The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay

by Anne Doughty

  ‘It’s a bit hard on us to have to spend a night here so you can say a fond farewell. Dicky’s been very good to come down with me.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t good of Dicky. He never does anything that isn’t entirely for his own benefit. I don’t know why he decided to come, but you can be sure of one thing, it wasn’t for your benefit and it wasn’t for mine.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s fair at all. It was damned decent of him to help me out when you couldn’t make it last weekend. I think you might be a bit more appreciative.’

  George’s face had turned slightly red and his Adam’s apple, which is rather prominent, was going up and down more than usual.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with being appreciative. It’s just that I can’t drop everything to suit Dicky.’

  ‘Never mind Dicky, what about me?’

  We crossed the highest point of the upper field and dropped down towards the quarry floor, alone now, not a farm or cottage in sight. I headed for a flat bench of rock where we could sit and talk.

  ‘Where are you off to?’

  He stopped where a winding path ran between the old spoil heaps.

  ‘There’s a good seat over here.’

  ‘Come here, it’s softer.’

  I followed him through the bumpy area beside the path until he stopped in a small hollow. He stretched out on the grass and waited for me to join him. I looked down at his smiling face. He wanted to kiss me, of course, but surely we could just sort things out properly first.

  ‘Come here, then.’

  I sat down on the grass beside him. Immediately, he flung his arms around me, pushed me back on the short grass and pressed his tongue deep into my mouth. I turned my head away and struggled to sit up, but he rolled over on top of me and went on kissing me. Whether it was the tobacco sodden kisses, or the way he pinned me down, or the piece of stone sticking into the back of my left shoulder, I don’t know, but I pushed as hard as I could against his chest. He drew back for a moment, surprised, sure I couldn’t mean it, and then reached for the top button of my blouse.

  ‘No. George, please . . . let go of me.’

  I scrambled to my feet, breathless and angry, pulled my skirt back down over my thighs and hitched up the shoulder strap of my bra.

  ‘Look, George, if we can’t have a sensible conversation, I’m going back to the house,’ I said, looking down at him where he lay still sprawled on the grass.

  ‘What’s wrong, Elizabeth? Is it the time of the month?’ he asked, his tone conciliatory.

  In medical terms, it was ‘the time of the month’. I’d been bleeding since Saturday and I had backache. But what had that to do with anything? He always behaved as if the menstrual cycle, all twenty-eight days of it, was the complete explanation of any problem he might be having with a woman. As far as he was concerned, failure to comply with his wishes was just another symptom, like fluid retention or stomach cramp.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ I lied, without the slightest compunction. ‘I’m perfectly well and in possession of my right mind, I just want to get things straightened out for tomorrow.’

  ‘But that’s what we were doing,’ he said petulantly. ‘I must say you don’t exactly seem pleased to see me. I get up at some ungodly hour, drive all the way down with no proper directions, and you’re not even here to meet me. I don’t think that’s much of a welcome.’

  ‘It might have been warmer if you’d had a little more consideration for my situation here.’

  ‘Consideration?’ he retorted, his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously. ‘I don’t think it’s much consideration when you go gallivantin’ off with your fine friend Mr Actually Geoffrey and leave Dicky and I hangin’ around till you honour us with your presence. I don’t think your mother would think that very considerate.’

  It might have been the reference to Geoffrey, or to my mother, or the sarcasm of ‘honouring him with my presence’, I really don’t know which, but I felt something snap inside me. I looked at him. How could I ever have imagined I loved him? The books had got it wrong again. It was not that this man wanted one thing and one thing only. It was much worse than that, this man wanted nothing of the person I really was.

  What he was looking for was a mixture of parts he could put together, a do-it-yourself kit for someone amenable, available not merely for sex, but for all the other ego-boosting activities females alone can perform. There was no doubt that was what he had always wanted. It had always been perfectly obvious. How could I have failed to see it till this moment?

  I struggled with the signet ring on my right hand, the one he had asked me to wear before he went to England. I pulled and tugged at it, twisting it fiercely in both directions, but it wouldn’t budge. I could see processions of fictional heroines flinging their rings in the faces of their rejected suitors but I was far too desperate for the irony to amuse me. I put my finger in my mouth to ease the pain and remembered that’s what you’re supposed to do. When moistened it slipped off quite easily. I held it out to him.

  ‘I’m sorry, George. I won’t be coming with you tonight, or tomorrow either.’

  My cheeks were flaming and there was a tremble in my voice. He ignored the ring, so I bent down, put it on a flat stone, stepped out of the hollow and went back to the path.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he shouted.

  ‘What I said. I’m staying here,’ I called over my shoulder.

  He scrambled to his feet, grabbed the ring, ran after me and caught at my hand.

  ‘Elizabeth, don’t be silly. You can’t stay here. You don’t mean it. Be reasonable, Elizabeth. You’re tired.’

  ‘Yes, I am. I’m tired of being expected to do whatever you want. I’m tired of being told I’m unreasonable, whenever I object to anything, and I’m tired of having my menstrual cycle used as an excuse to ignore any feelings I might express. Yes, I am tired of all of it. Leave me alone.’

  I was walking briskly now and he’d had to run to keep up with me. As I paused briefly to swing myself over a stone wall, he jumped over ahead of me and stood blocking my path. He scowled down at me.

  ‘You think I’m a fool, don’t you? I saw you making eyes at Mr Actually Geoffrey. And running off after him. That’s it, isn’t it?’

  I stared at him. He had mimicked Geoffrey’s accent quite grotesquely, twisting his own face into a parody of Geoffrey’s hesitant manner.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ I said firmly, as I walked past him. ‘Will you please keep your voice down. The sound carries a long way in this still air.’

  Then he mimicked me.

  ‘Oh yes, schoolmarm,’ he went on. ‘Full of wisdom you are. You’ll make a good mate for Frightfully Actually Geoffrey. If he can manage it, that is.’

  I came to the last gate on the lowest field. Usually I climb over it, because it’s all tied up with binder twine. But I felt so shaky I didn’t trust myself not to wobble on the top bar. I began to undo the knots. They weren’t difficult, there were just a lot of them and I had to concentrate. I was aware of every fibre as I traced them to the point where I could loosen them. As the last knot fell away, I pushed the gate open and went through. There was no need to tie it up again for the cows were in the top field. I walked on, George continuing his commentary at my heels.

  ‘You’ll regret this, Elizabeth.’

  I wondered in a leisurely way if I would. I looked back at him, his face covered with sprouting black stubble. That was it, he must be growing a beard. Like Dicky. Dicky said all the best people were wearing beards. No, I didn’t think I’d regret it.

  ‘You’ll feel better tomorrow, Elizabeth. It’s the strain of being apart all these months.’

  His tone had changed and softened, but his voice sounded as if it were a long way away. He might as well be reciting the Shorter Catechism.

  As we stepped onto the road, Dicky sounded the horn. It was one of those exceedingly loud ones like the Austrians use for hunting. He had turned the car round and I could see he was drumming his fingers on the ste
ering wheel and watching us in his rear-view mirror.

  ‘I’ll come for you in the morning about nine. Make sure you’re ready now, there’s a good girl, and we’ll forget all about it. We both said things we didn’t mean. We just need time to be alone together.’

  He kissed my cheek. I waved as they drove off. Prince appeared from the stackyard and I bent down to stroke him. ‘I’m not going, Prince. Definitely not.’

  Prince waved his tail enthusiastically. I knew he would agree with me. But I really must sit down. Or lie down. Yes, that was it. Lie down. There was no one in the kitchen, so I pressed the latch on my bedroom door, kicked off my sandals and climbed onto the bed. Tears began to stream down my face, spilling onto the cool starched pillowcase. I wept and wept, quite unable to stop myself, until quite suddenly the tears stopped of their own accord. I sat on the edge of the bed and removed the last of my mascara with a tissue.

  No, not grief. It was certainly not that. Relief, rather. I felt like a small creature who has scrambled out from under a stone and now feels safe enough to sit in the sunshine. I lay down again on my back and watched the pattern of reflections on the ceiling. Outside, the sun would be dipping over the islands, the hush of evening already spreading across the land as the shadows lengthened and the day’s work came to an end. My day’s work was not yet finished, but when it was, I knew there would be both comfort and rest.

  Chapter 14

  When I heard Mary come back into the kitchen and begin her evening round I knew it was time to get moving. I swung myself off the bed, smoothed out the dint my body had made in the fat, pink eiderdown and reached for my handbag. I took out my diary, glanced at it and then carefully emptied both my wallet and my purse on the bed.

  The diary was easy. Apart from a neat, black entry saying ‘Freshers’ Hop’, to which I would not now be going, the ruled pages between today and the beginning of term had no mark upon them. Nothing to stop me there.

  The money was more difficult. I unfolded the crumpled notes, stacked up the half-crowns and shillings and made little mounds of the remaining silver and copper. Feely’s taxi fare, single tickets to Limerick, Dublin and Belfast. Teapot money for this week. Stamps. Blue exercise books.

  I began moving piles and parcels of money as if I were playing some solitary game. Some things I had to guess at, but after I’d moved to one side all the expenses I could think of, there were still some notes and a few piles of silver. I added them up, then divided them equally, placing the coins in a row on a thin base of pound notes, two small armies facing each other across a deep pink valley.

  I smiled to myself, remembering my old money box, a small, shiny black and red replica of the large battered cash box in the shop. My box had a tiny key which I loved. I never thought of using it but kept it carefully among my special things, safe in its tiny cellophane envelope. As a child, I often played with my money box, tipping out the coins, the worn pennies and halfpennies, the gold-coloured threepenny bits, the silver sixpences, the shillings, the occasional large half-crown. ‘A right old miser you’ll be one day, always counting your money,’ my mother said when she saw me, absorbed in what I was doing.

  How wrong it is to judge other people by your own way of seeing. In those childhood days with few toys, coins were kings and queens, children or grown-ups, ships or armies. With my pennies I could make towers or fairy rings, with threepenny bits I built eight-sided castles. The stories I invented came back to me as I spread out the remains of my summer’s earnings. Today, I was inventing a new story about my future, moving the pieces and asking myself, ‘What if I do this?’ or ‘How could I manage that?’ But what I was doing was no fantasy. Today’s story was critical to my future, it had to be firmly anchored in reality.

  I fingered the grubby notes and counted the coins again. It might just be possible, but there was no margin for emergencies. Except that, of course, there was. I opened the single drawer in the washstand and took out three fat letters in strong white envelopes, the splendid epistles Ben had written me. He’d asked so many questions that I’d numbered them to make it easier to find the bits I needed each time I wrote. There in number one was the neatly folded fiver he’d sent the moment I’d let him know where I was.

  I spread it out. Now what I wanted to do was not only possible, but easy. Dear Ben. I stared unseeing at the patterns I’d made. Ben had urged me to stay longer if I could, because he thought it was what I needed to do. He knows how indecisive I can be, how I confuse myself when what I want is what I want for myself, so he had written to encourage me.

  In that particular letter he’d said he thought he understood my problem, because of what he’d found out quite recently about his mother. She was the youngest daughter of a village rector in County Antrim. As a little girl she was taught to repeat every day, ‘God first, others next, self last.’ He thinks that’s why still she can never do what she wants and why there’s been all this problem with getting her to see specialists about her poor health.

  I felt sad when I thought about Ben’s mother. She’s someone I’ve always liked but she’s never been very well and recently has been quite poorly. That, of course, was why Ben hadn’t gone off to England with George and the rest. He told me he’d been so glad he hadn’t gone. He’d been sure that what her own doctor dismissed as ‘menopausal symptoms’ was far more serious, probably some weakness in the kidney area. Now, at last, a specialist had diagnosed the problem. Ben had been right and she was now in hospital awaiting surgery. Of all this he had written, knowing I’d want to hear and assuming I’d understand his detailed medical explanations.

  I collected up the money, shook the coins back into my purse and put the notes away. I returned Ben’s fiver to his letter, put it back in the drawer and sighed. I’d set out to make one decision about my future and I’d ended up making another one as well.

  Never, never again, would I get mixed up with a man who didn’t treat me as Ben did, as an equal. Even if I should fancy myself ‘in love’, as I’d already managed to do, I promised myself I would never again be anyone’s ‘girlfriend’, not as George and his kind understood the word.

  No, take me or leave me, I said to myself. Should I remain ‘on the shelf’, risk becoming ‘an old maid’, never shed the label of ‘spinster’, words and phrases my mother used freely with bitter disparagement, it would be a far better fate than spending the rest of my life propping up some male ego. When I wrote to Ben he’d understand when I told him I wouldn’t be seeing George any more. It occurred to me as I closed my handbag and hung it over the back of my chair that Ben had guessed something wasn’t right between us quite some time ago.

  Mary turned to me the moment she heard the latch on my bedroom door. She was still wearing her best blouse and Sunday skirt but they were now enveloped in her familiar spotted overall. As she made up the fire, a strand of grey hair hung down over her eyes, and she looked tired in a way I had not seen before.

  ‘Had ye a headache, astore?’

  ‘I had indeed, but it’s better now. Did you wonder where I’d disappeared to?’

  ‘Ah no, I saw you come in. I was beyond in the haggard. The brown hen’s laying away again, bad luck to her.’

  As she filled her basin with potatoes, I fetched my favourite knife and sat down at the kitchen table beside her. I wondered how much she had seen or heard of George’s departure, but I could be sure she’d not mention it if I didn’t. Besides, I’d much more important things on my mind.

  ‘Mary, I wanted to ask you a favour.’

  ‘Shure ask away. You know you’ve only to ask.’

  ‘Do you think, Mary, you and Paddy could put up with me for a bit longer? Till Saturday fortnight, maybe?’

  She put her knife down and stretched out her hands on the table, a smile spreading across her face.

  ‘Ah, shure good. An’ you know ye needn’t ask. Couldn’t ye stay till Christmas, if ye’d a mind to. Indeed, it’s heartsore I was you thought to leave us so sudden and so unexpected.
’

  The smile faded as she spoke the words ‘sudden and unexpected’. I knew she was thinking of George and would go on worrying if I didn’t put her mind at rest.

  ‘I. . . told George I wasn’t going back with him, that I wanted to stay on, but he . . . didn’t really seem to grasp what I meant. He says he’ll be back in the morning.’

  ‘Will I tell him yer out?’

  Her reply was so brisk and so uncharacteristic I burst out laughing. She began to laugh herself and in the moments that followed some great dark cloud simply dissolved. With it went all my anxiety about getting ready to go, trying to finish what I still needed to write up, having to leave without any goodbyes to the people who had helped me and, worst of all, without seeing Patrick again. I thought of all my anxiety over Dicky and what he might be going to say next, and trying to keep my temper with both of them over the so-called ‘directions’.

  It was all gone. Just as a passing squall leaves the air fresh and bright, so the darkness of their coming had moved away and left me feeling elated, ecstatic, my mind so clear I could hardly believe it. I knew now why I was staying. For the moment though, I felt so overjoyed and excited I could find no words to express exactly how I felt.

  ‘Mary, I’m going to be doing an awful lot of writing. Will I not be in your way?’

  ‘Not a bit of it. And shure you’ll not write all the time. Won’t you want to be out visiting your friends, too. I think there’ll be some glad to hear you are staying.’

  She considered the eyes of her potato studiously, but it was quite clear who she meant.

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted, ‘but there’ll be others angry with me for changing my mind.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t you change your mind? Aren’t you well able to make up your own mind now, Elizabeth, and you twenty-one? Shure who’s to give orders to you now, tell me that?’