Ahoy for Joy (18 page)

Eventually, two men approached the bar. The young Irishman who turned out to be called Sean, quickly engaged them in conversation and suggested they should ask the barman for his
best
Guinness, carefully explaining that sometimes they don't supply their best grade to foreigners as they don't think it will be appreciated. This they did receiving the same dry response that Cees had received an hour or so earlier, much to the amusement of the little group. The newcomers spoke in slow English punctuated with pauses and stutters and fiddled about in their purses for money to pay for their drinks.

Sean watched carefully before once again catching the eye of one of them. “You folk aren't from around here then are you?”

“No, no, we are from Croatia,” came the reply.

“Croatia!”

“Yes, there is many coach load of us, but most of the older peoples are staying in the hotel. We are thinking we would come out and visit real Irish bar.”

“Bloody hell! Now we have coach trips from Croatia visiting the city,” remarked Sean, swaying joyfully as he spoke, the effects of the alcohol now becoming evident as he had already been present in the establishment for some time before Cees and Anna arrived.

“The thinking man's holiday destination,” added the Croatian visitor. “Look here.” He pulled a brochure from his bag, printed in a Balkan language of some sort, but with the slogan,
Belfast, the thinking man's holiday destination
, printed in English on the front cover. He handed it to the Englishman who was now gazing attentively.

“Well, I've lived in this city for over fifty years and I never thought I'd see this day!” He chuckled as he leafed through the pages full of illegible print but with familiar photographs of the city and surrounding countryside he knew so well. “Here we are, me an Englishman, two Irish, a Dutchman and his wife, two Croatian tourists and a humourless barman,” he nodded briefly at the bartender who was working diligently pouring further pints of stout, “all enjoying the craic together.”

Anna smiled politely. “Craic?”

It was Sean who answered. “Yes, like having a good time. Enjoying fun together, that sort of thing.”

“And is it spelled, c-r-a-i-c?” asked Anna.

“Well, yes it is! You know, I think there is something you're not letting on. You certainly have a bit more knowledge of this country than one might expect from the average Dutch visitor.”

Anna smiled once more, but this time more inwardly as her memories now delved back to the summer day when Grietje pulled a crumpled note from her purse. Cees smiled too, a little in keeping with the jolly chat that continued unabated, but his thoughts were really directed at his wife. He could see a side of her now that he had not seen before. He could see a depth of understanding she had failed to advertise in their relationship, but nevertheless must have always existed. Pride was a feeling he had mostly reserved for his children but now he felt a warm admiration for Anna's academic knowledge, so far from the certainties of the science world he knew so well, but still so full of colour and intrigue.

The little international group chattered on for most of the night, enjoying each other's company and interacting with the various visitors to the bar who came to replenish their empty glasses from time to time. The atmosphere was relaxed and informal. Cees involved himself enthusiastically in the often boisterous conversation and Anna smiled, interjecting the occasional contribution that always engaged the group's attention. As the evening wore on, she felt relaxed and at ease. She looked around herself from time to time, absorbing the atmosphere.
Michael's home town
, she thought. She was glad they had come.

At last the elderly Englishman set his empty glass on the counter with a loud clunk as it absorbed the abrupt shock of its meeting with the hard marble of the surface. “Ah, time for me to go. My beer is rationed, my life is ordered from morning to night with pills and potions but I still feel like shite! Oh, excuse me Miss!”

Anna smiled. The Englishman held out his hand. “It's been a pleasure meeting with you both. I do hope you have a wonderful stay in our city. Maybe you'll have time to see the countryside a little before you go. You won't be disappointed. Weather's supposed to be better after the weekend. What did you say your names were again?”

Cees shook his hand warmly, “Cees Bouwmeester,” he said, “and this is my wife, Anna.”

“And you are?” she asked expectantly.

“My name is Bailey, Oliver Bailey.”

Back at the hotel, a long day behind them, they settled down in bed. Anna dozed off quickly, not being accustomed to late nights, but Cees lay awake for a while, his thoughts engaging his brain in gentle discussion. It was rare that they would find themselves standing in a bar with unfamiliar company. Since marriage, their social lives had mostly centred on groups of friends with whom they were well acquainted. Then when the children came along, they quickly came to focus on their wants and needs and social lives became limited to the children's activities. However tonight, Cees, had watched his wife engage with complete strangers and he noted how her apparent shy disposition had found a new confidence. Maybe it was the opportunity to use the English language that was her passion. Maybe it was just the casual and jovial nature of the people with whom it seemed so effortless to interact, but she had shone in a way he hadn't seen for some years. He liked it.

The city too had already generated a warm feeling in his consciousness. There was a buzz of activity in the place, of placid excitement. People didn't take themselves too seriously. He liked that too. He wondered too about the young boy, Michael, who had so caught his wife's imagination all those years ago then lain dormant in her mind. He turned and looked across at Anna's sleeping figure, her hair strewn across the pillow and her eyes closed in peaceful slumber. He wondered what they would find out the next day and both optimism and apprehension mingled together in his thoughts as he dozed off to sleep.

Like the English and the Scottish too, the Irish like their breakfasts, cooked, greasy and tasty and the offering at Cees and Anna's hotel was no exception. However, for visitors to Ireland, the usual offering of bacon and eggs is supplemented with the local specialities of potato and soda bread filling the breakfaster with a starchy meal of guilty delight. However, they declined to try the recommended English Breakfast tea, instead they washed it down with a rather disappointing weak coffee or
coffee for people who don't drink coffee
as Cees referred to it. When they were well filled, the couple set out for their appointment with Sarah Thompson at the offices of the ‘Belfast Telegraph' in the city centre. The sky was overcast and a cool wind was blowing. A light drizzle filled the air.

Despite the weather they decided to walk, wishing to enjoy the atmosphere and perhaps look in one or two shops. The city offered an architectural mix from the grandeur of elaborate Victorian and Edwardian buildings, remnants of the city's heyday as an affluent commercial centre, to post war office blocks from the fifties and sixties. There were of course also the more recent shopping centres and department stores, a testimony to the post Troubles rebuilding programme with household names many of which were already familiar to the two visiting foreigners.

People went about their business, rushing around, takeaway coffees in hand, jumping on and off busses. Taxis stopped, setting down and picking up clients, shop girls gazed out towards the street, awaiting the day's customers. Despite the light rain, few wore coats and many were even dressed in short sleeves or loose summer clothing as if summer happened in Belfast whatever the weather and a positive expectation overruled reality.

A bicycle whooshed by, its bell ringing alerting the two visitors who had instinctively looked the wrong way before stepping on to the road. Anna's alarm turned to a giggle as Cees held her tightly and they retreated to the safety of the kerb before making a new more careful attempt. They passed by the grandeur of Belfast City Hall. Anna explained that it had been designed in a baroque style, similar to St Paul's Cathedral in London, but built more than two hundred years later as part of a revival movement.

Cees looked intently at his wife. She seemed to have a whole world of knowledge hidden away that he had never really noticed before. “How did you know that?”

“Michael wrote a poem about it.” She paused, considering briefly if she should expand on the subject, but quickly concluded she should and engaged her memory, “it was called Durban's big brother, I think. Or else, Durban's half-brother, I'm not sure. Apparently, there is a building in South Africa which is almost an exact replica, but strangely designed by a different architect. He likened the relationship to two siblings who share only one parent.”

They proceeded down the main thoroughfare, Donegall Place, leaving the City Hall behind them and gazed in the shop windows. Cees mused how his wife seemed somehow at ease in the city, like she knew it and understood it already. At last the bustle subsided a little as they followed the simple directions Sarah Thompson had supplied and arrived at their destination, a tall imposing building towards the Cathedral end of the city.

The Belfast Telegraph has a proud tradition of delivering the news throughout the various trials the city has experienced over many years. Outside the main entrance stood a bronze plaque above some superficial damage to the building's stonework which Cees and Anna stopped briefly to read:

Inside, they were greeted by a smartly dressed receptionist with a tight fitting skirt and white blouse accessorised with a small silk scarf tied loosely around her neck. She smiled widely as she welcomed them and showed them into an oak-panelled room with high windows facing the main road outside.

“Please, sit down and make yourselves comfortable.” Smiling politely, she stepped backwards from them towards the door and asked, “can I get you something to drink? Tea? Coffee, perhaps?”

They both declined the beverage and sat down in two large wooden armchairs positioned to one side of a huge desk topped in red leather that dominated the room. One wall was furnished floor to ceiling with bookcases of polished mahogany that bore the hallmarks of time gone by and contained a vast array of books, most of which looked as if they hadn't been opened for decades, centuries even. The two looked at each other, a little apprehensively, as they waited.

Presently they were joined by Sarah Thompson, whom Cees had already spoken with on the telephone a few days earlier. She was an attractive woman, if a little plump, who despite being aged only in her thirties wore a set of old fashioned looking glasses on the end of her nose in the way those who develop long sight in later years do as the eye muscles lose flexibility.

She carried a suspension file which she set on the desk before launching into enthusiastic welcomes interspersed with questions which she quickly answered herself, followed by short reprimands and scolds as if there was a kind of jovial split in her personality.

“Did you fly in? Well of course you did, how else would you get here. We're an island after all. People hardly go on the boat any more, not unless they're transporting something large and you would have needed more than one boat, then trains and buses, or whatever. Where is it you're from again?

“Holland,” said Cees in the shortest of intervals before the monologue continued.

“Yes, yes of course. Holland. So, thanks for your email. I understand you're interested in Michael Coglan.” She stopped briefly for a smiling interlude. “We are the Belfast Telegraph, the historical record of the city, the province too. We have records downstairs going back to 1870. Since then, anything that's happened here, good or bad, we have recorded it.”

Cees and Anna looked on intently, patiently.

“Well, Michael Coglan, a sad story, like them all back then, but of course, people forget that and nowadays everyone sees this with a much more positive outlook.”

She paused again, her face suddenly poised in thought conveying, perhaps uncharacteristically for a journalist, her own intimate thoughts to the newcomers before her. “Forgiveness?” Well, yes,” she said briefly, answering her own rhetorical question, “people are trying you know,” she affirmed. Her eyes met firstly with Anna's before moving to look at Cees intently. She went on, “we have had many dark years here, but yes, I do believe that today, people
are
trying, trying to forgive.”

She nodded her head agreeing with herself, before her demeanour changed to a more cheerful disposition and she went on, “still the mystery remains. Can't shed too much light on that,” she chuckled, “but look, I have what we have here.”

Cees raised his eyebrows and looked over at Anna who shrugged, the two now a little vexed as they struggled to take in the confused monologue of disjointed information, thought and opinion their new acquaintance conveyed while Sarah quickly opened the file skipping from page to page nodding from time to time and muttering a more or less constant stream of acknowledgment and affirmation as if any silence or the prospect of anyone else speaking were to be avoided at all costs. Cees found himself wondering how she could ever have succeeded in any journalistic sense as her mind seemed so constantly occupied with her own forethoughts that the gathering of new information must be rendered all but impossible but quickly discarded the question as Sarah continued.

“Well, yes you see. There doesn't seem to be any family. Both his parents died in the same attack, so Michael was left alone. Also, there doesn't seem to be any Aunts or Uncles or anybody from what I can gather. Rather unusual for Ireland; people typically have large families here, well at least they used to, though younger couples seem to be more into family planning and that sort of thing nowadays. Anyway, it seems his father was an only child… No hold on, there were some brothers, estranged though and there is a sister, but none of them seemed to have had any involvement with the family at the time. His mother had also had no contact with her siblings for many years. Hold on, there is a pencil note, just added here,” she pointed to a short paragraph scribbled on the side of the otherwise neatly typed page, “yes, mother's siblings live abroad. Oh, and I hadn't realised that, yes, look, it says here his parents were a mixed marriage.”

“Mixed marriage?”

Sarah smiled sweetly. “Ah, yes, his father was a Catholic and his mother a Protestant. A mixed marriage. Sorry! That's what we call it here.”

She shuffled some more papers, shaking her head from side to side. They both watched as she picked up the actual cutting from the newspaper of the article they had read on the internet only a few days earlier.

“Yes, and Michael was an only child himself, so really, it appears there was no one. Terribly sad. I guess that's why the nurse took such an interest, but we'll come to that in a minute.”

She turned over a few more pages.

“The house is long since gone. Demolished to make way for the motorway to the North. You probably travelled on it when you came in from the airport, unless of course the driver took you on some needless tour of the area if he thought you were foreign and didn't know your way around.” She chuckled. “You did take a taxi did you?”

She didn't wait for an answer.

“There is a bus too, but it just dumps you in the middle of town and it's not cheap either.”

“So, the house is gone. Nothing there for you then. Not sure what happened to the furniture, or even the family's personal effects or any money there might have been. Someone must have it, but I can't see anything here. Must find that out really.”

She paused, thinking for the briefest of moments. “Some solicitor in the city must know.” She lifted a pencil and made some notes on one of the papers. “I'll call around and see what I can find out.”

“So, like I said on the phone, this nurse, Bernadette O'Callaghan is her name, I'm sure I said already. She looks like your best source for information. She sort of adopted Michael during his last days when he was in hospital. Sat with him, talked to him and so on. A very nice lady.”

She made a short, uncharacteristic pause before continuing.

“She's retired now of course. Seventy something years old I would say, but spritely, bright as a button really. You know what they say, 70 is the new 60! As I said, she's not on the phone, so I went around there again on Thursday and rang her door bell. She's still very happy to see you, so that's great. I said you would call and see her at about 3 o'clock this afternoon. I hope that is OK with you?”

She raised her eyebrows as she looked over the top of her reading glasses first to Cees, then to Anna. They both nodded.

“I suppose you could go earlier, but well better not to. She is quite old now, lives alone. Never married. It's
Miss
Bernadette O'Callaghan by the way. Call her Bernie though. I'm sure that will be fine. I called her Bernie anyway. She lives up near the hospital, off the Falls Road.”

She pushed a note with the address across the desk which Cees lifted and inspected carefully.

“So, have you had a look around the city yet? Sorry about the weather, although they say it's going to be better after the weekend. Maybe you'll get a chance to go and see the countryside a bit. It can be beautiful when the sun shines. Are you staying long?”

“No, no, not long. Just a short trip for us. Thank you so much for your time Mrs Thompson.”

“Oh please do call me Sarah. Actually, it's Miss. And if I can do anything more to help, please just let me know.”

Cees nodded to Anna and they both got up from the table.

“I'll show you out myself. Where was it you said you came from again?”

“Holland.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” she said out loud reprimanding herself, “Oh, yes. The tulips.”

She hummed briefly,
Tulips from Amsterdam
without realising it, then smiled as she opened the door.

“Thanks so much for taking the time to see us on a Saturday Miss Thompson, Sarah,” said Cees, “It is most kind of you.”

“Oh, we're always here. News happens twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week . There's always somebody here.” She paused, “oh and Mr and Mrs Bowmeester,” she leaned forward, “it really is so nice that people from Holland are showing an interest in Michael Coglan.”

Cees raised his eyebrows and looked briefly at Anna who shrugged her shoulders. They walked out onto the street. Outside, the sky was overcast and a cool wind was blowing. A light drizzle filled the air.

“Jesus it's cold,” said Cees.

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in Belfast City,” joked Anna, thinking of a novel she had read some years before.

They both laughed. Cees put his arm around her and pulled her close, “Let's see what this nurse has to say.”