The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage. Anne Doughty
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Название: The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage
Автор: Anne Doughty
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780008328801
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George was easy-going. Nothing seemed to upset him. I had once thought I was easy-going, but I’d come to accept that I wasn’t. I was always getting upset over things and having to be comforted. And George was very good at that. What was the point in getting upset about things if you couldn’t alter them, he always said. It seemed he had a point.
I sat watching the swirling down and wondered about the name of the tall plant that had shed its seedheads with such enormous generosity. I picked some silky fronds from my black trousers and waved away a floating fragment that tickled my nose. As I moved my hand, the sunlight gleamed on George’s signet ring, the one he had asked me to wear before he went off to Spalding. I wore it on my right hand, but I knew very well that he hoped to replace it with an engagement ring as soon as we graduated. He’d never asked me to marry him, it just somehow seemed obvious that was what would happen. I hadn’t really thought about it till now.
Everyone assumed that because George and I had been going out together for more than two years we would marry. My parents certainly assumed that my bedroom wouldn’t be needed when I finished my degree and Adrienne Henderson was always asking where we would live and whether George would teach or try to get into industry, whether we’d stay in Belfast, or be prepared to move away for a time till George got established.
I took his letters out of my jacket pocket and looked at them again, the envelopes I had ripped open so hastily and my name written in biro on them. Miss Elizabeth Stewart. Perhaps it was being so far away that made my life in Belfast suddenly seem so very remote. What was it Patrick Delargy had said when he’d stopped to look at the islands? Something about distance lending perspective.
Perhaps, being so much older, he felt he had a lot to reflect upon. So much had happened to him. He had lost people he loved, given up a future he’d chosen to take up something he certainly hadn’t chosen. But nothing very much had ever happened to me. I’d lost my Uncle Albert the year I got my scholarship, but he was in his eighties so I could hardly complain about that. I hadn’t had to give up what I wanted to do and go and do something else.
‘Not yet, you haven’t.’
I heard Ben’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting beside me. One of his favourite phrases. If ever I told Ben I couldn’t do something, or I’d never been able to manage such and such a thing, he would always come back at me. Not nastily, but always firmly. You shouldn’t make closed statements about yourself, he said, because people and circumstances change all the time. Surely there were things I thought now that I never used to think, things I did now that I couldn’t do before.
I hadn’t noticed before how different Ben’s way of thinking about life was from George’s. I wondered if I would have noticed the difference had I not been sitting in the sun, in an abandoned quarry, over two hundred miles away from the low, red brick wall where I’d bumped into the two of them on a bright, spring morning that now seemed a very long time ago.
‘Hallo, Elizabeth, I heerd you was here. Will ye come with me to the dense tonight? Me cousin Brendan has the van from his work an’ he says there’s room for wan more.’
As I stepped through the door of the cottage, a red-haired girl of about my own age hailed me cheerfully.
‘Ah, shure do, Elizabeth, do,’ urged Mary. ‘Go to the dense with Bridget. ’Twill be company for her and it’ll do you good. Ye can’t be working all the time. There’ll be a great crowd.’
‘The dense is great gas, Elizabeth,’ Bridget went on, tossing her short, coppery curls. ‘Isn’t the band down all the way from Belfast itself. They must have knowed you were here!’
It was a long time since I’d been to a dance without George, I was tired and I couldn’t think what I’d wear, but because I liked her immediately, I let Bridget persuade me. There weren’t many people I knew who’d walk two miles to offer a complete stranger a lift to a dance.
When Brendan’s van started bumping its way round a huge, crowded car park full of buses and minibuses, cars and taxis, vans, tractors, motorcycles and bicycles, I could hardly believe that the long, low building ahead of us was a ballroom. With its rusting corrugated roof and boarded up windows it looked more like a warehouse or a battery chicken unit. Its breeze-block walls were plastered with the tattered remains of posters and flourishing nettles sprang from its concrete base but as I peered out into the darkness I saw a long line of people queueing up at its entrance and a tail-back of vehicles spilling out into the road behind us.
It was some time before we got inside. Only one half of the building’s double doors was open and once over the threshold the four large men who were supervising the payment of seven and sixpences created a further bottleneck. Beyond them a wide, empty corridor led to the darkened ballroom itself. We were greeted by a solid line of backs.
‘’Tis the season,’ Bridget explained, as we struggled through the press of bodies towards the dance floor. ‘They come from all over in the season. And there’s visitors forby.’
I felt a touch on my shoulder. Bridget winked at me and as I turned round, a young man asked me to dance. He put his arm firmly round me and energetically shouldered our way to the dance floor.
Despite the noise of the band and the speed of the quickstep, he asked me where I came from, what I was doing here, and whether I liked farming. Then, I danced with a farmer from near Ennis. He too asked me where I came from, what I was doing here, and whether I liked farming.
A few more partners and I was able to predict the questions. What was more I heard the odd snatch of other conversations. The same thing was going on all around me.
About eleven o’clock, I looked around for Bridget and couldn’t see her anywhere. Probably Danny had arrived and they were settled in the back of Brendan’s van for a while. No matter. As long as they turned up to take me home, I could look after myself. I manoeuvred my way towards the back of the hall and plumped down gratefully on the narrow bench next to an emergency exit, firmly locked and barred against gatecrashers. I wiggled my aching feet inside my high-heeled sandals and looked about me.
The dancers divided into two camps, women on one side, men on the other. Up by the stage, their ranks were six or seven deep. Down here, beyond the range of the beacon that bathed the dancers with alternate garish hues, they thinned out into a single line. On the men’s side there was an intense scrutiny of the opposite camp. The women’s scrutiny was just as intense, but they covered it by talking to each other and feigned indifference. Their eyes moved around just as much.
As the band started up again the dark wall of suits crumbled at its edge. The women held their ground as if nothing were happening and looked surprised or even bored as they were led onto the floor.
From time to time, a couple detached themselves from the moving mass of dancers and came and stood only a little way from where I sat. Not romantic СКАЧАТЬ