Rainsongs Page 20
Thank you Martha, he says taking her in his arms.
Thanks a million. It’s a deal. The book is yours.
5
They are up with the first light. She cooks him breakfast. Eggs and bacon and a pot of strong tea. When they finish she puts the dishes in the sink and he gets his jacket. They don’t say goodbye but stand hugging each other by the door of his van in the fine morning rain. She still in her pyjamas. Then he zips up his jacket, pulls down his blue hat and swings himself into the driver’s seat, before winding down the window and blowing her a kiss.
Take care Martha. God speed to you.
And with that his red van turns and he drives off down the hill.
6
She goes back inside, gets dressed and packs, putting all the box files with Brendan’s papers in the boot of the car with her case and walking boots. She’ll leave the rest of the books for Colm. It’s too problematic to take them home and she’s already sent a load of the more valuable ones back to London. Anyway she wants the cottage to stay as it is now she’s made the decision not to sell it, even if she is unlikely to come here any time soon. But she needs to get going while it’s still early. She hasn’t got a place booked on the ferry. Though at this time of year there shouldn’t be a problem getting a crossing. She wants to be sure that she gets away before she runs into Eugene. She’ll write to him from London. No, better still, she’ll get her solicitor to write. She’s not certain if not having her land will prevent him from going ahead with his plans, but it just might. It’s all she can do.
She goes to the cupboard under the stairs and turns off the immersion heater and electricity, cleans out the ashes from the stove, scattering them into the wind. Then washes up the breakfast things, dries everything and puts it tidily back in the cupboards, mops the kitchen floor and empties the fridge.
Upstairs she checks in the bedroom. Then, standing in the middle of the living room, takes one last look around. So much of her life is here. So much of Brendan and Bruno. She goes to the bookcase and takes out Brendan’s schoolboy Bible and, from the desk, his sketch books and the photo of Bruno. Then she locks the door, hangs the key back on the rusty nail under the eaves, and climbs into the car to head for the ferry.
21st June 2009
1
Martha hasn’t told Colm she’s here. Though they do stay in touch, mostly by email. There’s no need to see him or anyone else. She won’t be staying long. She has only come to do one thing. Arriving by taxi from Farranfore airport she books into the first B&B she finds with a vacancy in Ballinskelligs. The hall smells of air freshener and the glass cabinet in the breakfast room houses a collection of china horses and plaster leprechauns all dressed in green. Photographs of the Galway races cover the walls. Jockeys in striped vests holding up large silver cups beside their mounts and trainers. She is the only person in the dining room and tucks into her breakfast of fried eggs and bacon, the rack of white toast, which she washes down with strong tea. She won’t be eating again for a while so might as well make the most of it. She woke early, with a sense of urgency, unable to sleep on the nylon sheets in the very floral room with its colour-coordinated Kleenex and dishes of pot pourri. After breakfast she goes upstairs to clean her teeth, puts on her waterproof and walking boots, and then checks her rucksack to make sure she has everything she needs. The weather hasn’t been good and she’s not certain if the boat will be running. Yesterday, the first thing she did when she arrived was to walk down to the pier and speak to the skipper of the Flying Horse. It was raining but he told her that the forecast for today was more promising and that she should come back this morning.
The boat leaves at 8.00. And the round trip costs €40. She should wear sturdy shoes. Bring rain gear and maybe some sandwiches as they won’t be back till gone 4.00.
When she arrives there’s already a small crowd gathered on the quay dressed in weatherproofs, standing among the rusty chains and plastic fish boxes. Germans with backpacks, a clutch of Japanese tourists with cameras slung round their necks. The tide is out and the boat lies low in the water so they have to climb down a steep metal ladder fixed to the side of the wet harbour wall to get to the deck. The skipper takes their money and jokes that if anyone feels seasick then they should puke downwind. The Japanese laugh nervously. Then the engine starts and the boat judders into life, circles the little harbour and heads out to sea, chugging past Horse Island with its white cottage nestled beside a single tree growing just above the shingle.
As they pull out of the bay it begins to rain. Soft, insistent rain that seeps through her anorak. She stands in the stern and watches the stretch of grey sea grow between the boat and the mainland as the other passengers hunker down inside their waterproofs and take shelter under the awning behind the skipper’s cabin. High on the cliff she can see Brendan’s cottage and the clutch of other abandoned cottages dotted along Bolus Head. How precarious they look clinging to the brown mountain three hundred feet above the sea. Like a row of doll’s houses. Again she wonders why they built in such a harsh place. She images a woman bent against the mizzle hurrying between cottages, a couple of warm eggs wrapped in her apron. An old man, the smell of carbolic on him, lying cold in his best jacket and boots, between guttering candles as his family keeps vigil by the coffin.
A ribbon of smoke coils from the chimney. She wonders if Colm is up there writing or on the ridge with his mother’s cows. She knows that his collection is due out any day from a poetry press in Dublin. He’s invited her to the launch. But she’s unlikely to go. It’s his success and he doesn’t need her there, though she is delighted for him and pleased to have been able to play some small part in his success. Recently he repeated his promise to dedicate the collection to her and Bruno. And there is, he tells her, a girl. A young artist he met last summer while she was painting on the beach. Apparently she has a small exhibition coming up in Cork and, after that, he wrote, if it’s alright, she might come down for a bit and join him in the cottage. If Martha isn’t comfortable with the arrangement, he’ll quite understand, but it would be good to have some company.
She wrote back immediately. She is happy for him. Glad of course that the cottage is being lived in and used. She asks about the girl. What’s her name?
Imogen, he writes back.
So she’s not Irish then?
No he says. English and she’s fallen in love with this place.
And Paddy? How is Paddy?
Sure Paddy is grand. Still up on the mountain in all weathers. But Nora’s with him now full time and I give him a hand when I can.
2
It’s getting choppy as they head past the jetty to Eugene’s private beach. Gulls glide on the thermals. How oddly things turn out. How haphazard life is. Over the last few years the Irish economy had expanded rapidly and the country changed beyond all recognition to the place she knew when she first came here more than twenty years ago. But just as suddenly, it seems, that credit has become increasingly hard to come by. Irish banks are being squeezed by what, some predict, will be a global financial crisis. Many of the small-time builders around Kerry have, she’s heard from Colm, already gone bust. They borrowed on a three-month rollover basis to fund holiday homes and housing projects that are unlikely to be sold for years. If at all. Recession is in the air. It’s rumoured that even major developers such as Liam Carroll have fallen behind on their repayments. The Tiger’s teeth have been pulled.
Just before Christmas Eugene had an uncomfortable meeting with the bank about the feasibility of the loan for the Skellig Spa. Borrowing on the international market, the manager explained, tetchily, as he cleaned his rimless glasses behind the fort of his reproduction antique desk, had provided what seemed to have been an endless flow of cash. This, as Eugene well knew, had led to a massive increase in Irish property prices. But with the freezing up of world currency markets no new money meant no new loans and that meant no new property deals. He was
sorry but his hands were tied.
This wasn’t what Eugene was used to and he was in a foul mood as he drove to dinner with his solicitor in Killorgan to break the news.
It was a lively evening. They debated interest rates and poured over balance sheets. Eugene was unwilling to let his project drop and became very animated railing about the small minded bureaucrats who were standing in his way. There was port, brandy and cigars, and he left rather later than intended in an agitated state. The weather was atrocious, the roads treacherous and his 4x4 hit an unlit tractor parked by a ditch. He was, almost certainly, driving too fast.
Martha thinks of all those angry letters he sent her in London. The threats. The cajoling and emotional blackmail. And what had it all been for? So much aggravation, so much animosity. That would be his legacy. How he would be remembered by the locals. As the man who tried to push Paddy O’Connell off his farm. The old rectory, Colm tells her, has gone to Rory. He’s studying agriculture in Limerick and is more interested in trees than spas.
3
A grey outline, like a ghostly Gothic castle, looms out of the mist. No wonder those sixth century monks, making this same journey in their open boat, thought they were heading towards the edge of the world. A cloud of squawking sea birds swirls overhead, their cries piercing the mist like lost souls. Ahead the rock is completely white. Not only from the huddled bodies of gannets gathered on the narrow ledges but from the piles of guano. As the skipper draws near the Japanese scramble to the port side, cameras at the ready. The boat lists and they giggle anxiously.
It’s still another twenty minutes out to the great Skellig. When they arrive Martha is drenched. They pull in alongside the small pier but the waves are so high it’s hard to clamber onto the slippery concrete. The little party makes its way up the path below the under-cliff where the ground is littered with feathers and bird droppings and she can smell the stink of the nesting gulls. The rock is bigger than she expected. More like a craggy island. A small group has already gathered at the start of the precipitous steps to snap a puffin. With its clown-like beak it’s sitting in the scrub with the insouciance of a celebrity posing for the paparazzi.
The climb is so steep that she’s not sure she’ll make it. She’s afraid of heights and worried that if she looks down she’ll freeze and be unable to go on or climb back. She doesn’t want to make a spectacle of herself. When she was pregnant with Bruno she’d gone to St Ives with Brendan and they’d walked along the coastal path where, on that hot summer day, they lost the track and she found herself clinging to a rocky outcrop with a sheer drop down to the glittering turquoise bay. She couldn’t move and Brendan, who was none too good with heights himself, had to coax each footstep from her, until her lumbering frame was returned to flat ground. But this time she’s determined to make it to the top. That’s why she’s come. Bruno always wanted to make this trip, had sat restlessly in the cottage that last summer, fed up with the bad weather, staring out of the window to see if the mist was lifting.
Of course we’ll try and go, she promised. On the next fine day but you’ll have to be up early.
But it didn’t stop raining. He sat on the floor in front of the stove drawing and cutting out pictures from old magazines. And as they packed up the car to head back to London for his camping trip with the scouts, she promised that they would definitely go the following year. That the trip would be a priority.
We never know, she thinks, as she begins to climb the steep stone steps, if what begins with daylight will give way to grief. What would it be like to have him with her now, her son? A young man, healthy and tall, in his walking boots and anorak. Surely she’d be less apprehensive with him at her side. She wonders what he would have been. An archaeologist, or a historian? It wasn’t only the Skelligs that interested him. They’d spent many a wet Sunday afternoon at the British Museum among the Egyptian mummies. Or looking at Roman coins found buried in the mud along the Thames. But who knows how he’d have turned out. The boy he was at ten and the young man he would have been now might have had little connection. But whatever he was, he would always be her one, her only, boy. She hopes he’d have been proud of her doing this climb. Happy that she’s finally made it for them both.
She follows the walkers, trying to keep her gaze on the next stone ahead and not look down at the swell. Terns swoop overhead. A young man in a blue waterproof offers to walk on the outside and gives her his hand to steady her. She’s grateful for this small act of kindness. As she scrambles up the steps she thinks of the pilgrims who climbed barefoot. The sharp stones piercing their flesh so the pain would bring them closer to seeing the Virgin, or some other sign that might bolster their belief.
She’s amazed how each flat slab has been slipped into the side of the cliff and packed underneath with rubble to render it stable. What labour it must have involved to chip and hack each rock by hand. She looks up and there’s still a vertical flight ahead, that seems to disappear into the low clouds so that as she climbs, she feels like an angel ascending a celestial ladder in a medieval painting. The last part is the most precipitous. She has to turn her back to the sea so she can’t see the drop hundreds of feet below, then feel her way, inch by inch, cheek and palms flat against the rock face, across the narrow shelf. The stone is wet and cold against her skin. She leans in against the granite wall, her heart racing. How strange that something once molten, which came hot and bubbling from the centre of the earth, should have formed this obdurate mass that she’s clinging to for dear life. Then, suddenly, the path widens out onto flatter ground.
A low stone wall marks out the tiny plot where the monks once planted cabbages and kale to accompany their meagre diet of fish and sea birds. Fasting was an intrinsic part of their life. Some of the Irish monastic regimes were so extreme that monks died of starvation. There are no springs on the rock. Rain water was collected in cisterns. And there was little bread. For where would they have got the wheat? Bitter herbs added variety to their monotonous diet. Abundance was anathema. It was thought to trigger sexual arousal and they were bound by abstinence. But the lack of nourishment took its toll on their wasted bodies. They had visions and hallucinations as they sat for hours in the wind and rain and occasional burst of blazing sun on their rocky terraces, meditating on the mercy of God, the sea booming below.
She turns a corner and suddenly the beehive huts come into view. They look like stone igloos. She clambers inside one. It’s completely dark except for a ray of light that spills from a narrow slit onto the wet cobbles. The largest hut was used for cooking. There’s a stone step inserted in the outside wall where the monks climbed to remove the uppermost flagstone and let out the smoke. What did they burn? There’s nothing here for fuel. She tries to imagine living for months, sometimes years, in such a constrained space, a space that constituted their whole world.
She knows that further up on the South Peak, between the eighth and thirteen centuries, the monks built an even more secluded hermitage. To reach those three terraces requires real rock-climbing skills. You have to negotiate a natural stone chimney, the Needle’s Eye, then climb along a narrow ledge with its drop straight down to the sea, before making your way up the foot and handholds cut into the cliff face. What superhuman zeal lay behind the desire for such solitude? What tenacity led them to build this eyrie on the edge of space, where at any moment they might have been swept to their death? Devotional submissiveness or simply the stunning views of the Atlantic? Or did they believe that here, on the rock’s highest peak, they would finally come face-to-face with God?
She wonders if human beings have really changed that much in the last eight-hundred years. She’s been reading about mediaeval Irish society. How children from all walks of life were separated from their parents at infancy. Girls till they were fourteen, boys till seventeen. Vast numbers were placed in religious houses under the care of monks and nuns. Some, inevitably, never returned to secular life. Were people’s emotions an
d allegiances so very different then, that parents could give away their offspring without regret? Was the emotion invested in a child so much less than it is now? What traumas did they suffer? What nightmares did they have? Many didn’t survive. Leprosy was rife. Even the common cold or an infection from a small cut could go septic and become fatal. She thinks how this religious incarceration continued on into modern times. The young men shut away in seminaries. Girls sent to the Magdalene Laundries for the slightest misdemeanour that might label them fast or loose. The only real promise of happiness the afterlife. Maybe the monks weren’t fleeing, as we moderns would believe, from the pressures of life. Not taking refuge from persecution or searching for peace. Rather their purpose was to look on the countenance of Christ. They were impatient for death. But death was not in their hands. It could only be granted in God’s good time. Not at a moment of their own choosing. To seek it was blasphemy. To be purified and worthy of heavenly union, was their greatest desire.