Authors: Christopher Bland
Anna seems contented with their domestic life and tells James, ‘I’ve never lived like this. With Zach in Newcastle it was a roller-coaster; with Jack on my own in Allenmouth it was hard work with no one to share it. Here I’ve got Jack, and you, and Mick the dog, and the Sullivans, and my ladies at the oyster shed.’
‘If you came to church you could widen your circle, include the ex-pats.’
‘I’m not quite ready for God. And I’ll never be ready for the ex-pats.’
James has collected little seed pearls from the oysters since he started the fishery; he selects his best dozen, all small and oddly shaped, but with the deep translucent glow of natural pearls, and takes them to the jewellery maker in the Tralee craft village. She is one of the survivors, one of the few Kerry natives to work there.
‘They’re lovely, quite hard to set in gold, but I’ll try. Do you know the ring size?’
James does. He’s held Anna’s hand with particular care in the previous ten days and knows that her ring finger is the same size as his little finger.
‘I’d like an inscription on the inside: “Their hearts shall not grow old.”’
‘Sorry, you’d need several rings for that. Three short words is the best I can do.’
James collects the ring a month later. On the following Saturday, when Jack has gone to bed and they are sitting in front of the fire, he gives Anna the little red box. She opens it cautiously, sees the ring, frowns and then smiles.
‘James, it’s beautiful.’
‘They’re all Drimnamore pearls.’
‘They glow. And the gold’s a gentle colour. What does it say inside?’ She turns the ring over to read the inscription.
‘It’s Irish gold, the Tralee jeweller said, from an old brooch.
Mo mhuirnín,
it says.’
Anna slips it on her finger and admires it in the light of the fire. ‘Perfect fit. It’ll be a badge of respectability in Drimnamore.’ She stands up and leads James into their bedroom. A pair of thigh waders are draped over the foot of the bed.
‘You can choose who wears them,’ says Anna.
A week later she asks James if she can borrow the car for two days.
‘Of course. Where are you going?’
‘Cork. Saracens are playing Munster in the Heineken Cup on Saturday. Zach’s a Saracen now, and he’s in the team, so
The Kerryman
says. We’ll drive over in the morning, spend the night in Cork.’ She sees the look on James’s face and adds, ‘No, I’m not going to sleep with him. Although that’s my business.’
Anna and Jack drive to Cork and return on Sunday. James is relieved; Anna and Jack had reappeared in his life suddenly, and he remains afraid that they could disappear overnight.
‘Saracens lost, but Zach scored a try. We met them after the game and Zach gave me this.’ Jack holds out a miniature rugby ball with signatures scrawled all over it.
Later Anna says to James, ‘I’m glad they met again. Jack loved seeing him play. He still looks up and points to heaven when he scores, and he did ask Jack whether he was saved and then tried to explain what that meant until I stopped him. He’s probably got no more than a year or two playing top-class rugby, and I can’t think what he will do after that. I told him the three of us were living together here.’
‘Why did you tell him that?’
‘Jack talked about you, and Zach asked. And he saw my ring. He may be drinking again. He had only one pint in the clubhouse bar after the game, but with Zach it’s always been all or nothing.’
Anna prods James at regular intervals to get in touch with his half-sister.
‘I don’t know her. It might disrupt her life and she probably won’t want to meet me.’
‘Why don’t you let her decide that? She’s hardly a child, she can make up her own mind.’
James agrees but does nothing. The demands of the oyster fishery are his excuse, until in early spring a sudden bloom of algae in the Kenmare River means they cannot harvest oysters for at least three weeks.
‘Now’s your chance,’ says Anna.
James, nervous, rings the Maryborough number his father had given him and asks to speak to Cathleen McCann.
‘She lives in Dublin,’ says a man’s voice. ‘Who shall I say called?’
‘I’m James Burke. John Burke’s son.’
James hears nothing and wonders whether the phone is about to be put down.
‘I’m Diarmuid McCann, Cathleen’s brother. If you give me your number she may call you back at the weekend. That’s up to her.’
James is surprised at how pleased he feels when Cathleen returns his call on Sunday evening.
‘I know who you are, of course,’ she says, and agrees to meet in Dublin in a week’s time.
Dublin hasn’t changed since James’s last visit. The ‘To Let’ and ‘For Sale’ signs are everywhere, and James sees only one hopeful ‘Under Offer’ above an office block that he remembers from his earlier trip. As he drives around St Stephen’s Green there is scaffolding on the front of one of the new financial palaces; workmen are dismantling the Anglo-Irish Bank’s sign. ‘Go Irish’, the remaining letters read, in a strange injunction to the bankers, property developers and estate agents responsible for Ireland’s boom and bust.
Cathleen and James meet for supper in an Italian restaurant near her flat; she had vetoed James’s suggestion of the Gresham: ‘Too grand for me.’
He recognizes his half-sister at once when she comes into the restaurant, unmistakably his father’s – her father’s – daughter. She is tall, white-haired, handsome rather than beautiful; he had in his mind the image of a much younger woman, the girl in his father’s photograph. James feels a sudden surge of affection for this unknown older sister. He wants to embrace her, but she offers her hand and he shakes it.
She declines a glass of wine, ‘We’re a Pioneer family,’ and they sit in silence until the waiter takes their order.
When the food arrives, Cathleen begins to talk. ‘I was seventeen when I was told that I was a Burke. I sometimes wonder whether I would have been better off not knowing.’
‘Dad left me only the briefest of notes when he died. Until then I didn’t know you existed. Did you ever see him?’
‘My mother wouldn’t meet him, said it would upset Eamonn too much, but she was happy enough for me to make contact. It took me a while to get used to the idea that Eamonn wasn’t my natural father. He was a good man, thought I had a right to know and he didn’t want me to find out by accident.’
Cathleen takes a drink of water and picks at her risotto. ‘Grania told me she was frightened of her father, a hard, unforgiving man. He said that unless she married Eamonn her baby would be given to the laundry nuns. They could do that in those days. And he swore he’d kill John Burke if he didn’t leave Ireland. When he came over to the farm, trying to see Grania, Mannion and his men nearly destroyed John. Our father.’
She stops as she says the last two words and looks at James as if for the first time. ‘They were children; she was twenty-two, John was twenty-four. He was great with the horses, a shy man, very handsome, Grania said. And she must have been quite something then. They used to ride out to the Trafalgar Folly to meet, which I suppose is why Mannion burned it down. She cried a lot the night she told me, said they were in love, said it never would have worked. “I’ve been happy enough with your father,” she said.’
‘I’d love to have known what Dad was like then, and your mother. It wouldn’t seem earth-shattering today, but Ireland then wasn’t like Ireland now.’
‘I was a typical Irish girl from a small country town, in love with horses till I was sixteen, then I thought I had a vocation. “Oh Mary, I give thee the lily of my heart, Be thou its guardian for ever.” Eamonn encouraged me, said the McCanns hadn’t had a priest or a nun for a generation.’
James laughs. ‘I doubt the Burkes have ever had either.’
‘And then I found out I was half Prod, half a Burke. I began by feeling sorry for myself, finished by being angry. There was a terrible row when I told them, “I don’t feel the same about Our Lady now. Perhaps I’d have been better off in the Magdalene Laundries.” I’m ashamed now at how fierce I was.’
‘I see you’re not a nun.’
‘Nuns come in different guises these days, but I’m not. I became a nurse, spent the whole of my career at the Mater here in Dublin. Never married, but I lived with another nurse for twenty years. She died two years ago, and now I live on my own.’
Cathleen blows her nose, takes another long drink of water. ‘Anyhow, after several years and a great deal of heart-searching I went to see John. Three times in all, always at the yard among the horses, and we got on well. Partly because he’d found his calling and understood how I’d lost mine.’
‘He died in his monastery on Mount Athos.’
‘I spent most of a day with him before he went out to Stavronikita for the last time.’
‘I never fully understood that, although I went to see him there several times.’
‘It was the burden of Spain, he told me. He saved one prisoner outside a place called Teruel, but at the cost of not stopping the shooting of a dozen. Including a boy of seventeen or so. That stayed with him all his life. Do you know the Jesus prayer, do you know about Hesychasm?’
‘I do not.’
‘“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, the sinner.” Repeated many times, like a mantra. John said that inner prayer, the blocking of the senses, was the only thing that brought him peace.’
James orders a second glass of wine and tells Cathleen about his life at Drimnamore, about the oyster fishery, about Anna and Jack. At the end of supper and after three cups of coffee they stand up, and this time they do embrace.
‘I’m sorry I’ve put off this meeting for so long,’ says James.
‘I’m glad we were both brave enough. Strange that the tug of blood is as strong, don’t you think?’
‘Strange and strong. I would like to meet again.’
‘Let’s think about that. We’ve both got a lot to digest.’
They exchange telephone numbers and addresses and then part, Cathleen to her flat, James to his hotel.
The next day James drives back to Kerry via Burke’s Fort and the Trafalgar Folly. He doesn’t call on his cousins; instead he parks on the road below the folly and walks the muddy mile and a half through fields and woods to the ruin. He looks at what is left of the folly with a different eye. Only three of the incised names of Nelson’s ships –
Victory
,
Mars
,
Temeraire
– are visible on the connecting walls, the rest blackened out by the fire.
In the first-floor wall he sees, out of his reach on the surviving chimneypiece, a white enamelled mug streaked with soot. He pokes among the debris on the ground floor in the main building, turns over the remains of some cushions with his foot and sees a little book ruined by fire and rain. He picks it up, leafs through a few battered pages, then reads out loud, ‘I thought, O my love, you were so – As the moon is, or sun...’ The rest of the words are burned away. He puts the book in his pocket, walks slowly down to the road and drives back to County Kerry.
When James gets back to Drimnamore, Danny produces the latest accounts and bank statement for the oyster fishery. They have become a regular stopping point for tourists on the Ring of Kerry, and their Cork distributor cannot keep up with demand. The Kerry Oyster Festival now takes place over a three-day weekend and Drimnamore’s bars are enthusiastic sellers of oysters alongside pints of Guinness. Danny is paid a respectable salary and James takes a dividend for the first time.
Although
The Kerryman
comments favourably on this success, there is also some resentment that the profits from Kerry oysters should be ‘lining the pockets of a man from Galway and a Brit’. When Anna hears this loud aside in the bar of The Liberator, she reports it to Michael and Aisling when they next meet for dinner.
‘Typical,’ says Michael. ‘But nothing to worry about. Everyone knows who put up the capital. It wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for James and Danny and you.’
This reassurance lasts for a week. Danny comes to James with a large envelope and some papers, saying, ‘The chancers have served a writ on us. They claim we have no rights to the seabed, that anyone can dredge for oysters in the Kenmare River.’
‘We put the spats there in the first place. They belong to us as much as if they were potatoes we’d planted or heifers we’d reared.’
‘Much harder to prove.’
‘Anyhow, who are “they”?’
‘Two of the Kellys and a County Councillor from Tralee. They’re calling themselves Kerry Organic Oysters, and they say any profits should go to the community.’
Michael and Aisling are outraged. ‘They’re pulling a stroke, so they are. It’s all a fantasy. They want to be bought off,’ says Michael.
‘The writ is real enough. And I had thought about putting half my shares in a trust for Drimnamore,’ says James.
‘Do no such thing. It’s Danegeld. They’ll only be back for more.’
Anna is less robust than Michael and Aisling. ‘It makes me feel unwelcome, a foreigner.’
‘Come on, it’s three people, that’s all. They’ll go away in the end. Ask your ladies on the packing line.’
Anna’s ladies are as angry as Michael. They dissect the characters of the two Kellys and the County Councillor in lurid detail, then decide to invite them out to the oyster shed. ‘We’ll try them with a few dead oysters that’ve been left out in the sun. That’ll get them running.’ And for a while Anna cheers up.
The legal formalities drag on, and James has to make a brief trip to Dublin to get the deeds to the land around Oysterbed Pier. He goes up by train one evening and comes back twenty-four hours later.
When he returns to the cottage, Anna is sitting in an armchair in front of an unlit fire, and doesn’t get up when James comes into the room. She is shaking, her eyes red with tears, her left cheek swollen, both legs bruised and scratched.
‘My God, what’s happened to you?’ he says.
‘Zach came back. He’d been drinking. Tried to get me to leave with him, and when I wouldn’t...’ She cannot finish the sentence and starts to cry, burying her face in her hands.
‘Where’s Jack?’
Anna is unable to answer for a minute, then says, ‘He’s with the Sullivans. It’s Tomas’s birthday today and he’s spending the night there.’