Music

“He was angry with himself

for being young and the prey

of restless foolish impulses . . .”

James Joyce

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man



H AND RAISED IN FAREWELL , Meg stood in the driveway of the Bay Point and watched Niall pull the white Peugeot back onto the road. Barely an instant later, the front door of the bed-and-breakfast opened, and Fergal and Ari bustled out to join her. Meg’s mother trailed them as far as the top of the stairs, where she stopped with her arms wrapped around her waist, the ends of the brilliant red and pink pashmina wound around her shoulders streaming like a battle flag in the wind. Seeing her there, Meg tamped down a muddle of love and irritation, given that it was not quite five o’clock and the cable car back and forth to Dursey ran till eight. Talking to Niall had renewed her awareness that she needed to do more for her mother, but honestly, she was exhausted, too. She’d been craving time to herself, a chapter or two of a good book, a chance to breathe.

“How are you?” Fergal and Ari both said at once.

“Good as new,” Meg responded. “The doctor was great.”

Fergal stopped beside her. “We couldn’t believe when we heard what had happened. Adam’s a good lad, mostly.” Stooping from his great height, he caught her chin in his long-boned hand, turning her face this way and that to examine the tiny stitches visible on the surface. “But they did a grand job—I’ve seen designer clothing that wasn’t as carefully stitched as this, and you’re still gorgeous as ever.”

“Well, so I’d hope.” Ari wound her elbow through Meg’s arm, her warm smile revealing one front tooth that overlapped the other. “Come inside. Have a drink and relax and let us spoil you a little. The rain will start coming down any minute, and you must be parched after spending the day in the car and in the hospital. It’s a shame Niall’s rushed off already. They never get to have fun, those two. And poor Adam stuck out there—at his age—without the internet. Is it any wonder he loses his temper now and then?”

Meg thought of how Adam had disappeared into his music most of the day. Avoiding silence, but also avoiding conversation. But of the two, she suspected it was Niall who was even more broken by the guilt and the loss of his twin after Siobhan’s death. Losing a twin—Meg couldn’t even imagine that.

She thought of her own sisters, the hard push and pull that came with being family. As the eldest, she had somehow abdicated the responsibility to rebel most of her life, always trying too hard, trying to keep her mother happy— make her mother happy—which she was only lately realizing shouldn’t have been her responsibility. Katharine had been the polar opposite, never caring what anyone thought, and Anna? She had traded-in trying to please their mother in her early teens and had instead become a lawyer to please their father. Funny that both Meg and Anna had thought it was their own dreams they were pursuing all that time. Then Anna had met her husband, Connal, and his daughter and realized what she thought she wanted hadn’t been all she’d hoped. It had taken Meg a little longer to figure that out.

The thought stole her breath away. Where had it come from?

She still wanted her career. She’d been happy.

She was happy.

As if to prove that to herself, she smiled and looped her arm through her mother’s as they went up the stairs. “So, how was the dig? Fun? Anything like what you remembered?”

“Never mind that, what did the doctors tell you?” Ailsa asked.

“Nothing much. I’ll be fine.”

Her mother studied her cheek with a critical eye. “It doesn’t look too bad, I’ll admit. That’s a relief. If it leaves a scar, at least you should be able to cover it with makeup. Honestly, that boy. What were you thinking, trying to stop him like that? It could all have been much worse.”

“It could have, but it wasn’t. It was my own fault, and Adam’s just lost his mother. She died five weeks ago in a car accident, so he deserves our sympathy.”

Her mother pursed her lips. “That’s just like you, isn’t it? He pushes you, but it isn’t his fault. Nothing’s ever anyone’s fault these days. That’s the problem. No accountability. No sense of responsibility. Everyone does exactly as they like.”

Meg stumbled on the threshold. Coming from her mother, that was rich. “That’s not fair—I don’t think it’s any different from how it used to be. People make mistakes. You weren’t much older than Adam when you got pregnant.”

“That’s not remotely the same thing.” Ailsa whipped around to look at her.

Meg sighed and shook her head, craving a glass of wine. “If you say so.” She smiled at Ari and Fergal, who had paused in the entrance to the bar area to wait for them. “We need to make allowances, that’s all I’m saying. Glass houses and all of that.”

Her mother glanced away. “Do you want a shower before dinner? Or we could eat now. It’s early yet, so it’s up to you.”

Meg doubted that she’d have the energy to emerge from her room again if she took the time for a shower, and on top of that, she suspected her mother wanted to talk. As it was, she’d had to go to the dig by herself and meet the other volunteers knowing no one, face the very thing she had been trying to avoid, the reason she had brought Meg to Ireland with her. She was probably dying to talk about it, and it was the least Meg could do. “Let’s go ahead and eat. I’m getting a little hungry.”

A few minutes later, seated in the quiet dining room with its enormous windows that overlooked the steel gray sea and the clouds that had burst into a steady rain, she tried to keep her attention from drifting off as her mother swirled wine in her glass and provided a person-by-person narrative about the staff and volunteers, most of whom were college students or recent college graduates. Ailsa’s sharp observations were no more than her usual catalog of people’s flaws and weaknesses, but maybe because she was fighting to do a better job of listening, or maybe because she hadn’t heard her mother sum up a collection of strangers in quite some time, Meg couldn’t help feeling more uncomfortable than usual. Did her mother really see everyone as potential opponents whose vulnerabilities she needed to probe? It was a defensive view of the world, the perspective of a victim, someone under siege.

She’d never considered her mother in that light—never seen her from anything other than a position of strength. But the way people saw themselves and the way the world saw them were often very different.

“You’ve gone very quiet,” Ailsa noted, interrupting herself. “Did the doctor give you anything for the pain?”

“It’s just a little sore. No, this is exactly what I needed.” Meg raised her own glass, the deep bowl of it gleaming in the light and the pinot noir in it rich and dark and smooth. “The wine and the ocean and an opportunity to enjoy being here.”

“Hmm.” Ailsa studied her. “And what about Niall Sullivan? I hope you’re not thinking about him. I’ll admit he’s more attractive than I expected. I assumed the photograph on the website had been doctored up a bit.”

“I don’t see him as the type to doctor photographs.”

“Everyone’s that type these days. In academia and everywhere else. The cult of celebrity. I doubt he even has much choice if he wants to have a decent career.”

“He didn’t strike me as particularly ambitious, either. Just dedicated.”

“Well, Liam and Gemma sing his praises enough to make me wonder what’s wrong with him.”

“They could simply be telling the truth.”

“Oh, please. No one is ever that nice about anyone else unless they have an agenda. Probably hoping to talk us out of suing. They do seem to like him, though. Not that I’m sure you can necessarily trust their judgment. Why do otherwise intelligent people feel the need to deck themselves out in dreadlocks and tattoos? I’ll never understand that. Gemma could be very pretty, but those tattoos go from her wrists all the way up her arms. It must be a self-mutilation thing. Think what her poor mother must feel seeing her like that.”

“She might just be happy that her daughter’s happy. It’s Gemma’s body, after all, not her mother’s. Maybe she’s claiming it for herself. Asserting control. Expressing her creativity or her cultural or artistic identity. Honoring someone or something she loves. Proving she can take the pain involved. Did you ask her?”

Ailsa recoiled as if the idea set her back. “Why would I?”

“I don’t know. Conversation.” Meg took a slow sip of wine. “To find out the answer before judging someone.”

“I’m not judging. I never judge.”

Their server, a young woman with a high-bridged nose and a mass of dark, glossy hair pulled back in a single braid, arrived with their meal and saved Meg from having to answer that. For a brief respite, there was a flurry of activity and polite conversation, and even after the woman had gone, Meg concentrated on cutting a bite from the flaking monkfish she had ordered, pan fried in a burnt butter glaze and served with a rice soufflé and crusty brown soda bread. Between the wine, the salt of the ocean on her tongue, her own bone-deep tiredness, and the warmth of the room in sharp contrast to the windswept white geysers breaking against the cliffs of Dursey Island across the sound, she wanted to savor the moment. The last thing she wanted was an argument.

Her mother set down her fork. “What has gotten into you, Margaret? I barely say anything to you, and you bite my head off. You’ve always been the good daughter. The one I could count on. I meant for us to come out here and have some fun together. Take my mind off of things and have an adventure. Just the two of us.”

Meg refrained from pointing out that, in that case, it was a shame Ailsa had invited Anna first. But truth always had been relative to her mother, and the attempt at guilt, too, was a familiar tactic, often accompanied by an exquisitely formulated blend of defensiveness and accusation. Still, there was a note of wistfulness in her mother’s voice that made her wonder. Ailsa so rarely revealed even a drop of uncertainty, much less vulnerability. It made her want to hold her mother close, much the way she’d wanted to hold Adam close, to swaddle her like a newborn child who needs to be wrapped tight when the world becomes too vast and overwhelming.

Without Meg’s father, without the familiar life she had built for herself, her mother’s world must have become infinite with possibilities, Meg realized. She couldn’t help wondering if that wasn’t the real reason Ailsa had begged her to come on this trip, because she’d needed to bring one familiar person with her, and Meg was the only one left in her family who Ailsa hadn’t yet pushed away.

“Let’s not worry so much about trying to have an adventure,” Meg said, offering up a smile. “We could just enjoy whatever comes, couldn’t we? Talk if we need to talk. Be together. I know all this has to be hard for you, but that’s why I’m here. And look at this.” She gestured around the room, where light spilled from whimsically painted chandeliers overhead and the clink of cutlery against china. A low murmur of polite voices muffled the sound of the rain that was sluicing off the roof outside and pouring down the gutters. “It’s gorgeous. Now tell me more about the dig. Have they found anything interesting yet?”

Her mother studied her a long moment, her expression vacillating between being offended and the eagerness to talk. Fortunately, she opted for conversation. “There’s not much left of the fortress,” she said, “so that was a little disappointing, but they showed us the mobile laboratory where they clean the finds. The first week they were here, James—he’s the one who handles most of the remote sensing equipment, the ground-penetrating radar and the metal detector—uncovered a small horde of coins and jewelry. They think it might have been buried by some of the women when they were inside the keep and realized the men had to surrender. Imagine being huddled in there with your children, cannons firing at the walls, knowing any minute the English were going to break through.”

“If they tried burying their valuables, they must have hoped they’d survive.” The red liquid in Meg’s glass caught the light. “I don’t know if that makes it seem better or worse. Or maybe you always hope you’ll survive somehow. Especially if you have children with you.”

Her mother looked down at her plate. “They’ve found some of the cannonballs already, along with bullets and some broken bits of weapons. There was a slave shackle, too—that was the most interesting artifact. James found it off the main dig somewhere two weeks ago, and they’ve marked the area to excavate in more detail later. Gemma says the shackle is Viking, though. Apparently, they used this as a collection point for the Irish women they captured before they shipped them off to be sold.”

Meg looked up. “I thought they took them as wives. The Vikings were polygamous, weren’t they?”

“Earlier.” Ailsa’s eyes half closed, pleased to know something that Meg didn’t. “Then they traded men and women from Britain and the Slavic countries, mostly to the Middle East. They did that until the fourteenth century, then they traded in African slaves until the middle of the nineteenth. Naturally, they weren’t called Vikings by then.”

“Naturally,” Meg agreed, smiling.

Her mother ignored her. “James—you’ll like him—knows a lot about all that. He’s a sweet boy, really, though more Bill Gates than Indiana Jones, if you know what I mean. I suppose one Indiana Jones is enough.” She glanced at Meg with a faint lift of her brows. “There were a lot of disappointed volunteers when Niall wasn’t there today. But then again, most of the college girls were giggling over Liam. Especially when James mentioned Vikings since Liam looks a bit like one.”

“Maybe that’s the dreadlocks. Vikings and Celts both wore them,” Meg said, changing the subject. “I wonder why, come to think of it, whether it was some kind of symbol of manliness or a matter of convenience.”

Ailsa picked at the salad on her plate. “I don’t understand why people have to try to kill each other.”

“Survival. Or lines on a map. Wealth. Power. It always comes down to that. One person trying to take what someone else has or keep what they have themselves. Killing’s only one side of it all. You know that from your own family.”

“Campbells and MacGregors and MacLarens.” The Scottish burr Ailsa had tried to leave behind with everything else when she’d left to marry Meg’s father came back with the familiar names. “It was interesting,” she said. “Niall Sullivan is supposed to be related to the O’Sullivans who were killed and one of the other archaeologists—he wasn’t here today for the orientation, though—is descended from the man who ordered the massacre. He wants to prove it wasn’t his family who was responsible for the massacre, but the others all hate him. I could tell whenever they mentioned him. It made me wonder if it’s the same here as it is back in the Highlands, my father distrusting every MacLaren because his father hated them, and people only now starting to forget all that.”

Meg studied her mother, but there was only a clouded look in Ailsa’s eyes, no specific emotion that Meg could read. “Was that why you were so desperate to leave? Why you married Daddy instead of John MacLaren?”

“Water under the bridge. All that was a long time ago.” Ailsa took another long sip of wine.

“Dad doesn’t think so.”

“Things aren’t always what they seem, Margaret. The people we think are guilty. Sometimes they’re just caught up in events.”

Meg took a deep, long breath. “Are you saying you didn’t get pregnant on purpose after all?”

She didn’t know why she’d asked the question that way, so baldly, except maybe because she so much wanted it not to be true. Or maybe because having spent the day with Adam and listening to his silence, she’d realized that silences could be filled with too many terrible things. Driving back from Cork, there’d seemed to be an uneasy truce between him and Niall, a pause like two boxers retreating to their corners and waiting for the bell to ring again.

She didn’t want it to be like that with her mother. She wanted the air cleared, the truth told.

The truth mattered. What her mother had done—the accusation her father had made before filing for divorce—had changed the way Meg looked at her mother’s entire life, at her own childhood. Everything that she’d always thought she understood. It changed the interpretation of every piece of advice her mother had ever given her.

Afraid to see the truth while she waited to hear it, afraid her mother would lie to her, she looked anywhere except at Ailsa, at the single drop of butter glaze that had fallen on the pristine white tablecloth, at the storm that was getting worse beyond the windows, the ocean whipping into froth and clouds shearing flat beneath a driving wind.

When she looked up, her mother’s face had pinched itself into tight, hard lines. “I’ll put that question down to you having had a hard day. Maybe you should go straight to bed after dinner.”

“You didn’t answer me.”

“I’ve no intention of answering you. It’s none of your business.”

“I guess that’s answer enough, then, isn’t it?”

Ailsa opened her mouth then closed it again as Fergal came to clear away the plates and drop off the dessert menus. “Can I take these for you? How was the meal?” he asked. “I can get you something else if you’d rather.”

“No, no. It was wonderful. I’m just tired—I should probably have an early night,” Meg said.

He put the menu down on the table and picked up her plate. “Don’t say that. At least come sing for a while. You have to end the evening smiling. It’s a fast rule around this place. Singing together makes you happier—that’s proven science. It fights depression and boosts your immune system, makes you handle pain better. So you see, you have to come. Doctor’s orders.”

The way Fergal smiled at her with his entire face, with every neuron in his body, Meg couldn’t bring herself to say no. And having said yes, she found herself happier already.

She thought of Adam disappearing into his music at the hospital, and she pictured him over on the island now with no television or the internet, stalking his room like a caged dog, or sitting on his bed, his head bobbing to music while he threw a ball against the door. She imagined Niall listening on the other side of the wall, not knowing how to reach him.

“Do you suppose it would it be all right if I invited Adam and Niall to come for the music tomorrow?” she said to Fergal. “If getting them back to the island’s a problem, they could take my room if you don’t have any vacancies. I could stay with my mother.”

“You might have thought to ask me first,” Ailsa said, frowning, once Fergal had gone again.

Meg leaned forward. “I’m sorry. Do you mind?”

“I think it’s dangerous getting involved with them.” Her cheeks reddening, Ailsa bent her head to scan the menu. “That boy’s unstable, and Niall’s attractive. That’s a dangerous combination. For you especially.”

Her voice had gone ragged, and Meg wondered for an instant if that was all the answer she was ever likely to get to her previous question. But she couldn’t help prying at it anyway. “Do you regret it?” she asked. “Meeting Daddy on the excavation. Marrying him?”

“Ruining his life, is that what you’re implying?”

“I never said that. He never said that. Just that he needed honesty going forward.”

“I gave him a good life—it was a good marriage! A partnership. It wasn’t as if I meant for it all to turn out like this. I hoped for everything when I married him. I wanted the fairy tale, and I miss the idea of that kind of love. I lost out on that as much as he did. But I did love him. You should know that. I still do love him, in my own way.”

Hearing the selfishness in those words, Meg felt another hot curl of anger wrap itself around her heart. Or maybe it had been there all along, and she had simply tried to ignore it. Maybe she’d had no idea how angry she had been these last months since the truth about her parents’ marriage had all come out, and she wondered if that was the emotion she had mistaken for loneliness, the kind of loneliness she hadn’t seemed able to fill, no matter what she did. Or maybe the loneliness came from realizing she’d never had a good example of how to love someone. How to fill the emptiness inside herself.

Deciding that retreating to her empty room alone was the very last thing she needed, she squeezed into the bar after dinner, and in the cozy room with the firelight casting clawed shadows on the wall and twenty strangers around her, she sang to the accompaniment of Fergal’s guitar and a local farmer’s bodhrán drum. Not sure what she was trying to drown out, she let her voice ring out free and heedless. She barely even noticed that other voices were dropping away to listen, until on the last verse she was singing all alone.

“You’ve had some training, then,” Fergal said, when he’d played the last notes of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night” and laid his palm across the strings to still them.

Meg felt a little wild, too, high on the music and the determination to let loose. She missed performing, she discovered. Music was something she’d left behind deliberately along with her sashes, tiaras, and sequined gowns after winning the Miss Teen Ohio pageant. After a lifetime of having her mother cart her and Katharine from one to another, even after Anna had refused to do them anymore, that had been Meg’s last pageant. Her mother had always sworn winning a big one would help when it came to a career in broadcasting, and it had. Already in college, though, Meg had come to hate how the title made people see her. How so many people—men and women—had let it flatten her into one dimension.

Her music training had been part of the pageant world, and so she’d let it go. After years of developing her voice and writing songs, of expressing herself in notes and phrases that said things she hadn’t been able to say in any other way, she’d given it up because it had been the “talent” her mother had chosen for her. Funny, she hadn’t realized that, either. Not completely.

She turned and looked down the bar to where her mother had drifted away to talk to some of the volunteers. Seeing her there nursing another glass of wine, it struck Meg how much of their childhood and adult decisions—hers and Anna’s and even Katharine’s—had been driven by Ailsa’s choices. Living with them, affirming them, rebelling against them—or failing to rebel.

“You’re right,” she said to Fergal. “I haven’t sung in ages, but it feels wonderful. I’d forgotten how good it can make you feel.”

Fergal reached into the guitar case beside his chair and plucked out a music book, coffee-stained but otherwise with little sign of wear. Then he pulled out another barstool and set it beside his own. Ari, with her sweet smile, produced a violin case from somewhere behind the bar then came around to nudge Meg to the empty seat.

“You sing, and I’ll play,” Ari said. “I’ve a feeling you’ve got a lot inside you that needs to be let out.”