MUSIC WHEN SOFT VOICES DIE During the lunch hour the male clerks usually went out, leaving myself and the three girls behind. While they ate their sandwiches and drank their tea, they chattered away, thirteen to the dozen. Half their conversation I didn’t understand at all, and the other half bored me to tears. I usually drifted into the hallway with a Western. As a boy, I acted out whatever I was reading—taking steady aim, drawing rein, spurring to the rescue, and clutching at my shoulder where an Indian arrow had lodged—and the girls interrupted me with their comments. They were nice girls, though. Joan, who was nineteen, was my favourite. She was masterful and warmhearted; she would take my part when I got in trouble, and whenever she saw me with the sign of tears, she would put her arm round me and say, ‘Look, Larry—you tell Mr Scally if he says _another_ word to you, I’ll tear his _eyes_ out.’ She talked like that, all in italics. I liked Nora, too, but not so much. Sometimes she was very sweet and sometimes she didn’t see you, and you never knew which it would be. Marie I didn’t really like at all in those days. She was the prettiest of the three—thin, tall, and nunlike, with a queer stiff way of holding herself and an ironic intonation in her beautiful voice. Marie usually just didn’t see you. I thought she was an old snob. The three girls had fellows, and I knew these, too, mostly from seeing them hang about the office in the evening. Joan was going with a long-haired medical student called Mick Shea, with no hat and no religion, and she was always making novenas for his conversion. Nora went with a dressy fellow in Montenotte, the classy quarter of Cork, but she had a sort of underground understanding with a good-looking postman called Paddy Lacy, who used to stop me in the street and give me gallant messages for her. She never walked out with him that I knew of, but he was certain she loved him, and it shocked me that a superior fellow like a postman would not have more sense. Marie was going strong with a chap called Jim Holbrook, a rather snobbish intellectual type, who lived up my way. Thirty years has turned the girls and myself into old friends. Only Nora is still at the office. Joan owns a private hotel, and Marie is the harassed mother of two wild children. She is still beautiful, sedate, and caustic. Not one word of their conversation ever seemed to register in my memory, which was full of valuable information about American states and Indian nations, wigwams, colts, derringers, and coyotes; yet now that I cannot remember anything of what I read, it seems to me that I can hear the girls as though they were in the same room with me, like the voices of Shelley’s poem, trembling on the edge of pure music. ‘Do you know, I have a _great_ admiration for that girl?’ Joan begins in her eager italics. ‘Go on!’ Nora says lightly. ‘What did she do?’ ‘I admire her pluck, Nora,’ Joan says, emphasizing three syllables out of seven. ‘When I think what she went through!’ ‘Ah, for God’s sake, what did she go through?’ Nora asks sceptically. ‘That’s all you know, Nora,’ Joan says in a blood curdling voice. ‘You never had an illegitimate kid to support, and Susie had.’ ‘Good job, too,’ Nora says. ‘I can’t support myself.’ ‘What did you say she had, Joan?’ Marie asks incredulously. ‘A kid.’ ‘Well!’ Marie exclaims, looking brightly from one to the other. ‘The friends some people have!’ ‘Oh, it’s true, Marie.’ ‘That’s what makes it so peculiar, Joan,’ Marie says with a shrug. ‘What did she do with it?’ Nora asks inquisitively. ‘I suppose I really shouldn’t say it, Nora, but of course it’s really no secret. With the way the police watch girls like that, everything leaks out eventually. She had to farm him out in Rochestown. He must be about twelve now.’ ‘And does he know who his mother is?’ asks Nora. ‘Not at all, girl,’ says Joan. ‘How could she tell him? I suppose she’s never even seen him. Gosh, I’m sorry for that girl! ‘I’d be sorrier for the kid,’ Nora says. ‘Oh, I know, Nora, I know,’ Joan says earnestly. ‘But what could the poor girl do? I mean, what would we do if we were in her place?’ And now that the voices grow clearer in my mind, I realize that Joan is the leader of the trio. It is she who sets the tempo, and it is her violin that holds it all together. Marie, with her deep beautiful voice, is the viola; Nora, for all that her voice sounds thin and squeaky, is the cello. ‘Honestly, Joan, the things you say!’ Marie cries, but without indignation. Marie sometimes behaves as though Joan is not really right in the head, and manages to suggest that she herself alone, with her nunlike air and caustic tongue, represents normality. But Joan, who believes that Marie cultivates a blind spot for anything it doesn’t suit her to see, only smiles knowingly. ‘Well, we’re all human, girl,’ she says. ‘Ah, nonsense, Joan!’ says Marie. ‘There must be something wrong with a girl like that.’ ‘There’s something wrong with every girl or else she’d be a man,’ says Nora. ‘Ah, with the best will in the world, girl, I couldn’t imagine myself going on like that,’ says Marie. ‘I suppose I mustn’t be human,’ she adds with a shrug, meaning that if this is what it’s like to be human, so much the worse for humanity. ‘Of course,’ she ends, to show she has feelings, like anyone else, ‘we all like a bit of sport, but that’s different.’ ‘Oh, but it’s not different, Marie,’ Joan says warmly, and again the fiddle proclaims the theme. ‘That’s where you make your big, mistake, what you call “a bit of sport” is only a matter of degree. God knows, I’m not what you’d call a public menace, but if I didn’t watch my step, I could very easily see it happening to me.’ ‘So could I,’ Nora says, and then begins to blush. ‘And I don’t know what I’d do about it, either.’ ‘Well, what could you do?’ asks Marie. ‘Assuming that such a thing could happen, which is assuming quite a lot.’ ‘I suppose I’d have to go to England and have it there,’ says Nora gloomily. ‘England?’ says Marie. ‘That would be all right if you knew someone in England, Nora,’ says Joan. ‘I mean, someone you could rely on.’ ‘“All right”?’ echoes Marie. ‘I should think starting life again in a foreign country with a baby, like that, would hardly be described as “all right”. Or maybe I’m lacking in initiative?’ ‘Well, it would either be that or make him marry you,’ says Nora. ‘I was wondering when you’d think of marriage,’ says Marie. ‘That mightn’t be as easy as it sounds, either, Marie,’ says Joan. ‘I think Nora means the fellow wouldn’t want to marry you.’ ‘Yes, and I think it’s rotten!’ says Nora. ‘A fellow pretending to a girl that she’s the only thing in the world he cares for, till she makes a fool of herself for him, and then he cuts his hook.’ ‘Well,’ Joan says practically, ‘I suppose we’re all the same when we get what we want.’ ‘If that’s all a man wants, couldn’t somebody give it to him on a spoon?’ says Nora. ‘I’d simply say in a case like that that the man began to see what sort the girl was,’ Marie says, having completely misunderstood Nora’s remark. ‘And what sort would you say he was?’ Nora asks. ‘Ah, well,’ Marie replies comfortably, ‘that’s different, Nora. Considering the sort of sheltered lives women lead, it’s up to them to set a standard. You can’t expect the same sort of thing from men. Of course, I think he should be made to marry her.’ ‘But who’d make him, Marie?’ asks Joan. ‘Well, I suppose his family would, if it was for nothing but to avoid a scandal.’ ‘Ask any mother in Cork would she sooner a scandal or a daughter-in-law,’ Nora says cynically. ‘Then of course the priest would have to make him,’ says Marie, still unperturbed. ‘That’s what I find so hard to imagine, though,’ Joan says, and then her tone changes, and she becomes brilliant and mocking. ‘I mean, it’s all very well talking about it like this in the peace and quiet of the office, but imagine if I had to go up tonight after dark to the presbytery and talk to old Canon Cremin about it. “Excuse me, Canon, but I’ve been keeping company with a boy called Mick Shea, and it just so happens that he made a bit too free with me, and I was wondering would you ever mind running down and telling him to marry me.” Cripes, if I was the Canon, I’d take my stick to a one like that!’ ‘Lovely marriage ’twould be anyway,’ says Nora. ‘Exactly, Nora,’ Joan says, in her dramatic way, laying her hand on Nora’s arm. ‘That’s just what I mean. How on earth could you spend the rest of your life with a man after having to do that to get him to marry you?’ ‘How he could spend the rest of his life with me is what I’d be worrying about,’ says Nora. ‘After all, I’d be the one that was to blame.’ ‘Never mind about him at all, now, girl,’ Joan says with a jolly laugh. ‘It’s my own troubles that I’m thinking about. Honestly, do you know, I don’t think I could face it!’ ‘I’m full sure I couldn’t,’ says Nora, lighting a cigarette. ‘But what else could you do?’ Marie asks. She obviously thinks they are two very peculiar girls, and no wonder. They were peculiar, like all delightful girls. ‘Do you know, Marie,’ says Joan, ‘I think I’d sooner marry the first poor devil that came the way.’ ‘Aren’t you lucky, being able to pick them up like that?’ Marie asks dryly. ‘Ah, well, Marie,’ says Joan, ‘a girl would be in a bad way entirely if there wasn’t one man that would take her on.’ ‘Like Paddy Lacy,’ says Nora, with a giggle. ‘He stopped me on the road the other day while he was delivering the letters, and I declare to God I didn’t know which way to look.’ ‘I see,’ says Marie. ‘So that’s why you keep Paddy Lacy on. I was wondering about that.’ ‘You needn’t,’ Nora says with sudden temper. ‘I’m pretty sure Paddy Lacy would be just as tough as the rest of them if I went along and told him a thing like that.’ ‘But why would you have to tell him, Nora?’ Joan asks anxiously. ‘Wouldn’t you let him find out for himself?’ ‘And a nice situation I’d be in when he did!’ ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure,’ Joan says with another laugh. ‘Before a man made up his mind about a thing like that, I’d like him to have a chance of seeing the full beauty of my character. Like the boatman in Glengarriff, I’m at my best on a long stretch.’ ‘I think I’d as soon live with a man I forced to marry me as one I tricked into marrying me,’ Nora says. ‘And I’d sooner do either than what your pal did—farm out a child. I don’t think I’d ever have a day’s luck after.’ ‘Now, you’re misjudging the girl there, Nora,’ Joan says earnestly. ‘You are, really! It’s not the same thing when you never have the chance of getting attached to a child. And when there isn’t a blessed thing you can do about it, I don’t honestly believe that there’s any moral responsibility.’ ‘Responsibility?’ Nora says, getting up. ‘Who’s talking about responsibility? I’d live in dread of my own shadow for the rest of my days. I wouldn’t be able to see a barefooted kid in the street without getting sick. Every knock that came to the door, I’d be in dread to open it. Every body that was picked out of the river, I’d feel it was my kid, and I was the one to blame. For God’s sake, don’t talk to me!’ ‘There’s another cup of tea left, Nora,’ Joan says, a little too brightly. ‘Would you like it?’ ‘In a minute, Joan,’ says Nora, and goes out to the Ladies’. When she returns a few minutes later, she looks as though she had been crying. To me it is a great mystery, because no one speaks crossly to her. I assume that, like myself, she has a father who drinks. ‘Cripes, I’m sorry for poor May Jenkins,’ Joan begins on another day, after Nora has poured out the tea. That is her time for a new theme, when there is no serious danger of interruption. ‘Who’s she when she’s at home?’ Nora asks lightly. ‘May Jenkins? You’d hardly know her, Norah. She’s from the south side.’ ‘And what ails her now didn’t ail her before?’ asks Nora, who is full of local quips and phrases. ‘Oh, the usual thing,’ says Joan with a shrug. ‘Phil Macken, her husband, is knocking round with the Archer girl, on the Wellington Road—the Yellow Peril.’ ‘Really, Joan,’ Marie says, ‘I don’t know where you come across all those extraordinary people.’ ‘I don’t see what’s so extraordinary about that at all,’ Nora says. ‘People are always doing it.’ ‘And people are always getting terrible diseases, only we don’t go out of our way to inquire,’ says Marie primly. ‘Really, there must be something wrong with a woman like that.’ ‘Like May, Marie?’ Joan asks in mock surprise. ‘No, like that other creature—whatever you said her name was.’ ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that at all, Marie,’ says Joan. ‘Some very respectable people live on the Wellington Road. And a lot of men find her attractive.’ ‘Then there must be something wrong with the men.’ ‘Or the wife, why don’t you say?’ cries Nora. ‘Or the wife,’ Marie agrees, with perfect placidity. ‘She should be able to mind her own husband.’ ‘She’d want roller skates,’ says Joan, and again I hear the high note of the violin, driving the trio onward. ‘No, Marie, girl,’ she says, resting her chin on her hands, ‘you have to face the facts. A lot of women do get unattractive after marriage. Of course, I’m not blaming them. We’d be the same ourselves, with kids to mind and jobs to do. They can’t waste time dancing and dolling themselves up like Maeve Archer, and if they did, their houses would soon show it. You see, it’s something we all have to be prepared for.’ ‘If I felt that way, Joan, I’d go into a convent,’ Marie says severely. ‘But after all, Marie,’ says Joan, ‘what could you do? Suppose you were married to Jim and a thing like that happened?’ ‘What could I do?’ Marie echoes, smiling at the thought of anything of the sort happening with Jim. ‘Well, I suppose I could walk out of the house.’ ‘Ah, come now, Marie,’ Joan says. ‘It’s not as easy as all that. Where would you walk to, in the first place?’ ‘What’s wrong with going home?’ ‘With a houseful of kids?’ says Joan. ‘Of course, I know your father is very fond of you and all the rest of it, but all the same, we have to be reasonable.’ ‘I could go somewhere else,’ says Marie. ‘After all, Jim would have to support me—and the kids, as you say.’ ‘Of course he would. That’s if you didn’t mind spending the rest of your days as a grass widow. You know, Marie, I saw one or two women who did that, and it didn’t look too promising to me. No, in the way of husbands and fathers and so on, I don’t think you can beat men. A dog won’t do.’ ‘But do you mean you’d let him go on seeing a filthy creature like that?’ asks Marie. ‘Really, Joan, I don’t think you can be serious.’ ‘Oh, I never said that,’ Joan says hastily, ‘I’m sure I’d make it pretty uncomfortable for him.’ ‘Which mightn’t be such a bad way of making the other woman more attractive,’ Nora says dryly. ‘Oh, we all know what Nora would do,’ Joan retorts with affectionate mockery. ‘She’d sit down and have a good cry. Wouldn’t you, love?’ ‘I might,’ Nora replies doubtfully. ‘I’d sooner that than calling in the neighbours.’ ‘Oh, I admit you’d have to keep your dignity, Nora, Marie says, being particularly susceptible to any appeal to her ladyhood. ‘But surely someone would have to interfere.’ ‘I saw too much interference, Marie,’ Nora says grimly. ‘It’s mad enough thinking you can spend your whole life with a man and still be in love with him, but ’tis dotty entirely if you imagine you can do it with half Cork acting as referee.’ ‘All the same, Nora,’ Joan says, in her practical way, ‘before I saw a woman like that making off with a husband of mine, I’d get a fistful of her hair, and I wouldn’t mind who knew it, either. I’d read and spell her, I give you my word,’ ‘I certainly wouldn’t degrade myself by quarrelling with a creature like that,’ says Marie. ‘I wouldn’t have the nerve,’ says Nora, lighting a cigarette. ‘Look, it’s all very well to talk about it like that, but suppose it was the other way around? Suppose you were making a fool of yourself over another man, and your husband disgraced you all over Cork by fighting him?’ ‘Really, Nora,’ says Marie, with her Mona Lisa smile, ‘you have a remarkably vivid imagination,’ ‘Oh, I don’t know that that’s all imagination, either, Marie,’ says Joan, who enjoys nothing better than imagining things. ‘That could happen, too, mind you!’ ‘But that would make you no better than the woman you’re just talking about,’ says Marie. ‘Who said we were any better?’ asks Nora. ‘I might be worse, for all anyone knows.’ ‘But do you know, Nora,’ Joan says, ‘I’m not at all sure but I’d like Mick to do it.’ ‘To shame you all over Cork?’ Nora asks. ‘Oh, no. Just to stand up for his rights. Nobody wants a doormat.’ ‘Give me doormats every time,’ says Nora, with a sinister pull at her cigarette. ‘But, Nora,’ Marie asks in horror, ‘you don’t mean you’d just sit at home and do nothing?’ ‘I don’t know, girl. What could you do?’ ‘And wait till he changed his mind and came back to you?’ ‘Maybe,’ says Nora, with a shrug. ‘I mightn’t be there when he got back. I might have a fellow, too.’ ‘Really,’ Marie says, scratching her long neck. ‘I’m beginning to see a number of uses for this Paddy Lacy of yours.’ ‘That’s where women have the worst of it,’ Joan says quickly, to head off a reply from Nora about Paddy Lacy. ‘It’s not as easy for a married woman with a couple of kids to find someone to go off with. It’s too chancy giving children a stepfather, no matter how fond you might be of him. No, what I can’t imagine,’ she adds earnestly, ‘is what you’d do when he did change his mind. I often wonder could you ever behave in the same way to him.’ ‘Of course not, Joan,’ Marie says. ‘Naturally, if there were children, I could understand remaining in the same house with him, just for their sake, but living with him as husband and wife is a thing I could never imagine doing.’ ‘Ah, now, Marie, you’re a girl of great character,’ Joan says, ‘but that sounds to me too much like giving up sweets in a sweetshop. Of course, I know people do it when they get tired of one another, but it never seems natural to me. I wouldn’t do it just for fun,’ she adds gravely. ‘I’d want to be pretty sure that he was still fond of me.’ ‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t have much faith in the affections of a man like that,’ Marie says. ‘What about you, Nora?’ Joan asks. ‘Me? Nora says, blushing. ‘Oh, I suppose ’twould depend.’ ‘You mean, depend on how he behaved to you?’ ‘Yes,’ Nora replies with a frightened air. ‘And how he behaved to the other one.’ ‘Well, really, Nora, this is going beyond the beyonds!’ Marie exclaims, putting down her cup with a ladylike air of finality. ‘Are we supposed to take her feelings into consideration as well?’ ‘I suppose she might have feelings, too?’ Nora replies gloomily. ‘I know what Nora would do!’ Joan says triumphantly, bringing her hand down flat on the table. ‘I know it just as if I was there. She’d tell her husband to go to blazes, and skelp off to the other woman’s house to console her.’ ‘By the way she’s talking, it sounds as if she’d leave her husband and live with the other one,’ Marie says. ‘I might even do that,’ says Nora, moving towards the door. ‘Ah, go on, girl!’ Joan says boisterously. ‘Don’t you know we’re only making fun of you? I know what’s going to happen to you,’ she adds comfortingly. ‘You’ll marry a fine steady slob of a man that’ll stick his two heels on the mantelpiece and never look at the side of the road another woman is walking at. Look, there’s a cup of tea in the pot still’ ‘I don’t want it, Joanie, thanks,’ says Nora, and goes off to the Ladies’. Marie gives a shrug. ‘For an intelligent girl, Nora does talk the most extraordinary nonsense,’ she says with finality. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t be too sure it was nonsense, Marie,’ Joan says, in her loyal way. ‘I think Nora might surprise us all.’ But Nora, worse luck, has never had the opportunity of surprising anyone; nor has Joan—two fine women who have never met with men astute enough to grab them. As for Marie, she rules her husband gently but firmly, like a reverend mother dealing with a rather dull undergardener. Of the three, she is now the one I am most intimate with. Sometimes I even think that if I were to forget myself and make advances to her, instead of slapping my face indignantly she would only laugh and say, ‘Ah, Larry, will you have a bit of sense?—which from Marie would be almost like a declaration of love. And I think the reason is that like me, she hears those voices ‘vibrate in the memory’ and wonders over them. ‘Ah, Larry,’ she says, grabbing me eagerly by the hands, ‘do you remember all the old nonsense we used to talk in the office, and Joan saying what she’d do with an illegitimate baby, and me saying what I’d do if Jim went off with another woman? And look at us now—three old women!’ No doubt she realized that she can afford to say things like that to me, for while the music of those voices lingers in my mind she and they will never be old. (1958)