Country Girl: A Memoir (42 page)

Trip to the Lake District in England with Sasha, late 1970s.

The back of an ambulance is a big place to be in alone. One Easter Saturday I was diagnosed with a strangulated hernia,
and were it not for the fact that Sasha and a girl called Shoba were there, I would have gone “among the shades.” So remote was the Pink House that the ambulance, which the doctor had called, couldn’t find us. Sasha was standing outside the gate, waving for all his worth, only to see it turn around when it came to a bend where the road seemed to jut out into the sea. He ran with all his might and caught up with them, still searching, at another fork in a road, so that by the time I was lifted into it and covered with a red blanket, I was woozy from the injection the doctor had given me. We would have driven past Errigal and on through the Poisoned Glen, except that I was oblivious to it, hurtling back and forth in what I can only call a quasi-world. It was with great difficulty, on being admitted to the hospital, that I could remember my name and my mother’s maiden name, and I felt that the barrage of questions was too much. Then it was a big ward, with televisions blaring, and after what seemed too long a time, I was being wheeled in a trolley by two young men, who were eagerly discussing the tos and fros of the hurling match the following day, Easter Sunday. It was bumpsy-daisy as we careened along corridors, up one floor and then down another, and then up again to the operating theater, where so many strange figures in white coats, white hats, and white masks waited, as for some ritual.

I wakened with my mouth full of tubes, gasping for water. A youth came to take blood, but was unable to raise any vein, telling me—as I begged him to cease—that it was a “learning curve” for him, too. Later he was replaced by a Sri Lankan nurse who was like a jeweler with the needle, the blood happily bubbling into the glass vial.

The woman in the bed next to me was dying, as I could tell by her moaning and by the many relatives that kept arriving. Then the screen was put around her, and not long after, the priest came, carrying the oils in a wooden box, to give her
viaticum. A nurse followed, with a tall, lit wax candle in one hand and a white cloth in the other. The quiet droning of their voices as they recited the Rosary, the smell of the lit candle, and the warm oils made for a happy scene, and it was not like death at all; it was as if she was merely passing from one chapter of her life into another. I longed to follow her, as the thirst was well nigh unbearable and the machine inside my mouth felt like a forklift. She was carried out in the bed, and after the screen was removed, I saw my two pink earplugs that had fallen off my bedside table and lay forlornly on the floor. It was sheer luck that I had found them in my purse after being admitted to the hospital, and they had been a buttress against the constant noise and blare of television. They were retrieved and washed, and that night, sounds were once again muffled.

The day the tubes were taken out and I could feel my swallow and then taste the first drops of water that were like nectar, I felt a great gratitude to be alive.

Yet it was when I got home I began to weigh things up, as I sat and read the get-well cards and looked out the window at the daffodils on one side and the sea on the other. I had to concede that as a nondriver I had picked a lonely outpost indeed. No seafarer I. Yet it was a year before I put the house on the market.

And so the day came when I was wrapping the glasses and the several ornaments, hanging torn sheets over the mirrors, emptying drawers, finding leaflets about caring for one’s carpet and novel ideas for cocktail recipes. Great stacks of cardboard boxes were already packed, and the sitting room had a sacked appearance to it. I jumped at hearing a light tap on the door. It was a young woman, one of the “six sisters,” who had built a small house on a hill above mine. She wore a long calico skirt and a
white drawstring blouse with blown poppies on it. Her shyness was evident from the way she hesitated. I had often seen her in the years that I lived there, deft as a mountain goat, moving from rock to rock, and one Christmas Day, when she thought there was nobody about, she peeled off all her clothes and literally ran into the ice-cold water. She emerged a few minutes later, a verdant Eve, slathered with seaweed, which clung to her, the weed they called sea lettuce. What impulse had made her do that? I would see her often in the evenings, with her tin can, searching the undersides of the rocks for mussels for her dinner, but we had never spoken, neither of us had dared to break the ice.

She came in, wondering if I needed any help, and before I could answer she had already begun to pack things. There was something I had always wanted to ask her. Had she resented my being there, those ten years? “Yes. Twice.” The first was when she saw a second chimney put in the gable wall that was the stone wall of the house she had grown up in. The second was the night we moved in, lights in every room, so that to her, a few hundred yards up the hill, it was a fairy castle from which she had been banished. There was one other small thing I had to ask. What had made her plunge into the cold sea that Christmas Day? “Ah now” was the evasive answer.

Piling the books, she asked if I had read them all, and mentioned the only one she had read in years,
The Bridges of Madison County.
Then her eye fell on an open page of one of the books and she read aloud: “The sea, and Homer… it’s Love that moves all things.” She liked it, copied it on the back of one of the cocktail recipes, and put it in the pocket of her long skirt. He was a tall man, a stranger from the Land of the White Nights and the Cloudberries, and the previous Christmas he had docked his boat over in Gweedore harbor and she’d left a daft note in an empty beer bottle that was on the deck of his
boat, which was named after a Norse goddess. No, she did not dream of sailing the high seas with him, she would never leave that coastline, she was married to it, the way one cannot be married to a man.

Pointing to the low window, she said, “That’s where they laid my mother out, the night she died.” She was a child at the time. Her mother had given birth to eleven children in that tiny house, and she belonged to it, in a way I never could.

Under the stairs I found a last bottle of champagne, and we sat on the edge of the long table that the movers would soon dismantle, looking out to sea, not saying a word.

It was still dark when I left the following morning and put the back-door key through the letterbox of the big ceremonial oak door with its iron rivets. I had also left a letter for the auctioneer marked “Urgent.” He was coming later to look at a damp patch which had been discovered and was causing concern for the purchasers, so that the sale was in danger of falling through. A copy of it is in my book of memorabilia:

The minicab driver was not the young man I had expected, he was older and seemed peeved in some way, maybe the early hour.

In that pale light we came upon a strange and ghostlike spectacle. A field full of hares, dozens of them, peculiarly still, their ears cocked. There was something eerie about it, a suggestion
of madness and menace. I asked the driver to slow down, and as he did, some, obviously the females, scattered to one side, to allow for what would be the tournaments. Standing on their hind legs, grouped in pairs, the males began to box one another. They did it expertly and with a formality, as if it had been rehearsed, which it couldn’t have been—this hooking and jabbing they knew by some innate instinct, the battle that had to be waged to win the hand of a lady love.

Fearing I would miss the plane, the driver started the engine up and, apropos of nothing, said, “I had a good marriage,” his cue to tell me how suddenly his wife died, had been given the all-clear when she went for a checkup, and he was called in from the waiting room to find her, the doctor and two nurses, one male, all in floods of tears, as she had only a week to live. He could not remember what he had done in the two years after her death, could not remember which daughter he had gone to for the Christmas dinner. He drifted through life in a haze and was given counseling that couldn’t help. Eventually, he decided to take up the taxi work, to meet people, and then, late one evening, he was called to drive a lady home. When she got out of the car, she suggested they might have a walk sometime. Already they had taken a run in the car over to Letterkenny to look at the shops and another on a windy headland above Gortahork, where they were nearly blown away. He wasn’t saying anything, but maybe if I came back on a visit, I might see a change in him, he might be a family man again.

The plane always took off in one of two directions, depending on the wind, and as I had hoped, it cruised above the Pink House, so happy down below, an odalisque, her soft contours opening to the elements.