Second Chance at the Belfast Guesthouse. Anne Doughty

it all began to go wrong. Ginny and Edward had had a head-on collision on a narrow country road with a vehicle that shouldn’t have been there. Edward never regained consciousness, Ginny was left with scars on her face and arms and Andrew found himself head of the family and responsible for both the house in Caledon and his grandmother’s home at Drumsollen. The vision of wide acres of prairie and glistening mountains crumbled at a touch, like a warm and comforting dream dissolving as one wakes to the chill of a winter morning.

      Perhaps she had been wrong to break off their engagement. If she’d stayed with Andrew, not the most practical of men, she could have helped him cope with the tangle of financial affairs, mortgages and death duties that enmeshed him. She could have supported Ginny, who’d taken her half-brother’s death so very badly and whose scars would need more than plastic surgery if they were not to affect her for the rest of her life.

      She felt the bite of tension in her shoulders as the images flowed back. From a point in the future, it’s always easy to see how things could have been different. Here and now, after more than two years in a demanding job, with a new life, new friends, renewed hope for the future and a wedding dress waiting to be worn, it was just possible to see that there might have been an alternative. But the person she was now was not the person she was then. The girl who set off on the Liverpool boat could not have shared Andrew with all the many and conflicting demands he had accepted without question.

      She looked at her watch. The time had gone so quickly. Any minute now the familiar tape-recording would tell them to fasten their seat-belts. As they began to lose height, she took a last look at her Rocky Mountains and continued to argue with herself, as if it were a matter of great urgency that she decided what she really thought. Without their parting, there would have been no job in Paris, no new friends like Louise and Jean-Pierre. Especially, there would have been no Robert Lafarge, the eminent French banker who had given her a job and had now become a dear friend, one who treated her like the daughter he’d lost when his wife and children disappeared in the Fall of France.

      Parting with Andrew had been heartbreaking, but she’d done her best to begin all over again. When they’d met up again by accident last April and spent a weekend together, they’d admitted they’d found out things about themselves they might never have learnt in any other way.

      She prepared herself as they descended rapidly. What did it matter if she arrived home in a rainstorm? She smiled to herself as she remembered her leaving party, the laughter and the gaiety in her favourite restaurant. Her colleagues had teased her, wished her luck, drunk her health with rather a lot of very good champagne and promised to visit her in Ireland, even if it did rain all the time.

      Moments later, they came out below the base of the cloud. To her absolute amazement, she saw the familiar outline of the Isle of Man lying in the midst of a deep blue Irish Sea. Beyond, to the west, as far as the eye could see, there wasn’t a cloud in sight, the green and lovely land she called ‘home’ stretched into the far distance, radiant in the low evening sunshine. The Mourne Mountains threw long shadows towards the gentle hills of County Down as the aircraft moved northwards. As the wing dipped over the brick-covered acres of Belfast, she caught the first sight of the Antrim Hills. Dark, hard-edged basalt, as uncompromising as the six-storey mills that sprouted at their feet. Beyond lay the gleaming expanse of Lough Neagh, set amid green fields dotted with small, white farmhouses, placed like models on a playroom floor, a handful of trees alongside each one to shelter it from the prevailing wind.

      She wished she could pause, however briefly, so that this moment would be fixed forever in her mind. She needed time to gaze at the far horizon, to separate out the Sperrins and the mountains of Donegal from the distant banks of cloud, beyond which the sun would descend into the Atlantic. But only seconds later they were low over the calm water of the lough. They bumped slightly on the new concrete runway at Aldergrove, disturbing, if only for a moment, the hares who were feeding on the rich grass alongside.

      The engines roared in reverse, the whole cabin vibrating, then as the noise and vibration died away the plane taxied so slowly towards the new terminal building that she was able to look down into the yards of the nearest farms. The newly-milked cows moved back from byre to meadow, as indifferent to the noise of their new neighbours as the hares who grazed on the margins of the runways.

      ‘Andrew, I’m here,’ she said, catching the sleeve of the tall, fair-haired young man who was leaning over the balcony and peering down anxiously into the baggage hall.

      ‘Clare,’ he gasped, relief spreading across his face as he spun round and clasped her in his arms. ‘I thought you hadn’t made it. I was down at the gate to meet you.’

      ‘I thought you would be, but I couldn’t see you,’ she explained, shaking her head. ‘The plane was full of large men. All I could see was business suits.’

      He laughed and clutched her more firmly. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to let you out of my sight for a very long time,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve been going mad for the last hour.’

      He stopped and looked sheepish as he released her.

      ‘I know I’m silly, but I can’t bear the thought of losing you again,’ he began. ‘Now tell me, did you have a good flight?’ he went on, making an effort to collect himself.

      ‘Not entirely,’ she replied honestly, as she smiled up at him. ‘In the end, it was quite wonderful, but I had a bad time too. There was thick cloud and I kept thinking about what happened to us two years ago. And then, when I did get here I couldn’t find you either.’

      ‘Pots and kettles’ he said, his blue eyes shining, as he kissed her again. He dropped his arm round her shoulders and held her close as they made their way downstairs to the empty carousel.

      She laughed, delighted by the familiar phrase. It was one she’d learnt from her grandfather. She could hear him now, see the wry look on his face; ‘Shure them two are always right, one’s as bad as the other, and when they give off about each other, it’s the pot callin’ the kettle black.’

      All the pots and kettles at the forge house were black from the smoke from the stove. They’d have been even worse when they were hung on a chain over an open fire, as once they were in the days before there was a stove at all. Like everything else she had shared with Andrew from her life with her grandfather, he’d remembered it.

      ‘Six of one and half a dozen of the other,’ she replied, offering him back the phrase his mother would have used.

      For so many years, they’d exchanged words and phrases as they’d explored their very different life experiences. While Clare had never moved beyond ‘her teacup’, a small area round Armagh itself and her grandparents’ homes, Andrew had spent most of his time in England. He had been born at Drumsollen, the big house just over a mile from the forge, where his grandparents had lived, but after his parents had been killed in the London blitz, the very day they had taken him over to start prep school, Andrew was seldom invited back. Only when his grandfather, Senator Richardson, insisted on his coming, did his grandmother agree to a short visit.

      ‘Here, let me carry that,’ he said, reaching out his free hand for her cardboard box.

      ‘No, I’m fine. It’s not heavy.’

      ‘What is it?’

      ‘My wedding dress.’

      He laughed and shook his head. ‘My dear Clare,’ he began with exaggerated patience, ‘it is only seeing you in it before the wedding that brings bad luck, not me carrying it.’

      She laughed aloud, relief and joy finally catching up with her as he began to tease her.

      ‘Well, I’m taking no chances anyhow,’ she came back at him, as the first of the luggage appeared in front of them.

      She had arrived and all was well. It wouldn’t even matter now if her luggage had gone to Manchester or Edinburgh. She had her dress. The rest could be managed.

      ‘So where are we spending the night?’ she asked, as they drove out of the airport.