The Boatman's Wife(51)

The rain was coming in off the Atlantic in sheets, lashing across the hood and the windscreen. She’d no inclination to get out of the warmth of the vehicle and traipse around the village yet. She turned the key to start up the engine and put the heating up full, as well as the de-mister. The ocean was calling to her. She needed to see more of this wild peninsula where her husband had been born and raised.

She drove along the coastal road around the head of the peninsula, stunned by the raw beauty of the coast. Back home in Downeast Maine, though their town was on the coast, an archipelago of small islands sheltered their little bay. Sometimes it wasn’t possible to see just how wild it was far out to sea. Here, though, the land was a spit of rock thrown out into the Atlantic. Lily pulled up at a viewing point, astonished by the huge slabs of rock below, the frothing white waves crashing onto them. It was such a dramatic landscape. Breath-taking. She wished so much she was here with Connor, and that he was telling her a story about his childhood.

‘Why did you have so few stories?’ she asked him out loud. Was it her fault? Had their marriage always been about her, and her wants and needs, her family, her love of fishing?

But the sea was in Connor’s blood too – you only had to take in this incredible view to understand that. In the distance, to her left, she saw the silhouette of a castle, looking lonely and abandoned. Behind it was a very distinctive-looking mountain. Flat-topped and blue. She looked it up on her phone. Ben Bulben. The name rang a faint bell. Yes, Connor had mentioned he’d climbed Ben Bulben once, she was sure of it.

Lily got out of the car. The wind was so strong, it nearly pushed her off her feet. Tucking her head down, her chin to her chest, she shoved into the wind and walked towards the cliffs. No one else was about. Just her and the wild sea, and her memories of Connor. If only they’d found a body, she could have had some kind of closure. Brought his ashes with her to Ireland, and thrown them out into the sea right here. But Connor was still lost in the Atlantic. Out in the big wide blue, all alone. The coastguards had been very clear with her. They would never find his body, because he had been lost so far out to sea. He would become part of the ocean. His flesh would fall away first, and eventually, his bones would come to rest on the bottom of the ocean floor.

The thought made her shiver. Her husband’s bones, along with all the bones of other lost fishermen. She felt she should say something, a prayer, but she was beginning to doubt God, or anything divine at all. Fate and fortune. Being born under lucky stars. She wasn’t lucky. In fact, she had to be one of the unluckiest wives out there. Widowed at twenty-four, childless, estranged from her parents, and no desire to ever set foot on a fishing boat again.

Hey, what’s with the pity party, Lily?

‘You left me!’ she screamed out at the wind. ‘Why didn’t you tell my dad to turn the boat like I would have? Why’d you try to please him for me? Why?’ she screamed again, the wind whipping tears from her eyes.

As she turned around to get back into the car, she realised that she and Connor never would have been in Mullaghmore together. There was some dark secret in this wild edge of the west of Ireland that her husband had never wanted her to find out. That was why he’d hidden the email from her. She should leave well enough alone. Pack up her things and go back home. But as she started up the car again, she knew she was never going to do that. She might never be able to bury her husband in a graveyard with a headstone, but she could gain some kind of closure by finding out who the man she married truly was.





Chapter Fourteen





Mullaghmore, Sligo, 21st August 1992





Summer was ending. As the long bright evenings began to fade earlier and earlier, Niamh’s mam’s light grew dimmer. Niamh sensed it coming. Like every year since her father’s death, her mam’s depression would arrive the week before his anniversary, and each day get progressively worse, so that on the actual date of his murder, she would be curled up in bed, monosyllabic. Over the years, Niamh had hoped it would get better. But it never had. She’d tried to talk to her mam about going to the doctor’s. Getting some antidepressants. But she would protest, claiming no pills could fix her.

In the first three years following her father’s murder, An Post had been very sympathetic, always getting in a temporary worker to cover her mam’s round. But in the fourth year their patience had worn thin, and they requested she get grief counselling.

‘Can you believe it?’ her mam had given out to Niamh in one of her rare animated moments. She’d lit a cigarette, another activity she took up during her depressions, and took a long pull on it before proceeding. ‘You don’t get over a death like Cormac’s. You never do! They’re talking out of their arses.’

‘They’re just trying to help, Mam,’ sixteen-year-old Niamh had said gently. More the parent than the child. ‘Everyone’s worried about you.’

‘I’m just in mourning, is all,’ her mam had said, hunching her shoulders and shaking her head as Niamh offered her a bowl of vegetable soup. That was another feature of the depressions. Her mam stopped eating all but the bare minimum. The weight fell off her, and it frightened Niamh how gaunt her mam would look after just a few weeks of this behaviour. No matter what Niamh made for her to eat, all her mam would nibble on was the odd slice of bread and butter with her homemade raspberry jam. Working through the jars every year, as if in memorial to the night her husband had been killed. Niamh, on the other hand, could no longer bear the taste or scent of raspberry jam because it brought back the horror of that night. Their sticky jam pots still soaking in the kitchen sink, the pots of fresh ripe red jam lined up on the table, and the scent of raspberries all around them, as she and her mam had clung to each other, sobbing at the bad news.