‘What about all this monsignor guy’s plans?’ I asked.
‘He tried, the poor fucker,’ Luke replied, ‘and kept kicking ass till he keeled over and died.’
We walked out into the chilly air where cars were parked haphazardly. Luke found a taxi driver to take us to a local town called Castlebar.
‘I should really wait to see if any locals want to share the cab,’ the driver said, ‘but, feck it anyway, I have to get away. I’ve been ferrying people back and forth all week. I don’t know what’s worse, the journey in with the whole family or the journey back with just the parents saying nothing.’
He spoke to Luke about American wakes in his youth and evenings when all the tiny railway stations, that were long since closed down, had been packed with families seeing off young emigrants. The driver looked like he had never left Mayo but he recited the names of American cities where he’d spent thirty years working before coming home. He called out the nationality of the owners of various old houses we passed which were now holiday homes.
I let Luke and himself talk and stared out at the harsh winter landscape, thinking about that bogey man who was both my real grandfather and my great-grandfather and who must have stood on some God-forsaken platform like this. Could he have ever imagined me, three-quarters of a century later, any more than I could imagine him? I hadn’t even asked Grandad for his name, I didn’t wish to know it. I wanted him banished from my life as much as Gran had tried to write him out of hers. Yet the fear of him was inside me, a terror of inbred genes. All last night I had lain awake, testing the fault-lines of my life for glimpses of insanity. I kept thinking of Gran and how boringly English she had seemed. The Queen’s speech on Christmas Day, her sense of absolute propriety and her mistrust of anything foreign as inferior. Looking back, I realised she had always been that tiny bit too English. Her nationality had been pronounced with the self-consciousness of a person carefully speaking a second language.
Luke’s hand brushed against my knee in the back seat. ‘You’re quiet today,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’
I nodded and tried to smile. The driver was chain-smoking. I wanted to ask him to stop, but I felt it would draw attention to myself. I told myself it was the bumpy flight which had left me this queasy but I knew it was more than that. I had never been seven days late before. I couldn’t stop glancing at Luke and imagining how his features might come out in a child, in her nose perhaps or sometimes in the way she smiled.
We reached Castlebar and I followed Luke into the car hire firm. There had been a smaller one near Knock, but he hadn’t seemed keen to use it. The car hire shop doubled as a flower boutique, but that wasn’t doing any business either. The girl at the counter chewed gum and listened to hick music on a local station while traffic snarled up the narrow street outside. You could almost smell January. Even the sale in the small department store across the road looked utterly lethargic. The salesman brought the car around to the door.
‘That’s the top of the range I have,’ he said. ‘Where are yous heading?’
‘Here and there.’ Luke was curt and paid in cash. I didn’t know exactly where we were going either. We stopped to eat in an old-fashioned hotel, overlooking a mall of railed off grass. The toilet seats were wooden and the chains were brass. I checked myself in there again, praying for a sign of blood. Seven days wasn’t irredeemably late, nothing was certain yet. But I knew this uncertainty was mainly the reason I had agreed to travel with Luke.
I wasn’t sure if he understood that this was our final encounter or whether he imagined he could rekindle our relationship again. But once I returned to London I intended changing flat and vanishing. I would never tell him about my pregnancy, no matter whether I went into a clinic or decided to have the child. Whatever grew inside me was mine, but Luke couldn’t be trusted to see it that way. Yet I still wanted him near me, at least until I was certain of the news, so that he shared in this waiting, unbeknownst to himself.
We left Castlebar and headed towards Sligo. It began to rain. The road was patchy, stretches of modern highway being suddenly coralled again into a narrow looping road. Luke told me that we were booked into a country house a few miles beyond Donegal town. I asked if it was a hotel and he shook his head.
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘They’re too posh to use the word “hotel”. It’s a former archbishop’s palace, tarted up for Yuppies and Yanks.’
But I sensed he had chosen it on purpose, to make up for the poverty of that room off Edgware Road. The car was ostentatious and out of character with Luke, and we had lunched in the hotel dining room when bar food would have done just as well.
‘How do we find my father?’ I asked.
‘I’ve one or two good contacts,’ Luke replied. ‘Lads working on the trawlers at Killybegs who are into the music.’
‘Could you not have phoned them from London?’
‘Not these lads. They’re either making money out at sea or spending it playing music in some pub down the town. Besides, you don’t want your business broadcast. Not everyone is going to believe you, and locals are protective of your father. What’s required is a quiet word in the right ear at the right time.’
I sat back and stared at the scenery. It felt good to let someone else take responsibility. I would have enough decisions to make on my own. Finding my father meant a lot to Luke. I could imagine a time, in twenty or thirty years, when the roles might be reversed and I would bring an unknown son to find him.
We passed Sligo town and drove on, skirting the coast at times. I had never seen a landscape like it; the curious slant of Ben Bulben and then, across the wide bay, the first glimpses of the distant hills of Donegal. Seeing them, I even forgot my nervousness about the father I might finally meet there. I could imagine my mother hitch-hiking these roads in the blazing heat of summer. A young Englishwoman, or so she believed herself to be, intoxicated by this foreignness. I wondered how she had stumbled across my father and what they had first said to each other. I watched the Donegal hills disappear as the road swung inwards and wondered if I was doing the right thing in trying to find him? He’d had years to at least write, if he couldn’t bring himself to visit. What if he denied my existence? My nervousness returned. Luke slowed as we entered the edge of the next town, where a huge sign announced WELCOME TO BUNDORAN. The whole place seemed closed as it stretched out forever in a straggle of B&Bs, pubs, shuttered amusement arcades and burger huts locked up for the winter. Rain splattered against an incongruous mural which combined slot machines and palm trees. It looked like an Albanian version of Margate.
‘What a dump,’ I said.
‘We thought it was paradise once.’
I glanced at Luke, but he said nothing further. I wasn’t sure if he’d taken offence, although he looked out at the shuttered streets himself as if marvelling at their tackiness. A half mile beyond the town he slowed the car, searching for a turn. He swung left down a small road heading towards the coast, then pulled in at the next tiny junction to stare down both narrow lanes before swinging right. A golf course was flanked by bungalows and woodland where afternoon light flickered through trees. I knew he was looking for somewhere or someone.
‘Have we arrived?’ I asked.
‘No.’
There was an even smaller junction to the right, with a tiny triangle of grass in the centre. Gravel skidded under the wheels as Luke swung down it. Weeds laid siege to the centre of the road. Potholes had been filled with loose chippings which were scattered again. I could glimpse empty caravan parks and faded holiday chalets.
‘What are we looking for?’ I asked.
‘A boarding house. It’s thirty years since I was here.’
‘How often did you come?’
‘Twice. It’s a mile from the beach. That’s the only directions I can remember.’
We passed a junction and then another, a honeycomb of laneways branching down towards the sea. What information I could get about the place had to be prised from Luke. They were
the only two holidays his family could ever afford. His memories seemed haphazard but I tried to memorise each one, thinking that one day I might be asked to pass them on. He talked about swarms of insects beneath the trees beside the house where a Ford Anglia was parked and a Cork boy twisted to silent music on the long pebbled driveway. There were the sickening new tastes of tapioca and rice pudding. They were forced to share the huge upstairs room containing six beds with another family. He remembered the feel of sand walked into patterned lino and the sun’s warmth at the window as he sat alone after his family went downstairs and listened to crickets in the field behind the house. He recalled dusk through the ornate front door as Christy and Shane called to him from the gravel and a car passed, its headlights illuminating the local children queueing with buckets at the roadside pump beyond the gate.
Luke somehow seemed more naked recounting these memories than at any time in my arms. We were almost past a tiny lane with a church steeple peeping through trees when he swung down it and pulled up on the gravel outside a small, drab two storey house. Yellow paint flaked on the walls, the side entrance had been bricked up and there was a rusted lock on the main gates which led up a short overgrown driveway. Children played in a mobile home in the field opposite while their father talked to an old man leaning across the fence. Luke got out and crossed over to point at the house. I saw the old man nod while the children stopped playing to stare at us. I got out of the car and stood at the locked gate until Luke joined me.
‘It’s so small it’s hard to believe it’s the same house,’ he said.
‘Everything seems big to a kid.’
‘Big and grand.’
There was a broken pane in the front window. I could imagine Luke’s parents sitting there for dinner, awkward at being served plates of ham and potatoes and turnip. And I felt Luke could still see himself playing on that gravel long after he had been called in, and his mother coming to the doorway again, her voice low as he reluctantly entered the hall.
‘The daughter of the family comes from Cork for a few weeks every summer. That’s all it’s used for now.’
‘Do you want to look in?’ I asked.
‘No.’ I knew by his tone that he wanted to be gone.
‘For old times’ sake,’ I urged without really knowing why. ‘You’ve come this far out of our way to see it.’
‘Leave it, Tracey, I said no.’
Luke got back into the car. Curiosity or a battle of wills made me climb the gate as the men across the road watched. I knew I was infuriating Luke by walking up the driveway to peer through the windows. But this seemed more than point scoring. We would never live together. I would never open a drawer to finger his socks or stumble upon old letters or train tickets from forgotten journeys. This was the closest I would ever come to intimacy with the father of my child-to-be, standing in this place where he had never brought his wife.
We could just as easily have flown into Belfast, but now I understood why Luke had chosen Knock. I wanted to force him to leave the car in front of the watching men, to climb that gate and just once to come when he was bid. This sudden jealousy disturbed me. Finally I heard his footsteps on the gravel.
‘You’re making a mockery of me,’ he said, but there was no real anger in his voice. I turned to face him.
‘I want you to kiss me,’ I said.
‘Don’t be daft.’
But I didn’t care how crazy we looked. Luke had denied me when it suited him. The memory of that taxi still rankled. I had sworn never to let him touch me again. We had never discussed sleeping arrangements for this trip, but I was putting down a marker here that whatever we did was on my terms. Luke glanced back at the watching locals, then lowered his lips as bidden. His tongue was hot and wet. It felt juvenile but I held him in my mouth for thirty or forty seconds. Finally he lifted his lips away and looked at me.
‘Are you happy now?’
‘You should do what you’re told more often, Luke.’
The two men were grinning at the fence. I took Luke’s hand proprietorially as we walked along by the side of the house. The back yard was overgrown. Luke pointed to the window of what had been his family’s bedroom.
‘Shane got lost here the summer he was ten,’ Luke remembered. ‘My parents had to go to the barracks. Some bikers from Derry found him below the cliffs, almost cut off by the tide. He’d lost his sandals and got his feet stung off by nettles. He’d been crying for hours. I remember them bringing him back, with five motor bikes coming up the drive. All my mother could talk about afterwards was the length of their hair. At dinner-time a squad car came to check that he was all right. We’d done nothing wrong but I still remember the air of shame at the police coming to the door.’
‘That’s a bit ironic,’ I said. ‘The way things worked out. But even back then your father’s family were no saints.’
‘Dublin was different. Here we were respectable for one week in a year. Besides, my Da was the brother who played by the rules and this is all he ever got to show for it. Two lousy holidays, all of us packed into one room in this poky hole.’
‘It wasn’t poky back then.’ I tried to soften the memory. ‘You said yourself you thought it was paradise.’
‘That makes it okay, eh?’ The anger in Luke’s voice seemed to surprise even him. ‘Don’t patronise me with your well-heeled English accent. If we were too poor and backward to know this kip was poky, that only makes it worse. Because we thought we were the kings of the fucking castle here. In Dublin we were never done boasting about the size of this house. All it does is make us ignorant and dirt poor.’
Luke turned to walk down the path. The men had disappeared. I felt shaken, as if he’d struck me. Something had opened inside him which I didn’t understand and, instead of the intimacy I’d wanted to create, it only made me more aware of our differences. The car was already started when I climbed over the gate. I had to jump in as loose gravel spun beneath the wheels and Luke flicked the headlights on against the coming winter dusk.
The hotel was twenty miles further on. We were silent on the journey there. I felt Luke should apologise for his outburst, yet at the same time I felt guilty of somehow provoking him. I stared out at the landscape of Donegal which I had imagined so often as a girl. We passed through Ballyshannon, a placename come to life from those bus timetables. I became jittery again. I’d uncovered so much about my father over these past weeks, yet he still felt more like a childhood phantom than a man of flesh. I wondered if he had ever fantasised about my mother making such a journey to find him, never imagining it would be their daughter with news of her early death.
Beyond Donegal town we got stuck behind a Landrover towing a horse box. A queue of sales reps tried to get past, but their impatient manoeuvrings didn’t seem to register with Luke who was immersed in his own thoughts. He found the sign for the Bishop’s Palace Retreat and turned left. The house was a mile further on. We turned in through high ornate gates and followed a curving avenue of high shrubs to park in the cobbled enclosure of what had once been stables. A peacock clambered on to a wall near the car and surveyed us before turning his back. A cat came cautiously half way across the stones, paused and then darted through an archway under which I could glimpse a herb garden. Luke opened the boot and took our bags out.
‘They probably have porters for that,’ I teased.
‘Fuck them.’ His voice was low as he slung the bags over his shoulders and walked on. I followed him into the hallway where a fire was blazing. Two more cats arched their backs beside the flames before eyeing us and padding over to settle themselves in a basket in the corner. There was a pile of Country Living magazines and international hotel listings on the table beside the long sofas. Luke stood in the centre of the reception area, staring around him. A woman emerged from an inner office and hovered, her smile betraying an edge of anxiety as she waited to attain his attention. She tried to offer tea and home-made biscuits as she fussed over us, but Luke just mumbled a curt ‘No’ as he
allowed her to take the bags, which she insisted upon carrying, and to show us up the two flights of stairs to our room.
I felt more embarrassed here than in London by the discrepancy in our ages. I felt the woman glance at me behind Luke’s back but she said nothing. She left us and Luke went into the bathroom to splash water on his face. The room was fabulous yet overdone, like something you’d see on afternoon television in The Homes of the Rich and Famous. I lay on the fourposter bed, scanning the brochures and fulsome letters of welcome which had been left in a leather folder beside the complimentary fruit and mineral water. The new owners had composed a poem, with mock nineteenth-century cadences, to welcome their guests and praise the beauties of the house and grounds. Luke came out while I was reading it.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, looking at him brooding.
‘Nothing.’ He unzipped his bag and searched for a carton of duty-free cigarettes.
‘It says here they disapprove of smoking in the bedrooms as cigarette smoke can linger for days and may be deeply offensive to future guests.’
‘I said fuck them.’ He broke the plastic wrapper off a packet and opened it, going to the window of the long bedroom to stare out at the dark evening.
‘They also disapprove of casual dress for dinner,’ I said, feeling totally out of place. ‘You never told me we were going somewhere stuck-up like this. All I have is jumpers and jeans. I didn’t bring anything I could wear.’
‘Just put that shite away, right.’
‘Maybe you’re used to these kind of places,’ I retorted, ‘but I’m not, despite my well-heeled English accent. I don’t care if it is shite, I’ll read what I like.’
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