To Know the Road

Coyle Martin Annie

Description

A chance meeting with a handsome stranger sets Victoria on a heart breaking path of conflict involving family, tradition and religion. Caught between the Irish Catholic Protestant hostilities, will Victoria and Donny ever find happiness? "Coyle Martin has sandwiched a sweeping heart-tugging movie between the covers." The Globe and Mail on Coyle Martin's first novel "The Music of what Happens" Annie Coyle Martin grew up in Ireland. She now lives in Kingston Ontario. Book reviews online @ www.publishedbestsellers.com

Sujets

• Historical romance
• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Pneuma Springs Publishing
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782282082
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

To Know the Road



Annie Coyle Martin
Copyright
First Published in 2011 by: Pneuma Springs Publishing
To Know the Road Copyright © 2011 Annie Coyle Martin
Kindle eISBN: 9781907728914 ePub eISBN: 9781782282082 PDF eBook eISBN: 9781782280750 Paperback ISBN: 9781907728082
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, save those clearly in the public domain, is purely coincidental.
Pneuma Springs Publishing E: [e-mail] W: www.pneumasprings.co.uk
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Published in the United Kingdom. All rights reserved under International Copyright Law. Contents and/or cover may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the publisher.
Dedication
It’s never the leaving; it’s only that you know the road.
- Old Irish maxim
Dympna Power 1929 - 2003
Ita Corrigan 1927 - 2006
In memoriam

Flights of angels sing ye to thy rest.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my family for their support, especially to Sean Monaghan for technical expertise and help with research.
Ann Decter of McGilligan Books provided invaluable advice and editing. Marty Popoff was helpful on a variety of matters to do with publishing. Ciara O’Shea provided good editing advice. Dr Barry Martin corrected a number of errors in an early draft. Thanks to Jerry Villa for a conversation on wireless receivers and to Eilish Lennon for sharing her stories. Mary Yalfani was, as always, a friend to me and to writing. Thanks to Ken Adcock for sharing his knowledge and invaluable help with the paragraph on tennis. I’m grateful to Tony Monaghan for a discussion about country funerals in the 1940s and to John D. O’ Neill for sharing his memories of Dublin trams.
Viv Darcy, who sadly is no longer with us, was a wonderful source of stories about all things Dublin. May he rest in peace.
To Know the Road

Chapter 1 - 1937 The Party
Chapter 2 - At The Carnegie Library
Chapter 3 - In the Country
Chapter 4 - In Dublin’s Fair City
Chapter 5 - Wireless Dreams
Chapter 6 - The Road North
Chapter 7 - Jim Jams
Chapter 8 - The Confession of Sins
Chapter 9 - Country Woman
Chapter 10 - District Nursing
Chapter 11 - Shooting Season
Chapter 12 - Death in the Country
Chapter 13 - Planning Fire
Chapter 14 - After The Wedding
Chapter 15 - Fire
Chapter 16 - Country Christmas
Chapter 17 - Illness In The Family
Chapter 18 - Death Watch
Chapter 19 - Country Funeral
Chapter 20 - Homecoming
Chapter 21 - Memories of Spring
Chapter 22 - Dancehall Dreams
Chapter 23 - Motherhood
Chapter 24 - Wartime
Chapter 25 - Return
Chapter 26 - School Days
Chapter 27 - Electric Light
Chapter 28 - Constancy and Change
Chapter 29- New Beginnings
1. 1937 The Party
U nobtrusive and pleased, Margaret Mulholland made her way from her front sitting room through the open glass doors into the dining room. The drinks table with white lemonade and mineral waters in the centre of the sitting room, and a punch bowl on the buffet in the dining room, encouraged her guests to move about, rather than congregate at one end or the other. The narrow house was difficult for parties but, with the connecting doors open, the July evening light poured through from the back garden and the rooms seemed larger. The round dining room table was draped in white cloths, her Waterford bowl with roses in the centre. A rose stand held up the flowers, the guests circumnavigated the table rather than reaching across it. Margaret believed circulation was the life of a party. She’d given Kathleen her instructions, “Keep to the kitchen until I need you to bring in the tea and coffee.”
She suspected Kathleen of listening at doors. All maids gossiped! Margaret smiled sweetly at her son-in-law Richard, Georgina’s husband, dutifully talking to old Mrs. Butler, “I’m so glad Peter persuaded you to come, Mrs. Butler.”
“Oh, I came for his sake you know. He thinks I’m too much at home. Not many boys are so considerate of their mother.”
Margaret avoided Richard’s knowing look. Peter was not exactly a boy, fifty if he was a day. But he was single! Her youngest daughter Victoria was perched in the window seat talking to Jim Stewart, one of the few eligible men around. Their neighbour from across the street was entertaining them, pontificating, waving his glass about for emphasis. A bore, but one had to invite one’s neighbours. When Margaret and her sister Nicola were young there were scores of boys at tennis and musical evenings. But they had been swept away like paper boats in a fast river. On her dressing table, Nicola kept a picture of her lad in leather puttees. He’d left in December 1914 and never came back. Nicola nursed a broken heart and she drank too much: disgraceful for a Protestant girl. And she flirted at parties, fancied herself still one of the New Girls of her youth. Fortunately the house was large enough to provide room for her. A lost love could unhinge a woman. It could also, Margaret mused, make her tiresome. Nicola was no longer young; it was twenty-three years since her young soldier left. Margaret and Henry had offered her a home. Otherwise, with only her meagre war widow’s allowance, Nicola would be marooned in some tiny room in the city. Margaret walked back to the drinks table.
“What can I get you?” her husband Henry wanted to know. She moved closer, he bent his head to hear. “Nothing just now. Keep an eye on Nicola. She’s drinking.”
She went to speak to their minister the Reverend Arthur Gordon and his wife Celia, who were helping themselves to food.
“Such a lovely party!” Celia gushed.
“So glad you both could come.”
“Victoria is looking so well this evening, Margaret.”
“Thank you. I think she is enjoying herself.”
She moved on toward Victoria and Jim. What had the Reverend’s wife meant? Had she heard something? Then she decided it was the new hairstyle she had insisted Victoria adopt, precise Marcel waves flowing neatly from the flat centre parting. She’d been right to insist on her getting rid of her untidy curls, unkempt, unsophisticated. Her youngest child, her favourite. She frequently thought longingly of Victoria as a bride, although she could never fully imagine the man she might marry. Looking at photographs in The Tatler, she’d plan Victoria’s wedding dress. No wide flounces. Since the American woman had scooped up the King, narrow silhouettes and padded shoulders were the rage. But Victoria’s escapade was a setback. The less said about it the better. And Victoria’s quarrel with Margaret’s brother William and Helen. Awful! Margaret had long ago decided that her childless brother would leave part of his wealth to Victoria. Ever since she was a child, she had spent her summers with him and Helen in Obanbeg. Helen, enthralled by Victoria’s sweet nature and blonde blue- eyed prettiness, often said she was like their own child. Victoria, under Margaret’s direction, had written a suitably humble note asking forgiveness for the embarrassment the affair had caused. Margaret herself wrote asking that the matter be forgotten, never mentioned again in the family and received Helen’s assurance that the subject was closed. Consequently, Margaret had kept the entire matter from her husband. He was a Northern Presbyterian from Enniskillen, born between the bridges of Lough Erne, a true North of Ireland man. He bitterly resented what he saw as the triumphant bigotry of the Catholics in the South. His bank had plenty of Catholic clients but she felt her husband would never accept the new order of things, never resign himself to the departure of the British from Ireland. Margaret herself had been brought up in the Church of Ireland, which maintained civil but aloof relations with Catholics. She met Henry in the summer of 1905 at her elder sister’s house in Enniskillen. She was twenty- four. Her mother had been worried, before Henry appeared on the scene, that Margaret would be an old maid. Two years later, when Henry’s work took him to Dublin, Margaret returned to Blackrock, County Dublin, the village of her childhood. She sent her two older daughters to Mercer’s School in Dublin to be prepared as Church of Ireland wives who lived at a cool distance, but not necessarily in enmity, with the Catholic majority.
Victoria had attended Alexandra School and was the success of the girls, a university graduate, so her flirtation with a Catholic was certainly not in keeping with her mother’s plans, but Margaret thought William and Helen could have been more reasonable. They had exaggerated the whole episode. Wasn’t it a bit pre-war to be so aghast at what was just a fling? Of course, the boy was completely unsuitable and Henry, if he had known about it, would have been furious. But it wasn’t as if Victoria had been serious. She had probably been bored, and the boy was a diversion.
Margaret decided she would rescue Victoria and Jim from what was surely a boring conversation with their neighbour Jack Byrne who appeared to be finishing up a speech as she approached. “Of course the papers have to write about something. This fight in Spain will blow over. Makes it blasted hard to get a decent bottle of sherry.”
This neighbour was the silliest man Margaret knew. “How is your garden coming along?” she asked, taking his arm and leading him away. “I’ve never had such roses as this year.”
“He’s a bit of a talker, isn’t he?” Jim said mildly, when they had left.
“To say the least.”
“Who drinks sherry any more, anyway?”
“He does, apparently.”
“How was your trip to the country, Victoria?”
“Oh the country is always wonderful in the summer.”
“Now that you’re back, we should make up a set for tennis. Nicola is always game for a match and so is Peter. If I set it up for Satur