Beyond the Green Hills

by Anne Doughty

  Jessie had been in bed for a week now. The gynaecologist had said there was no specific problem he could discover, but she was badly run down. Unless she built up her strength before her labour she might lose the child. That was bad enough, but what came over in waves as Clare listened to Harry was his real fear that he was going to lose Jessie herself.

  The moment she put down the phone she unpacked her suitcase, sorted the contents and immediately repacked it. She’d thought of ringing Robert at home, but it was already late. There was nothing to be done before morning. She’d spent a long, restless night, short patches of dream-filled sleep alternating with hours of lying wide-eyed, going over and over every detail of her last visit to Belfast, all that had happened to Jessie since the evening when the four of them had dined together in the new home and Jessie had asked her and Andrew to be godparents to the coming baby.

  She dressed for work as usual, but took her suitcase with her and went up to Robert’s room as soon as Paul let her know he was in.

  ‘You must go, of course,’ he said, picking up his phone. ‘Denise, book a flight to Belfast via London for Mam’selle ’Amilton, an open return for the first possible flight. Allow enough time for her to get to Orly by car.

  ‘I think your dear Jessie may need you for some time, perhaps even until her child is born, which you say is maybe a month away. You must stay till then, if you feel it necessary. But keep me informed. I shall be concerned for you and for her. Write or telephone, whatever is convenient. Do you have any sterling?’

  She admitted she hadn’t even thought about money. Looking at him, as he stood by his desk, ready to do anything he could to help her, the tears sprang to her eyes. They dripped on the lapels of her moss-green costume, sitting on the surface of the close-textured fabric as if she’d been caught in a shower of rain.

  ‘There now, my dear. It is hard for you. Take courage,’ he said, as she took out a minute handkerchief from the equally minute pocket of her jacket. ‘I have only a little knowledge of the problems of pregnancy, but there is one piece of advice I must give you. Keep up your spirits. Do not allow your own anxiety to take away your warmth, or your humour. These may be the medicines that Harry and Jessie have most need of,’ he said, as he took her hand and held it for a moment.

  ‘Bon voyage,’ he continued, quietly. ‘And a happy return. I shall miss you. I shall think of you. I may even light a candle for you. You will not mind that, will you?’

  ‘I should like that, Robert,’ she said, mopping her eyes again. ‘I think I shall need all the help I can get. Thank you,’ she said, leaning forward and kissing his cheek. ‘I’ll come back as soon as I can.’

  By the time she’d walked down to reception, Paul was already waiting with a hundred pounds in sterling, an authorisation for setting up an English bank account for her to sign, and her suitcase. Denise had the number of the tickets awaiting her at the BEA desk at Orly.

  While Robert’s chauffeur brought the car to the front of the building, she ran back to her office, but Louise was already on the way to the banking hall to meet her. She’d spoken to Paul and had come to kiss her goodbye.

  The plane’s descent steepened. Only five hours ago, she’d been driving through Paris at the end of the morning rush hour. She saw below her now, in misting rain, a patchwork of tiny fields, the white shapes of cottages and farms slipping away under the wing. As the grey murk dissolved they made a wide sweep over Lough Neagh.

  She stared out at the flat grey waters, calm in the light, drifting drizzle, and saw a cart track leading to a small beach, a framework of poles covered with nets hanging up to dry. It might be the place they had picnicked; it might be another beach just like it. After all the anxiety and distress, to her sudden surprise, she felt steadier than she’d felt at any time since yesterday’s call to Harry.

  The wheels touched the wet runway, the engines roared and they taxied towards the newly completed airport buildings. In the rich grass verges of the new runways, the hares scattered as the Vanguard moved past. A few minutes later, they resumed their interrupted feeding as if nothing whatever had happened.

  In spite of all Harry had told her, Clare was still shocked when she saw Jessie propped up on her pillows. Earlier, Harry said, she’d tried to come downstairs to be there when she arrived, but the effort was too much for her. She’d had to go back to bed.

  ‘Hallo, Jessie,’ she said gently, as Harry pushed open the bedroom door. ‘Harry said you weren’t feeling great.’

  Ginny’s scars had been hard to bear, but she found the paleness of Jessie’s face and the blue smudges under her eyes every bit as bad. She heard Harry slip out of the room behind her. She moved closer to the limp figure lying back on the pillows and saw tears streaming down her face.

  ‘What is it, love? What’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong,’ she said, perching on the side of the bed and putting her arms round her.

  ‘I think I’m goin’ to die, an’ what’ll Harry do wi’ wee Fiona?’ she sobbed, clutching Clare as if she’d never let her go.

  ‘Who said anything about dying, Jessie? Who told you that?’

  ‘Oh, nobody says it, but they’re all that nice to me, the doctors and the nurse that comes. An’ I feel so awful. I’m sure I’m goin’ to die.’

  ‘And I’m absolutely certain you’re not,’ said Clare firmly. ‘If you go and die on me, I’ll never forgive you.’

  Jessie stopped sobbing and looked up at her for the first time.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Think what?’

  ‘That I won’t die.’

  ‘Sure you know only the good die young,’ she replied matter-of-factly. ‘Unless you’ve got religion since I went away, I’d have said you were safe as houses.’

  Jessie stopped crying. Her eyes were still wet, her face thin and peaky, her lovely, wavy brown hair, lank and unwashed, but a touch of the old Jessie suddenly broke through as she grinned and said, ‘Yer lookin’ great. Ye diden buy that suit at C and A’s, did ye?’

  Clare laughed and the moment she did, Jessie laughed too. Coming up stairs with a tray of tea, Harry couldn’t believe his ears.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ he asked.

  ‘Go on, show him,’ said Jessie, poking Clare with surprising vigour. ‘Take it off an’ show him.’

  Clare stood up and slid off the jacket of her costume, turning it so that Harry could read the label.

  ‘I thought they made perfume,’ he said vaguely, as he looked round the room for somewhere to put down the tray.

  ‘Would ye listen to him, Clare,’ she said, raising her eyes heavenwards in a familiar gesture. ‘That, Harry,’ she said, pointing to the label, ‘is a famous dress designer, and Madam here said in one of her letters he makes all the overalls for her firm. Could ye believe her?’

  Clare slept well that night, whether from relief or sheer exhaustion, she couldn’t tell, but she woke early next morning and tried to think through what she ought to do. Jessie was indeed in a bad way, but something had changed since her last visit. Then, she’d been physically well but abstracted, totally preoccupied with Fiona. She’d often been sharp with Clare, reluctant to sit down and talk. This time, she was very unwell, but in many ways she was much more the direct and affectionate Jessie she had once known.

  ‘She told me the other day you were the only one who could help her,’ said Harry, as they washed up together later that evening.

  ‘Did she say why, Harry?’

  ‘No, I couldn’t get her to say another word. I don’t think she knew herself, to tell you the truth.’

  ‘And the gynaecologist and the doctor have no suggestions?’

  ‘The doctor said it might be some personal matter. He suggested our minister of religion,’ he said, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘How did that go down?’

  ‘Not well,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But I tried. I’ve tried everything, Clare,’ he said, a dangerous catch in his voice.

  ‘I know you
have, Harry,’ she said reassuringly. ‘Now look, if she says I can help her, then probably somehow or other I can, even if I’m just as in the dark as you are. But we’ve got to keep our spirits up. That’s the advice my boss gave me before I left. Let’s make up our minds it’s going to be all right, and see what we can do. How about it?’

  ‘Whatever you say, Clare. You’re the boss this time. I’ll do whatever you tell me.’

  The week that followed was one of the grimmest Clare had ever spent. Each morning Jessie would wake up in despair and lie weeping till Clare came and sent Harry off to make his own breakfast. Each morning, she’d talk to her, encourage her, help her to do her hair, put on make-up. By afternoon, Jessie was in good spirits, able to get up, play with Fiona when her grandmother brought her to visit, eat a proper meal in the evening. But next morning, the despair had returned as if nothing were any different.

  There was nausea and sickness, as there had been in the first pregnancy, but the medical problems paled beside Jessie’s fears and anxieties. That was the heart of the problem. It was just so unlike Jessie to be fearful.

  Clare spent many a quiet night hour trying to think what could have triggered such a change. She talked to Harry, who said all had gone well enough till after Fiona’s birth. He’d asked the doctor about post-natal depression, but the doctor said he didn’t think the symptoms fitted the pattern. That was when he’d suggested they consult their minister of religion. They both knew there was no way forward there. After enduring church every Sunday morning when she was in Armagh, a ‘dog-collar’ was the last person Jessie would ever talk to.

  Try as she would, Clare couldn’t see anything that Harry or the doctors had missed. She talked to him about Jessie’s fathers death. He assured her she spoke of her father quite naturally, though not very often. That was hardly surprising, for he’d been away for so long in the war, he’d played a very small part in her life.

  Each day, Clare set out hopefully, trying to find something to fill up the bottomless well of despair. One day, Jessie confessed she was afraid she’d lost her looks and that Harry would go off with someone else, so Clare washed and set her hair, made up her face, insisted she wear a dress instead of a nightie. When her mother came up from Armagh to visit that afternoon, Clare took a bus into town and bought Jessie a bottle of perfume, a box of handmade chocolates and some peaches from Sawyers.

  She was so preoccupied with thoughts of Jessie, it was only on the way back from the city centre she registered where she was. The bus had just stopped outside Queen’s. She watched as crowds of students poured across the pedestrian crossing. A moment later, peering out of her window, down Elmwood Avenue, she just glimpsed the bay of her old room, still visible, because the trees here in Belfast were only just coming into leaf, unlike those she’d left behind on the quay by the Seine.

  Suddenly and passionately, she wished she were back in Paris, having coffee under the trees in the Champs-Elysées with Louise, or in the Bois de Boulogne with Marie-Claude, or sitting by the window of Robert’s office, under the watchful eye of the chestnut mare.

  That was when the solution came to her at last. Jessie was lonely. She’d been lonely since she’d had to leave the gallery. She was sure that was what it was. Harry was Harry, the dearest of men, but beyond him, who had Jessie got to share her thoughts, or her life?

  Then, a more chilling thought struck her. It was just when Jessie had to leave the gallery, that she and Andrew had parted. They had been Jessie and Harry’s closest friends. A week later, she herself had gone off to Paris and shown no signs of ever coming back.

  Pregnancy had taken Jessie out of the gallery, where she so enjoyed talking to customers. Later, illness shut her up at home and little Fiona had to be parked round the corner at her grandmother’s. Who had Jessie to talk to? Who was her Louise? Her Marie-Claude? Her Robert? Who was there with whom Jessie could be the self she’d been before marriage, pregnancy, motherhood and illness had changed her life?

  ‘What about Jessie’s sketching and painting?’ she asked herself.

  It struck her that she’d not seen so much as a pad of paper about the house, never mind watercolours, or oils. She recalled how totally dismissive Jessie had been when she’d mentioned the subject the last time she was over.

  Suddenly, the hills appeared beyond the end of Balmoral Avenue. What a joy it always was to look up and see them, the broad strip of ordinary fields and hedges still surviving, sandwiched between the housing estates on the lower slopes and the angular screes and fierce rock outcrops that marked the summit ridge. How often she’d gazed up at them, in sunshine and in rain, old friends and companions that always reminded her of the countryside not so very far away, even when her work kept her shut up in rooms and lecture theatres in the city.

  She stood up quickly, laughed at herself, as she picked up her parcels and made her way to the back of the bus. She’d gone on three stops beyond the stop for Jessie’s road.

  It was no matter. Her parcels were light and her heels not very high. It would be a pleasure to stroll back under the trees. She felt such a longing for the countryside – Italian countryside, French countryside or Ulster countryside, it didn’t seem to matter which, just so long as it was countryside, with wind, sun or rain. Firmly, she put the thought out of mind as she quickened her step. No thinking about that until Jessie was back on her feet again.

  Two weeks after Clare’s arrival, just as she was beginning to doubt the value of all her efforts, Jessie announced she’d love to go out to lunch if they could find somewhere with big holes cut out of the tables. It was the sign Clare had been waiting for. They had an excellent meal. Jessie tackled it like her old self, and by the time they got to coffee she’d even begun to tease Clare in her old way.

  Clare sat up late that night, writing a long letter to Robert. She shared with him her feeling that it was the radical changes in Jessie’s life that had almost overwhelmed her. Because everything had gone so well for her from the moment she met Harry, poor dear Jessie just hadn’t been prepared for the unhappinesses and disappointments that had come upon her. ‘Perhaps,’ she wrote, ‘it is easier to face adversity if you know that’s what you’re doing. I don’t think Jessie could see she had a problem. So she couldn’t begin to deal with it.’

  The first week in May was the date given for the birth of Jessie’s child. It was now the third week in April. Doctor and gynaecologist agreed that the longer Jessie could carry her child the better. She’d begun to put on weight and they expected the child to do likewise. Clare rifled through all the cookery books she could find, searching for recipes that would encourage her to eat more. She was actually thinking what she might cook for dinner the following evening, when Harry made a proposal that caught her completely unawares.

  ‘How would you girls like a little outing tomorrow?’ he said, as they were drinking coffee in the sitting room. ‘I’ve got some calls to do up around Armagh. You could visit home territory, the scenes of your former conquests.’

  ‘Fine, count me in,’ said Jessie promptly. ‘I’ll produce Number Two tonight, leave it with Granny tomorrow, and be ready for the road by nine. That’s if my lady-in-waiting can have my make-up and hair done by then.’

  Harry looked at her blankly, hardly able to believe she could move back into her old self so completely. He laughed and looked sheepish.

  ‘Sorry, love, I suppose that was silly. The car makes you feel sick, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, no. I’m grand, but it doesn’t like it. It wants to stay at home. But I’ll be fine on my own. Mrs D’s here anyway. You must take Clare. She hasn’t been anywhere since she came. Are you for Drumsollen?’

  Clare was so taken aback at the sudden question, she nearly spilled her coffee.

  In the last week, they’d talked about everything that had been part of their life together except Andrew, till suddenly, one morning, Jessie herself brought up his name.

  ‘D’you think you did the right thing when you broke it of
f, Clare? He was desperate cut up, Harry says. I didn’t see him meself at the time. He’s not been up in Belfast much since ye went. Has he got anyone else d’ye think?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Jessie. He’s working in Armagh now, but that’s about all I do know.’

  ‘I still think he’s yer man. I always did,’ she said, a look of such sadness on her face that Clare was immediately on the alert. ‘Sure I never thought you’d go to Canada. Or if ye did, ye’d be back in no time and we’d wheel our prams down the road together.’

  As the implications of what Jessie was saying dawned upon her, she had a very bad moment. Perhaps that was why Jessie had been so distant, so unwelcoming, a year ago. She blamed her for going away and breaking up that small circle of support she’d been relying on to see her through.

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, Jessie,’ Clare had said, recovering herself and seeing an opportunity. ‘If you do what you’re told and eat up like a good girl and produce another lovely little Burrows, I’ll contact Andrew before I go back and see if we can still be friends. Then we could be godparents to Number Two. How about that? Don’t say I don’t try to meet you halfway.’

  ‘You’re on. Before witnesses. I’ll tell Harry tonight.’

  Harry was much more sympathetic than Jessie when Clare admitted she didn’t want to run into Andrew without warning. She’d really had too much on her mind to think how she wanted to go about a first meeting. Driving up to Armagh, he reassured her that Andrew was never at Drumsollen during the week. Their arrangement was for Harry to call when June Wiley was there and she’d help him pack whatever he’d left out ready. Harry had told June he was hoping to bring Clare up and June had been delighted. It would be a pity to disappoint her.