The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay Read online

  Paddy O’Dara’s face lit up. He looked straight at me, his eyes intensely blue.

  ‘Ah, indeed, miss, every man needs a drap of medicine now and again.’

  ‘Divil the drap,’ retorted Mary O’Dara. ‘I think, miss, it might be two draps or three. Or even more.’

  It was true the arithmetic wasn’t always that accurate. I could never remember Uncle Albert being drunk, but he certainly livened up after he’d had a few. That was the best time to get him to tell his stories.

  ‘They’re all great men when they’ve had a few,’ she said wryly, as she offered us more tea.

  ‘Ah, no, Mary, thank you. Wan cup’s enough.’ Paddy got hurriedly to his feet. ‘I’ll just away an’ see to the goose.’

  I smiled to myself, as she refilled my cup. Uncle Albert always went to ‘see to the hens’ when he’d been drinking.

  ‘I’ll have to go and see to the goose myself when I finish this,’ I said easily.

  ‘Ah, sure you knew we had no bathroom and I was wonderin’ how I would put it to ye.’

  Her relief was written so plainly across her face that I wondered if she could ever conceal her feelings. I knew what my mother would say about someone like Mary. Only people with no education showed their feelings. Anyone with a bit of wit knew better. You couldn’t go round letting everyone see what you felt even if it meant ‘passing yourself’ or just ‘telling a white lie’.

  My mother sets great store by saying the right thing. Most of her stories are about how she put so and so in their place, or gave them as good as she got, or just showed them they weren’t going to get the better of her.

  Whatever my mother might think I knew Mary was no simple soul. She had a wisdom that I recognised. It was wisdom based on awareness of the world, of its joys and sorrows, of how people managed to live with them. I had known the same kindly, clear-eyed perspective on life for eighteen of my twenty-one years. I had lost it when Uncle Albert died and had not found it again. Until this moment.

  ‘Mrs O’Dara,’ I said quickly, ‘before Mr O’Dara comes back, you must tell me how much I’m to give you for my keep. Would four pounds a week be enough?’

  ‘Four pounds, miss . . . an’ the dear save us . . . I couldn’t take your money, shure you’re welcome to what we have, if it’s good enough for you.’

  ‘It’s more than good enough. But I must pay my way,’ I insisted quietly.

  She had taken a basin from under the table that stood against the outside wall of the cottage and was putting the teacups to drip on the well-wiped oilcloth that covered its surface. She looked perplexed.

  ‘Have you a tea-towel, so I can dry up for you?’

  ‘Shure, two pounds would be more than enough, miss. I don’t know your right name.’

  ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth Stewart.’

  ‘Well, two pounds, Miss Stewart, then, if you want to pay me.’

  ‘Oh you mustn’t call me that, Mrs O’Dara. I’m only called Miss Stewart when I’m in trouble with my tutor.’

  She laughed gently and pushed a wisp of grey hair back from her face. ‘Well, indeed, no one calls me Mrs O’Dara either, savin’ the doctor and the priest. Nor Paddy either. Paddy woulden’ like me takin’ your money, miss . . . I mean Elizabeth.’

  ‘But you’re not taking my money. It’s just grocery money,’ I reassured her. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll put it in that teapot on the dresser every week, that wee one with the shamrock on it. You can tell him it was the little people. Say three pounds and we’ll split the difference.’

  I went and took a striped tea-towel from the metal rack over the stove. Long ago, I had learnt to bargain for goods when I knew they were overpriced. I was good at it. This was the first time I had ever had to bargain upwards. I knew that Mary O’Dara would rather go short herself than exploit someone else. What a fool my mother would think she was not to take all she could get and close her hand on it.

  I dried the cups and watched her put them away in the cupboard under the open shelves of the dresser. When she came back to the table, she ran the dish-cloth round the basin inside and out, slid it onto the shelf below, wiped the oilcloth and spread both the dish-cloth and the tea-towel to dry above the stove. She moved slowly, with a slight limp and a hunch in her shoulders that spoke of years of heavy work. But there was no resentment in her movements, neither haste, nor hurry, nor twitch of irritation.

  I found myself thinking of a novel I’d read at school. The hero believed that all work properly done was an offering to God. His superiors thought he was mad, but his workmates didn’t. They were mechanics and the aircraft they serviced flew better than any others and seldom had accidents. The idea of a practical religion that worked on the principle of love really appealed to me, especially since the only one I was familiar with seemed to work entirely on the principle of retribution.

  I smiled to myself. After Round the Bend I’d read everything Nevil Shute had written and enjoyed it enormously. Then, when my mother finally realised that he wasn’t on the A-level syllabus, there was a furious row. ‘Filling my head with a lot of old nonsense,’ was what she’d said.

  Mary straightened up from the potato sack and came towards me. ‘Ah, ’twas my good angel that sent ye to my door today, Elizabeth, for I was heartsore. Sometimes our prayers be answered in ways we never thought of. Draw over to the table an’ talk to me, while I peel the spuds for the supper?’

  ‘I will indeed, Mary. But first, I really must go and look at the Aran islands.’

  She laughed quietly as Paddy came back into the cottage and I went out, crossing the front of the house in the direction from which he had appeared. Somewhere round that side I’d find a well-trodden path to a privy in an outhouse, or the sheltered corner of a field.

  The path led up behind the house, so steeply at first that there were stone steps cut into the bank. I stopped on the topmost one and found myself looking down on the roof. The cottage was set so close to the hillside, I could almost touch it from my vantage point. The thatch was a work of art. Combed so neatly there was not a straw out of place, it had an elaborate pattern of scalloping like the embroidery on a smock, all the way along the roof ridge, a dense weave to hold it firm against winter storms. Beyond the cottage, fields stretched down to the sea. Under the overcast mass of sky it lay calm and grey, but I could hear the crash of breakers where the long swells born in mid-Atlantic pounded the cliffs, a mere two fields away.

  I counted the houses. Seven cottages facing west to the sea, each with turf stacks and smoke spiralling from their chimneys. Four more in various stages of dereliction, their roof timbers fallen, the walls tumbled, grass sprouting from the remains of the thatch. There should be another group of cottages facing south to Liscannor Bay, but from this angle they were hidden by high ground. I breathed a sigh of relief; here below me at least was a remnant of the community I had come in search of, a community once more than a hundred strong.

  I stood for some time taking in every detail of the quiet, green countryside, the wide, grey sweep of the sea and the now-dark outlines of the islands. I thought of those who had once lived in the tumbled ruins, those who had been forced to go, those who had endured poverty and toil by remaining. Sadness swirled around me with the wind from across the sea. I knew nothing of these people, of their lives here in Lisara, or beyond in America, and yet some part of me felt as if I had known them, and this place, all my life. As I walked up the hillside, the sadness deepened. It was all the harder to bear because try as I might I could find no reason to explain my feelings.

  By the time we cleared away the supper things the wind had strengthened and the dark clouds hurled flurries of raindrops onto the flags by the open door. Reluctantly, Paddy put down his pipe and went and closed it.

  ‘I may light the lamp, Mary, for it’s gone terrible dark. I think we’ll have a wet night.’

  ‘Indeed it looks like it, but shure aren’t the nights droppin’ down again forby.’

  Paddy waited for the lo
w flame to heat the wick and mantle, his face illuminated by the soft glow.

  ‘D’ye like coffee, Elizabeth?’

  ‘I do indeed, Mary, but are you making coffee? Don’t make it just for me.’

  ‘Oh no, no. Boys, I love the coffee meself, and Paddy too. Bridget always brings a couple of packets whinever she comes.’

  Paddy put the globe back on the lamp and turned it up gently. The soft, yellowy light flowed outwards and the dark shadows retreated. I gazed across towards the corner of the kitchen where heavy coats hung on pegs. There the shadows were crouched against the wall. They huddled too beyond the dresser so that in the darkness I could barely distinguish the sack of flour leaning against the settle bed. But here I sat beyond the reach of the shadows in a warm, well-lit space. I leaned back in my chair and let my weariness flow over me, grateful for the moment that nothing was required of me.

  Above my head, the lamplight caught the pale dust on the blackened underside of the thatch. The rafters were dark with age and smoke from the fire. A row of crosses pinned to the lowest rough-hewn beam ran the whole length of the seaward wall. Some were carved from bits of wood, others were woven from rushes now faded to a pale straw colour or smoked to a honey gold. A cross for every year? There were a hundred or more of them.

  ‘I’ll just get a wee sup of cream from the dairy.’

  The lamp flickered and the fire roared as Mary opened the door and the wild wind poured in around us. As she pulled it shut behind her, I found myself gazing up at a tiny red flame that danced in the sudden draught. Beside it, on a metal shelf a china Virgin smiled benignly down upon the freshly wiped table, her hands raised in blessing over three blue and white striped cups and a vacuum pack of Maxwell House.

  ‘Boys, it would blow the hair off a bald man’s head out there,’ Mary gasped, as she leaned her weight against the door to close it, a small glass jug clutched between her hands.

  ‘That’s a lovely expression, Mary. I don’t know that one,’ I said, laughing. ‘I think Uncle Albert would’ve said, “It would blow the horns off a moily cow.”’

  She repeated the phrase doubtfully, while Paddy chuckled to himself. ‘Ah Mary, shure you know a moily cow.’ He prompted her with a phrase in Irish I couldn’t catch. ‘Shure it’s one with no horns atall.’

  She laughed and drew the high-backed chair over to the fire. I jumped to my feet.

  ‘Mary, you sit here and let me have that chair.’

  ‘Ah, no, Elizabeth, sit your groun’. I’m all right here.’

  I sat my ground as I was bidden. I was sure I could persuade her to sit in her own place eventually, but it wouldn’t be tonight. When Mary did come back and sit in her own place, it would say something about change in our relationship. But that moment was for Mary to choose.

  I watched Paddy fill his pipe, drawing hard, tapping the bowl and then, satisfied it was properly alight, lean back. The blue smoke curled towards the rafters and we sat silently, all three of us looking into the fire.

  It was not the silence of unease that comes upon those who have nothing to say to each other, rather, it was the silence of those who have a great deal to say, but who give thanks for the time and the opportunity to say it.

  We must have talked for two or three hours before Mary drew the kettle forward to make the last tea of the day. Paddy had told me about Lisara and the people who lived there, Mary spoke about their family, the nine sons and daughters scattered across Ireland, England, Scotland and the United States. In turn, I had said a little about the work for my degree, mentioned my boyfriend, George, a fellow student away working in England for the summer, and ended up telling them a great deal about my long summers in County Armagh when I went to stay with Uncle Albert.

  It was only when Mary rose to make the tea, I realised I’d said almost nothing about Belfast, or my parents, or the flat over the shop on the Ormeau Road that had been my home since I was five years old.

  ‘Boys but it’s great to have a bit of company . . . shure it does get lonesome, Elizabeth, in the bad weather. You’d hardly see a neighbour here of an evening.’

  I listened to the wind roaring round the house and reminded myself that this was only the beginning of September.

  ‘It must be bad in the January storms,’ I said, looking across at Paddy.

  ‘Oh, it is. It is that. You’d need to be watchin’ the t’atch or it would be flyin’ off to Dublin. Shure now, is it maybe two years ago, the roof of the chapel in Ballyronan lifted clean off one Sunday morning, in the middle of the Mass.’

  He looked straight at me, his eyes shining, his hands moving upwards in one expressive gesture.

  ‘And the priest nearly blowed away with it,’ he added, as he tapped out his pipe.

  ‘Oh, the Lord save us,’ Mary laughed, hastily crossing herself, ‘but the poor man had an awful fright and him with his eyes closed, for he was sayin’ the prayer for the Elevation of the Host’.

  As she looked across at me, I had an absolutely awful moment. Suddenly and quite accidentally, we had touched the one topic that could scatter all our ease and pleasure to the four winds. I could see the question that was shaping in her mind. It was a fair question and one she had every right to ask, but I hadn’t the remotest idea how I was going to reply.

  ‘Would ye be a Catholic now yerself, Elizabeth?’

  ‘No, Mary, I’m not. All my family are Presbyterians.’

  ‘Indeed, that’s very nice too. They do say that the Presbyterians is the next thing to the Catholics,’ she added, as she passed me a cup of tea.

  If she had said that the world was flat or that the Pope was now in favour of birth control, I could not have been more amazed. I had a vision of thousands of bowler-hatted Orangemen beating their drums and waving their banners in a frenzy of protest at her words. I could imagine my mother, face red with fury, hands on hips, vehemently recounting her latest story about the shortcomings of the Catholics who made up the best part of the shop’s custom. Try telling her that a Presbyterian was the next thing to a Catholic. I looked across at Mary, sitting awkwardly on the high-backed chair, and found myself completely at a loss for words.

  ‘’Tis true,’ said Paddy, strongly. ‘Wasn’t Wolfe Tone and Charles Stuart Parnell both Presbyterians, and great men for Ireland they were, God bless them.’

  I breathed a sigh of relief and felt an overwhelming gratitude to these two unknown men. The names I had heard, but I certainly couldn’t have managed the short-answer question’s prescribed five lines on either of them. The history mistress at my Belfast grammar school was a Scotswoman, a follower of Knox and Calvin. She had no time at all for the struggles of the Irish, their disorderly behaviour, their revolts, their failure to recognise the superior values of the British Government.

  When she had made her choice from the history syllabus, she chose British history, American history and Commonwealth history. I could probably still describe the make-up of the legislatures of Canada, India or South Africa, and bring to mind the significant figures in the history of each, but I knew almost nothing about a couple of men who were merely ‘great men for Ireland’.

  Yesterday, when the Hendersons had given me a lift to Dublin they had dropped me by the river within walking distance of the station. Under the trees, I gazed across the brown waters of the Liffey at a city I knew not at all. I had been to Paris and to London with my school, travelled in Europe on a student scholarship, visited Madrid, and Rome, and Vienna, but I had never been to Dublin. My parents had raised more objections to my coming to Clare than to my spending two months travelling in Europe.

  It was pleasant under the trees, the hazy sunlight making dappled patterns on the stonework, a tiny drift of shrivelled leaves the first sign of the approaching autumn. I liked what I saw, the tall, old buildings with a mellow, well-used look about them, the dome of some civic building outlined against the sky, the low arches of the bridge I would cross on my way to the station.

  ‘A dirty hole,’ I heard my fath
er say. ‘Desperate poverty,’ added my mother. Neither of them had ever been there.

  I sat on my bench for as long as I dared before I set off to catch the last through-train to Limerick. Just as I reached the bridge, I saw the name of the quay where I had been sitting. ‘Wolfe Tone Quay,’ it said in large letters.

  Mary took two candlesticks from the mantelshelf above the stove and I stirred myself. Paddy turned the lamp down and the waiting shadows leapt into the kitchen, swallowing it up, except for the tiny space where the three of us stood beside the newly lighted candles. Paddy blew down the mantle of the lamp to make sure it was properly out.

  ‘Goodnight Elizabeth, astore. Sleep well. I hope you’ll be comfortable,’ said Mary, handing me my candle.

  ‘Goodnight, Elizabeth. Mind now the pisherogues don’t get you and you sleeping in the west room,’ said Paddy. ‘And you might hear the mice playing baseball in the roof. Pay no attention, you’ll not disturb them atall,’ he added with a grin.

  ‘Come on, old man, it’s time we were all in bed.’

  He laughed and followed her towards the brown door to the left of the fireplace.

  ‘Goodnight, and thank you both. It was a great evening,’ I said, as I pointed my candle into the darkness at the other end of the kitchen.

  I pressed the latch of the bedroom door, pushed it open, and reached automatically for the light switch. Of course, there wasn’t one. My fingers met a small, cold object which fell off the wall with a scraping noise. As I brought my candle round the door, I saw another china Virgin. This one was smaller than the one in the kitchen and from her gathered skirts she was spilling Holy Water on my bed.

  Thank goodness, no harm done. I put her back on the nail and swished the large drops of water away from the fat, pink eiderdown before they had time to sink in. The room was cold and the wind howling round the gable made it seem colder still. I undressed quickly, the linoleum icy beneath my feet when I stepped off the rag rug to blow out the candle on the washstand. The pillowcase smelt of mothballs and crackled with starch under my cheek as I curled up, arms across my chest, hugging my warmth to me.