‘She must have been over the moon when you up and married the doctor.’ Jo snorted.
‘Actually she was, even though he was older and it was all a bit quick…’
‘A bit quick?’ Lucy said.
‘Back then, it was all a terrible shame, but I was… you know…’
‘She was pregnant.’ Jo cut to the chase. The water temperatures would gnaw at them too quickly to spend time beating about the bush here.
‘Oh, I didn’t realise.’ And then Lucy’s voice drifted off, because of course, there was no child.
‘The baby died.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Lucy said, keeping her gaze firmly on the sky, because perhaps they all knew that if it wasn’t for the fact that they were here and Elizabeth weren’t so very vulnerable she would never have spoken about the child she had lost.
‘It’s all so long ago now,’ Elizabeth said, her voice echoing strangely on the water. ‘I thought he saved me, you know? Eric. I thought he’d saved me from the unthinkable.’ She laughed then – a funny, hollow sound – and Jo closed her eyes, because she knew what was coming next.
‘Eric saved himself more like.’ Jo couldn’t help herself.
‘I don’t understand,’ Lucy said.
‘It wasn’t his baby,’ Jo said.
‘No. I went to have a pregnancy test – this was long before you could pick one up in the chemist’s here in Ballycove and then and there he proposed to me. He didn’t go down on bended knee exactly, but by the time I left the surgery that day, I had a fiancé and a baby to look forward to.’
‘He just asked you to marry him?’
‘Out of the blue. It suited both of us, he said. I didn’t understand then what he meant, but I was just so grateful to have a way out of telling my mother. It was such a shameful thing then, different times to now when every baby is celebrated.’
‘And the father?’
‘He was long gone. A boy I met, Vano Birt.’ Elizabeth let the name sit between them for a moment. ‘He came with the carnival and then he was gone and I was left with just the memory of our time together.’
‘Yes, well, Eric got the best end of the bargain,’ Jo said sharply.
‘He saved me from Saint Nunciata’s,’ Elizabeth said softly. ‘Anyway, it’s all a long time ago now.’ The starkness of that time, so long ago, when girls were hidden away and their babies taken from them lingered for a while. From here, Jo knew, if you really strained your eyes, you could probably make out the faint outline of the old convent just beyond the village. Jo had always hated the place. She’d been delighted when it closed up. Even now, they didn’t know the half of what went on in those places, but they knew enough to know that any unfortunate who ended up there would have given their eye teeth for a life as a doctor’s wife instead.
But of course, that kind of escape comes with a high price and Elizabeth had paid it many times over. ‘The point is that, tonight, it feels a little as if I’m making up for being held back all those years ago. I almost feel as if I’m taking up from where I left off that night I met Vano. It was the most wonderful night of my life, if I’m honest, but this…’ She shuddered and Jo knew she was crying, but it was a joyful sound. ‘This is simply perfect.’
10
Niall
Niall played the dinner conversation over in his head again and again as he sat looking out at the rough seas. It wasn’t that they’d argued, not by a long shot. Rather it was the fact that it felt as if they’d just settled into something out of the blue and it was so far from everything he knew. His mother and this job had dominated yet another dinner conversation and it felt like he was little more than spare baggage beside it. In fact, his mother hadn’t even been angry with him. She understood what it meant, days down here – unplugged – it wasn’t exactly the kind of relaxing break he’d signed up for.
He had slipped noiselessly from the cottage while his mother dozed before some boring political programme on the telly – even Dora had not heard the front door click softly as he’d left.
Niall sat for a long time on the fat stone wall that kept the sea at bay, but it was cold here. There was no getting away from the fact that the rain clouds that had settled overhead were intent on drenching everything for miles around. The sea beneath his legs had taken on a black and greenish colour, as if it might throw up the contents of its belly in ever angrier roars. It was epic, no doubting that, but it was frightening too. Occasionally a resounding roar would culminate in a surge of water that rushed over the wall alongside him. There was a storm on the way, and he’d seen before that the waves could wash away anything in their path.