It had a sink, a toilet, a rust-stained bath, and a paraffin stove that took the edge from the cold. The bedrooms were small and low-ceilinged, their rectangular windows set low down near the floor so you had to kneel on the boards to look out. In the biggest bedroom was a double iron bedstead with an old feather mattress, the sort with a hollow in the middle that you both fall into no matter how far apart you’ve started out. Not that I minded until I was pregnant. I liked sleeping sprawled over Liam.
So it was no palace, but that didn’t bother me. The flat in Belfast hadn’t exactly been Ideal Home country either, and there I’d opened my eyes every morning on Robbie’s bony shoulders, which never quite lost their tension, even in sleep. Here I would open my eyes and there would be Liam, flat on his back and snoring his head off, his brown curls rising and falling with every breath. I’d wriggle and squirm myself closer into his arms, then lie there smiling like an idiot until I grew bored with contentment and kicked him awake.
There was an ash tree outside the window and on windy nights in summer it swished and tapped on the glass, and on windy nights in winter it rattled and banged, and there was nothing I loved more than its lonely, companionable sound. Liam loved it too, he would never have cut it down, but when Andrew was four he was plagued with dark dreams and he’d wake in fear at the sound and the shadows moving across the wall. So the ash tree went, and I had to content myself with the one further round to the side of the house, which kept a civil distance and was never intimate with us. I’m sorry now that I let Liam cut it down, I should have taken time with Andrew and brought him back to loving the tree, for from that day he wanted everything that frightened him removed from him and there’s no peace in living like that.
But all that was a long way off. It was autumn when I came here, and I was stunned by this bosomy, treed land with the blue hills rising up from its plains and the march of bluer mountains away to the east. I had never been to “the South” that was south, I thought it would all look like Achill or Donegal—acid land, wild and empty, all wind and sky and that haunted light. Nothing had prepared me for the ease of this place, its soft skies and luxuriant growth, its wide meadows and its loose brown rivers.
Settled weather. There never was an autumn like it. Day followed day, week followed week, we would wake to mist like a wraith at the window, breath-thin, a wash of moisture drifting about the house, the sheds, the trees. The fields were heavy with dew; the horses and sheep stood up to their hoofs in vapour, grey as the sea. Even as I watched, the meadows brightened. By eleven the mist had burned clear.
Then sunlight, silence. Each day, the air higher and thinner. Leaves dropping down in the stillness, knocking against the layered branches, a hollow, papery sound. And the cheep of birds, small flurries of song, the chestnuts fiery, the ash going lemon yellow in the soft, clear light. At evening the sky all around the horizon laid out with layered white cloud, like fresh, folded linen. Above this, a pure, thin blue, with combings of fine cirrus, the wisps of an old woman’s hair.
I’d no idea what I was doing there, only kept from panicking by squashing down all thought. Derry, Belfast—they seemed like stories I’d invented, black-and-white photos, a long way away and in another time. I would wake in the early morning and lie in the breathing stillness, so happy I dared not move.
I should do this remembering more; it might bring me contentment. What’s happiness? Nothing at all. Wind in the trees. You only notice when it dies away.
We hid ourselves from Liam’s family, but with his friends it was different.
“This is Ellen,” he’d say. No explanation, no word of where he’d got me from. It must have seemed strange to them—one day I hadn’t existed, the next I was part of his life. A few of them asked about Noreen, but he only shook his head and smiled. Maybe they saw the way we were together and that stilled their tongues.
They seemed an odd lot, scruffy and garrulous, into music but indifferent to fashion. That was strange to me. There was more money in the North in spite of the unemployment, and if you were young you were mad for style. Here it was the opposite. Most of Liam’s friends seemed to live in jeans, and the girls my age hardly bothered with makeup at all. Everything was borrowed, thrown together, improvised. They thumbed lifts or rode around the place on antique bicycles; the few cars they had access to were clapped-out wrecks that no one ever serviced, much less washed.
But it didn’t stop them enjoying themselves. Any excuse was a good excuse and what money they had disappeared right away on a good night out with plenty of drink. Just the same, the talk was all of America and emigration and getting your hands on a green card.
That was then; it’s all completely different now. The banks are lending, the emigrants are coming back home, and everyone’s learned about possessions with the speed of light. But then was when I came, and it was so unlike what I was used to, it fairly made my hair stand up on end.
But Liam looked out for me, he knew I was frightened still, alert for any hint of the things I saw that weren’t there. We’d be in company, and something would shift on the edge of my vision; I’d tense, but before I’d had time to panic, there he’d be, at my side. And it wasn’t like it had been with Robbie, I didn’t feel hunted down by his eyes, just less always the stranger in the crowd. Which was odd, when you think about it, because for the first time in my life I truly was.
I knew I ought to write to Robbie, but I couldn’t put pen to paper and I couldn’t bear to ring him up and hear his voice. You think with a new love you’ll leave off loving the old one, but it doesn’t always work like that, or it didn’t for me. I knew I’d never go back to Robbie no matter what happened with Liam, but I cared for him still and I knew I’d hurt him sore. And I was his lawful wife, and Robbie set store by such things; if I wasn’t going back I should tell him so he could get himself a divorce. Robbie needed a wife—and children, too—that way lay his only chance. But I didn’t write or phone, I sent no word.
I signed on in the nearest town. There were no jobs anyway—half the country was signing on, they asked about qualifications, and when I said a degree in Russian they shoved the forms across at me, the same as in the North.
Liam was standing beside me, one hand on the counter, the other one dropped to my leg, which he planned to squeeze if I needed help.
“Different country, different ways,” he said. “One squeeze for yes, two for no.”
I was nervous as a kitten, for I’d got it into my head that they’d turn me down flat if they found out I was a Prod. But they didn’t. I answered their questions and filled in their forms, and I didn’t need help from Liam. Then they said it all had to be processed and told me when to come back.
The minute we were outside the door, Liam asked me about the Russian.
“Did I not tell you?” I said, all surprise, though I knew very well that I hadn’t. Robbie had used it against me—he’d liked going on about fancy degrees and a fast track to the dole, while he was only City and Guilds but it paid the bills. I’m being hard on Robbie, I know that. Robbie was a grafter, never out of work, and he measured himself by the wage packet he brought home. I took any job that came up—unskilled and low-paid, I wasn’t fussy—but they never lasted that long, and I felt inadequate when I wasn’t working, so Robbie’s sneers got to me.
At that time, with glasnost and the crumbling of the Soviet Union, I felt worse about the Russian than ever. As though I’d just put my shirt on the favourite and watched him come limping in last.
“They told us at school there’d always be a need for Russian translators,”
