Under a Skellig Sky Read online

  Carol pointed at the dining-room door and put a finger to her lips. “Shhh, for God’s sake! I’ve just heard him come in. Keep it down or we’ll end up on TripAdvisor. You’re forgetting that he doesn’t have the fry. That’s a big saving.”

  She brewed a pot of coffee and took it into the dining room where the visitor was poring over The Irish Times.

  When she got back into the kitchen, she switched on Radio Kerry and turned the volume up as a noise-shield to blur the effect of the tirade that Mary had resumed.

  “That fruit bowl will bankupt us. If you want to make money out of this Airbnb lark for yourself, you’ll have to listen to me. Did you see those three horses of Corkwomen this morning? Cleared the full fries and went on to lay into fruit, yogurt and cheese as if they never saw a bite in their lives before. It’s a wonder there’s anything left for his lordship. To add insult to injury, I saw them making off with the brown scones. No wonder they can spend a week walking the Kerry Way. It’s a cheap holiday. Are we a farm guesthouse or the Vincent de Paul? We’ll be halfway to the poorhouse ourselves if this continues.”

  Carol knew that, at heart, her mother would empty every food press in the kitchen to make sure that no one went away from the house hungry. It was just that the walkers had gone overboard. And she knew too that she wanted Carol herself to have a generous share of the profits over the summer. But the last thing Carol wanted was her mother to feel that she was a financial burden.

  “Ah, Mam, doesn’t everyone rave about your breakfasts? You’re hardly going to start cutting back at this hour of your life.”

  Mary smiled. “I suppose not, girl. It was just that those three madams got on my wick this morning. I never saw anyone to eat that amount. I’m a bit tired too because we were up that bit earlier for them. And we’re still behind ourselves. We’d want to clear the last table as soon as he’s finished and put the dishwasher on.”

  “We? We? Does that mean you’re going for the operation?”

  “What operation?”

  Carol grinned. “The one to separate your arse from the chair. What else?”

  Mary opened her mouth to reply but the sound of a car in the drive drew both their attention. She was stricken. “Surely the next booking isn’t landing yet, and not a bed made?”

  They both relaxed when they saw the post van pulling up outside the front door. Carol went out to greet the postwoman and lingered on the doorstep to savour the brightness of the prodigal sunshine. She stood there and inhaled the fresh spring air with the pleasure of a woman on temporary release from the fumes of sizzling rashers and an egg-pan crackling like a second Krakatoa. The smell of the kitchen was so dense she could have carved the fries out of it. Three-D printing was only trotting after her.

  She sniffed the sleeve of her blue sweatshirt. She was a ‘Full Irish’ on legs. What of it? The birds were singing louder, the hydrangeas swelling with buds. Bare branches of the beech trees were conductors’ batons swaying in the surges of wind. She’d seize the brightness and take a quick walk to blow the cooking fumes out of her lungs. Grabbing a blue fleece from the hall, she set off. Her energy level was so high she wanted to skip. Such a shame that adults gave up skipping. Then she spotted the lone Kiwi – Private Oliver Wesley – moping along the drive. How had he finished his breakfast so quickly?

  The last thing she wanted that morning was to be landed with someone to make talk to on her walk. She considered cutting through the wood to avoid him. But, on the other hand, she felt a longing to connect, to have a decent conversation. She recalled an article she had read about a woman who had carried out some incredible ocean crossing on her own. The woman had spoken of her appreciation of looking into the eyes of another human being when she finally reached land.

  Then again Private Wesley might be escaping from human eyes (one particular pair of eyes even) – from chatter and the whole shebang, to savour time on his own. There was something in his gait, though, that gave her the sense that the opposite might be true. And if her instincts were wrong, she’d just vamoose.

  Her mood lightened when it dawned on her that he’d be ideal material for a positive TripAdvisor review.

  She could read it already. ‘Carol, artist and daughter of the owner, shared her morning walk on an enchanting coast road as she gathered material for her new collection of paintings. Her local knowledge was invaluable. Glenosheen can’t be recommended highly enough.’

  Needs must. He couldn’t help it if he was as dull as ditch water. Still, better that than blinding her with bull.

  So, what would her opening line be? The weather, of course, the old reliable that kept Irish people connected in an age-old conspiracy against the elements.

  Putting on the charm for ‘the people’ was second nature to her since she was a child. She smiled brightly as she gained on him.

  “The rain is due in soon, according to the forecast. I thought I’d get in a quick walk before the clouds open. Do you want to tag along?”

  The grateful expression on his face made her feel guilty about her reluctance.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” he said.

  “Of course not.”

  He didn’t look totally convinced. “I really don’t want to intrude but it does make a big difference when you get to talk to the locals in any country.”

  They fell into step. Carol was used to driving conversations. She was riffling through her file of topics when Oliver got there before her.

  “I think I will take your advice and cycle over to the island later.”

  Carol had briefed him about Valentia Island the evening before.

  “I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “When you’re in a car, you’re insulated from everything really.”

  “Insulation is your only man around here when the mad winds are sweeping in from the Atlantic with gallons of rain. But you’re blessed to pluck this fine morning out of the March weather.”

  Oliver grinned. “I have all the gear. I’m an addict really. If I don’t get out, I get withdrawal symptoms.”

  The old estate wall ran along the left-hand side of the road while a grassy ditch enclosed the farms on the opposite side. Carol loved the old wall. She pointed out some of its idiosyncrasies to Oliver. Flat stones were wedged one on the other. At various points, the stonemasons of old had come across boulders in their path and incorporated them into the wall, stacking flat wedges of stone on top.

  She liked to imagine what thoughts had filled the stonemason’s mind as he whistled and worked: the girl whose eye he was looking forward to catching at the crossroads dance, the jam jar of coins he was steadily adding to for his passage to America? Or was he a married man torn between pride at his wife’s news that there was going to be ‘an increase’ in the family and the worry of another mouth to feed.

  She stopped here and there to take pictures of the wall, her eye taken by the pattern of lichens or tiny plants growing between the cracks.

  Oliver threw back his shoulders and inhaled deeply. “The trip over here is worth it for the air alone. That writer had it in one.”

  “Which writer?” Carol hated non sequiturs. She hoped he didn’t share her mother’s habit of emerging abruptly from her own thoughts to make references that bore no relation to what had gone before.

  “Oh, my apologies. I’m speaking about your great writer, John Millington Synge. Can you believe I planned this trip on the strength of a single sentence from him?”

  Nothing would surprise me, having come across every variety of a tourist growing up, Carol felt like telling him. Yes, we have a right one here. Slightly daft in an absent-minded-professor class of a way. He was the sort that a mother might be afraid to release into the world, but who glided on without a bother, mainly because people like herself took them under their wing.

  While all that was running through her mind, he explained how he’d bought a copy of Synge’s Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry and Connemara in a bookshop near Charing Cross. He stood at the side of the
road and closed his eyes – in preparation, she guessed, for delivery of the quote.

  “‘One wonders in this place,” he intoned, “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.’”

  She was gobsmacked. “That’s really beautiful. Are you sure it’s about Kerry, though? I thought he spent all his time on the Aran Islands?”

  Oliver grew animated as he listed names of places that Synge mentioned in the travelogue. “He spent a lot of time up the road from here near Rossbeigh. He devotes a whole page to the Glenbeigh Races. He’s quite funny about them. I’ll show you the book if you like.”

  Carol threw her arms in the air. “Oh, I believe you, though thousands wouldn’t. It’s a fright that a total stranger has to tell you something about your own place.”

  Oliver grew serious. “I didn’t mean to –”

  Carol punched his arm playfully. “Arrah, I’m only slagging you. Don’t mind me.”

  Oliver related a section of the book where Synge described meeting an old man, on the coast road near Glenbeigh, who had talked about the famous Irish warrior Fionn and his men, the Fianna.

  “And then he pointed to a neck of sand on the coast and told Synge that that was where Oisín had been drawn away to Tir na Nog – the Land of Youth.”

  Carol spluttered with laughter. “Tír na nÓg.”

  “Oh, sorry for mispronouncing it.”

  He was obviously stung. There went the TripAdvisor review gurgling down the drain.

  “No, I’m sorry – that was rude – but you made it sound like eggnogg.”

  “It’s OK.”

  Carol stopped dead in the road. “So, you read about Oisín, and that’s what attracted you to Glenosheen – the Glen of Oisín.”

  Oliver nodded. “I mightn’t have come here only that your house popped up on Airbnb soon after I’d read the book.”

  “Well, that’s gas – I mean, funny. Because we’ve only just gone up on Airbnb this month as an experiment. My mother has always registered with Fáilte Ireland but this is a new venture. My venture, really. For as long as I stay around.”

  “Well, lucky for me that you’re trying it out,” Oliver said. “I’m going to stop talking now and allow you to enjoy your walk in peace.”

  “I’m fine out, but you can’t really take in your surroundings if we’re yapping too much. If you want to ask me anything, don’t feel you need to zip your mouth entirely. Anyway, I need to take a few photos to give me ideas for my paintings. When I’m finished the spring flowers, I’m planning a series called ‘Meditations in Stone’. But I’m doing more thinking than anything else. Thinking and ducking the easel too often.”

  She took out her phone and zoomed in for a close-up of a boulder set into the wall. White lichen clouded the spaces between the emerald coating of moss. Her ear caught the music of the invisible stream coursing along the gulley on the other side of the road – one of her favourite sounds. She picked up on the energy of the turn of the season: the sheen on the lemon lesser celadines smiling from the grass verge, pockets of primroses in the ditch, the summoning light, the skittish breeze, the sky ballooning into a blue expanse above her. Even subtracting a few points for the ripe smell of slurry wafting from a nearby field, it was a good time of year to come home. A good time to be alive, even if she still didn’t know her arse from her elbow in terms of what she was going to do with her life. Not coming to a cinema near you soon: What Carol Did Next.

  She wandered on taking more photos and became so absorbed that she completely forgot about her walking companion for a few minutes. Then, she glanced over her shoulder. He had fallen behind and was studying a pair of listing wrought-iron gates sunk into the earth at the entrance to a wilderness of shrubbery. A colonnade of beech trees, leading up the centre, edged an open space that was obviously a driveway before briars and saplings had taken over.

  She retraced her steps to where Oliver was standing.

  “Please tell me I’m seeing things,” he said, pointing into the wilderness. “Surely those can’t be New Zealand Tree Ferns?”

  “Correct,” she said. “They’re nearly as common as furze in some sheltered pockets around here. Up in Dublin, they’ll only grow under glass in the Botanic Gardens. The Gulf Stream creates such a micro-climate down here that they can survive quite happily outside. And you’re wondering about the avenue of trees, no doubt. They used to lead to the ‘Big House’, the mansion that the estate walls were built around to keep out the locals unless of course they were admitted as cheap labour. An English family owned it. The head of the family in the late 1800s was a botanist. He made it his life’s work to colonise it with all sorts of exotic trees and shrubs, lots of them from your neck of the woods in the Southern Hemisphere.”

  The rumble of a tractor sounded behind them. Carol motioned to Oliver to stand well in off the narrow road. The driver waved from his perch on the blue tractor as he passed, drawing a slurry-spreader splattered with mud. A whiff of sulphur blew back to them.

  “There’s your champagne air now for you. The farmers will tell you it’s the smell of progress.”

  Oliver chuckled and they continued to walk.

  “But they left, the family?” he said. “Left a lifetime’s achievement behind?”

  “Oh.” She glanced at him. “They were burned out – like so many other Anglo-Irish families in the 1920s while the War of Independence was raging.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” he said, a little embarrassed. “I do know about that.”

  “They went to England and never came back. Rumour had it they fell upon hard times. And now the wilderness is claiming back the semi-tropical garden every year. You should walk up there – have a look – only three walls of the house were left standing and, now, screened by the luxuriant growth, the ruin has taken on the air of Sleeping Beauty’s palace.”

  By this time, they had climbed to the top of a steep hill. There was an open gateway to their left.

  A sea wind met them with force as they walked towards a two-storey, stone-fronted house standing on a rise. It was the holiday home of a wealthy American family who had relatives visiting in turn through the summer.

  “The Thumans spent the odd Christmas here in the beginning, but the bad weather put them off,” Carol said. “We call the father the Chicken Pie Baron. Apparently he’s made a fortune from them. Money or no money, it’s the same old story with holiday homes. Dark windows at night. One less neighbour to rely on. No children to keep the national schools open.”

  Carol was forging ahead towards the lawn that a scattering of boulders rose through like the backs of whales when she noticed that Oliver was hanging back again. What was with the man?

  “Isn’t this private property?”

  Carol tutted. “Of course it is. But they leave the gate open to give any would-be burglars the message that there’s nothing worth breaking in for. Come on, they won’t mind.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. We can wave to them on the security cameras.”

  Oliver frowned. “I’d prefer –”

  She went back, stepped behind him and pretended to push him. “Arrah, come on! I’m only letting on about the cameras.”

  The sloping lawn ended at a ditch topped by two whin bushes, sculpted by the wind to lean landwards. Carol stepped up on a boulder and beckoned to Oliver to follow. She didn’t look out to sea. She knew what lay out there. Instead, she waited for Oliver’s expression. She wasn’t disappointed. His eyes lit up and his jaw slackened. Way out on the horizon, the two Skellig islands reared up out of the waves. The sky above them was leaden – the promised rain was on the way. Sceilig Mhichíl and Sceilig Bheag – Skellig Michael and Small Skellig. They could have been christened ‘cloud-piercers’ because of their needle-like peaks.

  Grey clouds had unrolled from the horizon. Ca
rol had often seen the view more startling under a blue sky but the islands were always dramatic.

  Oliver was silent. She let him be for a few minutes.

  “Well?” she said finally.

  “Magnificent,” he said.

  Carol wheeled out the old reliable, not that the term was fair to the description which was the best she had ever come across for the Skelligs. “An English writer described them as two drowned cathedrals rising out of the sea.”

  “That’s perfect,” Oliver said in a faraway voice. He turned to her before looking back out to sea. “This reminds me of the first and only time I saw Gibraltar. We were driving for miles and miles down this motorway. Then, suddenly, there it was, looming out of the sea. I know it’s not quite the same thing – Gibraltar is a peninsula – but the effect is similar even though these islands are far out to sea.”

  Carol didn’t want to interrupt his rapture but she was growing cold standing in the sea wind. If they didn’t get a move on before the mass of cloud swallowed the sun, they’d be perished.

  “Believe me, this is absolutely nothing compared to actually visiting Skellig Michael.”

  “I’m definitely coming back here to take that boat trip,” he said.

  “Hope you won’t have to battle through crowds. Star Wars – The Force Awakens – really put Skellig Michael on the map!”

  Suddenly, a wayward squall laden with the rotten-egg-aroma of slurry tore towards them from a field near the house. Carol waved her hand in front of her face. “From the sublime to the ridiculous. Come on, we’d better skedaddle before we suffocate. We need to get back before it pours and my mother sends out a search warrant for me. I knew the morning was too good to last. I haven’t even started the bedrooms yet. Anyway you’d want to be making tracks for Valentia, even though I think you’re nuts to cycle there with the rain on the wing.”

  As they retraced their steps, Oliver kept his neck craned to take in a view of the Skelligs for as long as possible. The grey bulk of cloud continued to expand across the sky towards the headland, and puffy white clouds scudded across the diminishing blue like sailboats in a headwind. Gulls sky-skated in slanting white clusters, their cries carrying to the headland.