Cushla has little time for Father Slattery, but does look out for seven-year-old Davy McGeown who, coming from a struggling mixed marriage, is friendless and in danger of being taken in by social workers.
She is beguiled by him, although it is awkward and complicated, as his friends know his wife and family, but they rather take to Cushla too, and ere long she and Michael launch in a full-blown affair, carried out at his Belfast flat where he works.Ĭushla teaches at the local primary school where they are all, even the children, used to talking daily about bombings and beatings, and Father Slattery rules the children with catechism and horror stories about sinners.
Michael returns to the pub and asks Cushla if she’d give him and some friends in Belfast Irish lessons. Just one wrong word can be twisted and misread with untold consequences Eamonn’s customers are mostly Protestants and he is extremely aware of that. He got on well with your daddy.Įverything in this story is complicated by the Troubles, and the sectarian division of the society. God, I haven’t seen him for donkey’s years. When Cushla gets home she tells her mum, Gina, who is mostly fuelled by gin and pills, about Michael. This is Michael Agnew, who will keep Cushla company after Eamonn ejects the soldiers for groping Cushla and she sends Eamonn home for a while to say goodnight to his kids. But today, there’s another man sitting at the bar, older, nursing a whisky. Sometimes there are soldiers at the tables who, shall we say, tend to be over-friendly to Cushla. The bar is being propped by the team of regulars, Jimmy, Minty, Leslie and Fidel, the latter being in the Ulster Defence Army. t was one thing to drink in a Catholic-owned bar quite another to have your pint pulled by a woman smeared in papish warpaint.
Most of the men who drank in the pub did not get ashes on Ash Wednesday or do the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday or go to Mass on Sunday. As the novel begins, Cushla is starting her shift in the family pub run by her brother Eamonn, having come from the School’s service for the first day of Lent.
As you may guess, religious politics will play a large part in their inevitably doomed relationship. Cushla is a young Catholic teacher in her mid-twenties, who falls for an older Protestant barrister and family man. It is set in County Down at the time of the Troubles in the early 1970s, and tells the story of two star-crossed lovers – one Catholic, one Protestant. My second book for Reading Ireland month hosted by Cathy, I’m really glad to have read this superb novel, which has recently been longlisted for the Women’s Prize.
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