Last Summer in Ireland

When I woke it was quite dark and yet my eyes felt dazzled as if by strong sunlight. For a moment, I had no idea what had happened or where I was.

Gradually the dim outlines of my room took shape around me. It was much too dark to see the face of my watch, but beyond the undrawn curtains the sky was pricked with stars. Faint moonlight made pale patches on the wallpaper and caught the bright petals of a kingcup in a glass vase on my table by the window.

Memory flowed back as I burrowed deeper into the soft hollow of the duvet where I had lain down, just as I was, when I staggered back from the garden exhausted after the throbbing pain of that fearsome headache. Startled, I realised that I’d had a full-blown migraine and not a trace of it was left. Not only had the pain completely vanished but there was no hint at all of the nausea that usually lingers long after the pain itself has gone. Apart from my cold arms, chilled by the flow of night air through the open window, I was so blissfully warm and comfortable that I felt I never wanted to move again.

For a little while I lay quite still just enjoying the wonderful sense of being free from pain. Then I began to recall the dream from which I’d woken, an intensely vivid dream full of detail still fresh in my mind. Unlike those dreams that evaporate the moment you wake up and try to catch them, this one was crystal clear and so absorbing I found I could rerun it like a video I had made.

‘Now I know what her name is,’ I said out loud, amazed that it had only just struck me.

Her name was Deara. She had just been bereaved, as I had. But how different her situation. She had loved the old woman who had died in her arms. With her gone, Deara would be lonely and vulnerable. I didn’t see myself as having those problems as a result of losing my mother.

The old woman’s name was Merdaine. I whispered it over and over again. I was sure I’d heard it before, somewhere. But nothing came to me. I always forget that the harder you try to remember something the less likely you are to succeed. So I tried to put it out of mind and hoped it would come of its own accord.

I still felt very reluctant to move and break the spell of comfort and well-being that enveloped me, but I had needs that would wait no longer. I was desperate for a pee and I was absolutely ravenous.

The fluorescent lights in the kitchen are hard on the eyes at the best of times. Tonight they were unbearable. Hastily, I poured myself a bowl of cornflakes, stuck it on a tray with a jug of milk and a spoon and carried it down the hall to the sitting room.

A small sliver of moon was rising above the trees down by the road. It cast long shadows across the lawn, as I stood by the window, munching devotedly. Outside, everything was still. Not a single car whizzed past on the road. Not even a bird rustled on its roost in the shrubbery. I thought of all that had happened since William Neill dropped me at the foot of the drive after church. I found it hard to believe I could have experienced so much, in such a short time, and feel so incredibly different at the end of it.

The sitting room clock struck twelve. I laughed aloud. No, my ball gown was not going to turn to rags. I felt quite clear in my mind that what I’d been given was not going to disappear. But I was equally sure that it was up to me to decide exactly what I did with it and whether I was willing to accept what might grow from my experience in the weeks to come, while I dealt with the business that had brought me back to this house and led me to re-encounter the life I had once lived within its limits.

Surprised at how very calm I felt, despite my rising sense of excitement at the prospect, I went back to the kitchen, made some coffee and spread a thick slice of bread with honey. I couldn’t remember when bread and honey had tasted so good. I drank my coffee, left cup and crumby plate on the draining board with the empty cornflake bowl, rinsed my fingers and ran back upstairs to my room.

As I went in, it was bright enough to see the blue notebooks sitting on my table. I paused only for a moment before I drew the curtains together, switched on my Anglepoise, unscrewed the top of my pen and began to write.

This time, there was no problem. I had something to set down that I couldn’t wait to begin. It must be written now, before even another minute should pass. The sharpness and vividness of what I had experienced today mustn’t be lost or allowed to dull with the passage of time. And the words came without deliberate thought and almost without any effort at all.

6 (#ulink_4143c1f4-4255-50ca-bf2c-6c872975dd4d)

It was two o’clock in the morning when I put down my pen, pulled off my clothes and crawled back under the crumpled duvet, but when I woke next morning and saw what I had written I was so excited by it I ran downstairs full of a bubbling sense of joy. It was so strong that even the dreary list of jobs I jotted down while I drank my second cup of coffee could not extinguish it.

‘A touch of the Monday shit,’ my friend Sheila would say. She has three children under ten and a husband passionate about all kinds of do-it-yourself. She dreads Monday morning. Left to face the wreckage of the weekend, she steels herself for that moment, back from school, when she pushes open the front door, walks through the empty house and sizes up the full enormity of the task that faces her.

Today I would be keeping her company. The estate agent was coming on Wednesday, so the debris generated by the funeral and our attempts at a preliminary sort would have to be dealt with and the whole house made clean and tidy. And then, there was the woodwork.

I sighed. Beautifully painted only two years ago, the white woodwork throughout the house had suffered a year of Mother’s cigarette smoke and a year of neglect. Sandy and I had tried wiping a damp cloth over one of the worst bits. We’d produced a dirty streak and confirmed the source of the nasty smell we noticed the moment we stepped into the closed up rooms. There was masses of it; doors, skirtings, picture rails, banisters, windows, built-in shelves and assorted ledges.

I put on the immersion, heated up enough water for a home confinement and got stuck in. I really did surprise myself. Whether I was so far away inside my head that I didn’t notice what I was doing, or whether I had a sudden burst of energy, I don’t know, but by lunch time I’d done so well I reckoned I could allow myself to go out into the garden.

I’d already made a beginning, but the flowerbeds were still a sorry sight. Encouraged by the sudden warmth, weeds were growing even more vigorously than the carefully chosen perennials, tall plants leant at drunken angles or squashed less lofty specimens, while winter’s damage had left behind empty spaces and dead foliage. My fingers itched to put things right, to restore the shape and form my father had created, a shape and form my mother had never troubled herself to modify. Somehow I felt I owed it to my father to restore what he had so lovingly created.

Morning and evening I did whatever needed doing indoors, but through most of the long hours of daylight I worked in the garden, following the shadows on the flowerbeds so I could move plants that were overcrowded and fill up the empty spaces that spoilt the overall effect. And from the moment I picked up a trowel everything I had learnt from my father came back to me.

‘Yes, that’s all very well,’ he would say, when I read out the instructions on the back of a packet of seeds. ‘Not all plants have read the book, you know.’

That’s what he used always to say when some job needed doing at the wrong time of day, or in the wrong season, or to the wrong plant.

‘If you move a plant when it’s in flower, it will die,’ he would say cheerfully, as he dug it up and carried it carefully across the garden. ‘Seedlings should be potted up when they are two inches high,’ he would intone as he gently separated the roots from a flourishing boxful three times that height. ‘A plant is more interested in growth than in obeying the rules,’ he would say dryly. ‘Plants can’t read books, they just get on with what they need to do.’

He would have been proud of me those first few days when I pruned and moved and planted out with a gay abandon quite at odds with my normal caution. And not a single seedling wilted. Things grew as if they were grateful for being given the space they needed, the light and air they craved.

Everything I touched flourished as if by magic. And then the day the spirea bloomed, its branches weighed down with clusters of delicate white flowers, I suddenly remembered my old childhood fantasy.

‘One day,’ I said to myself, ‘I shall have a magic ring, a huge ring set with masses of small white stones.’

I had picked a single blossom from the small spirea bush and held it between my fingers. Pretending the cluster of tiny flowers was the boss of my magic ring, I walked solemnly round the garden.

‘Everything I point this ring at will grow especially well.’ I picked up a broken twig and continued on my way. ‘Everything I touch with this wand of willow will turn into whatever I want it to turn into and any one who’s ill whom I touch with my hands will immediately get better.’

I looked up at the magnificent spirea towering above me and laughed to myself. Would a child in the 1980s entertain such imaginings? Or was it only that their fantasy moved in different directions, into space or time travelling?

I had no answer, but all through the day as I tucked self-sown seedlings into spaces I made for them and stroked their leaves as I firmed in the soil around them – the way my father always did – I was acutely aware of what an imaginative child I must have been and how rudely my fantasy world was shattered when I lost my father’s sheltering presence.

For my mother had no time at all for imagination. Indeed, she was actively hostile to even the mildest flights of fancy. I could even remember her objecting to an essay I’d been given for homework: ‘A Day in the Life of a Penny.’ I hadn’t been much enamoured of it myself, but she had been quite virulent. Wasting time on such nonsense. That wasn’t what she’d sent us to the High School for.

So what on earth would she make of the experience I’d had yesterday, when this girl called Deara came and healed my migraine, and then by some means I still couldn’t even guess at, had begun to share her life with me through the images that came to me unbidden, asleep and awake?

As I worked my way round the garden, once more my mind filled with the images I’d had both sitting under the hawthorns and later while I slept. I found I could call them back so easily and as I went over them again and again I found I was asking questions of them, trying to fit together the fragments that had come to me. Who was this woman, Merdaine, for instance, of whom Deara seemed to be so fond? Clearly not her mother. So what had happened to her mother? And what about brothers and sisters? She seemed a solitary person and yet someone who could be very loving.

It was on my third afternoon in the garden that I started dropping things. I knocked the bloom off a plant I was tying carefully to a stake and was furious with myself. The more I tried to calm down, the more anxious and restless I became. Increasingly, I felt as if there was something terribly important I hadn’t done. Something awful would happen if I didn’t pay attention and do it right away.

I told myself to stop being silly. Things had been going well; the estate agent had come, spent two hours measuring and taking photographs and made a special note about the well-stocked garden. He’d even complimented me on how well the rockeries were looking. The house was immaculately tidy, the woodwork pristine and the only smell was a hint of lavender polish and the varied perfumes of jugs and vases of blossom and flowers.

In the end I put down my tools and walked straight across the lawn to the hawthorns. The moment I sat down on my stone under their shade, the agitation ceased. ‘It’s Deara,’ I said to myself. ‘She needs me. She’s in some kind of trouble and I must try to help her.’

Without giving any thought to what I was doing, I propped myself against the trunk of the largest hawthorn, shut my eyes and tried to bring her to mind.

Immediately, there she was, leaving the hut where I had first seen her with the old woman, Merdaine. She walked slowly uphill towards a much larger building near the top of the great mound. I could tell by the way she walked that she was uneasy, reluctant and fearful. At the same time it was clear to me she was determined to do whatever it was she had to do.

I leaned back and concentrated all my attention on the slim figure walking slowly away from me.

It was three days after Merdaine’s burial before the King held Council again. Although it was the custom to observe such a period of mourning on the death of a close relative, it was also Morrough’s custom to disregard any observance which was not to his liking. So although Merdaine had been mother’s sister to him, many were surprised that he made no attempt to go to the Hall of Council.

It was not only Morrough who acknowledged Merdaine’s passing. An unfamiliar hush lay over the whole encampment. Deara noticed it as she took up her usual tasks again, waiting as best she might to see what her future would be. There was turbulence, foreboding almost, which made her think of those days when the thunderclouds mass and the Gods vent their wrath upon human kind.

Yet on the surface there was no visible change in the pattern of daily life. The weather continued warm and fine, the cattle grew fat on the lush pastures and the cooking pots were full every day. Women span in the sunshine and ground barley out of doors, their shifts or tunics drawn high in their kirtles to benefit from the sun. But their chatter seemed less noisy, their glances less direct. Many of them feared Merdaine, for she had a sharp tongue and tolerated little foolishness; nevertheless, she was part of their life, stable and secure. Her going left a space which few of them had the slightest idea how to fill.

For Deara, the days passed with incredible slowness. From first light till sundown seemed an eternity of time. She found it hard to sleep in the empty hut and lay wide-eyed in the darkness, seeing again the days of her childhood, her meeting with Merdaine, and all the hours she had spent by her side learning the herblore, making infusions, grinding willow bark, blending spices, repeating and repeating all the recipes, mixtures, prescriptions and laws which Merdaine herself knew. Often her head had ached and the words tangled till she thought she would never understand anything. But it had come. Like the welcome to Nodons, the words had finally stood still. They were hers for ever. As were the parting words Merdaine had spoken to her. She had repeated them to herself as often as any poem or prayer.

The words would stay with her. She would have need of them and of all Merdaine’s wisdom, for on the third day after the burial fires she must go to the Hall of Council bearing Merdaine’s brooch to Morrough, the King.

Deara had never before entered the Hall of Council for it was not a place where women might go, unless, of course, they had a petition to make, or were party to a dispute. Today, as she joined the groups of people making their way between the King’s Hall and the storehouses, she felt full of dread. However much she had tried to master her feelings, she knew she was afraid. Lying awake in the short summer night, part of her wanted to run away, to slip out of the well-gate which was never guarded these days, and disappear into the Long Wood. Another part of her argued that it would be no use. There was nowhere to run to, no neighbouring encampment to shelter her. And besides, although she bore no slave mark, for Merdaine had refused to permit it, her situation would be obvious. A slave was a slave and the law tracts were quite specific as to how they were to be treated. No, there was no escape that way.

‘Cumail, where do you think you are going?’

Deara stopped short by the doorway of the hall and turned to face the man who had spoken. It was Conor. Only he would call her ‘slave’ instead of using the name the woman who had nursed her had given her, or even the commonly used word, ‘handmaiden’.

She looked him full in the face. ‘I go to petition the King.’