This Is Happiness Read online

  The infancy of my playing was fostered by an absence of criticism. The wisdom of the old people was incalculable. Ganga, coming and going from business with cattle, would cross from the yard with a mimed deafness. He would scrupulously not hear a note, and only when Doady, palms down and air-paddling a flotilla of hens out the front door, directed him by a head-beckon to the fiddler in the garden, did he stand and listen a moment before carrying on. At the tea later, he’d deliver his five-star review with the single phrase that was Faha’s highest praise for musicians: ‘You have an ear, Noe! By God, you do. You have an ear!’ I would play the musician’s part of denying it, but some element of the compliment would enter me, and when Ganga added, ‘My father had one too,’ and, after a bite of buttered loaf, ‘This house often heard him,’ it would go deeper still. It warmed me. But I didn’t give it more weight than that then, not yet realising you can turn a corner and find your life waiting there for you, and that if you walked past it, it would come after and keep tapping you on the shoulder.

  A different tap came from Doady, picking up the ware from the table, giving me the flashing-glasses look, and saying, ‘I had a letter from Mother Acquin.’ She waited for a response I didn’t give and then added, ‘She says to tell you your mother is in her prayers.’ She knew that was all she needed to say.

  That evening, when we were heading out, Christy said, ‘Bring the fiddle with you.’

  I didn’t. Not physically, anyway. But, near enough midnight, when we were standing in the crowded sawdust of Looney’s listening to an old man playing a timeless ‘Rakish Paddy’, I found I had the sharpened ears of the tune-hunter, my mind fingering and bowing goodo.

  Christy didn’t press me for details of Sophie, but from its thousand creases he translated the adventures of his shirt and told me to keep it. He realised I was dying of a hunger that could not be cured by food or drink, but, by an Apollo grace, could be stayed by music.

  And music was plentiful that season, which was in itself remarkable. In general, there was neither as much music, nor was it as celebrated as it would be in the decade ahead. This is maybe a hard thing to appreciate, the music was there but under a bushel. The coming of modern times had made it seem a remnant, tradition belonging to a past the country was hurrying away from. But in places like Faha and thereabouts the music was one of the things the people had, it belonged to them the way the rain did, the way the blackthorns on the ditches did, and whether it was a poor thing or not was of no consequence. It was theirs, and it was free. In normal times it was often hiding, had to be coaxed out from under a low-capped shyness in players who were both Mohicans and Catholics, end-of-the-line and deeply restrained, who circumvented the sin of pride through a studied unshowiness, Those old tunes, and played only to their local audience and intrepid musical expeditionaries like Christy and me.

  The fine weather, as Ganga said, had made mincemeat of the farm chores this year. The annual battle to secure a living out of mud and water was relieved by honeyed sunlight and a golden hay against which all future years would be measured, and about which Senan Hehir passed the immemorial judgement, ‘You’d eat it yourself.’ And so, because of the sun-lightened load, for the first time, farmer-musicians found their pockets filled with gifts of time. In fine form, they went abroad in the night, the result a jig-time after a slow air, and an aura of holiday where there was none.

  Cycling home from Looney’s you’d have a hundred tunes and not a small bath of liquid in you, with consequent chaos of feeling and thought. The code we had evolved was to concentrate on the cycling part, avoid discourse, and that way stay between the margins of the ditches. We were sometime successful. A loose pairing, by virtue of the singularity of souls, one of us would get ahead of the other on the road, and after a while realise it and slow down or stop altogether. Christy would prolong the opportunity to take breath by making one of the wise statements of the sloshed.

  ‘That playing tonight, it was as pure as a bishop’s rectum.’

  An image I couldn’t reconcile but found I could nod to.

  Somewhere along the ribbons of the road, we left: ‘A gift for the make-believe, Noe. The first requirement of saints’, ‘That barman was a poem to listen to’, ‘That other, did you notice, built like a battleship but looked like he had a want’ and ‘God is devilishly clever. You’d have to give him that.’

  In the daytimes, in the broader parish, there was an atmosphere of imminence. The electrification of Faha was not yet complete, but near enough. The vans of electricians appeared for the first time. The generalities of the national policy for rural parts was made personal by their pulling into yards and coming in the door to take a look at what wiring would be needed, Missus. None of the electricians of course were local, the first electrician in Faha old Tom Lawlor, who had no education only intelligence, who learned it by the antique method of looking, and operated as unofficial electrician in the years while the trainees were training, operated after that too when they learned the first rule of their occupation, which was to be unavailable. The electricians that came were schooled in the mulish practice of shaking their heads when they looked at the job that needed doing. The houses of Faha had a natural resistance to the new. The interior walls of stone could not be drilled in channels for the chasing of the wires, and instead would have to wear them like string dressing. The cables could be housed in plastic, but it cost extra. The electricians had perfected a tut-tut look and engineered an air of superiority, leaning on the knowledge that the local diet was to swallow all complaints except for things Boolaean. People took the news of their houses’ inadequacy the way they did their penance, stoically. The cold assessments of the strangers in their homes – ‘Where does this door go?’, ‘Does that table have to go there?’ – were met with shy acknowledgement and all demands accommodated because nobody wanted the shame of being told their home was too backward to receive electricity.

  The electrician who came to my grandparents’ was a long narrow strip with a tight mouth and slits of eyes. Doady traced him. His people were Purtills out of Tarbert, every one of them got the croup, she said, whatever way they were living. For a thin man, Purtill had a brusque way with him. The way it was, once a parish was declared ready for the final phase, it was a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel time for the electricians, and the more houses they could get wired, the more money they could make and the quicker they could move on. The individual character of the houses was their enemy in this, the character of the individuals in them another.

  There was no actual electricity yet, mind. There would be an announced switch-on once the whole parish was wired.

  Purtill posted his tongue out the corner of his lips while he considered the crooked kitchen. He banged his right boot on the floor, as though testing it was still true that flagstone didn’t give. He went to the parlour door followed by my grandmother. He made the simplest thing sound outrageous: ‘You want light in here, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  The tongue moved some and the head shook slowly, words were spared. Although mostly silent, Purtill had a manner that was like he was salting your ancestors. His range of response went from Could be a problem to Would take a small miracle. He came back into the kitchen and felt the wall. He looked up at the temporary ceiling Ganga had built forty years earlier and which doubled as the flooring in my bedroom.

  ‘Light up there?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  He took the small-miracle look up the Captain’s Ladder. His boot stamped the floor up there and snowed the dust of her childbearing years on Doady and me. When Purtill came back down the tongue was posted out the far corner and in a coroner’s tone he delivered a bleak verdict: ‘That place is about to fall down.’

  To which Doady didn’t blink, but responded with a Kerrywoman’s peninsular intransigence, ‘Put a light in it all the same.’

  As if accompanied by an invisible assistant, Purtill walked around the rooms, itemising, ‘One bulb here, one light switch here,
one socket,’ affixing them with his gaze and leading my grandmother to look carefully to be assured virtual reality hadn’t yet been invented and that they weren’t already in place. A single light bulb was the most any room could want. You wouldn’t want it too bright, a common judgement.

  ‘Where will you put the Sacred Heart?’

  Purtill cast the slit eyes along the ceiling. ‘I’ll put Him there.’

  ‘We usually have His picture here.’

  ‘He can stay there. The lamp will be over here, near the door. He can look across at it.’

  Doady’s blinking eyes didn’t see the humour. Purtill moved away from them, he tapped the wainscot boards overhead the kitchen door. ‘Your meter will be here. Light switch here.’ A pencil materialised from under the hair that covered the top of his ear. He drew an X on the wall. ‘Socket here.’ Another X.

  There was something of the slapdash about the way Purtill operated. The positions of the light switches were decided by his own height and reach. He put out his arm to where the switch would suit him, and that’s where the X went. That my grandmother was much shorter than him didn’t come into it. Either way he left his mark on the parish, and for years to come you could step inside a kitchen, find the light bulb hanging off-centre, the switch high as your shoulder, or higher still because that’s the amount of wire Purtill had to spare – ‘You can step on a stool and switch her on there, just as handy’ – and the small gods of three-eyed sockets could be located anywhere. It was not unusual for a shelf for the kettle to be built in the immediate wake of the kettle socket going in along a no-man’s-land of wall, and not unusual for these shelves, which had to be improvised at short order, to be uncarpentered constructs variously and ingeniously propped, tied, glued and hanging off stone walls whose last dignity was to refuse to be screwed.

  Supposing homeowners would want to show off they lived in modern times, the socket was put in plain sight, a policy that in those doughty houses of earlier centuries would soon give birth to the Faha caution Mind the wire, rooms taking on the look of an elderly patient, resigned to wearing tubing, but liking it not one bit. By the time Bourke’s and Clohessy’s started selling adapters, the one socket in the kitchen becoming a kind of extemporised power station, men confirming their stereotype by finding sticking things into holes irresistible, one adapter going into another, and that into another, and fuse-blowing commonplace, well, by then it would be too late to call back Purtill.

  Having X-ed all the rooms of the house, he was standing in the kitchen doing a tot, ‘And seven and three is ten and two is twelve, and…’ when Ganga came in with Joe. He was in his suit trousers and wellingtons, tops cuffed on account of the heat, and shirtsleeves rolled. His round face was florid, eyes shining.

  ‘This is Mr Purtill, he’s—’

  ‘I’ve lost my place,’ Purtill said, and went back up the sum in his mind, one finger pointing vaguely at invisible bulbs and sockets and ticking them off the mental audit.

  Ganga was just smiling at him. He let the man do his business, one hand dropping down and making a small rubbing on the top of Joe’s head. Joe’s head had a way of always being under his hand. Ganga never needed to look down, he dropped the hand and scratched and the head was there. It was an arrangement they had, and when it happened here there was complicity in it, as though they’d both discussed the scene beforehand, worked out how it would go, and the hand was just saying Hold on, hold on a bit, Joe and all the time my grandfather’s face just beaming away like he couldn’t be happier, like Purtill was the Pope come to call.

  ‘Not a straightforward job,’ Purtill said. He let his slit eyes tell a vexed story. He was too skinny to amplify it, but from the back lean of his posture it was clear he mightn’t be going forward, and in the balance was the possibility that my grandparents’ house was too contrary for modernity. ‘Not straightforward at all,’ he agreed with himself.

  The kitchen window was ablaze with afternoon light, the pendulum of the grandfather clock pending and pulsing in the timber throat of it.

  ‘May be unforeseen expenses too,’ Purtill said, and then defiled the adjective by adding, ‘but there always is.’

  Through the reflective moons of her round-rims, Doady blinked at him.

  ‘I might as well make a start anyway,’ Purtill said, and made the move to go out past my grandfather who stopped him with a short delivery in the plain style.

  ‘There’s no need.’

  Purtill took a tone he employed on the dim. ‘I don’t start today you could go down the list.’ And when that brought no immediate response, he underlined himself, ‘I’d be gone. Don’t know when I’d be back.’

  ‘That’s grand,’ Ganga said, still beaming away, like this was the good news, like he’d been filled with it for a while now and had shared it with Joe and all the time been waiting for this moment when at last, with no trace of rancour or choler but with a kind of free-falling bliss, he could close the door on the future and announce: ‘We’re not taking it.’

  37

  Without further debate, the forum on the future ended there, and soon enough Purtill took himself off, leaving his Xs on the walls, where they’d be slow enough in fading. But I recall no argument between Doady and Ganga in the immediate after. That may be a weak spot in this poor act of resurrection, or my deaf blindness at the time to everything but my date with the Mars on the coming Friday.

  In the lead-up, you can imagine the state of me. Add to it something of Haulie Ryan, who at fifty-two believed his parts had become fused by rust, the oil to free them not invented, until he met Marie Costello. And add to that a small bit of Jack Dunne who discovered a convex irony in creation, because up close all the things he most disliked about his wife Sheila when she was living were the things he missed most when she was dead.

  On top of these, the out-and-out saintly beauty of Sophie Troy.

  That Friday evening, as I was once more walking up the avenue, I think the final argument of my case for the defence was that I would take Charlie to the pictures but see Sophie when she came down to determine who the visitor was, and, like those in the films whose lines have been cut, my eyes would declare me.

  The hackney drove up the avenue, Heaney adhering to the letter of his hire contract by not picking up the unpaying and once more honouring the coachman’s code by acknowledging in no way last week’s history of ravishment. He let the cloud of his dust speak on his personal behalf. He had pulled up at the foot of the steps and was idling as before, window rolled down and that same one elbow out that was so characteristic that McCarthy would consider accommodating it when they put him in the coffin. Heaney didn’t turn the hair-cloud to look at me and I responded with a proprietary air, taking the steps quick and firm with an invented entitlement I instantly betrayed by pressing the door-pull like a stranger, following up with a too-loud hammering of the knocker.

  I had a moment when I thought the doctor would open the door, another when he’d open it with his shotgun. The surgery was a citadel, but also came with a reputation for doom. You probably caught it at the surgery one of Faha’s accepted wisdoms, following a cross-eyed unorthodoxy that people left their illnesses there like old rags to be picked up by whoever came next. Also, there were many whose last known appearance in Faha was at the surgery. She went to the surgery a calamitous pronouncement which meant that soon enough the choir would be put on standby for the funeral.

  Sophie opened the door.

  All of me knelt down. All of me bowed. Inside the chapel of myself, all my candles lit.

  When Sophie Troy opened the door I lost language, I lost all bearings, and instead of kneeling and bowing, instead of the operatic gestures that belonged to the fervent, instead of a gloss-eyed poetry, I stood on the top step in the troubadour’s shirt and said the thing I least wanted to: ‘I’m here for Charlie.’

  A quick furrow came on her serious brow, she kept the door half-closed against herself.

  ‘She asked me. Last week.’


  This didn’t open the door. There was a further moment in which Sophie accommodated this news within the knowledge she already had of her sister, this next proof of the breathless and inconceivable recklessness of Charlie, and of which, vexingly, in equal measure, she disapproved and admired. ‘You better come in.’

  I stepped inside the furniture chaos of the front hall where the tennis net remained part floormat, part bench-occupant, its entanglement made worse by time and the discovery that it had been stored in a press with the netting for the fruit bushes, and by proximity and like-mindedness, they had married. Not to betray myself, I treated everything in Avalon as though it were the norm and stood on the net, its mouths taking my heels.

  ‘In here.’

  Sophie pointed into the drawing room. She had already picked up the book she had left down to open the door, and that was where her interest lay.