that she had chosen it because the star reminded her of him.
‘Do you think so?’ he said, staring closely at the poster outside, obviously pleased by the compliment. ‘Do you think there’s a resemblance?’
Cathleen laughed. ‘Yes there is, but perhaps I shouldn’t have told you. I think you’re a bit of a vain man, Bill Lewis.’
‘Oh no,’ he grinned, steering her firmly inside the picture house, ‘not at all.’ But she noticed him examining his own reflection in the glass as they queued at the ticket booth.
She liked the way he had agreed so easily to do what she wanted, even though she could tell he was not particularly interested in films himself. He was gentle and mild-mannered and she liked that too. There was a fondness growing inside her which she had never experienced before, and she found herself looking forward more and more acutely to his visits to the hotel and to their days out together. She learned that he was actually fifteen years older than her, much more than she had imagined, although he didn’t look it, but had never been married. She doubted if he had even had a serious girlfriend before, which she found charming. He was already something of a confirmed bachelor in his ways, but he was always eager to please her if she let him know how. As the weeks passed she had a feeling that he had started to model himself on Clark Gable in his clothes and hairstyle, and she hoped that he was doing that in order to impress her. She noticed that he couldn’t pass a mirror or a piece of glass without glancing into it.
When he eventually kissed her, having had enough drinks to steel his courage, it was so gentle and right that she felt sure they would be together for ever.
They often went back to the picture house, and sometimes they would ride out into the Wicklow Mountains on the bike, posing as a married couple for the benefit of the managements in the small hotels and bed and breakfasts they stayed in. As they sat together in pubs or listened to the live ceilidh bands that played everywhere in those days, or gazed out over the beautiful hills and meadows of the Irish countryside they started to talk about what a future together might be like. The more they got to know about one another the more they felt they had in common, with a shared outlook on life in almost everything. Being together was just so easy. Now she understood why she had never been interested in the farm boys back home. She just knew she was meant to be with this man in every way.
Both, however, were aware that there was one major obstacle they were going to have to face up to sooner or later. Bill was a Protestant and Cathleen was a Catholic – and this was Ireland, where such a difference mattered more than possibly anywhere else in the world. Between them lay a chasm of historical bitterness and division so wide and so deep that most ordinary people no longer even understood or questioned why it was there; they merely believed that those who lay on the other side were to be avoided at all costs.
These religious differences didn’t seem like a problem to either Bill or Cathleen personally, who were both happy for the other to belong to a different faith since they believed in all the same fundamental things in life. But both of them also knew that it was going to be an enormous problem if they ever got to the stage of telling their families about their relationship.
‘My mother won’t like it,’ Cathleen admitted as they lay in one another’s arms during one of their outings into the mountains, ‘but I’m sure we can win her round eventually. I’m sure we can win them all round when they see how we feel about each other.’
‘You’ve not met my sisters,’ he said with a sad shake of his head. ‘They will be unmovable on something like this.’
But by that time it was too late, because both Bill and Cathleen had fallen deeply in love and knew that whatever their families might say about the religious differences, they wanted to spend their lives together.
Chapter Four
Bill was the second youngest in a family of four boys and four girls. Their father had set up a business delivering wood to factories in Dublin, using a horse and cart. He was proud of being his own boss and had done well enough to buy a house in the south side of Dublin. They had become close to being a middle-class family and aspired to continue their social rise, particularly the girls.
Bill had started out wanting to be a surgeon, but his father’s finances did not stretch quite far enough to provide the sort of education needed for such a career and an alternative had to be found. Bill’s father knew that his son was good with his hands and gifted at making things. During his rounds delivering wood to local factories he got to know many of the joinery companies. Eventually he recommended Bill to a well-known company as an apprentice joiner, and after five years of training and hard work Bill became a master-craftsman.
Although Cathleen and Bill’s families were very different, there were similarities in the situations they eventually found themselves in. Bill was not entrepreneurial, and when his father died he felt he had a duty to stay at home with his mother and four sisters since his brothers had all joined the British Army to fight in the war and later stayed in England in search of work. Bill had wanted to join the air force but his mother, frightened that she might lose all her sons in battle, asked him to remain behind and he lacked the ambition to argue about it.
The two elder sisters, Susie and Annie, were more business-minded and assertive than their peaceful brother, and looked after the family business, believing Bill to be too young for such responsibilities. The two younger sisters, Jenny and Sara, also had considerable influence over Bill, insisting that he stay at his job and concentrate on his career as a joiner. Being the sort of man who liked a quiet and comfortable life, he had until then gone along with whatever they told him, allowing them to cater for all his everyday needs in return for bringing in good wages and living at home. Jenny was a seamstress and Sara worked in a doctor’s surgery.
When Bill met Cathleen, however, at the age of forty-five, his sisters noticed that their brother had changed, although they had no idea why that might be. He went out more often and spent more time in front of the mirror checking his appearance. There seemed to be a new spring in his step. Cathleen had also encouraged him to set up his own business, something he had never got round to doing before. The workshop was an instant success but no one in his family realised that the idea had come from someone else.
‘You got yourself a girlfriend, Bill?’ they joked, but he just grinned and shook his head. He was not yet ready to face the anger that would inevitably erupt once they found out the truth.
Visitors to Ireland were often fooled by the apparent friendliness and hospitality of the people they met. They were lulled into an impression that it was a romantic land filled with a mellow people who knew how to enjoy themselves in the pub and how to tell a good story. What they didn’t always see was the darker side, where religion played a crucial role in both uniting and dividing communities. Virtually everyone went to church, whether they personally believed in God or not, and most people still clung to a certainty that whatever they had been told when they were young by priests and teachers and parents was the absolute truth. The vast majority of the population in Southern Ireland were Catholic, making a minority like the Protestants all the more defensive of their faith. We lived alongside each other. We spoke the same language, but a surname could instantly reveal that someone came from the other side of the chasm formed by hundreds of years of hatred and suspicion.
Neither Cathleen nor Bill felt comfortable with the religions they had been born into. Cathleen went to church once a week because that was what she had always done, but she found Catholicism oppressive and riddled with rules about how to avoid going to hell. Everyone seemed obsessed with sin and guilt. Bill was from a Protestant family but had even less time for his Church, while Catholicism seemed ridiculous to him. Neither of them allowed their religions to stop them going away for romantic weekends together in the Wicklow Mountains. It was inevitable that such out-of-character behaviour would arouse Bill’s sisters’ suspicions.
‘Where do you keep disappearing off to then?’ they wanted to know.
‘Just travelling around on the bike,’