Anne Doughty - The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay

I turned to look back at Lisara and to study the new perspective from the high point I had reached on the long curving slope of the road. Funny how people see you differently. George. Paddy. My mother. Mary. It made me wonder how you could ever tell what the truth really was when people offered you so many different versions of yourself.

Just over a mile from the cottage I came to a weather-beaten signpost. It didn’t say anything for the arms had long ago dropped off, but the track which led away to my left was clearly used. It was rough, but some of the bigger holes had been filled with stones. Apart from that, there wasn’t much other sign of life about. No houses were visible either behind or before me. The hedge boundaries were overgrown and the fields were full of rushes. The trackway to my right that led down to the cliffs was identifiable only by the parallel stone walls. Its whole length was filled with the luxuriant growth of grass and bramble.

The bank below the signpost was smooth and mossy. I sat on my plastic-covered maps and took out my letters. I fingered the two from George in anticipation and laughed at myself as I put them to one side. I always save the nicest things till last. Adrienne always says you can tell a great deal about a personality from that simple observation, but whenever I ask her to explain exactly what you can tell, she never does.

My mother’s letter was a single large sheet. It had been written hastily in blue biro on the strange-smelling, pink paper she had been using for years, a line that hadn’t sold in the shop. ‘Dear Elizabeth,’ I read,

Dad and I were glad to get your letter and hear that you had found somewhere to stay. It sounds reasonable considering but be careful of a damp bed. You can’t be too careful in these places. Things are much as usual. We are very busy in the shop. It’s amazing how trade keeps up especially cigarettes. Dad had to go to the Cash and Carry twice last week. Everyone has money these days especially (the Other Side). I don’t know how they do it what with the big families and what they have to pay the church. Of course they have the big family allowances and the national assistance. The house at the end of St Judes the one with the orange lilies has been sold to one of them. One of our customers says the church puts up the money for them. They’re getting in everywhere round here.

I paused. Even the irony of the Other Side having bought the house with the orange lilies failed to raise a smile. My mother puts on paper exactly what she thinks. Given how I feel about most of what she thinks, it was hardly surprising I’d find a letter upsetting. I just hadn’t been prepared for it. Listening to what she said, evening after evening, I had learnt to filter out the things that upset me, but seeing them written down in tangible blue biro was another matter. I couldn’t filter out the words and what they meant. She’d even written ‘the Other Side’ in brackets, like a stage direction, to remind me of the customary lowering of the voice.

Mary and Paddy were ‘the Other Side’. So was Patrick Delargy, a man who had talked to me as a friend and driven me home to save me a walk and a wetting. Just by being here in Lisara, I was doing something neither of them could accept. There would be no talk of my visit when I went back, no interest in anything I’d done. My father would put the event out of mind, as he always did with anything uncomfortable. My mother would wear that tight, thin-lipped look of hers, if I were foolish enough to mention the visit myself.

Once, long ago, I had made the mistake of suggesting that some Catholics might be quite nice people. I have never forgotten the look she gave me.

‘Don’t ever let anyone hear you say a thing like that,’ she warned me, two bright spots of colour flaming on her cheeks.

My father had actually lowered his newspaper, a rare thing for him to do. ‘Indeed, Elizabeth,’ 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.