Twelve Thousand Days

by Eilis Ni Dhuibhne

  Not that there was anything doing. Mandy was living with someone else with whom she was desperately in love. They shared the kind of tiny cottage in Stoneybatter that had not yet become the last word in fashion for with-it young people – not quite yet. But it would very soon. Mandy and her man were the trendsetters. He owned the cottage; she had ‘moved in’ with him, and she talked about him all the time. She talked about him too much.

  There had been more than one reason for Bo’s neglect of his thesis duties.

  He had suffered a minor nervous breakdown, precipitated by divorce from his wife and the fall-out from that, which he took very badly. He had been seeing a psychiatrist regularly and taking anti-depressants that made him tired and bloated.

  The whole story was not told, to me, or to Mandy, that summer. We knew he was divorced, and in the process of buying a new apartment, because he talked about that quite a lot. The business of mortgages and insurance and so on subjected him to a lot of stress. It kept him in Dublin when he wanted to be in Kerry, collecting stories and writing. It filled his life with administrative problems, for which he had no taste or natural ability, although since he was meticulous and careful he handled them reasonably well: Bo was the sort of person who always answers a letter or pays a bill the day it arrives. But these chores distracted him; he had a tendency to be catastrophic and to feel overwhelmed by administrative challenges. (He could forget, sometimes, that he had been in the army.) The systems he was dealing with seemed unnecessarily inefficient, cumbersome and unpredictable – which they often were.

  Con, and the car, left on Tuesday. Every morning, Bo spent an hour with Mandy, teaching her Irish. For the next few hours he transcribed tapes of stories collected from Mícheál Ó Gaoithín. After lunch, he sat with me at the kitchen table and discussed my thesis.

  His method of working with students on a thesis was thorough and unusual. He read every word, with the student, and suggested changes and amendments as he went along. This laborious line editing demanded a great deal of his time – more than the majority of supervisors would ever be willing to give to students – but it was the method Bo had experienced himself, as a student of Dag Strömbäck in Uppsala, and he continued to use this intensive one-to-one method until his retirement. He was an outstanding editor, spotting every error, woolly thought, inaccurate observation – although occasionally due to the fact that he was working in what for him was a foreign language, small spelling errors could slip past his eagle eye. Not often, though, since his English was excellent, as was his Irish. Theories unsupported by evidence, pretension, or any kind of illogical thinking, never escaped him.

  If Bo had a fault as a supervisor, it was that he could be too controlling. His intentions were the best, and his judgement almost invariably correct, but he could seem over-protective in his desire to prevent students from making wildly inaccurate assumptions and drawing false conclusions. Although he inspired almost all his students with his passionate interest in his subject, he did not encourage enough experimentation with methodology. His contempt for shoddy scholarship – that is, opinion that was not supported by evidence, theories that were generalisations and could not withstand scientific scrutiny – wrought in him occasional contempt for academics who employed shortcuts. Swedish folklorists of his own generation, who had dumped philology and the study of historical texts in favour of loosely defined sociological studies (of gardening, it could be, or weekend hobbies), he regarded with undisguised dismay. There were plenty of good reasons for his harsh judgement of the new wave of folklorists. He was a scholar of an old-fashioned kind – as a young man aged twenty-two, for instance, he had read the entire corpus of medieval Icelandic literature during one summer when he worked as a farm hand in Iceland. He had taken the time and trouble to learn several languages almost to perfection: his library contained substantial numbers of books in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Danish, Norwegian, as well as the medieval versions of most of those languages and the languages that he used more or less daily: Swedish, Irish, English and Icelandic. His knowledge of literature, folklore, and history was immense. Academic writing that was more akin to journalism than to scholarship as he knew it he had no time for. This meant that he was occasionally dismissive of new theories, and tended not to keep up with the times. For him, it didn’t matter. In a sense he transcended the times. But for his students, it might sometimes have been important to be more in tune with the latest fashions in research. One result of this dismissal of many (although not all) of the latest theories was that some students, when they encountered them for the first time, usually during the year abroad, were utterly seduced by them and turned against Bo – he who had encouraged them to go abroad in the first place. They fell hook, line and sinker for the latest trends, took up a critical stance towards their old teacher, and, in his view, betrayed him and what he represented.

  Back to the summer of 1976.

  On Wednesday, Bo went to Dingle on the bus that stopped at the bottom of the hill to buy more groceries, and Oliver came from Dingle on a later bus to join the party in the house. He arrived as we were sitting around the table for the evening meal. The door was opposite the table, and he entered as on to a stage. Mandy’s eyes widened when she saw him.

  He was wearing blue jeans, as always, and a light beige raincoat, also as always. The suitcase he carried – rather oddly, for a young man visiting the country for a few days – was an expensive-looking one, made of a sort of tweed fabric that was sturdy enough, apparently, to withstand a blow from an icepick, should anyone want to try bashing it with one. He looked more like a basketball hero than a classical scholar. He was not what Mandy had expected, that was clear.

  ‘I’ll move out into the other room,’ Mandy immediately offered.

  I refused. ‘It’s fine. Stay on here.’

  Bo was not sure how the room situation would work out. He knew Ireland was a strange place as far as sexual relations were concerned, very unlike Sweden, and kept his nose out of it. As it happened, Oliver and I had not had sex together, not properly, at this stage, although we had been a couple for over a year. It is a situation that is unthinkable nowadays, and Oliver, although admirably tolerant and understanding given that he was English, and came from quite a different and more liberated country, was beginning to find it all a bit ridiculous. But that was how it was. I had all the hang-ups of an Irish Catholic girl who has been rigorously conditioned to regard sex as the gateway to perdition. If you are told repeatedly that you will go to hell if you allow a man to penetrate you, and before that you will get pregnant and everyone will revile you and you will be in hell on earth, or at the bottom of the river, your attitude to the body is affected. Even though I was by now an atheist and regarded myself as sexually liberal, when it came to practice rather than theory I was very screwed up. Presumably most of the nation was in the same boat. It is a wonder that anyone in Ireland had sex at all. I think there is a great deal we don’t know about sexual practices, within and outside of marriage, in Ireland in the twentieth century. Given the way most of us were brought up, I suspect that many of those young women who found themselves pregnant outside wedlock and cast into Magdalene laundries and the like were rape victims at one level or another. Or else totally ignorant of the facts of life.

  I was happy to continue sharing a room with Mandy, while Oliver was safely isolated in the small bedroom. I would kiss him and hug him, but I didn’t want to have sex with him, especially not in someone else’s house.

  Over the next few days, the sun continued to shine, as it would all through the summer of 1976. The routine of Irish lessons and thesis editing continued exactly as before: depressed or not, Bo was a stickler for routine where writing and research were concerned. Oliver was writing his own thesis and so was perfectly happy to devote two thirds of the day to work. For the rest of the time, we walked in the rich dramatic landscape of Dunquin – to the beach at Clochar, where we picnicked and went for a swim in the rolling, crashing waves. On
the way back, over the heathery hillside, Oliver, who loved all kinds of music, sang ‘I Come from Alabama with a Banjo on My Knee’. In the evenings we went to Kruger’s, a small shebeen-like establishment, with standing room only for the hordes of people who filled it on summer nights. Bo and Oliver loved it, the pints of Guinness, the dozens of real Dunquin men, one-time Blasket islanders, who leaned on the bar and spoke Irish. I didn’t like pubs of any kind much and still less the kind of pub where you couldn’t sit down, but I appreciated the special quality of this one – which was linguistic and cultural. One evening we visited Bab Feirtéir, Bo’s favourite storyteller since Mícheál Ó Gaoithín had died in 1974. We asked her if she knew the story I was working on – ‘With His Whole Heart’. But she didn’t. She told other stories, however – ‘The Mouse Who Was Late for Mass’, and a few others. It was the first time I ‘collected’ folk tales: I hadn’t been a folklore undergraduate so had not been on the annual field trips that were such a feature of that programme. It was thrilling to hear a storyteller narrating, especially by her own fireside.

  Oliver loved everything: the pub, the Irish, the boats bobbing in and out on the choppy waves to the island. He was thrilled with the view of the Blaskets, and with the rich, dramatic landscape. He was thrilled with me: it was thanks to me after all that he was here in this iconic, historically fascinating, stunningly lovely place. Bo’s invitation had given me status in his eyes. If the professor invites you to his summer house he must think your thesis is good was the reasoning. Bo didn’t think it was good – he never thought anyone’s thesis was good – but he believed it was a bit better than most, and that it could become good, if we worked on it hard enough.

  Most attention in the house focused on Bo. He was the host and he was unlike anyone else we knew: learned, clever, handsome, Swedish. More friendly than most teachers, and also more reserved.

  And more sad.

  His heart, I could see it so easily, was broken. I knew the barest outline of the story. ‘I am divorced from my wife.’

  When you heard these facts about an adult, you just assumed everything was as straightforward as it sounded. Matter-of-fact decisions were made. We separated. These things happen.

  It was the same as hearing that someone died, that someone had lost a wife or a husband to death. Blah. It’s a line in a newspaper. You read it and a shadow falls on your cup of coffee. In a second the shadow vanishes, perhaps a nanoscar incises itself somewhere deep in your unconscious, but you have forgotten, you return to the business in hand, the cup of coffee, your busy immortal life.

  These things happen. To other people. They’ll get over it. They all seem to get over it, don’t they? Heartache, love, joy and tears, the agony and the ecstasy, were the preserve of youth, I believed, or rather assumed, as my companions and I tumbled about in the whirling emotional oceans of our early twenties.

  Older people like Bo swam in a different stream and had other things to occupy them, such as teaching and writing and being important. Divorced? So what? Could it really bother him much?

  Only in his eyes I saw something that I recognised.

  Heartbreak, behind the cheery laugh and quick wit and the enthusiastic energy. Behind the elegant face and the tweed coat of armour. I wasn’t going to lift the visor; I wasn’t going to ask questions. He would certainly have snubbed me, if I had begun to pry.

  I caught a glimpse of him, behind the veil. And he knew I’d caught it. He knew I understood things that Oliver, for instance, would not. There was that understanding between us. We were members of the club of the X-ray eyes, the club of people who can see into the human heart.

  I didn’t delude myself that he saw anything in my eyes. He preferred Mandy’s: sparkling, quick, and hurt in the way a child’s eyes can be hurt. But he knew me, all right, because of what he read in my thesis, my essays. Even in the driest scholarship, emotional learning emerges, since stories and literature are about emotions, in folklore as in literature, in the Middle Ages as in the twenty-first century. As we analysed folk tales, and the poems of Chaucer, we realised we both knew how the human heart works. We could understand the depths of emotion that the poets and storytellers described in symbols and metaphors.

  At the end of the week in Kerry, I believed I had something in common with Bo, apart from an interest in folklore. We were on the same emotional wavelength.

  But of course it is easy to imagine such things, when you are falling in love.

  BEFORE OUR DAY

  ‘The forgotten fiancée’

  That had been summer 1976. In 1977, Oliver and I became engaged, but by January 1978 our relationship was in stormy territory. I was still in love with him but the feeling was no longer reciprocated. I found it difficult to accept this. He was pulling away, sending the messages that are a sure indication that the carnival is over: he came late for dates, sometimes he didn’t show up, he was impatient and distant when he did. Breaking up is hard to do, whichever side of the fence you are on. Oliver wanted to end the relationship, but didn’t want to be cruel. Unfortunately this was an impossible goal.

  I was in denial. But the situation was uncomfortable, to put it mildly. I made an excuse – the only person who demanded this excuse was myself – to escape. The last week in January, I decided to go to Donegal. A strange place to head off to at that time of year.

  I was scheduled to give a paper to the postgraduate seminar group in the Folklore Department in February, and decided that I would write this paper in a B&B in Gortahork. I had the impression that folklorists did things like this: travelled to remote Gaeltacht regions in the west of Ireland to do fieldwork, research. To write.

  Bo was very enthusiastic. I was closer to him now than before, more relaxed, and, as a doctoral student, had a little more status in college than I had enjoyed previously. He advised me to drop into Seán Ó hEochaidh, a retired full-time collector, who spent his life collecting folklore in Donegal for the Irish Folklore Commission. He lived in the post office in Gortahork, just across the street from McFadden’s Hotel.

  ‘Ask him if he has heard a version of “With His Whole Heart”,’ Bo advised. ‘You never know.’

  Oliver did not approve of the trip.

  ‘Why don’t you write it at home? Or in the library?’

  He didn’t enjoy having me around, but neither did he want me to go away.

  I had no good answer to his question. People like to remove themselves from their usual environment to write things: to cottages in the country, to institutions in other countries, even to hotels. But why such places should be more encouraging or inspiring than a quiet room at home, or a table in a library, I don’t actually know.

  Still, how nice that he didn’t want me to go away, even for a week! Just as he had not wanted me to go away for a year, to Algeria. I interpreted it as a sign that he still half-loved me, in spite of all the indications to the contrary.

  I got off the bus at the road which leads to Cnoc na Naomh, and carried my bag and typewriter down towards the sea, to the McFadden’s bungalow – lots of McFaddens, around here. A thin sheet of snow covered the ground like sugar. The crisp air was spiked with the smell of turf smoke, like some delicious herb in a glass of champagne. Stars crowded the sky. A nice yellow moon, almost full. What with all the moonlight and starlight and snowlight, it was not dark at all, and my heart was light too, as I made my way along the road. What an intrepid thing to do! How brave, how unusual I am!

  Breedeen, the woman of the house, thought so too.

  She was a round motherly woman, with a round rosy face and a round cap of black curly hair, and she greeted me and showed me to my room with great warmth and politeness but an undertone of amusement. It was obvious that whatever she had been expecting, it wasn’t this slight girl of twenty-three, carrying a typewriter and a rucksack.

  McFadden’s was a long low bungalow, with white walls, picture windows, and a green tiled roof – the type of bungalow that had been springing up all over the west of Ireland fro
m the 1960s, during the decades of modernisation, which were also decades of destruction. They were modelled on designs in a best-selling paperback called Bungalow Bliss, already coming under attack from the young journalists in Dublin, who would soon inspire a backlash against this latest kind of vernacular architecture. It had a big front garden, and on one side a shop, on the other the ruins of the old country cottage that had been the original dwelling house and was now used to store junk. Its thatched roof had caved in, and there was a bit of galvanised iron on one end, forming a partial shelter.

  I was given a big bedroom, painted primrose yellow, with fresh flowery curtains on the window and a yellow wash-hand basin in the corner. The radiator was lukewarm, the default temperature for central heating systems in Ireland then, when it existed at all, being about fifteen degrees. An electric heater, the little fat kind with two bars, was in the corner, not switched on, but Breedeen told me to use it to boost the temperature should I need it. Then she showed me a sitting room, where I could sit and read or write by the turf fire, and the dining room – a big conservatory at the back of the house, furnished with eight tables, and obviously designed to cater for a houseful of summer visitors. That’s where I would eat my breakfast and evening meal for the duration of my stay.

  I was the only guest at the moment, f course. Who comes to the Gaeltacht in January?

  The week passed, and I was happy. I walked to Gortahork, about two or three miles away, and called in on Seán Ó hEochaidh. A plump pleasant-faced man whose looks reminded me of my father’s: medium height, square body and square head. Thick white hair, twinkling eyes. No, he didn’t know my story, but he advised me to visit a storyteller, Joe Mac Eachmharcaigh, who lived near to my B&B, in the townland of Doire Chonaire.