The seagull turned his head and looked straight into Cassie’s lens, his grey and white feathers and pale gold beak echoing the colours of the creamy-yellow lichen on the grey clifftop rock. Cassie was about to press the shutter when a violent gust of wind hit her on the shoulder, bowling her sideways and sweeping the bird off its perch.
‘Damn!’ She checked her camera, which had been jerked from her hand and was dangling from its strap on her wrist. It was fine, but she decided to take no more risks and, tucking it safely into its case, she made her way back to the car. She’d drive on to the internet café in Couneen and upload the shots she’d taken in the last few days. The family at home hadn’t shown much interest in the stuff she put on Instagram, but the friends she’d made on the cruise ships seemed to think that Ireland was cool.
When she walked into the shop in Couneen, it looked like the café was closed. There was no one behind the counter either. But as she hesitated in the doorway, Dan clattered down the stairs. ‘Hi, can I help— Oh, hi, Cassie.’
‘I wanted to go online with a coffee but . . .’
Dan waved her in. ‘No problem. I can stick a kettle on.’
‘But if you’re not open . . .’
‘That’s always a moot point at this time of year. Honestly, it’s no hassle. I’ll make you a cup and you can work away.’
By the time she’d uploaded the photos, he’d brought her a coffee with a cookie on the side.
‘You weren’t out with a camera in this weather?’
‘Well, yeah.’
He looked at her screen and chuckled. ‘You might do better to switch to interiors.’
‘I think I’ll give up. I usually do. What are you up to today?’
‘The parents are off on a skite, so I’m minding the place. Serving the odd customer. Dragging bags of nuts up to the sheep.’
‘So your folks have a farm?’
‘I wouldn’t say that. Just a few sheep, and my mum keeps hens. This was always a place for fishing, not farming.’
‘And your family’s always lived here?’
‘Yup. Time immemorial. The place that’s a shed now behind the shop was my grandparents’ house. It’s hard to tell with old houses round here, but it could’ve been built a few hundred years before that.’
‘Awesome!’
‘Tell you what,’ Dan turned away from the table and went to put on a jacket, ‘do you want to come up and I’ll show you a proper interior? The fireplace in my grandad’s house is practically a museum piece.’
He locked the shop and they climbed a steep path to the old house, which had whitewashed walls and a corrugated-iron roof. The windows were roughly boarded up, with wide gaps between the boards; and the door, which was white uPVC, had obviously started life in a suburban terrace. One panel was badly dented but it still had a little inset fanlight and an imitation Georgian knocker.
‘The original half door gave up a few years ago. The place doesn’t really need one, but this keeps the hens out. I found it in a skip.’
Dan led Cassie into the single room, which was piled with tools and sacks of animal feed. Sunlight falling through the boarded windows made broad stripes on the floor, but the ends of the room were in shadow. He pursed his lips. ‘Not sure you’ll get much of a shot with this lighting.’
But, forgetting photography, Cassie was already at the hearth. The fireplace was in the gable wall of the house, a high chimneypiece with spaces left between the stones to make little niches for storage. There was a tarnished tin tea caddy in one, and a decaying box of matches in another. An iron crane festooned with pothooks still stood by the hearth, and rusting beneath it was a wheel that had once worked a bellows. The proportions of the tapering chimneypiece were beautiful, and over the stone lintel above the opening, a wooden shelf held a candlestick, and a faded picture in a frame. ‘This is so amazing. They cooked on an open fire?’
‘I’d say if my nan had lived there’d have been a range installed, and electricity and running water. But she died young and Grandad was happy to leave things be. He ate below in the shop with us, and most evenings he’d be down the pub with his mates. Anyway, half the time he’d be out fishing at sea.’
‘Did you know him well?’
‘I sure did. I was always out in a boat with him. He was a great teacher.’
Cassie sighed, lifting down the tea caddy and brushing dirt from the lid. ‘You see, that makes me really envious. I bet he told you all sorts of stories about how life was when he was young. Stuff that makes you feel rooted here yourself.’
‘I suppose that’s it. I’ve never wanted to live anywhere else, anyway.’
‘But you went to Australia.’
‘That was just for the craic. Or maybe I had a notion of making my fortune.’ Dan shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t have worked out anyway because this is where I belong.’
Cassie crouched down by the fireplace to peer up the chimney. The stone walls were furred with burned-on soot and she could see straight up to the sky overhead.
Dan hunkered beside her. ‘At night you could look up from beside the fire and see stars.’
Cassie pulled a face. ‘My dad grew up in the flat where Pat and Ger are living now. I guess he and my uncle Jim went to Canada to make their fortune. But they never came back, and they never talk about the past.’
‘They never even came on a visit?’
‘Nope. I’m the only one of my family who seems to have had the urge.’
‘But, shur, you’re a great traveller, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, I like to travel. But this trip is different. I’m not like you. I don’t know where I belong. But I guess I’ve always wondered if it might be here.’
‘Is it?’
Cassie laughed. ‘I dunno. I just wish I could be here with my dad and have him teach me stuff. Like your grandad and you.’
‘Was your dad raised a farmer?’
‘See, I don’t even know that!’ Cassie stood up crossly, wiping the dust from her hands.
‘Can’t you ask your gran?’
‘I don’t think so. She’s a pet but she’s . . . kind of emotionally frail. It’s like there are no-go areas? And, as far as I can see, my grandad never talks at all.’
Catching sight of Dan’s face, she wondered if this was way too much information. After all, she hardly knew him. The thought prompted the realisation that she’d never talked like this to Shay. That was strange. Everything she’d just articulated seemed to have crystallised since she’d come here to Ireland, and Shay was a big part of her new sense of feeling at home. Yet somehow Dan seemed more likely to understand.
He was looking slightly awkward but she could feel he was sympathetic. Then he stood up, moved away from her and began to heave a sack of feed towards the door. ‘Ger would rap out the orders all right, but he’s no conversationalist. His customers hardly get a word out of him when he’s serving inside in the shop.’
Cassie went to place the tin candlestick on the windowsill. Taking out her camera, she tried to frame a shot that took in the lines of light falling through the boards.
Dan leaned on the doorframe and looked across at her. ‘How about your mum’s family? Are you close to them?’
Cassie shook her head. Her mom was an only child, whose parents were both dead and, though Gran’ma had lived to be quite old, she’d had Alzheimer’s for ages. There had been a few visits to the care home for seniors where she’d lived but mostly they’d been half embarrassing, half distressful, and after a while Cassie and her sisters weren’t taken along.
She looked through the lens at the candlestick on the windowsill, focusing on the stump of a candle that was almost burned down to the quick. But the shot she took didn’t look like much of anything, so she deleted it.
Then, glancing up, she realised that Dan was waiting to go. ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. You need to get up to your sheep.’
‘They won’t starve.’ He came over to join her at the window and, turning the candlestick, began chipping pieces of wax off it, using his fingernail.
Cassie had a feeling that, given half a chance, he’d start sharing confidences himself. And she wasn’t sure that she was up for it. Dan was nice, and undoubtedly attractive, but he wasn’t her problem. And, if he needed someone to talk to, surely he had Bríd?
Looking up, she saw a strange expression in his eyes. For a moment she thought he was about to make a move on her. But instead he turned away, running his hand through his hair. It was an oddly despairing gesture, and before she could decide what to make of it, he’d gone back to the threshold and heaved the sack onto his shoulder.
His car was round the side of the building with a trailer hitched to the back and, as she walked down to her own car, he waved as he drove off.
On her way back to Lissbeg Cassie wondered if the Fitzgeralds too had a tumbledown house that had once been the family homestead. Uncle Frankie’s fancy home had been built near the old farmhouse. The home that Ger had grown up in wouldn’t have been like Dan’s grandad’s place, which, as Dan had said, was pretty much a museum piece. But she wondered what it was like.
Dad and the uncles must have visited there when they were kids. Maybe they’d hung out in the kitchen with their grandma. Maybe they’d carried animal feed up to the fields, like Dan. She wondered if the house had had a range, like Pat’s, in the kitchen, and whether it was still standing, with windows boarded up, like the Cafferky place, and empty rooms full of dust and memories, and slanting sunlight.
And, if such a house existed, who would it belong to? Was it standing there waiting for Dad and Uncle Jim to come home? According to Jazz Turner, Hanna had inherited the house where she lived from some ancient auntie. It was left to her when she was only a kid and she’d grown up and emigrated to England. And, when she came back to Ireland, it had almost gone to ruin. But Hanna had done it up and settled in.
Cassie had a vision of herself in another fifty years. A voyager with her travelling done, coming home to a craggy niche in some green mountainy field. Would she be a warm presence in the community, like Min the Match or Pat? Or crabby and totally taciturn, like Ger? You could never tell what would happen next in life, though – look at poor Gran’ma with her Alzheimer’s. So maybe it was best to live for today and let the future look after itself.