The Belfast Girl on Galway Bay. Anne Doughty

men for Ireland they were, God bless them.’

      I breathed a sigh of relief and felt an overwhelming gratitude to these two unknown men. The names I had heard, but I certainly couldn’t have managed the short-answer question’s prescribed five lines on either of them. The history mistress at my Belfast grammar school was a Scotswoman, a follower of Knox and Calvin. She had no time at all for the struggles of the Irish, their disorderly behaviour, their revolts, their failure to recognise the superior values of the British Government.

      When she had made her choice from the history syllabus, she chose British history, American history and Commonwealth history. I could probably still describe the make-up of the legislatures of Canada, India or South Africa, and bring to mind the significant figures in the history of each, but I knew almost nothing about a couple of men who were merely ‘great men for Ireland’.

      Yesterday, when the Hendersons had given me a lift to Dublin they had dropped me by the river within walking distance of the station. Under the trees, I gazed across the brown waters of the Liffey at a city I knew not at all. I had been to Paris and to London with my school, travelled in Europe on a student scholarship, visited Madrid, and Rome, and Vienna, but I had never been to Dublin. My parents had raised more objections to my coming to Clare than to my spending two months travelling in Europe.

      It was pleasant under the trees, the hazy sunlight making dappled patterns on the stonework, a tiny drift of shrivelled leaves the first sign of the approaching autumn. I liked what I saw, the tall, old buildings with a mellow, well-used look about them, the dome of some civic building outlined against the sky, the low arches of the bridge I would cross on my way to the station.

      ‘A dirty hole,’ I heard my father say. ‘Desperate poverty,’ added my mother. Neither of them had ever been there.

      I sat on my bench for as long as I dared before I set off to catch the last through-train to Limerick. Just as I reached the bridge, I saw the name of the quay where I had been sitting. ‘Wolfe Tone Quay,’ it said in large letters.

      Mary took two candlesticks from the mantelshelf above the stove and I stirred myself. Paddy turned the lamp down and the waiting shadows leapt into the kitchen, swallowing it up, except for the tiny space where the three of us stood beside the newly lighted candles. Paddy blew down the mantle of the lamp to make sure it was properly out.

      ‘Goodnight Elizabeth, astore. Sleep well. I hope you’ll be comfortable,’ said Mary, handing me my candle.

      ‘Goodnight, Elizabeth. Mind now the pisherogues don’t get you and you sleeping in the west room,’ said Paddy. ‘And you might hear the mice playing baseball in the roof. Pay no attention, you’ll not disturb them atall,’ he added with a grin.

      ‘Come on, old man, it’s time we were all in bed.’

      He laughed and followed her towards the brown door to the left of the fireplace.

      ‘Goodnight, and thank you both. It was a great evening,’ I said, as I pointed my candle into the darkness at the other end of the kitchen.

      I pressed the latch of the bedroom door, pushed it open, and reached automatically for the light switch. Of course, there wasn’t one. My fingers met a small, cold object which fell off the wall with a scraping noise. As I brought my candle round the door, I saw another china Virgin. This one was smaller than the one in the kitchen and from her gathered skirts she was spilling Holy Water on my bed.

      Thank goodness, no harm done. I put her back on the nail and swished the large drops of water away from the fat, pink eiderdown before they had time to sink in. The room was cold and the wind howling round the gable made it seem colder still. I undressed quickly, the linoleum icy beneath my feet when I stepped off the rag rug to blow out the candle on the washstand. The pillowcase smelt of mothballs and crackled with starch under my cheek as I curled up, arms across my chest, hugging my warmth to me.

      ‘And don’t say the bit about getting my death of cold sleeping in a damp bed. It isn’t damp. Just cold. And it will soon warm up.’

      I laughed at myself for addressing my mother before she could get in first. She had beaten me to it last night in Limerick. Oh, the predictability of it. Like those association tests my friend Adrienne Henderson did in psychology. She said a word and you had to respond without thinking. My parents were good at that. I knew the key words. Or more accurately, I spent my life avoiding them. If I accidentally tripped over one, I could be sure I would get a response as predictable and consistent as a tape-recording.

      The smell of the snuffed candle floated across to me. I was back in the small upstairs room of Uncle Albert’s cottage. The candle wax made splashes on the mahogany furniture and I picked them off with my fingernails, moulded them and made water-lilies to float on the rainwater barrel at the corner of the house. Suddenly, I was there again, a ten-year-old, sent to ‘the country’ for the holidays.

      Being ten years old didn’t seem at all strange. I lay in the darkness, wondering if I would always be able to remember what it was like to be ten. Would I be able to do it when I was thirty, or forty, or fifty? Or would some point come in my life where I would begin to see things differently? For as long as I could remember, my parents, my relatives and those neighbours who were ‘our side’ had all assured me that when I was ‘grown up’, or ‘a little older’, or ‘had a family of my own’, I would come to see the world as they did. The thought appalled me.

      Was it really possible that I could end up locked into the kind of certainty that permeated all their thinking? They always knew. They were sure. Indeed they were so sure, I regularly panicked that I would come to think as they did. What if there was nothing to be done to stop the process? What would I do if I found that thinking as they did was like going grey, or needing spectacles, or qualifying for a pension, one of those things that was as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow.

      As I began to feel warm I uncurled and lay on my back. Moonlight was flickering from behind dark massed clouds and gradually my eyes got used to the luminous glow reflected from the pink-washed walls. I distinguished the solid shape of the wardrobe at the foot of my bed and the glint of the china jug on the washstand. Then, quite suddenly, for a few moments only, the room was full of light. In the brightness, I saw a large, grey crucifix on the distempered wall above me. Crucifixes and Holy Water. Even more to be feared than a damp bed.

      The room settled back to darkness once more and I closed my eyes. The door latch rattled and stopped. Then rattled again. Perhaps I wouldn’t have to change after all. Perhaps I could just go on being me at twenty-one, or thirty-one, or any age, till I was so old there would be no one left older than me, to tell me what I ought to think. There was a scurry of feet in the roof. The wind whined round the gable and the door latch rattled again. The scurrying increased. Mice, of course.

      And pisherogues. I had not the slightest idea what a pisherogue was. But whatever it turned out to be, it would not harm me. Indeed, in this unknown place at the edge of the world, I felt as if nothing could harm me. Tomorrow, I would ask Paddy what a pisherogue was and make a note about it. I was going to make lots and lots of notes. In the blue exercise books I had brought with me. Tomorrow.

       Chapter 3

      After three days tramping the lanes and fields of Lisara I was looking forward to my walk into Lisdoonvarna on Thursday afternoon. Paddy was sure I’d get a lift, but as I strode along, turning over in my mind all I’d learnt since my arrival, the only vehicles that overtook me were full of children and luggage. I was very glad when they waved and left me to the quiet of the sultry afternoon.

      As I reached the outskirts of the town and turned up the hill by the spa wells, I was surprised to find there were people everywhere. Preoccupied and distracted, they wandered over the road, walked up and down to the well buildings and streamed back and forth to the Square. After the emptiness of the countryside and the company of my own thoughts, the sudden noise and bustle hit me like a blow. I wove my way awkwardly between family parties, strolling priests, and bronzed visitors, only to find that the Square too was completely transformed.