The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage. Anne Doughty

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СКАЧАТЬ he said, in a tone intended to sound both conciliatory and wise, ‘that’s all very well, but when all’s said and done, you know, you can’t trust one of them.’

      I never raised the subject again, or expressed any further opinion, but I did wonder what strange power it was that produced such hatred and fear.

      I shivered in the chill wind and turned back to the rest of the letter.

      Clare Roberts that you were at school with has got engaged to Clive Robinson the shop. They are going to live in Helen’s Bay. Clive has got a big job with the Co-op and they have bought a lovely bungalow with an L-shaped lounge. Her mother says it is the last word. She is very pleased I was speaking to her on Monday. She also told me Mary Dalzell as was had a lovely baby boy born on her birthday. What a coincidence. They are calling it William John after the grandfather.

      That was the trouble with the shop. It meant my mother heard all the news. All the girls I went to school with, married and having babies, or leaving their babies with their mothers to take ‘wee, part-time jobs’ so they could buy the velvet curtains for the L-shaped lounges, or clothes for their Spanish package holidays. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I sometimes thought the only time my mother ever looked at me was when she talked about my contemporaries. It seemed as if she were waiting for me to say something. But whatever it might be, I’d never managed to say it. Her face went hard and disapproving, no matter what comment I made.

      A graduation photograph on the piano in the seldom-used sitting room over the shop and a married daughter in a lovely bungalow in Helen’s Bay. Was that the future she wanted for me?

      The single page of the letter was flapping in the stiff breeze and my fingers were numb with cold.

      Dad has started to do up your room. He thought it was a good chance. Uncle Jamsey got us the paper from his work 30% off. It is a nice big green leaf with gold on white. Dad says it will dirty awful easy but you only have a year to do. He has only the woodwork left. You said white but he thought it would look a bit bare so he got a nice cheerful yellow at the cash and carry. I have no news at all from the country so will close now. Mum.

      I suddenly began to feel very depressed. At first I thought it was the green and gold wallpaper, which sounded hideous. Then I wondered what they’d done with my precious maps and postcards that I’d been able to sellotape all over the walls, because the paper was brown with age and long overdue for stripping. My mother was quite capable of throwing the whole lot out.

      No, it was something deeper than wallpaper and the lack of respect for my possessions. It was L-shaped lounges and babies called after their grandfathers. That wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t know what I did want but it certainly wasn’t that. Just thinking about my mother’s news of the girls I’d been at school with made me feel afraid. Perhaps such things could happen to me too. Just like one of those road accidents you couldn’t possibly predict, where people get killed or injured, because they happened to be where they were at a particular moment.

      I stuffed my mother’s letter back in my pocket and started to open the first of George’s. At that moment, the wind caught me. I looked up and saw the islands had already disappeared beneath the approaching squall. The grey, choppy sea had white caps and the first spots of rain fell chill on my cheeks. I put the letter away, stepped back onto the road, pulled up my hood and tied it awkwardly in place with my numb fingers.

      A few minutes later, the squall hit me as I walked up the track to Ballyvore. Hail peppered my back and legs, bounced off the loose stones at my feet and drifted into the tangled grasses below the low stone walls. I bent my head forward and walked as fast as I could. I’d had a good look round and I knew there was no shelter anywhere. The only thing to do was keep going.

      After the squally morning, the day improved steadily. By late afternoon the sky was a brilliant blue. Up on the floor of the quarry where I’d been collecting rock samples, I had to take off my jacket and then my sweater. When I opened the neck of my blouse and turned up my sleeves, I decided it was time to have a rest. I spread my jacket on one of the smooth surfaces at the foot of a layered rock face, stuck my rolled-up sweater behind my shoulders and leaned back in the blissful warmth. I thought about George.

      In all the romantic novels, this would be the moment when he would come striding up the track. He would have come home unexpectedly, borrowed a car and driven down to find me. Now he would be in sight, looking everywhere, calling my name. But this wasn’t a romantic novel. George and I hadn’t seen each other since he’d gone off to England to his vacation job in the middle of June. I had wanted to go with him but the factory he’d found had no accommodation for women. That’s why I’d ended up at the Rosetta.

      Earlier in the summer I’d thought a lot about our reunion. Whenever things got bad at home or when I felt especially lonely, before I started my job, I’d let myself daydream. Particularly, I thought of his arms around me. Not of kissing him or of our limited lovemaking, but simply of being held, of being safe in his arms, of feeling warm and secure.

      I stirred myself, for my sheltered corner was so comfortable I was in danger of dozing off. I took out the letters I had been carrying with me since the morning, saving them for just such a quiet moment. I opened them quickly.

      They were both rather short. The first had been written from the vegetable factory in Spalding. It said how much George missed me, how he longed to put his arms around me and how awful the campbeds were. Their Nissen hut had no hot water and the bog across the yard had been bunged up for days. He said the crack was good and his crowd had taken over a pub which sold Guinness and that the fish and chips were the best he’d ever had. He said I wasn’t to worry about him. He could cope with these things. The rest of the letter was an account of the practical jokes they had played on the supervisor to break the monotony of tending the pea belt, or watching the labelling machine.

      The second letter was shorter still. The vegetables had come to a sudden end with a change in the weather, so he had packed up and caught the first boat home. He missed me terribly. None of our friends were around in Belfast, the students’ union was still closed, and he couldn’t have his mother’s car. She needed it for work since they’d stopped the estate bus. How wonderful it would have been if he could just have driven down and whisked me away from all those strange people and found us a nice place where we could be alone together, just the two of us, a long way away from Belfast. He hoped the work was going well and that I’d be back very soon. I was to let him know by return when he could meet me at the Great Northern.

      I reread both letters several times to see if there was anything I had missed. But there wasn’t. Letters were such a poor substitute for being together, I reminded myself. And, of course, George didn’t like writing letters in the first place. He always said that scientists have difficulty with literary modes. Geography wasn’t really a scientific subject, he said, and anyway I’d always been good at English which was his worst subject.

      Beside me a clump of tall, pink wildflowers began to sway in the light breeze. From their lower stems hundreds of tiny balls, like thistledown, drifted in front of me. They spun slowly in the sunlight, a hint of iridescence on their white fronds, some borne upwards by the warm air, some colliding, some few moving towards me, touching my warm skin, catching in my hair. I looked down the empty track and tried to re-enter my daydream. But I had the greatest difficulty remembering what George looked like.

      I thought back to our first meeting. It was in my second year, a lovely, lively spring day just before the beginning of term. I came out of the front gate of Queen’s on my way up to the Ulster Museum and saw Ben sitting on the wall opposite the bus stop with a tall boy I didn’t know. Ben had hailed me, introduced George, asked if I had time for a coffee. We’d gone to the espresso bar across the road, talked for an hour or more and then gone for a walk in the СКАЧАТЬ