this time Liam’s family was well aware of my existence. I hadn’t meant them to be—Liam had promised me he’d say nothing—but you can’t hide anything down here, and anyway Connor had caught us. He’d called in one morning early, and there was I, in the kitchen making tea, with nothing on me but Liam’s old woollen dressing gown that I’d washed on him and shrunk down to half its size. I don’t know which of the two of us was the more embarrassed. The only one who wasn’t was Liam, who came in through the back, three eggs from the laying hen in his hand, and introduced us, cool as you please. I turned pure red, and I couldn’t look at Connor; then I scuttled off up the stairs and pulled on my jeans and a sweater. But I didn’t go back down; I stood at the door and listened till the voices ceased and Connor had gone.
When Connor came next he told Liam we were both expected for dinner on Sunday.
I wouldn’t go, though Liam said I was only making things worse for myself.
“They won’t stop asking, you might as well get it over and done with.”
But he went alone. The afternoon was fine, and I meant to go out for a walk but I hung around waiting instead. It was well after six when the car pulled up, and I heard Liam whistling to himself as he closed the yard gate. He came in carrying a pile of bed linen that his mother had sent, and apples and pears from Kathleen.
“Did they ask about me?”
“They did,” he said, dumping the fruit on the table.
“Well?”
“I told them you didn’t like Catholics.”
I stared at him, not believing my ears. He laughed. I shot out of my chair and pummelled him, hard as I could, but he only grabbed me and held my arms pinned to my sides. I swore I’d stay quiet if he let go.
He let go, and I went for him again.
He was wise to me, was Liam; he never once tried to persuade me, but off he would go, and when he came back I was always out of sorts.
“What is it you think they’re going to do to you, Ellen? Invite you to Sunday lunch and call you a whore?”
I was offended; I shook my head stubbornly and wouldn’t answer. At that time living together here was still something that was talked about. Besides, they were Catholics—under the thumb of the Church—their disapproval wasn’t negotiable in my mind. That I was unsure and embarrassed didn’t come into it at all.
Then I ran into Connor one Saturday in Kilkenny when I was shopping, and he said he was due to meet Kathleen outside Dunnes and she would want tea, and why didn’t I come along?
So I did, and Kathleen was plump with short brown hair and warm, direct eyes. We had tea, then we had a drink, and the end of it was that I promised her I’d come over with Liam the following Sunday. At that time Liam’s mother was still alive, and Connor and Kathleen were living in a house down the road from the farm. Kathleen said we should call with them first and she’d show me the house, then we’d all go over together, and that way it wouldn’t be so bad.
And it wasn’t. I liked them, especially the parents. And they made me welcome, for all I was a Protestant, living in sin with their son.
Fixing a house can be a habit you get yourself into. Once you are in it you go on doing it—you barely notice the months turning into years. And you get used to there always being some room you can’t use, some wall being ripped down, some passageway piled with rubble that your foot knows to step over. I never minded in the early days, when the nesting thing was strong on us, but there came a time when I wanted to call a halt. Enough was enough, I said, but Liam couldn’t listen. He loved that house, he never grew tired of planning, and he didn’t mind dirt or mess.
He couldn’t listen, and I couldn’t leave it alone. But then the commissions began to come in, so he had to go into the workshop full-time and let the house be. Liam’s work was beginning to sell, there were new demands on his time, he even began to turn down the building work that he’d always done to bring in some ready money.
Liam was strong and able. People employed him and found that they liked him, so the next time they needed a hand they came looking. Sometimes they didn’t come to the house, instead they’d run into me in the supermarket and ask me if Liam was free. At first the answer was always yes, but slowly it got to be no. I’d been proud of saying yes, but I was prouder still of saying no, and I liked them knowing to ask me for Liam, it didn’t make me feel awkward—it made me feel almost accepted.
It was hard for me here to begin with, and it made no difference that the hardship was mostly of my own making. I couldn’t help myself; I felt I had Protestant written in neon lights across my back. Liam was never done telling me that it was the opposite. He said once folk heard the North in my voice they assumed I was Catholic, for Northern Protestants never came this far south, or not to live. He told me, but I couldn’t listen, I was too used to scanning everyone and everything, too deeply tuned to the fact or conviction that difference meant threat.
As well as that, I missed the North. There was a gritty excitement about it, especially if you were young and not worn down, not paying the price in grief or in prison visits. There, violence was the stamp of reality—at the very least it was the yardstick by which you measured reality—and once you’re used to the hit of danger it’s hard to wind down and adjust to a seamless flow of days. That’s the way of violence—it drowns out the subtle, despises the ordinary, barges straight to the head of the queue. Here everything was always the same, and how could you know you were even alive if mayhem and chaos didn’t lep from the radio every time you turned it on? Sometimes I thought I’d fallen through time and landed facedown in a featherbed to smother in its softness.
With me, it was “in the North this or in the North that”—I was always on about it, always bringing it up. Mostly folk changed the subject, as if what I’d said was foolishness or bad taste. Or that’s what I thought then; now I think they were just bewildered. And on the whole they were amazingly patient with me. Patient and polite.
As for the Wildwood, it kept its distance. I had odd flashes—a blur and change at the edge of my vision—but nothing that stayed around or turned into anything else. And these shadowy “sightings” (for want of a better word) were always easy to deal with. I’d only to shake my head as you’d see off a fly, and they’d vanish away.
“You’re learning to handle yourself,” Liam had said when I told him.
I wasn’t at all, though I didn’t say that, and I soon learned to keep my own counsel. I was avoiding even thinking about it, just forgetting as fast and as hard as I could and leaving well alone.
We still had a permanent cash-flow problem, so I’d do a few evenings in one of the pubs if there were any hours going begging. There never were at the start, but once people knew my face and who I was they’d ask from time to time. I always liked bar work—I’d done it in Belfast, after Queens, when I couldn’t get what my mother called “a proper job.”
By then you would never have thought our house was the same place I’d first stepped into. It was snug and dry, the windows were sound, and it was painted white inside from one end to the other. We’d knocked the middle room into the kitchen so it wasn’t poky and wee anymore, and we’d fired out the cooker and put in a range that we had off one of Liam’s sisters, who was busy updating. It had its drawbacks, that range: it was solid fuel, so you had to be there to fill it, and you couldn’t run radiators off it the way you can with the newer models. Just the same the kitchen was always warm, and the water was spanking hot. I love the kitchen—it’s mine and I keep it scrubbed clean as the dairy at Gran’s, and mostly it smells of baking. I like the rest of the house as well. It’s home, I don’t care if Liam still thinks it isn’t finished, I don’t care if it isn’t perfect.
We applied for a phone, but back then you had to wait months, so when we finally got it in I sent my mother the number. I’d sent the address, but not right away, I’d taken my time