Only Thomasina Durcan and Miss Murphy called him Mr Condon, Thomasina Durcan because any other mode of address might have sounded forward, Miss Murphy for reasons he had never been able to fathom.
‘Would it be the way it was washed, Miss Murphy? Was it put into a machine?’
‘Oh, it would have been washed all right, Mr Condon. Naturally you’d expect it to have been washed.’
‘No, I mean in a machine though. Or maybe it got boiled in error. It’s all tinged with blue, look. Some blue garment has run into it.’
‘It would save an argument with the customer, Mr Condon, if you replaced it. It’s good for business when something gets replaced.’
Justin made a note in his order book and said that Miss Murphy would have a replacement within a fortnight. He had a new line he wanted to show her, he added, and displayed for her the sample he had displayed for fifty-seven other drapers, including the McGurks, since he’d left Dublin. Miss Murphy picked it up gingerly.
‘It comes in a peach, Miss Murphy, and a coffee. The gusset is guaranteed sturdy. Man-made fibre.’
‘I never saw that type of cut before.’
‘It’s the fashion in Dublin.’
Miss Murphy shook her head. She folded the piece of clothing in a professional manner and Justin returned it to the suitcase in which he carried his samples. Miss Murphy ordered a supply of summer vests and made arrangements to replenish her stock of first-communion stockings. ‘Is your father fit?’ she asked as Justin closed his order book, and for the first time since he had known Miss Murphy it idly occurred to him that she and his father might have had the same relationship as Fahy claimed to have with Mrs Keane. Miss Murphy was elderly now, a woman with a face like an arrow, with spectacles on a chain. Once she might have been pretty; it was odd that she had never married.
‘He’s grand,’ Justin said.
‘Remember me to him, will you?’
Her tone was different from Garda Bevan’s when he mentioned Justin’s father, different from the McGurks’ and all the other drapers’. Had there always been a hint of bitterness in Miss Murphy’s voice when she sent this message to his father? He looked up from the suitcase he was fastening and found her eyes upon him. They held his own until he felt embarrassed. He had noticed before that there was a similarity between his father and Fahy. They were both small men, rotund, bald-headed, pink-skinned, given to banter. He snapped the clasps on his suitcase and Miss Murphy turned away to attend another customer.
She made a cake, the banana cake he liked. Usually she wrapped in tinfoil what remained of it after their Sunday tea and he took it away to eat during the week, on his travels. She enjoyed thinking of him eating the cake, sitting out in the sunshine as he liked to do, in some quiet place.
Slowly she chopped up two bananas. He had belonged to them as he never had to his parents. On Sunday afternoons and again on Wednesdays they had been a family. She left the kitchen and in her sitting-room she delicately placed the needle on the same worn record of John Count McCormack singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’. Soon she would die, as the old priest had, six months ago. She would fall down, or she would die in her sleep. And before any of it happened she might become muzzy in her thoughts, unable to explain to Justin Condon and properly to ask for his forgiveness. Father Finn had known also in the end, death banishing his illusions. ‘We did a terrible thing,’ the old priest had said, sending for her specially.
The record came to an end and she sat there for a moment longer, listening to the scratchy sound of the needle. She had once, long before the child had come into her life, tried to become Father Finn’s housekeeper. ‘Ah no, no,’ he had murmured, gently rejecting her because it wouldn’t have done.
‘Arid how were things in West Waterford?’ his father inquired. ‘Has Joe Bolger retired from Merrick’s?’
Glistening, as if he had just scrubbed his face with a nailbrush, Mr Condon held a glass of whiskey in his right hand. As well as his face, the backs of his hands glistened, as did his glasses, his even false teeth, the dome of his hairless head. Justin imagined him with Miss Murphy in her shop, telling a joke, driving out into the country with Miss Murphy when it was dark, the way Fahy said he’d had to with some woman in Claremorris before he got going with Mrs Keane.
‘I didn’t see Joe Bolger,’ Justin said. ‘I think maybe he’s retired.’
‘I always liked West Waterford.’
They were in the sitting-room. His father was standing in front of a coal fire that was too hot for the time of year. In the kitchen Justin’s mother was frying their evening meal. Recently Mr Condon had taken to giving himself a glass of whiskey at a quarter to six in the evening instead of making his usual journey to McCauley’s at the corner. When he’d eaten his food he returned to the sitting-room and occupied the chair nearest the television, pouring himself another glass of whiskey at a quarter past seven. Justin’s mother said the whiskey was bad for him but he said it was doctor’s orders. ‘It’s ready for you,’ she shouted from the kitchen, reminding Justin of Thomasina Durcan calling out in Mrs Keane’s that the breakfast was ready.
‘I could eat an elephant,’ said Mr Condon, swallowing the last of his whiskey.
Between them, his brothers and sisters had brought thirty-seven children into existence: Justin often thought of that. At Christmas they all crowded into the house, shouting and quarrelling and reminding Justin of what the house had been like in his childhood. On Saturdays there were visits from one or another of those families, and on Sundays also.
‘There was a time I was below in Dungarvan,’ Mr Condon recalled in the kitchen, ‘the day Golden Miller won at Fairyhouse. Joe Bolger was footless behind the counter.’
Mrs Condon cut slices of loaf bread, and pushed the butter past her husband in Justin’s direction. Mr Condon had never been known to pass anyone anything.
‘God, you’d have died laughing.’ As if to lend greater verisimilitude to this claim, Mr Condon laughed rumbustiously himself, exposing egg and bread partially chewed. ‘He was handing out skeins of wool and not charging for it. He gave a gross of safety-pins to a farmer’s wife by the name of Mrs Quinn. “Sure, aren’t they always handy,” he said, “in case you’d have something falling down?” ’
Mrs Condon, who did not always care for her husband’s humour, asked what the weather had been like down the country. Justin replied that it had been fine.
‘There was another time,’ Mr Condon went on, ‘when the boys in the digs took poor Joe’s clothes when he was asleep in bed. I didn’t see it myself but didn’t he have to descend the stairs with the sheets on him?’
‘It rained on Wednesday,’ Mrs Condon said. ‘It didn’t cease the whole day.’
‘There Wasn’t a drop down the country.’
‘Well, isn’t that strange?’
‘It’s often that way.’
‘They say it’s settled in Dublin for the weekend.’
Mrs Condon was as thin as his Aunt Roche, with a worried look that Justin couldn’t remember her ever having been without. She wore flowered overalls even when she went shopping, beneath her black coat.
‘The wildest lads in West Waterford was in Joe Bolger’s digs,’ continued Mr Condon. ‘There wasn’t a trick they didn’t have knowledge of.’
Justin, who had heard about these exploits in West Waterford before, nodded. Mrs Condon poured more tea.
‘They went into the Bay Hotel one night when a pile of boxes containing young chicks had just come off the bus. Your men had them released in the hall before anyone could lift a hand. They had them flying up and down the stairs and into the dining-room, knocking down the sauce bottles. The next thing is, didn’t they have them fluttering about the bedrooms?’
‘You told us, Ger,’ Mrs Condon said.
‘I did of course. Didn’t I come back that Friday and go through the whole thing? It could kill you stone dead to wake up in your bedroom and find chickens squawking all over you.’