by Laura Elliot
When Miriam left I took you in my arms and told you about the day I first came to Maoltrán and how the seahorses brought David and me together. You stared at me with those round eyes, as if you could understand every word I said, and I was back there again, eight years ago, driving through the summer heat, heading towards my future.
Maoltrán, in English, means a bare hillock. As I drove through this small country village with its wide main street and the usual assortment of shops, I could see how it had acquired its name. The surrounding countryside is hilly and pastoral, but the grey rocky outline of the Burren is its most distinctive landmark. I’d passed a one-storey school with stencilling on the windows, and high stone steps leading to a Catholic church. I’d sped past lichen-covered tombstones and a small Protestant church, its ancient heritage diminished by the steel frame of an ugly creamery erected next to it. On reaching the new craft centre I searched for a sign that would lead me to Miriam’s Glasshouse. The small compact buildings exuded fresh cement and paint, the sheen of creativity and hope. Miriam had recently moved from a small studio in the back garden of Rockrose to larger custom-built premises and she planned to expand her business. We’d spoken on the phone and I was confident I’d be her marketing manager by the end of the interview.
My job in public relations was a mystery to her. She read a press release I’d written about an age-resistant moisturiser and asked how I could write with such conviction when I knew there was no truth to the claim. She touched her face, the laughter lines deep around her eyes, the pull of middle age against her mouth.
She was right. What I’d written had no substance but I worked in the business of persuasion. I used words to capture the imagination, to trail it towards desire and the ultimate dream of eternal youth.
‘Why would you change your career,’ she asked. ‘You’re at the heart of everything in Dublin. Why bury yourself in a small country village?’
Silence is golden. I’d learned that lesson early, knowing that an inadvertent word from me could spark against the tinderbox of my parents’ marriage.
Her fingers were adorned with rings. Celtic swirls and knots, but no wedding band. Not even a Claddagh. My fingers were bare. The indentation where my engagement ring had rested was a stark reminder that I was planning a new future. I couldn’t stop touching it. Like a tongue to a broken tooth, I would find my thumb rubbing against the white circle, as if, somehow, I could hasten its slow fading.
I held up my ring finger. ‘A man,’ I said. ‘I need a fresh start.’
She noticed the white circle left by my engagement ring and nodded. Richard, the villain. No further explanation was necessary.
Richard was my rebound man. Not a good basis to start a relationship but I needed calm in my life after Edward Carter. I was twenty-eight when we met at a party and we became engaged two years later. Richard was upwardly mobile and ambitious, his career in the financial sector giving him the authority to wear pinstripe suits without looking ridiculous. What can I say about our relationship? It was safe and steady and Richard was an eager lover, who only became impatient when I mentioned babies.
‘Plenty of time when we’re married,’ he’d say, whenever I brought up the subject. But I was anxious for a baby, aware of time marching smartly by. The brief mad spell after my mother’s death, when I’d tumbled so heedlessly and headlong into sex, now seemed like someone else’s shambolic nightmare; but the memory of what followed was indelible.
Without telling Richard, I stopped taking the pill. A year passed, hope fading each month. My gynaecologist advised me to bring him along for tests. Deceit had me by the ankles and, just when I’d plucked up the courage to confess the truth, he arrived home one night with champagne and roses. He’d been offered promotion, along with a three-year transfer to his company’s headquarters in New York. We would move the date for our wedding forward and honeymoon in the Big Apple.
‘No babies,’ he wagged his finger at me and said, ‘New York is no place for children. We’ll start a family after we return to Dublin.’
As we drew up wedding lists, booked our hotel and church, I felt myself closing down. How could I describe it? A tight coiling inwards, mentally moving away from his words, physically from his touch, from everything he planned for our future, until, when it was finally time to walk away, I did so without tears or regret. I moved from his apartment, surprised at how little I had to carry with me.
I did not blame him for hating me. Our wedding plans had been cancelled for no reason that he could understand, apart from the reason I gave him. Incompatibility. As an excuse, incompatibility was vague enough to cover a multitude of reasons, yet serious enough to break the foundations of any relationship.
Miriam offered me the job and, when the interview had ended, she invited me to her house for a meal before I began my journey back to Dublin. I followed her car from the craft centre for about a mile. Ancient walls, ridged as the selvaged edges of a rough-knit jumper, ran over the hills. The Burren lay around me, flat pavement rocks marked by dolmen tombs and fortresses. She slowed after we passed the grey house, where Phyllis Lyons lives with her mother, and took a sharp right-hand turn into a narrow lane. Grass grew along the centre but tyre marks had grooved the edges. A tumbledown cottage was almost hidden by hedgerows and the grassy embankments were aflame with red-hot pokers, poppies, foxgloves and dense pockets of maiden pink. The lane rose sharply until I reached the line of cedar trees sheltering her house. The grey limestone walls blended into the rocky landscape and the name Rockrose had been carved into a gate pillar.
I fell in love with Rockrose as soon as I saw it or perhaps it was David who moved my heart so violently that, for an instant, I needed to possess everything within my gaze. He was dressed in shorts and a singlet, well-worn trainers, a sweatband tied around his forehead. He was playing with a small boy, chasing him around the garden, pretending, with exaggerated gestures, to be unable to catch him.
I parked outside the low drystone perimeter wall binding the front garden and stepped from my car. I watched as he hoisted the boy to his shoulders. David looked so young that day, like a teenager, far too youthful to be a father. I assumed the boy belonged to someone else until Miriam introduced him as her grandson.
Susanne…David lowered the boy and spoke my name slowly, as if anxious to memorise it. His face glistened with perspiration. The faint musky smell of youth oozed from his skin as he took my elbow and directed me into the kitchen.
The long wooden table looked as if it had served generations, as did the six sturdy chairs and the high upright dresser. A sofa was pushed against one wall and the cushions, deep and sagging, provided a trampoline for the boy to bounce upon. The open window looked out into the front garden and a jug of meadow flowers sat on the ledge.
Miriam served beef bourguignon from a large earthenware tureen. David ate heartily, sopping up the sauce with chunks of crusty bread, breaking off pieces and feeding them to his son. By then I had established their relationship. Joey was three years old and David would never be able to deny him: the same dark brown eyes and brown curly hair, the high, broad forehead, the easy grin.
Outside we heard the sharp blast of a horn, repeated three times. It broke like glass into our conversation. Joey jerked his head and looked up at his father. A blue car was parked outside the gate. The driver was female, with long black hair, impatient hands that once again sent out a demanding summons.
‘Time to go, big boy,’ said David. He lifted his son in his arms and ruffled his hair. He carried Joey down the path and handed him over to his mother. The exchange was brief. He returned to the house and went upstairs, muttering an excuse about phone calls he had to make.
‘Young people,’ Miriam had sighed then, ‘so reckless with their happiness.’ For a while after Joey’s birth, Corrie O’Sullivan and David had tried to make their relationship work, she explained, but their son was all they had left in common. Corrine had recently become engaged to a local carpenter and they planned
to settle in Canada. Miriam hinted at custodial battles, lost before they would even reach the courts; a single father in his early twenties, no chance.
David’s expression when he had returned from handing Joey over to Corrine had been hard and angry. I recognised what lay behind it. Loss. I understood, as only I could, how he felt as he watched his son being lifted away from him. But at least he and Corrine O’Sullivan could lay claim to their son’s identity.
I’d no idea who had fathered my baby during that crazy year after my mother died. Cervical cancer, the symptoms diagnosed too late. For months afterwards, my father had wandered around in a daze, twitching at sudden noises, as if he expected her to emerge from dark corners or behind closed doors and shriek at him.
I escaped into the arms of Shane Dillon, then Liam Maguire, then Jason Jackson. Dark lanes, the back seats of cars, my bedroom when my father was out. I didn’t enjoy these furtive encounters, the impatient fumbling and tumbling, the brief satisfaction gained by them, not me. Yet my need seemed insatiable. I understand it now. The need to be loved unthinkingly, unconditionally. Such a demanding, primal need. Why else do we perpetuate our race? Why else would we subject our bodies to such grotesque manoeuvrings, the animal grunts and heaves, the savage satisfaction that is instantly forgettable and, in my own case, always dispensable?
‘Slut,’ my father said, when Tessa brought the strain of my stomach against my school shirt to his attention. Five months gone by then, too late for an abortion, which was his first intention. ‘Off to London on the next flight,’ he said. ‘Quick fix.’
But Tessa was determined that he was not going to export my problem. ‘Too late,’ she insisted, ‘and even if your daughter wasn’t five months gone, it’s against the laws of the state and the law of God.’ The country was not yet riven by abortion referenda and opposing views, but Tessa knew which side she was on. Actively pro-life, she’d decided that adoption would be the perfect solution and that’s what probably would have happened in the end.
I’d argued loudly against either option. How I hated them, him and her, smug with happiness, and my mother hardly cold in her grave. None of us realised that it was my boy who would decide whether or not he would make that hazardous journey towards the light.
I didn’t see David again until it was time for the official opening of Miriam’s new studio. A lively occasion compared to the usual formal launches I’d once organised. No muted and strained conversations as strangers sipped tepid wine and struggled to find common ground. The people who crowded her new studio were loud and boisterous. They had gathered to celebrate her seahorses, those gentle males with their protruding bellies who mate for life and sing their love songs under the silver rays of the full moon. David had just qualified as a geologist. No surprises there. He’d grown up with sand and fire, flint and oxides, and was familiar with the melting and moulding of brittle substances. Petroleum exploration and oilfield development were his fields of expertise. Soon afterwards he left on contract for the oilfields of Saudi Arabia.
I settled into Miriam’s Glasshouse and was soon travelling across Ireland, meeting customers and building up her market base. I rented one of the new townhouses being built in Market Square and she invited me regularly to Rockrose. In David’s room I browsed through his music collection. The Chieftains and Horse Lips sat uneasily beside Alice Cooper, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath. I was familiar with the Chieftains but heavy metal was not a taste I’d acquired. I was repelled yet fascinated by the lyrics: death, pain, anger, loss. I absorbed his presence and thought about his absent father.
By then I knew Miriam’s story. I asked her if she felt any animosity towards her ex-husband, who had walked out on his family when David was six years old.
She shrugged and admitted her only emotion was in difference. ‘And David,’ I asked, imagining him as a young boy, alone in his room, playing his harsh angry music, giving the finger to the man who had deserted him. ‘At first they used to meet,’ she said. ‘But not any more, not since he was thirteen and stopped mentioning his father’s name.’
David arrived home from Saudi Arabia six months later. In Molloy’s, the local pub where set dancing was a tradition, he stood out from the crowd, a tanned, mature man with a new firmness about his mouth that suggested authority. He was immediately whisked to the floor by an impetuous young woman.
‘Imelda Morris,’ Miriam nudged me. ‘She’s been friends with David since their pram days.’
More than friends, I thought, watching her heels flashing.
Miriam nudged me again when another young woman danced past. ‘Corrine O’Sullivan,’ she whispered.
Up close, Corrine was pretty in a blowsy way that would, I suspected, soon turn to flesh. Her boyfriend was sturdy and straight-backed, a squared-off chin that would brook no arguments. I watched David dancing with Imelda and Corrine dancing with her husband-to-be. They seemed oblivious of each other, yet I sensed the tensions that could be released by an inadvertent glance. I thought of Nina, my mother, cold and silent in her grave, and wondered where all that angry energy went when it could no longer be contained within the body. But the night passed off without incident. David asked me to dance. I suspect a hint from Miriam sent him in my direction. I shook my head, having no wish to compete against the fleet-footed Imelda, who claimed him once again.
When he came home on leave again I’d learned to set dance. In Molloy’s, I wore a sundress with a discreetly plunging neckline and my toenails were painted red as sin. What was ten years between a man and woman, I asked myself. Nothing…if it was the man who carried the years. But for a woman, trapped by time, by a biological clock, it was different. I had squandered my time with too many men and had no more to waste.
Imelda had youth to flaunt but I was skilled in the art of pleasure. I knew how to give, if not to receive. How to stroke and caress a man’s flesh, to apply firm or gentle pressure, to moan deeply, to breathe urgently, to gasp, as if pain and pleasure had clashed then melded. I often wondered if the sour coupling that led to my conception was responsible for my inability to experience pleasure; but David, on our first night together, had no reason to doubt my satisfaction. No condoms. I reassured him. Everything was under control.
We were together every night until it was time to start his next contract. I didn’t write and tell him I was pregnant. Time enough when I was sure. Two months later, I was in Dublin, attending a meeting with a department store buyer, when a cramping pain forced the breath from my lips.
‘It happens,’ said the doctor in the family planning clinic. ‘First babies, it’s tricky. No reason why it should ever happen again.’
Miriam, busily crafting glass, did not notice my shadowed eyes when I returned to the studio, and David never knew.
Six months later, when he came home again, I’d chilled white wine in the fridge and red wine was breathing on the hearth. I served beef roulades with blue cheese and walnuts, a blackberry crumble for dessert. He carried me to the bedroom. Afterwards, I brushed his hair from his eyes and whispered endearments. Sweat beaded his chest. I leaned my palm against the beat of his heart and, for once, I wished I could experience that hot, racing sensation where nothing else exists outside the boundaries of our desire.
We slept and awakened, made love again. Three times he came inside me and when he finally left my side, his eyes dark with spent passion, I lay still and sensed his strong determined sperm shouldering each other in the rush to create something wonderful between us.
Three months passed before I wrote and told him I was pregnant. I assured him he’d no reason to worry. Nothing would be demanded from him, no commitment, no support, no strings. I imagined him reading my letter, surrounded by the scorching sands. He would be alarmed at first, then reassured, then wincing, thinking, no doubt, about his son, who now lived with his mother and stepfather in Canada.
He rang and proposed. We would be married when he came home on leave. He spoke with certainty. This child would carry his name.<
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I asked him if he loved me. We’d had so little time to know each other.
‘Yes,’ he said, and I believe he spoke sincerely. ‘I love you, Susanne. That’s all we need to begin our lives together.’
A week later the pain began. Miriam drove me to the hospital.
‘First babies, it’s common enough,’ she said, and cried with me, held me gently, as if she was afraid I’d shatter at her touch. She faded quietly into the background when David returned from the oilfields to comfort me.
‘We will still be married,’ he said, ‘and we will have many children.’
We married that summer in Maoltrán. I’d achieved what I desired yet I was haunted by ghosts; the ache was unbearable. Miriam moved into my house and I moved to Rockrose. ‘Less clutter, more space,’ she insisted. ‘Two women together in the family home, not a good idea.’
The Burren billowed into the distance, a grey patchwork quilt stitched in green. I imagined the earth seething beneath the limestone ridges and dolmen tombs; and on the surface, the gentle orchids and gentians, the woodruff, harebells, eyebrights and rockrose spurting from the cracks. This grimly beautiful landscape would absorb my grief. We would have more babies. They would grow up wild and free and happy.
I was in the business of persuasion but fate mocked my hopes one by one. And then they began to whisper to me, my lost children: no more…no more…no more.
They don’t whisper any more. Not since you came to me. The only sound that breaks the night silence are your fretful cries, as if you are trying to break through the walls with your voice.
Today, sitting at my kitchen table that had once been hers, Miriam asked how I was feeling. Her expression was guarded, as if she was picking her way through thistles. She wanted to know if I’d seen Dr Williamson.
