Authors: Kate Kerrigan
Chapter Eleven
‘Now,’ said Sean Walsh, as Jimmy and the rest of the crew climbed into the truck that would take them on the short ten-minute journey back to the bothy, ‘there’s another honest day’s work done.’
It was day twenty of the season and the end of another long session of potato-picking. Five bells sounded from the church tower in the nearby village of Cleggan and the workers trooped over to the long trough at the edge of the field where they threw the last of the day’s harvest to be collected, dusted and finally sold to the good people of Scotland.
‘Surely,’ said Tom Collins.
‘Never was a thing more certain,’ agreed his son Noel.
‘Aye,’ added fourteen-year-old Kevin, the younger of the Collins boys, always following the ‘big men’ in the family with his final affirmation.
Jimmy was starting to really enjoy the company of these men. Aside from Sean and himself, there were ten other men: Aileen’s family and the two Kelly men, the three Collins men, Noreen Flaherty’s brother, James, and then the hilarious Iggy Murphy, whom Jimmy teased by saying that his twin sister, Claire, was after him.
Iggy was sweet on Noreen Flaherty, and while the others were
hard men for the work, Iggy and he enjoyed an unspoken camaraderie in their wiry, somewhat romantic appearances.
‘I’ll be off for the morning tomorrow,’ said Mick. ‘I’m away into town. I’ll be relying on you to keep an eye on the younger lads,’ he said across to Sean.
‘Aye, boss,’ Jimmy’s father said.
Jimmy believed his father to be the hardest-working man he knew, but he had never seen Sean work for another man before in this way. Everyone on Aghabeg pulled their weight – that was a given if you wanted to survive on an island. However, you chose how and when you worked – there was no one there ringing bells telling you when to start and finish. The fishermen worked as a team, and although that could be said to be true with the tattie-hokers, there was nonetheless a pecking order and Jimmy found this difficult to fathom at times. There was a queue for who got first pick of the hot bacon straight from the pan and the tea still steaming hot at the midday dinner break. As newcomers, Sean made sure that he and Jimmy held back and kept themselves at the end of the line.
It wasn’t in Jimmy’s nature to be compliant and hang back, but when he complained to his father about this, the older man explained, ‘We are not just earning a wage, son; we are earning our right to be here. The Lord gave you luck in being born a fisherman – the island and its waters give us all the fish we can eat and a bit besides to sell. It’s a great life surely.’ Then his face hardened and he became deadly serious. ‘Working for a wage is a different story altogether. You must have humility, keep the head down and work hard for pride as much as money, son. When you work for another man, he gets your respect as a given, but you have to earn his respect back by doing his bidding. It’s a challenge for every man, Jimmy, but it’s what makes the working man great.’
Their working day started early. At first light, all of them would go straight outside, where the fore graipe already had the fire going and was waiting with a mug of tea and a hunk of lavishly buttered bread to keep them going through the morning. If they dilly-dallied or were last in line, as Sean and Jimmy were, they ate their bread on the truck.
On their first day out, having secured a kiss from Aileen the night before, Jimmy had waited to see where she would sit on the cart into the fields. She had thrilled him beyond belief by cocking her head high in the air past her brothers and sitting next to him on the cart. Paddy, her father, sat directly opposite them and held Jimmy’s eye as Aileen, ignoring her father, flirtatiously hooked her arm into his coat and rested her head on the young fisherman’s shoulder. Paddy made no move to stop this, which was in itself a sign of approval, but his mere presence nonetheless made it clear that his tolerance was limited to Jimmy behaving with propriety towards his daughter. So Jimmy sat every morning like a statue, smelling the sharp tang of his new lover’s breath on his neck, knowing that while he could not kiss her in view of all the company, the wait made the want in him all the sweeter because he looked forward to the moments they would steal together later.
Their days developed a routine. Jimmy and Aileen worked alongside each other for the first few hours. He dug and turned the soil with a shovel as Aileen followed behind. Her slender body bent, her shoulders arched so that her small breasts tucked themselves into her waist – picking the hard muddy orbs and throwing them into her bucket with surprising agility and speed.
‘She’s like a machine,’ Iggy remarked on their first day out, as Jimmy carried his belle’s bucket over to the trough for her.
‘She’s a natural,’ Mick said, as he weighed the bucket. ‘Some people have the land in them – she’s a great asset to the crew.’
‘She’ll keep you on your toes, anyway,’ Iggy added. ‘Sure you can hardly dig them as quick as she can pick them.’
The cheeky lad looked as if he was going to say something else, but Jimmy stared at him good and hard and made him think again. Jimmy was a joker, but when it came to people talking about Aileen, the men had learned to hold their tongues with the banter.
‘He’s got it bad with that Doherty girl surely.’
‘Red hair? You’d never have a moment’s luck in your life.’
‘Skinny wee thing too – not enough meat on her for my liking.’
The men were worse gossips when they got together than the women, but Mick’s job was to keep them in line.
‘Mind Jimmy doesn’t hear you on about her like that. He may be small, but I’d say he’d take an awful lump out of you as soon as look at you if he was riled. And as for the brothers, they’d kill you stone dead.’
By mid-morning Aileen had filled as many buckets as the grown men would do in a full day. By the end of the first week she had been selected by Biddy to be the assistant to the fore graipe. This was a big honour, not only because it took you from hard labour into the more feminine domain of the kitchen, but it also meant you got paid a small stipend for the extra work. So, at 11 a.m. sharp, the truck came to take the two women back to the bothy to prepare the main meal of the day, which would be eaten at midday. Mick would have put money aside from each of their wages to pay for the best of meat – steak, ham – and he always made sure there was plenty. Because Mick had been coming to Scotland for so long, he was friends with the locals and would buy animals direct from a pig farmer; then, for an overall price for the season, he would keep them with Finlay, the butcher in Cleggan, whose wife also provided
them with such foods as Biddy did not have the equipment or ingredients to make herself – like butter and jam. Dinner was as good as you would get in any fine restaurant. Not that Jimmy had ever eaten in a fine restaurant, but it was as good as anything his mother had ever served up to him, and privately, he thought this bode very well indeed for Aileen’s prospects as his wife. On one or two occasions he had looked over at his father as the two men were pounding gratefully into a plate of fried bacon, cabbage and spuds, and given him a look that clearly said, ‘Well? What do you think?’
Sean had just smiled and shaken his head in amusement at his hopelessly infatuated son.
‘Will you have some sense, boy, and stop hounding the poor girl? If you hold back, you’ll get further.’
‘I think she’ll be a grand wife,’ the incorrigible boy said. ‘Will Mam like her?’
‘Of course she will – she’ll love her.’
Twice a week Biddy and Aileen missed the afternoon shift and stayed behind in the bothy to catch up on the housekeeping. On these occasions Jimmy could barely wait for the day to end. Just those few hours when she was not within his sights made him feel anxious. So he was always first on the truck and hauling the others up onto it trying to hurry them along.
Carmel was the last on, as usual, dragging her heels and complaining. ‘My feet hurt,’ she’d whine. ‘Ow! Don’t tug my arm – I’ve caught my skirts . . .’
Although she was certainly difficult, Jimmy was starting to feel sorry for Carmel. He could see that she was madly in love with Paddy Junior, and he knew what it was like to be so in love with somebody that you were in constant danger of losing yourself. As the weeks had passed, people were starting to distance themselves from Carmel’s constant spoilt moaning. Even her
father had taken to travelling on the other truck both to and from the fields. He was fearful, Jimmy suspected, of either admonishing his outspoken daughter or incurring the disrespect of his workforce if he was seen not to.
He said as much to Aileen that evening, as she was drying up the food things after supper, although she was not sympathetic.
‘Carmel Kelly was a spiteful brat in national school and she’s a bitch yet. Small wonder her own father can’t stand the sight of her.’
‘She’s in love with your brother,’ Jimmy said.
‘She’s not a hope in hell with Paddy Junior,’ Aileen bit straight back at him. ‘She’s a face as flat and plain as a bun, and she’s malicious too. She is no more in love with him than she is with you, though she’d take a chance on you for the sake of it if I gave her half the chance!’
Aileen was fiery. Jimmy liked that.
‘Sure it wouldn’t be you giving her the chance,’ Jimmy teased her then; ‘it’d be me surely.’
Aileen’s lips tightened and her eyes flashed wide as she spat, ‘If you want to go off with Carmel Kelly, you’re welcome, Jimmy Walsh. See if I care a jot if you do.’
Jimmy could see the whites of her knuckles as she gripped the cup so tightly that he thought she might break it and he knew she was jealous.
He smiled and said, ‘Don’t you know I’d never leave you for another, Aileen. I’m only teasing.’
‘You can tease all you like and you can go off and do your worst with that Kelly cow or any other woman of your choosing – if you can find one that would have you, and you would be lucky at that!’
‘Ah, don’t be cruel, Aileen,’ he said – although he was as entered in the game as she was.
‘I can be very cruel, and don’t you forget that for one instant of your sorry life, Jimmy Walsh, if you carry on teasing me with your stupid talk.’
As she glowered at him defiantly, Jimmy looked at her small, hard hands rubbing away at the porcelain and imagined them scraping with the same angry voracity down the skin of his naked back. He quickly pushed the thought aside, something that he found he had to do often since that first kiss, and the kisses that had followed whenever they got the chance to be alone together.
‘There’s a picture on in Cleggan tonight,’ he said.‘I was thinking we could go.’
‘Maybe I’ll go with one of the girls,’ she said.
Jimmy decided to take his father’s advice, for once. Aileen needed a firm hand or she might disappear on him altogether, so without giving himself time to think about it, Jimmy turned his back on her and, walking towards the door, said, ‘Suit yourself.’
He closed his eyes and bit his lip but kept walking, and as he reached the door, Aileen suddenly said, ‘I’ll be ready at seven.’
Without turning round, he added firmly, ‘Put on something pretty and I might take you for chips afterwards.’
As he stepped out of the bothy, Jimmy was aware he was beaming like a goon. He had her on her toes all right, and when it came to Aileen Doherty, that was the only way to have her.
Chapter Twelve
There was a world of work to be done before Aileen met Jimmy for the pictures at seven.
The men’s sleeping quarters were next to the women’s, but the unpredictable Scottish weather had turned chilly in the past few days and some of them had been complaining about the cold at night. Mick wanted his workforce happy, so decided to move the men’s beds to an empty barn that contained an open fireplace.
The gaffer was determined to have the men set up in their new sleeping quarters that night and so the moment the supper bowls were washed, everybody got to work moving the twelve potato boxes and mattresses from one barn to the other. Making the beds and moving the effects took no time at all, but clearing the barn first was hard work. The long, narrow space had originally been an outdoor shed and still had an earth floor, although it had been so compacted by sweeping and footsteps that it was as good as a stone floor for dryness. It had been used to store farm equipment, some of which was too heavy to move. Jimmy and two other men tried to move a large barrel of tar from smack bang in the centre of the room and it was comical seeing the strong young men’s faces gurn with the effort of moving it two inches.
‘Here,’ Biddy said, throwing a cloth over the top of it, ‘now you have your own table.’
‘A bar maybe,’ one of them laughed, and then to drive home her point, Biddy produced a teapot and placed it ceremoniously on the cloth, saying, ‘There’ll be nothing stronger than tea consumed in this room, I can assure you!’ and they all laughed.
One wall of the barn was taken up almost entirely by two sliding doors that would only stay shut when padlocked from the outside. In effect, the new ‘bedroom’ could therefore only really be accessed from the kitchen, which Biddy was not happy about.
‘I don’t like the idea of big men traipsing in and out of my kitchen.’
‘We’ll get the doors fixed, Biddy, but in the meantime I’ll make sure they all bed down together so as not to be causing you too much disruption.’
The men rigged up a heavy tarpaulin as a temporary wall, sealing it on one side by laying it up against the wall with bags of coal and leaving the other end open as a makeshift entrance. Since the weather had been fine up to that point, Biddy had been cooking outside and had not lit the fire in that room before.
‘Stick a brush up there, Aileen, good girl, and check the chimney is clear.’
Aileen hesitated. It was half past six and she had her good dress on ready for the pictures.
The new bedroom was finished, and the men were all outside smoking and talking; the other girls were scattered about the bothy tending to their various grooming routines and romances.
Biddy never stopped working. The extra money she made as fore graipe meant she could never be seen to rest like the others. Aileen instinctively followed her lead but stalled, worrying with
the amount of work ahead of her that she wouldn’t get out in time for the pictures.
This outing would be their first proper evening together, and while Jimmy was blasé about it, Aileen knew that they had earned this permission from her father for not acting improperly up to now. Even at that she and Jimmy had managed to catch a little time together each day – but with her brothers never far away, sometimes it was just a hastily stolen kiss after supper.
Jimmy was still something of a mystery to her except for the fact that he loved her wildly, although she didn’t need to know much more than that. She knew that she loved him too, though she certainly did not feel ready to tell him.
‘Say you love me, Aileen,’ he said, as she sat back into his chest and felt the sureness of his arms wrapped around her waist in the nook behind the coal shed where they went to hide away from the others after supper.
He wrapped tendrils of red hair round his finger and kissed the tip of her curls.
‘It’s bad luck, you know,’ she said, teasing him as she always did by changing the subject, ‘my red hair.’
‘Sure I know that and you’ll be the death of me, Aileen Doherty,’ he said, ‘unless I don’t get you back to your brothers and they get to me first.’
She pulled him back down and pushed his mouth onto hers and he groaned but pulled away. It was always him who did the right thing.
‘I can’t upset your family,’ he’d say. ‘I’ve the future to think of.’
‘Fool,’ she said, laughing. ‘Come back down and let me kiss you.’
If she told him she loved him in that moment, he would stay
and Lord knows what trouble they might have got into, but the longer she spent in his company, the less she cared about anything or anyone but him.
Still, she wouldn’t tell him she loved him. Not yet. Invincible Jim was as weak as a kitten when it came to her affections and that was the way she would keep it, for now.
When she was out in the fields working, Aileen could always feel his eyes on her, sometimes protective, sometimes just admiring her, wanting her, and she would look across at him and they would share a moment when it felt like they were touching, even though they were on opposite sides of the field. Even when he was in the field and she was back at the bothy, Aileen could still feel him around her.
‘Well, girl,’ Biddy said now, her back turned as she made newspaper balls for kindling, ‘where’s my fire? Get on with it.’
Aileen bent down and tentatively looked up the chimney. At its base was a film of heavy cobwebs grey with dust – there would be some mess coming down at her if she wasn’t careful. Closing her eyes and turning her face away, she shoved the broom handle up as far as she could. There was a small clatter as a blackened bird’s nest fell with a firm
plump
into the grate, followed by a cloud of coal dust. Aileen jumped back to avoid it and almost pushed over Biddy.
‘Mother of God, child, what is the matter with you?’
‘Sorry, Biddy – it’s my good dress.’
‘Are you going somewhere?’
‘Jimmy is taking me to the pictures in Cleggan – that is, if that’s all right with you?’
‘You should know by now that everything and nothing is all right with me . . .’ She looked down into the grate behind Aileen and said, ‘Well, that’s the worst of it down, I suppose.’
Biddy adjusted her shoulders and took a deep breath, puffing
it out in a dramatic sigh. Biddy was old, more than fifty anyway, and Aileen could see she was tired. For a moment Aileen thought she was going to ask her to stay and help watch the fire for the evening. Instead, she looked her carefully up and down and said, ‘That’s a pretty dress all right. The green looks well on you.’
Aileen wondered if perhaps she should cancel the pictures, stay back and keep Biddy company for the evening. There would be other nights, and it might be no harm to let Jimmy down that day. He had given her an awful teasing earlier, pretending to flirt with Claire Murphy to get a reaction out of her brother, Iggy. In any case, he had not even bothered to find out what picture was on. It was probably just some boring John Wayne cowboy movie – they were all the same.
‘I might stay here and keep an eye on the fire with you,’ she said.
Biddy smiled, a rarity, and swiped her with a rolled newspaper. ‘Go on out to that eejit of a sweetheart and don’t let him get you into any trouble.’
Aileen flew out the door to find him.
Jimmy, in grand style, had ordered a taxi to take them to the pictures. Aileen had never actually been in a car before, but she did not let on. She was familiar with them, of course. She was, after all, from a big island and they had cars. Well, three that she knew of, but in the summer, when the tourists came, it was not unusual to see a bus packed full of holidaymakers. The bus would take them across to the ‘English’ hotels that opened seasonally next to the sandy beaches on the north side of the island. She guessed that Jimmy’s small island didn’t even have a proper road that might carry a car. Yet here he was being Mr Big Stuff and opening the door of the taxi for her as if he had been at it all his life. He was a funny boy surely, but nonetheless she felt
a definite thrill sliding along the shiny leather seat and arranging herself in the corner.
Jimmy sat in the front with the driver. When they reached the town hall in Cleggan, Aileen watched as Jimmy paid the driver and shook his hand firmly. She found herself thinking how elegant and gentlemanly he appeared. This was a Jimmy she had not seen before: a man of the world. Quite the catch.
As she stepped out of the car then, she could not believe her eyes. On a billboard outside the entrance was an advertisement for that night’s picture:
Wuthering Heights
. ‘I am torn with Desire – tortured by hate!’ the poster screamed. The devilish eyes of Heathcliff, played by the English actor Laurence Olivier, glimmered from the shadows and bored angrily into the innocent beauty of Merle Oberon’s ribboned ringlets. Aileen thought she might fall into a dead faint in excitement right there on the street.
‘That is my favourite book!’ she said to Jimmy. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this was on?’
He paused and then said sunnily, ‘It was a surprise!’
She knew right away it was no more than a happy accident. In all likelihood he had not even known it was based on a book, let alone the most romantic, passionate, perfect book in the world. In any case, she was thrilled beyond reason.
She let Jimmy buy the tickets and herself a quarter-bag of Iced Caramels because he knew she liked them. However, Aileen was irritated to note that he didn’t get any sweets for himself. She knew his favourite were Emeralds, a chocolate-covered toffee, but the crafty lad knew there would be scant kissing opportunity if there were two of them chewing toffees at the same time. Did he think of nothing else besides kissing? A proper man – a man like Heathcliff – would have his mind on higher, more poetic things. When Jimmy tried to manoeuvre her into a row
of seats near the back, Aileen marched right down to the front row. There would be no canoodling opportunities down here with them in full view of the audience behind. She would be able to enjoy the film and allow herself to completely sink into the fervent spine-tingling passion of Olivier’s Heathcliff without Jimmy’s bothersome groping.
‘You may as well get yourself a bag of Emeralds,’ she said to him when he asked if she was sure she wanted to sit so close to the screen. She almost added, ‘Because that’ll be all you’re chewing on,’ but held her tongue because it would have sounded common and already she was starting to feel ladylike and wistful, like Cathy.
However, Aileen did not find the movie as engaging or satisfying as the book. Although Laurence was handsome enough, he was not the swarthy Heathcliff of her dreams. If anything, his dark, pointed features and intense staring eyes made him look a little like Jimmy. Merle Oberon was tolerable as Cathy, but as Aileen had always imagined herself in that role, it was somewhat disconcerting to see her being portrayed as somebody else. All in all, the whole experience was something of a disappointment, and on a number of occasions throughout she wished she could steal a kiss from Jimmy, although he seemed to be enjoying the film, which vaguely surprised and annoyed her too. The best Aileen could say was that Jimmy was so mesmerized that she got to eat half his packet of Emeralds scarcely without him noticing.
Before the curtain was drawn down, she nudged Jimmy, saying, ‘You promised me chips – come on now and we’ll beat the crowd.’
The chip shop in Cleggan got very busy after the pictures on a Friday and Aileen wasn’t in the humour for queuing in the rain.
However, Jimmy didn’t move. His jaw was set, his brows furrowed, and his eyes glowered darkly as he sat silently staring at the rolling credits.
‘Come on,’ she said, as the man at the side of the screen switched the town hall’s lights on and pulled across a makeshift red curtain. ‘Everyone will be out before us – hurry up.’
Still Jimmy didn’t move. She took hold of his arm and then got a fright as he pulled it away from her with a rejecting, angry tug.
‘What’s the matter, Jimmy?’ she said.
The cinema was all but empty. The man who had switched on the lights was gathering the last of the audience out through the door and seemed to have missed these two stragglers at the front.
Jimmy turned to her and his lips curled into a nasty sneer the likes of which she had never seen on his face before.
‘You know well what’s wrong with me, Aileen Doherty, and don’t pretend. It’s clear to me now.’
Aileen’s stomach twisted into a tight knot. What was the matter with him? What was he talking about?
‘You’re mad in the head,’ she said, bluffing. She felt afraid. She wanted to cry. What was wrong with him at all?
‘Now you’ve said it,’ he said, leaping up from his seat and standing in front of her. ‘I am mad – mad with love for you. You put a spell on me from that first day I saw you – with your fire and your witchery – and now you have me driven to distraction. I can barely look at you without my heart fit to bursting, and when you’re not there, I don’t know what to do with myself, Aileen. I’m like yer man in the film – I’m sick with love for you and that’s the truth.’
Jimmy was shaking from his outburst, too emotional to even look into her face. Tears formed at the corners of his eyes, and
for the first time since this foolish young man had burst into her life, Aileen felt completely overtaken by emotion herself. He loved her – properly, passionately. He loved her like Heathcliff loved Cathy. Compelled out of her seat and into his arms, she put both her hands behind his neck and pulled him down to her for a kiss that was so intense she felt she would never want to emerge from it. He gripped her tightly around the waist and all but lifted her from the ground and laid her down on the dusty wooden floor, where they entwined their limbs, then pressed their bodies so close to one another that they could not be certain which body belonged to whom as they tumbled and turned on the floor.
There was a noise behind them and they fell suddenly still and silent, limbs still wrapped round each other like they were one animal. From under the metal legs of the seats they could see through across to the door, where the manager was checking the hall. Satisfied it was empty, he turned off the lights. Now they were alone together in a dark place, unseen, for as long as they wanted: for as long as they might need. They paused to take in this fact, and the timbre of their lovemaking altered to accommodate it. Jimmy held Aileen’s face and kissed her tenderly on the lips, then moving down to the delicate skin of her neck, he unbuttoned her dress to the waist and kissed whatever bare flesh he could find until her hands reached up behind and loosened the clasps of her bra. As his mouth shunted aside the loose fabric and his lips brushed the escaped breasts, Jimmy let out a groan. Then he moved his hand slowly up her leg until she felt his cold fingers on the flesh at the top of her stockings and the thin fabric of her dress being pushed aside. She could feel he was rock hard pressing against the side of her leg. She had some idea of what might happen next – her curiosity about nature had led her to understand these things – and although she
wanted it to happen, more than anything, she was also afraid. That was the way of disaster and damnation. She must not give in. They had already gone far enough, further than they should ever have gone, and that was her fault. It was always the woman’s fault. Although she could not say she regretted it for one single moment, she knew that she had to draw a halt before things went any further.