Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,11

and blues and tonalities of twelve all came from the same source. He listened with an ear well stocked and weaned on rhythm and ballads. He collected hundreds of recordings, though he had little desire to master the playing of any of this music himself.

Donal began to train his fingers to the rigours and discipline of prelude and fugue. He thought he had found what he was looking for in strict counterpoint of the old music of Europe. He wanted a new bull fiddle and found a magnificent seventeenth-century Maggini bass. The aged virtuoso who owned it demurred that the bass was surely beyond the means and talents of such a young man. Human beings, he said, are granted only a single life. My instrument is stained with a length of experience beyond any mortal’s.

He agreed to allow Donal to play it just once. He watched the young man caress the neck of the bass and he listened to him play Bottesini’s “Allegretto Capriccio.” He apprehended with sorrow that his exquisite time-shaded instrument had found a worthy new guardian. Donal felt the bloom of low sound vibrate through his body like a resuscitating breath. He heard in the Maggini’s depths things that most ears do not discern. Its essence and beauty thrived in its unperceived lowest tones, like an elephant’s inaudible rumblings. The night the old man finally gave it to him, he took it to play with Colin and some young students in a smoky bar below a restaurant. He played for them a piece he improvised called “Narcissus.” At dawn a harried woman from the virtuoso’s building rushed down to the cellar and told the students that the old man was dead by his own hand. The police were looking for Donal and the Maggini.

Colin said to Donal, Is it really yours?

He gave it to me.

Then let’s go before someone decides he didn’t.

The cathedral chimes did not ring another hour before the two young men were on their way to the nearest port, looking for a ship heading west. It was reason enough to go back. When they were out on the ocean walking the deck at night their home thoughts began to take up space. Donal said to Colin, Do you remember that girl at the greenhouse? Do you think she’s married yet?

Colin answered, Can’t know. Wonder if anyone got froze on the clumpers this winter.

They were embraced after their wandering by the extraordinary musicians of Millstone Nether, who took all they liked from the travellers and tossed off what they did not fancy. They liked Colin’s recordings of music from mountains and bayou, isolated places like their own. He played them abbey and court music they admired but declined to play. They had little taste for his piano with bolts and erasers between the strings.

He’s got high-learned, joked one.

He’s jinking us, said another. That’s not music.

So Colin picked up his fiddle and scratched out “Sandy MacIntyre’s Trip to Boston” as if he’d never left. The fishermen joined him with their fiddles and guitars and spoons.

Donal had been harder stirred up by his learning and left the kitchen party early, troubled by the restlessness of a young man confined. He went to see Dagmar at blind Norea’s. They talked of the weather and the sea and planting, and he played for her what he could not speak. To his delight, Dagmar pulled out a fiddle and scratched along.

After her mother died, Madeleine Dob agreed to marry Everett, a poor fisherman thirteen years older than she was and so miserly that no woman on the island would take him. The only thing he liked to do was smoke.

He came by and said to Madeleine, Yer alone. If I moved in, would you like to keep house for me?

Madeleine said, I’ll marry you if we spend equal parts on tobacco and paint.

There were some who said that Madeleine’s was a bleak life with the mean little man who wouldn’t haul in enough water, who hoarded the lamp oil and kept the fire so low there was frost on the insides of the windows all winter long.

If a poke-your-nose-in said anything about it, Madeleine answered, We get along.

On days when her hands were too stiff Everett did the milking. On days when he didn’t feel like fishing he stayed home and smoked. The insides of the once-neat house became a dark shambles of dirty dishes and clothes piled up and the mixed odours of tobacco and paint. And those few