Lovers’ Hollow Chapter One

1995

The thick front-door under the sign - Devereux’s Bar and Grocery - is closed. A For Sale board juts from the side wall, with a Sale Agreed banner across it. The window-blinds are drawn, like eyelids pulled down. The house looks as if it, too, has died.
That’s all I have time to notice as my taxi whips past. I can’t tell the driver to slow down as I have already given him instructions to hurry. After we pass, I look back through the rear window. It seems nothing about the place has changed, yet it looks different. Smaller, lesser. Then the road swerves behind us and the house is gone, disappeared by a bend.
I lean forward to the driver. “That’s the chapel there,” I say and he brakes to a screeching stop, ending my hopes of a discreet arrival. At the church-door, heads turn towards us and I shelter in the back of the cab for a final moment while the driver collects my suitcase from the boot. A loud slam and he is at my window, tugging the door open. “Here we are, so.”
I put on my sunglasses, fading the world to shades of brown, and let my hair veil me from the stares turned my way. I step out. The air feels thick and hot, hardly like air at all, and nausea growls again inside me. I pay the driver and he hands me my bag. Through the open gates I walk, fixing my eyes beyond the gaping faces, onto the chapel door. Beside the crowd, the hearse sits and waits, its hatchback door open like a mouth.
As I draw nearer, people begin to recognise me. One says “Hello”, another, “Sorry for your trouble.” Then there is a general murmur of greeting and sympathy. I nod acknowledgement. “Welcome home,” says a man whose face I know, one of the Kennedys, I think, a sly fellow who used to mock me from his high-stool at our bar counter. Is he mocking me still? The crowd parts to let me through.
Inside, the porch is crammed. I shoulder my way through into the chapel proper. From the altar come words I haven’t heard for a long, long time: Giving thanks to you, His Almighty Father, He broke the bread … gave it to his disciples … The priest is a performer, wallowing in emphases and pauses. Two other clerics in purple robes stand behind him. One is Father Pat Moore, curate of Mucknamore when I was growing up, the same plump face with twenty extra years in it. Father Fat, my sister Maeve and I used to call him. The other is a stranger to me but he must have meant something to Mrs. D.
The congregation is on its knees, heads bowed. It is the Consecration, the holiest part of the Mass. The quietest part of the Mass. So the click of my heels stepping from the porch rug onto the red-and-black tiles sounds louder than it should. People look up, nudge and nod to those beside them. The silence loosens. As I walk up the aisle, whispers swirl in my wake. The years peel away, laying me bare. I am back where I started, with the eyes of Mucknamore on me.
Father Performer genuflects deeply. Do this in Memory of Me. The altar boy tinkles a little bell, its sound failing to cut through the buzz of the congregation. Sensing the loss of his audience, the priest comes out of his prayer-trance and looks up, his eyes narrowing to specks of stone as he watches me advance.
I hold and answer his stare. Back off Padre, I tell him with my eyes; she was my mother. Between us, at the top of the aisle, her coffin sits gleaming on its trolley, all polished wood and burnished trimmings, topped by flowers: bunches, wreaths, circles and crosses of glossy leaves and over-perfect blooms. Funeral flowers, grown to be cut.
The priest stops the ceremony and stands still, hands together pointing heavenwards, a column of forbearance. Father Pat and the other priest behind him imitate the pose. They wait, censuring me with silence.
I am almost at the top pew, where my family is sitting. I can see Maeve now, looking thin, too thin, almost gaunt. Her hair is drawn up into a bun like a ballerina’s, making me wish I had tied back my own. I watch her follow the eyes of the priest’s, turning to see what is causing the delay. When she finds it is me, a look of pure exasperation breaks across her face. Now Jo? her expression says, before she turns her elegant neck away from me, back towards the altar. Now? My brother-in-law, Donal, grants me a nod. The little girl between them must be Ria, their eight-year-old daughter, staring at me with Maeve’s eyes. A look that tells me she has heard all about about her Auntie Jo.
At last I am there. Donal walks his knees down to make a place for me but Maeve, in one of her childish gestures, kneels firm. I put my bag down in the aisle, squeeze into the pew whether Maeve wants me or not. The wood is hard against my kneecaps. The smell of incense sends another wave of nausea undulating through me.
The priest begins again. Heavenly Father, you gave your only son …
I close my eyes. Kneel. Wait for it to be over.

Why am I here? All the way back I kept on asking myself: why? Through the black night-flight from San Francisco. During the taxi-ride between Dublin airport and the railway station. Through every chug of the rickety, three-hour trip to Wexford. And still in the final cab I took from Wexford town to Mucknamore, all the time, the same question: why? Why - when I spent twenty years not making this journey, when I had left it so late that I was unlikely to arrive on time anyway - why had I nonetheless organised a last-minute ticket? Why did I feel I had to come?
And it wasn’t just me. My sister, who long ago gave up trying to get me back to Mucknamore while my mother lived, made frantic efforts to contact me once she began to die: left numerous messages, telephoned my friends, in the end sent a telegram.

We rise and stand and sit and kneel and stand sit again, through the rites, beyond Holy Communion when everybody in our pew goes up to the altar except me, and everybody from the other pews has a good look at me on the way back to their seats. Finally, the organ springs into sound for the last time and an elderly voice begins a quavering ‘Ave Maria’. I look up to the balcony: it is Mrs. Redmond, chins a-wobble, Mrs D.’s oldest friend. While she struggles with the top notes, an undertaker steps up to release the brake on the trolley and glide the coffin down the aisle. The rubber wheels skim smoothly over the uneven tiles. We follow the coffin out of the church, Maeve and Donal first, then Ria and me, and everybody else behind. Maeve is crying, curling her sobs into her husband.
Outside, the heat crawls over us. The others are quickly engulfed by sympathisers, swept away into the crowd, a wall of backs encircling them. Everybody in Mucknamore knows Maeve; she has kept allegiance with the place. Seeing me alone, Donal steps across and bends to bestow a kiss on my cheek. “So,” he says. “The prodigal returns.”
I have met Donal only a handful of times in the seventeen years he has been married to my sister. When they were first engaged, Maeve brought him to London to meet me, and that first encounter has always stayed in my mind: how he enfolded her as we sat in the restaurant, her hand heavy with his ring.
“How is Maeve?” I ask, ignoring his gibe.
“Wearing herself to a frazzle,” he says. “Your mother had very definite ideas about this funeral. Maeve seems to feel duty bound to carry them out to the nth degree.”
I think I’m detecting a sardonic note. Maeve always claimed that Donal and Mrs. D were fond of each other but when it comes to family relationships, my sister is prone to whitewash.
“I take it she’s annoyed with me?”
“Your mother wanted to see you and Maeve promised her she’d track you down. When she wasn’t able to … Well… you know what your mother meant to Maeve.”
I can’t give him the response that leaps into my mind and find I can’t think of anything to say instead. Maeve is the single thing Donal and I have in common; communication is strained when she is not with us. Just as the silence is stretching towards awkwardness, we are rescued by a loud shriek that jerks our heads - and everybody else’s - around. At the church door four young women are screeching, there’s no other word for it. Screeching a tuneless chant that sounds like a saw scraping across metal. The four are in costume, made up to look old, with shawls drawn up over grey-wigged heads and black wrinkles painted across their foreheads and around their eyes. Their lips strain, their eyes gape as they shriek through a string of unintelligible words. I resist the impulse to cover my ears. “What the hell…?”
“Ahhh,” says Donal, enjoying himself. “Our keening friends again.”
“Keeners?”
“Professional mourners, one of your mother’s many special requests,” he says. “She wanted an old-style, traditional Irish send-off. We had a wake too, last night, complete with those four weeping and wailing and flinging themselves on the floor. She left Maeve six pages of instructions about this funeral. Six pages!”
All around us, people in the churchyard are pointing and nudging. I look across at my sister, explaining to everybody what the side-show is about and wonder how she can bear it. Did Mrs. D consider her at all while concocting her schemes? Probably not. Our mother wouldn’t understand how funerals serve the needs of those left behind. No doubt she had visions of her celestial self scrutinising proceedings, seeing who came along and noting how they behaved, so she would know how to treat them when they eventually caught up with her above.
“I don’t think anybody will be sorry when this day is over,” Donal says, his thoughts, for once, in line with mine.
I feel a hand on my back and turn to see Eileen standing there with her husband, Seamus. “Jo,” she says. “Jo, I’m so sorry.” For the first time I feel something wobble inside me. Eileen worked in our shop while we were growing up and lived with us until she married. I let her hold me.
Her hug seems to give the others permission to approach me and people I haven’t seen for years begin to come over and grab my hand. Faces I remember, names I’ve forgotten; names I remember, faces I’ve forgotten. They find words to say: My mother is gone to a better place. She is the lucky one now. She was a great character, one of the best. God would give me comfort. Only one old woman says something that sounds like the truth, and she gets herself dragged away by the arm for it. “Who are you?” she asks. “I never heard Máirín mention you at all.”
Then, abruptly, out of the mass of well-wishers comes a hand and a voice that I do know. “Jo,” he says, and my heart skips in recognition. A second hand comes forward, encircles mine in a careful, caring cup, and then he is there, all of him, looking down on me: Rory O’Donovan.
I had thought about Rory on the journey back, of course I had. I knew I would meet him and had planned my opening lines and the airy way I would deliver them. But in my imaginings, we met on the beach, or on the village street. Not here, at my mother’s funeral, the last place I would expect to find him, or any O’Donovan. Not here, in front of everybody. Not here.
“How are you, Dev?”
Dev. His old name for me. Extra weight has loosened his jawline. He is still the picture I have held in my head but blurred at the edges, like a photograph out of focus. His hair is gone, his long, black, beautiful hair. It used to flow down his back, soft and shiny as night-water. I used to sink my face in it, loop it through my fingers, knot it around my naked neck. All gone. Shorn and thinning and greying now: any man’s hair. And he wears a suit, any man’s clothes. I look for what I used to know.
“How are you?” he asks again. Behind us, the keeners raise their wailing to a higher pitch and he winces with a smile. It is a look to share: amused and confident of my amusement. Just like the old days, us against Mrs. D. A deep flush begins at the base of my neck and tracks slowly up my face.
I panic, swivel my head round to look about the churchyard, at the pockets of people, the waiting priest, the undertaker slamming the hearse door shut. I point across. “I have to go!” I say and that’s what I do, almost running from him, decamping back to Donal who stands with Ria near the hearse. It’s the shock of seeing him here that has unnerved me, I tell myself as I flee. The suddenness of this new Rory sprung upon me when my mind was on Mrs. D and Maeve and everything else. But I know that’s not it. I know that really it’s Mucknamore. Not even back an hour and already I am regressing, coming unstrung.
Donal explains that we are to stand behind the hearse and lead the cortege to the cemetery. The old cemetery. Only when he says this do I look across and realise: my father’s grave lies flat and undisturbed, no heap of earth beside it, no open cavity waiting to be filled.
“She’s not going to be buried with Daddy?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me. Another special request?”
“Yup. Down in the old cemetery, with her own family.”
The old cemetery. A twenty-minute walk away. At least.
“Can’t we drive?”
“Apparently not. She wanted us to walk.”
Thank you, Mrs. D. I seriously doubt that I can walk that far in this blistering heat. And now here’s Maeve bustling across, her aggravated-big-sister face taped on. She surprises me by slipping an arm around me and kissing my cheek. A real kiss, a close hug. “Am I supposed to say, better late than never?” she asks.
“I’m sorry, Maeve,” I say. “Really I am. I didn’t get your messages until last night and…”
“Honestly Jo, you’re impossible. Why do you have an answering machine if you don’t bother listening to your messages?”
I say nothing. Usually, I do take my messages as soon as I come in the door of my apartment. But these past days have not been usual.
“Couldn’t you have let us know you were coming? Where were you when I rang, anyway?”
“Out.” It’s what I have planned to say so I say it.
“Out!” she says. What do I mean, out? She rang me at all hours of the day and night, left four or five messages on my machine. She even telephoned Deirdre Mernagh who told her I was home, that she had been with me on the Friday night. So where had I been since?
I want to tell her to back off and mind her own business, but I don’t. Her red-rimmed eyes are ringed with black, circles gouged deep by days of distress. Scolding me seems to ease her, so I take the rap. But it’s a relief when the undertaker slides across and whispers in her ear and she returns to her duties.
She lines us up in the order Mrs. D dictated: first Father Performer, whose name, I learn, is Doyle, then two of the shrieking keeners; then the hearse, followed by the other two priests, the other two keeners behind them. Then us: herself, Donal, Ria, me. Was Mrs. D expecting me when she made her plans, I wonder? “Ria! Over here, love,” Maeve calls, with that voice that mothers use to address their children when they have an audience.
Behind us, everybody lines up in whatever order they like. The black car slips into gear and rolls towards the chapel gates. As we begin our march, the keeners lift the pitch of their noise another notch, start to hold their notes for longer. The only words I recognise are the lamentation of the refrain: Ochón agus ochón ó. They are a troupe of actors, Maeve explains in whispers. Mrs. D contacted them through the Arts Centre in Wexford, paying them to research the keening tradition and compile a performance that would enact that tradition at her funeral. They also performed in the house last night, at the wake. The wake was done in the old style, with stories and music and singing and Mrs. D laid out in the middle of it all in an open coffin. On all of this, she had insisted. Her instructions covered everything, from the food to be eaten to the songs to be sung. She must have been planning the event for months, Maeve says, if not years.
On we trudge down the village main street. Slow progress, up a gently sloping hill. Past the two-roomed national school; past Lamberts’ little farm, still the same stench of dung mingled with sea-salt; past the post office, its green An Post stickers plastered all over the window. We round the curve in the road and I can see our house atop its small hill. As the road rises, my breath begins to strain again. When we reach the front door, the hearse stops. The undertaker turns off the engine, the keeners drop quiet, and now we can hear the sea-surf, its sound loud in the hush. We all stand for two minute’s silence, praying or thinking. Our house. Mrs. D’s house, really. Bar and grocery in front, bedrooms above, living rooms and kitchen behind. Just a front-room bar and shop but in Mrs. D’s world it made her someone. A home that was bigger than most others around and a business that was central to village life. So central in her mind, that when she talked about the shop, she gave it the name of the village itself.
“Mammy’s talking about selling Mucknamore,” Maeve had said to me on the telephone a month or so ago. “This time I think she really means it.”
And this time she really did. The For Sale sign went up on the dwelling that had defined her for seventy-six years and in boom-time Ireland, quickly attracted a handsome offer. But before she had time to sign the deal, she fell dead.
Dead, Mrs. D. Dead. That is what you are. It’s over.

After one-hundred-and-twenty blessed seconds of silence, the keeners recommence their lament and we move off again, feet treading together in a slow march. Now we can see across the tops of the houses set into the cliff below. It’s fresher up here, with a small breeze blowing off the sea. We pass the old police barracks, once a burnt-out husk, now a holiday-apartment block with landscaped gardens and balconies facing the sea. Around the corner, a caravan park has opened and opposite its entrance, a mini-market sells food and beach-balls and yellow canisters of gas. Next door, a silhouette of a steaming black kettle announces Kehoe’s Kafé and beside that is Fryer Tuck, a fried-food takeaway.
Here, everything has changed. The older part of the village was closed and empty, but here people stand and stare and some of them bless themselves as we pass. Beyond the shops is a line of bungalows, each built without any awareness of its neighbour so they squat higgledy-piggledy along the road, like a row of crooked teeth. Many have B&B signs swinging above their gates, offering accommodation. On we go, past two holiday-home developments: Sea View and Mucknamore Cottages and beyond them two building-sites in the muddy stage of excavation. ‘Luxury Three and Four-Bedroom Houses’, their signs promise. ‘Investment and Private. Last few remaining.’
Then suddenly, the buildings stop, the road narrows and we are in a country lane. The sun bleaches the hedgerows to grey and seeks out white skin to burn. I tuck my exposed arms into my body, away from its glare. No fresh air here. My nausea now is solid, a squirming mass in the pit of my stomach, so thick and threatening I can no longer respond to Maeve ’s whispers. I concentrate on my breathing, keeping it regular, focusing only on the road ahead. Slowly, slowly, on we tramp.
At last, we can see the cemetery up ahead at the end of the curving road that veers back towards the coast. Old Mucknamore cemetery, a patchwork of crosses and slabs of stone staring over a low wall at the sea below. Closed now to anybody who does not already have a plot inside. The keeners separate as we approach the entrance, two standing at each pillar of the gate, their eerie, unearthly sound ushering us through.
Her open grave is up near the top of the cemetery, waiting for us. Beside it lies the pile of earth that will be thrown back in on top of her coffin, its surface cracking as it dries in the sun. Two Celtic high-crosses and a simple granite slab stand sentry over the hole. The taller, thicker cross is Uncle Barney’s, a memorial erected by his old IRA brigade. Its inscription is in the old Irish alphabet and therefore illegible to me; all I can read is the date of his death: 10.1.1923. The other, erected by the family, commemorates Granny Peg and their parents. And now, soon, Mrs D. The small one is Auntie Nora’s, buried with Peg, not her own people.
A terrible thought strikes me and I whisper to Maeve. “We’re not having a tricolour flag over the coffin or any of that rigamarole?” Granny Peg had had a full Irish Republican burial when she died, I knew: tricolour, prayers in Irish, volleys from old IRA guns fired into the air as the coffin went down….
“No, no.” Maeve whispers from the side of her mouth, her eyes to the crowd. “Nobody does that any more. Not since things got bad in the North.”
The keeners join us at the graveside, their singing even louder now. My knees long to buckle but we must stand straight and wait under their clamour while the long string of people trudges in and gathers round the grave. Father Doyle’s face makes his feelings clear: he has no choice but to indulge these eccentric requests - the deceased was, after all, one of his keenest patrons - but he does not have to approve. Reluctant as I am to be on Father Doyle’s side on anything, I too long for them to stop. Instead they get louder and louder, until their noise batters against my temples in time with my blood. Shut up, beats the pulse inside my head. Shut up. Shut up. Finally, at the height of the lamentation, they do, stopping abruptly and stepping back into the crowd.
Silence reverberates. A lone pair of hands starts to applaud, the claps faltering as it becomes obvious that nobody else is going to join in. Father Doyle begins to pray in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, his voice and the crowd’s responses weak and small in the open air: Lord Have Mercy. Lord Graciously Hear Us. My tongue feels dry and rough as the sand-dunes below us. Nausea twists in me again. And again. I try to beat it back down but this time pressure is swelling up into my nose and ears and I know it’s going to come. My heart starts knocking. My stomach constricts. My head floods until I am swimming in black.
Somebody is wailing and Fr. Doyle looks up from his missal, annoyance all over his face now. This is not what was agreed, this is supposed to be his time. He should have recognised that this sound is different, rawer than the ritual cries of professional keeners. Me.
I try to stumble away, floundering in the only direction free of people, and find I’m walking towards the open grave. I can see Fr. Doyle and Maeve and all the questioning faces of the crowd, their necks straining to see, but it is as if they are behind a gauze. Mrs. D’s cool earth-hole beckons.
As I pitch towards the ground, a male voice calls out my name: “Jo!” and two strong arms shoot out towards me. My body recognises him before I do, sways towards him but as it does, my stomach erupts, spurting vomit out over his shoes. I try to apologise but the next wave surges up. Again and again I retch, sick pooling on the grass around our feet, thick and pale first, then hot, clear-green liquid, stinging-sour. Rory holds me throughout. “You’re all right, Jo” he says. “You’re all right.”
Oh but I’m not.
When the heaving stops he places a handkerchief into my shaking hands and I wipe my mouth. I try to speak but my lips won’t move and when I step away from him in an effort to stand on my own, the world comes rushing in through my ears, spinning me round, dragging me down into a vortex of black. Rory O’Donovan takes hold of me and I sag, let unconsciousness carry me off.