Selected Stories

Once Brigid heard the music, a tinkling of the piano keys that lasted only as long as the green, baize-covered door at the end of the kitchen passage was open. John’s shoulder held it wide while he passed through with a tray of cups and saucers. At the time, Annie-Kate was showing Brigid how to fill the oil lamps in the passage, which soon would become one of her duties if Mr Crome decided she was satisfactory. Until that morning she had never been in the passage before, the sculleries being on the other side of the kitchen wing. ‘That same old tune,’ Annie-Kate said. ‘He never leaves it.’ But Brigid would have listened for longer and was disappointed when the baize door closed and the sound went with it. It was the first time she had heard a piano played.

Three days later, at dinnertime, Mr Crome said:

‘The Italian has done with them. On Friday he’ll pack his traps and go on to Skibbereen.’

‘Can they do the steps now, Mr Crome?’ Annie-Kate asked, in the pert manner she sometimes put on at the dinner table when she forgot herself. Once Brigid heard Mrs O’Brien call it cheek, giving out to Annie-Kate in the kitchen, and Annie-Kate came into the sculleries afterwards, red-faced and tearful, dabbing at her face with her apron, not minding being seen by Brigid, the way she would by the others.

‘That is not for us to know,’ Mrs O’Brien reprimanded her, but Mr Crome pondered the question. It was a safe assumption, he suggested eventually, that the dancing-master wouldn’t be leaving unless the purpose of his visit had been fulfilled. He interrupted a contribution on the subject from John to add:

‘It’s not for that I mention it. On Thursday night he is to play music to us.’

‘What d’you mean, Mr Crome?’ Mrs O’Brien was startled by the news, and Brigid remembered hearing Lily Geoghegan once whispering to Annie-Kate that Mrs O’Brien was put out when she wasn’t told privately and in advance anything of importance in Mr Crome’s news.

‘I’ll tell you what I mean, Mrs O’Brien. It’s that every man jack of us will sit down upstairs, that John and Thomas will carry up to the drawing-room the chairs we are occupying this minute and arrange them as directed by myself, that music will be played for us.’

‘Why’s that, Mr Crome?’ Annie-Kate asked.

‘It’s what has been arranged, Annie. It’s what we’re being treated to on Thursday evening.’

‘We’re never sitting down with the Master and Mrs Everard? With the girls and Miss Turpin and Miss Roche? You’re having us on, Mr Crome!’ Annie-Kate laughed and Lily Geoghegan laughed, and John and Thomas. Old Mary joined in.

But Mr Crome had never had anyone on in his life. For the purpose of the dancing-master’s recital, the drawing-room would be vacated by the family, he explained. The family would have heard the music earlier that same day, in the late afternoon. It was a way of showing gratitude to the dancing-master for his endeavours that he was permitted to give his performance a second time.

‘Is it the stuff he’s always hammering out we’ll have to listen to?’ Annie-Kate asked. ‘The waltz steps, is it, Mr Crome?’

Mr Crome shook his head. He had it personally from Miss Turpin that the music selected by the dancing-master was different entirely. It was music that was suitable for the skill he possessed at the piano, not composed by himself, yet he knew every note off by heart and didn’t need to read off a page.

‘Well, I never!’ Mrs O’Brien marvelled, mollified because all that Mr Crome said by way of explanation had been directly addressed to her, irrespective of where the queries came from.

On that Thursday evening, although Brigid didn’t see the Master or Mrs Everard, or the girls, or Miss Turpin or Miss Roche, she saw the drawing-room. At the end of a row, next to the Widow Kinawe, she took her place on one of the round-bottomed chairs that had been arranged at Mr Crome’s instruction, and looked about her. A fire blazed at either end of the long, shadowy room and, hanging against scarlet wallpaper, there were gilt-framed portraits, five on one wall, four on another. There were lamps on the mantelpiece and on tables, a marble figure in a corner, the chairs and the sofa the family sat on all empty now. A grand piano had pride of place.

Brigid had never seen a portrait before. She had never seen such furniture, or two fires in a room. She had never seen a piano, grand or otherwise. On the wide boards of the floor, rugs were spread, and in a whisper the Widow Kinawe drew her attention to the ceiling, which was encrusted with a pattern of leaves and flowers, all in white.