It was said that his ancestors had come from Donegal, and for that reason if no other he had decided to spend a holiday in Ireland. The lush countryside, so quiet after London, and the little villages around the coast delighted him, and the people were polite and, he supposed, as friendly as they would ever be to an Englishman. Ah, but he was quick to point out to them that his roots were in Donegal; that in spirit if not in body he was as they were, a blood-hot Celt.
Having spent long enough in the west, he travelled east, driving through Fermanagh and Monaghan until he reached the coast, just south of Dundalk. The days were balmy and clear, and he breathed it all in, resisting the occasional temptation to telephone back to London with news of his trip. He could wait for all that.
A few of the men along the coast were fishermen, but not many, not now that the economy was dragging itself, along with the country’s social problems, into the twentieth century.
The north was a ferment of naive idealism and brutish anger, the whole concoction spiked by foreign meddling of the most malign nature.
In particular there was one young man, his hair wild and with a beard to match, whom he met in Drogheda, and who had spoken to him of the fishing industry and the village pubs and of politics. Politics seemed to pervade life in Ireland as though the very air carried whispered reminders of bloodshed and injustice. He had listened with an unjaundiced ear, explaining in his turn that he was on holiday, but that really he was recovering from a broken heart. The young man nodded, seeming to understand, his eyes keen like a gull’s.
In one of the pubs they sat for night after night, though he could feel, through his happiness, the end of the holiday approaching. They drove into the countryside one day, so that the young man, Will, could spend some time away from the gutting of fish and the rank posturing of the boats. They ate and drank, and, with Will’s directions, approached a quayside as dusk was falling. He pointed over to a small boat. The air was rich with the smells of fish and the endless screeching of the herring-gulls. The boat, Will told his companion, was his own.
‘Shall we take her out?’