The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage
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 father 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.
‘And don’t say the bit about getting my death of cold sleeping in a damp bed. It isn’t damp. Just cold. And it will soon warm up.’
I laughed at myself for addressing my mother before she could get in first. She had beaten me to it last night in Limerick. Oh, the predictability of it. Like those association tests my friend Adrienne Henderson did in psychology. She said a word and you had to respond without thinking. My parents were good at that. I knew the key words. Or more accurately, I spent my life avoiding them. If I accidentally tripped over one, I could be sure I would get a response as predictable and consistent as a tape-recording.
The smell of the snuffed candle floated across to me. I was back in the small upstairs room of Uncle Albert’s cottage. The candle wax made splashes on the mahogany furniture and I picked them off with my fingernails, moulded them and made water-lilies to float on the rainwater barrel at the corner of the house. Suddenly, I was there again, a ten-year-old, sent to ‘the country’ for the holidays.
Being ten years old didn’t seem at all strange. I lay in the darkness, wondering if I would always be able to remember what it was like to be ten. Would I be able to do it when I was thirty, or forty, or fifty? Or would some point come in my life where I would begin to see things differently? For as long as I could remember, my parents, my relatives and those neighbours who were ‘our side’ had all assured me that when I was ‘grown up’, or ‘a little older’, or ‘had a family of my own’, I would come to see the world as they did. The thought appalled me.
Was it really possible that I could end up locked into the kind of certainty that permeated all their thinking? They always knew. They were sure. Indeed they were so sure, I regularly panicked that I would come to think as they did. What if there was nothing to be done to stop the process? What would I do if I found that thinking as they did was like going grey, or needing spectacles, or qualifying for a pension, one of those things that was as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow.
As I began to feel warm I uncurled and lay on my back. Moonlight was flickering from behind dark massed clouds and gradually my eyes got used to the luminous glow reflected from the pink-washed walls. I distinguished the solid shape of the wardrobe at the foot of my bed and the glint of the china jug on the washstand. Then, quite suddenly, for a few moments only, the room was full of light. In the brightness, I saw a large, grey crucifix on the distempered wall above me. Crucifixes and Holy Water. Even more to be feared than a damp bed.
The room settled back to darkness once more and I closed my eyes. The door latch rattled and stopped. Then rattled again. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to change after all. Perhaps I could just go on being me at twenty-one, or thirty-one, or any age, till I was so old there would be no one left older than me, to tell me what I ought to think. There was a scurry of feet in the roof. The wind whined round the gable and the door latch rattled again. The scurrying increased. Mice, of course.
And pisherogues. I had not the slightest idea what a pisherogue was. But whatever it turned out to be, it would not harm me. Indeed, in this unknown place at the edge of the world, I felt as if nothing could harm me. Tomorrow, I would ask Paddy what a pisherogue was and make a note about it. I was going to make lots and lots of notes. In the blue exercise books I had brought with me. Tomorrow.
Chapter 3
After three days tramping the lanes and fields of Lisara I was looking forward to my walk into Lisdoonvarna on Thursday afternoon. Paddy was sure I’d get a lift, but as I strode along, turning over in my mind all I’d learnt since my arrival, the only vehicles that overtook me were full of children and luggage. I was very glad when they waved and left me to the quiet of the sultry afternoon.
As I reached the outskirts of the town and turned up the hill by the spa wells, I was surprised to find there were people everywhere. Preoccupied and distracted, they wandered over the road, walked up and down to the well buildings and streamed back and forth to the Square. After the emptiness of the countryside and the company of my own thoughts, the sudden noise and bustle hit me like a blow. I wove my way awkwardly between family parties, strolling priests, and bronzed visitors, only to find that the Square too was completely transformed.
The empty summer seats were now packed with brightly coloured figures. Close by, a luxury coach unloaded a further consignment. Clutching handbags and carrier bags, beach bags and overnight bags, they queued erratically beside a small mountain of luggage and reclaimed matching suitcases from a uniformed courier.
I’d been planning to sit down for a bit but now even the stone wall of the war memorial was fringed by families eating ice-creams. Nothing for it but the first grassy bank on the way home.
The queue for the post office greeted me on the broken pavement outside. It moved slowly forward. When I finally got inside the door the smell of damp and dry rot caught at my nostrils. The place hadn’t seen a paintbrush for years, the walls were yellowed with age and seamed with cracks. Behind a formidable metal grille, an elderly lady with iron-grey hair and spectacles despatched stamps and thumped pension books with dogged determination, apparently unconcerned by the queue of restless women with coppery tans, white trousers and suntops in violent shades of lime-green and pink.
I shuffled forward on the bare wooden floor. In front of me, an old lady cast disapproving glances at two women writing postcards on the tiny ledge provided. She glared at their bare shoulders and arms and the skimpy tops that revealed their small, flat breasts. Despite the heavy warmth of the afternoon, she was wearing a black wool coat and a felt hat firmly skewered to her head with large, amber hatpins.
The woman behind me fidgeted impatiently and shuffled her postcards as if she were about to deal a hand of whist.
‘Gee, you Irish girls sure do have lovely complexions. How come you manage it?’
Her voice so startled me, I must have jumped a couple of inches but I went on watching the postmistress counting out money for the old lady, a pound note and some silver coins. Could her pension possibly be so small?
I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned round she was looking down at me. Waiting. Pinned to her suntop was a button which said: ‘I’m Adele from New York City . . . Hi.’
‘I think it’s probably the climate,’ I said, awkwardly.
The moment I spoke I knew it was ‘my school teacher voice’. George often says I must never become a teacher. Women who do always lose their femininity and he couldn’t bear that. He loves me just as I am so I mustn’t ever change.
‘D’you mean all that there rain we had in Killarney lass’ week?’
She looked baffled, but something in her manner suggested she would not give up easily. People were turning to look at us and I felt my ‘Irish’ complexion grow a few shades more rosy.
‘I think it’s the dampness of the air here.’
I tried to sound suitably casual, but I just sounded lame. What else could I say? I could hardly explain the adaption of skin colour and texture to environmental features, could I? What on earth would George say if I did that?
‘Gee, you Irish girls do talk cute.’
She beamed indulgently and gazed around at the women writing postcards, delighted to have got one of the natives to perform.
I was saved from further questions by the little lady in black who pushed past me, handbag firmly clutched in both hands, leaving me to face the postmistress who stared at me fiercely as I handed over my letters.
‘You’d be a friend of Mrs O’Dara, then?’
I nodded awkwardly. Of course Mary and I were friends, but I knew that wasn’t what she meant.
‘I’m staying with Mr and Mrs O’Dara for a few weeks,’ I said quickly. ‘I’m a student.’
‘We don’t get many students here,’ she said suspiciously. ‘Is it the Irish yer leamin’?’
‘Only the odd wee bit from Mr O’Dara. I’m really studying farming.’
That sounded a bit schoolmistressy too. Behind me, the queue was building up again and Adele from New York City was breathing down my neck.
‘And that’s nice fer ye too,’ she said decisively, as she studied the envelope addressed to Mr and Mrs William Stewart.
‘You’d be wanting to let yer paren’s know ye was safely landed, indeed,’ she said severely, as she turned her attention to my letters to George and Ben, and my thank you to the Hendersons.
‘Oh, I did write letters on Monday, but Paddy the Postman took them for me.’
‘Indeed, shure he wou’d take them for you, and why wou’dn’t he?’
Her face crinkled into a grimace that looked like a friendly gesture, though I could hardly call it a smile.
‘I’ll be seein’ ye again, Miss Stewart, won’t I?’
‘Oh yes, you will indeed. I’ll be doing the shopping while I’m here.’
I was so glad to escape the smell of Adele’s Ambre Solaire that I set off back to the Square at a brisk trot. But I had to slow down. Apart from the ache in my legs, the afternoon was getting hotter by the minute. Huge clouds were building up in threatening grey masses and it felt warm, sticky and airless.
The windows of the hotel with the summer seats had been thrown wide but there wasn’t the slightest trace of a breeze. The net curtains hung motionless and I could see into the dining room where small black figures moved to and fro. Like the pale, dark-eyed girls I’d seen at the Mount, these girls were equally young, straight from school at fourteen.
I thought about them as I waited in the queue at the butcher’s, drawing circles in the sawdust with my toe. I too might have left school at fourteen if I hadn’t passed the Eleven Plus. Even then, I still might have had to leave if it hadn’t been for the Gardiners.
‘Did ye hear that Mrs Gardiner today, bumming again?’
I was back in my bedroom in Belfast on a summer evening towards dusk, reading in the last of the light. My parents had come out into the yard behind the shop. There was a rattle as my father filled his old metal can so he could water the geraniums and the orange lilies which he grew in empty fuel oil cans he’d brought home from Uncle Joe’s farm. It was the beginning of July, for the lilies were in flower but hadn’t yet been taken to the Lodge to decorate the big drums for the Twelfth.
‘Oh yes, she was in great form, and the whole shop full. Did ye not hear? Ah don’t know how ye cou’da missed her.’
The reply was indistinct. My father always speaks quietly. Often, he just nods or grunts.
‘There’ll be no standin’ that wuman, if that wee girl of hers goes to Victoria an’ our Elizibith doesn’t.’
Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves, I thought to myself. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. The window was wide open and they were right underneath.
‘Well, if Bill Gardiner is going to send that wee scrap of a girl, why shouldn’t we send our Elizibith,’ my mother went on. ‘None of the Gardiners have any brains worth talkin’ about an’ that shop of theirs is only a huckster of a place, not even on the main road. It won’t look well at all, Willy, if we don’t send her. People’ll think our shop’s not doin’ well. I think we should just send her. We’re every bit as good as the Gardiners. We’d have done it for wee Billy for sure.’
I stuck my fingers in my ears, for I hated them talking about wee Billy and I knew that was wicked. You shouldn’t hate your brother, especially if he was dead. The trouble was it didn’t feel as if he was dead. They were always talking about him, what he liked and disliked, what he used to say, what age he would be his next birthday if he’d lived, where he would be going to school, or even what flowers they would take when they next visited the cemetery where he was buried. My Aunt Maisie once said to me that it was a pity I hadn’t been a boy, for Florrie would never get over wee Billy now and her too old to have another.
I lifted Mary’s shopping bag onto the counter and let the red-faced man put the brown-paper parcel inside. The butcher’s counter was marble and the one in the shop was wood. I imagined myself standing behind it in a pink, drip-dry, nylon shop coat like my mother’s, handing out papers and cigarettes and penny lollipops, ringing up items on the till, running up the rickety stairs to the stockroom for a new box of Polo mints, or a fresh carton of Players.
He counted out my change slowly, made a mistake and corrected himself. His fingers were smeared with blood. My father’s fingers were yellowed with nicotine, the nails cut short to keep them clean. I could see him as he spread the day’s takings on the table each evening. Piles of silver, mounds of copper, creased pound notes, and the occasional papery fiver which he held up to the light to make sure it was all right. Business was good, he would admit as he counted. Never better, my mother would agree. Everyone has money these days, she would continue, especially the Other Side.
It was the Other Side’s money that let me stay at school to take A-levels. Then my scholarship had taken me to Queen’s. After seven years passing the back of the students’ union every day on my way to school, I got off the bus one stop earlier and stepped into a different world. It was luck. Pure luck. I had my books and my hopes for the future, these girls had their skimpy black skirts and their long hours of hard, poorly paid work.
‘Well then, how do you fancy a career in catering?’ Ben and I were sitting in our usual seats at the top of the double decker, our first week’s pay envelopes torn open on our knees.
‘Not a lot,’ I replied. ‘If this was all you had to live on you wouldn’t have much of a life, would you?’
‘No, not even if there were two of you and there was equal pay.’
I laughed wryly and counted the crumpled notes in my hand. We had worked so hard, sharing the same dreary jobs, working the same long hours. Ben had ten pounds, I had only seven.
‘It’s one thing if you’re earning book money,’ he went on, stuffing the notes into his pocket, ‘it’s another if it’s all you’ve got. Are you going to have enough for going to Clare, Lizzie?’
I’d reassured him that I’d be fine for I knew he’d offer to help me. I couldn’t let him do that for I knew what he was planning to buy. The newly published book he hoped might help him to make sense of his mother’s condition would cost several weeks’ work.
‘It’s exploitation, Ben, isn’t it? But what can one do? What can anyone do?’
‘Political action, Lizzie. Probably the only way. But that’s not my way. It needs a particular sort of mind and I know I haven’t got it. I’ll have my work cut out to make a decent doctor. What about you?’
I told him I didn’t really know about me.
The first thing I noticed as I opened the door of Delargy’s shop was the smell. This time, unlike the post office, it brought the happiest of memories: small shops in Ulster, in villages where I had done messages for various aunts, places where you could buy everything from brandy balls and humbugs to groceries and grass seed, packets of Aspros and pints of Guinness. There had been many such places in my childhood and I had loved them all.
Surprisingly, the shop was empty but for a single customer, the little lady in the black coat whose hatpins I’d studied closely in the post office queue. A pleasant-faced girl in a blue overall had come from behind the counter to pack her shopping bag. As she fitted in the packets of tea and sugar, she listened sympathetically to what the old lady was saying.
‘And they want to put me out and knock the whole row down.’
‘But Mrs McGuire dear, they’ll have to give you a new house, or one of the bungalows. Wouldn’t that be nice for you now, and no stairs to climb?’
The girl glanced at me and made a slight move as if to come and serve me but I shook my head. ‘I’m not in a hurry. Do you mind if I have a look round?’
‘Do, miss, do. I’ll be with you shortly.’
We exchanged glances over the head of Mrs McGuire, who was completely absorbed in her problem. Indeed, they were very nice, she agreed. And a nice price too. Where would she get seventeen shillings rent out of her pension?