by Orna Ross
I watch the work from my shed.
Here is where I’m living now, inside a strange hiatus. The accommodation is primitive. I have an oil lamp for light, an oil stove for cooking and each morning, before the builders arrive, I draw water from an outside tap beside the house, lugging it across the garden in two enamel buckets. Calls of nature are answered between the dunes.
Primitive, yes, but the walls and corrugated iron roof are sound. And it’s what I seem to want. I feel like I’m being purged.
Most days, I spend my time around the other side, facing the sea, but every so often I come round here to view progress. Across the lawn from me, the new owners Hilde and Stefan watch too. Their gaze is fond. Arms entwined, they stand and stare, smiling at the work and each other.
To them, these labourers are wonder-workers, making concrete the dream that sustained decades of desk-bound years in Düsseldorf.
One of the workmen in the distance sees me and waves. He is a show-off who likes to go naked to the waist, to roar along to songs on the radio. His wave is really for the other men, not me. I don’t return it.
The builders agree with my sister, that I am unhinged. By grief, perhaps, or maybe just by nature. Most of the village agrees. Eyes lift skywards or slide away from me as I pass. Behind my back, index fingers are circled around temples.
I don’t care. I can be mad if that is what they need me to be, if it means I can live in my shed and forgo explanations.
Fifteen black refuse sacks were filled with rubbish to clear this shed, then Rory helped me carry some furniture across from the house before the Germans came — the single bed from my old bedroom, a long table I use as a desk, one wooden chair, one easy one. And a rug for the floor by my bed.
The kind weather makes it possible. Each morning, the sun comes up shining, and as warm as California. I leave the steel sliding door open during the day as I work; sometimes a small breeze lifts my papers so that letters or notes or newspaper cuttings have to be weighted down with stones. But mostly it is calm and clear. And set to stay fair, according to Hilde: June, she tells me, will break all records.
Under Hilde’s hands, Mrs D.’s front-room shop is to become a substantial business, serving food as well as alcohol. Upstairs, what were family bedrooms are to be renovated to provide guest accommodation: six rooms – “all en suite!” cries Hilde with delight – from which tourists will rise each morning and come downstairs for “the Irish breakfast” – fried eggs and sausages and rashers of bacon.
She has supplied me with breathless details of her plans. Stone floors, wooden tables and stools, walls decorated with replicas of old advertisement boards: “Guinness is Good For You”; “For a Smoother Smoke – Smoke Sweet Afton”; “Drink Lyons – the Quality Tea”. Tankards and bottles and musty old books scattered on high shelves, in calculated disarray.
“A real Irish pub,” she says, hugging herself. As the Zimmermans’ ideas about Irish pubs were acquired in Europe, truly traditional features like outside toilets, men-only access or sawdust on the floor will not feature.
Hilde is a large woman, lavishly warm, and my reaction to her plans is a great disappointment to her. “Your dear, dear mother,” she says, bringing her face, a round melodrama of sadness, close to mine. “What you must know is that we, Stefan and I, love this place as much as Máirín did.” Hilde gets everything wrong. She mispronounces my mother’s name: Mayreen she says every time, instead of Maureen. And my reservations about their schemes have nothing to do with Mrs D.
I cannot explain myself to Hilde but I like her. She has spoken to my sister, has heard the talk of the village, has been informed about my performance at the funeral. Her response is kindness. Every day at one o’clock, she comes to my door with a dinner tray held out before her.
“Hello, hello,” she calls, the same words each day, the same cheery tone. “Are you there, Jo? I have brought for you a little food.”
She tries not to shudder at my choice of accommodation. I live in a shed while she and her husband overthrow my old home: she is shocked at that. Shocked at me, that anyone could choose to live like this, but especially a woman in my condition. Shocked at herself: she still can scarcely believe she has allowed it. The house is legally theirs; I had no rights to it. Still, she acts like I have done them a favour.
So I eat her food, all of it, although it is not to my taste – pot roasts, frankfurters, gravy. I even drink the accompanying glass of milk. To Hilde, Irish milk is something wonderful, and for a pregnant woman, essential sustenance.
She knows I want to stay in Mucknamore until I finish what I am writing, though I haven’t explained why. What reason can I give for not returning to San Francisco with the blue suitcase and doing the work over there? None, except that I know it would never be done.
At first I slept badly here in my shed, my sleep perforated by noises of the night. The door has a big bolt and is secure but still I would jerk awake at certain sounds, heart pounding. Or I would turn over, thinking myself in my double bed in San Francisco and wake against this mattress’s narrow edge, with a sensation of being about to pitch out onto the rough, unsanitary floor.
All this has passed. I have learned to turn in a smaller space, got used to the snaps and rustles of the outdoors, so they now bother me no more than the night-time creaks of an apartment building.
Each evening, while the sun is going down in a flamboyance of oranges and reds that bode well for the following day, Rory comes to visit. He waits until then, knowing I won’t see him earlier. He brings drinks, wine or beer for himself, orange juice or Coca-Cola for me.
I look forward to these visits, I admit it. As the light seeps out of the day and I push my tired brain through another diary entry or document or letter, I listen for his footfall and, when he arrives, I fold away the papers and we go and sit on the rug I have already set down behind the shed for us. It’s private there, overlooking the night water, high enough and far enough back from the edge to be cloistered from passers-by on the beach below.
We sit close for two or three hours each evening in velvet darkness and talk, our voices low, moths swooping in to knock themselves against the oil lantern set between us.
We talk: we do not touch, except when he is leaving to go home, when he bends and places a swift, soft peck on my cheek.
Each time, as I tilt forwards to receive this almost-kiss, I think about turning my head to allow his lips to meet mine. That would do it, I know: one gesture from me and the rest would follow.
He is glad that I don’t. He loves his wife, his children. He is afraid of what sex with me would do to his feelings for them. As for me, I don’t have his belief in — his awe of — the sexual act. That he comes here every night is betrayal enough, surely? Yet I too hold back.
Become Rory O’Donovan’s other woman? Unthinkable.
So I accept the peck, keep my eyes steady front. And after he is gone, I wash and brush my teeth by lantern light, turning my thoughts away from him and back to the doings of young Granny Peg and Norah and Barney and Dan. They are who I take to sleep with me.
Sometimes, I think of my empty apartment in San Francisco, its curtains standing open to foggy summer days and street-lit nights. I think of the agony letters I left lying beside my computer, unanswered, dust settling over them. I think of Dee and Gary and Susan and Jake and all the others who continue to meet in Benton’s or Araby’s or Café Crème without me. I find it hard to believe it’s all still going on while I’m not there.
A replacement has been engaged to cover my column. “She won’t be the same,” Lauren said when I called, “but she’ll do us fine until you get back.” I was not to worry about work. I was to take all the time I needed. Lauren lost her mother two years ago; she thinks she understands. I trade on her sympathy to win myself this interlude.
I am content to be here, for now; I don’t want to go back, not yet. It’s all very temporary. As soon as the construction work on the house is done, the builders will turn thei
r attention to terraces and gardens and my shed will go. Hilde tries to reassure me with terrible promises about what will happen then. The guest bedrooms will be done, she says, and I can join her and Stefan in the house. I will be most welcome, I must stay as long as I like.
Her generosity terrifies me, so I work hard, harder than I have ever worked in my life. Up in the morning with the sun to write out the previous day’s findings. A break at nine for food, again at eleven for a run on the beach. Once, I was able to run for miles and I am taking this opportunity to do what I have been pledging to do for a long time: regain my lost fitness.
After the run, it’s back to my shed in time to wash and eat Hilde’s lunch. The afternoon I spend writing until I can write no more. I make myself a light meal and after that, read something from the cache in the suitcase. Read and unravel until Rory comes, when we talk and talk, piecing together what happened to him and to me and to the people who made us.
It isn’t always easy; often I worry that I’m getting it wrong, or over-interpreting. I don’t fully trust my own recollections any more than I believe everything I read in the papers. Memories are like dreams: putting them into words makes them too solid. Even as I’m doing it, a part of me is thinking I shouldn’t.
But I do. To my own mixed feelings, I stay on in Mucknamore, in a crumbling, run-down shack of a shed, and I write.
1922
On Monday afternoon, Peg Parle came out the side door of Mucknamore National school, and saw him immediately, sitting on the schoolyard wall with his back to her. He had his jacket off in the sunshine, his shirtsleeves rolled up. She spun round on her heel the second she saw him, to face the door she had just closed behind her.
It was she who locked up the school each afternoon, as Master Cole flew off home like a hare out of a trap as soon as the three o’clock bell came, and she was glad of the duty now. It bought her a minute to hide her infernal blushing — and to think.
Was he waiting for her? He must be. What else would have him sitting there like that, at this time of the day? The key shook in her hand as she tried to fit it in the keyhole. Look at what he did to her, it was desperate. His simple presence two hundred yards away…The key clicked in the lock and now she had nowhere she could go but about turn and forward, to see what he wanted.
She put on what she hoped was an ordinary smile, as if it was no great surprise at all that he should turn up like this, as if he were nothing to her but an ordinary friend well met, as if there was no blush pumping through her face and forehead.
At the sound of her footsteps approaching, he turned, got up. Stood facing her, with his jacket looped on one finger over his shoulder. “Hello, you.” He was grinning, enjoying her confusion as he always did.
She fought for her voice to be normal. “What has you down here? Is it thinking of going back to school you are?”
“There’s a thought,” he said, putting his head to one side as he pretended to consider it. “Sitting in a little desk every day and you leaning over me telling me what to do.”
“I’d say it would be old Cole you’d have. You being a big boy.” Dark hairs coiled all along his bare forearms, she could see them from the edges of her eyes and something about them made her dizzy. She hardly knew what she was saying. He opened his mouth to make some smart retort but she cut across him.
“Be serious. What has you here in the middle of the day?”
“The ould fella wanted me to fix some fencing in the upper field but I couldn’t stay to it. Everything was telling me it was a day for a walk on The Causeway so I made my escape. And as I was walking down, I saw the children coming from school and I thought to myself, I’ll go down to the schoolhouse and see does Peg want to come along with me.”
A walk. Out in public, in front of everybody. Her insides warmed, she hoped it wasn’t showing.
“So do you?”
“They’re expecting me at home.” That was true. And her mother wouldn’t be one bit pleased to see her walking the roads with Dan O’Donovan. Only his morning she’d been spitting fire about him bringing Mucknamore Band to the Michael Collins rally in Wexford.
“But they’ll manage without you for half an hour?”
She could tell Mammy she took the opportunity to question him, to sort out where he stood.
“It is a lovely day,” she said, with a show of reluctance.
“And who knows when we’ll get the next one?”
He started walking in the direction of the strand and she fell into step beside him. “I won’t be able to stay too long.”
Without discussing it, they walked towards the gap between Lambert’s farm and Dillon’s to get to the strand, rather than going down to the Hole in the Wall, which would take them too near to her house.
In the ditch opposite Lambert’s, some crocuses were peeping up purple and white, and bunches of daffodils, tall beauties, were flaunting their flamboyant yellow heads. Was there anything lovelier than a lovely spring day, especially after a tough winter? For weeks, they’d had an east wind with the waves hurrying to the shore with veils of spray blown back, like an army of angry brides. Now the wind had dropped and the water settled to sleek.
As they turned onto the strand, the brightness and beauty of it all laid itself out before them.
“Do you ever wonder about heading off out there,” he asked as they walked down towards the shore. “Off beyond the sea?”
She hadn’t. Which wasn’t very adventurous of her, when she thought about it. “If you go up to Forth Mountain on a day like this, you can see Wales,” she told him. “Did you ever do that?”
“I didn’t. Maybe you’d like to take me up there sometime.”
“I might,” she said, matching his tone. “If you’re good.”
“Oh, good, is it? Good at what?”
He was the very devil of a man. He always bested her because he never minded going low.
“We went across once, when I was about thirteen,” she said. “Mammy brought us on the ferry from Rosslare and we stayed in a boarding house.”
“What was it like?”
“The people talked funny. We took a coach into the mountains – their mountains are huge – but it rained all day and we could hardly see a thing.”
He nodded. “When I said about going away, what I meant was for good.”
“Oh, emigration. No, I never considered that.”
“I suppose why would you?”
He was right, why would she? She was one of the lucky ones, with her good job and her nice house where she could live happily until the day when, please God, she’d meet a good man and make her own home and family. For him, it was different. He was a second son, doing jobs about the place at home but knowing that his brother John would get the farm. He wasn’t a man to play number two.
“You’re not thinking of leaving us, are you?”
If he were, would she go with him? He’d make something of himself wherever he went. Would he ask her?
“No,” he said. “I might have, before. But this Treaty we have now, it changes everything. There’s hope for us all now.”
“I don’t want to get into an argument about the Treaty, but—”
“Good,” he said. “Then don’t.”
She’d better ask him the hard question so, get it out of the way. “What’s all this carry-on with the Mucknamore Band?”
“Listen, I know your mother has me blamed for that, but she’s all wrong. The band members are ten men with minds of their own.”
“But you’re not coming to the Sinn Féin meetings any more. And neither are they.” She kept her voice light.
“There’s no point. There’s only room for one opinion in Mucknamore Sinn Féin.”
“Mammy’s.” She laughed and he – looking relieved – laughed along.
“That’s right.”
“But if you want your opinion to get across to the other members, you can’t go isolating yourself.”
He stopped. “It’s the other way round
, Peg.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s ye who are isolating yourselves. Your family needs to be more careful. You’ve a lot of influence around here. There’s no good hoping your mother will calm down but you – the schoolteacher -”
He was looking into her face, as intense as she could ever wish him to look. “This Treaty gives us the freedom to win freedom, Peg. We work within it for the time being, keeping our eye on an all-Ireland Republic down the road, when the time’s right. Everything doesn’t have to be done at once.”
“But Dan, our oaths.”
She took an oath of allegiance to the Irish Republic when she joined Cumann na mBan, as did Norah. As did he and Barney when they joined the Irish Republican Army. They couldn’t now go and take an opposing oath of allegiance to a so-called Free State, as this Treaty demanded. Or to an English King.
“The Irish Republic lives. It was brought into being by the Irish people in 1918. Nothing but the decision of the Irish people can dismantle it.”
“That’s what I’m trying to say to you. When the election comes, the Irish people will do the sensible thing and vote yes to the Treaty.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Why wouldn’t they? Every English soldier is to be shifted out of their barracks and shipped back home. We’re to have our own army and our own government and our own judges and our own police. They’re gone, Peg. It’s over.”
Dan bent to pick up a flat stone, and tossed across the water so that it skimmed the surface once – twice – thrice – four times before sinking. How was it that boys could always do that, Peg wondered, and girls couldn’t? It was a paltry skill, one that didn’t need strength or any other masculine quality to succeed. It must just be that girls didn’t bother with it. Because it was a boy’s thing, boys became good at it.
She wondered what it would it be like to be a boy, to do what Dan did today, just decide that you wanted to spend time with somebody and turn up where they were. Imagine if she were to do it the other way round, call up to the O’Donovan farmhouse when she felt like seeing him. Just imagine.