This Is Happiness Read online

  By Commodore’s Cross, where for once Greavy was not on guard for bicycles with no lamps, links of laughing girls in clacking shoes hurried behind a bobbing torch beam on the rumour of a house dance. A gate shouldered open, loose on the road ran little clusters of back-kicking cattle, going from dark into dark on adventures of escape. An occasional car announced itself in sound and light long before its appearance, the eyes of the headlamps opening the countryside, making brief orange discs of a fox’s gaze, before leaving all back where it found it. Each car that passed was window-steamed and packed tight with passengers. A sleeved arc in the windscreen, it motored down the centre of the road on an Easter excursion of small revelment and loose steering. In its aftermath, the quiet was quieter, and sometimes in the silence that reassembled you could hear from across a valley a solo music played outside a front door for no audience but the night, a concertina, and one time a timber flute, travelling from the unseen player across the fields. It travels still, and of all the things I have forgotten that survives.

  As before, Christy and I walked up hills and freewheeled down them, so on the rises there was opportunity for talk and on the slopes a chance to escape it.

  ‘Tell me again how she smiled.’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘I wronged her.’

  ‘Fifty years ago?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  The history of it passed across his eyes but not out of his mouth.

  ‘Tell me how.’

  ‘I want her forgiveness,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  He angled over the bicycle to mount it. ‘I broke her heart.’ He pushed off and sailed ahead of me down the hill.

  As though an infinite store had been discovered, more and more stars kept appearing. The sky grew immense. Although you couldn’t see it, you could smell the sea.

  With the common excuse of slaking the dust of the cycle, we went into a place called Pyne’s. There was a Sunday-evening gathering and a man being coaxed to play the tin whistle. We stayed the while and drank from bottles. The player was being coaxed still when we left. It was a given then that with musicians in Clare it was difficult to start them, to stop them impossible.

  In McCarthy’s further on there was a crowd and a sing-song and we had what Christy called a drop and after a time I thought he was on the point of bursting into song himself, but a fiddle was found and, because it is a true fact that women live for dancing, a set was called and the women formed into pairs. They spun and stepped, dancing with each other in loose embrace, their faces flush with faraway looks and their feet like a native clockwork, slipping them free for now of all hardship and chores, stepping them into that elsewhere from which all music takes its origins. Christy made no bones about admiring the women, or letting them know either, a behaviour that not only made me uncomfortable but confused. The women smiled or laughed or threw back comments and nothing came of it. I’m not sure if more was intended.

  In Cooney’s there was no music, but there might be later. It would be discourteous to come in and go out without having the one. Mrs Cooney behind the counter had a smile would defeat a bishop, Christy told her.

  After, we mounted the bicycles, and got off them fifteen yards further, to try O Connor’s, where the same courtesies applied, and where, on a stool by the counter Denis Doohan, a precursor of future times, made a living off his celebrity. Doohan had a share in a minor prize in the Sweep, and, because luck like leprosy passed by touch, for a small fee would let you have a rub of him. Christy paid him thruppence, got five seconds’ worth, and at once felt lucky.

  Junior Crehan was maybe in O Connor’s, he was sometimes in O Neill’s, he was known to have played in Moloney’s. But that night he wasn’t in any of them when we were.

  The pubs that followed those have folded into the night and lost their names. In many there was music, all of it played by suited figures earnest and excellent and entirely absent in vanity or showmanship. It was a mystery to me how before they took up their instruments you could not tell the musicians from the audience. They looked like farmers, grounded ground-men, shy and unshowy, smoking cigarettes and hunkered silent or small-talking over pints, with no evidence at all of their gift. They had no apparent inclination to take the instrument cases out of where they were stacked in the windowsill, until they did. And when they did, the air was changed. There’s no other way to say it. The smoky, dark corner of a dingy pub forgot that it was a nowhere. It became a locus, a centre, and we became a company, focused around tables where, behind abandoned butts smoking in ashtrays and pint glasses paused in mid-tide, two fiddles, a flute and a concertina made time stretch so it was now and back across the ages in the same moment.

  Not all the music was excellent, but it was to Christy. He was moved by it, and sometimes, when a reel would end and a jig start up, I’d hear a Good man or a Yes or a big clap out of him.

  When the music ended the players lowered their instruments and took up their glasses, resuming their habitual shyness but allowing a glint in their eyes now if they met another’s, a silent acknowledgement, not so much, it seemed to me, that they had played the music, but that they had been there when it happened.

  The instant the music ended, time was turned on again, with subsequent rush for the bar, and I’d be witness to Christy’s shouldering in to the counter and his helpless munificence as he bought drinks, porter, shorts, port, minerals and cigarettes for those around him in what seemed to me a fairly decent attempt to rid himself of money.

  Coming back through the throng, drinks at head-height, like things rising or rescued, he had a dozen new friends. ‘People here are wonders.’ Unsurprisingly, in all the pubs he grew an instant popularity and was to come back, and soon. Women twenty years younger than him told him he was a melted rogue but they were laughing when they said it. In Burke’s we were told Junior Crehan had recently played. O God he did. But the rising curtain of the dawn and the drawn limits of human tolerance defeated us and that night we did not make it any further.

  When at last we came outside to the bicycles we were in the blink-and-head-scratch of that well-known location Who-Knows-Where, abroad in the back country of west Clare, the ocean near and pounding. By which time I might have believed my mother forgave me, that Annie Mooney had in fact smiled, and that in the days ahead lay the happiness found only in stories.

  Ambushed perhaps by the Wild Colonial Boy, the Minstrel Boy, and Kelly the Boy from Killane, inspired by the near and distant company of smiling women, and with the rub of Doohan’s luck still on him, Christy succumbed to a fevered dream, and by the flawless logic of those out of their minds we arrived back in Church Street, Faha, and outside the chemist shop.

  The birds were awake but the street was asleep. The first rays of the sun were taking off a pale scarf of rivermist. As if conspiratorial, the scene was painted. I wasn’t sure what Christy intended. I remember we left the bicycles by the church wall, and that he walked his square-chested walk ahead of me across the street. He was this solid block of human emotion with the short swallow and shone eyes of a man resolved on a tactic of all or nothing.

  ‘Wait!’

  I’ll give myself that. I called out wait, not because I knew what was about to happen, not because I had insight or foreknowledge, not even because I knew I had to confess the lie before he acted upon it, but because catastrophe is in the air and in your blood a moment before it happens and your mouth falls open helpless with doom because O God here it comes.

  Already he had assumed the position he had taken in Craven’s, head back, chest out and fists pressed down, and at once he was singing. He was singing that same sad love-song with shut eyes and a full-throated volume to which Nolan’s dog in Nolan’s yard responded with a low whimpering, as if it knew that, although the human need for music was both mysterious and universal, this was a frequency unheard in the street in Faha and that there was ruckus and rira and danger in it. The singing was all the louder for the
stillness of the morning after the Resurrection, the sliding slope of Church Street like a crooked yawn, the misaligned huddle of the shops and houses curved into a comma, paused beneath a sky now both opal and pink, the picture of actual earthly peace, or as near as.

  Christy sang the song up to the front windows of Gaffney’s chemist shop. I stood a little ways behind, like one holding the horses.

  I can’t say if he sang well, I can say he sang loud, certainly louder than any had sung a dawn love-song in the street of that or any parish in west Clare. He sang it shut-eyed, but aimed, his face tilted up like a priest. In his mind he was seeing her. I am certain of that. If you came into Faha at the moment, if you came into either end of the sleeping village, in the grace and the repose of the just now delivered dawn-light, the two parked cars, the tied bundles of newspapers outside the post office, you’d hear him singing and you’d be certain too. With screwed-up eyes and throat-cords bulging, with bubbling porter-sweat and cuckoo-spittle, he was singing her into being and, by the power of an antique passion, porter and the potency of an old song, seeing her too. Whether the Annie Mooney of years earlier or the one in St Cecelia’s that morning, I couldn’t have said. I was not even an amateur in love and understood nothing of emotion that could endure deep below the tides of time.

  But I think I knew that while he sang he was in thrall to a fiction, and on the thin foundation of the lie that she had seen him in the church, recognised him, and smiled, like all male lovers he had quickly built a rose-coloured version that matched his own hope: how Annie Mooney had hurried into the chemist’s after Easter Mass, turning over the cardboard Closed with a frantic heart, questioning the evidence of her eyes, Had it really been him? How could he have found her? How she hurried upstairs, along the landing with peremptory step and into the front bedroom to sit on the pearled ridges of the chenille spread and watch through the veiled privacy of the net curtain as he and the young man moved out the church gate; how she let out an involuntary gasp that her eyes had not been lying, that it was really him (and that the decades had not withered his bull-chested captain’s handsomeness); how her cheeks flushed, pinched with memory, and her right hand moved to her breast; how the rest of her day was upturned; how later she sat stiff and polite in the dull, cushion-less small talk of her husband’s distant relations, found her appetite absent, her taste metallic, and her mind edged by sickles of questions; how she came home early in the late afternoon, sought a palliative among the powders of the pharmacy, chastising herself for foolishness even as she opened her mouth in a young girl’s vain attempt to release the butterflies in her stomach.

  All of this, I imagine, Christy pictured as he sang. The plots of cheap romantic novels were known even by those who never read them, and a serenade was venerable enough to have become a cliché before it was thrown in the dustbin of the world.

  Now Christy was going for it.

  Giving it everything grew him by two inches. They were two inches he was unaware he had, but we all have them, folded up on themselves inside the purse of the heart. He was picturing Annie’s distress and had come to relieve it. That was what I understood. To announce himself. And, because I was not immune to the force of his feeling, because of travelling through the starred night, because by drink and dream I was so far removed from myself, or because of what would become a lifelong weakness for fine words and minor chords, I think I believed not only would calamity pass but the tactic would prove ingenious. In a moment the curtain would move aside and Annie Mooney would appear at the upstairs window and bring her hands to her mouth, helpless in the face of so naked a declaration and a ballad behaviour out of a sunny clime in the seventeenth century.

  To the serenade, Nolan’s dog was not a convert.

  Nor, it turned out, was Bourke’s.

  Nor Cleary’s. Nor Ryan’s.

  This too was traditional, but in the case of Faha was augmented by Clancy’s cock, Hayes’s hens, and then, wait, Healy’s ass in the half-acre behind the hardware shop. In truth nothing in creation could be declared a fan, and, though the singing was neither drunken nor loutish, soon enough a rough chorus was barking and braying and the village was started from sleep with the forked hair and quizzical eyes of the burgled.

  Christy didn’t care. Old songs had the uncertain virtue of many verses and he was pressing on right to the end.

  Cleary opened his front door.

  Ryan opened his back one and yelled at the dog. Faces came to windows, Mona Ryan’s curtain moved. But not the one above the chemist’s.

  Sentry to this Church Street display, I had been certain that at any moment Annie would appear. If only to throw something. But not for the first nor last time, certainty proved a bad bet, and at her curtain there was not the slightest movement, and now the song had ended.

  At his front door Cleary scowled and by way of review delivered his catchphrase, ‘Thank God for small mercies,’ large mercies being unknown in Faha.

  Returning from the passionate elsewhere of the song, Christy opened his eyes and looked up at Annie Mooney’s window. I haven’t the skill to describe the expression in his face. He turned away from the chemist’s and took his bicycle.

  ‘Maybe she isn’t there,’ I said, and, to make less excruciating the failure of the moment, suddenly found myself speaking quickly, doing that thing people do when faced with the mystery of another, prescribing to them your own emotions and behaviours. ‘Maybe she was embarrassed. Maybe she was about to come down but then she saw the doors opening.’ Out of me ran a mouthful of maybes. We were walking the bicycles out the end of Church Street. Like Butt, the blubbering barrel of the County Barrister, I rested my case by concluding: ‘There are many plausible reasons.’

  ‘None of life is plausible, Noe,’ Christy said. The eyes, in which I expected to see distress, were the blue of a Mediterranean June, and I realised that unlike those of us whose hope only came in one size, slim, Christy’s was still broad enough to survive the failure of his first approach.

  ‘She heard me,’ he said. ‘But she won’t forgive me as easy as that.’ He swung his leg over the saddle. ‘Neither would I.’

  He pushed hard on the pedal and I the same and we cycled past the forge and out of the village, leaving behind us the operatic scene, the singing of the love-song, and a story that I’m assured is still told, embroidered into fable, sixty years later.

  19

  Easter Monday may have existed, I’ve no proof or recollection. I stayed above in the bed. Christy, sleep defeated by the aches the Good Lord sets into old men’s bones to make appealing Eternal Rest, rose after an hour and went I never learned where.

  Doady and Ganga journeyed to the park for the holiday renewal of the challenge match between Boola and Faha. Under the auspices of Gaelic football, parish rivalries were unbounded and in the warm, milky bath of an April sunshine the bulk of the populace could go to Mulvey’s field and enjoy the capriciousness of the high ball and the Homeric spectacle of men taking lumps out of each other. It was a game rough and ready which found many devotees, particularly among the clergy. Years earlier, the villainous Father Sully, perhaps knowing he was Hell-bound, had seized an earthly immortality by donating a trophy, the Father Sully Perpetual, and there were medals somewhere, if only they could be found. Enjoying the animation of the rivalry and the pulse in the blood that was not available to them in the Church, priests came after the jelly of their desserts, some doing the rounds of Mulvey’s tin-roofed shed which passed then for a changing room, in the mustard air of embrocation smacking their hands together and administering the age-old exhortation of Come on now, men.

  And these were men. Neither team had youth on its side. England and America stole the young on the cusp of bloom and emptied the parishes of all between the ages of seventeen and thirty, a truth made evident by the sight of the Senior men trotting on to the pitch in the short shorts and chest-compressing jerseys of youths. Still, this was Faha versus Boola, and once the ball was thrown in, the players forg
ot their antiquity. Showing the native love of the literal, they marked their marker, saying hello the Spartan way, with a dig in the ribs. Ahead of the funds for the purchase of a pitch proper, funds that, like everything else, were on their way from Dublin, Mulvey had given the use of his field and allowed the goalposts to be erected but saw no reason why between games his cattle shouldn’t graze. The result was ground pocked with ankle-breakers, bounce-unpredicters and Friesian plops of local hazard.

  In an effort to elevate the status of the game and replicate the wireless commentaries on Radio Éireann, Thomas Nally employed a bullhorn and ran up and down the sideline broadcasting a pro-Fahaean version of what was happening. Not to be outdone in the battle for reality, Boola had a Brophy with a bullhorn who did likewise, running up and down the same sideline, describing the same action with battalions of superlatives but with a partisanship so blatant that no one could believe the evidence of their eyes.

  In the long black coat and wide-brimmed hat of the poet, hands clasped behind his back, Felix Pilkington paced the pitch, throwing the blackbirds of his eyebrows hither and thither. After a heavy tackle from a Boolean, he stopped, threw his hands in the air and cried out, ‘Elvish-mark’d, rooting hog!’ and ‘Bull’s pizzle!’ for those who preferred their commentary in longwave.

  This year the sun made hard the ground and high the bounce, Ganga reported. Boola, once they got ahead, took a low tactic of driving the ball into the river to preserve their lead, but two of the undrownable Kellys were positioned, and plunged, plashed and made short work of returning it, he said. The referee, a martyr called Tuohy, who came by bicycle and hoped to depart that way, had two watches, was sole adjudicator of time, and, no matter how long it took, always endeavoured to bring the game to the fair conclusion of a draw. ‘The sides could not be separated,’ was his hasty annual review before he pushed off, pedalling hell-for-leather out of the many erupting disputes.