by Anne Doughty
Whatever happened after graduation next year, I now saw my future from a new angle. Although I had never even considered going on with my work, something had clicked into place with the same decisive snap as the Leica’s shutter.
We sat on the wall for a long time, talking about our lives and the strange pattern of decisions which had brought both of us to this western shore. The afternoon continued warm and sunny, the small clouds formed and dissolved, a slight breeze stirred the heads of yellow ragwort and scattered the rusty brown fruits of the seeding dockens.
‘When did Mary say supper would be?’
‘Seven,’ I replied automatically, my mind still moving over questions of mythology and belief.
‘Have you been to the Cliffs of Moher yet?’
‘No, no I haven’t.’
‘Well then, we must go, even if we don’t find the hoof print of the fairy horse.’
We drove south along the coast and turned up a rough track to an area of uneven ground fenced round with a few strands of barbed wire. The Morris was the only car there. To our left the mass of the cliff was deep in shadow, the gulls whirling below us tiny white specks against the dark layers of rock. To the right, the land rose even higher. Bathed in sunlight, the steep, grassy slope above the cliff edge was topped by a stone tower. I looked down at the pounding water and shivered. Even today, with an almost flat calm, the swell plucked at the soft shales, wearing them away even as we watched.
Involuntarily, I took a step back, though we were nowhere near the sagging strands of barbed wire, our only protection from the three hundred foot drop.
Geoffrey turned to face me. ‘Do heights trouble you?’
‘Sometimes. But it’s not just the height. I think it’s the darkness and the chill.’
‘Shall we climb up to the tower? It’s in sunlight. And we can see the whole coastline from up there.’
I nodded and made my way quickly towards the thread of path that headed up to O’Brien’s Tower. I had such an urge to get away from the chill shadows that I was breathless when I got to the top. We sat down on the short grass by the worn stone base, the whole of the coast to the south spread out beyond us as he had promised.
‘Sorry about that,’ I said, as he settled himself beside me. ‘I just had a funny feeling, very creepy and nasty, and I can’t explain it.’
‘There are places can make you feel like that. In some the aura is so strong that almost everyone feels something; others, the power is much less and only the more sensitive are able to tune in to it. I would think you were a sensitive. You pick up such a lot in the visible world, I’d be surprised if you weren’t picking things up from the Other World as well.’
I looked at him in amazement. For someone who seemed so sensible and rational what he’d just said was extraordinarily strange and fanciful. And yet, I felt again he had said something of great importance to me.
The whole idea of picking up auras from an Other World seemed quite bizarre if I thought about it in practical, sensible terms. But part of me wasn’t practical and sensible at all. I’d always recognised powerful feelings I couldn’t name, or label, or explain. Perhaps that was why I was so fascinated by the old stories, by myth and legend and the long tradition which had kept them alive in this remote corner of the world.
‘I wonder if that is why I had to come to the west,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘I felt I just had to come.’
‘ “All life is a voyage of discovery. The most important bits are the bits you do without maps.” That’s what my Welsh grandmother says, and she’s well on her way to being a Wise Woman. You’d like her. You must meet her one day,’ he added as he opened his camera bag and took out the Leica. ‘You owe me a picture.’
‘Geoffrey, I hate being photographed.’
He looked disappointed and put the camera down. Then he picked it up again.
‘Could you manage a figure in a landscape? Moira Rhu looking out for her fairy lover on his magic steed?’
I laughed, and went and stood on a grassy mound with my eyes shaded, gazing out towards the islands. I wished I had long, dark hair flowing in the breeze and a woven cloak streaming from my shoulders. I heard the click, turned and grinned at him.
‘Got it?’
I heard a second click.
‘I have now,’ he confessed, as I went back down the slope to join him. ‘You’re not cross, are you?’
I was not in the least bit cross. A day begun in heartache and tears was ending in warmth and friendship. Horizons were opening for me as wide and welcoming as the sky now yellowing towards sunset beyond my beloved islands.
It was time to go back to the cottage, to supper, to Mary and Paddy, and an evening by the fire. But we would meet again now, Geoffrey and I. We would meet when he travelled north from Dingle on his way to Donegal. Then we would meet again, somewhere, sometime, that only the future would reveal.
Chapter 17
According to Paddy, the old cliff road along the coast had been used as late as the 1940s, but after that it began to collapse into the sea. Each winter produced new rockfalls and by the 1950s no one used it at all. Now, ten years later, the broad, well-beaten track used for as long as anyone could remember, was almost invisible. To follow its line along the coast, I’d had to take to the adjacent fields, and only where it turned inland towards Ballyvore had I been able to measure its original width between the tumbled and overgrown stone walls.
Late last evening after Geoffrey left us, I’d got Paddy to help me make a sketch map of where the road used to run. From where I now stood it was clear the seaward wall had gone. Now, the landward wall was only a few yards from the cliff edge. So, here at the boundary of Paddy’s land, the loss could have been thirty feet in twenty years. So much for the slow wearing away of land surfaces quoted by the text books.
I set aside my clipboard, dropped to the ground, and wriggled forward to the cliff edge. Here, where there had been a recent fall there were no telltale cracks, the edge was firm for the time being. I peered over and felt the cool touch of the updraught on my face. Below me, gulls circled in a leisurely way, some silhouetted against the dark shadow at the foot of the cliffs, others wheeling and diving over the turquoise water which surged against the streaming rocks.
Yesterday, I had felt a kind of panic at the cliffs at Moher, deep in shadow. Today, though these cliffs were every bit as high, I felt no unease at all. Was it just the difference of place, or was the difference in me? I wondered if I had shed some old anxiety.
I lay leaning on my arms, aware of the tiny plants under my fingers and the blissful warmth of the sun penetrating the light fabric of my blouse. I’d hated being on cliffs with George. No matter how far we kept from the frightening drop, I still felt uneasy, as if the actual edge itself had some enormous power to draw me away from my chosen path. But this afternoon I’d been working back and forth quite happily within feet of the edge and now I lay looking down into the water three hundred feet below.
Some old fear had gone. Paddy would call it ‘a mystery’, something to be accepted whether you understood it or not. As he’d said last night, after telling one of his long and complex tales, ‘Shure the tales are full of wisdom and just by listenin’ the wisdom comes to us, but it is a mystery how it happens. It is not for us to ask understandin’, we must just give thanks for the gift.’
I had been given so many gifts since I’d come to Lisara. I raised my head and looked out at the islands, where the white walls of the cottages were once more visible in the clear light. I ran my eye east along the horizon until it reached the northern shore of the great bay where I had walked with Patrick, nine days ago, on the sweeping curve of the beach at Drennan. I could see the gleam of the Hills of Burren in the slight heat haze, but though I knew exactly where Drennan lay, the beach itself was invisible in the dazzling light.
There were so many things in your life you couldn’t see, or touch, or prove, however sure you felt that they existed. Like Paddy’s ‘mysteries’, you
simply had to take it on trust that they did. And sometimes, it wasn’t easy. When I was back in Belfast, I knew I would have to trust that the islands had not disappeared, that the tiny flowers between my fingers would go on growing and blooming; and that the friends I’d made would not forget me.
At the thought of Belfast, I shivered. I could imagine myself looking out from the top of a double decker bus, the sun setting behind the dark bulk of the gasworks, the trees in Ormeau Park leafless and dripping and the street lights reflected in the slate-coloured waters of the Lagan as I crossed the bridge. Going home. Home from the university to the flat above the shop, its rooms dim and empty and chill, till I pressed the switches on the lights and the electric fires set in the closed-up fireplaces.
‘Sufficient unto the day is the greyness thereof,’ I said to myself, as I glanced at my watch. Almost four. Mary would expect me for a cup of tea. Later, Patrick would call if he was back in time. All day I had been trying not to think about him. I wanted to see him so much that my longing made me fearful. What if I had imagined he felt more for me than he did? If he had not kissed me, the day we spent together would seem no more than a pleasant outing with a lively companion. But his kissing me changed everything.
I wriggled my way back from the edge, rolled over and sat up. With the brilliance of the sea still in my eyes, all I could make out for a moment was a solid black figure sitting on some mossy stones beside the fallen wall. I thought I was seeing things.
‘Patrick,’ I cried. ‘How long have you been there?’
‘Not very long,’ he replied, getting to his feet. ‘You were so damned near that edge I wasn’t going to risk saying anything.’
He held out his hands for mine and grasped them tightly when I went to him. I wondered if he would kiss me. We were standing close to each other and he was gazing down at me with that same look of tenderness and longing I had tried to evade all through the day we had spent together. But he just smiled broadly and ran his eye over me.
‘Well, you seem to be all in one piece.’
There was a curious quality in his voice as if he was enormously relieved, but didn’t dare show it.
‘More or less,’ I replied, aware that my blouse had parted company with my trousers while I wriggled around. ‘Did you expect me to be damaged?’ I asked lightly.
‘Not exactly,’ he replied steadily. ‘But a man can’t be too sure if he goes off and leaves a lovely young woman alone among the rough, rug-headed kerns of the west.’
I laughed at the idea of Sean O’Struithan, or Michael Flannigan, or the bachelors of Ballyvore, playing the part of rug-headed kerns and spiriting me off. Then I remembered how nearly I had been spirited off. If I’d gone with George, I’d be on my way to Dicky’s party in Wicklow right now, after the promised night in Limerick.
‘How did you know I was down here?’
We sat together on a small grassy patch, our backs against the low hump of the landward wall.
‘Paddy,’ he said simply. ‘He was standing at the gate as I drove up. I came direct, as you see. I was afraid you might be about to leave . . . or worse.’
The uneasy glance he gave me told me ‘or worse’ had been very much in his mind. The thought of the note I’d have had to write came back to me and the way the tears would prick whenever I tried to imagine what I’d say. Three days ago, the very idea of it had been bad enough, but now it was quite unbearable.
‘I nearly was gone . . . on Wednesday.’
‘So I heard,’ he replied, looking grave. ‘But it seems the Red Branch from the north were unsuccessful in their attempts to carry off the lovely Elizabeth.’
He was smiling and he’d caught Paddy’s accent and manner so exactly I wondered if he was quoting him.
‘He didn’t say that, did he? You make it sound like the Cattle Raid of Cooley.’
‘Well, he didn’t use those actual words, I admit. But he did inject the tale with, shall we say, a little poetic licence.’
‘And how did this heroic tale end? You didn’t by any chance have a giant Welshman in the denouement?’
‘No,’ he replied, stopping to consider. ‘I think there was a bit more to come, but Mary appeared and hastened the proceedings. She told me where you were and Paddy was not allowed to finish his story, which is a pity in one way. It was shaping up nicely.’
‘Remind me to tell you the authorised version sometime.’
As I spoke, I was suddenly aware we were sitting close to each other in a grassy hollow well out of sight of the watchful eyes of Lisara. But for that handclasp on meeting, he had not attempted to touch me, he had just looked at me closely to make sure I was well. All that had happened between us so far was a little friendly talk and my offer to tell him what had really happened in his absence, and yet I knew something far more intimate was going on between us than in those unhappy moments up in the quarry, when George demonstrated the depth of his feeling by sticking his tongue in my mouth.
‘But you stayed, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, I stayed.’
I wondered if I had stayed because of him. Or because of me. Or because of my work. And then to my surprise, I remembered Geoffrey quoting his grandmother, not twenty-four hours ago: ‘All life is a voyage of discovery. The most important bits you do without maps.’
‘How long have you got?’
‘A whole fortnight.’
He seemed pleased. I thought he was about to say something, but then I saw him check himself and I had a moment of blind panic. He sat twiddling a grass stem round his fingers and it seemed an age before he spoke.
‘I can be free a good deal in the next fortnight if I want to. Charles is better and the season is nearly over. Would you like to come exploring with me?’
He waved a hand towards the horizon, the hazy hills in the distance and the invisible beach at Drennan.
‘Your wish will be my command,’ he added, taking my hand and bowing over it.
I nodded and did not take my hand away. ‘I should like that very much. I’ve got such a lot to tell you. And lots more questions.’
‘Yes, I thought you might have. I did indeed,’ he added, as he helped me to my feet. ‘Mary’s expecting us for tea.’
He picked up my jacket and clipboard and waited while I rewound the ball of string and the tape measure I’d been using. We climbed the remains of the old wall and walked a yard or two apart as we went up the fields and came under the watchful eye of Lisara. I was sure something was resolved between us, but what it might be I did not know.
Chapter 18
Patrick’s study was at the front of the small Georgian house where his family had lived for four generations. Its tall windows faced north and west across a small, parklike area dotted with trees and grazed by sheep. Beyond the curving driveway the main road ran invisible for a quarter of a mile or more shaded by woodland, trees planted by Patrick’s great-grandfather when he inherited the Clare estate, came south to live, and grew homesick for the wooded islands of Fermanagh, where he was born.
Where the trees, now touched by autumn colour, gave way to pasture, the road was plain to be seen, rising over a low hill, skirting lush meadows full of buttercups and turning suddenly southwards to the town. I scanned its empty length, hoping for the gleam of sunlight on metal which would tell me Patrick was on his way back. So far, there was no sign of him. With Moyra and Charles in Dublin this weekend, it might well be a problem at the hotel or in the bar delaying him.
I moved away from the window and went back to my interrupted study of his bookcases. I’ve always found people never come when you watch for them, however much you will them to appear, but as soon as you stop watching they are sure to arrive. After such a long, happy day together, it was a pity he’d had to go out in the first place.
I’d been pleased enough to chat to Mrs Brannigan in the kitchen, have a bath and change my clothes, though even then the smell of the roast lamb was making me hungry. But as time passed and he still wasn’t back, I grew r
estless, fidgeting anxiously, acutely aware of how long he’d been gone.
I paused in front of the mantelpiece and observed myself in the mirror which formed part of the carved overmantel. My face glowed pink through my light make-up. It looked as if I’d caught the sun but when I looked more closely it was not just my face which was radiating such a vibrant sense of well-being. Everything about me seemed brighter, sharper, more clearly defined than usual.
I straightened my neckline and smoothed the skirt of my best dress, the one George had thrown at me just over a week ago when he departed from my life. Mrs Brannigan said it suited me real well. But then, as Patrick would say, she was biased. She had taken to me at our very first meeting and made me so welcome I’d begun to wonder if she too were hoping for a match, like Mary and Bridget, and Mr Feely.
Well, if she was, she would be disappointed could she have followed Patrick and me on our travels this week past. We’d driven far and wide, had walked and talked, picnicked and dined together, had explored Limerick and Galway, and visited the most remote coasts and shores, all without a word suggesting even the possibility of marriage. Not only had we not spoken of marriage, but we had not even kissed again, though we had been alone often enough. It had surprised me a little, but it didn’t trouble me. We were so easy in each other’s company and I was in so little doubt about his love, I hardly gave it a thought. When I did, I felt that Patrick would return to where we had left things, that evening at Drennan, in his own good time.
I turned away from the hearth, the fire laid carefully with paper and fir cones, and walked over to Patrick’s desk, old and worn, well-ordered and well-loved. I thought of the desk in the stockroom where we had first talked together. From its very first moments, my relationship with Patrick had been quite different from any other I’d ever had.
When I first found myself ‘going out with boys’, the whole issue seemed to come down to one thing, did you or didn’t you kiss. Later on, the issue shifted to whether or not you went to bed. Looked at from where I stood now, I could see no difference between the earliest and the most recent of all those relationships. All had been carried on between ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’: somewhere, somehow, the critical issue of its being this individual girl or boy, this individual man or woman, had got quite left out. However I might try to describe my relationship with Patrick, of one thing I was quite sure, I was no ‘girlfriend’. I was always and only Elizabeth. Whether or not we kissed, made love, or married, in his eyes I would always be Elizabeth, not a somebody put together to meet his needs and expectations.