The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay Page 7

  I stirred myself, for my sheltered corner was so comfortable I was in danger of dozing off. I took out the letters I had been carrying with me since the morning, saving them for just such a quiet moment. I opened them quickly.

  They were both rather short. The first had been written from the vegetable factory in Spalding. It said how much George missed me, how he longed to put his arms around me and how awful the campbeds were. Their Nissen hut had no hot water and the bog across the yard had been bunged up for days. He said the crack was good and his crowd had taken over a pub which sold Guinness and that the fish and chips were the best he’d ever had. He said I wasn’t to worry about him. He could cope with these things. The rest of the letter was an account of the practical jokes they had played on the supervisor to break the monotony of tending the pea belt, or watching the labelling machine.

  The second letter was shorter still. The vegetables had come to a sudden end with a change in the weather, so he had packed up and caught the first boat home. He missed me terribly. None of our friends were around in Belfast, the students’ union was still closed, and he couldn’t have his mother’s car. She needed it for work since they’d stopped the estate bus. How wonderful it would have been if he could just have driven down and whisked me away from all those strange people and found us a nice place where we could be alone together, just the two of us, a long way away from Belfast. He hoped the work was going well and that I’d be back very soon. I was to let him know by return when he could meet me at the Great Northern.

  I reread both letters several times to see if there was anything I had missed. But there wasn’t. Letters were such a poor substitute for being together, I reminded myself. And, of course, George didn’t like writing letters in the first place. He always said that scientists have difficulty with literary modes. Geography wasn’t really a scientific subject, he said, and anyway I’d always been good at English which was his worst subject.

  Beside me a clump of tall, pink wildflowers began to sway in the light breeze. From their lower stems hundreds of tiny balls, like thistledown, drifted in front of me. They spun slowly in the sunlight, a hint of iridescence on their white fronds, some borne upwards by the warm air, some colliding, some few moving towards me, touching my warm skin, catching in my hair. I looked down the empty track and tried to re-enter my daydream. But I had the greatest difficulty remembering what George looked like.

  I thought back to our first meeting. It was in my second year, a lovely, lively spring day just before the beginning of term. I came out of the front gate of Queen’s on my way up to the Ulster Museum and saw Ben sitting on the wall opposite the bus stop with a tall boy I didn’t know. Ben had hailed me, introduced George, asked if I had time for a coffee. We’d gone to the espresso bar across the road, talked for an hour or more and then gone for a walk in the Botanic Gardens. A few days later George found me in the library and asked me out.

  It had been easy to get to know him. Although he lived on a new estate near Lisburn with his widowed mother, he’d gone to the same city-centre grammar school as Ben, so we knew many of the same people either from schooldays or from our first year at Queen’s. We began going to the weekly hops and to the film club. George worked hard and sometimes we would meet in the library and go to the union together for coffee. I was grateful for his company, glad to have someone to talk to when things got on top of me, when I felt suffocated by the flat over the shop and my mother’s complaints, or when my tutor was being awkward, pressing me for work I could only do if I had enough time to think it through.

  George was easy-going. Nothing seemed to upset him. I had once thought I was easy-going, but I’d come to accept that I wasn’t. I was always getting upset over things and having to be comforted. And George was very good at that. What was the point in getting upset about things if you couldn’t alter them, he always said. It seemed he had a point.

  I sat watching the swirling down and wondered about the name of the tall plant that had shed its seedheads with such enormous generosity. I picked some silky fronds from my black trousers and waved away a floating fragment that tickled my nose. As I moved my hand, the sunlight gleamed on George’s signet ring, the one he had asked me to wear before he went off to Spalding. I wore it on my right hand, but I knew very well that he hoped to replace it with an engagement ring as soon as we graduated. He’d never asked me to marry him, it just somehow seemed obvious that was what would happen. I hadn’t really thought about it till now.

  Everyone assumed that because George and I had been going out together for more than two years we would marry. My parents certainly assumed that my bedroom wouldn’t be needed when I finished my degree and Adrienne Henderson was always asking where we would live and whether George would teach or try to get into industry, whether we’d stay in Belfast, or be prepared to move away for a time till George got established.

  I took his letters out of my jacket pocket and looked at them again, the envelopes I had ripped open so hastily and my name written in biro on them. Miss Elizabeth Stewart. Perhaps it was being so far away that made my life in Belfast suddenly seem so very remote. What was it Patrick Delargy had said when he’d stopped to look at the islands? Something about distance lending perspective.

  Perhaps, being so much older, he felt he had a lot to reflect upon. So much had happened to him. He had lost people he loved, given up a future he’d chosen to take up something he certainly hadn’t chosen. But nothing very much had ever happened to me. I’d lost my Uncle Albert the year I got my scholarship, but he was in his eighties so I could hardly complain about that. I hadn’t had to give up what I wanted to do and go and do something else.

  ‘Not yet, you haven’t.’

  I heard Ben’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting beside me. One of his favourite phrases. If ever I told Ben I couldn’t do something, or I’d never been able to manage such and such a thing, he would always come back at me. Not nastily, but always firmly. You shouldn’t make closed statements about yourself, he said, because people and circumstances change all the time. Surely there were things I thought now that I never used to think, things I did now that I couldn’t do before.

  I hadn’t noticed before how different Ben’s way of thinking about life was from George’s. I wondered if I would have noticed the difference had I not been sitting in the sun, in an abandoned quarry, over two hundred miles away from the low, red brick wall where I’d bumped into the two of them on a bright, spring morning that now seemed a very long time ago.

  Chapter 5

  ‘Hallo, Elizabeth, I heerd you was here. Will ye come with me to the dense tonight? Me cousin Brendan has the van from his work an’ he says there’s room for wan more.’

  As I stepped through the door of the cottage, a red-haired girl of about my own age hailed me cheerfully.

  ‘Ah, shure do, Elizabeth, do,’ urged Mary. ‘Go to the dense with Bridget. ’Twill be company for her and it’ll do you good. Ye can’t be working all the time. There’ll be a great crowd.’

  ‘The dense is great gas, Elizabeth,’ Bridget went on, tossing her short, coppery curls. ‘Isn’t the band down all the way from Belfast itself. They must have knowed you were here!’

  It was a long time since I’d been to a dance without George, I was tired and I couldn’t think what I’d wear, but because I liked her immediately, I let Bridget persuade me. There weren’t many people I knew who’d walk two miles to offer a complete stranger a lift to a dance.

  When Brendan’s van started bumping its way round a huge, crowded car park full of buses and minibuses, cars and taxis, vans, tractors, motorcycles and bicycles, I could hardly believe that the long, low building ahead of us was a ballroom. With its rusting corrugated roof and boarded up windows it looked more like a warehouse or a battery chicken unit. Its breeze-block walls were plastered with the tattered remains of posters and flourishing nettles sprang from its concrete base but as I peered out into the darkness I saw a long line of people queueing up at its entrance an
d a tail-back of vehicles spilling out into the road behind us.

  It was some time before we got inside. Only one half of the building’s double doors was open and once over the threshold the four large men who were supervising the payment of seven and sixpences created a further bottleneck. Beyond them a wide, empty corridor led to the darkened ballroom itself. We were greeted by a solid line of backs.

  ‘’Tis the season,’ Bridget explained, as we struggled through the press of bodies towards the dance floor. ‘They come from all over in the season. And there’s visitors forby.’

  I felt a touch on my shoulder. Bridget winked at me and as I turned round, a young man asked me to dance. He put his arm firmly round me and energetically shouldered our way to the dance floor.

  Despite the noise of the band and the speed of the quickstep, he asked me where I came from, what I was doing here, and whether I liked farming. Then, I danced with a farmer from near Ennis. He too asked me where I came from, what I was doing here, and whether I liked farming.

  A few more partners and I was able to predict the questions. What was more I heard the odd snatch of other conversations. The same thing was going on all around me.

  About eleven o’clock, I looked around for Bridget and couldn’t see her anywhere. Probably Danny had arrived and they were settled in the back of Brendan’s van for a while. No matter. As long as they turned up to take me home, I could look after myself. I manoeuvred my way towards the back of the hall and plumped down gratefully on the narrow bench next to an emergency exit, firmly locked and barred against gatecrashers. I wiggled my aching feet inside my high-heeled sandals and looked about me.

  The dancers divided into two camps, women on one side, men on the other. Up by the stage, their ranks were six or seven deep. Down here, beyond the range of the beacon that bathed the dancers with alternate garish hues, they thinned out into a single line. On the men’s side there was an intense scrutiny of the opposite camp. The women’s scrutiny was just as intense, but they covered it by talking to each other and feigned indifference. Their eyes moved around just as much.

  As the band started up again the dark wall of suits crumbled at its edge. The women held their ground as if nothing were happening and looked surprised or even bored as they were led onto the floor.

  From time to time, a couple detached themselves from the moving mass of dancers and came and stood only a little way from where I sat. Not romantic encounters these. No affectionate gestures, not even the touch of hands. The faces were far too intent for it to be any kind of chatting up that was going on. I watched cautiously and saw that as each dance ended, the couples who’d been engaged face to face would either return to the dance floor together, or turn their backs on each other and rejoin their respective camps.

  ‘Ah, sure many’s the bottle of whiskey I’ve had, Elizabeth, for the making of a match. But sure, nowadays, the young people see to it themselves and save the expense of a matchmaker, more’s the pity.’

  Paddy had talked at length about the custom of matchmaking. I’d listened to every word, intrigued and fascinated by what he’d said. What I hadn’t expected was to see it actually going on around me.

  ‘I think the hardest match atall is when the family has no money and the daughter is ill-favoured forby. There’s a lot of work and if no good comes of it the matchmaker gets the blame from both sides,’ he’d said ruefully. ‘Another hard one is when there’s a love match. The boy and girl have their minds set on each other but maybe one of the families is hoping to gain by the match and they think they’re losing a great opportunity.’

  What was clear to me from all Paddy had said was how good he was at the job and how much he enjoyed it.

  ‘Ah well,’ he reminded me, his eyes twinkling. ‘There’s a lot of grand eating and drinking at the expense of both sides while the negotiations are going on. An’ many’s the bottle of whiskey I’ve had if it came out right.’

  Some of the women I could see were as young as fifteen or sixteen, others were years older than I was and some few were in their thirties. Small and fragile, large and matronly, warm and homely, large-boned and gingery, they were dressed in a variety of ways, everything from the latest fashion in bridesmaid’s dresses to T-shirts and jeans.

  I wriggled uncomfortably on the hard bench. It was one thing reading up the marriage customs of the Nootka or the Inuit and quite another to observe the customs in action. It didn’t look to me as if ‘love and marriage went together like a horse and carriage’ as the song would have it.

  Whatever I might like to think about how people behaved in 1960, the evidence was that out on that crowded floor young men were looking for a woman who would cook and clean for them, help with the farmwork and bear sons to carry on the work on the land as they themselves grew older.

  ‘And the women? What about the women?’ I said quietly to myself.

  It looked as if they were just as hard-headed as the men. They had to be. What they wanted was a man to give them a place of their own, children and their status as a married woman. Until they acquired that status, be they fifteen or fifty, they would still be a ‘girl’. And a ‘girl’ had no rights. She was someone who stayed at home, had no life of her own, did always what others told her to do, someone who could end up spending her whole life looking after aged parents or unmarried brothers.

  Suddenly, I thought of my own Aunt Minnie, my mother’s youngest sister, a tiny wisp of a woman married to a large, loud-mouthed man I’d never managed to like. Uncle Charlie was a greaser in the ropeworks, his hobbies were drinking, betting on greyhounds and sitting in front of the television in his vest. He and Minnie didn’t get on. Often, they didn’t speak to each other for days and when they did, it was only to complain.

  ‘Yer Uncle Charlie’s a dead loss,’ she would say to me, shaking her head, when I went over to visit her in Short Strand. ‘Yer grandfether warned me. “Minnie,” he sez, “if ye marry thon pahel of a man ye’ll have neither in ye nor on ye.” An’ he wos right.’

  Standing over the chipped and stained jaw box in her shabby kitchen as she emptied the tea leaves into a cracked plastic drainer, she nodded at me and went on.

  ‘All verry well, Elizabeth, but how wos I te get outa that aul hole at the back end o’ Dromara? Yer mather upped and went as soon as she cou’d. I might ’ave been there till this day if I hadn’t struck up wi’ Charlie, bad an’ all as ‘e is.’

  So it wasn’t just here on the far western seaboard, ‘the back of beyond’, as my parents would call it, that women still married to escape an even more unwelcome future.

  I shivered at the thought of it and decided it was time I looked for Bridget again. I stepped back into the glare of the rotating spot as the singer grasped the microphone and launched into ‘April Love’. ‘Our song,’ George always called it, since that first date in April 1958 when he said he’d fallen for me.

  ‘There ye are, Elizabeth,’ said Bridget. ‘We was lookin’ for you all over. This is Danny.’

  Danny beamed down at me, a gangly youth with a sharp nose and a good-natured manner.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, pumping my arm. ‘Are ye enjoyin’ yerself?’

  I was about to assure him that I was when a hand grasped my elbow. Bridget’s eyes moved heavenward. I turned and recognised the only one of my former partners I’d actively disliked. He was small, about my own height, and fat. When we danced, he’d held me so close I was impaled on the buckle of his large leather belt. He’d breathed beer and super strong mints in my face and I’d got a crick in my neck trying to lean away from him. Now he was smiling and holding out his arms. There was nothing for it, I’d have to dance with him again.

  ‘Ah, Elizabeth, shure I’ve been searching for you these last two dances. That’s a lovely name, indeed it is.’

  He smiled at me and held me at arm’s length to observe my reactions. I couldn’t remember him having smiled at me when we last danced. But then, I’d looked at him as little as possible. He really
was quite repulsive. The kind of man who looks as if he’s sweating even when he isn’t. And at this moment, he was. Rivulets of sweat poured down from the bald dome of his head through the thinning black hair below.

  ‘You were telling me,’ he went on, ‘that you were interested in farming. Now, isn’t that a coincidence and I interested too? Were you brought up on a farm then?’

  ‘Yes, but I live in Belfast now,’ I said shortly, hoping to discourage him. But he only nodded as if my answer was entirely satisfactory. I could almost see the wheels going round as he set about preparing the next question.

  ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen,’ boomed the Master of Ceremonies, who had become louder and louder as the evening wore on, ‘for Maureen and Sean who have just announced their engagement, “True Love”. Congratulations Maureen and Sean, and love from everyone at Ballymore Creamery.’

  ‘Tell me now, Elizabeth, how many cattle could you keep on forty acres?’

  He turned his head to one side playfully, this being a little joke between those of us who were interested in farming. He might be oblivious to the band, but I wasn’t and trying to raise my voice over the well-amplified strains of ‘True Love’ was positively painful.

  ‘That depends, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, it does. It does indeed.’

  He laughed merrily as if I’d said something amusing. But the gaiety was forced and beneath the smile there was an unpleasantly determined look about his face.

  ‘Ah, now, Elizabeth, shure it’s a lovely name, Elizabeth, tell me now what it depends on.’

  ‘Well,’ I said firmly, convinced now that he was trying to trip me up, ‘if it’s the dry land round Ballyvaughan you might keep ten, but if it’s the wet land towards Liscannor, you’d do well to have four.’