The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage. Anne Doughty

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СКАЧАТЬ pounds, miss . . . an’ the dear save us . . . I couldn’t take your money, shure you’re welcome to what we have, if it’s good enough for you.’

      ‘It’s more than good enough. But I must pay my way,’ I insisted quietly.

      She had taken a basin from under the table that stood against the outside wall of the cottage and was putting the teacups to drip on the well-wiped oilcloth that covered its surface. She looked perplexed.

      ‘Have you a tea-towel, so I can dry up for you?’

      ‘Shure, two pounds would be more than enough, miss. I don’t know your right name.’

      ‘Elizabeth, Elizabeth Stewart.’

      ‘Well, two pounds, Miss Stewart, then, if you want to pay me.’

      ‘Oh you mustn’t call me that, Mrs O’Dara. I’m only called Miss Stewart when I’m in trouble with my tutor.’

      She laughed gently and pushed a wisp of grey hair back from her face. ‘Well, indeed, no one calls me Mrs O’Dara either, savin’ the doctor and the priest. Nor Paddy either. Paddy woulden’ like me takin’ your money, miss . . . I mean Elizabeth.’

      ‘But you’re not taking my money. It’s just grocery money,’ I reassured her. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll put it in that teapot on the dresser every week, that wee one with the shamrock on it. You can tell him it was the little people. Say three pounds and we’ll split the difference.’

      I went and took a striped tea-towel from the metal rack over the stove. Long ago, I had learnt to bargain for goods when I knew they were overpriced. I was good at it. This was the first time I had ever had to bargain upwards. I knew that Mary O’Dara would rather go short herself than exploit someone else. What a fool my mother would think she was not to take all she could get and close her hand on it.

      I dried the cups and watched her put them away in the cupboard under the open shelves of the dresser. When she came back to the table, she ran the dish-cloth round the basin inside and out, slid it onto the shelf below, wiped the oilcloth and spread both the dish-cloth and the tea-towel to dry above the stove. She moved slowly, with a slight limp and a hunch in her shoulders that spoke of years of heavy work. But there was no resentment in her movements, neither haste, nor hurry, nor twitch of irritation.

      I found myself thinking of a novel I’d read at school. The hero believed that all work properly done was an offering to God. His superiors thought he was mad, but his workmates didn’t. They were mechanics and the aircraft they serviced flew better than any others and seldom had accidents. The idea of a practical religion that worked on the principle of love really appealed to me, especially since the only one I was familiar with seemed to work entirely on the principle of retribution.

      I smiled to myself. After Round the Bend I’d read everything Nevil Shute had written and enjoyed it enormously. Then, when my mother finally realised that he wasn’t on the A-level syllabus, there was a furious row. ‘Filling my head with a lot of old nonsense,’ was what she’d said.

      Mary straightened up from the potato sack and came towards me. ‘Ah, ’twas my good angel that sent ye to my door today, Elizabeth, for I was heartsore. Sometimes our prayers be answered in ways we never thought of. Draw over to the table an’ talk to me, while I peel the spuds for the supper?’

      ‘I will indeed, Mary. But first, I really must go and look at the Aran islands.’

      She laughed quietly as Paddy came back into the cottage and I went out, crossing the front of the house in the direction from which he had appeared. Somewhere round that side I’d find a well-trodden path to a privy in an outhouse, or the sheltered corner of a field.

      The path led up behind the house, so steeply at first that there were stone steps cut into the bank. I stopped on the topmost one and found myself looking down on the roof. The cottage was set so close to the hillside, I could almost touch it from my vantage point. The thatch was a work of art. Combed so neatly there was not a straw out of place, it had an elaborate pattern of scalloping like the embroidery on a smock, all the way along the roof ridge, a dense weave to hold it firm against winter storms. Beyond the cottage, fields stretched down to the sea. Under the overcast mass of sky it lay calm and grey, but I could hear the crash of breakers where the long swells born in mid-Atlantic pounded the cliffs, a mere two fields away.

      I counted the houses. Seven cottages facing west to the sea, each with turf stacks and smoke spiralling from their chimneys. Four more in various stages of dereliction, their roof timbers fallen, the walls tumbled, grass sprouting from the remains of the thatch. There should be another group of cottages facing south to Liscannor Bay, but from this angle they were hidden by high ground. I breathed a sigh of relief; here below me at least was a remnant of the community I had come in search of, a community once more than a hundred strong.

      I stood for some time taking in every detail of the quiet, green countryside, the wide, grey sweep of the sea and the now-dark outlines of the islands. I thought of those who had once lived in the tumbled ruins, those who had been forced to go, those who had endured poverty and toil by remaining. Sadness swirled around me with the wind from across the sea. I knew nothing of these people, of their lives here in Lisara, or beyond in America, and yet some part of me felt as if I had known them, and this place, all my life. As I walked up the hillside, the sadness deepened. It was all the harder to bear because try as I might I could find no reason to explain my feelings.

      By the time we cleared away the supper things the wind had strengthened and the dark clouds hurled flurries of raindrops onto the flags by the open door. Reluctantly, Paddy put down his pipe and went and closed it.

      ‘I may light the lamp, Mary, for it’s gone terrible dark. I think we’ll have a wet night.’

      ‘Indeed it looks like it, but shure aren’t the nights droppin’ down again forby.’

      Paddy waited for the low flame to heat the wick and mantle, his face illuminated by the soft glow.

      ‘D’ye like coffee, Elizabeth?’

      ‘I do indeed, Mary, but are you making coffee? Don’t make it just for me.’

      ‘Oh no, no. Boys, I love the coffee meself, and Paddy too. Bridget always brings a couple of packets whinever she comes.’

      Paddy put the globe back on the lamp and turned it up gently. The soft, yellowy light flowed outwards and the dark shadows retreated. I gazed across towards the corner of the kitchen where heavy coats hung on pegs. There the shadows were crouched against the wall. They huddled too beyond the dresser so that in the darkness I could barely distinguish the sack of flour leaning against the settle bed. But here I sat beyond the reach of the shadows in a warm, well-lit space. I leaned back in my chair and let my weariness flow over me, grateful for the moment that nothing was required of me.

      Above my head, the lamplight caught the pale dust on the blackened underside of the thatch. The rafters were dark with age and smoke from the fire. A row of crosses pinned to the lowest rough-hewn beam ran the whole length of the seaward wall. Some were carved from bits of wood, others were woven from rushes now faded to a pale straw colour or smoked to a honey gold. A cross for every year? There were a hundred or more of them.

      ‘I’ll just get a wee sup of cream from the dairy.’

      The lamp flickered and the fire СКАЧАТЬ