The Belfast Girl at O’Dara Cottage

скачать книгу бесплатно


The dancers divided into two camps, women on one side, men on the other. Up by the stage, their ranks were six or seven deep. Down here, beyond the range of the beacon that bathed the dancers with alternate garish hues, they thinned out into a single line. On the men’s side there was an intense scrutiny of the opposite camp. The women’s scrutiny was just as intense, but they covered it by talking to each other and feigned indifference. Their eyes moved around just as much.

As the band started up again the dark wall of suits crumbled at its edge. The women held their ground as if nothing were happening and looked surprised or even bored as they were led onto the floor.

From time to time, a couple detached themselves from the moving mass of dancers and came and stood only a little way from where I sat. Not romantic encounters these. No affectionate gestures, not even the touch of hands. The faces were far too intent for it to be any kind of chatting up that was going on. I watched cautiously and saw that as each dance ended, the couples who’d been engaged face to face would either return to the dance floor together, or turn their backs on each other and rejoin their respective camps.

‘Ah, sure many’s the bottle of whiskey I’ve had, Elizabeth, for the making of a match. But sure, nowadays, the young people see to it themselves and save the expense of a matchmaker, more’s the pity.’

Paddy had talked at length about the custom of matchmaking. I’d listened to every word, intrigued and fascinated by what he’d said. What I hadn’t expected was to see it actually going on around me.

‘I think the hardest match atall is when the family has no money and the daughter is ill-favoured forby. There’s a lot of work and if no good comes of it the matchmaker gets the blame from both sides,’ he’d said ruefully. ‘Another hard one is when there’s a love match. The boy and girl have their minds set on each other but maybe one of the families is hoping to gain by the match and they think they’re losing a great opportunity.’

What was clear to me from all Paddy had said was how good he was at the job and how much he enjoyed it.

‘Ah well,’ he reminded me, his eyes twinkling. ‘There’s a lot of grand eating and drinking at the expense of both sides while the negotiations are going on. An’ many’s the bottle of whiskey I’ve had if it came out right.’

Some of the women I could see were as young as fifteen or sixteen, others were years older than I was and some few were in their thirties. Small and fragile, large and matronly, warm and homely, large-boned and gingery, they were dressed in a variety of ways, everything from the latest fashion in bridesmaid’s dresses to T-shirts and jeans.

I wriggled uncomfortably on the hard bench. It was one thing reading up the marriage customs of the Nootka or the Inuit and quite another to observe the customs in action. It didn’t look to me as if ‘love and marriage went together like a horse and carriage’ as the song would have it.

Whatever I might like to think about how people behaved in 1960, the evidence was that out on that crowded floor young men were looking for a woman who would cook and clean for them, help with the farmwork and bear sons to carry on the work on the land as they themselves grew older.

‘And the women? What about the women?’ I said quietly to myself.

It looked as if they were just as hard-headed as the men. They had to be. What they wanted was a man to give them a place of their own, children and their status as a married woman. Until they acquired that status, be they fifteen or fifty, they would still be a ‘girl’. And a ‘girl’ had no rights. She was someone who stayed at home, had no life of her own, did always what others told her to do, someone who could end up spending her whole life looking after aged parents or unmarried brothers.

Suddenly, I thought of my own Aunt Minnie, my mother’s youngest sister, a tiny wisp of a woman married to a large, loud-mouthed man I’d never managed to like. Uncle Charlie was a greaser in the ropeworks, his hobbies were drinking, betting on greyhounds and sitting in front of the television in his vest. He and Minnie didn’t get on. Often, they didn’t speak to each other for days and when they did, it was only to complain.

‘Yer Uncle Charlie’s a dead loss,’ she would say to me, shaking her head, when I went over to visit her in Short Strand. ‘Yer grandfether warned me. “Minnie,” he sez, “if ye marry thon pahel of a man ye’ll have neither in ye nor on ye.” An’ he wos right.’

Standing over the chipped and stained jaw box in her shabby kitchen as she emptied the tea leaves into a cracked plastic drainer, she nodded at me and went on.

‘All verry well, Elizabeth, but how wos I te get outa that aul hole at the back end o’ Dromara? Yer mather upped and went as soon as she cou’d. I might ’ave been there till this day if I hadn’t struck up wi’ Charlie, bad an’ all as ‘e is.’