The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay Read online

The sight of her bare arms made me shiver again. I spread my hands to the newly made-up fire in the massive black stove. It was another Modern Mistress, the same as Mary’s and Uncle Albert’s, except that it was the larger size, with two ovens instead of one, and a large tank at one side which heated water.

  The stove was beautifully polished. I sat looking at my own reflection in the silvered edges and recalled the ritual of cleaning it with black lead and polishing it with old newspapers, which were then burnt. The silvery bits round the edges were rubbed with emery paper, as was the fender below. Hard work, and hard on the hands. I could still remember trying to scrub the black lead off with a nail brush after my early attempts to help Uncle Albert, the year Aunt Nellie died.

  Granny slept. She was so still I could not be quite sure she was breathing. I looked at her closely, deliberately, knowing I had to get used to her presence before Bridget came back. She was not the first old lady I had seen, fragile and failing, in chair, or settle bed, but there was something about her situation which I found almost unbearable. Here she sat, sleeping out the last weeks of her life, by the fire she once tended, on the hearth she once swept, in the house where she had been mistress. I wondered how many hard years she had laboured in this house to keep it clean and swept, with food for the table and fire on the hearth.

  The latch on the back door clicked as Bridget came in and put the buckets down under the table. She came over to the fire, shivering.

  ‘It would skin you out there,’ she said, giving me her hands to feel.

  ‘Here, let me rub them. You’re frozen. I don’t know how you do it.’

  ‘Shure, I’m used to it,’ she said, tossing her head. ‘I’m in and out all day. I’d niver get me work done, if I was to stop and put on a jacket.’

  She pulled her hands away from me impatiently. Most of her fingers were still white.

  ‘Wait’ll I put the water on. The coffee will warm me up,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Let me help.’

  I jumped up, unable to sit still any longer, and promptly fell over.

  ‘Are ye all right?’ she asked, torn between concern and laughter.

  I rubbed my ankle ruefully. I had forgotten my exotic footwear.

  ‘Sit there and act the lady,’ she added as she put the kettle on the stove.

  ‘Doubt if I’d be much good at that, Bridget. Shall I say “frightfully nice” when you give me my coffee?’

  I watched her move back and forth across the kitchen, fetching cream from the dairy, cups from the parlour, a lace cloth from a drawer in the dresser. She moved quickly, talking to me over her shoulder, asking questions as they occurred to her. I was fascinated by her deft movements. She lifted a wire cooler with freshly made cakes of bread one-handed from the table and spread the cloth with the other before replacing it.

  If I tried that, I’d drop the lot, I thought to myself. But then, as she’d said about the cold, she was used to it. She probably baked bread every day. And cleaned the stove, and pumped water, and carried baskets of turf, and washed floors, and cooked food.

  ‘Come on, Elizabeth, sit over now, do. D’ye take sugar?’

  ‘Coffee smells marvellous, Bridget. What is it?’

  ‘American. D’ye like it? My sister left it behind when she was here in June. She won’t drink tea at all now. All coffee. She brought six packs for three weeks, but there was some left. The boys won’t have it, so I have it meself when I get them all out. Go on, have a biscuit,’ she added, winking, as she pushed the plate closer.

  She leaned back in her chair and snapped a chocolate biscuit with her teeth. She had nice even teeth and they showed when she laughed. Sitting there, full of gaiety and excitement, Bridget looked more like someone downing gin at an illicit party than a girl having coffee with a friend on a chilly, September morning.

  Her laughter was infectious. Whatever sad thoughts I’d had when I saw Granny and remembered Uncle Albert, they disappeared with the first cup of coffee.

  ‘Isn’t it great, Elizabeth, I have no dinner to make the day. Paddy and Own are away with Da to the fair in Ennistymon. It’s not often I get a day off.’

  ‘You’ve three brothers, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. An’ all with big feet.’

  She laughed again. I couldn’t see quite why it was so funny, but there was something irresistible about Bridget’s good humour, so I laughed anyway.

  ‘And two sisters?’

  ‘Both in Boston.’

  She pushed the plate of biscuits over again, leaned her elbows on the table and started to tell me about their lives, their houses and patios, barbecues and holiday cottages, their clothes, their children, the jobs they had, the presents they sent, and the places they visited when they didn’t come to Ireland. It was all very fascinating and a long way from buckets of water from the pump and a line of washing the whole length of the yard.

  ‘Would you like to go to America?’ I asked, when she paused for breath.

  ‘Ach, I don’t know. ’Twou’d be awful strange. I might be homesick.’

  She had been so enthusiastic in her talk, I could hardly believe the change that had come over her. She tossed her head and changed the subject.

  ‘You’d like to travel, Elizabeth, wouldn’t you? Have you been to America?’

  ‘No, I haven’t, I’ve been the other direction, across Europe and into Norway and Sweden. I won a scholarship with an essay about travelling.’

  ‘Europe? Were you not afraid, going away over there. What was it like?’

  I thought of the way Mary spoke of her daughters in Boston as if they were just round the corner and then lamented that her sons were ‘away over in England’. Mary’s map of the world was quite different to any I might find in an atlas. What Bridget’s map looked like, I couldn’t guess, but I did my best to pick out the bits of my adventures that might make her laugh.

  Bridget was full of questions. She assumed I’d visited all the capital cities she could remember from schooldays. I had to confess that the only one I knew reasonably well was Paris.

  ‘Did ye do the can-can when ye was there?’ she asked promptly.

  I laughed and remembered that by a strange coincidence the dance I’d learnt to do in Paris was ‘The Waves of Tory’. I told her how we’d found a party of young Scots lads staying in die same place we were and how we’d celebrated Bastille Day, dancing in the streets with everyone else.

  ‘D’ye mean the French people just get up and have a dance in the street?’

  Her eyes were round with amazement as I told her how we’d danced with our Scots friends and then split up the couples and taken partners from the crowd who gathered to watch us.

  ‘I had a little man with a black beret just like you see in pictures. He was a fantastic dancer, but I couldn’t make out a word he was saying, never mind understand it.’

  ‘Was he a better dancer than Michael Brady?’

  After her worries about me last night and the soaking poor Danny got when he went back for my jacket, she was entitled to tease me.

  ‘Oh, don’t mention Michael Brady, I was a right idiot to get stuck with him.’

  ‘I think he fancied you, Elizabeth,’ she said, winking.

  ‘Oh, he fancied me all right,’ I agreed. ‘He fancied someone to run his house, and keep his bed warm, and he wasn’t too particular who it was.’

  I hadn’t meant to speak sharply, but the words came out with an edge I instantly regretted. Bridget tossed her head impatiently. Her habitual smile disappeared and without it, her face was square and plain and looked neither young nor old. Our laughter and gaiety vanished like snow off a ditch.

  ‘Michael Brady’s a right eejit,’ she said, stirring her second cup of coffee vigorously. ‘Everybody knows he’s as mean as get out, but to hear him talk you’d think he was great. Did he tell you about his house?’ she asked crossly.

  ‘With the running water?’

  She glanced out of the window and scowled. ‘There’s a tap in t
he yard, and they say it doesn’t work. And hasn’t he his oul’ granny there. They say she smokes a pipe. Yer well out of it, Elizabeth.’

  I couldn’t think what to say. Bridget was treating the matter as if I were seriously considering the man, when I’d long ago seen the funny side and was quite ready to make a joke at my own expense.

  ‘I must say I’d rather have your Danny than Michael Brady,’ I began, hoping to revive her good spirits. ‘He’s awfully nice, Bridget’

  She blushed and fiddled with her spoon. ‘That’s just a bit of a cod.’

  Again, I couldn’t think what to say. I’d seen her bright, excited look when she spoke about him on the way to the dance. I’d seen them together later in the evening, arms entwined, quite unaware of anyone else. If Bridget had been pretending more interest than she felt, she had certainly fooled me.

  ‘He’s all right for a bit of carry on, but shure there’s no future in it’ She glanced at me briefly, then looked away. ‘His da’s only forty, and he’s got three sisters as ugly as sin.’

  I didn’t have to puzzle over that one. It might be years before Danny inherited the farm. And there mightn’t be much of it left, if three ill-favoured girls were ever to make a match.

  ‘There’s a drop more coffee, Elizabeth. Have it, do,’ she urged, collecting herself.

  ‘No, we’ll share it,’ I replied, putting my fingers over the cup till she had taken some herself.

  As she poured mine, I saw that all her nails were broken, and the skin of her fingers was so hard it was ingrained with fine brown lines, as if her hands were dirty. I thought of that ridiculous jingle on television. ‘Now hands that do dishes can be soft as your face.’

  I could see the inane smile of the model as she lathered her immaculately manicured hands with the latest washing-up liquid. Yes. And what about hands that scour milk churns and wash stone floors and rub black lead on the stove and scrub manure stains out of blue dungarees? And do that day after day, week after week, month after month, without any hope of things ever being any different.

  ‘Would you and Danny think of going to England maybe?’

  ‘Shure how would I leave Granny, and the boys, and Da? There’d be no one to look after them. And Danny knows nothing but farm labouring and odd jobs,’ she said wearily, as if she had already decided it was hopeless.

  ‘You’ll not always have Granny,’ I said, as gently as I could.

  ‘I know. Elizabeth, I know. I see her failed over the summer itself. But there’s still Da and the boys. There’s not one of them could make you a cup of tea.’

  She said it without the slightest hint of criticism. It was simply a fact. Like the fact that Danny had no future unless he got the farm. Like the fact that my father couldn’t make you a cup of tea, either.

  Oh yes, literally, he could. He was always brewing up in the storeroom behind the shop. But once out of the shop, he felt entitled to put his feet up, mentally and physically. The running of the flat was no concern of his. How often had I heard him ask where his clean shirt was, or when his meal would be ready, or what was he to tell the milkman, or where the money was for the insurance man, or how he was to clean the car without a rag. My father was no more capable of performing the simplest household task than Da, or the boys. He took it for granted, just as they did, that it was a woman’s job to ensure a man’s comfort and convenience. Neither he nor they had ever questioned it, nor had I seen it for myself until this minute.

  ‘But Bridget, if you hadn’t been here, they’d have had to manage somehow,’ I protested.

  I was incensed by the idea of her spending her life slaving away for four men and looking after an old woman. Surely no one could expect that of her. But I knew perfectly well that many would expect just that. The business at the Kincora Ballroom last night had made that absolutely clear.

  ‘Ach I suppose they might find someone,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘But ye know, Elizabeth, things are so dear these days. How would I rear a family on what Danny could earn?’

  She looked at me as if she thought I might have an answer. But the only answer I had, I could not give. Bridget was a Catholic and a country girl. For her, marriage meant babies. Perhaps one a year, like Mary-at-the-foot-of-the-hill. For me, babies need not be inevitable. Once again, I was lucky. I had options that Bridget didn’t have.

  Suddenly, I thought of Gloria Ramsang, my Indian friend. She would be married by now. We had parted in June, after our General Degree exams. She was returning to Madras, where she would meet her husband-to-be in the week before her marriage. She had been happy, totally happy. Her parents had chosen a suitable young man, she was quite sure they would come to love each other and create a loving family.

  I sat digging a hole in the sugar. What could I say? Part of me wanted to cry out, ‘Oh, Bridget, run away. Go to England. Or America. Get a job. Don’t have children, till Danny gets some training for something.’ But how could I? Was it so surprising that Bridget took marriage and a family to rear for granted in the same way that Gloria Ramsang accepted her arranged marriage?

  With a sickening thud, the penny dropped. And what are you taking for granted, Elizabeth Stewart? What’s lined up for you that you haven’t even thought about?

  ‘It’s great to be brainy like you, Elizabeth. Shure you can go where you like and marry who you like and laugh at oul’ eejits like Michael Brady. When are ye going to get married? Can I come to yer wedding?’

  She laughed and immediately became her former pretty and good-humoured self; it was I who felt a sudden stab of anxiety. Was marriage just as much my fate as it was Gloria’s or Bridget’s?

  ‘Of course you can come.’

  I tried so hard to sound enthusiastic that the words came out sounding bright and insincere.

  Bridget simply assumed I would marry George because I’d told her he’d been my boyfriend for two years. She’d also assumed that I’d always been free to do what I liked. But she was wrong there. I knew how hard I’d had to struggle to read the books I wanted to read, to wear trousers instead of skirts, to study on Sundays instead of visiting relatives I had no wish to see. And as for coming to Lisara! Without the excuse of my thesis, it could never have happened, any more than my European trip without the scholarship.

  ‘Will ye live in Belfast, Elizabeth, to be near yer parents?’

  Her question pulled me up short. ‘I don’t really know,’ replied truthfully.

  I hadn’t thought about it. But I could see immediately there was bound to be a struggle over that. Whatever George and I might want to do, we could be sure that his mother, or my parents, would expect something different.

  ‘Will ye have a house, or a bungalow?’ Bridget continued. ‘Theresa has a bungalow. It’s all open plan. She says it’s great for the wee’ans with no stairs to fall down. Would ye like that?’

  I went on excavating the hole in the sugar. Bridget saw my future so clearly. I’d get married, have children and a house or a bungalow to put them in. It was all so obvious to her. Just as it was obvious to my parents that women did housework and men didn’t; that men marched on the Twelfth, while the women watched from windows, and cooked late dinners at the Orange Hall for when they got back from the demonstration.

  ‘We’ll have to see how things go, Bridget. The big thing is to pass my exams first and get a job.’

  ‘Will ye take a job?’ she asked, surprised.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, briskly. ‘I don’t know what yet.’

  ‘Ye’ll be a teacher, Elizabeth.’

  She sat up straight, made her face look prim and severe and then laughed.

  ‘I don’t know. Everyone’s always said I’d be a teacher, but I’m not sure at all. Perhaps I just want to be different for badness.’

  Deliberately, I filled up the hole I’d made in the sugar bowl. ‘George hates me fiddling with sugar bowls,’ I said, apologetically. ‘I’m sure it’s bad manners.’

  ‘Divil the bit of bad manners,’ she retorted strongly, as if
she were saying I had a right to do whatever I chose, because she liked me. Because we had become friends.

  ‘I’m awkward, Bridget,’ I said with a sigh. ‘I always want something different from everybody else. That’s what my mother says. She thinks it’s daft for a girl to go to university and then just get married. Yet that’s really what she wants me to do. And that’s not what I want. At least, I don’t think it is.’

  ‘Maybe you’re a Career Woman, Elizabeth.’

  She said it slowly, with the kind of unease you notice when people use a foreign word and are not quite sure how to pronounce it. Said as Bridget said it, Career Woman sounded like the name of a rare species, one you might have read about, but which you never expected to meet face to face.

  ‘I wish I knew,’ I said slowly. ‘It would save me a lot of bother working it all out for myself. Sometimes I think I’d just like to travel around, finding out things all the time. I’d hate to be stuck at home all by myself, away from everything.’

  ‘But sure you’d have the children for company and a lovely house. George’ll have a big job after all his exams, won’t he? Shure it’ll be great. I’ll come and visit you.’

  She said it briskly with that dismissive tone I was beginning to recognise. The subject of Michael Brady had been too close for comfort for Bridget, and now the vision of a house or a bungalow with fitted carpets, children about the place, and Sunday tea with salad and in-laws was having just the same effect on me.

  It had looked so different, her life and mine. I had seen hers as so limited, bounded by the demands of others and the heavy, physical work. Now, I wasn’t sure how different it really was. If Bridget wanted to talk about houses and gardens to push away the reality of her life, then perhaps I had better play my part and push away the reality of my own.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘You come and visit me and I’ll make chocolate haystacks. They’re the only thing I like making, because you have to bash the cornflakes in a paper bag with a rolling pin before you start. And we’ll eat the lot and get fat.’

  Barney barked a staccato protest and I heard the squeak of a wheel axle. Bridget jumped to her feet so quickly she nearly knocked her chair over. She blushed.