LIAM AND AINE wanted a summer wedding, but the old man was ill in the spring, and he decided he would see his daughter married before he died. I suppose in the days that followed, he regretted his haste: when Aine came home, on the night of her wedding, and moved back into her old room, she hung up her gown in her mother’s wardrobe, alongside the dead woman’s dresses, and Tommy sat in the kitchen, drinking whiskey till four in the morning, while the rain lashed at the windows, and no word came from Liam, or from those who were out looking for him. Aine didn’t go out for several weeks after the wedding, and it broke Tommy’s heart to see her, sitting in the front room, staring into space, pretending she was reading a book, or watching television. At the club, he’d say Liam Moone was a bad lot, that he’d always known there was something funny about him, but he never said this in front of Aine. He knew she was grieving; besides, he had liked Liam, everybody knew that, and they knew he was just as bewildered by what had happened as anybody else.
Liam Moone was quiet and easy-going, and something of a mystery, in his way. He liked a drink, but I never saw him drunk, and all the time he was engaged to Aine, he never looked at another woman. I knew him as well as anyone, I suppose – which wasn’t much. I knew old Tommy too, and that was how I came to play at the wedding – the old man and Liam had agreed that it ought to be a traditional affair, good music and a spot of dancing to make it a day to remember. I used to play at the club on a Friday night – Friday Night is Irish Night, the posters would say, and what that meant was me on the fiddle, Mickey Doyle on whistle and pipes and Pat Lavin on guitars. Sometimes Pat did a bit of singing, and Kevin McReynolds played drums if he was free. I didn’t usually do weddings, but Tommy said he wanted the authentic sound, and he wasn’t going to settle for anyone else. The funny thing was, our sound was far from authentic – some old-fashioned Irish tunes, certainly, but as much country and western as anything else, mixed up with a bit of sixties, and some Van Morrison covers for the younger crowd. Still, I wasn’t going to argue; I knew I could use the money. I rehearsed some of the old songs with Pat, and Mickey said he could get us a proper singer, a friend of his sister’s from college, called Cathy O’Brien. It rained for days before the wedding. There was flooding at Fulbrook and that morning, when we got to the club, there were inch-deep puddles all over the car park.
We pulled up as close to the door as we could but we still got pretty damp as we unloaded the gear.
‘What a day for a wedding,’ Pat said.
I looked at the sky. There was no sign of it letting up.
‘Never mind,’ I replied. ‘As long as Aine’s happy.’
‘As long as Tommy’s happy, more like,’ said Pat.
I’d seen Aine in town the day before. I’d always had a soft spot for her at school, but that afternoon she looked more beautiful than ever, and I experienced a twinge of jealousy when I met her, with one of her bridesmaids, her hair tied back with a pale-blue ribbon, her face damp with rain.
Mickey brought our new singer round while we were setting up. She was tall and slim, with curly dark hair and a light in her eyes, a gladness about her that was contagious. She’d dressed for the occasion – which was more than could be said for Mickey, in his sweatshirt and cords.
‘Did you forget it was a wedding, Mick?’ Pat asked him, but Mickey just smiled and shook his head.
It was raining even harder when the guests arrived, and there was a great coming and going with umbrellas to get them indoors without spoiling the dresses. Aine looked radiant and Liam was quite the new husband, smiling and shaking hands, and posing for pictures with the bridesmaids. We played for a while, then they all went through to the dining room for the food and the speeches, and I stepped out into the foyer for a quiet cigarette.
I’ve always enjoyed those moments, when I get away from the crowd and stand in a corridor or a car park somewhere, watching the rain or listening to the birds and the traffic. The foyer was narrow and dim: at one end, near the window, an array of notice boards was covered twice over with lists of football teams and announcements of charity events. Nobody ever bothered to take any of these down, they just pinned the new stuff over the top. I was standing there, idly reading a report on a recent sponsored walk, when I heard a voice behind me.
‘Do you play requests, mister?’
I looked round to see who it was, but the woman who had spoken was nobody I recognised. She was small and thin and she had a contained look about her, the look animals sometimes have in zoos – the small cats, the hunters. Yet her eyes were bright, alive and shiny and compelling.
‘That depends,’ I said.
‘On what?’ There was a challenge in her voice, and I suspected she was slightly drunk.
‘On who’s asking,’ I answered quietly.
‘It doesn’t matter who’s asking,’ she said, with a smile. ‘All that matters is the song.’
‘And what would the song be?’ I asked.
‘“She Moved Through the Fair.”’
‘I don’t think I know you,’ I said. ‘Are you a friend of the bride’s?’
She laughed.
‘No,’ she said. ‘A friend of the groom’s. An old friend.’
‘Ah.’ I studied her face. By now I was certain she was nobody I had ever met, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t an invited guest at this wedding.
‘Do you like weddings?’ I asked her. I was trying to distract her from her request and, at the same time, I was intrigued by her, especially by her voice, and that light in her eyes.
‘They’re all right. Though I’m not sure about this one. My old man would always say he preferred a good funeral to a wedding. I mean – there’s always the promise of tragedy when two people come together. Whereas, with a funeral, the tragedy’s over and you can relax. At least that’s what my old man used to say.’
She laughed softly.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
I didn’t say anything. We stood in silence for a moment, our presences drowned out by the sound and the darkness of the rain, then she glanced towards the dining room.
‘Play the song,’ she said. ‘Get your girl to sing it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think it’s appropriate.’
‘Oh, it’s appropriate,’ she replied. ‘It’s entirely appropriate.’
She smiled again, then turned and walked to the door at the far end of the foyer, and stepped outside into the dark wet of the afternoon.
The guests emerged from the dining room in twos and threes, wanting music and drink, crowding to the bar, or sitting at the tables around the edge of the room, talking and smoking and working up the energy for a dance. Liam and Aine were the first on to the floor, then the others followed, men cutting in and dancing with the bride, while Liam stood by, grinning, with his hands thrust into his trouser pockets. I’d almost forgotten the strange woman – she wasn’t there in the hall, and I’d started to put it all down to a bad joke when, about an hour after the dancing started, the woman appeared in the doorway. Slowly, she worked her way across the room, finding gaps between the dancers, circling and shifting around, till she stood at the edge of the stage, looking up at me.
‘You haven’t played my song,’ she called out, after we’d finished our number. By now, I was certain she was a gatecrasher, and I was just about to lean down and tell her she should go, when I caught sight of Liam, watching her. He was standing at the edge of the dance floor about ten yards away. A moment before, he’d been flushed and happy, pleased with himself, letting somebody else dance with the bride. Now, all of a sudden, his face was drained of colour and he was staring at the woman, his mouth half-open, as if he wanted to speak, or cry out to her across the noisy dance floor.
The woman saw me looking and turned. Then she laughed and spoke to me again.
‘I’m a friend of Liam’s,’ she said. ‘The song’s for him. For old time’s sake.’
The others were starting up behind me. In any other circumstances, I would have said something to humour her, to get her away from the stage, but from the look on Liam’s face, and from something in her manner, I knew there would be a scene unless I did what she wanted.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘What was it again?’
She smiled and shook her head.
‘You know what it was,’ she said.
I straightened up and turned to Cathy. She was standing with her head to one side, listening, as if she were miles away, but I was pretty sure she’d overheard the whole conversation.
‘Can you sing “She Moved Through the Fair?”’ I asked her.
‘What, now?’
I nodded.
‘It’s a bit of a change of pace,’ she said.
‘It’s a request,’ I replied. ‘A friend of the groom.’
‘All right, then.’ She glanced down at the crowd of dancers, gave me a look that was meant to say on your head be it, swung her hair back and stepped up to the mike.
‘We’re going to slow it down a little now, folks,’ she said.
People had stopped dancing and were turned to the stage now, watching us curiously. I suppose they imagined there was a trick coming, or another speech from the bride’s father. Some looked a little fazed when I played the intro, and Cathy closed her eyes and began singing, while Pat and Mickey put up their instruments.
I glanced across at Liam. He was standing away from the crowd now, his head bowed, so I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he was listening. The others were listening too; after the initial surprise, they had fallen into the mood, and they seemed to appreciate the introduction of this melancholy note, a moment for thoughts and memories, and a sweet, fleeting sadness. Half of them were homesick for places they had never known, for fishing towns and dairy farms they had only seen in pictures, or glimpsed from a car on a two-week holiday to Kerry or Donegal. They knew home existed somewhere, but they weren’t quite sure what it was. It was only a dream of belonging, but it was the best they had, and if Cathy gave them an illusion of kinship for a few minutes, they were happy to take what they could, and not think too hard about it. For the first time that day, I realised how fine her voice was. She struck just the right tone, haunting and mysterious, yet suitably distant, as if she belonged to another time, or to no time or place at all. It was as if nothing mattered in this world where we found ourselves: everything was a story, a fragment of dreaming. I looked around for the woman I’d met in the foyer, but she had gone and, when I turned to where Liam had been standing, I saw that he too had vanished. I looked for Aine. She was standing by her father, holding his arm, swaying to the music. She seemed not to have noticed her new husband’s disappearance, and I only hoped that Liam would get rid of his woman and come back, before anyone else figured out what was going on.
The old stories have endings, even when they’re mysterious or frightening. That’s how it is in the old country, things always happen a generation away and the people of that time are always capable of improbable shifts and transformations. When the strange girl comes to the farmer’s bed, just as she promised, the neighbours hear his cry for miles in the snowy dusk, and that night, over the fields, they see wandering fires, pale and wet and subtle in the moonlight, as the fox people come to the chosen house for their yearly feast. Or perhaps a man comes up from the sea, and lives in their midst all winter: wherever he goes, there’s a shadow beside him, the colour of something hard and misshapen that has lain years underwater; his eyes are bright and green, some people say his fingers are webbed or his skin is smooth and silvery, like fish-scales. He bides his time till Candlemas, then he leaves and one of the village girls follows him into the fog. Her sand-filled dress is discovered at daybreak, between the lines of fishnets and the sea, or an old man finds her, crouched in the lee of his upturned boat; she is wild-eyed, speechless, old before her time. Nine months later a child is born, and it lies silent in its crib, unwanted, gazing through a veil of eelskin. In the old country, our sins and errors are turned into stories of transformation. There’s no room for judgment.
The old stories have endings, but our lives aren’t like that – they’re messy and inconclusive, and sometimes people disappear for no reason. I wish I could say for sure what happened to Liam. I heard rumours – that he’d been hurt in a disturbance at a squat, that he’d cut someone in a fight outside a bar. I heard that two other men and a woman were involved, but nobody knew the details. I only heard these things months after the wedding and, as far as I knew, Aine was unaware of what was going on. When Tommy died, she inherited the house and quite a bit of money – a lot more than anyone had expected. She didn’t get a divorce; she didn’t go out with other men; she stayed at home, and it seemed to me she was waiting for him to return, even though she knew he never would. I used to go round and see her sometimes, and she’d welcome me in, give me a cup of tea, and listen to my stories about the band, and how well we were doing. She never once mentioned Liam. I think she managed to convince herself, at least some of the time, that he’d disappeared into one of those old stories and, if he had, then an ending would come, sooner or later. I think she imagined him travelling in the dark, caught up in some strange magic that nobody could have resisted, or even explained. He wanted to come home, he just didn’t know how. Maybe what really happened was even a little like that: seen from a distance, it would be ugly, but close-up, in his own mind, it probably felt like something else, like part of a story that could only be told in a lie, or a fairy tale, or the words of an old-time song.