Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly (Detective Sean Duffy #6)(5)

It is somewhat of a paradox then that until the arrival of cheap packet flights to Spain, Donegal was the preferred holiday destination for many people in Northern Ireland. All my childhood holidays were taken in Donegal at a succession of bleak caravan sites on windswept, cold, rainy beaches. Scores of parents wrapped in thick woollen jumpers and sou’westers could be seen up and down these beaches driving their small, shivering children into the Atlantic Ocean with the injunction that they could not come out until they had enjoyed themselves.

My memories of Donegal had never been particularly good ones and when my father took early retirement and my parents moved to a cottage near Glencolumbkille I was a reluctant visitor.

Things had changed, of course, with the birth of Emma. My folks demanded to see their granddaughter and Beth and I had driven out there for Christmas and now here we were again in the early spring. Glencolumbkille is in the Gaeltacht, with almost everyone in these parts speaking the quaint Donegal version of Irish. It is a little whitewashed place straight out of The Quiet Man with a spirit grocer, a post office, a pub, a chapel, a golf course, a small hotel, a beach and a cliff-path. A pleasant enough spot if you didn’t mind rain or boredom or the hordes of embedded high-school students from Dublin practising their Irish on you. One of these kids stopped me when I was out getting the milk. “Excuse me, sir. An gabh tu pios caca?”

“No I would not like any cake, thank you.”

He tried again, this time apparently asking for the way to the bandstand.

I explained in slow, patient Irish that there was neither a bandstand nor a band in Glencolumbkille.

He cocked his head to one side, puzzled.

“There is no bandstand. There is no band. No hay banda, il n’est pas une orchestra.”

“Oh, I see,” he said in English. “No I was looking for the way to the beach hut, we’re supposed to meet at the beach hut.”

“It’s just over there on the beach. And the word you’re looking for is bothán trá.”

“Thanks very much, pops,” he said and sauntered off.

“Pops, indeed,” I muttered as I bought the milk and a local paper and I was still muttering as I walked back to the house where Mum and Beth were talking about books.

My mother, Mary, had taken immediately to Beth, despite her being a Protestant, monolingual, well off, younger and, worst of all, not a fan of Dolly Parton.

“Don’t you even like ‘Little Sparrow’?” she had asked on hearing about this calamity.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs Duffy, it’s just not my cup of tea. But I’ll listen again if you want me to,” Beth had said conciliatingly.

This morning they were talking about Beth’s master’s thesis which she was trying to do on Philip K. Dick, something the stuffy English department at Queens were none too happy about. My mother’s sympathies lay with Queens, as, secretly, did mine.

“But Mr Dick, apparently, is only just deceased. You can’t tell if a writer’s any good or not until they’re dead a generation, at least,” Mum was saying.

Beth looked at me for support but there was no way I was stepping into that minefield.

“Milk,” I said, putting the carton on the kitchen table. “And I’ve brought Dad his paper,” I added quickly, before nimbly exiting and leaving them to it.

My father also had taken to Beth and he discovered that he enjoyed the company of his daughter-in-law and granddaughter so much that while we were here he even, temporarily, lost all interest in his beloved golf and bird-watching. At night he would talk to us in low tones about Emma’s prodigious achievements in ambulation, speech and the manipulation of wooden blocks.

“Talking at six months! And almost walking. You can see it. She wants to walk. Standing there, thinking about it. She said ‘Grandpa’! I heard her. That girl is a genius. I’m serious, Sean. You should start speaking to her in French and Irish. She’ll be fluent by the time she’s one. And you should have seen her make that Lego tower. Incredible …”

My parents’ cottage faced the ocean and at the far end of the house there was a little soundproof library with a big double-glazed plate-glass window that looked west. Dad’s record player was over twenty years old and his speakers were shite, but his collection was eclectic and pretty good. Since moving to Donegal he had discovered the works of the English composer Arnold Bax, who had spent much of the 1920s in Glencolumbkille.

I walked down to the library, found a comfy chair to look through the local newspaper and put on Bax’s really quite charming “November Woods”. Dad came in just after the strange, muted climax which was so reminiscent of the instrumental music of the early Michael Powell films.

“Hello, Sean, am I bothering you?”

“No, Da, not at all. Just listening to one of your records. Arnold Bax isn’t bad, is he?”

“No, you’re right there. He’s wonderful. There’s a lightness of touch but it’s not insubstantial or frivolous. His heyday was the same time as that of Bix Beiderbecke. It’s a pity they couldn’t of played together. Bax and Bix. You know?”

“Yes, Dad,” I said, stifling a groan.

He sat down in the easy chair next to me. He was sixty-five now, but with a full head of white hair and a ruddy sun-tanned face from all the birding and golfing, he looked healthy and good. He could have passed for an ageing French flaneur if he hadn’t been dressed in brown slacks, brown sandals (with white socks) and a “Christmas” jumper with reindeers on it.