Beyond the Green Hills

PRAISE FOR ANNE DOUGHTY’S BESTSELLING NOVELS

‘An ability to capture between the pages the tender beauty of the Armagh countryside … Ms Doughty writes with insight and humour.’

Irish
Times

‘Anne Doughty brings the Armagh hills to life with her descriptive narrative which draws you deep into a fascinating world.’

News
Letter

I am grateful, as always, to my agent Judith Murdoch for help and encouragement. It was she who suggested I continue Clare’s story from
On A Clear Day
before I set out on the historical journey which took me back to 1861 and
The Woman from Kerry
, the story of Clare’s great-grandmother which leads on into the twentieth century and returns to Clare and Andrew in the 1960s.

My friends at the Irish Studies Centre, Armagh, have helped me once again and my husband, sister and closest friends have done some of the research I would have done myself had I been able to use my own legs.

Those who wrote to me and commented so generously on my earlier novels encouraged me greatly when writing proved to be very difficult, but my greatest debt, this time, must certainly be to the lovely people at Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast, who gave me a second new hip so that I can once again walk my beloved green hills.

ANNE DOUGHTY

T
hey stood in the shadow of the great stone pillar and studied every detail of the fields and orchards that covered the little humpy hills all around them. The old cottages, long and low, white painted, were tucked into their hollows on the south-facing slopes, sheltered from the north and west by plantings of trees. There was the odd new farm building, and a few two-storey houses, edging the little lanes that turned and twisted, dipped into valleys and climbed over their smooth, well-rounded shapes.

The blue tractor finished its work. The driver unhitched the plough and drove off down the lane below them. Gleaming in the sunlight, the newly ploughed field was left to the gulls, which hunted up and down the straight, newly turned furrows.

‘You love this place, Clare, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do,’ she said firmly. ‘I’d be heartbroken if I thought I’d never stand here again.’

She paused, remembering a summer Sunday long ago when she’d climbed up to the obelisk for the first time. Uncle Jack had been there and various aunts and uncles she couldn’t quite sort out. She was nine years old. She’d looked all around her and made up her mind that she was going to stay with
Granda Scott, even if Auntie Polly wanted to take her with them to Canada.

‘I think I do belong here, Andrew, like you do. But I’d be sad all my life if I never saw anything of the world out there, beyond the green hills.’

‘D
o you ever wish you could make time stand still?’ Clare asked, as she rolled over and sat up on the short, springy turf of the sunny hollow where they’d lain down to rest.

They’d been so lucky. Day after day, all through this miraculous week, the sun had poured down on them out of a flawless blue sky. Beyond their sitting place, the flower-studded grass gave way to powder-fine sand. The tide was far out, the brilliant blue-green mass of the Atlantic a good half mile away. So soft and distant the ripple of minute waves, it was entirely overlain by the whisper of a tiny breeze and the devoted murmurings of the insects which swung in the globes of sea campion and nuzzled the pink heads of thrift that bloomed all around them.

A mile of shimmering white sand away, the fishermen’s cottages in Port Bradon stood around their small harbour. The only inhabitants of the beach were cows, a dozen of them, settled happily on the warm sand, a short distance from the grassy slopes that ran down to the shore.

‘Hm?’ he said sleepily, an arm thrown across his eyes as he turned towards her, the sunlight catching a hint of red in his fair hair.

She pulled his hair, laughing as a trickle of sand slid down his face.

‘Deaf ears! I asked if you ever wished you could make time stand still.’

He smiled up at her.

‘If, perhaps, this fortnight could go on for ever?’

She nodded.

‘But think what we might miss. What joys might be stored up in the weeks which would come after.’

His voice was light and teasing, his blue eyes full of a tenderness that still amazed her.

‘I keep thinking I’ll wake up and find it’s all a dream,’ she said, half seriously.

‘Why should it be?’ he asked easily. ‘We knew we wanted to be together. We knew we wanted to be lovers. Why shouldn’t it be wonderful now we’ve finally managed it?’

His smile faded as he watched her face grow thoughtful and rather sad.

‘Perhaps I think it’s too good to be true. All this and you too,’ she said, with an attempt at lightness.

She threw out a hand to embrace the sky and the sea, the dazzling white gulls gliding overhead, the golden splashes of tormentil dotting the hollow where they sat.

Suddenly Clare shivered, as if the warmth and light of the June day had been switched off.

It was November, and she was looking down through the leafless tree beyond her window to the pavements of Elmwood Avenue below. The last of the leaves lay saturated and brown, tramped into the wet surface below the dark, dripping branches.
Although it was midday, the room behind her was dark but for a single point of light, the glow of her gas fire.

In her hand, she held a letter from Andrew. He was trying to comfort her. She had lost her grandfather and her home. She had friends, she had her grant to live on, she had her work, but it seemed to her then that she had lost all that she loved. Except Andrew. He was the only one who grasped what it meant not to be able to go back to the place where you grew up, where you knew every stone and tree, every detail of a house and garden. However tedious and hard her life had so often been in the house by the forge, in those first awful months she had felt sure that she would never heal the loss of all that had been so familiar.

‘Perhaps this all seems unreal,’ she said slowly.

‘But why should what is beautiful and happy be any less real than what is sad, or dark, or painful?’ He sat up and reached out for her hand, his eyes moving over her face, usually so mobile, now so still, sombre and downcast. He had never seen her look like this before. Her shoulders drooped as if she were burdened by cares, her eyes focused on a tiny fragment of golden flower she had picked and now held between finger and thumb. She rubbed its short stem so that it twirled round and round, the tiny red speckles on the base of its petals now invisible in the blur of gold.

‘Was last night unreal?’ he asked urgently.

To her own surprise, Clare blushed.

‘No, my love, it wasn’t,’ she said softly.

She glanced up at him and caught his look of anxious concern just as it softened.

‘There’s nothing of the phantom lover about you,’ she added, smiling weakly.

Making love to Andrew for the first time had been no more difficult than kissing him for the first time, all those years ago on their first outing to Cannon Hill.

A week ago, they’d arrived at the old fisherman’s cottage, tucked in under the cliffs beyond the harbour at Ballintoy, a bag of food in the boot of their borrowed car. They’d found a bottle of wine waiting for them and a note from Clare’s old friend Jessie, explaining the peculiarities of the cottage. Andrew had pushed open the door into the tiny bedroom. The high bed was so large it filled almost all the space. They looked at each other and laughed.

‘We’d better have supper first or we won’t get any,’ Andrew said as he turned her round and propelled her back into the other room.

They’d eaten the food in the bag, drunk the wine, and made love in the moonlight, eagerly and joyously. They drifted into a blissful doze; woke up and made love again, the roar of the incoming tide loud in their ears. And again, as fingers of light reached across the patchwork quilt and a blackbird tuned up for its morning song. Exhausted at last, they’d fallen asleep and not opened their eyes till the middle of the morning.

‘No wonder football teams are locked up when they’re in training,’ Andrew said, as he peered into the kitchen cupboard, in search of bowls for
their cornflakes.

She looked at him blankly as she turned from the larder, a jug of milk in her hand.

‘Passion can be quite debilitating, don’t you think?’ he asked, with a perfectly straight face.

She laughed till the contents of the milk jug rocked like a stormy sea.

They’d just managed to eat breakfast before going back to their crumpled bed.

It had all been so easy. Easy to make love, easy to cope with the primitive arrangements at the cottage, where water came from the spring under a bush near the back door and the loo was a rickety wooden plank over a hole in the ground. Easy to be together hour after hour.

That first week, they’d worked their way all along the north coast. They’d tramped the length of the Giant’s Causeway, taken it in turns to sit in the Wishing Chair, promised not to tell each other their wish. They’d looked down into the chill waters below the Minstrel’s Window at Dunluce Castle and imagined the sheer rage of the storm that had brought it crashing into the sea, one fearful winter’s night, long ago. They drove to Ballycastle, walked along the beach to Marconi’s cottage. Staring out across the wide ocean he’d been the first to span with radio waves, they wondered if they’d ever visit America themselves.

They had talked, hour upon hour, as if to make up for all the years of silent letters and frustrating phone calls. At night, they made love with the same urgency, trying to satisfy their deep longing in the
sheer passion of the moment, only to discover that such longing grew by what it fed on.

‘You’re quite right, you know,’ she said, coming back to the present. She squeezed his hand. ‘Sometimes the dark things, the sad things, seem more real than the good things. I wonder why. Is black more real than white?’

‘Perhaps we’ve been encouraged to see the dark as more real. Sin-soaked religion with hellfire at the end of it is supposed to concentrate the mind on our follies and failures rather than our joys and successes.’

‘But I don’t even go to church now,’ she protested.

‘You don’t have to. It gets into the bloodstream. You pick it up from other people, from how they behave, what they say.
Ach,
shure
ye
never
know
the
day.
Just
when
he
was
on
the
pig’s
back,
shure
didn’t
the
good 
Lord
call
him
in
and
he
fell
off
the
muck
spreader.
Dead
and
buried
an’
him
that
pleased
he’d
just
got
his
pension
.’

Clare laughed. She’d forgotten just how well Andrew could still mimic the local Grange accent. And he’d got the uncompromising tone so right. So often in the days when she’d sat on the settle by the stove listening to the men who visited her grandfather of an evening she’d heard them speak in such a way that even the mildest disagreement seemed impossible. She’d even felt there was real enjoyment in telling the tale of a well-known figure suddenly struck down, someone seen or talked to only a day or two previously. It wasn’t that they weren’t sorry at the loss of a neighbour, but their
enthusiasm for telling a story of death and disaster had always puzzled her.

‘It could be good old Calvinism, Clare. Never let yourself be happy or you’ll be struck down. Happiness is not for the likes of us mortals.’

She nodded thoughtfully and then smiled.

‘Are you happy, Andrew?’

‘Yes. I am. Happier than I’ve ever been in all my life,’ he said firmly. ‘And what about you?’ he added more hesitantly.

‘Yes,’ she said, nodding vigorously. ‘I’m happy too. So happy I get the wobbles,’ she added, laughing, as she moved into his arms.

They lay entwined until they grew too hot in the strong sun.

‘How would it be, my best beloved, if I drove us into the nearest metropolis and bought us an ice cream?’

She laughed as he extended his tongue and licked a large, imaginary cone. What a silly she’d been, having such dark thoughts when life was all they’d ever hoped for. The years of separation were over. The summer lay ahead. Andrew would be in Belfast and so would she. For the next three months, while she was working with Jessie and her husband, Harry, they’d actually be in the very same street. They’d see each other every day. And this time next year, with Finals behind her, they’d be married. They’d be properly together at last, never to part, free to shape their future the way they wanted it to be.

‘Where
is
the nearest metropolis?’

‘I really don’t know,’ he said honestly. ‘But there’s
an Antrim map in the car. Fairly ancient, judging by the colour of the cover. But things don’t change that much around here. If we can find somewhere with a church, a chapel and at least three pubs, it’ll be big enough to have a shop with a fridge and Walls choc ices.’

He paused, looked at her very seriously, and then continued.

‘On the other hand, Your Honour, I have to say, on the evidence accumulated over the years, it is an established fact that watering places such as Portrush support a superfluity of establishments wherein the delicacy in question may be consumed, suitably seated, from a silver receptacle.’ He paused for effect. ‘Furthermore, in such establishments, I have it on good report, it is the custom to offer a wide choice of this particular consumable – and you don’t get your fingers sticky either.’

He stood up, pulled her to her feet and into his arms. After a short delay, they set off through the dunes, back to the car.