Would she ever see him again? Probably not, she thought. And if she did, they would probably have blessed little to say to each other. This week had been a delicious accident, a moment when each was ready for the other.
And the rest of the trip would be good, she told herself fiercely. It would be exciting, and she would forget him.
She slipped out of her clothes and snuggled under the bedcovers. It was cold in her room. She pulled the quilts up to her chin and settled her head on her pillow.
Damn that song! Why did it have to run through her head this way? Why?
Six
She left The White House almost immediately after breakfast. She settled her bill and carried her suitcase and guitar and tape recorder to a waiting taxi. The bus station was only a few blocks away, but it was too far for her to carry everything on foot. She had half-hoped and half-feared that David might call that morning to say a last goodbye to her, and she was both glad and sorry that he did not appear. Goodbyes had always been difficult for her, and although she would have liked to see him a final time, she was relieved that she would be spared the awkwardness of another leavetaking. He had said he would miss her, and she knew full well that she would miss him.
Her bus left at the appointed hour, though David had cautioned her to approach all Irish schedules with a certain amount of skepticism. “An Irish mile is about a fourth again as long as an English mile,” he said. “I suspect the national character has something to do with it, because an Irish hour often turns out to be half a day. Just be confident that the bus will leave sooner or later and reach its destination sooner or later. Don’t pay too much attention to the time. That’s one of the charms of the country. You can get along very well without ever looking at a clock. Sometimes I leave my watch in my room for weeks at a time and never miss it.”
But this particular bus had left on time, and she sat a few seats behind the ruddy-faced bus driver and looked out the window as the old bus left Dublin and headed south. David had helped her plan her route, although he had impressed upon her the need to keep her plans flexible. “Just remember that you want to arrive in Tralee in time for the Festival of Kerry, and let things follow their own course between now and then. The best part of a trip is slipping off your schedule and getting caught up in some fascinating surprise. I feel so sorry for the poor fools who take those carefully arranged tours. Breakfast in Paris, sightseeing for the morning, lunch in Florence, shopping in the afternoon, dinner in Rome, a tour of the nightclubs, a morning flight to Vienna — I don’t know how they stand it. They might as well stay at home and watch a Technicolor travelogue at the movies. A trip should be more personal than that. It should move at its own pace. That way it can keep on surprising you — and travel’s no fun without surprises.”
Still, she had sat with him while they mapped out a rough itinerary. She was heading south now, through the Wicklow Mountains toward County Wexford. She would spend the night in Wexford City and then head west along the southern edge of the country. There were parts of Waterford and Tipperary that she wanted to see, along with Cork City and parts of western Cork and Kerry. The itinerary was purposefully vague, the timetable almost nonexistent. She was not sightseeing so much as she was seeking out new songs and native singers, and so she would go where the material could be found.
The first couple of days on the road, while delightful, were musically unproductive. Despite David’s advice, she found it impossible to overcome her natural shyness and approach total strangers. She spent the night and part of a day in Wexford City, touring churches and a small museum, spending quietly satisfying hours in a local café and breathing the fresh salt air of the seaside town. But she left her guitar in her room, and she did not hear people singing where she went.
Several times the local tradesmen spoke to her. They were excited to hear that she was an American, since tourists were more of a rarity in Wexford than in Dublin. Almost everyone she spoke to had relatives in the States and was anxious to talk about America. Often the pubs and stores sported color portraits of Kennedy, and people seemed anxious to talk about the Irish lad who had become America’s president.
But no one sang. When she told of the motive for her trip, of her desire to collect new material, everyone was interested and sympathetic and quite useless. “You’ll want to go to the west,” she heard more than once, “where they’re a regular race of singers. We’ve nothing so unusual here, sad to say.”
A bus took her westward from Wexford to the smaller towns within the county. Here she caught the flavor of rural Ireland, a far cry from the cosmopolitan quality of Dublin. The rude little cottages, their tall rooftop television antennas the sole visual reminder that they were actually a part of the electronic age. The scarcity of automobiles and the great quantity of bicycles, with old men and women riding them. The sweet, timeless sensation of a walk through the center of town and a stop in a village pub. These last were wholly unlike the Dublin pubs; they were more like small grocery stores with a single counter where liquor and beer were sold for on-premises consumption.
“We’re just country folk here,” a woman told her at a boardinghouse where she found a comfortable room for just sixteen shillings, breakfast included. “Not like your Dublin jackeens, so city-wise and quick like. A young lass like yourself might find nothing to do here. There’s no picture show, and no night life.”
“But I like it here,” she said.
“Oh, and do ye? Most of our young people are after leaving. For Dublin, and some for London or America.”
That night she took her guitar with her to one of the tiny pubs. She had been thinking of David, sitting in her room and remembering the time she had spent with him, and she suddenly felt a great need to be among people, to make music and hear music. There was just one other customer in the pub, an old man in cap and long coat who sat drowsily over a glass of whiskey. The woman behind the counter was reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. Ellen sat in a corner of the small shop and played softly on the guitar, her fingers toying with the melody of one of the songs David had taught her. She wondered if she remembered the words. It was a song of the Wexford rising, and she thought that this was the very region where the rising had taken place almost two centuries ago. She began to sing, softly, more to herself than to the others, and before she knew it the old woman had abandoned her newspaper and the man had turned from his glass of whiskey to listen to her.
“Sure, you know the old songs of Wexford!”
“Oh, one or two...”
“And do you know this one?” And the old man, his face all lined and pinched with age, began to sing in an impossibly sweet tenor voice. By the end of the first verse she had caught hold of the melody and was able to accompany him on the guitar. When he finished the old woman remembered a song she had sung as a child, a sweet bit of nonsense about an old woman and her pig. And then Ellen sang another song, and the pub began to fill up with other men and women, and before she knew it the evening filled with song.