The Music Lesson (15 page)

I have always wanted to live in those rooms. Here, on this wild coast, I have lived in those rooms. So much of my time has been squandered on an approximation of a life, a description of a life. But in these days here, I have been truly present, truly alive.

When I worked on my thesis, I discovered a wonderful remark by Henry James about his travels in Holland: “When you are looking at the originals, you seem to be looking at the copies; and when you are looking at the copies, you seem to be looking at the originals. Is it a canal-side in Haarlem, or is it a Van der Heyden? … The maid-servants in the streets seem to have stepped out of the frame of a Gerald Dow and appear equally well-adapted for stepping back again.”

I will never know this woman—I will never know
her name, or the music she is about to play. I don’t know what foods she likes, or if she has children. She remains silent. But I have come to know what she represents very well. And I am grateful for her lesson, for what she has taught me about integrity, and constancy. Through her, I have come to know myself, and I have begun to understand the world a little better, too. I have to figure out ways to live in my own rooms. I have started to recognize my strengths as well as my weaknesses. Some of my strengths, it turns out,
were
my weaknesses.

I don’t know how much longer I will have her to myself. Mickey’s presence makes me think that possibly this was the last time I will have had the privilege and luxury of this singular communion. It will be a sad moment when I have to give her up. Life seems sometimes like nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end. That’s the given. How you respond to those losses, what you make of what’s left, that’s the part you have to make up as you go.

M
ARY
C
AREW
was found dead this morning, in her chicken house, lying in the chicken litter with her head next to a pan of layer’s mash, where she had dropped it. Hugh O’Keeffe, the neighboring farmer, happened to find her because he was passing by, out for an early walk with his new hunting dog (a mean-looking German shorthaired pointer), and he had looked in to the chicken house to investigate the unusual racket Mary’s chickens were making—he thought their alarm signaled an intruding fox or dog. Her chickens were all crowded at the other end of the house, perched on an abandoned settle Mary had told me the other day was originally from the kitchen of her cottage, before she made all sorts of Formica improvements a few
years ago. It was her heart, people thought. She’d had a heart condition for a long while. Mary was seventy-nine—a good age.

Nora rapped on my door before daylight this morning to tell me the terrible news. She was so agitated, blurting out the details of the plans for the wake and funeral, and what Mary’s nephew from Union Hall wanted her to do, that she stood there, twisting her hands over and over, almost violently, as she talked, until she looked down and exclaimed, “Oh, look at me, I’m the knitter without wool!” before she scurried off to her milking.

Mickey was still asleep, and I had been nervous as well as upset, standing in the open door clutching my bathrobe around my nakedness, concerned that he would call out to me or come downstairs while Nora was still there. I didn’t know how Mickey would want his presence explained, or if his presence is supposed to be completely hidden.

I realized as the awfulness of Nora’s words washed over my brain like ice water that I have no idea how long Mickey is going to stay. He and I hardly spoke once we went upstairs last night. The information we exchanged was not about schedules.

Nora asked me if I would be able to take a turn sitting with Mary’s body through the night. She seems to have been put in charge of the preparations by the
nephew. I had a hard time understanding her, because we were both so upset, but I gather there’s something like a wake tonight, in Mary’s cottage, and then tomorrow there will be a funeral and then a burial in the churchyard at the Protestant church in Clonakilty, beside George Carew, who’s been sleeping alone in their double grave since 1944. My hands are trembling as I write. I cannot take this in.

I’m going to stop now and put this away, then make some breakfast for Mickey, and wake him up, if the smell of rashers and eggs doesn’t. We have to talk.

I have a gnawing fear, a dread, that Mary’s death is my fault. Am I losing my mind? What is happening? Surely I am in mourning for the death of an elderly woman with whom I was briefly acquainted. But why does it feel as though I’m in mourning for something in my life far more significant than that?

I
AM AN IDIOT
. A naïve idiot.

So much has occurred in two days. This will be my last entry in the account book. I can only try to describe things as they happened.

The bacon and eggs were just ready when Mickey appeared at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in his clothes from the day before, startling me as I was getting milk from the tiny fridge under the counter. He’s like a cat the way he can slip in and out of places. It must have been close to nine o’clock by then.

He grinned at the sight of—what, me, the food?—and came up behind me to catch me in an embrace as I stood with the milk carton in my hand. I poured him a
cup of coffee from inside the circumference of his arms, and then we sat together while he wolfed down all of his breakfast and most of mine. I wasn’t hungry. I almost burned the toast again, but Mickey looked up and sniffed and said he thought he smelled something burning, and I jumped up and caught it just in time—it didn’t even need scraping. I felt like someone playing a part. Words came to mind and then just congealed in my chest. Why didn’t he notice that something was wrong?

“Is there any jam?” he asked hopefully, swabbing up the last of the egg yolks on my plate from across the table with a nugget of toast.

Wordlessly, I went to the counter to get Mary’s bramble jelly, which sat there in its little jar on the counter, not having heard the news. I placed it carefully on the table in front of him, and as I did so, a squeak of despair rose out of my chest and hit the back of my throat.

Mickey looked up and our eyes met. I didn’t know him. I did not know this man sitting at my table, though his clotted semen was between my legs. He caught hold of my wrist, the burned hand with the bandage across the palm. I stood there, looking down at him. There was egg on the corner of his mouth. Whatever mix of dread and hope I had been feeling in these last few minutes seemed to coalesce into a terrible kind of icy despair.

“We had to, you know,” he said so softly, so gently, so reasonably.

I knew this already, didn’t I?

“Why?”

“Oh, Patricia, don’t be naïve. Why? Because she would have told someone, that’s why. Because she would have made a hames of our plans, no matter what her sympathies. Several lives would have been at risk, including your own.”

I must have just stared. Mickey went on. “I
am
sorry, you know. I didn’t think there would be call for wet work, especially once we’d got the picture safely here. I really do regret this. You must be more careful, Patricia.”

I could feel my pulse roaring in my head. I felt deeply sick, hot, cold. A creeping nausea seemed to rise in my gut on the tide of those words. Mickey was someone I had invented for my own needs. Clearly, he had never really existed. Michael O’Driscoll from Rosscarbery was real enough, sitting here before me.

“How did you even know she saw the painting?” It seemed insane that we were having this conversation, that something this brutal could be discussed over breakfast. I sank back down into my chair because I could hardly stand up for another moment. I turned the chair away from the table so that I didn’t have to look directly at Mickey. The way Mary had been unable to look at me only the morning before.

He waved a hand in the air, gesturing around the
room, indicating—what? I didn’t understand, and then I did.

“The cottage is
bugged
? You
bugged
me?”

Mickey shrugged and buttered another piece of toast. “A routine security precaution,” he said lightly. “Nothing personal. You’re quite adorable altogether when you sing in the bath, by the way.” He whistled a few halting bars of “King of the Road” and my humiliation was complete.

“I cannot believe this.” God knows who was listening to us right now. I felt a creeping sensation up my back and arms: horripilation.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Mickey said impatiently. “You’ve been a little bit had, and you’ll lick your wounds and call me a load of shite on a stick, and that’s fair enough. But mind you get over it fast, because we’ve got a larger matter on our hands at the moment.”

“No. Wait.” I could hear my voice outside my head, as if it belonged to someone else. “I need to know something from you right now.”

He nodded, waiting for me to continue.

“Mickey. Who
are
you? What’s real? What about … us? Last night? Has any of it mattered to you, or was it all part of the plan?” I hated my own pleading tone, the clichés. The thought that Mickey’s confederates were listening right at this moment.

“Don’t be simple, Patricia,” he said. “No, wait—hear me out.” I had started to get up from the table. “You’re
asking what’s real. Let me answer you. The plan is real,” he said slowly, choosing his words with evident care. “Retribution, righting the wrong, that’s the only certain reality for me. I’ve grown very fond of you, and I wasn’t plannin’ on that a’tall, but it’s happened. So that’s real. We’ve had a great run together. It really wasn’t something I was lookin’ for, though I’ve been lonely enough, but then you came along—”

“How? How exactly did I come along?” I had never asked Mickey enough about this before, though he had told me at the outset that I had been selected as a candidate for approaching because my profile was such a good match, given my art expertise and my Irish sympathies. Why hadn’t I questioned him more closely before I jumped in so blindly? I must have been crazy. I had confused destiny with feuding and violence.

“Your name came up.”

“That’s it? My name came up? Where? In some IRA bunker in downtown Derry? What exactly do you mean, my name came up?”

“Patricia, when are you going to learn the cardinal rules—you don’t need to know that, so I’m not going to say. Let’s just leave it that a Foley’s regular spoke your name with much admiration and proposed Patricia Dolan as a fine candidate for the job. Which, by the way, you’ve been, right up to this moment here.”

“Foley’s? Foley’s in the South End? Pete’s Foley’s?”

Mickey looked at me with a little condescending smile on his lips. He reached over and patted the back of my bandaged hand. “You see what a little knowledge does? Just makes trouble. Just makes you wonder about things you shouldn’t wonder about.” I snatched my hand away and he lunged across the table and grabbed my wrist and slammed my hand back down on the table. The searing pain was a great deal less than the sting of knowing that Mickey would deliberately hurt me this way. I fought back tears, hating my tears, hating Mickey.

“Now you listen,” he hissed at me. “You were proposed for inclusion by an old fella who’s done a bit of work here and there for us called Jimmy Leary. All right? Does knowing that little bit more improve anything a’tall?”

“Jimmy Leary? Pete’s old friend from the squad? Jimmy Leary who taught me how to drive? Oh my God.”

“Now can we leave it? We’ve got more urgent business, Patricia.”

“No! We fucking well can’t leave it!
You
listen! I want to know what happened to Mary! And I’m going to the police if that old lady was murdered because of me,” I said, struggling to locate a clear place to land from this terrifying height. “Would you kill
me
if I said I was going to the police? No, gardai, isn’t that it? The guards? I could walk down to the call box in front of Nolan’s right now. What did you do? Have that fake telephone guy
break her neck? While you were here keeping me busy? Is that what they train you to do in the IRA?” My hand was throbbing.