She could recall the conversation quite clearly. He’d thought about it, he’d said, but she’d never found out exactly what he had thought. She’d let herself be distracted by his story of why he’d gone to sea. And face it, girl, you haven’t had the courage since to ask him, have you?
Fidelma was right too about Paudeen going to propose. He would—and soon, she was sure. She longed for him to, but—but she still wanted her Leaver’s. She still wanted to teach.
Maybe, she thought, maybe she was being selfish. Maybe she should do what all the other girls did, but she’d been dreaming for years about her career. She’d never wavered in that. She’d worked, and worked hard, toward it.
Maureen had been lost in thought, paying no attention to the surroundings. She sat up to see they were in the outskirts of Clonakilty. Now that Fidelma had raised the question, the need to talk to Paudeen about their future was gnawing at Maureen. She’d have to make up her mind about whether to ask him or just have fun today. And she’d have to make it up right soon.
Perhaps if the opportunity arose she would to talk to him today. He was an intelligent man. Surely when she did broach the subject, explained what she wanted, Paudeen wouldn’t let some outmoded notion of pride stand between the woman he loved, and who loved him to distraction, doing what she was sure she would love.
“Here we are, people,” Eamon announced like a tour guide, “in the throbbing heart of the metropolis of Clonakilty, so.” He was stopped at a crossroads waiting for a gap in the light traffic.
Clonakilty, she thought, was a name with a musical ring to it, like the nearby villages of Castlefreke, Rosscarberry, and Timoleague. She knew the Irish Cloch na gCoilte meant “castle of the woods.” The literal translation of Cloch was stone house, a structure that had first appeared in Ireland in Norman times.
Maureen looked round. It was the biggest place she had ever been in. To her right and to her left, rows of two-storey terraces lined both sides of the street. Their roofs—yellow thatch, red-rusting corrugated iron, and dark blue-grey slate—looked to her like a row from a patchwork quilt. The church with the needle spire that sat solidly on the far corner to her right must be the Roman Catholic one. She’d recognised the worshipping place of the Anglicans on the road into town.
Eamon turned left and drove slowly along a broad main street. Maureen inhaled. The smells here were not country odours. The fumes of exhaust mingled with a faint aroma of decay that the tang of the nearby sea could not quite disguise.
And it was noisy. Horses clopped on the cobbles. Lorry motors clattered. People seemed to yell at each other, not simply converse.
Pedestrians bustled along the footpaths, going in and out of the shops, and stopped to greet neighbours and chat. She tutted as a scruffy-looking boy finished eating chips and discarded the newspaper and greaseproof paper wrapping in the gutter.
She noticed a greengrocery with fresh vegetables displayed on tables outside the shop window. There was a single-storey whitewashed pub with an advertisement for Guinness on the wall. A simple poster of seven full straight glasses, black as pitch and each with a white clergyman’s collar for its head, displayed the words “Guinness Gách Lá.” Have a Guinness every day.
Outside two draymen had stopped their big Clydesdale-drawn cart and were rolling a cask down two planks. Making sure, Maureen thought, that the supplies would be on hand to accommodate the urging of the poster.
The noise, bustle, and size of the place had surprised Maureen. “It’s very big,” she said to Fidelma.
“It is not as big as Cork City, but it’s big enough for me,” Fidelma replied. “Do you know there’s a thousand linen looms here and the mill”—she grimaced—“employs ten thousand workers like me. That’s the mill over there.” She pointed to a grey-stone, forbidding-looking building that was multistoried and many-windowed. Two high red-brick chimneys towered above the town. “I’ll be glad I’m going to be shot of it.”
Maureen gently squeezed her sister’s thigh.
They had come to another crossroads.
“That place there to our left, Maureen, that’s the Old Town Hall,” said Fidelma. “It was built in 1696, and on the road to our right, not very far down, is the courthouse. They put it up in 1825.”
“One of the nice new buildings,” Eamon said with a laugh.
“Don’t be daft, Eamon,” Maureen said. “It’s one hundred and one years old.”
“Aye,” said Eamon, “but Clonakilty’s been here since a fellah called Thomas de Roche got a charter from the English king, Edward I, in 1292 to hold a market here every Monday.”
“Has it? Good Lord,” Maureen said. That was the kind of Irish history that intrigued her. She knew there’d been a battle at nearby Big Cross in 1798 when the United Irishmen rose. The square which Eamon now drove past was named Asna Square after the leader of the defeated Irish, Tadhg O’Donovan Asna.
Other streets commemorated great patriots, Emmet, Pearse, Clarke. Eamon was driving along Wolfe Tone Street, which according to a fingerpost led to the road to Ring.
Funny, she thought, the name Ring meant point of land or hill. It was quite the coincidence that she’d be going there today when her sister would be getting a ring of a very different kind. In her heart, Maureen was glad for her sister.
She stared out to see how the way curved round the near shore of a wide sun-glistening inlet.
“This is your first time here, isn’t it?” Eamon asked.
“It is.”
“That land over on the far side of the inlet’s Inchydoney. It used to be an island, but there’s a couple of causeways to the mainland now. The tide’s in, but you should see this place at slack ebb. Nothing but eelgrass, mudflats, and only a shallow, narrow channel at the mouth near Ring Harbour.”
She watched a grey heron standing hunchbacked, rapier-billed, at the water’s edge. Its neck uncoiled like a striking cobra, and its beak darted into the water to reappear holding a wriggling silver fish. Two mute swans, snow white and yellow-billed, glided along, stately in the company of their own mirror images.
From across the water over on the Inchydoney side, Maureen heard the strident crowing of a rooster.
Eamon slowed. “That’s the pier there,” he said, bringing them to a halt.
“Thanks, Eamon.” Maureen hugged Fidelma, looked her sister in the eye. “Have a great shopping trip.”
Fidelma grinned and winked.
Maureen jumped down. “Enjoy Ben-Hur.” And, she thought, a bit of a cuddle in the dark.
“We’ll be back here at five,” Eamon called, engaging his gears and swinging the lorry in a circle.
She waved good-bye as they bounced away. I hope he gets you a lovely ring, Fidelma, she thought, and I wish with all my heart he will bring you happiness.
As she walked along the pier, Maureen breathed in the smells of the sea, of salt, and of seaweed, tarred ropes, and diesel smoke. They were new to her, used as she was to the odours of animals and ploughed land, and scents of gorse blooms and mown hay, and turf fires.
Boats were tied to the stone quay, and Paudeen stood on the deck of one, beckoning to her. Over the grumbling of an engine, the slap of waves against the granite, and the creaking of mooring lines, she heard him calling, “Over here, Maureen.”
She saw the smile on his face, heard the gladness in his voice, and convinced herself that she’d spent half the ride here worrying over nothing.
She started to hurry along the pier.
27
Maureen tried to hurry, but found she couldn’t run because the pier was cluttered with lines, nets, net floats, and piles of lobster pots. She was warm when she stopped and stood beside his boat.
Paudeen, who was waiting on the granite quay, enfolded her in a bear hug and kissed her. “How’s my girl?”
“Grand, so, but I’ve missed you, pet.”
“And I you.” He kissed her again. She felt the softness of it, the love in it. They stood apart, he holding her hand.
“It is.” She heard the pride in his voice when he said, “She’s a beauty, so.”
Maureen looked at the vessel. A short planked deck, with railings on either side, ran a quarter of the boat’s length from the rounded stern to a little wooden hut. It was eight feet high, had a sloped roof, and had windows at the far side, in the front, and halfway along the near side to where a glass-paned door stood open.
The flapper valve of a narrow chimney coming from the hut rattled as puffs of blue smoke escaped.
“Do you like her name?” he asked.
“Princess Macha? And her a red-haired queen of all Ireland.”
“Like my copper-haired queen.” He kissed her again.
She laughed and looked along the boat. “That’s the fish hold,” Paudeen explained, pointing to a canvas-covered square in front of the hut. “I have the hatches shut.”
A mast with two vertical poles held to it by a bewildering array of ropes and pulleys rose from the deck in front of the hold.
“Your boat’s not . . .” She could see the way he looked at the vessel and bit off her next words: “exactly the Mauretania.” Instead, she said, “It’s not very big.”
“Thirty feet, and a grand sea boat. She was a trawler, but I use her as a long-liner. That means I catch fish with a great long cord with baited hooks on it at intervals. You’ll see her better when you come on aboard.” He held Maureen’s hand and helped her over the side onto the rear deck.
The smell of fish and diesel was overpowering. Maureen wrinkled her nose. “You’d not mistake her for a boat that delivers flowers.”
“Och, sure,” said Paudeen, “if you lie down with dogs you’ll rise up with fleas, and if your boat’s for the fishing you’ll have to learn to live with the stink. It’s the ling and the skate and the monkfish that do pay my wage. Now”—he held open the door of the little hut— “this is the pilothouse.”
“Pilothouse. Right.” She peered in and could see a spoked wheel mounted on a pedestal. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing to a cylindrical structure topped by a brass dome that stood in front of the wheel. She could see it had a small window facing the wheel.
“The binnacle. It’s where the compass is . . . and see here?” He indicated a flat shelf on which rulers and a set of brass dividers, like the ones she used in geometry class, lay on top of a map covered in small numbers and symbols. “That’s a chart of Clonakilty Bay and the waters surrounding. There”—he pointed to a symbol on the paper outside the harbour entrance—“that’s the mark on Wind Rock. That’s where we’re going. The water shallows there . . . see the five? That’s five fathoms.”
So that’s what the numbers meant. A fathom was six feet, so the water would be thirty feet deep. She wondered, just for a moment, how deep was her love for this wonderful man who made his living from this tiny cockleshell of a boat? Was it deep enough for her perhaps to forgo plans to travel to America and settle down as a teacher married to a fisherman?
“You can usually jig up a nice lemon sole for your tea there,” he said.
She looked at his smile as he spoke, at his blue eyes in which she saw his deep, honest pleasure at the thought of catching a sole. She felt herself tingle. Yes, she told herself, her love for him was so deep it was unfathomable.
He took her arm and guided her to the back of the room where she could see a set of iron ladders disappearing below a square hole in the floor. “That’s the way below to the galley.”
“Galley?” She thought of Ben-Hur and Roman biremes. “Do people row this thing?”
He laughed. “Galley’s what we call the kitchen on a boat.”
“Oh.” She’d remember that. She never liked to make the same mistake twice.
“I have our lunch ready down there. I’ll just need to warm it up, and anytime you fancy a cup of tea sing out.”
“I will, so, but I’m not thirsty now.”
“A bit past the galley there’s a bunk. Sometimes me or the crew can grab a nap if we do be out overnight and have to wait for the right tide to get back into harbour.”
“I see.” A question formed. “Paudeen, I don’t suppose you have a toilet too?”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. We don’t usually carry ladies, but if you need to go, just tell me, and I’ll get you a bucket.”
“All right.” She shrugged. Farm girls weren’t prudish about natural functions.
“Now you’ve had the tour, shall we go to sea?”
Maureen could feel the boat moving under her feet as if impatient to get away. “Aye, aye, skipper,” she said and kissed him.
Paudeen left the pilothouse. She was pleased she’d remembered its name. Maureen watched him working with the ropes that ran from rings on the pier to iron posts on the boat. He brought the lines inboard, came back, and busied himself with the familiarity of a man moving about his home.
She moved aside so as not to get in his way.
Paudeen stood, legs astraddle, behind the wheel. He moved a lever on the pedestal, and as the note of the engine rose he turned the spokes so the boat moved away from the pier and out into the short narrow gut lying between low hills.
She could see the open sea of Clonakilty Bay beyond the channel’s mouth and past that to the horizon. To her surprise that distant edge was curved where the wide blue sea and vastness of the friendly sky met and melded. She’d never seen the earth’s curvature before. Was it such a sight, maybe, that had got Christopher Columbus’s mind thinking the earth was round? And she wondered, looking straight up, how beautiful it must be out here on a cloudless night with nothing to block the view of the myriad stars and the planets in their courses.
She was beginning to understand why Paudeen would say that the sea could take a hold of someone. It was wonderful out here, and everything was so new to her.
Maureen turned and gazed at more familiar land, and as the shore passed by she admired the great trees, oak and elm and rowan, and the gorse hedges in bright chrome-yellow contrast to the surrounding soft green of the fields. In one pasture, two roan horses galloped one after the other, for no other reason, she thought, than sheer high spirits. She felt a bit like kicking up her own heels for the same reason and because, she glanced at Paudeen, they were together again.
When she stuck her head outside, the breeze made her hair flutter. Ahead, the sea was choppy and Princess Macha swayed gently, one partner in the endless dance of boats and the ocean.
She looked out behind to see twin waves curving away as if the Princess were a plough and the water a field being furrowed. Gulls glided on outstretched wings over the wake.
“The gulls,” Paudeen said, “are the beggars of the sea. They always follow fishing boats in the hopes of picking up fish that slip overboard, or guts if we’re cleaning and filleting before we salt the ling.”
As if to mock his words, one bird let go a harsh, screaming, cackling laugh.
Maureen laughed with the bird. “I’ve never been on a boat before,” she said, moving close behind Paudeen and wrapping her arms around his waist. “It’s wonderful. Thank you for bringing me.”
“I’m glad you like it, bye.” He didn’t turn to face her but concentrated on keeping his course. A larger boat was coming in the opposite direction. “Hang on,” he said, “your man Willy Cowan’s boat there’s wake will make us rock a bit, and there’s always a chop at the harbour mouth.”
Maureen grabbed hold of a wooden rail supported by brass brackets that ran round the wall of the pilothouse. Paudeen waved at the other boat as it passed, and she heard him yell, “Did you do good this morning, Willy, bye?” She saw Willy’s mouth opening and closing but did not hear his reply.
The front of the Princess rose. Maureen felt herself starting to slide backward. She clung more tightly and looked a
t Paudeen. He stood braced there, legs apart, both hands on the wheel. He seemed planted as solidly as if he were on dry land.
“The wind funnels in through the narrows. It can screech a bit, but we’ll be out of it in a minute. Hang on.”
She flinched as spray rattled off the glass of the window in front of her, blotting out the view ahead. She clutched even more tightly as the boat rolled to one side. For a moment, Maureen thought the little vessel would not stop until it had turned completely over. More spray clattered on the glass ahead. She screwed her eyes tightly shut.
This was different from the sea when it was calm, and yet she realised she had found the needle of fear exhilarating too. It was the same feeling she got rushing down on a bigger camogie opponent, knowing a collision could break bones, and slipping past unscathed.
Paudeen probably felt the same sort of thrill too.
She opened her eyes to find the glass in front of her had cleared and the boat was on an even keel. The sun sparkled from a sea where now only a tiny chop disturbed the surface. Overhead, two black cormorants, necks outstretched, flew lazily out to their fishing grounds.
The boat butted its way forward.
Paudeen turned his head and smiled at her. “That’s better, isn’t it?”
She nodded but did not let go of the rail.
“I’m sorry if it scared you,” he said. “I’ve got used to it.”
“It was exciting,” she said, and meant it. “But I don’t think I’d enjoy being out in a real gale.”
Paudeen grinned. “I’m not so fond of it myself, but the Princess is a tough little lady. She has to be, out here in the wintertime.”
For a moment Maureen thought the way the boat was moving was preventing her from focusing, or perhaps it was how the sun backlit Paudeen’s head. She blinked and rubbed her eyes with the back of one hand.
Here in the shelter of the pilothouse his long black hair seemed to be tossing as violently as willow branches in a high wind, and it was full of white stuff. She frowned, tried to focus her thoughts, to see more clearly, but try as she might, she could not make out whether the white material was blackthorn blossom, snow, or sea spray. She only knew it frightened her more than the day she’d seen the wave behind Paudeen.
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