I stuffed my mother’s letter back in my pocket and started to open the first of George’s. At that moment, the wind caught me. I looked up and saw the islands had already disappeared beneath the approaching squall. The grey, choppy sea had white caps and the first spots of rain fell chill on my cheeks. I put the letter away, stepped back onto the road, pulled up my hood and tied it awkwardly in place with my numb fingers.
A few minutes later, the squall hit me as I walked up the track to Ballyvore. Hail peppered my back and legs, bounced off the loose stones at my feet and drifted into the tangled grasses below the low stone walls. I bent my head forward and walked as fast as I could. I’d had a good look round and I knew there was no shelter anywhere. The only thing to do was keep going.
After the squally morning, the day improved steadily. By late afternoon the sky was a brilliant blue. Up on the floor of the quarry where I’d been collecting rock samples, I had to take off my jacket and then my sweater. When I opened the neck of my blouse and turned up my sleeves, I decided it was time to have a rest. I spread my jacket on one of the smooth surfaces at the foot of a layered rock face, stuck my rolled-up sweater behind my shoulders and leaned back in the blissful warmth. I thought about George.
In all the romantic novels, this would be the moment when he would come striding up the track. He would have come home unexpectedly, borrowed a car and driven down to find me. Now he would be in sight, looking everywhere, calling my name. But this wasn’t a romantic novel. George and I hadn’t seen each other since he’d gone off to England to his vacation job in the middle of June. I had wanted to go with him but the factory he’d found had no accommodation for women. That’s why I’d ended up at the Rosetta.
Earlier in the summer I’d thought a lot about our reunion. Whenever things got bad at home or when I felt especially lonely, before I started my job, I’d let myself daydream. Particularly, I thought of his arms around me. Not of kissing him or of our limited lovemaking, but simply of being held, of being safe in his arms, of feeling warm and secure.
I stirred myself, for my sheltered corner was so comfortable I was in danger of dozing off. I took out the letters I had been carrying with me since the morning, saving them for just such a quiet moment. I opened them quickly.
They were both rather short. The first had been written from the vegetable factory in Spalding. It said how much George missed me, how he longed to put his arms around me and how awful the campbeds were. Their Nissen hut had no hot water and the bog across the yard had been bunged up for days. He said the crack was good and his crowd had taken over a pub which sold Guinness and that the fish and chips were the best he’d ever had. He said I wasn’t to worry about him. He could cope with these things. The rest of the letter was an account of the practical jokes they had played on the supervisor to break the monotony of tending the pea belt, or watching the labelling machine.
The second letter was shorter still. The vegetables had come to a sudden end with a change in the weather, so he had packed up and caught the first boat home. He missed me terribly. None of our friends were around in Belfast, the students’ union was still closed, and he couldn’t have his mother’s car. She needed it for work since they’d stopped the estate bus. How wonderful it would have been if he could just have driven down and whisked me away from all those strange people and found us a nice place where we could be alone together, just the two of us, a long way away from Belfast. He hoped the work was going well and that I’d be back very soon. I was to let him know by return when he could meet me at the Great Northern.
I reread both letters several times to see if there was anything I had missed. But there wasn’t. Letters were such a poor substitute for being together, I reminded myself. And, of course, George didn’t like writing letters in the first place. He always said that scientists have difficulty with literary modes. Geography wasn’t really a scientific subject, he said, and anyway I’d always been good at English which was his worst subject.
Beside me a clump of tall, pink wildflowers began to sway in the light breeze. From their lower stems hundreds of tiny balls, like thistledown, drifted in front of me. They spun slowly in the sunlight, a hint of iridescence on their white fronds, some borne upwards by the warm air, some colliding, some few moving towards me, touching my warm skin, catching in my hair. I looked down the empty track and tried to re-enter my daydream. But I had the greatest difficulty remembering what George looked like.
I thought back to our first meeting. It was in my second year, a lovely, lively spring day just before the beginning of term. I came out of the front gate of Queen’s on my way up to the Ulster Museum and saw Ben sitting on the wall opposite the bus stop with a tall boy I didn’t know. Ben had hailed me, introduced George, asked if I had time for a coffee. We’d gone to the espresso bar across the road, talked for an hour or more and then gone for a walk in the Botanic Gardens. A few days later George found me in the library and asked me out.
It had been easy to get to know him. Although he lived on a new estate near Lisburn with his widowed mother, he’d gone to the same city-centre grammar school as Ben, so we knew many of the same people either from schooldays or from our first year at Queen’s. We began going to the weekly hops and to the film club. George worked hard and sometimes we would meet in the library and go to the union together for coffee. I was grateful for his company, glad to have someone to talk to when things got on top of me, when I felt suffocated by the flat over the shop and my mother’s complaints, or when my tutor was being awkward, pressing me for work I could only do if I had enough time to think it through.
George was easy-going. Nothing seemed to upset him. I had once thought I was easy-going, but I’d come to accept that I wasn’t. I was always getting upset over things and having to be comforted. And George was very good at that. What was the point in getting upset about things if you couldn’t alter them, he always said. It seemed he had a point.
I sat watching the swirling down and wondered about the name of the tall plant that had shed its seedheads with such enormous generosity. I picked some silky fronds from my black trousers and waved away a floating fragment that tickled my nose. As I moved my hand, the sunlight gleamed on George’s signet ring, the one he had asked me to wear before he went off to Spalding. I wore it on my right hand, but I knew very well that he hoped to replace it with an engagement ring as soon as we graduated. He’d never asked me to marry him, it just somehow seemed obvious that was what would happen. I hadn’t really thought about it till now.
Everyone assumed that because George and I had been going out together for more than two years we would marry. My parents certainly assumed that my bedroom wouldn’t be needed when I finished my degree and Adrienne Henderson was always asking where we would live and whether George would teach or try to get into industry, whether we’d stay in Belfast, or be prepared to move away for a time till George got established.
I took his letters out of my jacket pocket and looked at them again, the envelopes I had ripped open so hastily and my name written in biro on them. Miss Elizabeth Stewart. Perhaps it was being so far away that made my life in Belfast suddenly seem so very remote. What was it Patrick Delargy had said when he’d stopped to look at the islands? Something about distance lending perspective.
Perhaps, being so much older, he felt he had a lot to reflect upon. So much had happened to him. He had lost people he loved, given up a future he’d chosen to take up something he certainly hadn’t chosen. But nothing very much had ever happened to me. I’d lost my Uncle Albert the year I got my scholarship, but he was in his eighties so I could hardly complain about that. I hadn’t had to give up what I wanted to do and go and do something else.
‘Not yet, you haven’t.’
I heard Ben’s voice as clearly as if he were sitting beside me. One of his favourite phrases. If ever I told Ben I couldn’t do something, or I’d never been able to manage such and such a thing, he would always come back at me. Not nastily, but always firmly.