Twelve Thousand Days Page 4

  On the Monday afternoon, I did the beach walk again, and on one of those days we drove, at Bo’s request, down to Fanad lighthouse, along the small roads of the peninsula, which wend their way dreamily between a landscape of hills and drumlins and lakes and the sea: a landscape that looks like a picture in a particularly beautiful children’s book. This part of Donegal, between Mulroy Bay and Lough Swilly, is not very well known but it is one of the most exquisite places on earth. We shopped a little in the local store, the Blueberry – and we tried to find some information in the tiny local museum they have upstairs there. Some question we had about the locality – about megalithic remains, dolmens, in the area. Just a few weeks previously we had visited Lough Gur, in County Limerick, which is rich in ancient archaeological artefacts and which has been inhabited for four or five thousand years, and were wondering if this part of Donegal had an early history of settlement, or if it had been settled later? The museum did not hold the answer and in fact I still don’t know, since very soon such questions were far from the forefront of my mind.

  BEFORE OUR DAY

  Summer in Dunquin

  Bo knew Oliver, my boyfriend, my fiancé, because while I was a student on the MPhil programme in Medieval Studies, and Bo’s student, Oliver and I were one of those college couples you can see on any campus in the world. Glued together from morning till night. We studied together, we ate together, we walked home together. Mean students joked that we went to the loo together. When you are young and in love you want to be with the beloved all the time, and, if you are a student, you can do this. It’s natural. But I’m not sure if it is good. The self becomes subsumed in the other – there is no boundary, no sense of being a separate person. Then, if things do not work out, the shock is terrible.

  Actually, although we seemed to be glued together, we were apart for quite a lot of time, because I tutored in Old English for two or three hours a week, and I also worked as a ‘Trainee Cataloguer’, indexing folklore manuscripts, in the Folklore Archive in UCD for fifteen hours – a job, as it were, three days a week. On my cataloguing mornings, Oliver would call in to the archive and collect me at lunchtime. Very tall and striking in his smart casual clothes, he was a familiar figure on the corridor of the Department of Irish Folklore.

  It is an enchanting corridor, unlike anywhere else in Belfield, hung with big paintings on Irish ethnographical themes – The Pattern at Glendalough, The Eviction, Donnybrook Fair. This richly-coloured, evocative passage linked the front office to the manuscript archive, where the oral tradition of Ireland, transcribed, handwritten, was stored in hundreds of brown leather volumes. It’s all too easy to wax sentimental about anything with the word ‘Folklore’ in it. But the Department of Irish Folklore was like an Aladdin’s cave, full of rich colours and beautiful manuscripts and books, full of curious objects – the big black Ediphone machines (the earliest sound recorders), various types of St Brigid’s Cross. It was exotic and authentic, natural and hi-tech, artistic and scientific, all at the same time. In the grey utilitarian setting of Belfield, it glowed like a precious jewel. And it was a secret, separate from the rest of the Arts Block, down at the back of the building. Hardly anyone seemed to know it existed.

  Over this kingdom Bo presided; it was entirely in keeping with the mood of the Department of Irish Folklore that its director should sail over the sea from the land of the Vikings, that he should speak Irish and English with a strong foreign accent, that he should bring skills and ideas and standards from the Nordic world to this little kingdom down at the back of Belfield.

  Bo saw Oliver tramping down the magical corridor to collect me every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday during term time. But he got to know him better during the final summer of my MPhil.

  This is how it happened.

  Bo was my thesis supervisor. But not much supervision had been carried out during the year, for reasons unknown to me, and about which I did not enquire. Students were very passive in those days. At the best of times supervision was a bit haphazard. Even teaching could be random. When I was an undergraduate in the English department, it was not unusual for some lecturers simply not to turn up for small classes – a group of ten or so students or so would hang around outside the lecturer’s room for half an hour, and then simply go away. We never thought of complaining. Who would you complain to?

  So I simply accepted that Bo had not had time to meet me to discuss the progress of my thesis. I was in any case fully occupied with my trainee cataloguing, and my classes and homework in Old Irish, which I was taking as a second subject in the MPhil and which took up an inordinate proportion of my time. Old Irish is a very hard language! The MPhil in Medieval Studies was a challenging degree. In addition, Bo had assigned another lecturer, Dáithí Ó hOgáin, to check my translations of stories from Irish (modern Irish, that is) to English. That had been systematic enough. It was easy to translate the tales and Dáithí had gone over my work with me regularly. But as the summer term drew to its close I was getting a bit panicky about the thesis. I had a thick wad of translated stories, but not much in the way of analysis. The chapters that I had written had been read by nobody but myself and the deadline was approaching. On 1 September fifty thousand words would have to be handed in, typed and bound, in three copies.

  At the last minute, when term was over, Bo took action. He invited me to his house in the country for a week of intensive supervision. Oliver was also invited, since as far as Bo could see, he and I were inseparable. Another doctoral student, a girl called Mandy, completed the party.

  Bo, Mandy and I were driven to Kerry by one of the full-time collectors, Con Breslin, in Con’s car, a Cortina. Oliver was to come later, on the bus. Bo didn’t drive at that stage and Con acted as his chauffeur once or twice a year, at Easter, when the folklore students carried out fieldwork in the country, and at the beginning and end of the summer, which Bo spent collecting and writing about folklore in his house in Dunquin, near Dingle in County Kerry.

  Mandy and I sat in the back, Bo in the passenger seat. Mandy came from Cheshire. She was writing a doctoral thesis about T.W. Thompson.

  ‘Have you heard of him?’

  ‘The name rings a bell,’ I lied.

  Bo looked over his shoulder. ‘He collected gypsy stories, in England. He’s quite important.’

  ‘There you are!’ Mandy rolled her eyes. ‘He’s quite important.’

  ‘And he’ll be very important by the time you’re finished with him,’ Con said. ‘If you ever are.’

  Bo lit a cigarette and opened his window, but the car filled with smoke anyway.

  ‘I hope this isn’t bothering you, girls,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no.’ Nothing ever bothered me.

  ‘It’s getting in my eyes,’ Mandy squeaked.

  ‘I’m sorry! Are you suffering?’

  ‘It’s very bad for you, smoking.’

  ‘Would you like one yourself?’

  ‘Not at the moment, thank you.’

  Mandy was on the plump side. She had a soft, smooth complexion, light brown wavy hair, and very pleasant features: a little retroussé nose, big blue eyes, a wide, generous mouth. Her good looks, combined with her Englishness and her prosperous background, gave her an air of self-confidence that I knew I would never have.

  Mandy talked a lot about herself, in the car on the way down, and when we got to the summer house. She talked about herself all the time. Her parents lived in a big rectory, as far as I could gather – but I didn’t think her father was a rector; perhaps he was just one of those rich men you read about in Nancy Mitford novels, whose money was inherited, one of those men who didn’t have to work for a living. Her mother was stunningly beautiful and amazingly intelligent but used her brilliance to do crossword puzzles. She also rode horses regularly.

  All this we found out before we got to Dingle.

  Woodlands, gates, avenues. Coats of arms hanging in the stone hall. That’s what I saw, as I listened, nodded, told nothing about my own life – I fel
t fully alive in college, but at home I was, as it were, crouched in the corner of the hall, with my bags packed, like a refugee preparing to escape. My real life hadn’t started, I didn’t know what it would be like. There was no point in describing the transitory state I was in – the home of my childhood and adolescence was a nest to which I didn’t belong, it seemed to me. It was just a temporary shelter, of which I was ashamed, and had no intention of describing to anyone. A butterfly might as well describe the interior of its cocoon, or a baby the walls of the womb. So I listened to Mandy babbling on, to Con’s grunts, to Bo’s occasional ironic comments, and watched Ireland rolling by.

  In those days, the road to west Kerry went right through all the towns and villages between Dublin and Dingle – you had to drive along the main streets of little towns like Monasterevin, Newbridge, Mountrath, Moneygall, Toomevara, and big ones, like Naas, Portlaoise, Roscrea, Nenagh, Limerick, Tralee. We set off on Monday morning; there was not much traffic. The countryside was at its most lush, the fields green like wet emeralds, fat cows chewing the cud under trees heavy with rich, thick leaves. Alder and meadowsweet. Foxgloves, purple vetch, ox-eye daisies and dozens of other wild flowers burgeoning in the hedgerows along the two-lane road, not yet known as the N7. Roads still had proper names: the Naas Road, turning into the Limerick Road when you got through Naas. Country towns were still vibrant, full of people and shops and little businesses. Doused in syrupy July sunshine, they looked not asleep or dead – as they all too often look these days – but as if they were just taking the morning off to sunbathe. With confidence, in businesslike fashion, the old, dusty shop windows displayed their wares – flowery blouses and high-heeled shoes, aprons, cans of paint and spades and sweeping brushes, packets of cornflakes: hardware stores and grocery shops and haberdasheries. Newsagents. Butchers. Hairdressers with witty names: Golden Scissors. Snips. A Cut Above. Supermarkets existed – Dunnes had opened in Cornelscourt in 1966 – but shopping centres were extremely rare. Down the country, people still came to Main Street to do the big shop.

  There weren’t many cafes or restaurants in the towns, though, big or small. Plenty of chip shops. Prim old hotels, for solicitors and doctors and parish priests, with roses in the porch, lace curtains on the elegant, shining windows. A smell of whisky.

  A superabundance of pubs, naturally.

  We stopped in Portlaoise, for coffee in a pub, the sort of pub where you could get coffee – one that had been done up recently, with plastic soft seats, and Formica-topped tables. Con ordered a pint of Guinness and a chaser, Bo and Mandy and I coffees. Nescafé.

  ‘Would you like a scone?’

  Bo always ate something with his cup of coffee. And smoked a cigarette afterwards.

  ‘I’d love one!’

  ‘No, thanks.’ That was me.

  ‘That’s how you’re so slim,’ Mandy said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I starve.’

  You could win a few Brownie points if you said that, which cancelled out the ones you lost for being slim and not eating a scone, dripping with butter and finished with a dollop of strawberry jam. Nobody wants to hear that you can eat anything and stay skinny. And in my case, that wasn’t true. I had a good figure because I watched my diet like a hawk. I had watched it for so long that I no longer felt hungry, ever, and occasionally regretted the loss of that sensation, with which I had been extremely familiar in childhood – though not in a bad way. I used to feel hungry for my dinner, and full, satisfied and bouncing with energy, even intellectual energy, when I had eaten. But I hadn’t felt like that since I was seventeen, and discovered dieting.

  We stopped again in Nenagh. Con parked on the side of the main street, and we trooped into a hotel, grey stone, ivy-covered, pink roses rambling around the door. In the dining room the tables were covered with white linen cloths, the silver sparkled and so did the glasses. There was a silver bud vase containing two red carnations in the centre of the table. A smell of roasting meat, the tinkle of clinking glass and silver, a hum of low voices conversing quietly across an expanse of starched linen. Oxtail soup, roast pork with apple sauce, roast potatoes, cabbage and carrots.

  Con had a pint of stout, Bo a glass of Carlsberg, Mandy and I drank water. I drew the line at apple pie or trifle, and so did Con, who excused himself and said he’d see us back at the car. Bo took the pie and Mandy the trifle.

  ‘Life’s too short.’ She picked a fat cherry from the bottom of the dish, and licked custard and cream from a thick spoon. Bo smiled appreciatively. ‘Anyway I’m going to Weight Watchers when I get back to Dublin.’

  Finally, after several more coffee breaks, we arrived in Dingle, the small fishing village built on a hill sliding down into the bay.

  ‘I need to do some shopping –’ Bo’s face was anxious – ‘otherwise we’ll all starve.’

  His Swedish accent never disappeared when he spoke English, but it became more pronounced when he was anxious.

  Mandy glanced at me and we nodded in female complicity.

  ‘We’ll give you a hand,’ Mandy offered.

  ‘That would be very helpful!’ His smile came back.

  ‘See yez back at the car,’ said Con, and hurried through a red door in a garden wall, quick as an Alice in Wonderland rabbit.

  The house in Dunquin is a small dormer bungalow, although bungalow is a word that conveys the wrong impression entirely. It’s a modern cottage, with a nicely designed interior – wooden ceilings and a tiled stone floor, carefully selected country furniture, a kind of modernist country design that was rare in Ireland in 1976. Everyone assumed it had a Scandinavian look, but the house was designed by a German architect, and did not look particularly Scandinavian at all, although it had some Swedish touches in the form of textiles and wall hangings. The cutlery and utensils had come from Sweden, and the bed linen and tablecloth, a wonderfully bright white oilcloth with a huge green and black pattern, which lifted the mood of the house, like a child’s laugh breaking out in a church.

  There are no windows at the back of the house. It fits into a shelf that has been dug out of the hill, an extinct volcano, Carraig an Mhionnáin, the Rock of the Kid Goat. The house turns its back to the volcano and looks directly at the sea. In front are two big windows, floor to ceiling, one which opens as a patio door on to a stone terrace. A field then, full of long grass, July weeds and wild flowers – thistles, burdock, as well as eyebright, clover, buttercups, dandelions. Then, the Blasket Islands: the rounded hump of the Great Blasket directly in front, the elongated Inis Tuaisceart, the Dead Man, to the right, the north side. Not a single house or building impeded the view in 1976 – far down on the edge of the sea the sweet brown wooden house with blue gables, the MacEntee bungalow, built by Monsignor Padraig de Brún in the 1920s – the house where the Irish poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi spent her childhood holidays – sat. Already in 1976 the house had started its slow journey to decay and extinction but it always had a friendly, warm look, and it fitted into the landscape gently, almost naturally, just as Bo’s house did.

  Mandy and I gasped and made admiring comments about the view. Con put his hands on his hips knowingly, sighed deeply and agreed that it was a fine view all right. He’d seen it often before. Bo nodded and paid no attention to any of this. He had other concerns. Telling people where to sleep, where the bed linen was, showing them the bathroom.

  He had already given some thought to who would sleep where: Mandy and I shared the big bedroom upstairs, Con had a bed in a smaller room, and Bo slept in the library, a study opening off the living room.

  I took it for granted that all this organisation of rooms and food and space and time happened easily, naturally. Bo was the professor; he owned the house. I assumed he could just make the arrangements at the drop of a hat, without forethought. I had never taken responsibility for looking after guests and it never occurred to me that for anyone such an act of organisation would be challenging: where to put them, how to feed them.

  It was harder in Dunquin than it
would be in town. There was one small shop in the parish, within walking distance – the post office, where you could buy bread and milk and cigarettes and sweets and ice cream, every day, and sausages and rashers and cabbage and potatoes on Fridays. Kruger’s, the pub, also stocked a few eclectic provisions: there you could get milk, or a can of beans, or a jar of strawberry jam. Otherwise you had to shop in Dingle and Bo didn’t drive. So he had to plan the week strategically. He’d already bought what he hoped was enough food to see us through two days. On Wednesday, he would get the bus to Dingle and stock up again, with food that would last until Saturday, when all his guests would go home – after which, he would eat his dinner down the hill, in Molly’s guest house. The planning of the week, which brought together people who did not know each other at all well, if at all, would have been difficult for anyone. For Bo, who was always nervous and anxious when it came to making practical arrangements – who was the sort of person who liked to be at the airport two or three hours before take-off, even in the old days when there was no such thing as security checks – it must have taken a huge amount of effort and caused at least some anxiety. But he did it, as he did everything which he considered to be his duty, without complaint and without showing signs of stress. ‘I have been in the army,’ was one of his sayings, referring to his year of military service, and meaning that nothing could really seem too challenging, after that horrible experience.

  I soon guessed that I had been invited partly as a chaperone. Bo fancied Mandy. Any man would. She was beautiful in a soft, feminine, unintimidating way – she was a bit like Liv Ullmann, Liv in the country, with couldn’t-be-bothered hair, jeans and a sloppy T-shirt. And apart from her physical attributes she had charm and wit. She teased Bo and argued with him, as if she were his equal. I treated him the way most of his Irish students did: meek and watchful. Mandy’s peppery, bubbling spontaneity must have been a welcome relief from all the shy cunning and respectful scepticism that saturated the air of Belfield.