The Beach at Doonshean

by Penny Feeny

  He was dismissive. ‘Oh, it’s just a manner of speaking. It’ll be easier for Clem if you’re with us. She asked for you, didn’t you, darlin’?’

  A family reunion in difficult circumstances – why would they want a stranger present? ‘Better, surely, if her mother was there?’

  ‘Ah, but that’s never going to happen.’

  Clemmie’s brown legs stuck out in front of her, ending in pink Wellington boots studded with stars. She gave Bel her gap-toothed smile. How much of a secret was she? Bel wondered.

  Tom added, ‘I’m trying to make a good fist of things. You will help out, won’t you?’

  There was undoubtedly some magic in his voice, some quality that sent tremors up her spine and plucked at her emotions. Bel possessed an easy social poise, but it hadn’t often led to romance. Tom Farrelly had the knack of making her feel special, her company desirable. A knack, that’s all it was. ‘Of course.’

  She could see on a rise ahead of them the plain grey rendered farmhouse with its slate roof and blue painted window frames, blending into the sky. A Border collie barked and cavorted as they approached and seemed to disappear beneath the car wheels. Horrified, Bel waited for the crunch.

  Tom said, ‘He’s a noisy bugger but he’ll come to no harm.’ He stopped the car and got out. ‘Stay there, JP, stay. He’s named after a feckin’ pope, wouldn’t you know.’ He aimed a kick in the collie’s direction; JP cringed and Bel gasped. ‘Jaysus, I wouldn’t hurt him! But he needs to know who’s in charge.’ He opened the passenger door and scooped Clemmie from the back seat. ‘Don’t you be afraid of him, Clem.’ As she wriggled in his arms, he added, ‘Or me. Or anyone. Now why don’t I show you the hay byre? When I was your age it was my favourite spot in the world.’

  ‘Your parents,’ Bel began, ‘I thought they were expecting you.’ The house looked bleak. There were no lights on, no cat sunning itself on a doorstep, only a straggling rose bush to soften its austerity.

  ‘There’s time enough,’ said Tom, leading them down a dung-spattered track. ‘You’ll have been expecting mud. You won’t be disappointed.’

  Clemmie’s pink boots splashed into puddles and through the cowpats. And then they came upon it: a stack of dusty straw bales beneath a corrugated-tin roof, a ladder propped against them.

  ‘It’s bit depleted after the winter,’ he said.

  Clemmie craned her neck. ‘It’s very high.’

  ‘It’s wonderful up there. You can see all the way to America.’

  ‘America!’ she squealed.

  ‘And you can spot anyone coming across the land, that’s for sure. When I was a lad I used to lie low, make myself scarce. If I was really in deep shit…’ his laugh was throaty, mischievous ‘…I’d bring the ladder up too. Anyway, as you know, priests wear skirts, they’re not great at climbing.’

  Bel said, ‘Was it always the priest who was after you?’

  ‘Well now.’ His hand was resting on one of the rungs, stroking the wood. ‘Children’s memories are so exaggerated, aren’t they? It certainly felt like I was always in trouble with Father this or Father that. They believe in putting the fear of God into you around here and the priest has a direct line. I was a terrible rascal, forever missing choir practice. And besides, there was the matter of the collection plate…’

  ‘Can I go up?’ begged Clemmie. ‘Please. Please.’

  ‘If you fell, my darlin’, your mother would never let me take you out again.’

  ‘I’ll be careful. I won’t fall.’

  ‘That’s what you’re telling me now…’

  ‘I won’t,’ insisted Clemmie, stamping her foot. ‘Bel will look after me.’

  ‘Well I don’t know,’ said Bel. ‘I have a terrible head for heights.’

  Clemmie wasn’t going to be deterred. She took hold of the ladder’s sides and put her foot on the first rung. Then the second. Tom watched, helpless and half admiring. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ he said. ‘Somebody tells you no, you just want to prove them wrong. Right?’ And he started nimbly after her.

  At the top of the stack Clemmie’s face appeared, dark and disembodied above the yellow straw. ‘Come on, Bel, it’s boss!’ she called.

  Well I’m not going to be shown up by a six-year-old, thought Bel. (Though when she got to the top the distance from the ground startled her.)

  ‘Don’t look down,’ said Tom as she pulled back from the brink. ‘Look out to sea.’

  The view was impressive. The fields were the rich green of grass mixed with clover, a glorious quilt ruffling beneath a fast-moving sky. The cows stood about, stolid black and white chunks, like chess pieces waiting for a hand to move them. Beyond lay the Atlantic, its froth-capped waves mirroring the plumes of cloud. There wasn’t a human figure to be seen.

  Clemmie was crawling over the bales, picking up loose strands of straw. ‘Can you make me a corn dolly?’ she said.

  Bel was amused. ‘Where did you hear about corn dollies?’

  ‘I saw it on the telly. Please!’

  ‘Okay I’ll try, if you find me some long pieces.’ She began to braid the strands together.

  Tom had been scouring the horizon, as if in search of something or someone. He said suddenly in a passionate undertone, ‘I didn’t want to come, you know. I didn’t want to be part of this sentimental sanctimonious shite. God, I hope I die suddenly!’

  He was upset, Bel told herself, by his father’s condition. An angry, cynical reaction would not be unusual. Unsure how to respond, she gave his shoulder a tentative pat. He seized her hand and held it against the side of his face, drawing her closer. Conscious that they weren’t alone, she looked for Clemmie. The child had crawled to the end of the barn and was burrowing into the hay, creating a little nest for herself. She had her back to them.

  Yes please, thought Bel, I do want to repeat the experience of Saturday night. I want physical contact. I want to come alive again. She leaned towards him. She didn’t say a word – nor did Tom – but their tongues combined with alacrity. He slipped his hand beneath her sweater, tapping his way up the xylophone of her ribs, caressing her breast until the nipple hardened. ‘There’s nothing of you, is there?’ he murmured.

  ‘It’s because I’ve been ill. I told you before, I haven’t been able to eat properly for weeks. It’s so tedious.’

  ‘Ah, that’s a topic I know about. Endured many a time. Fucking unbelievable boredom. But not right now. Sweetheart, you’ve brightened my day.’

  He sounded sincere, though it hardly mattered. She suspected they both wanted to find somewhere more private, a warm dark space where they could explore each other’s bodies. He picked up a piece of straw and ran the end meditatively along the curve of her jaw. He reached for another kiss.

  ‘Daddy!’ called Clemmie.

  He spun around, dislodging one of the straw bales. It rolled towards the child and she put out her foot to stop it. She in turn lost her balance and Tom lunged forward. He caught her by the arm and clutched her against his chest. The bale changed course and bowled into the prongs of the ladder, knocking them at a vulnerable angle. In slow motion the ladder slid sideways and fell to the ground.

  Clemmie froze, but Tom laughed. Still holding her, he swept his other arm around Bel and said, ‘Ah, girls, is this what you were planning all along, to be stranded with me on top of a haystack?’ Clemmie, who might have been going to cry, giggled instead.

  Bel said, ‘So what are we going to do now?’ The moment of sexual arousal had dissipated. The corn dolly was a few brittle twists of straw snapping between her fingers. A wind was getting up and the clouds were darkening.

  ‘You’ll be astonished,’ he said. ‘Tom Farrelly can get out of anything.’

  ‘So astonish us.’

  ‘It’s not difficult, darlin’. What we need to do is toss down some bales so they mount up like a staircase. Then jump.’

  ‘And break a leg?’

  He grinned and cracked his knuckles. ‘If you fell awkwardly you cou
ld break something, yeah. But it only needs one of us to get down and right the ladder again.’

  ‘Go on then.’

  He pushed the first bale over the edge and it landed in a cloud of dust. Bel thought she saw a creature scuttle away from it, a field mouse probably. Was Clemmie frightened? She took the child’s hand to reassure her. She wouldn’t allow herself to be bothered by a field mouse. After all, in Sudan she had encountered snakes and scorpions, a spider as big as her fist. The spider had terrified her but done her no harm. Instead she had been laid low by a vibrating speck scarcely visible to the naked eye. Danger doesn’t necessarily come from the obvious source.

  Tom’s pile was growing, though it took time and looked dangerous. ‘Oh, Daddy,’ said Clemmie solemnly as he lowered himself on to it. ‘Don’t hurt yourself.’

  He sneezed and rocked on top of the pile, which didn’t seem stable at all. Bel held her breath as he slid from level to level until he finally reached the ground. He raised a fist in triumph and she and Clemmie both cheered. Tom hefted the ladder so the topmost prongs were once more within their grasp.

  ‘Clem, you must go first,’ said Bel. ‘While we hold it steady, top and bottom.’

  When Clemmie was safely down, it was her turn. But she was experiencing a crushing wave of vertigo. She used to be so fearless. What had happened? Having all the stuffing knocked out of her, that’s what.

  ‘Bel, what are you waiting for?’

  She inched one foot onto a rung of the ladder, then another, scared it would peel away from the stack. Tom had angled it more steeply than before; it seemed vertical. And she wasn’t small and agile like Clemmie. ‘Oh God, I’m stuck.’

  ‘If you think you’re going to fall,’ said Tom from below, ‘then you almost surely will. Do you want me to help you?’ He climbed a little way up and closed his hand around her ankle, guiding her descent. ‘Don’t panic,’ he said. ‘I’m right behind you.’

  Bel, convinced the ladder was buckling under their double weight, kicked out.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Tom, leaping off.

  Unfortunately his jump destabilised the ladder, which swayed, bearing Bel with it. She slithered rapidly downwards and was ejected onto the concrete floor with a smash.

  17

  The Press Cuttings

  Teresa had been polishing the taps again, an endeavour Vince found mystifying. If you wanted to look at your face – and really it was only a necessity for shaving – then you could use the mirror above the basin. He’d screwed it there himself. You’d not gain much from trying to peer at your reflection in the shine of a tap. Though there was no doubt about it: Teresa Hogan’s taps shone. In the old days you’d have been lucky to have such bathroom facilities. When his bachelor uncle Seamus inhabited Dolphin Cottage he’d had to piss into a bucket outside the back door. Come spring he’d soak his winter blankets in the urine for twenty-four hours to kill off the bugs and stretch them on the bushes to dry. The whiff of ammonia when Teresa brought home the dry cleaning would remind Vince of his uncle’s methods.

  He emerged from the downstairs toilet drying his hands on the seat of his trousers. She would have reproved him for not using the fluffy apricot towel swinging from its hoop, but she was busy entertaining her friends, Breda Malone and Mary O’Connor. They were perched on easy chairs with their teacups; the three witches, was how he thought of them when they were together. Teresa had been doing more than a bit of unnecessary spit and polish, he could see now – she’d been ferreting through the press cuttings.

  She kept them in an old box file: several years’ worth of christenings, weddings and obituaries, accounts of local Field Days and Festivals and the Rose of Tralee snipped from the Kerryman. She’d had them out before, on Sunday, and he’d thought maybe she was after the date of an anniversary of some kind – though it would be unlike Teresa not to have such information written down. Hers was always the first card through the letter box; people said her goodwill was much appreciated.

  She had the scissored ribbons spread on the table top – including the thirty-year-old photo of himself when he still had hair on the top of his head and could rise to the challenge of an arm wrestle. And win, mostly. But it wasn’t her younger, fresh-faced husband’s picture Teresa was passing across to Breda Malone; it was the reproduction of a family snapshot: a broad-chested man, a petite woman and a stocky little boy in dungarees.

  ‘What do you think?’ she was saying. ‘Is there not an incredible likeness?’

  Breda adjusted her glasses so she could look more closely at the grainy image. ‘I believe you are right, so,’ she said. ‘The little boy here, he’d be a mite younger, would he not, than the grandson she showed us on Sunday?’

  Teresa nodded agreement and lifted her chin in a mulish way as if waiting for Vince to join the discussion.

  He said, ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘The lady doctor. The one who stayed here before she moved into Dolphin Cottage.’

  ‘What about her?’ He recalled the crisp accent, how she was polite but withdrawn as the English tended to be. They’d had a conversation about TB, about whether or not you were safe to drink green milk (which Vince had done all his life, in point of fact). She was very knowledgeable about the TB, which was only to be expected from the medical profession, but she came round in the end to his point of view. Indeed, she had poured the milk on her cereal in the mornings. Nothing else had struck him.

  ‘You didn’t recognise her?’

  ‘Should I have done?’

  Breda and Mary pursed their lips and continued to pass the press cuttings between them, studying the detail.

  ‘We were first alerted,’ said Teresa, ‘when we bumped into her after Mass and she’d told us she’d been to the burial ground at St Silas.’ The women nodded to confirm this. ‘She didn’t mention the memorial that Ronnie and Pat put up, but she must have seen it. And it got us thinking. Here—’ She took the black and white photo from Breda and thrust it towards him. ‘Take a good look. Is she not the wife of the man who drowned? Cast your mind back.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Vince.

  ‘But you saw more of her than any of the rest of us. You were a witness.’

  The last person to speak to William Langley alive – what a responsibility that had been. He’d not felt easy about it. How could he have realised its significance at the time? And it was only because he was asked so often afterwards – while it was fresh in his mind – that he could still picture the scene.

  It was back when they’d been running the bar, before he and Teresa sold it for redevelopment. The English couple had come in and taken a corner table in the snug with their drinks. The man, neutral, inoffensive: chestnut eyes, beige shirt, brown trousers, like he could blend into the landscape with no trouble at all; the woman’s hair cut so short it cleaved to her skull. They were speaking quietly, but with an intense insistence: a quiet fierce argument. The bar was deserted. Vince didn’t know why they were keeping their voices down, unless on account of the fluffy-haired child they had with them, blowing bubbles in his red lemonade.

  He’d been shaking out his damp tea towel and checking the pressure on his barrel taps, when the woman pushed her chair back so it legs grated on the floor. She jumped up and swung a large canvas holdall over her shoulder, like a game bag loaded with duck or rabbit. Then she knocked the boy’s thumb from his mouth and jerked him from his seat, tugging him out through the doors.

  At this point Vince met the man’s eyes. His smile was rueful. He was a big fellow, well-built but nimble with it. He leaned his elbow on the bar and glanced at his watch. ‘Might as well have one for the road.’ He took a punt note from his pocket. ‘Bushmills please.’

  ‘A large one?’

  ‘Why not? A dose of Dutch courage.’

  That was the remark they kept asking Vince about. But it was only an expression, he insisted, it wasn’t significant. One thing he did remember, three decades later, was the hungry way the widow h
ad watched him in the courtroom in Tralee when the Coroner asked: ‘Did William Langley seem agitated at all?’ At that moment Vince had glanced in her direction and seen her crane forward in her seat as if she couldn’t afford to miss whatever he was going to say.

  ‘No, not particularly.’

  She’d relapsed then, slumped like a sack of Kerr’s Pinks. She’d only mentioned the quarrel glancingly herself. They’d had a disagreement, she acknowledged, which was why she’d left the pub ahead of her husband; she’d needed to curb her temper. This fitted with Vince’s view. She had steamed off at a gallop because that’s what some women do, is it not? For a man, a drink can go a long way to soothe a hurt. There was no suggestion that William Langley might take his own life, nothing to indicate suicide. No reason for him to plunge into the sea again after the rescue. The riptide had claimed him. The verdict was accidental death.

  Ronnie Farrelly hadn’t brought her sons to the inquest – they were far too young for such proceedings – but she’d brought Anna. The older girls had been minding the little ones that day, beach-combing while the boys fished in the rock pools. Anna had pulled the child from the water and got him breathing again. She had acquitted herself very well, for it was a terrible ordeal and the Coroner had praised her.

  Afterwards Vince had spoken to Ronnie and they’d been standing not a yard away from the widow, the pair of them building up the nerve to approach, to shake her hand and tell her how sorry they were for her loss. But she had given them a glittering black-eyed stare, her pupils so dilated Vince felt as if he was looking straight through them into her brain and the torment churning there. She didn’t acknowledge him, or Ronnie.

  And then the reporter from the Kerryman had talked him into going for a Guinness at the Grand. They’d sat on high stools at the mahogany counter and he’d repeated his story again – No, he hadn’t been able to hear what they were saying and no, your man hadn’t seemed agitated, although it was true he’d joked about Dutch courage. And Vince finished his jar and the photographer (who’d died since from a severe asthma attack, so there was another life cut short) took his photo, the one that Mary O’Connor was putting back in the box because it wasn’t Vince in his younger days they were interested in.