” she continued in a low voice, as if she was telling me a soothing bedtime story. “My uncle, my mother’s brother, he was Samuel Swift, chancellor of the Exchequer. You’ve never heard of him, I’m sure. I’ll never forget that day. The finery everywhere. The uniforms on the guards. It was grand. The tea in the tiniest, thinnest cups you can imagine, like flower petals. The paintings on the walls.”

I stared at her. She stared back. She looked … disappointed. I didn’t know what to say. I can’t imagine who she thought I was right then, what she thought I was thinking. What was I thinking? That I had ruined something important. That my carelessness had put everything at risk.

I started to stammer out some reply, some reasonable account, an impossible explanation that would undo her impression and shape it another way, and Mary interrupted me, looking down at her feet, avoiding my eyes.

“Don’t,” she said sharply. “You owe me no explanations. ’Tis none of my business what you’ve got up in that room or how it got there. If I’ve learned anything at all, living in this corner of this country all these years, it’s to
keep my mouth shut. Tell me nothing and I’ll know nothing.”

She went back into the kitchen and I could hear the sounds of her tea making, and then she returned with a brimming mug that she gently put into my right hand.

“I’ve given you just a drop of milk. Do drink it while it’s hot, Patricia; it’ll calm you.” She wouldn’t look at me; she was speaking with her gaze averted again. “I hope you’ll see to that burn. Will you, love? Let me know if you need anything. I’ll be on my way, now, if you don’t mind. No, no, don’t get up.”

She got her coat and let herself out the door.

I went for a walk. I didn’t know what else to do, and I really did need those plasters, or something for my burn, so I wrapped up the painting and put it away in the suitcase inside the cupboard and locked everything up carefully, and then I walked down into the village. The sunlight was pale, lemony, too bright for the day, somehow. I met Nora with some of her cows on the road, and I put my hand into my pocket so as to avoid a conversation about it.

“One of those false spring days,” she warned, wacking the muddy back end of a cow with a stick for no apparent reason. “Pay it no mind. There’ll be a gale before the end of the week. And we’ve got the AI man scheduled for Friday.”

I didn’t know who the AI man was, and she explained that it was an artificial-insemination service for her cows.

“Isn’t calving in the spring?” My hand throbbed. I was sorry I had asked a question and now had to listen to the answer.

“That’s nature’s way, but not the AI way—Hugh O’Keeffe’s got new twin calves just born Sunday week. You can calve all the year round now. ’Tis more efficient to space them out. Some here, some there, instead of all at once. No mucking around with a bull. It’s all modern. If ’twas up to the women, half the country would have their kiddies the same way, no more mucking around.”

On the walk back, with a tube of antibiotic ointment possibly intended for livestock and a packet of plasters, I tried to sort my thoughts. I had a headache. I wished I had bought aspirin. What did I feel? I didn’t know. It’s so hard for me to know what I feel under ordinary circumstances, and I was just flooded with fear, and guilt. How could I have been so careless?

Mr. O’Mahoney in the shop had been curious about my hand and about my purchases, but he hadn’t asked directly, and I had deflected all of his usual opening gambits with shrugs and distracted monosyllabic replies. Pete calls that “taking the conversational ball and putting it in your pocket.”

I was unusually fatigued by the long walk down and back. I had a profound desire to crawl back into bed and take a nap. Daylight was almost at an end, by now clouds had massed together into a leaden sky, imperceptibly, and I was cold. There was a chilly breeze that hadn’t been anywhere about when I left the cottage, or I would have worn a heavier jacket over my sweater. Everything was gray. It was a relief when I was in sight of the cottage once again.

I had trouble with the key at the door—the lock seemed wrong—and as I tried to turn the key again, the knob turned and the door opened from the inside.

Someone was there.

I was terrified.

Then I heard Mickey’s laugh.

When he put his arms around me, I started to cry. I was so relieved that he was there, and at the same time I suddenly felt how alone I had been up until that moment.

“So, how’re ye keeping?” Mickey asked mockingly, holding me at arm’s length for a moment, looking me up and down. “You’ve almost gone native,” he said, taking in my not particularly clean hair and my mud-caked boots and the various wool- and flannel-covered parts in-between.

We held each other for a long time without speaking,
just standing there, totally still. It was hard to believe he was here—paradoxically, he seemed too large, the wrong scale, out of place here in the front room of the cottage, just a few miles from his own village. He appeared tired, worn-out. Older. I touched his face and he took my hand in his and gazed at me intently.
So this is what it is to be known
.

“The roasty chicken was really brilliant. I finished it. Hope you don’t mind,” Mickey muttered into my hair a moment later, hugging me again. “I hadn’t eaten a proper meal in a couple of days. I haven’t slept very much, either.”

“Oh, Mix, I’ll cook proper meals for you. Where have you been? What have you been doing? What’s going on?”

Silence.

“Oh shit, Mickey,” I said crossly, pushing myself out of his embrace. We were still out of sync after the separation, not quite connecting. “Fine, don’t tell me where you’ve been. Don’t tell me what’s going on. Obviously, I can’t be trusted.”

“Patricia.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been the last three nights in a filthy shed about four miles from here, and I haven’t been particularly comfortable, and I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

I hugged him again, feeling guilty for my relative comforts and privileges—and lack of responsibilities—and for putting him on the spot.

“But please don’t pressure me, Patricia. We’re both a little tense.”

“Paddy used to say he was as jumpy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs when he was out of sorts.”

Mickey snorted and pulled me close to him. Sparring with him this way, seeing him so unexpectedly, I suddenly wanted him very badly. We kissed, briefly, then again, more seriously, searchingly. “I missed that warm cunny of yours,” he whispered, melting me. I slid my hands up inside his shirt and then began to rummage in his pants. Mickey’s hands ranged over my shirts and sweaters and leggings and jeans with increasing urgency until he broke away from our kissing to exclaim, “Good Christ, Patricia, I can’t find you at all under your horse blankets.”

We went up to bed then, unbuttoning as we climbed the stairs.

I’ve woken after the deepest of sleeps. It’s night, and the steady drum of rain might be what woke me. And I was hungry. My bare shoulders were cold, too. I covered Mickey, who seemed just now to be sleeping twenty thousand leagues under the sea, that near-coma sleep of the exhausted. I’m downstairs at the table, drinking tea and eating a boiled egg and most of the scones Mary
brought—I never did have supper—and trying to think clearly.

I don’t know what sort of future I really see with Mickey. I don’t know what we have. It’s a powerful connection, but it might not have a place in the real world. I know that. But in the past few hours, we have been together in a world of our own, where words don’t count, where there are no politics, where there is nothing but all the simplicity and all the glory of that very basic joining together. We don’t know each other very well, but in those moments, we know each other deeply, and if I don’t know the small truths of every detail of these weeks, I do know the larger and profound truth of the way my body and my mind have truly been met by Mickey’s body and mind. When we meet, it is a rare and perfect thing.

In the morning, I know, I will have to tell Mickey about Mary seeing the painting. My time alone has consisted of a series of simple moments. Every simple moment has become more complicated in an instant with Mickey here. This account book, for instance, isn’t something I want him to find, and so I’ll have to sneak around, which I don’t like. I’m relieved that he’s here at last, but I think I miss my solitude.

I sat for about an hour with the painting just now. It’s getting late. I was thinking about what it is in Dutch
interiors that has always drawn me, since childhood: the quality of safety, the sense of resolution, an exactness, a specificity, a devotion to order, a celebration of dailiness. What Cartier-Bresson called the decision in every moment. There is a sense that a painting can contain knowledge, information, beautiful information. And Vermeer was never only about content. He wanted to capture what’s visible—tones, not the simulation but the situation of a tapestry on a table. He painted the blur, the wedge of light at the edge of what we are looking at, not just the thing we are looking at. He painted the way we see, not just what we see.