The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay

by Anne Doughty

‘Not a lot,’ I said, laughing. ‘Not my period.’

  ‘No, nor mine. But I’d like to know more, wouldn’t you?’

  We examined the huge stones that made up the tomb. Their surfaces were so encrusted with lichens, white and pale grey, bright mustardy-yellow and deep red, that we couldn’t see an inch of bare rock, never mind identify what kind of rock it might be, so we turned to the landscape around us and tried to identify other landmarks.

  ‘Would it have looked like this when it was built?’ he asked, waving an arm round the great circle.

  His face was pale in the chill breeze, the skin tight around the eyes, his fair hair tousled. There was a tenseness about him that was quite new. When he smiled or passed on bits of news, it was the old, familiar Ben – lively, relaxed, completely in possession of himself. But when he stood as he did now, looking to the far horizon, scanning the surrounding high ground, preoccupied, absorbed, there was definitely something I’d not met before and could give no name to.

  ‘The bank might have looked the way it does now, but the surroundings might be different. The climate’s changed but I can never remember how the sequence of warm bits and wet bits goes, after the last Ice Age.’

  ‘Like me and small bones. I’m fine on the big ones, it’s when we get down to the little fellows I’m in trouble.’

  He sighed and I wondered if he was thinking of all the hours he’d have to spend in the coming year memorising every small detail of the human anatomy. So much of his future rested upon his doing well in his MD exams.

  ‘Lizzie, there are some public lectures at the Ulster Museum on Wednesdays this term. “From Prehistoric to Iron Age”. Would you come?’

  Something in the way he spoke, the way he didn’t look at me, made me feel I couldn’t say no, even if I’d wanted to, which I most certainly didn’t.

  ‘Yes, I’d like to. What time?’

  ‘Six o’clock. I thought we could go and have a bite to eat afterwards. Nothing posh, Chalet d’Or or Queen’s Espresso. My treat, I’ve been doing Saturday nights at the Rosetta.’

  ‘Ben, you’ve just reminded me. I’ve something to give you,’ I said hastily, as I dug my purse out of my jacket pocket, took out the five pound note he’d sent me in Clare and held it out to him. To my amazement I saw his face fall. He looked terribly upset.

  ‘Ben, what is it?’

  ‘I thought you’d used that to help you stay.’

  ‘But I did, Ben,’ I protested. ‘I couldn’t have risked staying on what I’d got. I was just lucky. Feely undercharged me and the Dublin single wasn’t as bad as I thought. Even at that, I’ve only got five and tenpence left.’

  ‘Five and tenpence won’t last long,’ he said abruptly.

  ‘True, Ben, true. But my grant cheque’s come through.’

  I had never seen Ben look so sad. It was quite unlike him to be upset, especially over money. He stood looking at me, his hands stuck resolutely in his pockets, ignoring the offending fiver.

  ‘Now, come on, Ben, tell me what’s wrong. This isn’t like you. What have I said, or not said? Come on, tell me.’

  The sky had grown overcast, spots of rain began to fall.

  ‘Come on, Lizzie, we’ll get soaked,’ he said, striding off.

  I pushed the fiver back into my purse and hurried after him, but he arrived at the car well ahead of me. As I scrambled in, the rain began in earnest.

  ‘Ben, will you tell me why you’re upset? Please.’

  His face softened slightly, but he said nothing. I waited. And went on waiting as the rain sheeted down around us.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m upset, but I am. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh Ben, you don’t think I’m rejecting what you offered, do you? I’ve just brought it back so we can do something together. It will buy lots of teas, if they aren’t too posh.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure of what?’

  ‘That you want lots of not very posh teas with me?’

  ‘Yes, of course I am,’ I said firmly. ‘Now, here, take it and keep it for us and tell me about the Brigadier. I forgot to ask you about him last night.’

  To my surprise, he closed his hand round mine, leaned forward and kissed me for the first time, very gently, on the lips.

  Chapter 21

  The autumn term was even busier than I’d expected. As well as an endless stream of essays to write, I was drafting my thesis and it gave me a bad time. I just couldn’t keep inside the prescribed length. Twice my tutor sent me away to cut out huge sections and synthesize others. I felt that everything I did involved unhappy compromises. Even the splendid black and white prints I’d had from Geoffrey, exactly the illustrations I needed, created problems with binding and made it far more expensive than I’d expected.

  I could cope with this sort of problem and with the misery of a particularly wet autumn, but living with the atmosphere at home was a quite different matter. I spent as little time there as I could, escaped to my room when I had nowhere else to go and thought about Patrick continuously. Eventually I had to discipline myself and put him out of mind when I was at lectures, or working in the library, but as soon as I relaxed even a little, walking between seminars and practicals, riding on buses or heating baked beans for my tea, I thought of him compulsively.

  At night, lying in bed, I imagined his arms around me, and thought about what it would be like making love to him, but when I fell asleep my dreams would be full of obstacles and difficulties, and I’d wake up frustrated and desolate.

  The worst of it was, there was no one I could talk to about Patrick. I daren’t tell Adrienne or any of my friends at Queen’s, because such interesting news was sure to travel outwards, reaching girls I’d been at school with, some of whose mothers were customers at the shop. The only person I could rely on was Ben, but somehow after that first afternoon when I’d not managed to tell him as I’d planned, it now seemed more and more difficult to introduce the subject easily and naturally.

  Patrick’s letters arrived regularly. In his first one, he apologised for being out of practice with a pen, but I was so delighted to hear from him I hardly noticed the formality of his style. His accounts of assessing his uncle’s pedigree herd for breeding purposes and planning a new series of land drains were written with a wry humour that always made me smile.

  His letters were long and I read them avidly, enjoying his descriptions of people he’d met and places he’d visited. He always included news of the people I knew, particularly Mary and Paddy, and he often added messages from Mrs Brannigan, or Kathleen from the shop, and even John Carlyle, the blacksmith, who always asked after me. Often, he enclosed newspaper cuttings from the Clare Champion and book reviews from the Irish Times.

  With Patrick and our time together occupying so much of my thoughts, it came as a real shock when it dawned on me that the excitement I felt at finding a letter in the familiar spiky hand had ebbed away in the time it took to read it. It happened so regularly and left me feeling so sad, that I could not ignore it. Each time a letter came, I set out hopefully but ended up puzzled and depressed by my disappointment. I told myself philosophically it was nothing more than the obvious: a letter was a poor substitute for a real, live Patrick. But, progressively, I wasn’t able to convince myself.

  Beyond an occasional ‘my dear’, he never used any terms of affection and all his letters ended simply: ‘with love’. At first this didn’t trouble me, for I accepted it as part of the rather formal style. After all, what else should I expect from someone whose feelings were so rigidly controlled. Would I rather he wrote the sort of passionate and meaningless nonsense I’d had from George?

  Weeks turned to months and still he never confessed to missing me, never once referred to the happiness of our times together, and made no mention of our meeting. I began to think more often of the dark shadows which had so often crossed his face. I had dispersed those shadows with my questions and stories, but I had no idea how deep set they were and what effect they might have
on him, now I was so far away.

  After the early weeks of October, most of his letters were posted in Dublin. His great-uncle, the one whose death had almost defeated our relationship, had made him his executor, so he was forced to visit Dublin regularly. First, he stayed at a hotel, but, as the need for visits grew more frequent, cousins in Rathfarnham invited him to use their house. Each time I saw the Dublin postmark, I hoped he might suggest coming to Belfast, but November ended with sleety snow and the posting of the Christmas cards to our Canadian relatives and still he did not suggest that he might come.

  There was one helpful outcome of his regular visits to Dublin, however. After I’d received a transcript of some stories from Professor McDonagh’s office on St Stephen’s Green, my mother decided that anything from Dublin was something to do with my work. As that was a subject of no interest whatever to her, my letters from Patrick arrived without comment to be parked behind the living room clock until I could carry them off eagerly to my room.

  It was a short note arriving in early December and not the hoped for letter from Patrick, that set events in my life moving again.

  ‘Yer Uncle Joe is not one bit well,’ my mother announced shortly, when she tore open the flimsy envelope. ‘Jimmy says they’ve let him out of hospital at his own wish.’ She compressed her lips. ‘If anything happens we’ll have to shut the shop. An’ it couldn’t be a worse time with trade so good.’

  Uncle Joe was the brother closest in age to my father, a slight, frail-looking man, who said little and seldom smiled. Apart from his passion for growing giant dahlias, I had never been able to find any interest or activity which gave him the slightest pleasure in life, even the running of his very successful dairy farm. When the news came of his death and my mother insisted I go to Keady with them for the funeral, I was completely taken aback.

  ‘It’s not as if I even knew him very well,’ I confessed to Ben, as we came out of the library, where we’d been working together all evening. ‘The service isn’t till three and then there’ll be a bun fight. I’ll not be back for our lecture and it’s the last one as well.’

  ‘Can’t be helped,’ he said easily. ‘Actually, there’s something else I’d like you to come to. Perhaps it would make up for missing our lecture.’

  ‘What’s that then?’

  ‘Medical Formal.’

  ‘But Ben, you never go to Formals? You’ve always said you hated wearing a penguin suit. . .’

  ‘But you’ll come, Lizzie, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I’d love to.’

  Sitting in the back of the van on the way to Keady in company with a large cardboard box of groceries for Aunt Lily, two umbrellas and my mother’s hat, I thought about Ben and the Medical Formal and the sort of comments my going would inevitably provoke. I still hadn’t managed to tell Ben about Patrick. Since that first walk at the Giant’s Ring when I’d missed my chance, I’d been waiting for the right moment, but the right moment just didn’t seem to turn up. By now, so much time had passed, I wasn’t sure what it was I had to tell him anyway.

  If I confessed that I loved Patrick he might feel I’d only been going out with him because I was lonely. That certainly wasn’t the reason. Oh yes, I was lonely, but then so was Ben. For all his circle of friends, he seemed to be happiest in my company. The same was true for me. We felt safe with each other, more confident we could cope with all the strains and stresses of a difficult year because each of us had the other to comfort and encourage them. When I thought about this, often I saw us as we stood that Sunday, at the centre of that great earthwork, two small figures in an immensity of space.

  And as often as not, another and very different image would follow it into my mind: the dazzle of sky and sea and the light reflecting from the limestone, the day Patrick and I had gone to the Burren. Standing with him in that very different immensity of space, I had felt I’d never feel lonely again, so long as he were with me.

  I stared out at the frosty countryside, the grass crisp with ice crystals, stiff and white, except under the south-facing hedges where it lay, vivid green, beaded with droplets that caught the light and sparkled. Even at midday, the sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows in the empty fields, reflecting back from the surface of the road, spilling down on barns and outhouses, picking out their corrugated roofs and the pale colour of the bales of hay stacked up for winter feed.

  Was it possible to feel the same thing with two quite different people? I sighed to myself. As Patrick had once said, love was a tricky little word at the best of times. I hadn’t appreciated then just what a variety of feelings might be involved and how difficult it was to work out what they were.

  ‘To the best of my knowledge that clock in Joe’s sitting room is left to our Elizabeth,’ my mother pronounced as my father drove down the hill into Armagh, turned along the side of the Mall, crossed the front of the county jail, and made his way through the old horse market to the junction with the Keady road.

  ‘When Albert died, Joe told me that he’d left that clock to Elizabeth, but that Joe was to have it for his lifetime. D’ye hear me, Elizabeth?’

  She twisted round in her seat to see what I was doing. Satisfied I was paying attention, she issued her instructions. ‘Now if that clock’s mentioned you’re to say nothing. Just leave it to your father an’ me. Just close yer han’ on it. Must be worth a right bit.’

  ‘Ach no, Florrie, those clocks were mass-produced in America,’ my father replied mildly. ‘You’d see one in whatever house you went into when I was a lad. You might get a pound or two from these antique dealers that come round the countryside looking for stuff, but that’d be the height of it.’

  ‘Yer wrong there. Sure look at the work in those wee columns up the side of the face. It’s all twisty bits. Nellie used to say it was always the very divil to clean.’

  They argued back and forth most of the way to Keady, but perhaps as a tribute to the solemn nature of the occasion, my mother didn’t go into a huff, her usual response to any disagreement in which she’d not come off best. As she got out of the van, I reached for her hat and took my chance as I handed it to her.

  ‘Uncle Albert did say I could have his clock, but I thought he’d forgotten. I’d like to have it whether it’s worth anything or not.’

  The funeral passed off without event, the graveyard iced with white except where the open grave had spread heavy, clayey soil around its narrow trench. The sun was setting, pink and gold behind the bare trees on the edge of the old burying ground, as we hurried, shivering, back to the farm kitchen where tea was waiting.

  The object of disagreement sat silent in the centre of the sitting-room mantelpiece, the room used only for such state occasions. Over the teacups and glasses of whiskey, it provided exactly the topic needed to oil the social wheels and keep the conversation going. Everyone seemed to know something about it, remembered it from Uncle Albert’s cottage, had heard his intentions, or Joe’s intentions. Stories were told, opinions offered, but agreement was general and surprisingly amicable. The clock had been intended for me.

  ‘Would you not like to keep it, Aunt Lily?’ I asked quietly, ignoring my mother’s sideways look. ‘You might miss it.’

  ‘Ach, not at all, chile dear, I have the keys here for you and a note Joe left to say what Albert’s wishes were. Now wait till I get that box the groceries came in and we’ll pack it with newspaper for you.’

  The drive back to Belfast was slow and unpleasant, the lanes around Keady already filling with drifting snow, the Portadown road gleaming with ice and the junction with the motorway at Lisburn closed, because a lorry had shed its load.

  ‘Ye may put that box under the bed for there’s no room for a clock that size on these mantelpieces,’ my mother said, as my father dropped us at the back of the shop and drove off to lock up the van in his rented garage. She climbed the outside stairs ahead of me, jabbed on the light and took off her hat.

  ‘I’m not makin’ tea at this hour, it’s time we were
all in our beds.’

  I took the hint, carried my box into my bedroom and shut the door gratefully. Fairy Liquid, I read, as I parked it on the bed. Every time I used Fairy Liquid, I thought of Bridget Doherty. It always amazes me how a single phrase can conjure up so many memories: that chilly morning after the dance at the Kincora Ballroom; Bridget’s hands, red and chapped from scrubbing and cleaning; our talk at her kitchen table. At our last meeting, I’d told her about George and she’d grinned slyly.

  ‘Sure there’s plenty of others better than him – an’ one not so far away, I do hear tell.’

  I pushed the thought out of mind and found myself abstractedly smoothing out the crumpled sheets of the Armagh Gazette the clock had been packed with. ‘Nettie Falloon Carnagh’s Beauty Queen,’ I whispered to myself. ‘City Man Gets Top Job in Belfast. Armagh City, that is,’ I added. ‘Spanish Honeymoon For Lisnadill Couple, Creamery Manager Marries Schoolteacher, Customs Crackdown On Smuggled Heifers.’

  What different worlds we all live in. Not the grand differences of continent, or country, or even county. Within a village, a street, within one house, people live in quite different worlds. It was all a question of what was important to you: dahlias or dairy cattle, boxes of Fairy Liquid from the cash and carry, or the Cycles of the Kings in Irish mythology. But how much choice did anyone really have as to what they drew into their lives and what they excluded? Some people, it seemed to me, had very little choice.

  I got down on the floor and put the silent clock on the levellest piece I could find. I took the keys from their envelope and opened the other one, addressed to me in Uncle Joe’s large shaky script

  To whom it may concern

  On the instructions of my brother Albert Stewart of this townland, I, Joseph Stewart, do record his last wishes in respect of the clock formerly to be seen at his residence and now in mine. This clock is to go on my decease to Elizabeth Stewart of Belfast together with its keys and the following message which I do not understand, but record faithfully, my brother being of sound mind till his decease.