Second Chance at the Belfast Guesthouse

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One (#ulink_36e46261-5b50-5dae-8ac6-aff576d0ba3e)

September 1960

The moment the Belfast flight was announced, Clare Hamilton put down her coffee cup and picked up the large, beribboned box parked neatly under the table. She walked quickly across the departure lounge, a small, slim figure in an elegant moss green suit and was among the very first passengers to enter the quiet, echoing corridor that led down to the roar and whine of engines, the oscillating turbulence of aircraft movements and the dazzling glare of acres of pale tarmac.

The waiting Vanguard shimmered in the strong evening sun as she paused to hand over her ticket. How long it might be before she flew again she could not guess, but if this was to be her last flight for some time, she hoped it would be like the one she’d made back in April. On just such a sunlit evening she’d flown into Aldergrove over the green landscape she so loved to the totally unexpected sequence of events which had changed her life.

‘May I put that in the hand luggage store for you, madam?’ the young steward asked politely, with a small bow towards her silver and white striped box.

He put out his hand for the box, large and rectangular, but clearly light in weight.

‘I’ll put it down by my side where it won’t get in the way,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘It’s my wedding dress,’ she added, as he seemed about to protest.

‘Who’s the lucky man?’ he asked, his careful pronunciation replaced by a familiar Ulster accent.

She laughed, suddenly delighted by the sound of home and the broad grin that creased his face as he waved her past.

She made her way to the window seat she’d booked weeks ago from her office in the Place de l’Opéra, settled herself and tried to relax, but the excitement that had pursued her all day was not to be dispersed so easily. She was going home, home to Andrew and to her beloved little green hills. In three days they would be married, ahead of them a life together quite different from any they had once imagined.

She looked down through the dusty window at the familiar activities of the airport, the small vehicles scurrying to and fro bringing luggage and catering supplies, the large fuel tankers now uncoupling their hoses and returning to their depot. Luggage manifests were being exchanged. A Royal Mail van appeared at speed, its back doors sprang open, sacks of mail flew out on to waiting trolleys that quickly disappeared from view. She listened for the familiar sound of the hold doors being banged shut.

Whenever she watched the familiar scene, whether in London or Toulouse, Zurich or Athens, she always thought of the summer of 1957, shortly before graduation, when she’d arrived in London, wearing her best summer dress and carrying a single suitcase. She had tramped the dimly lit platform at Euston Station, struggled with the escalator to the Tube, spent a night in a student hostel, got herself to Victoria for the train to Paris and wept. Whenever no one was looking, and even sometimes when they were, tears had streamed down her face. She was quite alone, without home, or job, or future. She had taken the Liverpool boat, because she had broken off her engagement with Andrew. She had loved him for so long and been so happy, but their bright hopes had been shattered and she could see no way forward for them.

The engines roared and the aircraft rose into the clear sky. The wing dipped over the Hounslow reservoirs as they turned west and she studied the streams of traffic flowing in all directions, the veins and arteries feeding the great city at their heart. She tried to take in every detail of the moving pattern for she might never come this way again. Moments later, the course correction complete, she caught sight of the Chilterns, wisps of cloud blurring their outline.

She moved uneasily in her seat, adjusted the box propped between the window and her left foot. Everyone had said she’d got it wrong, that she and Andrew were made for each other, but after his cousin was killed in a road accident, he’d abandoned their plan to go to Canada and had taken over the running of the Richardson family estates. She’d seen him shoulder the responsibility for his grandmother, his aunt and uncle, his cousin Ginny. In fact, it seemed he’d accepted his obligations to everyone except herself, so that all they’d planned together appeared just a beautiful dream.

It was not the first time in her life the world had come crashing down around her. Long years earlier, on a hot June afternoon in 1946, she and her young brother William had been taken to the Fever Hospital outside Armagh by the Headmaster of their school. Days later, her mother and father, Ellie and Sam Hamilton, had both died in the typhoid epidemic of that year leaving them parentless and homeless.

She had found a new home with her grandfather, Robert Scott, and then, only weeks after a scholarship had taken her to university in Belfast, he’d walked down the lane to stand by the anvil in the forge where he’d worked all his life and died instantly of a heart attack.

Once again, she had found herself homeless. The landlord had given her two weeks’ notice to dispose of the contents. There’d been help with that sad task from Jack Hamilton, the youngest of her uncles, but dealing with the memories of a house lived in by Scott blacksmiths for over a century was a different matter. Harder still was the loss of what had been her second home, the one she’d lived in for half her eighteen years.

Suddenly the distant pattern of the English Midlands far below disappeared completely. The grey mizzle that swirled around the aircraft and streaked her window with tiny raindrops as they continued climbing into cloud enveloped her in the chill remembrance of that bleak time. After Granda Scott died the only comfort she knew came from Andrew’s letters and their occasional short phone calls in the dim hall of the house in Elmwood Avenue where she’d inherited her cousin Ronnie’s old student room after he packed up and headed for Canada.

She went on staring through the window, perfectly aware she was rigid with tension. She had never been afraid of flying, had enjoyed all but the most turbulent of flights, but what she could never bear was this grey blanket that removed all light and joy from a world where previously there had been sunshine and colour.

She took a deep breath, extracted her book from her handbag, tried to focus on the words on the page. Then, as suddenly as it had disappeared, the sunlight returned. It poured down from a blue sky, glancing off the moist, glistening wing, the view below now of dazzling white cloud caps. She shut the book gratefully. Yes, she had known the light would return, that above the murk the sun always shone. But no matter how many times it happened, she still feared the grey mist. It was not the mist in itself. It was the fear that, like some of the worst times in her life, the bleakness would go on for so long she would finally lose heart and give up.

The cloudscape below always made her think of the Rocky Mountains, though any postcards she’d ever seen of them made it perfectly clear they didn’t look like this at all. Probably her Rocky Mountains were pictures in her imagination, something she had called up when she and Andrew were planning to go to Canada.

The plan itself emerged quite unexpectedly one day when they’d had an outing with lunch as a special treat. Andrew had looked so miserable most of the time she’d forced him to tell her what was wrong. He’d finally admitted that being back in Belfast and near her didn’t make up for the misery of his job with the firm of solicitors his uncle had arranged for him.

He’d been so negative to begin with, had said there was no other way of earning a living, given all he had was a Law Degree from Cambridge. Gazing down at the towering mountains of cloud, silhouetted against the brilliant blue sky, she remembered how she’d refused to go along with his negative view of himself and asked him what he’d do if he were rich and if money were no object. His answer had delighted her, for it was the same answer he’d given years earlier when the two of them were playing Monopoly with his cousins Ginny and Edward at Caledon that very first summer they’d been able to spend time together.

‘I’d buy cows,’ he said firmly. ‘But not here,’ he added, looking just as dejected as when they’d begun to talk.

She’d stopped smiling instantly, but she went on asking questions and by the time they’d left their sitting place, they’d made their decision. Canada it would be. The Palliser Triangle to be precise, because Andrew had a relative who had gone out there in the 1920s and now had a very large ranch with a substantial herd.

The plan to go to Canada had sustained her through the last year of her Honours course at Queens and Andrew’s year in Linen Hall Street, a junior solicitor at the beck and call of elderly partners. They were very experienced and quite meticulous over points of law, but they had a set of values and attitudes towards the people they encountered that he found almost impossible to stomach.

Then, on that wonderful day when Clare finished her last exam and they’d planned a picnic supper in the Castlereagh Hills to celebrate, it all began to go wrong. Ginny and Edward had had a head-on collision on a narrow country road with a vehicle that shouldn’t have been there. Edward never regained consciousness, Ginny was left with scars on her face and arms and Andrew found himself head of the family and responsible for both the house in Caledon and his grandmother’s home at Drumsollen. The vision of wide acres of prairie and glistening mountains crumbled at a touch, like a warm and comforting dream dissolving as one wakes to the chill of a winter morning.

Perhaps she had been wrong to break off their engagement. If she’d stayed with Andrew, not the most practical of men, she could have helped him cope with the tangle of financial affairs, mortgages and death duties that enmeshed him. She could have supported Ginny, who’d taken her half-brother’s death so very badly and whose scars would need more than plastic surgery if they were not to affect her for the rest of her life.

She felt the bite of tension in her shoulders as the images flowed back. From a point in the future, it’s always easy to see how things could have been different. Here and now, after more than two years in a demanding job, with a new life, new friends, renewed hope for the future and a wedding dress waiting to be worn, it was just possible to see that there might have been an alternative. But the person she was now was not the person she was then. The girl who set off on the Liverpool boat could not have shared Andrew with all the many and conflicting demands he had accepted without question.

She looked at her watch. The time had gone so quickly. Any minute now the familiar tape-recording would tell them to fasten their seat-belts. As they began to lose height, she took a last look at her Rocky Mountains and continued to argue with herself, as if it were a matter of great urgency that she decided what she really thought. Without their parting, there would have been no job in Paris, no new friends like Louise and Jean-Pierre. Especially, there would have been no Robert Lafarge, the eminent French banker who had given her a job and had now become a dear friend, one who treated her like the daughter he’d lost when his wife and children disappeared in the Fall of France.

Parting with Andrew had been heartbreaking, but she’d done her best to begin all over again. When they’d met up again by accident last April and spent a weekend together, they’d admitted they’d found out things about themselves they might never have learnt in any other way.

She prepared herself as they descended rapidly. What did it matter if she arrived home in a rainstorm? She smiled to herself as she remembered her leaving party, the laughter and the gaiety in her favourite restaurant. Her colleagues had teased her, wished her luck, drunk her health with rather a lot of very good champagne and promised to visit her in Ireland, even if it did rain all the time.

Moments later, they came out below the base of the cloud. To her absolute amazement, she saw the familiar outline of the Isle of Man lying in the midst of a deep blue Irish Sea. Beyond, to the west, as far as the eye could see, there wasn’t a cloud in sight, the green and lovely land she called ‘home’ stretched into the far distance, radiant in the low evening sunshine. The Mourne Mountains threw long shadows towards the gentle hills of County Down as the aircraft moved northwards. As the wing dipped over the brick-covered acres of Belfast, she caught the first sight of the Antrim Hills. Dark, hard-edged basalt, as uncompromising as the six-storey mills that sprouted at their feet. Beyond lay the gleaming expanse of Lough Neagh, set amid green fields dotted with small, white farmhouses, placed like models on a playroom floor, a handful of trees alongside each one to shelter it from the prevailing wind.

She wished she could pause, however briefly, so that this moment would be fixed forever in her mind. She needed time to gaze at the far horizon, to separate out the Sperrins and the mountains of Donegal from the distant banks of cloud, beyond which the sun would descend into the Atlantic. But only seconds later they were low over the calm water of the lough. They bumped slightly on the new concrete runway at Aldergrove, disturbing, if only for a moment, the hares who were feeding on the rich grass alongside.

The engines roared in reverse, the whole cabin vibrating, then as the noise and vibration died away the plane taxied so slowly towards the new terminal building that she was able to look down into the yards of the nearest farms. The newly-milked cows moved back from byre to meadow, as indifferent to the noise of their new neighbours as the hares who grazed on the margins of the runways.

‘Andrew, I’m here,’ she said, catching the sleeve of the tall, fair-haired young man who was leaning over the balcony and peering down anxiously into the baggage hall.