by Anne Doughty
Before I went to sleep that night I made up my mind that if he didn’t suggest a meeting by the end of March I would write and tell him I was coming to Dublin to see Professor McDonagh. I’d ask him when he’d next be in Dublin and where we could meet.
A few days later, I bought myself some new earrings, a woolly wrap and a pair of long gloves, all in the same shade of deep midnight blue. It made me think of the four sisters in Little Women, swapping bows and bits of fabric to brighten up dresses they’d been wearing season after season. Like them, it was the best I could do. Ben was looking forward to his first Medical Formal and I wasn’t going to let him down.
Something so totally unexpected happened three days before, however, that it drove all thoughts of dressing up and dancing right out of my mind.
The weather had turned bitterly cold again. When my alarm went off at seven on that Tuesday morning and I nipped out of bed to put the electric fire on, I could see my breath rise in a cloud. The window was so thickly encrusted with icy patterns I could catch no glimpse of the prospect beyond as I dived back into bed and snuggled down for a blissful fifteen minutes before the bathroom was free.
Only moments later, there was a loud crash, the room shook and I heard the noise of a deluge of falling, shattering glass. The bedroom door flew open, the electric fire crackled and went out, and a shower of plaster fell from the ceiling. I leapt out of bed, grabbed my dressing gown and peered through the open door. The air in the passageway was full of choking dust and beyond its end I could just make out a vast patch of unfamiliar daylight. I heard my mother’s voice shout ‘Willy, where are ye’, just as my father, his face half-soaped, appeared from the bathroom behind me, dragging his dressing gown round him.
I reached the open door of their bedroom ahead of him, in time to see the double bed tilt backwards and downwards towards a gaping hole in the bedroom wall where once the window had been. I made a grab at it as it slowly began to slide.
‘Get out, Mum, quick,’ I shouted, as I felt the floor vibrate beneath my feet.
‘Give us yer han’, Willy, for dear sakes,’ she cried, ignoring me.
But he was too slow. Another chunk of floor fell away, a stream of plaster descended on the pillow beside her and the bed tilted further, jerking loose my grip upon it. I tried to catch hold of it again but it had gathered momentum and was already out of reach. I watched helplessly as the bed, complete with my mother in curlers and chenille nightdress, still protesting, slid rapidly downhill and came to rest on the back of a long vehicle which was blocking half the road outside.
The floor tilted beneath my feet again and my father and I had just got back into the passageway when another slice of the bedroom floor collapsed. As we made for the back stairs, lumps of plaster from both ceiling and walls fell around us like giant snowflakes, water trickled out from under the bathroom door and through the choking fume of dust came the unmistakable smell of gas.
The icy cold hit me like a blow as we left the flat and ran round to the front of the shop, or what was left of it. My mother was being helped out of bed by two men who’d been on their way to work. I stood shivering as I watched her descend the load of concrete girders on which the bed had come to rest. She was quite unhurt and was stepping down from girder to girder as if she were coming down a grand staircase. At the edge of the vehicle she paused until someone produced a kitchen chair to enable her to make the last step down to the ground.
A heavy coat dropped round my shoulders and I felt myself propelled towards the police car which had just arrived and now sat empty with its lights flashing.
‘In you go, miss. Stay there like a good girl till the ambulance comes.’
I sat shuddering so violently I wondered if my teeth might damage themselves. I pushed my arms into the huge, police great-coat and wrapped its surplus bulk round me, then wiped the misted window nearest to me to see what was going on.
The street was full of people. I wondered wherever they could possible have come from at only five past seven in the morning. Still more people were arriving all the time. Two policemen were setting up diversion signs, others had roped off the area around the shop. It was only when the Fire Brigade arrived I finally figured out what had happened. The long articulated lorry with its load of concrete girders had skidded into the shop, demolishing most of it. Part of the flat was being held up by the cab, the back of it was skewed across the road reducing traffic to one lane.
My mind was working very slowly. I couldn’t puzzle out why the Fire Brigade had come when there was no fire. Then the penny dropped and I gasped out, ‘Oh no. No. Please let him be all right.’ Somewhere under the debris, the driver of the lorry must still be in his cab. Tears trickled down my cheeks and I began to sob as if my heart would break.
How long I sat and cried in the back of the police car I don’t know, but when the burly officer came back to collect me, I found my legs were shivering so much I couldn’t stand up properly. He half-carried me to an ambulance, where a young man in shirtsleeves sat chatting to one of the team.
‘You all right, miss?’ he asked, as the man in uniform helped me out of the policeman’s coat and wrapped me in red blankets.
‘I’m fine, thank you,’ I said, annoyed by the shake in my voice and the tears which streamed silently down my cheeks. ‘Have they got the driver out yet?’
‘Yeah, that’s me. Right as rain. Sorry ’bout the way I dropped in on you. Old gent walked out in front of me, must ’ave been pure ice in the gutter. Next thing I knew, I was lookin’ out at boxes of cornflakes.’
I giggled and drew my blankets round me as the doors banged shut and we drove off. For some ridiculous reason I felt quite sure that as long as he was safe everything else was going to be all right.
So much happened that day of the accident, I still can’t remember whether it was my own idea or someone else’s that I ask the Student Accommodation Officer to find me somewhere to stay. Not only was the woman in question warmly sympathetic when I explained my situation, she also moved very fast. By late morning I had a bed for the night in a hostel and an appointment the following afternoon to see a room at the women’s hall of residence.
I climbed the broad steps and rang the bell. I heard it echo round the lofty spaces that lay beyond the glass panes of the inner doors. A maid admitted me, small and square, dressed in black, a white cap positioned so erratically it almost obscured one eye, parked me in a waiting room, and waddled off to fetch the lady housekeeper.
‘I’m afraid it’s one of our smaller rooms, my dear,’ the elderly Scots woman began, as I walked beside her up the impressive staircase and across the broad, polished landing on the first floor. ‘But it is very bright. We always put our overseas students on the south side. It seems the least we can do for them in our dreadful climate.’
She threw open a door and we stepped into a room bathed in sunlight. I looked around me. The room was at least three times the size of the bedroom I’d revisited the previous afternoon in the company of a curly-headed young fireman with an axe tucked into his belt and a whistle dangling from his top pocket.
It felt rather empty. The floorboards were polished and there were large expanses of bare wall, but beyond the single bed, quite pleasantly disguised to look like a couch, I found there was a wardrobe, a dressing chest, and an armchair. More important still, there was not only a bureau but a table by the window, a corner cupboard and two large bookcases in the deep alcoves on either side of the closed up fireplace. I could hardly believe my luck.
‘We’re due for decorating on this corridor this summer, so we do turn a blind eye to sellotape, but I’m sure I needn’t tell you that we take a very dim view of biro marks, or any other kind of mark, on the walls.’
I moved to the window. Beneath us on the sunlit terrace, stone steps led down to lawns bordered on one side by a rose garden. Beyond the green slopes, at the edge of a shrubbery that spread across a small valley, a few delicate sprays of pink blossom had appeared on an early-
flowering tree.
‘It’s a lovely room,’ I said, as I turned away.
My guide had dropped a sixpence into a meter and was bent over the electric fire, checking that it was working properly.
‘The central heating is the same age as the building, I’m afraid. Like the rest of us, it gets less efficient as it grows older, but these electric fires are quite effective. Miss Kumar always worked up here, though the library downstairs is always beautifully warm and reliably quiet.’
She talked on in a friendly, ruminative way. She told me how poor Miss Kumar had had to return unexpectedly to Kenya because of family troubles. She went on to give me a brief history of the hall and an interesting sketch of the two formidable ladies who had endowed it. She insisted on showing me the kitchen used by students on this corridor and then took me downstairs to her own sitting room. I listened politely to all she said, made noises in the right places and tried to conceal my growing delight.
Even if the efficient lady at Student Accommodation couldn’t persuade the Education Committee to pay my fees right away, I could certainly afford to pay them myself for the time being. One look at that table in the window and the sunshine falling on the garden had told me all I really needed to know about my very first room of my own.
‘When would it be possible for me to move in?’
‘Whenever you wish. Officially, you ought to have an interview with the Warden, who isn’t available this afternoon, but I think in the circumstances . . . Yes, I don’t think we have any problem there. Shall we expect you for dinner at six-thirty? We do dress for dinner, but if you haven’t been able to retrieve your clothes it will be quite understood. Those photographs in the Belfast Telegraph were really most dramatic. The Warden was so concerned when we heard about you from Mrs Wilson at Queen’s. I take it your parents are quite comfortable with your neighbour?’
I assured her that they were and explained that it would be mid-evening before I had transport available to bring my things. As I wished her goodbye I had to smile to myself. What was my mother going to make of dressing for dinner? I positively skipped down the steps from the red brick building and tripped along the curving drive to the bus stop on the main road as if I had a following wind behind me.
I was out. Out. Out. A young man in shirtsleeves had smashed open my home and disrupted my life. Yes, I could see that it might have had a quite different effect, I could understand Ben’s anxiety, and the enquiries of relatives and friends, the concern of the Warden at the pictures in the Telegraph, but I couldn’t hide from myself the fact that Tuesday morning’s disaster was rapidly transforming itself into a most wonderful opportunity, every aspect of which I fully intended to exploit.
Chapter 24
Within a day of my moving into my room I’d managed to make it look very different. I unpacked the books from the blue suitcase and the assorted cardboard boxes that had lived for so long under my bed, installed Uncle Albert’s clock on the broad mantelpiece and spent a whole evening mounting my collection of photographs and postcards on sheets of cartridge paper. They filled the large bare spaces on the walls with images of the people and places that I loved.
The bookshelves were still very empty, even when I’d unpacked all my books and files, so I used them to display a few treasured possessions like my pottery horse, the decorated teapot Mary had given me from the dresser at the cottage, and my only surviving teddy-bear. Ben’s mother had given me a Donegal-woven rug and I used it to drape the worn armchair. Ben himself had bought me a bunch of daffodils. All I could find to put them in was an empty coffee jar, but they looked so bright and welcoming sitting on my table in the pale sunlight that no one would have noticed they hadn’t got a proper vase.
I slept late after the Medical Formal, which we enjoyed enormously, and spent most of that Saturday with Ben, going for a walk in the afternoon and having supper with his parents in the evening. It was a really happy day. Next morning, comforted by my room and the unexpected delights of the last two days, I gathered myself, sat down at my table in the window and wrote to Patrick.
I wasn’t very successful. Nothing I wanted to say seemed to fit together very well. There was a missing piece somewhere, I couldn’t seem to get a hold of. I produced several quite different letters, all of which ended up in the wastepaper basket. Finally, I wrote a short note telling him what had happened on the Ormeau Road and where I was to be found. As I wrote his Lisdoonvarna address on the envelope, it occurred to me he might be in Rathfarnham, so I wrote another note, just in case, and went out and posted them both.
I had a reply from Rathfarnham by return. I was surprised by his promptness, but even more surprised that he suggested we meet for lunch in Belfast the following week. He named a day, a time, and a place and asked me to let him know at Rathfarnham if it would fit in with my lectures. If not, he’d come on the nearest possible day that suited me, or on the following Saturday.
The Wednesday he named presented no difficulties as far as lectures were concerned, rather, my problem was trying to work out why he had suddenly suggested a meeting. I could see that things might seem easier now I was no longer living at home, but if it was merely a question of meeting for lunch, surely we could have managed that any time in the last five months. So why now?
Perhaps my tension was more obvious than I realised as the week passed, or it may have been Ben was on the lookout for any signs of delayed shock. Whatever the reason, the day before my meeting with Patrick, he suggested we drive to the coast the next afternoon. The weather had turned mild and as his mother never taught on a Wednesday afternoon, she’d offered him the car. She’d actually said she thought a spot of sea air would do us good.
Panic swept over me as he laid out his plan. I’d rehearsed what I would say if he suggested something that clashed with Patrick’s coming, but at the moment he spoke all I’d planned went right out of my head.
‘I’ve got to go into town on Wednesday, Ben. Sorry.’
My voice sounded peculiar and I knew he couldn’t help but notice.
‘Shopping?’
‘Er. . . no. No, actually I. . . I’ve to meet someone for lunch. Professor McDonagh,’ I added hastily. ‘He’s just passing through. We could meet in the evening if you like.’
I felt a rush of colour to my face. I hate telling lies at the best of times and I couldn’t bear the thought of lying to Ben. There was a strange look about him which I couldn’t read. I just didn’t know whether he believed me or not I wasn’t even sure I wanted him to believe me, but once I’d started I had to carry it through. I said I’d meet him in the union as soon as dinner was over on Wednesday evening.
I had to leave him then rather abruptly for a lecture in the department I hurried off feeling miserable and upset, dashed up the stairs as the clock struck the hour, glanced at the Fourth Year notice board as I hurried past and had to stop when I saw a note pinned up with my name on it. I grabbed it and unfolded it as soon as I found a seat. ‘Elizabeth Stewart – The professor would like to see you in his study immediately after his lecture.’
Another wave of panic hit me as I tried in vain to concentrate on the diffusion of agriculture in the ancient Near East By the end of the professor’s lecture I felt so dreadful I had to go downstairs to the loos and drink a glass of water before I could face returning to the first floor and knocking on his door.
He was standing by the window lighting his pipe when I went in, brows furrowed with concentration. My thesis lay on his desk in its expensive, shiny binding. Pushing it to one side and reaching for a large ashtray, he smiled and told me to sit down. It dawned on me the irritability he was displaying might relate to the lighting of his pipe.
‘I understand you’ve had some difficulty with your thesis, Miss Stewart?’
My heart sank. It was my thesis after all.
‘Yes, I’m afraid I found it difficult to say all I had to say in the space available.’
To my amazement, he laughed. He said it was rather better to b
e faced with that problem than spinning out a few half-baked ideas and precious little evidence to cover the pages necessary. Then he tilted his chair, chewed the end of his pipe and said abruptly: ‘I met Frank McDonagh in Cork last weekend. Nice man. Knew his work, but not him. You seem to have made an impression there. How did you do that?’
I told him about the two days’ work in Lisara, the stories we’d listened to, and how I’d noticed similarities with fragments I’d heard as a child in the border areas of Armagh. He listened carefully, nodding, but what he said next took me completely by surprise.
‘Of course, we’ve precious little here in the way of research grants, and naturally a certain amount hangs on your Finals, but we ought to start thinking what you do next. The English universities have more in the way of grants, particularly Oxford and Cambridge, but there’s money about if you can produce a subject that looks good on paper. Once you’ve been accepted, you can then go and do what you actually want to do. Would you be interested?’
I left his study half an hour later with a list of references, the names of possible fund-awarding bodies and details of the temporary jobs available at the new Ulster Folk Museum where I could do something interesting on a reasonable salary while I worked out a detailed research proposal. I was so excited I immediately thought of trying to find Ben to share my good news. Then I remembered how awkwardly we’d parted and decided I had better stick to the plan we’d made.
Getting through the next twenty-four hours till it was time to go into town for my lunch with Patrick was almost unbearable. I tried desperately to work, but ended up doing my washing and ironing to help me get through the hours and not waste them completely. I had a long, leisurely bath before bed and then spent half the night tossing and turning. Or so it seemed. Next morning was even worse. I don’t have many clothes, but for the first time in my life, I changed three times before I finally made up my mind what I was going to wear.