Selected Stories

Small, and thin as a knife-blade, just as she had described him herself, the dancing-master brought with him a scent of oil when he arrived, a lemony smell yet with a sweetness to it. He entered the drawing-room, closed the door behind him, and went quickly to the piano, not looking to either side of him. He didn’t speak, but sat down at once, clasped his hands together, splayed his fingers, exercising them before he began. All the time he played the music, the scent of oil was there, subtle in the warm air of the drawing-room.

There had been a fiddler at the wake of Brigid’s grandmother. He was an old man who suffered from the coldness, who sat close in to the hearth and played a familiar dirge and then another and another. There was keening and after it the tuneless sound continued, the fiddler hunched over the glow of the turf, Brigid’s grandmother with her hands crossed on her funeral dress in the other room. But while the lamplight flickered and the two fires blazed, the dancing-master’s music was different in every way from the fiddler’s. It scurried and hurried, softened, was calm, was slow. It danced over the scarlet walls and the gaze of the portrait people. It lingered on the empty chairs, on vases and ornaments. It rose up to reach the white flowers of the encrusted ceiling. Brigid closed her eyes and the dancing-master’s music crept about her darkness, its tunes slipping away, recalled, made different. There was the singing of a thrush. There was thunder far away, and the stream she went by on Skenakilla Hill, rushing, then babbling. The silence was different when the music stopped, as if the music had changed it.

The dancing-master stood up then and bowed to the congregated servants, who bowed back to him, not knowing what else to do. He left the drawing-room, still without saying anything, and the round-bottomed chairs were carried back to where they’d come from. Brigid caught a glimpse of Lily Geoghegan and John kissing while she was getting herself ready for the walk across the hill. ‘Well, there’s skill in it all right,’ was Mr Crome’s verdict on the dancing-master’s performance, but Thomas said he’d been looking forward to a few jigs and Annie-Kate complained that she’d nearly died, sitting on a hard chair for an hour and a half. The Widow Kinawe said it was great to see inside a room the like of that, twenty-three pieces of china she’d counted. Old Mary hadn’t heard a thing, but still declared she’d never spent a better evening. ‘Who was that man at all?’ she asked Mrs O’Brien, whose eyes had closed once or twice, but not as Brigid’s had.

That February night on the stony hillside track there was frost in the air and the sky was blazing with stars that seemed to Brigid to be a further celebration of the music she’d heard, of beauty and of a feeling in herself. The tunes she tried for eluded her, but somehow it was right that they should, that you couldn’t just reach out for them. The hurrying and the slowness and the calm, the music made of the stream she walked by now, weren’t perfect, as when she’d closed her eyes in the drawing-room. But crossing Skenakilla Hill, Brigid took with her enough of what there had been, and it was still enough when she woke in the morning, and still enough when she worked again in the sculleries.

Mr Crome said at dinnertime that the dancing-master had left the house after breakfast. One last time he’d gone through the waltz steps. Then he left for Skibbereen.

Only once in the weeks and months that followed did the Italian dancing-master come up in conversation. Mrs O’Brien wondered where his travels had taken him, which caused Mr Crome to draw on his conversations with Miss Turpin and Miss Roche. The dancing-master, true enough, was a wandering stone. The chances were that he was in England or perhaps in France; and Spain and India had been spoken of. One fact that could be stated with confidence, Mr Crome assured his fellow-servants: long ago the dancing-master would have shaken the dust of Skibbereen from his heels. ‘And who’d blame him?’ Thomas muttered, chewing hard on gristle until surreptitiously he took it from his mouth.

That was the last time in the dining-room next to the kitchen, or anywhere else where the servants conversed, that the visit of the dancing-master to Skenakilla House was talked about. The event passed into the shadows of their memory, the gathering in the drawing-room touched in the recall of some with tedium. Other instances more readily claimed attention: heatwaves and storms, winter nights that froze the pump in the yard, props made for two of the cherry trees.