As it turned out, it was Jack’s professor friend, David Manyaki, who said that he was intrigued by the idea of a letter that might pertain to Douglass and that if I ever made it to Dublin he would be delighted to buy me lunch.
An African accent. He sounded older, accomplished, careful. Some Harris Tweed in the voice.
EARLY MORNING SHELLS fell from the sky, bouncing on the slate roof. The gulls up there, small ziggurats across the expanse. I walked out into the dew. A couple of stray mussels lay open-shelled in the grass. It was Debussy who said that the music is what is contained between the notes. It was a relief to be home, and my energy had returned despite my bedraggled sleep. I took the pile of bills and burnt them in the fireplace.
In the living room near the fire, some of my mother’s old watercolors hung. In her later years, she took up painting as her interest in photography waned. She thought the new machinery took the joy out of the work. She liked to sit in the sunroom and paint: there is one of the cottage itself, the blue half-door open and the lough stretching endlessly behind it.
I sat in the kitchen listening to the radio while a ten-force blew in. The wind began hammering across the lough. Within an hour, huge waves were breaking hard against the seawall. The rain came up the garden and whacked the windowpanes and the storm put its shoulder to the lough.
David Manyaki. An odd name. He would be a widower with an Achebe face perhaps. A ledge of gray hair. A deep brow. A serious stare. Or perhaps he was a white man with an African accent. Silver spectacles and charm. With leather patches on the elbows of his jacket.
I wondered if I should BlackBerry him or Google him or whatever the phrase may be, but my mobile phone was cut off, no signal.
WHEN I EXCAVATE my childhood it is always the journey to the cottage from the Malone Road that I like the most. Sitting in the car with my mother and father. We remember paths as much as we remember people. I wanted to retrace some of the miles for old times’ sake. I looped north to Newtownards, then east through Greyabbey and south by Kircubbin, all the way along the loughshore.
There is a beautiful slant to the ancient ferryboat at Portaferry. I queued on the eastern shore and watched the boat come across. Churning a thin line of white. About a dozen cars on deck, the sun shining on their windscreens. A few children on the upper level, looking out over the channel for porpoises breaking the water. The journey across the Narrows is only a few hundred yards, but the boat has to attack the channel at an angle, depending on the strength and direction of the tide. For four hundred years it has gone back and forth. In the distance, the mountains lay purple against the sky. Perhaps they were called the Mournes for another reason: in the face of such beauty it always shocks me that we blew ourselves asunder for so many years.
The ferry negotiated the current, slid into dock. I drove the Land Rover on, rolled down the window, paid the tall young ferryman. He didn’t look like the sort of young man who would understand a quip about the Styx. Still, he was good-humored and smiling. For a moment all sense, even memory, of land disappeared. I put on the handbrake, closed the car door, brought Georgie to the upper deck for a breath of fresh air.
At the far end, a young couple snuggled into each other, speaking Russian. Perhaps a honeymoon. I tugged on Georgie’s leash and wandered along to where a family from Portavogie were breaking out sandwiches and a flask of hot tea. Two parents, six kids. They offered Georgie bits and pieces of their sandwiches, rubbed her neck. They were on their way down south, they said, for the Queen’s visit. I had been out of the loop, away from what the world thinks of itself. I had neglected the newspaper for many months. No television. My radio was permanently tuned to the classical station.
“The Queen herself,” said the young mother, clearly beaming, as if there might be multiple copies of the monarchy. Her tongue was loose with a little lager. She said with a sniff that President Obama was coming, too, in the exact same week. Strange collisions. It hardly mattered: all I had to do was sell my letter.
The ferry bumped up against the far shore. Gulls wheeled above us. I bid the family good day and shunted Georgie back into the car.
I skirted around the coast road. To hell with the cost of diesel. A large queue of cars gathered impatiently behind me. They overtook, flashing their headlights. One even stopped in the middle of the road, got out of his car, and said: “Fuck you, you stupid old cow,” and I thanked him for his remarkable eloquence. I inquired if he, too, was on his way to see the Queen. A footman’s humor. He didn’t laugh.
There was no avoiding the busy road. Large trucks bore up behind. I was going so fast that the steering wheel shook in my hands. A rigid pain in both my shoulders. I passed the border without even knowing it and when I stopped at the first petrol station I could find, I recalled that I needed to get euros. The clerk, a young Asian gentlemen, directed me towards the bank machine. A moment of freeze. What message would come up on the screen? How do you explain, at seventy-two years of age, such a stranded life?
The screen flickered an instant, but out came the small sheaf of money, the little rollers of joy.
I bought Georgie a celebratory sausage roll. I thought about splurging on a packet of cigarettes, a habit from the old days, but decided against it. We inched out onto the old road with a full tank of diesel.
I switched on the radio in the car. All the talk was of security and the Queen’s visit. They didn’t seem so worried about a bullet for Obama. Our complex histories. Inner colonialism indeed. I switched the station. The traffic deepened the farther south I got. It had already taken me four hours from Belfast, largely to do with Georgie’s bladder control. Every twenty miles or so I had to pull the car to the side in order to let her relieve herself. She wasn’t too fond of the journey and kept whimpering in the backseat until I finally allowed her to sit up front with her head out the passenger-side window.
It was early evening by the time I reached the outskirts of the city. I dawdled along, cursing myself for having booked a hotel in the city center. It would have been far easier to find a place on the outskirts. Dublin so much like anywhere else. Swerving flyovers. Shopping centers. Streets pepper-sprayed with For Sale signs. Closing Down. Liquidity Blowout. Empty glass towers. The repetitive strain of what we have all become. The vain show. The status hunger. I took advantage of the bus lanes and made my way along Gardiner Street. A Guard tried to flag me but I just kept going, waggling my northern license plate like a young girl parading herself along. I wanted to walk across the Beckett Bridge just for the sheer irony of it, No matter, try again, fail again, fail better, but got caught up in a vicious series of one-way junctions and traffic roadblocks for the state visits.
It was almost eight o’clock in the evening when I finally pulled up outside the Shelbourne, an expensive treat for myself. The valet, a vile little Spanish snob, looked at the car and then at me with more disdain than I can possibly describe, and then I was curtly told that there were no dogs allowed. Of course not. I had to admit to myself that I had known it all along. No point fooling any longer. Not much beyond a snob myself, of course. I feigned outrage and indignation, then promptly got snarled in the traffic again. The truth was I had hardly any money left at all, certainly not for the luxury of a hotel.