The Dazzling Truth

by Helen Cullen

  She looked out of the window for a moment then turned back to look at him.

  “I’m worried, though, that I gave up too easily, that maybe something might have happened if I’d held my nerve.”

  Murtagh fidgeted into a new position, careful not to disturb the priest sleeping in the seat to his right.

  “But we talked all about this.” Murtagh started counting on his fingers. “You’re going to get involved in the theater scene in Galway, for starters, and if the chance of a tour or a movie ever comes along, you’ll take it! Dublin’s only a train-ride away.”

  He paused, waiting for her to agree, before hesitating and beginning again.

  “Maeve, we are not going to that island if it makes you feel like it’s all over for you. That’s not happening.”

  Murtagh’s skin prickled under his clothes.

  In the unnerving manner Maeve had of seeming to read his mind, she threw a dark look at him that made him squirm.

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Murtagh,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “You know it’s too late for that now. Don’t pretend you can walk away, because you’re only saying that now so, later on, if I hate it there, you can insist you gave me the option not to go and I didn’t take it.”

  The priest started coughing and silence fell between Maeve and Murtagh while he drank from a glass bottle labeled Holy Water. Murtagh rested his head on the back of his seat and closed his eyes, swallowing continuously. Maeve put her hand on his, and the heat of her touch felt like it was radiating through him.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m in. I promise you. I know that there is more than one reason to go. But please can we be honest about how hard it’s going to be? You don’t have to always pretend you’re fearless about it, that it’s all going to be wonderful. I’d be so much happier if we could admit it whenever we think it was all a terrible idea, which we will, without that having to mean we’re not going to stick it out. Do you get it? Let’s just be real about it. Otherwise, I know I’ll lose it altogether.”

  He put his hand on hers. “I do. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t rewrite history so that I was the one who decided we should go. We have to both take responsibility, agreed?”

  The priest leaned over in his seat and smiled at them. “Word of advice to you both,” he offered, his head a shining pink snooker ball atop his black shirt and slacks. “The family that prays together, stays together.” He made the sign of the cross, excused himself to go in search of a nip of whiskey from the drinks cart.

  “There’s no hope for us so.” Murtagh laughed as Maeve curled in under his arm. He stroked her hair, willing the worries to leave her with his touch, trying to suppress his own.

  Would his mother ever forgive him for getting married abroad?

  Would Jeremy?

  His stomach seemed to double upon itself as he pictured himself waiting for Maeve at city hall on their wedding day, the blank space beside him where his best friend should have been. How could Jeremy not even like, let alone love, the woman he was besotted with? It didn’t sit right with him at all. What am I missing?

  He thought of the night Maeve and Jeremy had finally met. It was New Year’s Eve, the one night of the year when he believed no good ever came of hitting the town. And that occasion was no exception. Instead of joining Finola at her new man’s masquerade party in Maynooth, Murtagh and Maeve had decided to spend the night alone, to avoid the crush of drunk strangers squashed into student digs and the inevitable last-minute panic to catch a night bus back to the city. Their relationship had found a state of bliss; Maeve had been walking on air since their engagement was announced, and Murtagh was happy to be the one with his feet on the ground. Now everything felt different and they were happiest when alone together, secure in the intimate knowledge that only they shared of the promises made between them.

  Maeve was concocting a punch from the remnants of various bottles of alcohol when the telephone rang. She heard Murtagh’s muffled voice from the hallway but couldn’t quite catch who he was talking to. His head popped around the door, the telephone receiver smothered in the lapel of his cardigan.

  “It’s Jeremy,” he whispered. “He wants to meet for a drink. Something happened with a girl. I should say no, yes?”

  “No way!” Maeve mouthed back. “This is my chance to finally meet him. We’re going!”

  Maeve sensed that Jeremy had been avoiding meeting her before now, but from all the stories felt as if she knew him already; how he and Murtagh used to sneak into town to visit the record shop during PE; that their first big concert had been Leonard Cohen at the National Stadium in 1972; how, in reality, most of their adolescent firsts had happened together. Jeremy was an exciting piece of the Murtagh puzzle, and Maeve was intrigued. So, on Lower Baggot Street, they waited in one of Toner’s infamous wooden booths; it was Jeremy’s favorite drinking emporium. “He always says the privacy promotes bad behavior,” Murtagh explained. They sipped cheap red wine and eavesdropped on the conversations around them as folks reflected on a year that saw six thousand people march through Dublin to protest the building of civic offices on a Viking site, Maeve and Murtagh among them, a year when Ireland launched a brand-new television channel, RTé 2, and mourned the death of Jack Doyle, “the Gorgeous Gael,” famous for being a boxer, an actor and a tenor, and the thought of whom sent Murtagh’s mother to confession. Talk of the Troubles in the north bubbled up and faded away while Maeve strained to catch more understanding. She’d asked Murtagh to take her to Belfast, but he declared it “an unnecessary risk to his well-being” and instead bought her Troubles by J. G. Farrell to read. In the corner, a traditional music session was gaining momentum, and Maeve loved watching the organized chaos of the musicians finding time with each other as they looped through the old, familiar songs. It was a warm cocoon in the midst of a black, wet night as the rain poured down, cleansing the old city anew once again. They’d heard a rumor The Undertones were playing a secret gig in town tonight but, for once, they didn’t feel the need to chase down the buzz.

  Jeremy appeared: androgynous, pristine and stylish in a vintage pinstripe suit. He hugged Murtagh tightly, mumbled something in his ear and then stood back, noticing Maeve for the first time.

  She was perched in her seat, ready to jump up to greet him, but he looked away from her toward Murtagh. “I thought it would be just the two of us,” he said, and Murtagh flushed.

  “But it’s New Year’s Eve, I couldn’t...”

  Jeremy brushed past him and elbowed his way to the front of the queue at the bar, while Maeve slunk back into the booth.

  She gripped Murtagh’s hand under the table with her own. When Jeremy eventually sat with them, she overcompensated, trying harder and harder to make him laugh, and as each anecdote collapsed between them, he retreated further and further away.

  While Murtagh and Maeve slowly drank their wine, Jeremy wasted money he did not have buying shots of Jameson whiskey that barely touched the glass before he swallowed them whole. When he staggered off to the bathroom, Maeve insisted on following him. “This isn’t on, Murtagh,” she said. “He needs to get a grip.”

  She found Jeremy squaring up to a man twice his size wearing a Limerick football jersey. Before Maeve could reach him, Jeremy was pinned to the wall. She squeezed herself between them, pushing the other man backward, and he laughed at them both.

  “Is your little girlfriend going to stand up for you, eh?”

  Jeremy ran at him and aimed a punch that was easily deflected. Instead, he received one hard and deep in his own stomach. He doubled over with a low groan and Maeve tried to help him stand, but he shook her off and snarled in her face, “Get away from me. I don’t want you anywhere near me.”

  She stepped back, shocked, and watched him shove his way through the bar to the exit. Maeve never told Murtagh what had happened, just that she saw him l
eave.

  By the time the bells of Christ Church had chimed midnight, Maeve and Murtagh were already at home and in bed together. As Maeve’s breath steadied beside him, Murtagh lay awake, staring at the ceiling. He couldn’t shake the image from his mind of Jeremy’s back as he’d leaned over the bar, how the fabric strained across his shoulder blades. He recognized the clouds that lingered around him as similar to those that had hovered before, when Murtagh told him he was leaving for art school in Dublin. Leaving Jeremy behind in Sligo. That was how he had taken it.

  “It’s six hours on the bus, ya know?” Jeremy had said in despair as he paced back and forth in Mrs. Moone’s kitchen, rapping his fingernails along the kitchen counter in contrary rhythms. It took four months of Murtagh coaxing and cajoling before Jeremy would come to stay in his flat in Rathmines.

  “I don’t want all your new posh arty friends looking down their noses at me,” he’d protested—he hated telling Murtagh’s classmates that he worked making bathroom scales in Hanson’s Ltd., much as he loved the camaraderie there, and the celebrity that his unexpected star performance as the team’s striker for the MacArthur Cup had brought him.

  Once Jeremy had tested and tasted the fruits of the city center for the first time, however, Murtagh could barely keep him away. He was a country mouse destined to be a city dweller; he just hadn’t known it yet. Before long, not a weekend passed that Jeremy didn’t turn up at his door after taking the last bus from Sligo town. Every Friday night between midnight and one o’clock, Murtagh was sure to hear the dilapidated doorbell ring and his name being whispered through the letterbox.

  “Murt, are you awake? It’s me, Jer.”

  As if it would ever be anyone else. Until it could be Maeve, of course.

  And then Jeremy stopped coming.

  * * *

  Was it really six months since they’d last seen each other? How had he let that happen?

  Murtagh breathed in the smell of Maeve and stayed awake, watching over her while she dozed, until they landed in Shannon Airport with a gentle bump.

  “Blessed be the pilots,” the priest said, mopping his bald head with an Aer Lingus napkin.

  “Amen,” said Murtagh, and nudged Maeve awake.

  “Are we home?” she said, rubbing her eyes with the cuff of her jumper.

  “I hope so,” he answered, as she stretched within the confines of her seat and shrugged off the sleep.

  Maeve beamed the confidence at him that she knew he needed her to feel.

  The seat belt light pinged off, and they were released into their new life.

  “Amen,” Murtagh said again, under his breath, twisting the new band of silver he now wore on his finger and shaking off the guilt he felt for Jer.

  They disembarked the airplane, hands held tight.

  They were the Moones now and a whole new life awaited them.

  Inis Óg: July 1984

  IT WAS TWO years, three months and five days since Murtagh and Maeve had arrived on the island of Inis Óg, growing the population from 197 to 199 as of May 11, 1982.

  They were relieved to have finally finished renovating, and extending, their thatched stone cottage. Now so firmly embedded in the perfect imperfections of their dwelling, it was strange to recall how, stepping off the ferry on that glorious sun-drenched day, in clothes unfit for purpose, they had not yet seen the ramshackle house that would become their home.

  Murtagh was busy flattening cardboard boxes in the back garden, the last debris of their home improvements. Maeve watched him carefully fold each one as she wrapped potato and carrot peelings in newspaper for Christy Moore. The contrary donkey they had adopted upon his retirement, and that now grazed in the adjoining field, had drawn their wooden cart with all of their belongings on that first day on the island.

  Maeve could picture herself sitting up front with Liamie, his owner, a scarlet crocheted blanket across her knees, gripping the side of her seat, with rust-colored seaweed bunched by her feet, excited but wary of what awaited them. Liamie had explained that the donkey was named in honor of his favorite folk singer, and that he reckoned the real Christy Moore would be proud to know of his namesake.

  Murtagh perched precariously on the rear of the cart, his legs dangling over the edge, one arm around the waist of her dressmaking mannequin as the wind whipped his hair about his face. The smell of the sea, cut turf and damp grass overwhelmed him as a hot April sun scorched the stones they clattered over, making them sizzle.

  Maeve had flung her head back and filled her lungs with a deep breath. “The air feels different here,” she said. “Like it’s got magic in it.”

  “Folks say it’s healing,” Liamie replied. “They come over from the mainland, ailing and weary, and leave here transformed. It’s the three S’s.” Maeve stared at the grooves in the leathery skin of his hands as he held up one finger at a time to list them off. “Sea salt. Soil. Stones. That’s the Holy Trinity right there.”

  The moment Maeve stood before their cottage, she recognized it as their own immediately.

  Those thick whitewashed stone walls overgrown with ivy; the dirty, golden thatched roof it wore like a heavy toupee. The black wrought iron gate that squealed each time they passed through; an affliction they would soon stop noticing and never repair. It was clear to her that the front garden had once been much loved. Empty wooden window boxes, painted a sky blue to match the sills, remained and flower baskets hung on brass hooks from the thatch gables, with some blooms still surviving. Dandelions and weeds were breaking through the cobblestoned pathway that led to the red front door, and the grass needed cutting, but all along the garden perimeter rosebushes flourished: yellow, white, blush pink and the deepest burgundy. Although the rest of the garden had fallen into decline, the roses remained triumphant. Maeve crouched down to breathe in their scent. “I declare myself the newly crowned rose queen.”

  “Queen Maeve,” Murtagh said, bowing. “I am but your loyal servant.”

  In time they would realize how much they were indebted to Seamus O’Farrell, the retiring potter to whom Murtagh became an apprentice for what in the end was only three months. Murtagh had inherited an already established studio, with loyal customers and a shopfront for tourists in the summer holiday season. It was more than he had ever dared dream of; the letter that arrived from Galway had accelerated his life from student novice to professional potter almost overnight. And yet, Seamus’s gift was not solely one of commerce. In his own quiet way, he lifted the veil off the island for them and helped them understand the islander ways. Although walking for him had become a feat of gargantuan effort, he liked to link his arm with Maeve’s and shuffle to the end of the lane, where they would sit on a low stone wall as he trickled truths to her.

  “Don’t be afear’d of the direct way they have of looking—sure our eyes have been trained to scan the horizon for the boats coming in. Makes us all good at seeing.

  “That explosion of color in the flora and fauna, you’ll not see the likes of it anywhere else on God’s great Earth. Once May is in, Mother Nature starts showin’ off, and where all was barren the flowers bloom, four climates all integrating here—the Mediterranean, Arctic, Alpine and Temperate.”

  He gave her a book with glossy photographs so she could learn all of their names: the Irish harebells and oxeye daisies, the red clover and saxifrage, the Dryas octopelata from the Arctic and the Alpine Minuartina verna. To hear him murmur their names, it sounded like a prayer.

  The secrets of the clay that he passed to Murtagh were seldom spoken of. The apprentice learned by witnessing his master at work, sometimes in silence, sometimes while Seamus taught him to read the sea and how his beloved clouds were in a never-ending dance with the waves. The challenge was daunting, but Seamus demonstrated discipline, commitment and endless experimentation in a manner that emboldened Murtagh to take more risks with his work, not to shy away from what seemed too
difficult, and to seek balance between creativity and productivity. The rhythm he found in the studio was soon emulated outside of it as the philosophies his teacher had developed over a lifetime were slowly delivered to him. And with Seamus’s openhearted invitation to the Moones, he gave the islanders permission to accept them also.

  They learned that Maeve’s roses had been the pride and joy of Seamus’s deceased wife, Alma. In the end, as his energy waned, it was the roses he had used his depleting resources to maintain.

  When the day came that the funeral procession passed by the cottage, with Seamus’s coffin carried on oars by men who would miss him but seldom speak of it, the mourners paused outside his former home for a decade of the rosary while children wriggled impatiently to move on; there was no shielding them from the reality of death. One of their own was gone, and all the island would mourn. Maeve snapped a white rose that stretched through the iron gate and placed it on top of the coffin. An elderly woman, her head covered in a black woolen shawl, nodded her approval, and the procession moved on.

  While Murtagh was reconciling his practice with the ghost of Seamus, Maeve found satisfaction in the design and execution of their decorating. The interior of their cottage had proved better and worse than expected, but she reveled in deciding what to nurture and what to replace, which elements were characterful and which just caused unnecessary suffering.

  The original floorboards in the hallway remained, their shine illuminated when sunshine flooded through the small glass window.

  Maeve immediately claimed as her own a cuckoo clock perched on the wall.

  The framed Sacred Heart picture hanging over the door, however, was removed immediately; Murtagh avoided the eyes of Jesus as he gently lifted it down and tucked it out of sight.

  It was still hard to shake the all-encompassing guilt impressed upon him since childhood; shame borne of the knowledge that the omniscient God could see inside his heart and mind, that just thinking of sinning was as damning as acting upon it. Coveting, resenting, dreaming, avoiding, tempting, looking: all slippery slopes that only abstinence, penance and the strictest policing of self could save him from. Of all the blessings Maeve had brought to his life, her gentle mocking of his eternal guilt was a salvation. Her teasing undermined its power and made him, if not fearless, more confident that, if God existed, his intentions had been woefully misunderstood. They were both adamant that when they had children of their own they would hand down a different quality of faith, and the time was drawing closer for them to translate their values into behavior, for Maeve was four months pregnant.