by Anne Doughty
I stood in the sunshine, the rhythmic crash of the breakers and the peremptory call of the jackdaws etching themselves into my memory. It was twenty-two years, almost to the day, since the weekend that had changed the course of my life. It was time I went back and found out what really happened that weekend.
Chapter 1
BELFAST 1968
The door clicked shut. As the footsteps of my sixth-formers echoed on the wooden stairs, I put my face in my hands and breathed a sigh of relief. My head ached with the rhythmic throbbing that gets worse if a fly buzzes within earshot or a door bangs two floors away. There was aspirin in my handbag, but the nearest glass of water was on the ground floor and the thought of weaving my way down through the noisy confusion of landings and overspilling cloakrooms was more than I could bear.
I made a note in the margin of my Shakespeare and closed it wearily. I enjoy the history plays and try to dramatise them when I teach, but today my effort with Richard III and his machinations seemed flat and stale. Hardly surprising after a short night, an early start, and an unexpected summons to the Headmistress’s study in the lunch hour. After that, I could hardly expect to be my shining best, but I still felt disappointed.
I stretched my aching shoulders, rubbed ineffectually at the pain in my neck, and reminded myself that it was Friday. The noise from below was always worse on a Friday afternoon, but it came to an end much more quickly than other days. Soon, silence would flow back into the empty classrooms and I might be able to think again.
I looked around the room where I taught most of my A-level classes. Once a servant’s bedroom in this tall, Edwardian house, the confined space was now the last resting place of objects with no immediate purpose. Ancient textbooks, music for long-forgotten concerts, programmes for school plays and old examination papers were piled into the tall bookcases which stood against two of the walls. Another tide of objects had drifted into the dim corners furthest from the single dusty window: a globe with the British Empire in fading red blotches; a bulging leather suitcase labelled ‘Drama’; a box inscribed ‘Bird’s Eggs’; a broken easel; and a firescreen embroidered with a faded peacock.
There were photographs too, framed and unframed, spotted with age. Serried ranks of girls in severe pinafores, accompanied by formidable ladies with bosoms and hats, the mothers and grandmothers of the girls who now poured out of the adjoining houses which made up Queen’s Crescent Grammar School.
I wondered yet again why the things of the past are so often neglected, left to lie around unsorted, neither cleared away nor brought properly into the present, to be valued for use or beauty. I thought of my own small collection of old photographs, a mere handful that had somehow survived my mother’s rigorous throwing out: Granny and Grandad Hughes standing in front of the forge with my mother; my father in overalls, with his first car, parked outside the garage where he worked in Ballymena; and a studio portrait of my grandmother, Ellen Erwin, clear-eyed, long-haired and wistful, when she was only sixteen. That picture was one of my most precious possessions.
My husband, Colin, says I’m sentimental and he finds it very endearing. But I don’t think it’s like that at all. I think your life starts long before you’re born, with people you may never even know, people who shape and mould the world into which you come. If I were ever to write the story of my life, it would have to begin well before the date on my birth certificate and I couldn’t do it without the fragments that most people neglect or throw away, like these faded prints at Queen’s Crescent.
The throb in my head had eased slightly as the noise level dropped from the fierce crescendo around four o’clock to the random outbursts of five minutes past. Another few minutes and I really would be able to get to my feet and collect my scattered wits.
I stared out through the dusty window at the house opposite. In the room the mirror image of mine, there were filing cabinets; a young man in shirt sleeves bent over a drawingboard under bright fluorescent tubes. On the floors below, each window framed a picture. Girls in smart dresses sat on designer furniture, in newly decorated offices with shiny green pot plants. They answered telephones, made photocopies and poured out cups of Cona coffee, disappearing with them to the front of the house, to their bosses who occupied the still elegant rooms that looked out upon the wide pavements of the next salubrious crescent.
Colin would be having tea by now. Outside the large conference room in the thickly carpeted lobby, waitresses in crisp dresses would pour from silver teapots and hand tiny sandwiches to men who dropped their briefcases on their chairs and greeted each other with warm handshakes. Beyond the air-conditioned rooms of the beflagged hotel, I saw the busy London streets, the traffic whirling ceaselessly round islands of green in squares where you could still hear a blackbird sing.
Daddy would probably be in the garden. He might be talking to the tame blackbird that follows his slight figure up and down the rosebeds as he weeds, working steadily and methodically, as if he could continue all day and never get tired. ‘Pace yourself, Jenny,’ he’d say, as he taught me how to loosen the weeds and open the soil. ‘No use going at it like a bull at a gate. Give it the time it needs. Don’t rush it.’
He was right, of course. He usually was. A mere two hours since I’d been summoned to Miss Braidwood’s study and here I was, so agitated by what she’d said that I’d gone and given myself a headache when I had the whole weekend to work things out.
I glanced at my watch and thought of all the things I ought to be doing. But I still made no move. My mind kept going back to that lunchtime meeting. I looked round the room again. This was where I worked, where I spent my solitary lunch hours, a place where I was free to think, or to sit and dream. It wasn’t a question of whether I liked it or not, it was what it meant to me that mattered.
Up here, I could even see the hard edge of the Antrim Hills lifting themselves above the city, indifferent to the housing estates which spattered their flanks and the roads which snaked and looped up and out of the broad lowland at the head of the lough.
At the thought of the hills, invisible from where I sat, I was overcome with longing. Oh, to be driving out of the city. I closed my eyes and saw the road stretch out before me, winding between hedgerows thick with summer green, the buttercups gleaming in the strong light. Daddy and I, setting off to see some elderly relative in her small cottage by the sea or tucked away in one of the nine Glens of Antrim, whose names I could recite like a poem. The fresh wind from the sea tempering the summer heat, the sky a dazzle of blue, we move through meadow and moorland towards the rough slopes of a great granite outcrop.
‘Well, here we are, Jenny. Slemish. Keeping sheep here must’ve been fairly draughty. Pretty grim in winter even for a saint. Can we climb it, d’ye think?’
‘Oh yes, please. We’ll be able to see far more from the top.’
Bracken catching at my ankles, the mournful bleat of sheep, the sun hot on my shoulders as we circle upwards between huge boulders. A hawthorn tree still in bloom, though it is nearly midsummer, shelters a spring bubbling up among the rocks. We stop and drink from cupped hands. There isn’t another soul on the mountain and no other car parked beside us on the rough edge of the lane below. As we climb, the whole province of Ulster unrolls before us, until at last we stand in the wind, between the coast of Scotland on one far horizon and the mountains of Donegal, blue and misted, away to the west.
‘Isn’t that the Mull of Kintyre, Daddy?’
‘Yes, dear. That’s the Mull of Kintyre,’ he replied, as if his thoughts were as far away as the bright outline beyond the shimmering sea.
Reluctantly, I got to my feet. Daydreaming, my mother would call it, but the tone of her voice would make the weakness into a crime should she catch me at it.
‘Jennifer, you have got to get to that bookshop,’ I said to myself severely. There was shopping as well and whatever else happened I had to be at Rathmore Drive by 5.30 p.m.
The staffroom door was ajar. Gratefully, I pushed it w
ide open with my elbow, dropped the exercise books on the nearest surface and breathed a sigh of relief. No one sat on the benches beside the long plastic-covered tables. There was no one by the handsome marble fireplace, peering at the timetables and duty lists pinned to the tattered green noticeboard perched on the mantelpiece. Best of all, no one crouched by the corner cupboard, where a single broad shelf was labelled ‘J. McKinstry – English’.
I winced as the light from naked fluorescent tubes flooded the room. Mercilessly, it exposed the peeling paintwork of cupboards and skirtings, layers of dust on leafy plaster interlacings. It also revealed a folded sheet of paper bearing a badly smudged map of the world in an empty corner of the message board. Across the width of what survived of Asia, my name was neatly printed. Hastily, I read the note:
I should like to have a word with you about Millicent Blackwood. Could you please come to me in the Library on Monday at 1 p.m. before I raise the matter with Miss Braidwood. E. Fletcher.
My heart sank as I picked up the tone. Millie, poor dear, was yet another of the things I had to think about over the weekend. Oh well. I tucked the note in my handbag, switched off the lights and left the building to the mercy of the cleaners.
‘Bread,’ I said to myself. The pavements were damp and slippery with fallen leaves, the lights streamed out from shops and glistened on their trampled shapes. I looked up at the sky, heavy and overcast. There was no sign at all of the hills. I’d have given so much for a bright autumny afternoon. Then the hills would seem near enough to touch, just down the next road, or beyond the solid redbrick mill, or behind the tall mass of the tobacco factory.
But today they lay hidden under the pall of cloud, leaving me only the less lovely face of the city that had been my home for most of my childhood and all but two of my adult years. Thirty years ago Louis MacNeice called it ‘A city built upon mud; a culture built upon profit’, and it hadn’t changed much in all the years since.
I made my way to the little bakery where I buy my weekly supplies, a pleasant, homely place where bread and cakes still come warm to the counter from behind a curtain of coloured plastic ribbons. In my second year at Queen’s, Colin and I used to visit it regularly, to buy rolls for a picnic lunch, or a cake for someone’s birthday. It hadn’t changed at all. Even Mrs Green was still there, plumper and greyer and more voluble than ever.
She prides herself she’s known Colin and me since before we were even engaged. She’s followed our life as devotedly as she watches Coronation Street. Graduation and wedding, first jobs in Birmingham and visits home. I remember her asking if she might see the wedding album and how she marvelled at the enormous and ornate volume Colin’s mother had insisted upon. These days, she asked about the house or the car, the decor of the living room or the health of our parents, Colin’s prospects or our plans for the future.
I paused, my fingers already tight on the handle of the door. I turned my back on it and walked quickly away.
‘No, I can’t face it. Not today.’ No one had seen me, but I was shocked by what I had done. ‘Jenny McKinstry, what is wrong with you?’ I asked myself as I hurried on, grateful to be anonymous, invisible in the crowd.
It was something about having to perform a ritual. Having to say the right things, in the right tone. Responding to hints and suggestions in the right way. Taking my cue and playing the part of the young, married, working wife, as Mrs Green wished it to be. She was a good-hearted, friendly woman, but today I couldn’t keep up the bright bubble. It would have to be bread from the supermarket.
‘Telly, miss. Sixth edition. Telly.’
I put down briefcase and basket and hunted for change. The newsboy had no mac, only the worn jacket of a suit several sizes too big for him. I put coins into his damp, outstretched hand and read the headline as I picked up my things.
Thank God for that. The march was off. I didn’t read the details. The fact was enough. One less thing to worry about, for Keith and Siobhan would certainly have marched in Derry and everyone knew the police and B Specials had orders to teach them all a lesson.
‘You’re a coward, Jenny McKinstry,’ I said to myself and wondered if it was really true. Would I have the courage to march if I were a student, like Keith and Siobhan, or would I need to be as politically minded as they both were. Or was the problem more that I was one half of ‘a respectable young couple’?
That was the phrase on the bank manager’s file. Though it was upside down and in small print, I had managed to decipher it that day when he interviewed Colin about the loan for the car we were hoping to buy. We had laughed over it all the way back to our borrowed flat, where our worldly goods were stacked high, awaiting their final destination. It became a joke between us, a couple of words that encoded a moment in time, when we were happy, looking forward to our new jobs, and our first proper home.
I had stepped into the bookshop before I quite realised it. I turned round at the sound of my name.
‘Hello, Mr Cummings. My goodness, you’re busy this afternoon.’
‘Indeed, we are,’ he agreed, nodding vigorously. ‘Never known the place so busy. Come on down to my wee office. It might be best if I lead the way!’
I followed the tall, stooping figure between the book-lined aisles to the newly constructed and unpainted cubicle he dignified as an office. Beneath the sloping roof there was space for neither filing cabinets nor cupboards, but from rows of hooks on every vertical surface hung clips full of invoices, pink and yellow and blue. From beneath a small table piled high with similar clips, he drew out two stackable stools.
‘Do sit down, my dear. I think we’ve got them all, but we’d better make sure.’
He unhooked a clip, flipped through it deftly and extracted a sheet of pink paper. I glanced quickly down it and breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Wonderful, Mr Cummings. You’ve got the whole lot. I don’t know how you’ve managed it but I’m so grateful. I really was caught out, you know.’
He smiled broadly and settled back on his stool. ‘You shouldn’t make your subject so popular, Mrs McKinstry. Look at the problems it gives your poor bookseller when you come in and tell him your classes have doubled.’
I laughed easily at his mild complaint. Mr Cummings was an old friend. For years we had shared our passion for poetry and our enthusiasm for the young Ulster poets we both knew personally.
‘You’re very good to take all this trouble over such a small order. Three knights sharing a single copy of Richard III does rather cramp the dramatic style!’
He laughed and nodded at the bulging clips all around us. ‘There’s no lack of orders these days,’ he said flatly. ‘And you could hardly believe the sales on the fiction side. But it’s the quality that counts, isn’t it?’ he ended sadly.
I nodded silently. When his pleasant face shadowed with regret like this, I always thought of my father. They were probably about the same age, but whereas my father had an air of wry humour about him whenever he reflected upon his life, Mr Cummings always spoke as if his plans had never come to anything and it was now too late in the day to hope for anything better.
‘Another year, Mrs McKinstry, and the quality of business won’t be bothering me. At last I’ll be able to read all the books I’ve never had the time for.’
I saw the sadness deepen. I was wondering what I could possibly say when he checked himself and turned towards me.
‘Which reminds me,’ he went on briskly. ‘What’s this I hear about Miss McFarlane retiring? To the best of my knowledge, she still has several years to go. I remember taking her by the hand to the village school when I was in the top class. Surely she isn’t serious?’
‘I think Miss McFarlane’s mother has been unwell a great deal recently,’ I said cautiously.
I saw his lips tighten and his head move in a curious little gesture he always made when someone, or something, had really upset him.
‘Quite a character, old Mrs McFarlane,’ he said shortly. ‘She must be nearing ninety now.�
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His tone told me that what I’d heard in the staffroom about Connie was probably not exaggerated after all. At the age of fifty-seven, her mother, it appeared, still treated her like a child. Each morning she got up at 6.30 a.m. to light the fire and see to her mother’s needs before she left for school. After school, she did the shopping and the housework. At weekends, Mother liked to be read to and taken for drives in the countryside. Of all this, Connie never spoke, though just occasionally she would refer to ‘Mother’ in excusing herself from an evening engagement.
‘A great admirer of yours, Mrs McKinstry. I’m sure you’ll miss her when she goes.’
‘Oh, I shall indeed. She’s been so kind to me since I came to Queen’s Crescent.’
‘So, it is true.’ He nodded to himself and looked quizzically at me over the curious half-glasses he always wore in the office. ‘Another new face, perhaps? Or perhaps not. Perhaps a face I know very well?’
I blushed. For all his rather formal manners and old world air, Mr Cummings missed very little.
‘Perhaps, Mr Cummings,’ I began awkwardly. ‘You’ve guessed, of course. She is going. I have been offered the Department. Miss Braidwood wants to advertise right away, so I’ve got to decide this weekend. It’s not an easy decision.’
He looked so puzzled that I wondered if he’d forgotten about young couples and families.
‘It would be a big responsibility indeed,’ he offered finally. ‘But very rewarding, I’m sure,’ he went on quickly, as if he were happy to be back on firmer ground. ‘With the new building, I expect you’d have all kinds of resources.’
I nodded and told him about the English workshop and drama areas already planned for the new building on the outskirts of the city. He listened attentively, but when I finished he reminded me that a Department is only as good as the people who run it. He said he was sure he knew who Connie would want.
