Under a Skellig Sky Read online

  Under a Skellig Sky

  Breda Joy

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,mliving or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Published 2020

  by Poolbeg Press Ltd

  123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle

  Dublin 13, Ireland

  E-mail: [email protected]

  www.poolbeg.com

  © Breda Joy 2020

  © Poolbeg Press Ltd. 2018, copyright for editing, typesetting, layout, design, ebook

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-1-78199-753-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.poolbeg.com

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Breda Joy is a native of Killarney, County Kerry. Under a Skellig Sky follows her debut novel Eat the Moon (2018) into the the Poolbeg Press stable. She is also the author of three books of non-fiction.

  A graduate of the M. Phil. in Creative Writing Programme (2010/2011) at Trinity College Dublin, she has had poetry published in literary journals including The Stony Thursday Book.

  She was a finalist in the 2016 GreenBean Novel Fair at the Irish Writers’ Centre, Dublin. She has been shortlisted for the Francis MacManus Short Story Competition (2011); long listed for the RTÉ Guide Penguin Ireland Short Story (2012); a winner in the inaugural Trócaire/Poetry Ireland Award (2012), and a winner in the Kerry County Council One Act Play Competition (2005).

  A winner in the ESB National Media Awards (1997), she has worked as a regional journalist with Kerry’s Eye and The Kerryman/Corkman newspapers in Killarney and Macroom, as well as with the Leader Group in Melbourne.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I can’t have been much more than four years of age when my mother called me to the breakfast table of an English couple and their little daughter who had brought her own miniature cutlery set on holidays with her. The encounter with these guests in our streetside Bed & Breakfast is my earliest memory of this sector of Ireland’s tourism industry.

  Over the years, I’ve stayed in various B&B’s and Farm Guesthouses as well as having had short stints working in some as a student. I knew many of the women at the heart of this sector through our family grocery shop also. Eventually, as a journalist, I came to write about their life and times.

  I would like to acknowledge their spirit of entrepreneurship, financial independence and genuine care for and interest in their guests as the chief inspiration for this book. They were and are fiercely competitive businesswomen who, at the same time, often created bonds of kindness lasting generations with guests. I felt it was timely to record their contribution through fiction because the emergence of Airbnb and other factors have led to a more impersonal accommodation sector in Ireland.

  The theme of loyal and supportive friendships between women is very much at the heart of this work too. I’ve been blessed through my life with the best of friends from so many different walks of life and countries. The soundest of women! Thank you, one and all. And let me give a moment of loving remembrance to the ones who have passed.

  Thank you to my fine son, Brendan, who gives the deepest meaning to this confounding caper of existence.

  I appreciate deeply the feedback given to me by the readers of the near-finished draft of Under a Skellig Sky. The encouragement of Liz O’Brien, Marion O’Donnell Cronin and John Magee, Killarney, and Mary O’Connor, Derrynane, gave me great heart.

  Thanks also to Mary O’Leary for one or two good yarns that I wove into the narrative. And thank you to Mark and Jean Eldred for their advice on the work of the artist.

  My mind can only wonder at how Poolbeg’s Paula Campbell manages all the aspects of publication from choosing book covers to liaising with writers and retailers. Thank you, Paula, and everyone else at Poolbeg Press.

  The chief ‘error detector’, Gaye Shortland, is meticulous. Your attention to detail means everything, Gaye.

  My agent, Jonathan Williams, must take a bow for introducing me to Poolbeg and setting me on the road to publication. His mantra, ‘Onwards and upwards’, has been added to my personal store of motivational phrases.

  Thank you to all the readers who gave my first novel, Eat the Moon, a vote of confidence. I hope my imaginary Skellig cast absorbs you as much.

  DEDICATION

  In memory of Gisela Willms-Guiton

  One wonders in this place, why anyone is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, where it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut, with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air which is like wine in one’s teeth.

  John Millington Synge, Travels in Wicklow,

  West Kerry and Connemara (1910)

  Chapter 1

  Mary’s eyes sharpened to a seagull gleam when she focussed on the hard cash the husband and wife had handed over at the kitchen door. Vouchers and credit-card payments never delivered the same satisfaction.

  “Thank God for loose people,” she said, storing away the banknotes under the bright yellow china hen on the worktop.

  Carol had stopped midway through stacking the cereal bowls in the dishwasher, glancing over her shoulder. She was going to chide her mother yet again about leaving too much money lying around the house but she was distracted.

  “Excuse me? Loose people. Are we talking about loose morals? That pair didn’t look much like swingers.”

  Mary clucked disapprovingly. “Will you go away from me, you gligín! I’m talking about tourists in cars rather than buses.”

  “So you mean ‘privates’,” Carol said. She considered introducing a frisson of sexual innuendo but thought better of it.

  Carol and her mother had just finished serving breakfast to three Corkwomen, all walkers on the Kerry Way, and the intrepid Dutch couple who had turned up without booking.

  Mary was warming up to an interlude of Killarney envy. Carol could feel it coming.

  “Loose people or privates,” said Mary. “Call them what you like but South Kerry would be lost without them. All the rest are shooting round the Ring from Killarney in coaches and landing back there to the hotels like homing pigeons in the late afternoon. You know they say it must have been a Killarney person who invented the Ring of Kerry trip. They start out in Killarney! And where do they end up?”

  “Killarney,” Carol repeated dutifully. She started on the greasy plates. “Well, God bless the appetites of this set of privates.”

  Mary chuckled to herself.

  Carol raised her eyebrows. “Are you going to share the joke or am I to diagnose early-onset dementia?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to be going on and on, and I’m the first to admit that Killarney was good to me, but I just thought of Máire, that old friend of mine from the hotel who started her own B&B. She was complaining to me one day that she wasn’t busy enough. When I pointed out that she’d just told me she was full, she said, ‘But I’m not turning anyone away!’”

  Mary was shaking with mirth. Carol had heard the anecdote before – many a time – but she was glad to see
her mother in such good humour. It was the weather. She’d have to ring the date on the calendar: March 24, the day the sunlight came back. The colour register, set at monochrome during the eternal rains of spring, was suddenly suffused with light. The terracotta-coloured garden shed was radiant. Light flared off the windows of the parked cars. But she wasn’t going to fall for this flashy visitor: this light was a tourist, a day-tripper just giving a quick look round before the curtains of rain were drawn again.

  After the snow had melted in that first week of March, it had never stopped raining. The best fields in the lower reaches of the valley were muddied green skirts, weighted at the edges by grey hems of flood water. Waterfalls foamed white through gulleys in the grey cliffs and, when the winds gusted, the spray was blown skywards like smoke billowing from a chimney.

  The March monsoon had continued. Confined to such close quarters with her mother, Carol had perfected the art of selective listening. From her usual station at the easel, she zoned in and out at strategic junctures to minimise reprimands about the silences essential for concentration.

  Maybe setting up the studio in the old conservatory opening off the kitchen wasn’t such a great idea, but the light was ideal and she was on hand whenever she was needed. The magnolia shrub had grown so much in her absence that it shaded off the space from all the harshness of the southern light. It was ideal: perfect clarity and no shadows. Not that there could be any problem with glare on a damp morning when the sky was a grey shield.

  The conservatory had been one of her favourite spaces in the house when she was a child. She’d lose herself in a book in there, stretched full-length on the bench along one side, the muffled tap of the magnolia branches on the glass in high winds a comforting noise.

  There was nothing comforting this particular morning about the drone of the television as Mary zapped from one channel to another. Carol much preferred it when her mother was surfing the net on her iPad (she’d joined a computer course in Waterville), but that urge was fitful.

  Now she was stabbing the remote control with the urgency of a game-show contestant with the right answer. “Every kind of a channel under the sun and not a decent programme on any blessed one of them.”

  Carol examined the cluster of primroses taking shape on the canvas. Miniatures were challenging, but she hadn’t the energy for landscapes yet. She was working her way through a series on the first flowers of spring: dandelions, lesser celandines, wood anemones, and her favourite, the delicate wild violets. If she could flog a few of the canvases to the craft shops in Portmagee and Cahersiveen, it would save her from eating into her bank account.

  She addressed her mother without turning around. “You mean no documentaries on genocide or the Third Reich on daytime telly? Why don’t you try Loose Women for a bit of light relief?”

  “Yes, and listen to some halfwit twittering on about still being a virgin after twenty-three years of marriage. Like that foolahthe other morning on one of those mindless programmes.” She switched channels. A weather forecaster was standing in front of yet another diagram of Ireland obscured by overfed clouds. “Would you look at this one? She’s like a pull-through for a rifle.”

  Carol turned away from the easel just in time to catch a glimpse of the petite presenter. “She must be on a diet – cabbage soup and power shakes, I’d say.”

  She immediately regretted shifting her attention to the kitchen. The worktop in her line of vision was littered with cartons of milk and fruit juice, cereal boxes, egg containers filled with broken shells, marmalade and jam pots, as well as breakfast dishes cleared from the table of the Corkonians who had insisted on eating at half seven, half an hour before the regular starting time.

  It was a quarter past eleven. Where had the time gone? There seemed to be no end to the work since she had persuaded her mother to put the house up on Airbnb just before Paddy’s Day. Bookings had begun to come in immediately.

  Mary had been complaining that business was dwindling and there was no one “off the road”. Carol suggested that they try Airbnb as an experiment for six months or so.

  “Do you mind if I stay around until the end of the summer?” she asked her mother. “I need to lick my wounds. The Airbnb would generate some extra cash for the house. Just treat me as the hired help and pay me whatever percentage you think is fair.”

  Mary had been deflated when Carol rang to say she was pulling out of Italy. She had hoped that she would settle there. She was glad to have her home, but she worried about her next move.

  “Give it a go by all means but extra people will mean extra work,” she said. “Do you think there’s any hope of you mending things with Matteo and going back?”

  Carol shook her head. “I don’t think so. But you never know. I just need some time on my own. He has been ringing me. Maybe absence will make the heart grow fonder.”

  Mary’s heart went out to her daughter. “Take your time, Carol. We’ll play this Airbnb thing by ear. We can always cancel it if you change your mind. Don’t be too quick to write Matteo off. Remember what your father used to say – ‘There’s so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it evens out’.”

  Carol was moved by her mother’s kindness. “I know, Mam. He’s not the worst in the world. There’s a lot of good in him. That’s what makes it hard.”

  She had originally thought there would be plenty of time for painting once the breakfasts were served. The idea was that she’d fly through cleaning the bedrooms to have the rest of the day free for herself. It wasn’t quite working out like that. She’d hardly had time to meet up with Angela. She’d have to ring her and arrange something. And then there was the question of her mother. Had Mary really complained that much before?

  Mary sighed. “I wouldn’t have opened until Easter only that you got ahead of yourself. There’s more work in this job than people think. You’re away so long, you’ve forgotten the half of it.”

  Carol had forgotten but she wasn’t going to admit it. “Well, if you weren’t so dead against me looking for a Woofer, we wouldn’t have half the work. We could do up the old den in the yard for them. It was fine for us in the summers when we were kids.”

  Her mother snorted. “Wouldn’t I sound nice telling Margot and Timmy that we were getting a Woofer?” Her voice curdled. “It sounds like some kind of dog.”

  Carol winced at the thought of her domineering cousin Margot. At least they’d been free of her for a few days. And Timmy – it was a pity that his arthritis prevented him from doing much gardening around the place. He was still only sixty-nine. He’d been her mother’s right-hand man when her father was busy at work.

  “Willing Workers on Organic Farms. How many times must I explain it to you? They work in exchange for their food and accommodation. They’re nearly all young students who want to see a bit of the world. I did it myself. The path down to the cove is all grown over. They’d be great for jobs like that.”

  “And before you knew it, there’d be a cannabis plantation in the middle of the wood,” her mother said. “I can imagine the type of organic farming that crowd’d be into alright.”

  Carol smiled. “Wouldn’t it be an ideal cottage industry in keeping with the enterprises tucked away in the forestry by our resident hippies? Anyway, we’ll work something out, I’m sure. We can’t afford extra help unless things get rightly going.” She turned back to the easel.

  The crunch of gravel carried faintly through the window.

  A fly couldn’t pass the window without Mary noticing. “Is that the New Zealander gone past?”

  It was. Oliver Wesley, their very first overseas booking on Airbnb. A Kiwi with odd eyes – one green, one blue – and a distant personality. Maybe he was an iceberg that would melt under the heat of the Kerry welcome. He had requested a plain breakfast at a later time than the other guests because he wanted to get in some early morning cycles. No Full Irish, just yogurt, cheeses and bread. Carol agreed readily – one less fry. Tall, spare and athle
tic, he had iron-grey hair cut close to his head. He had brought a racer that you could lift with your little finger. Setting out on the dark mornings, he was like a satellite on wheels.

  His insistence on keeping the bike in the bedroom hadn’t gone down too well with Mary. “Where’s he going, bringing muck and dirt into the house? That’s a beige carpet in that room, I’ll remind you.”

  She had looked at Carol as if she had twenty-two heads when she’d accepted a booking for him, a single, for seven nights on Airbnb.

  “You know I have a soft spot for singles, but seven nights?”

  “There’s hardly going to be a stampede before March is out,” Carol had said.

  Mary hadn’t got over her initial animosity. She sniffed in disapproval now. “I find it more than strange that he can’t sit down to breakfast at a normal time with everyone else. It’s odd too that he doesn’t want us cleaning the bedroom while he’s here.”

  Carol could feel a prickle of irritation. At this rate, she’d have to clean out the den and turn it into a studio for herself. “He’s hardly an axe murderer. And it’s less work. I’m not going to argue with that. He’s living in the heart of London. I suppose he just wants peace and quiet.”

  Mary frowned. “I don’t know. I’ve a funny feeling about that fella. Remember all those cases of women going missing up around Kildare and Dublin? It usually boils down to some oddball floating around on his own.”

  “Well, I have to hand it to you – a mother’s intuition. He’s got that strained look. The bedroom will be littered with body parts when he leaves. Just say a decade of the Rosary that ours won’t be in there with them.”

  Mary shook her head. “Mark my words.” She turned off the TV. “He’s a strange fish if ever there was one. Burning lights into the small hours – God only knows what the next electricity bill will be.”