The southeastern part of Ireland is breathtakingly beautiful. There are endless seas—the Irish, the Celtic, the Atlantic, St. George’s Channel—and endless views. It feels like the edge of the world, with its wild pathways and hidden coves.
We drive the scenic route, because Michael insists we need all the uplifting that Mother Nature can throw at us. When we stop for lunch at a tiny seafood place in Curracloe, I have to agree.
The sun is shining, children are playing, seagulls are wheeling, and if I breathe deeply and forget why I’m here, it feels like a perfect moment.
Michael, in full-on tourist guide mode, tells us that Saving Private Ryan was filmed here. Belinda has taken off her boots and waded in. I am trying to put off wondering what happens next, as we head for the cottage Michael has booked for the night.
We have the postcards on the table in front of us, and I enjoy tracing the words written on them with my fingertips. We have scanned copies as well now in case of disasters, but touching the originals reinforces my sense of connection to Joe, and my determination to find him.
We have a postcard of Hook Lighthouse, striped black and white, with the words “Greetings from Wexford” printed at the side of it. That’s from March 2005, which fits with Bernadette’s recollection of daffodils.
We have the postmark of Wexford for Gracie’s sixth birthday card, which is an especially pretty one featuring a baby elephant blowing the words “Happy Birthday” from his trunk, from October 2005.
We have a postcard of Enniscorthy Castle, and a way-past-its-sell-by-date pack of gum in my birthday card from September the same year. The postmark on the envelope is smudged past recognition, but then we also have a postcard of the Kennedy Homestead, which is apparently the birthplace of JFK’s great-granddad. That one is from January 2006, which fits the timeline.
What doesn’t quite fit is the postcard from the Giant’s Causeway, which is in Northern Ireland, from December 2005. Michael points out that it’s entirely probable that he simply took a trip to see it, sounding worried that we are about to pull up stakes and drive north again.
I agree with him—all the signs point to him having been here, in this part of the world, for just under a year. It doesn’t change again until he seems to relocate to Cornwall early in 2006.
Michael, who has become our designated internet guru, has been digging up information on pubs in the area. Bernadette was quite right when she said there were a lot, but she also came up with a surname for the couple Joe worked for. Unfortunately it’s Doyle, which is about as rare as a pub around here.
Still, I have a bizarre and possibly misplaced faith that this will work out—that the ancient spirits that allegedly abound in this place are on our side. For now, I am content to sit in the sunshine, watching the children play on the beach.
There’s a small group of them, maybe fifteen or so, primary school age. They’re all wearing yellow T-shirts that say “Smilez Summer Club.” It’s not teaching them much in the way of spelling, but they all seem spectacularly entertained building sandcastles and chasing each other with crabs and filling holes with buckets of water.
“You look strangely happy,” says Michael, peering at me over the top of his sunglasses. “In fact you’ve seemed strangely happy for this whole trip. Are you on Valium?”
I laugh, and consider telling him that I have an ample stock of various pharmaceuticals at home in the bathroom. Drugs for relaxing me. Drugs for anxiety. Drugs to make me sleep. They’re probably all out of date now, left over from darker times.
“I know,” I say, smiling at him. “It’s weird, isn’t it? I recently lost my mum. I’m tracking down my lost love. I’m letting myself think about my dead daughter a lot more than I have for years. By rights I should be having a breakdown. But I’m not . . . I just feel, I don’t know, like I’m actually doing something positive. Like my life has been on hold for so long, and now it’s not.”
He makes a humph sound and thinks about it for a few minutes. Belinda appears to be reading the Guardian, but I know she’ll be listening.
“I can see that makes a funny kind of sense,” he admits, taking the glasses off and perching them on his head. “So while you’re sharing, can I ask you something else I’ve been wondering about?”
I nod, and Belinda looks up, apparently interested.
“It’s about your career choice. I mean, I get that your life was interrupted, so you never quite got to uni and all that. But why do you work in a school? Isn’t it hard, after Grace, I mean, to be surrounded by children all the time? Don’t they remind you of her?”
I look on at the youngsters playing in the sand, and bask for a moment in their simple joy at being alive, at running, at being wild and free on a sunny day.
“Some of it is that,” I say, pointing at them. “That sense of excitement. Young kids are full of fun, so it’s fun being around them. But yes—I can see why it might look odd. To start with, it was just because I needed to do something. After I came out of hospital, there was this horrible time when I was technically OK, but wasn’t really. I still felt . . . mentally bruised, I suppose, even if the breaks had healed. And you knew my parents—a lot less fun.”
“About as much fun as a strangulated hernia. Sorry to speak ill of the dead.”
“No, you’re right. So, I spent some years just . . . floundering. Eventually, the boredom overcame the anxiety, and I started volunteering at the school. Reading with the kids. It went from there, I suppose—and I do enjoy it.
“It was tricky at first, because people would assume I had kids—the other mums. I’m the right age and I work in a school, so they’d often ask, ‘Do you have any children?’ They never meant any harm by it, but to start with it always tripped me up. I never knew quite how to answer it. I mean, it’s a bit of a mood killer telling them the truth, isn’t it?”
“How did you answer?” asks Belinda, all pretense at reading the paper now gone. “I remember the school gate world. It’s a gossip festival.”
“It is a bit. Plus sometimes it’d annoy me, listening to them moan about sleepless nights, or the stroller board hitting their ankles on the walk to school or whatever, and I’d want to scream at them and tell them how lucky they were to have such problems. To have babies to keep them awake. But I remember one day, someone asking me the question about if I had kids, and me going silent, and one of the other mums jumping in and changing the subject.
“I went to talk to her the next day when she picked her little boy up, and she told me she’d lost her older child to leukemia a few years earlier. And even now, ages after, when people asked about her kids, she wanted to say she had two, even though she had only one left . . . and I suppose it made me realize. What happened to me was awful, and life-changing. But a lot of women have lost children—to illness, or cot death, or miscarriage. And some have never been able to have them at all. There’s loss all around us—you just have to try not to let it overwhelm your whole life.”
The two of them are staring at me now, looking about as surprised as if I’d stripped naked and danced the Macarena on the table.
“Wow,” says Michael quietly. “That was . . . really quite profound.”
“I have my moments. Plus, you have mayonnaise on your chin.”
“That was less of a moment,” he replies, snatching up a napkin and wiping his face.
We pay our bill and set off on what might possibly be the world’s biggest and least drunken pub crawl. Michael grumbles about driving, and Belinda agrees to take over the next day.
I, useless woman, am unable to help out as I can’t drive. Unusual for a person of my age, but there are extenuating circumstances. I did spend over an hour trapped in a mangled wreck, and in all honesty, it took me several years to even willingly get inside a car at all.
The first few times I sat in the front seat I was terrified, hands clutching the seat belt, every muscle tensed, staring out the windows, scanning for potential danger. Car horns made me jump out of my skin, loud bangs startled me, and even the sound of a car door being slammed especially hard could make me pale and clammy.
When you’ve been through a trauma, your brain finds sneaky ways to remind you of it. Probably it thinks it’s protecting you, keeping you alert to potential threats. The most everyday of sounds or smells or sensations can trick your nervous system into thinking there is still danger lurking nearby. It’s exhausting—a constant battle to balance the reality you see and the reality your mind is warning you about. Cold sweats, adrenaline rushes, clenched muscles—all of it telling you to be careful.
The years of outpatient therapy did help me find my way through some of that, and these days I can at least fake being a normal person—inside, though, I am still hyperalert, and will never, ever sit in a parked car for any length of time.
Michael perhaps suspects some of this, and grumbles slightly less once we are on the road.
Our first two pubs are both fails. The Ship’s Cabin and the Sailor’s Rest have been under the same ownership for decades, and nobody remembers anything about the Doyles.
The third, the Mermaid, has closed down, and there’s nothing around it for miles, so we can’t even ask. We rule out one called Walk the Plank, as it seems to be a party bar popular with younger people, and by the time we’ve had yet another drink in one called the Anchor and Pilgrim, we’re all a bit fed up.
“This is torture,” says Michael, as we return to the car yet again. “All these pubs, and so little alcohol.”
“I know,” says Belinda, sounding just as miserable. “I’ve drunk so much Diet Coke I’ll never sleep. On the plus side, I could have a new career writing The Rough Guide to Irish Pub Toilets.”
“Sounds like a winner. You should start your own YouTube channel. Belinda’s Big Bog Bake-Off.”
“Bake-Off?”
“I know. It doesn’t work. I just liked the alliteration.”
We climb back into the car, and Michael squeals as he checks his phone.
“Have you won the lottery?” asks Belinda, winding the windows down.
“No—it’s from my good friend Bernie the Barmaid. Smashing alliteration there too. Anyway—she was chatting to one of the old guys who used to work with Adrian in the restaurant, someone who doesn’t work at the hotel anymore but happened to stop in for a drink, and he remembers the name of the pub.”
He’s silent for a while, and I see him scrolling through several lines of emojis from Bernie, and giggling at one of her jokes.
“OK—so what is it?” says Belinda, in a slightly menacing tone.
“The Cock and Seaman,” he snaps back, slapping away the hand she’s placed on his shoulder.
“No, it’s not.”
“No, it’s not—it’s apparently called the Smuggler’s View. Not quite nautical but close enough. A lightning-fast google has revealed that the only place with that name is less than an hour away, a few miles outside a place called Kilmore Quay. If we set off now Belinda will be just about ready to use the loo again.”
The view, when we arrive, is lovely, even for non-smugglers—a sweeping panorama from its perch on a steep hill, out across green patchwork fields across the water to the tiny Saltee Islands, the sea almost a Caribbean blue. There is very little traffic around here, and the sounds are a pleasant mix of churning waves and seabirds and the occasional hovering insect.
It would be even more lovely if not for the fact that we seem to be at the wrong pub, despite having followed the satnav’s instructions. Michael double-checks, and confirms that we are technically in the right place—but the pub in front of us is called O’Grady’s Top of the Hill.
We all stand staring at it for a while, wondering where we’ve gone wrong, until Belinda announces that she intends to have at least one pint of Guinness while she’s in Ireland, and this looks as good a place as any.
I follow, feeling a twinge of disappointment. I didn’t expect to find Joe here, but I did think I might find the family he lived with—and be able to talk to them about him, ask them questions, maybe see photos. If I wanted to be really creepy, even visit the room he slept in.
Now, as I look at the smartly painted, perfectly maintained building, in its equally perfect location, it all seems unlikely. We’re talking a very long time ago, and the pub has changed its name and probably its owners, and might not even be the right one. I feel tired, and remind myself that I chose to do this. I chose to go on my wild Joe hunt, and I also chose to do it this way, following in his footsteps—so now I have to handle the fact that we will have disappointments.
I knew it was never going to be easy, and we’re lucky we got this far—if this is a dead end, I guess I’ll just drive around Cornwall aimlessly for the next few months, or hire a giant billboard with a sixteen-year-old picture of Joe on it, and the words “Have you seen this man?” at the bottom.
I trail behind the other two through the pub doors. It’s darker inside, and it takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust after the bright sunlight. Belinda and Michael are at the bar, ordering a Guinness and asking if the owner is in.
I half-heartedly eavesdrop on a conversation where a young barman tells them he’ll be back soon, and sounds confused when they ask about an earlier pub called the Smuggler’s View, which was here in 2005.
The barman shrugs, tells them he was only three at the time, and goes back to the important business of staring at his phone. I hear Michael huff, and make a comment about the younger generation, which makes Belinda laugh out loud. He’s a strange combination of teenager and grumpy granddad, is Michael.
I need a few moments to settle myself, and wander around the half-empty pub, investigating its nooks and crannies. The place has been nicely done out, the old stone walls whitewashed, the beamed ceiling restored, and a huge fireplace filled with unlit logs.
There are framed photos on the walls of olde-worlde scenes that I presume relate to the fishing village nearby, and the islands. I browse maps, images of horses and carts, boats and nets and sepia-toned fishermen with bushy beards.
There’s a section in one corner on the history of the pub, which apparently has been here in one form or another since the eighteenth century. There are some lurid accounts of buccaneering, and some faded black-and-white prints of the place in the 1920s. All the people on them have that weird, stilted frozen-in-time expression on their pale, indistinct faces.
I feel my pulse quicken slightly when I notice that one of the latest phases of the display is about the pub’s rescue from near dereliction—in the early 2000s. There isn’t much, just a typed note in that antique-style font that makes everything look like it’s from a museum, saying that it was bought in 2006 by the current owners, who changed its name and reopened it the year after.
There is, however, one photo of the work in progress—and three smiling people standing in front of a mountain of rubble sacks. In the middle is an attractive dark-haired woman, and on either side, arms around her, two men.
One has flaming red hair, and the other . . . the other is Joe. The woman is leaning slightly toward him, her body language saying she’s more comfortable with him than the other man by her side.
I stand transfixed, reaching out to touch the glass frame that covers his face. It’s not a close-up, the photo taken to show the backdrop as much as the people, but it’s definitely him.
He’s grinning, his face smudged from manual labor, his hair longer than I remember it, brushing his shoulders and blowing back in a breeze. He’s wearing mud-spattered boots and cargo pants with a tool belt, and his arm is snaked around the woman’s waist.
His brown eyes shine out at me, and I have a strange moment where I think he might open his mouth and speak to me. Tell me once more “baby, I love you.” Tell me where he is, and what his life has become, and that everything is going to be OK.
“Are you all right there? The young fella told me you were looking for me.”
I spin around, almost angry at being interrupted as I commune with a picture on a wall, and physically bump into him. He’s tall and broad and has an impressive belly swelling over the waistband of his jeans. He’s only in his early forties, I’d say, but has the ruddy face of someone who possibly enjoys his job in hospitality a bit too much.
He holds my shoulders to steady me, and gives me a kindly but curious smile—the type of smile I’ve seen many times before. The one that tells me I’m maybe letting my inner oddness seep into the outside world.
“Oh! Thank you!” I say, too excited and involved to try to fake normality. I point at the picture, and ask: “These people, here. Can you tell me anything about them?”
He stares at the photo, eyes slightly crinkled in a way that shows he should be using glasses, and replies: “Not a great deal, no. They’re the people my father bought the place from, back in the day. I was off and about back then, adventuring on the other side of the world.”
His accent is one of the strongest I’ve heard since we’ve been in Ireland, as though he’s making up for leaving by being even more Irish now he’s home.
“I came back when my old man died, to help my mammy run the place. I don’t remember a lot about them. Can I ask you why?”
Michael had had great fun coming up with fake reasons for our quest for information on the ferry, presumably practicing for his future life as a thriller writer. They’d included various takes on me being a spy, a researcher for a TV show hunting for heirs and heiresses, and a woman with amnesia trying to piece together her backstory. None of them seems as relevant as the truth.
“That man there,” I say, pointing at Joe, “is the love of my life. I haven’t seen him for seventeen years and I’m trying to track him down.”
His eyes widen, and he stares at Joe with renewed interest.
“That’s quite the task now, isn’t it? All I really remember is that there was some scandal. The couple were supposed to be buying the pub to run together, but there was some kind of upset . . . an affair, I think. Something like that. Anyway, they decided to do it up and flip it instead, and that’s where the O’Gradys came into it. I might have some records left in my dad’s files, if you can wait while I look? I’m Sean, by the way.”
I nod, and place my hand on his arm in thanks. He blushes slightly, which is beyond sweet, and tells me he’ll be right back. I use my phone to take some snaps of the picture, and rejoin Belinda and Michael at their table.
“I think you have a fan,” says Michael, gesturing toward Sean, who is watching me from behind the bar as he chats to the youngster.
“Don’t be daft,” I reply, dismissing him, far keener to tell them about my discovery. Belinda takes a quick look at the picture herself, as though needing to double-check I haven’t imagined it, then slumps down next to me, nodding.
“It’s him,” she says, which makes me roll my eyes.
“I know!”
“And he looks cozy with that woman, doesn’t he? That must be Geraldine. And the owner said there was a scandal? Someone had an affair?”
It’s very clear from her tone what she’s thinking, and I can see why. There’s something about that picture that seems to have captured a strange moment, distilled the essence of a small drama.
“That’s what he said. But maybe you could get your mind out of the gutter for a minute? I can see what’s going on in there and it’s not pretty.”
She holds her hands up in defense, and replies: “I’m just saying. Bernie described them as an unhappy couple. Joe . . . well, he was never more than a mate to me, but Joe wasn’t exactly hit by the ugly stick, was he?”
“Definitely not,” adds Michael, earning himself a scowl from me.
“That doesn’t mean anything. And anyway . . . so what? It’s not like I expect him to have lived like a born-again virgin ever since 2003. I know I haven’t. It changes nothing.”
Both of them look shocked at that statement, and I may have been exaggerating—I’ve not exactly been setting Tinder alight, it has to be said. But they don’t need to know that, and anyway—we don’t know what happened with Joe and Geraldine, if anything, and we certainly have no right to judge.
I have no idea how I’ll feel if I find out that he’s now married, or with someone else. Loath as I am to admit it out loud, I probably have constructed some kind of fantasy around all of this—built myself a fictitious future happy ending.
Another woman would definitely get in the way of that happy ending, but I can’t allow that to derail me right now.
“Really?” probes Michael, his eyes wide, leaning forward in deep interest. “You? And . . . men?”
“For goodness’ sake, Michael, I am a human being! Of course there’ve been other men . . .”
Something in my outraged tone sets off Belinda’s very well-tuned bullshit detectors, and she points a finger at me.
“How many men?” she asks. “Precisely?”
I try to maintain my outrage, but it suddenly all strikes me as funny—getting my almost nonexistent love life dissected by these two. They didn’t even know each other a week back and now they’re ganging up on me.
“OK,” I reply, grinning. “One man. It was a few years ago. I . . . I decided I needed to try it. To be with someone else. So I used a fake name, and I contacted a man online, and I met him in a Travelodge off the M62. We booked a room and we had sex. And then I left.”
“Wow,” says Michael, shaking his head. “That sounds almost unbearably sensual.”
“Well, it wasn’t. It was shit. But . . . I had to do it. I had to see if it was the same with other people as it’d been with him. With Joe. And it wasn’t. It was awkward and uncomfortable and embarrassing, and I’ve never been tempted to do it since.”
“What fake name did you use?” Belinda asks randomly. Boy, her detectors really are well tuned. I feel myself redden slightly, and force myself to meet her inquiring gaze.
“Belinda. Belinda666, to be accurate.”
“I knew it! I just somehow knew it!”
Luckily she seems to be seeing the funny side, and all three of us are laughing into our Guinness by the time Sean returns, hovering uncertainly beside us until I gesture for him to please sit down.
He nods at the others, and holds up a sheet of paper.
“This is all I had. We bought the pub from a Geraldine and Adrian Doyle—there’s a phone number on there, but it’s anyone’s guess as to whether it still works or not. They listed their address as here, which doesn’t help much. I also called my mother, and she said there were definitely some . . . How did she put it? Extramarital shenanigans. The husband, she doesn’t know much more about—but she did recall that the wife and child moved to Cornwall not long after. Probably not much help, I’m afraid.”
I take the paper he offers, and thank him sincerely. He blushes again, and adds: “No worries. I’ve put my number on there as well. In case, you know, you stay around and need a local guide.”
He tells us he has to get back to work, and as he leaves, Michael leans across the table and whispers: “By ‘local guide,’ he means big Irish shag—you do know that, don’t you?”
I throw a beer coaster at him, and stare at the info Sean’s jotted down. It’s not a lot, and it doesn’t really give us anything more than we already had. I’ve seen that photo—I’ve seen Joe. I know that he helped restore this lovely old building I’m sitting in, and I know he moved to Cornwall.
But Cornwall is a big place, and I have no clue what to do next. It all feels huge and overwhelming.
“I’m going out for a fag,” I say, gathering my backpack.
“You don’t smoke,” points out Michael helpfully.
“It’s code for I need a minute alone,” I respond, walking away and heading for the door.
I find a spot near the edge of the hill, and sit in the sunshine looking down at the glittering sea, trying to come up with a plan. The landscape is beautiful but gives me no answers. The thought of just heading for a new part of the country and starting all over again is daunting, and feels insurmountable.
I grab my bag, and its precious cargo. I pull out an envelope marked “Read Me When You Feel Like Giving Up,” and gently pry it open.
Do you remember that time the nurses in the hospital tried to help you with all the baby stuff? The breastfeeding, and the bathing, and the changing? They tried to be kind, but I could see on your face that you were terrified. You had no clue what you were doing, and nobody seemed able to help. When we came home with her, it was even more scary—I saw the tears you tried to hide, the frustration, the way you felt like a failure every time she cried or wouldn’t latch on.
But I also remember coming home from work one day, when she was a few months old, and finding you both asleep on the sofa. She was crashed out on your shoulder, and you both looked so peaceful. So content. It’s something I’ll always treasure, that image—I’ve carried it with me ever since. She was fed, and happy, and you were finally relaxed and confident. You were finally starting to believe that you could be a mother. All the things you’d struggled with at the beginning were second nature. All the challenges that threatened to break you had been overcome. You were a mum, and you were great at it.
You didn’t get from being a frightened girl to being a momma bear by accident, Jess. You got there with hard work, and patience, and determination. You kept at it—you never gave up, never gave in. Don’t forget what you’re capable of.
I fold the note away, and close my eyes, and feel the sun on my skin and hear the insects buzzing and the seagulls screeching. I remember those early days, how hard they were, but how joyous I was.
He’s right—it was so hard. But so very worth it.
I clamber back to my feet, brush warm grass from my jeans, and go back inside.
“So,” I say, as they look up from their pints. “Anyone for Cornwall?”