The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage. Anne Doughty

      By the time we cleared away the supper things the wind had strengthened and the dark clouds hurled flurries of raindrops onto the flags by the open door. Reluctantly, Paddy put down his pipe and went and closed it.

      ‘I may light the lamp, Mary, for it’s gone terrible dark. I think we’ll have a wet night.’

      ‘Indeed it looks like it, but shure aren’t the nights droppin’ down again forby.’

      Paddy waited for the low flame to heat the wick and mantle, his face illuminated by the soft glow.

      ‘D’ye like coffee, Elizabeth?’

      ‘I do indeed, Mary, but are you making coffee? Don’t make it just for me.’

      ‘Oh no, no. Boys, I love the coffee meself, and Paddy too. Bridget always brings a couple of packets whinever she comes.’

      Paddy put the globe back on the lamp and turned it up gently. The soft, yellowy light flowed outwards and the dark shadows retreated. I gazed across towards the corner of the kitchen where heavy coats hung on pegs. There the shadows were crouched against the wall. They huddled too beyond the dresser so that in the darkness I could barely distinguish the sack of flour leaning against the settle bed. But here I sat beyond the reach of the shadows in a warm, well-lit space. I leaned back in my chair and let my weariness flow over me, grateful for the moment that nothing was required of me.

      Above my head, the lamplight caught the pale dust on the blackened underside of the thatch. The rafters were dark with age and smoke from the fire. A row of crosses pinned to the lowest rough-hewn beam ran the whole length of the seaward wall. Some were carved from bits of wood, others were woven from rushes now faded to a pale straw colour or smoked to a honey gold. A cross for every year? There were a hundred or more of them.

      ‘I’ll just get a wee sup of cream from the dairy.’

      The lamp flickered and the fire roared as Mary opened the door and the wild wind poured in around us. As she pulled it shut behind her, I found myself gazing up at a tiny red flame that danced in the sudden draught. Beside it, on a metal shelf a china Virgin smiled benignly down upon the freshly wiped table, her hands raised in blessing over three blue and white striped cups and a vacuum pack of Maxwell House.

      ‘Boys, it would blow the hair off a bald man’s head out there,’ Mary gasped, as she leaned her weight against the door to close it, a small glass jug clutched between her hands.

      ‘That’s a lovely expression, Mary. I don’t know that one,’ I said, laughing. ‘I think Uncle Albert would’ve said, “It would blow the horns off a moily cow.”’

      She repeated the phrase doubtfully, while Paddy chuckled to himself. ‘Ah Mary, shure you know a moily cow.’ He prompted her with a phrase in Irish I couldn’t catch. ‘Shure it’s one with no horns atall.’

      She laughed and drew the high-backed chair over to the fire. I jumped to my feet.

      ‘Mary, you sit here and let me have that chair.’

      ‘Ah, no, Elizabeth, sit your groun’. I’m all right here.’

      I sat my ground as I was bidden. I was sure I could persuade her to sit in her own place eventually, but it wouldn’t be tonight. When Mary did come back and sit in her own place, it would say something about change in our relationship. But that moment was for Mary to choose.

      I watched Paddy fill his pipe, drawing hard, tapping the bowl and then, satisfied it was properly alight, lean back. The blue smoke curled towards the rafters and we sat silently, all three of us looking into the fire.

      It was not the silence of unease that comes upon those who have nothing to say to each other, rather, it was the silence of those who have a great deal to say, but who give thanks for the time and the opportunity to say it.

      We must have talked for two or three hours before Mary drew the kettle forward to make the last tea of the day. Paddy had told me about Lisara and the people who lived there, Mary spoke about their family, the nine sons and daughters scattered across Ireland, England, Scotland and the United States. In turn, I had said a little about the work for my degree, mentioned my boyfriend, George, a fellow student away working in England for the summer, and ended up telling them a great deal about my long summers in County Armagh when I went to stay with Uncle Albert.

      It was only when Mary rose to make the tea, I realised I’d said almost nothing about Belfast, or my parents, or the flat over the shop on the Ormeau Road that had been my home since I was five years old.

      ‘Boys but it’s great to have a bit of company . . . shure it does get lonesome, Elizabeth, in the bad weather. You’d hardly see a neighbour here of an evening.’

      I listened to the wind roaring round the house and reminded myself that this was only the beginning of September.

      ‘It must be bad in the January storms,’ I said, looking across at Paddy.

      ‘Oh, it is. It is that. You’d need to be watchin’ the t’atch or it would be flyin’ off to Dublin. Shure now, is it maybe two years ago, the roof of the chapel in Ballyronan lifted clean off one Sunday morning, in the middle of the Mass.’

      He looked straight at me, his eyes shining, his hands moving upwards in one expressive gesture.

      ‘And the priest nearly blowed away with it,’ he added, as he tapped out his pipe.

      ‘Oh, the Lord save us,’ Mary laughed, hastily crossing herself, ‘but the poor man had an awful fright and him with his eyes closed, for he was sayin’ the prayer for the Elevation of the Host’.

      As she looked across at me, I had an absolutely awful moment. Suddenly and quite accidentally, we had touched the one topic that could scatter all our ease and pleasure to the four winds. I could see the question that was shaping in her mind. It was a fair question and one she had every right to ask, but I hadn’t the remotest idea how I was going to reply.

      ‘Would ye be a Catholic now yerself, Elizabeth?’

      ‘No, Mary, I’m not. All my family are Presbyterians.’

      ‘Indeed, that’s very nice too. They do say that the Presbyterians is the next thing to the Catholics,’ she added, as she passed me a cup of tea.

      If she had said that the world was flat or that the Pope was now in favour of birth control, I could not have been more amazed. I had a vision of thousands of bowler-hatted Orangemen beating their drums and waving their banners in a frenzy of protest at her words. I could imagine my mother, face red with fury, hands on hips, vehemently recounting her latest story about the shortcomings of the Catholics who made up the best part of the shop’s custom. Try telling her that a Presbyterian was the next thing to a Catholic. I looked across at Mary, sitting awkwardly on the high-backed chair, and found myself completely at a loss for words.

      ‘’Tis true,’ said Paddy, strongly. ‘Wasn’t Wolfe Tone and Charles Stuart Parnell both Presbyterians, and great men for Ireland they were, God bless them.’

      I breathed a sigh of relief and felt an overwhelming gratitude to these two unknown men. The names I had heard, but I certainly couldn’t have managed the short-answer question’s