Surely Gussie would be glad to see him. The big gaunt giant towering over him. His huge hands around the parcel and a single strand of brown hair falling down over his left eye. After a while she could hear the muffled voice of her son. And she was right. He sounded as if he had been dosed with drugs. Thank God she didn’t go in.

2

NOT THAT THERE WAS ever anything inappropriate about her friendship with Hughie Donoghue. Make no mistake about that. And certainly not that there was the slightest – oh Jesus be her witness – not the slightest suggestion ever of anything flirtatious between the pair of them. Or cheating behind the Vet’s back. Not for one second! Didn’t she keep her eyes down, if he ever started that codology with her. Or she’d look away. In the warm Kerry nights. In the smoke-filled pubs. And besides, when did she ever see him again, after that week? Hardly ever. And then him and the Vet parted ways. So that was the end of it.

If there was anything, it was the music. That’s what she loved about him. He had the music. The three of them had it. The Vet most of all was the dancer. And in those days it was all big bands and saxophones and smoky, crooning voices. A world of taffeta frocks and men like stallions in harness. A ballroom world. A golf-club fantasy.

But Hughie was on a different planet. His jigs and reels were like a universe unto themselves. And even though he’d sit in the corner of the bar, stiff as a poker, with his head twisted sideways to the flute, there was something uncivilized, unharnessed in the energy that his music released. Knowing Hughie was like standing beside a fire. That’s what she loved about him.

Hughie was born beside the lake. Just where it turns into river and runs in torrents over the rocks towards the sea. Rivulets of brown water and white foam in every gully of the mountain. Water and music oozing from the earth in equal measure as Hughie used to say. A diviner’s world.

He told her once that he could remember how the old men used to leave their flutes in the grass of the meadow on summer nights. All night the rosewood and black-wood instruments would lie silent in the damp land, until dawn, while they slowly absorbed both the sun’s rays and the early morning dew rising from the grass. It tempered the wood so beautifully that when the musician came out from his breakfast and lifted the flute to his lips, there emerged a sound so mellow and light that people would say it must have been the fairies put the music in it. Or that some timbre of the earth’s sleeping inhabited the rosewood overnight, imbuing it with the music of the world’s dreaming.

In Cornagee, where Hughie Donoghue lived, people told a story about where music came from. There were five brothers, they said. And one of them went to the fair one day, but didn’t return. Seven days passed, and seven nights, and the other brothers watched from the end of the lane and wondered where might the young fellow have gone.