by Cathy Kelly
For the first time, Megan sensed that this wasn’t a straightforward emigrant-returning-home trip. Up to now, she’d never questioned Eleanor’s desire to visit her old home. Eleanor hadn’t been to Ireland for many years, it was a pretty standard thing to want to do, right?
But now, Megan began to wonder if Eleanor’s visit to Ireland was that straightforward after all.
She consulted the satellite navigation screen on the dashboard, and steered back into the traffic. She’d have liked to have asked exactly what had brought Eleanor to Ireland, but she couldn’t. Instead, she went at it indirectly.
‘It must be strange to be back here,’ she said. ‘I felt the same when I got back to Golden Square. I hadn’t lived there for years and I’d changed so much. It must feel the same for you.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Eleanor. ‘It’s so different, it’s unnerving.’
Megan took a risk. ‘And a bit sad?’
‘Very sad, actually. Not in Golden Square. I love it there. But this –’ she gestured out the window at the countryside they were driving through ‘– this isn’t anything like the place I left.’
Megan said nothing. All she knew about therapy came from TV or Woody Allen movies – she wished he’d cast her in something – but she knew that if you said nothing, people sometimes jumped in. However, Eleanor had fallen silent. More prodding was needed.
‘When we lived in Ireland, we were kids and I couldn’t wait to get somewhere exciting, like New York,’ Megan went on. ‘Now, after everything that’s happened, I love the quiet of Golden Square. Not that it’s that quiet, I suppose. Stuff is always happening. I don’t mean the photographers – I could do without them outside Aunt Nora’s house – but other stuff.’
‘It’s a community and you’ve got friends here,’ Eleanor remarked. ‘That’s why things are always happening. You know what’s going on in people’s lives.’
‘That’s nice, isn’t it?’ Megan said with enthusiasm. ‘I’ve never had that anywhere else.’
‘Community is important to people, and Nora’s very much a part of the local community. You’ve met some nice people too, like Connie, Nicky, Birdie and Rae. That’s how you’ve become involved. It changes everything.’
Megan drove in silence for a little bit. The GPS on the car was constantly telling her where to go as she navigated a series of roundabouts, so she was concentrating.
‘It’s funny, we’re both newcomers, really, and we’ve become totally involved in the place,’ she said thoughtfully once they were back on a straight road again. ‘Is it Golden Square, do you think?’
Eleanor shook her head. ‘It’s because we’ve both stayed on the outside for a long time. Megan. You in your starry world, your feet not touching the ground, and me in my analyst’s world, watching the world and not getting involved. Suddenly we landed in Golden Square and, in spite of ourselves, we became involved.’
Megan was confused. ‘You mean, you don’t normally get involved with people? I thought that’s what you did?’
Eleanor’s laugh was soft. ‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘In spite of myself, I got involved. I was trained to stay on the outside, and it’s a hard habit to break. When you meet someone in the park and they tell you their problems, you know it’ll realistically take years of ripping down the barriers to get to the problem and build the person up, so you – sorry – so I don’t say anything. Well, I never used to say anything.’
‘But now you do,’ Megan finished. ‘Which is a positive thing. Look how much you’ve helped me. I hadn’t told anybody all about Rob until I told you. I kept it knotted up inside me, eating away at me. And now look at me! You’ve done so much for me. We’re friends.’
Eleanor felt a surge of affection for the young woman beside her. It was true: for all the difference in age, she felt that Megan was her friend, as were Connie and Rae. Before Ralf died, she’d had few female friends. Her family was her world outside work. Going to Golden Square meant she’d had to open up to new support networks.
She had a twenty-six-year-old actress friend. How great was that.
Eleanor decided to do something she never did any more with other people and open up.
‘Do you know, I’ve never been back here since my family left,’ she said softly.
‘Wow,’ said Megan. ‘That was a long time ago, wasn’t it? Not that you’re old or anything –’
Eleanor laughed. ‘I am old,’ she said. ‘It’s all right to say that. I know that the society constructs these days mean that women don’t want to say how old they are but it’s not a problem for me. I left here in nineteen thirty-seven.’
‘Whoa,’ said Megan. ‘That’s a long time.’ She hesitated to do the maths but Eleanor got there before her.
‘I was eleven,’ she said. ‘My mother, my aunt Agnes and I took the boat to New York to live with my uncle and we never came back. It’s a long time to think about a place.’
Megan wasn’t sure how to respond. She did the mental calculations: Eleanor hadn’t seen the place of her birth for some seventy-three years. Megan herself was only twenty-six. Imagine being alive that long, imagine having lived through so much.
‘I don’t think I know anybody that old,’ Megan said, and Eleanor gave a rich, deep laugh.
‘That’s not what I meant,’ Megan apologised. ‘But you’ve seen so much. The thirties – I love the thirties, the clothes are so glamorous.’
‘It wasn’t very glamorous to arrive in Ellis Island in those days,’ Eleanor said. ‘America was in the grip of the Depression. We thought we’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. When we left Kilmoney we didn’t have much, but we had a roof over our heads and a garden. When we landed in New York, we had next to nothing.’
Megan’s history was sketchy. The most she could remember about the Depression was a Hollywood mini-series. It had shown bleak poverty and people committing suicide due to bankruptcy.
‘How did you survive?’
‘My mother and Agnes worked as seamstresses. Agnes had been in service and she had training, My mother was very good with her hands. People were used to sewing in those days. At home, my mother made all our clothes.’
‘Incredible. What was it like when you were a kid? Here in the West, I mean.’ Megan could vaguely imagine life in New York because she’d been there. But the rural world of 1930s Ireland, that she couldn’t imagine.
‘My mother wanted me to know what it was like,’ Eleanor said. ‘When she died, she left me a little book about life in Connemara. Well, she called it a recipe book, but it was sort of a diary-cum-recipes-for-living-your-life book. She didn’t want me to forget where I came from. It’s supposed to be about food, but it’s really about life.’
‘I’d love to see it.’
‘I’ll lend it to you tonight,’ Eleanor promised. She paused. ‘I came back to Ireland because my husband died last December.’
There, she’d said it out loud. It was ridiculous for a psychoanalyst to have a problem saying such a thing out loud, but there it was. She felt that saying Ralf was dead made it real.
She knew it was real, it felt painfully real. But telling other people was the final act.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Megan took a hand off the steering wheel to touch Eleanor’s hand. ‘All these months, I’ve been telling you my problems – we’ve all been telling you our problems – and you never said a word about this.’
‘It’s been difficult,’ Eleanor said. ‘I’m not good with sharing or asking for help. Physician, heal thyself!’ she joked.
‘Had he been sick for a long time or was it sudden?’ Megan asked.
‘It was quite sudden,’ Eleanor said quietly. ‘We can talk about it tomorrow, perhaps? I’m so tired now…’
‘Sure,’ said Megan quickly. ‘Let’s drive on and get to our B&B.’
Outside Galway, the landscape began to change. Suddenly, they were on a much narrower road that sat in a bare, beautiful landscape that spread up rocky mountains to the left, and down t
o a jagged coast on the right. The road was set high on the land in some places, with ground falling away on each side of the road where unwary drivers might find their car stuck in a ditch if they strayed from the tarmac.
‘The road is on the bog,’ murmured Eleanor to herself as she gazed out the window.
The sky was big and lit with a strange, clear light. Grey rocks dotted the hillsides and wild-looking mountain sheep were scattered in groups, diminishing as the hills turned into solid, rugged mountains.
She remembered a painter her mother had loved: Paul Henry. He’d painted the expanse of Connemara and County Mayo with small thatched cottages set in lonely swathes of bogland. She’d bought a print of one of his works: stone cottages set beneath purple mountains with brooding clouds overhead. He’d been famous for his cloud structure. When she’d seen prints of his work, she’d wondered if he’d imagined the desolate beauty of the place, but being here, she could see he hadn’t.
In her memory, Connemara was smaller, tamer than this wild, beautiful country.
It was beautiful but so stark. How had her family survived here for so many years?
It was growing dark by the time they pulled into the bed and breakfast that the guide had recommended to Eleanor.
The Bay was a medium-sized Edwardian hunting lodge that had had been transformed into a B&B.
A smiling woman of about forty brought them in, showed them prettily decorated adjoining rooms, and said she could cook them scrambled eggs if they liked, or else send sandwiches up to their rooms.
‘Sandwiches,’ both women said at the same time.
Eleanor said goodnight to Megan, and closed the door on her room. She wasn’t used to spending that much time with anyone any more and although Megan had been staying with her for a week, this was different. Both the trip and the conversations had been deeply emotional and for the first time ever, it wasn’t Eleanor who’d been doing the probing: it had been someone else. She shut the curtains, glad it was dark and she didn’t have to look out at Connemara any more. It was so beautiful and yet being here made her feel terribly sad. She should have been here with Ralf.
She had come to look for her past too late. Her mother and now Ralf were dead. Her daughter, Naomi, had her own life, as did her grand-daughter, Gillian. It wasn’t fair to foist herself and her sadness on them now. There was nobody left who remembered her past. Nobody except herself and this lonely landscape. Perhaps it was apt that she was here now: the woman with a lonely landscape inside her visiting a lonely landscape.
She didn’t really feel hungry but she made herself eat half of one of the sandwiches, drank some tea, then took a sleeping tablet. She could not bear to lie sleepless here tonight. Then she got into bed and waited for chemical oblivion.
Morning brought a glorious sunny day and the sounds of geese and hens at the back of the B&B. Eleanor lay in bed and listened to the noise of the birds. It had been years since she’d heard hens, probably since that time she and Ralf had gone antiquing in New England, and had stayed in a tiny country hotel adjoining a farmhouse.
She remembered how the sunny-side-up eggs at breakfast had been golden yellow from free-range hens.
‘To hell with my cholesterol,’ Ralf had chuckled, slicing his knife into one egg and letting the yolk spill out in a saffron river.
All that worry over cholesterol and checking of HDL and LDL, and he’d still died.
Eleanor could recall many patients who’d been to see her to get over the death of a loved one. The fear that they wouldn’t be able to exist without the person was often the most overwhelming part of grief. And here she was, highly educated with years of experience in helping other people to get over such grief, and still totally unable to get over the grief herself.
She got up, pulled on her dressing gown and looked out one of her bedroom windows to see where the hen and geese noises were coming from. Beneath the back window she could see a small farmyard where the woman who’d let them in the previous night was out feeding geese who stretched out long necks and hissed at her.
Eleanor smiled. Geese never changed, they were always badtempered creatures.
Life went on, as she told her patients. Geese hissed, people survived.
Once dressed, she went outside to walk down the drive. The house was set on a curve of the road opposite a small, jagged bay. Rushes grew at the water’s edge, and moss-covered rocks clustered around as if dropped haphazardly by a giant. Eleanor watched an elegant bird stand on one spindly leg and survey his empire. A heron, she thought, and wished she had a camera. Gillian would love it here. She’d taken a photography course at school and was always taking photos. Naomi would have enjoyed it too. How many times had they talked about coming ‘home’ and seeing where the old house had been? And then Eleanor had left them for Ireland.
She’d flattened down the guilt when she was in Golden Square. She’d had to leave New York, she was too sad after Ralf’s death and getting away had been the only option. But here, in the land where she and the girls had talked of coming with Ralf, the guilt came back.
She and Megan had breakfast in a bow-windowed room looking out over the bay.
Megan had been for an early-morning walk up one of the hills. ‘It’s amazing,’ she said enthusiastically. ‘If you took away the modern houses and the telephone poles, this place probably looks like it did a hundred years ago.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ agreed Eleanor.
The guide from Ireland of the Ancestors was a slim, middle-aged man named Phil who came equipped with a couple of historical reference books in his rucksack, binoculars, a flask of tea and a picnic blanket. He had pens and an ordnance survey map in the right top pocket of his fisherman’s waistcoat, and a Swiss Army Knife in the left.
‘Be prepared is my motto,’ he said cheerfully. He spoke in the Connemara accent that Eleanor hadn’t heard for so many years. She had a hint of it in her own voice, although a lifetime in New York had rubbed most of it out, but hearing Phil made her heart ache.
Phil installed Eleanor in the front seat and Megan in the back of an old but clean Land Rover, and they set off.
‘Kilmoney has almost disappeared as a town,’ he explained as he drove along undulating roads. There were plenty of cars on the roads. ‘April,’ he said. ‘Time for tourists, coarse fishermen, the whole lot. It’s a great time for perch and roach. The roads go a bit mad, but we need the tourism. There haven’t been so many visitors for the past years, not since 9/11. Terrible thing, that was. But the visitors are coming back. How long is it since you were at your home?’ he asked Eleanor.
‘Seventy years,’ she said.
Phil didn’t appear shocked. ‘I have to warn you, it’s all changed. Kilmoney was a decent-sized town if you look at the 1911 Census. Some six hundred and fifty people lived there. But, as you know, there was a lot of emigration after that. There was a slowing down of emigration during the American Depression, but of course, many people from Connemara took the Mail Boat to Britain. They’d work for a few years and come home. Then off again when the work here dried up.’
Megan was silent in the back of the car. It sounded so grim, so frightening. Work meant food in those days. Having a job was the difference between living and dying. She looked out at the stunning countryside around her and shivered at the thought of how different it must have looked to people with nothing to live on.
‘There was seasonal employment for people in the big houses when the aristocracy came to their country estates in summer and autumn, but that began to die off too. The young men and women left the village, they wanted something else for their futures. Four of the big houses went empty during the Emergency – World War Two,’ he explained to Megan.
‘A fellow by the name of McGeraghty opened a small distillery a few miles from Kilmoney in 1953, and that kept the town alive a little longer, but the fire in 1958 destroyed the church and the local school, and it was all over then. It’s a bit of a ghost town now, just a main street with a couple of
houses and a very nice little hotel named The Sheep’s Head. Run by a Kiwi couple. They do good business bringing walking tours up the mountains, and sending fishermen off in the right direction. You can even bring your dogs with you.’
Eleanor laughed. ‘We’ll have to stop there,’ she said. ‘I like the sound of these people.’
‘They’re a decent pair of skins,’ Phil went on. ‘I’d hate to see you upset, Mrs Levine, when you see the place. The old stone cottages are in rack and ruin. The tourists love it, picking their way through the ruins and imagining it all fifty years ago, but it might be upsetting for you.’
Eleanor smiled bravely. ‘Let’s just see it all. Have you worked out where my home was?’
‘More or less,’ Phil replied. ‘It’s a ruin, I have to tell you. But you were expecting that, weren’t you?’
‘Do you know, I’m not sure what I’m expecting,’ Eleanor said.
The lonely main street was a bit of a shock to Eleanor. To visitors, it probably looked pretty with a few cottages and a couple of bungalows on either side of the road, along with a small petrol station, and at the end, The Sheep’s Head, painted white with black timber on the walls and colourful window boxes. Behind a small monument were black gates to a very old cemetery with nothing but a bare patch of ground where the church used to be.
To someone who could remember a public bar, the post office with the grocery attached, and the big grey church set back from the road with a hill graveyard beside it, Kilmoney looked almost deserted. As if someone had described the village badly to a artist, who’d then drawn only half of it in.
Eleanor found her hand covering her mouth as she looked around, trying to recall landmarks and wondering if her memories of the place were accurate at all. People romanticised places, she knew that. Had she?
‘It’s cute,’ said Megan from the back seat, watching Eleanor carefully. ‘But very different?’
‘Very,’ breathed Eleanor.
‘The O’Neill homestead was out on the Clifden Road,’ Phil went on, driving straight through. ‘We can stop later for tea. Let’s see the house first.’