The Fish Ladder (12 page)

They had both divorced and eventually married when Noreen’s youngest child turned eighteen.

I began to spend most of my weekends at the house. Even my parents and an aunt came to visit. Brian always seemed especially interested in me. We had something in common, he had rapidly gleaned: I was an adopted child. He had given his firstborn up, although the decision had been both against his wishes and out of his hands. A few years ago he had paid a private detective to find his daughter. She had been born to his first wife, but before they were married, and convention or scandal didn’t allow them to keep her. The baby had been given in adoption to an English vicar and his wife, and they had called her Felicity. As it happened the vicar had recently died and Brian appeared at just the right moment. He brought Felicity to Walworth, with her husband and little daughter, and she met the unruly family that were her kin.

This was the dream that I had never dared acknowledge, and for Felicity it had come true. I glowed in the warmth from Pamela’s family, like a stray dog drawn to a fire. To me they were beautiful, wild, generous, hilarious, glamorous, and good.

Noreen told me one night of a home movie that had gone missing at the height of the Troubles, when Brian was a leading defence lawyer representing various Protestant paramilitaries, despite his Catholic business interests. The film was of the family playing Cowboys and Indians. Brian had worn a feathered chieftain’s headdress and stripes across his cheekbones. Noreen was a squaw. The children were everything in between and at one point Brian’s eldest son had surfed down the kitchen staircase on an ironing board, devastating both the ironing board and the stairs. Brian roared at the thought of MI6 or the IRA or the Army or whoever had pinched the film scratching their heads at the tomfoolery.

I had longed to be a part of it – and in a way, of course, I was. But I also longed for such a story to open – for me. In part, this yearning stopped me from revisiting the house when I left my job in Ireland. I had driven away from Walworth, for what turned out to be the last time, the morning after the 1997 General Election. The Labour Party had taken power in a landslide victory with a majority of over two hundred seats. Brian had placed a rollover bet. He was especially interested in proportional representation, and he won fifty thousand pounds that night. I drove past him in the grey first light. I was due to be in Belfast at nine, and Brian was asleep. He was sitting very straight on a wooden bench beneath a tree, and a soft rain was falling. His glasses had misted over, and his two Irish wolfhounds lay at his feet, the fine rain sticking to his hair and their coats so that all three figures seemed adorned with pearl hairnets. For me, in the years that followed, other things came up: Evie was born, my own adopted father fell mortally ill, and I didn’t return to Ireland until Evie was almost two years old, when we came for Pamela’s wedding. And now, seven years later, I had come again, and this time it was because Pamela had died.

She had been swimming in the sea off Caherdaniel in Kerry with some friends. It was in a river mouth, as it happened, where the Atlantic breakers surged against the downward stream, and at high tide you could bodysurf through a channel into the shallow water of the river. Pamela was struck by a headache and had come out of the water, walking to a house above the beach. She was staying with the same friend who had introduced us to one another, all those years ago. Pamela had said something about going to make the lunch. But her headache grew worse until soon she could not speak. Her husband, John, was with her, and she lost consciousness looking into his eyes. An ambulance brought her to Tralee. Noreen took a taxi from Limavady. As many of Pamela’s friends as could get there in time gathered around her bedside, and then her life support was switched off. The cause of death had been an aneurysm. That, at any rate, was the story that I pieced together when I eventually got to the house.

I missed the funeral. I had missed my flight from Liverpool to Belfast because I fell asleep in the bath, and the next flight wasn’t until noon. By the time I got to Walworth the mourners were streaming home. The family and Pamela’s closest friends were gathered at the house. I passed Arthur standing in the yard behind the house, a glass, half empty, in his hand. He was talking with someone who was inside the kitchen, but he made no move to enter. In the living room of the cottage where Pamela had lived were two wooden trestles where her body had lain in an open coffin. The room was filled with flowers, many of them cut from the garden, hydrangeas, roses, marguerites, lilies. They surrounded the place where Pamela had been. Her husband John was sleeping, and the voices in the cottage were subdued. Towards evening someone commented that the room felt cold. People supposed that it would be all right to light a fire, but felt they’d better wait till John woke up. I went back into the big house where Noreen was moving among the mourners, gracious, outwardly calm. The emerald glinted on her finger, there were more at her throat and wrist. She held a cut-glass tumbler of dark liquid, which I supposed to be brandy. I grew vaguely anxious at the thought of meeting Brian. I still hadn’t seen him, and I wasn’t sure what my reception would be. But when he saw me, his face opened into the same wild smile, and he said:

‘Did you ever find your father?’

‘No,’ and it was my turn to smile. More than ten years had passed since Brian had first asked me that question, but I had never even learned my natural father’s name or, as Brian saw it, my own.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said.

‘What about?’ asked Brian.

‘Well, Pamela –’

‘Ah. Death slides off me like water,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen enough of it to last a lifetime. What have you been doing with yoursel
f
?’ I told him about my summer plan to follow a Scottish river from the sea to its source and how I had so far failed to get off a beach in Wales. Until now.

‘Book Five!’ he roared.

‘I’m sorry?’ I said.

‘Of
The Odyssey
. “But Hermes did not find great-hearted Odysseus indoors but he was sitting out on the beach, crying, breaking his heart in tears.” Odysseus spent nine years crying on a beach before the gods remembered where they’d left him. Only then could he fulfil his destiny.’

‘And what was that, Brian?’ asked a passing mourner, a glass of wine in each of her hands.

‘To go home, to his family, to his sheep and his pigs.’ Brian’s hand came down on the mourner’s arm, the ash from his cigarette toppling. ‘What else is there?’ The question didn’t seem to need an answer and the young woman smiled and moved on. ‘Kate, where are you staying tonight?’

‘Oh, I have an early flight from Belfast,’ I started, but Brian patted my shoulder.

‘You must stay here, of course.’

Later, when the wine and spirits had been replaced by tea, and the sad tales by poetry and song, I slept on a long leather couch in Brian’s study, where the housekeeper made up a bed for me, protesting that she could find me
a proper bed
if I wanted one. But I was where I wanted to be, behind the sign on the door that said:
Piss off I’m busy
. I watched the fire burn to nothing as the sun diluted the darkness and I felt something, some spirit, flow through the house, binding us, and holding us all together.

When I got back to Wales I was disconsolate. Evie was still at her cousins’ house; she’d been invited to stay for the week. I was alone at the cottage. I thought about a conversation I had had with my friend, Liz, who lived near Berwick-upon-Tweed.

‘If Evie’s in Chester why don’t you come over? I mean, you’re just on your own down there.’

If I were to visit Liz in Berwick, as she had suggested, then I would have reached Scotland. The journey I had told Brian about, the abandoned trip to find the source of the Dunbeath Water, re-presented itself, shadowy, but real. I walked down to the beach. The wind was blowing in a cool flat block, and I pressed my back into the harbour wall for shelter. A man was also leaning on the wall and I didn’t notice him until he spoke to me.

‘You love it here, don’t you?’ he said. I realised that he was one of the fishermen, and that I had never actually heard him speak before.

‘Yes,’ I replied, and I found myself trying to explain the feeling that just being there gave me; and the odd sense of breathlessness whenever I thought of it, like an ache underneath my ribcage.

‘It’s love,’ said the fisherman, ‘I feel it myself.’ I was amazed. In part because I hadn’t thought one could feel such a thing for a place, and in part because I hadn’t recognised the symptoms. Which seemed a tragedy. As I walked back along the beach I picked over the unexpected conversation.

Love. I wasn’t sure about it. But the feeling of longing, or yearning, for something not quite discernible that could almost be nostalgia. A sense that was as acute as hunger, or homesickness, but not necessarily for a place that one knew. Something elusive, unquantifiable, and yet – in its very depth and poignancy – as compelling as desire.

When I got back to the cottage I telephoned Rupert, who agreed that there didn’t seem to be a word for it in English. But Rupert spoke German. He said:

‘Try
Sehnsucht
.’

‘But what does it mean?’ I asked, and Rupert found it difficult to reply. It’s made from
Sehnen
, he said, meaning yearning, and
Sucht
, which means addiction, but
Sehnsucht
conveyed more than simply an addictive yearning. I waited on the telephone while he tried to find a better meaning. He said: ‘C. S. Lewis describes it as: “That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of
The Well at the World’s End
 . . .” ’

‘You’re joking,’ I said. ‘Did he really say
The Well at the World’s End?’

‘Yes. It’s a book.’

‘I know what it is . . . Look, I’ve got to go.’

I called Liz straight away. I packed a sleeping bag and a thermos flask, as well as a hip flask,
just in case
, and carried them out to the car. I then turned the car round so that it faced downhill. In the morning, before the sun had reached around the Garn, or pushed aside the blanket of mist, I closed up the cottage. Liz lived just the other side of the Scottish border; I could be there by the end of the afternoon.

Notes on
Caherdaniel

Skell

I
retraced my route over the Pennines from the early days of the holiday – this time in daylight – under the warm August sun. The moors looked hazy, the heather at the cusp of flower­­­ing, with a promise of lilac fire. When I reached
Yorkshire, I headed north. The previous day Liz, on whose coat-tails I was following, sent me a text:
Just passing the
Angel of the North
,
he is so big and strong!
And he was. I gasped when I saw him, another Antony Gormley metal man, part Titan, part spitfire, dark as mahogany. The Angel stood on a smooth mound between two carriageways of the A1 and I pulled up the car in a lay-by-cum-car park next to him. Oddly, like the metal men at Crosby Beach, the Angel faced the opposite direction to the one in which I was travelling. Children gathered around his feet and perched on them, eating sandwiches, or having their photographs taken.

The mound reminded me of Silbury Hill, the so-called Neolithic burial mound in which no burial chamber has ever been found. A well at its base, called Swallowhead Spring, floods the River Kennet – at certain times – around the hill, to form the shape of a pregnant woman made of water. Much has been made of this, not least by me. On the winter solstice before Evie was conceived I made my way across the monochrome plains of Wiltshire. I ignored the barbed wire and the warnings to keep out and passed through a gap in the fence. When I reached the top I crouched beneath a tearing wind and shelterless sky, and as the white sun rolled into soft clay, I emptied my heart:

Give me a child!

But on this northern mound, between the two carriageways of the A1, there stood an angel, and he resembled nothing so much as the angel standing guard outside the gates of Eden – now a blasted wilderness – to keep prying eyes away from all that remained of the tree of life. Which would make the garden, now a wilderness, Scotland.