The Traveller's Guide to Love

by Helen Nicholl

  Archie, as I expected, was initially resistant.

  ‘My sister?’ he said, in answer to my first suggestion. ‘We haven’t seen each other for twenty years, an arrangement that is entirely satisfactory to us both. And I have no wish to go to Australia.’

  ‘Europe, then. Think of the art, the antiques, the culture!’

  ‘I don’t care for flying,’ said Archie.

  ‘You and Albert both. Very well then, what about Scotland? You could take the ferry.’

  ‘Unfortunately not: I am a martyr to seasickness.’

  ‘Well, that leaves Ireland, which is after all the obvious choice. There is no reason at all why you shouldn’t take your car and make a leisurely progress from one charming county to the next. You like driving – and think of all those delightful little hotels you could stay in, like the one we stayed in on Achill Island.’ It was time to play my trump card. ‘Archie, think of the food!’

  I had already described in detail the wild Atlantic salmon, the melting lamb and the glorious homemade bread that Albert and I had enjoyed.

  ‘And who would look after the shop?’

  ‘I would, of course. I can easily do a few extra days. You could be away tomorrow, Archie, and I would promise to take great care of everything. Take ten days – take two weeks! It will do you all the good in the world.’

  It would also, I reflected, do me good. Albert’s Rosie would be celebrating her birthday that weekend and the family celebrations were set to continue throughout the following week. I had nothing planned, and no chance of seeing my beloved, so getting Archie organised and taking over the running of the shop would be as good a project as any to keep me busy.

  And so I was left in charge of Archibald’s Antiques for what turned out to be a period of ten days. In the beginning Archie telephoned me at least once a day, but by the middle of the first week he had begun to adjust, and after that when the phone in the shop rang, it was usually Albert, who had been press-ganged into chauffeuring the visiting relatives to the various far-flung farms and villages where their multitudinous cousins dwelt. He would ring and say that if he never saw another slice of fruit soda or drank another cup of dark brown tea, it would be too soon. This was some comfort to me, but not a lot.

  In the meantime, customers came and went (occasionally) and Archie’s Friday and Saturday cronies took the shock of finding me in his place with the quiet resignation so common to men who spend their lives pursuing postage stamps and postcards.

  It would have been a fairly dreary week, had it not been for a phone call I received on the Friday night. It was my sister Frederika.

  ‘Hanna? Good, I was hoping you’d be in. What are you up to this weekend?’

  ‘Not much. I’m looking after the shop tomorrow but Albert’s still tied up with his family.’

  ‘In that case you can pick me up from the airport on Sunday,’ said Frederika. ‘I’ve booked a flight out tomorrow. I get in to Heathrow at the crack of dawn on Sunday and I’ll be in Belfast in time for lunch. I’ve got to rush out now but I’ll email you the details. Can’t wait to see you, sweetie!’ And the line went dead.

  ‘Well I never!’ I said to Tiger Lily, who was gazing down at me from the top of a cupboard. She had gone from being a proud and attentive mother to being rather bored with the whole affair and frequently scaled great heights to avoid her offspring. ‘The planets must be in favourable alignment!’ And I went off, humming happily, to clear the spare bedroom for my sister.

  Chapter 12

  In all the years I have lived in Northern Ireland, I do not think I have ever had a visitor on whom the rain did not fall for at least some – and frequently all – of their stay. Frederika was the exception. She flew in to glorious sunshine and the weather held until she left.

  At first I cursed the fact that I had sent Archie off on holiday and committed myself to the shop, but in the end it turned out very well: Freddy was entirely happy to explore the city on her own, returning periodically to Archibald’s Antiques to catch her breath and dump her purchases, and once introduced to the Good Intentions Bookshop, she could only be prised out with difficulty.

  On the Wednesday afternoon Archie rang to say he would be back the following day, so it was in happy anticipation of the rest of the week off that I closed the shop and went in search of my sister. I found her, as expected, in the bookshop, where she was deep in conversation with a long-haired young man who sported a checked keffiyeh and an array of badges proclaiming him to be in favour of anarchists, whales, Jesus, Greenpeace and Palestine, and against capitalism, fracking and homophobia.

  ‘Hello, Dylan,’ I said. ‘I see you’ve met my sister. When did you get back?’

  ‘Last week,’ he replied. ‘And oh boy, Johanna, is it ever good to be back here! One more day in the States and I would have gone crazy.’

  ‘Poor Dylan has an arch-conservative family in deepest Missouri,’ I explained to Frederika. ‘He goes home once a year hoping for a bit of truth and reconciliation but is always disappointed. Still, at least this time you seem to have come back unscathed!’ This was perhaps unkind, being a reference to a previous occasion when Dylan had returned sporting a black eye.

  ‘And what are you doing here in Belfast?’ my sister enquired.

  ‘I teach a course in conflict resolution,’ Dylan told her, ‘but, like Johanna, I help out in the bookshop when I can.’

  ‘Well, good for you!’ said Frederika. ‘Of course, as a South African, the whole subject of conflict resolution is of enormous interest to me, but to get back to what we were discussing a moment ago, what Deepak Chopra really meant was …’

  I decided that this was as good a moment as any to excuse myself; besides, I could see Dolores signalling to me with her eyebrows, so I went over to the counter.

  ‘He’s found a soulmate in your sister,’ she said. ‘Apparently they are both into Guerilla Gardening and Cosmic Ordering – or maybe it was Cosmic Gardening and Guerilla Ordering. Whatever – they’re as mad as each other. I like her, mind you, and she’s bought a whole clatter of books.’

  A pile of books to one side of the counter bore witness to this: Frederika appeared to have cleaned out the section loosely known as Loony Fringe.

  ‘She used to be a top investment banker,’ I told Dolores, ‘until she went to India and found Enlightenment. Fortunately she made an awful lot of money first.’

  The enlightened one chose that moment to break off her conversation with Dylan and announce to the room at large that she was going to take us all out for a drink. ‘At The Craic,’ she said. ‘Is that right? Dylan tells me that no holiday in Belfast is complete without a visit to The Craic.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ I asked? ‘This is The Craic we’re talking about? As in “lively conversation” – only in this case the full name is The Craic of Doom. It’s a den of thieves! We’d be lucky to get out of there with our lives!’

  Dolores backed me up – she said visits were terminated rather than completed in The Craic – but our words were in vain: Frederika was determined to have her way. Despite a half-hearted protest about there still being ten minutes to closing time, we were chivvied into locking up and then bundled into a taxi in short order. A second taxi followed, containing the three or four customers who had been in the shop at the time, and had therefore included themselves in Freddy’s invitation.

  As expected, the pub turned out to be one of Belfast’s murkier establishments, but my sister was in her element, and even without the vast amounts of alcohol she insisted on paying for, it wouldn’t have taken long for everyone to fall under her spell. The thing about Frederika is that she is a brilliant storyteller and she has an endless fund of (ever more colourful) anecdotes about our childhood in Gauteng. By the time she had described the occasion when our brothers, Kobus, Stefanus and Jannie, had tried to charm a cobra, and had regaled the growing audience with the scandalous affair of our aunt Katrien and the policeman, she had them hanging on her every word.

 
; The other thing about Freddy is that once she gets into her stride, she’s not easy to stop. So one drink turned into two, and two to three, and it was only when Dolores turned to me and said, ‘She’s good craic, your sister, I’ll say that for her, but it’s high time I was away,’ that I realised just how long we had been there. I also realised that I had had very little to eat, and far too much to drink, and that it was going to take some ingenuity to dislodge Frederika. So I excused myself, along with Dolores, and staggered out into the night air to ring Albert.

  ‘Thank God,’ I said when he answered. ‘Are you home?’

  ‘I’m just in this minute,’ he replied. ‘Where are you?’

  I told him.

  ‘Good grief!’ said Albert. ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘Drinking with my sister,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t like to come and take us away, would you?’

  Albert was impressively decisive. ‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ he said, and rang off.

  Fortunately, Frederika’s curiosity is powerful, and she was dying to meet Albert. Of course she wanted him to come in and join us but I told her no, he was driving, and that no one ever drank and drove in this part of the world, whatever they still did in the less civilised reaches of Gauteng. It also helped that the pub was becoming noticeably noisier and more crowded, and that the earlier raffish but good-humoured atmosphere was beginning to deteriorate – proving, not for the first time, that Dolores had a finely-honed instinct for getting out when the going was good. It was obvious to me too that Dylan’s conflict resolution skills might soon be called upon, and I had less faith in them leading to peace and harmony than to total mayhem.

  So in the end I got my sister out of there without too much difficulty, and Albert, to my great relief, was waiting with the engine running – no doubt to facilitate a quick getaway, should one be needed. I pushed Freddy into the passenger seat and climbed into the back, intending to lie down, but the moment I put my head down, it spun in a way I had not experienced since my student days, so I propped myself back up and listened to Freddy and Albert getting acquainted.

  My sister had drunk at least as much as I had, but as her head has always been a great deal harder than mine, she showed no sign of it. Instead she bombarded Albert with questions, and he responded. By the time we got home, they were mutually charmed, and a plan had been hatched for Albert to collect us the following morning to drive us down to the Mournes.

  There are many routes into the heart of the Mourne Mountains, but for me the simplest (and least strenuous) is to start from the Carrick Little car park above the village of Annalong, where a gently climbing track crosses the dry-stone boundary that is the Mourne Wall and leads you north into the mountains. In no time at all you find that you have left the world behind you and have entered the domain of wind and sheep and scudding clouds, where the peaks of Slieve Binnian, Slieve Donard and Slieve Lamagan surround you and the only sounds are those of the birds and the little stream that tumbles downhill.

  Frederika was enchanted. As we paused for breath at a bend in the track – Albert, who is extremely fit, was striding on ahead – she turned to me and said, ‘I can see why you love it here. And I can see why you love Albert – he’s very attractive, and he really listens, which is so unusual in a man. I’m not surprised though: I was struck at once by his aura – it has a most unusual glow.’

  ‘Really? And what about mine?’

  ‘Oh, you’re very pink at the moment,’ said Freddy, and gave me a sphinx-like smile.

  Our destination that day was the Blue Lough, which for once lived up to its name, reflecting the brilliant sky above us. There is always a wind up there but the clouds that flew overhead were white and fluffy, and the sun shone brightly on the three of us as we perched on a group of boulders and shared a bottle of ice-cold mountain water that Albert had filled on the way up.

  From the Blue Lough a short walk will take you up to another ridge, and more panoramic views, but we decided to turn back, because Freddy and I were both famished, and Albert had promised us lunch in Warrenpoint, which was still a fair way off. Accordingly, we set off down the track, scrambling over boulders and continuing down through open heathland, and along the side of Annalong wood, until we came in view of the sea once more. We passed the odd hiker going north, and one or two runners, but it was only when we were climbing over the stone stile that crossed the wall that Freddy said, ‘We seem to have lost our companion.’

  ‘What companion?’ asked Albert.

  ‘That woman who has been behind us most of the way.’

  ‘I didn’t see anyone,’ I said. ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘I couldn’t see her face,’ Freddy replied, ‘but it was definitely a woman. She was wearing a blue dress – I remember wondering if she was cold without a jacket.’

  Albert had come to a dead halt.

  ‘Good heavens,’ he said. ‘I wonder if it was the Blue Lady.’

  ‘Who’s the Blue Lady?’ we asked in unison.

  ‘The ghost of a woman who was abandoned by her husband – local legend has it that she haunts these parts.’ Albert was looking at Frederika with a combination of awe and alarm; I, on the other hand, regarded her with some suspicion. My sister is, after all, a woman who loves a good story above all things, and it seemed to me entirely possible that she had come upon the legend in her guide book and had seized the chance to lay the foundations of yet another gripping yarn – a suspicion that was in no way dispelled when she turned and gave me the very faintest shadow of a wink.

  Our expedition to the Blue Lough was followed two days later by one to the north coast, specifically to see the Giant’s Causeway. I am with Dr Johnson on this one: it is worth seeing, but not worth going to see, being a long way from Belfast even on the most direct and least interesting route. And if you take the Coastal Route, it is a much longer drive altogether, and the chances are that you will be so intoxicated by the scenery along the way that you will be in no hurry at all to get to the causeway itself. But Albert was happy to act as our chauffeur – which was good of him, considering how much driving he had done lately – and we had a very pleasant day out.

  With just one day left before she was due to fly home, Freddy declared that we should have a farewell lunch with the three men in my life. And so she invited Albert, Sticky Wicket and Archie – whom she had never met, but who was inveigled into coming by the promise of a gourmet South African meal. It was also decided that he would share a taxi with Albert because there was to be no stinting on food or drink, and no one was to be allowed to drive. Freddy let me peel and chop and lay the table, but otherwise she insisted I leave her to it: in cooking, as in storytelling, I bow to my sister’s superior talents. And Frederika in charge is a force to behold, and a reminder of just why she was so successful in her earlier career. It is also something to be grateful for that her later ‘enlightenment’ did not extend to vegetarianism, because her lamb bredie – lamb, golden onions, ripe tomatoes and long thin green beans – and her sweet potatoes and spicy chicken are the food of heaven. By the time the guests had assembled, the flat was full of mouth-watering smells and the table held such an artistic presentation of dishes that it seemed a shame to disturb them. We did though, and we also drank a great deal of excellent South African wine as we demolished Freddy’s feast.

  ‘Superb!’ said Archie, leaning back – to the peril of his chair – and patting his lips with his napkin. He wasn’t finished, he was merely taking a short break. ‘My dear Frederika, I congratulate you.’

  ‘Absolutely top-notch!’ Sticky Wicket agreed. ‘Can’t think when I had a meal like it.’

  And Albert, raising his glass to us, toasted the ‘Sensational van Heerden Sisters’, which was very gallant, as well as being an impressive piece of articulation considering how much wine he had drunk. There was cheese and fruit to follow, and then, just as I had steered Archie over to the largest armchair in the room, Tiger Lily, with unerring timing, brought in her kitten
s for inspection.

  ‘Oh dear me!’ Archie bent down to scoop one on to his lap. ‘How irresistible they are! What have you called them, Johanna?’

  ‘Nothing as yet,’ I answered, ‘because I can’t possibly keep them, much as I’d like to, and if I give them names I’ll get too attached to let them go.’

  The kitten on Archie’s lap danced up the gentle slope of his stomach and burrowed into his neck just as her sister began to ascend his left leg. He was weakening before my eyes.

  ‘Anyway, it really is high time I found homes for them. I suppose I could try Cats’ Protection …’

  ‘All right, dammit,’ said Archie, ‘I’ll take one.’

  ‘Why not have two?’ Frederika suggested. ‘They’d be company for each other. And Sticky Wicket could have the other. That way Tiger Lily would still have one of her kittens in this house, they’d all have good homes, and everyone would be happy.’

  And so it was that Albert and Archie departed in a taxi with two kittens in a basket while Sticky Wicket meekly and carefully bore the third upstairs. As for Tiger Lily, she gave what appeared to me to be a heartfelt sigh of relief as she curled herself up in undisturbed possession of her favourite armchair once again.

  The following morning my sister flew out. The sun which had shone so steadily throughout her stay vanished with her plane; the rain fell in torrents, and not even the prospect of having Albert all to myself for the first time in weeks could stop my tears from falling too.

  Chapter 13

  The rain fell for most of July. It didn’t stop the time-honoured practice of enthusiastic marching and drum-banging, with the occasional riot thrown in, for several days on either side of the Twelfth – the date which commemorates the Battle of the Boyne, when William of Orange defeated King James II. As this event took place in 1690 you would think that all parties would have had enough time to get over it, but apparently not.