The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage. Anne Doughty

teacup with elaborate care and turned towards me a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.

      ‘Now coulden’ I make a great match for a girl like you?’ he began. ‘There’s very few these days can bake bread. It’s all from the baker’s cart or the supermarket.’

      I thought of the rack of sliced loaves by the door of my parents’ shop. Mother’s Pride, in shiny, waxed paper. They opened at eight every morning to catch the night workers coming home and the bread was always sold out by nine. ‘A pity we haven’t the room to stock more,’ said my father. ‘Or that the bakery won’t deliver two or three times a day.’

      Bread was a good line. People came for a loaf and ended up with a whole bag of stuff. Very good for trade. And, of course, as my mother always added, the big families of the Other Side ate an awful lot of bread.

      ‘It was my Uncle Albert down in County Armagh taught me to make bread,’ I went on, reluctant to let thoughts of the shop creep into my mind. ‘He wouldn’t eat town bread, as he called it In fact, he didn’t think much of anything that came from the town. Except his pint of Guinness. His “medicine”, he used to call that.’

      Paddy O’Dara’s face lit up. He looked straight at me, his eyes intensely blue.

      ‘Ah, indeed, miss, every man needs a drap of medicine now and again.’

      ‘Divil the drap,’ retorted Mary O’Dara. ‘I think, miss, it might be two draps or three. Or even more.’

      It was true the arithmetic wasn’t always that accurate. I could never remember Uncle Albert being drunk, but he certainly livened up after he’d had a few. That was the best time to get him to tell his stories.

      ‘They’re all great men when they’ve had a few,’ she said wryly, as she offered us more tea.

      ‘Ah, no, Mary, thank you. Wan cup’s enough.’ Paddy got hurriedly to his feet. ‘I’ll just away an’ see to the goose.’

      I smiled to myself, as she refilled my cup. Uncle Albert always went to ‘see to the hens’ when he’d been drinking.

      ‘I’ll have to go and see to the goose myself when I finish this,’ I said easily.

      ‘Ah, sure you knew we had no bathroom and I was wonderin’ how I would put it to ye.’

      Her relief was written so plainly across her face that I wondered if she could ever conceal her feelings. I knew what my mother would say about someone like Mary. Only people with no education showed their feelings. Anyone with a bit of wit knew better. You couldn’t go round letting everyone see what you felt even if it meant ‘passing yourself’ or just ‘telling a white lie’.

      My mother sets great store by saying the right thing. Most of her stories are about how she put so and so in their place, or gave them as good as she got, or just showed them they weren’t going to get the better of her.

      Whatever my mother might think I knew Mary was no simple soul. She had a wisdom that I recognised. It was wisdom based on awareness of the world, of its joys and sorrows, of how people managed to live with them. I had known the same kindly, clear-eyed perspective on life for eighteen of my twenty-one years. I had lost it when Uncle Albert died and had not found it again. Until this moment.

      ‘Mrs O’Dara,’ I said quickly, ‘before Mr O’Dara comes back, you must tell me how much I’m to give you for my keep. Would four pounds a week be enough?’

      ‘Four 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