The Meeting Point Read online

  The Meeting Point

  LUCY CALDWELL

  For Tom, my rock, my love

  Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.

  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.

  Ruth 1: 16–17

  The land of Dilmun is holy, the land of Dilmun is pure.

  In Dilmun the raven does not croak, the lion does not kill.

  No one says, ‘My eyes are sick, my head is sick’.

  No one says, ‘I am an old man, I am an old woman’.

  Ancient clay tablet found in Mesopotamia, c.2000 BC

  displayed in the Bahrain National Museum

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I

  Theirs had been the first wedding

  II

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  III

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  IV

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  V

  Seven years pass.

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  I

  Theirs had been the first wedding of the new millennium to be held in the little church at Kirkskeagh. The smooth granite steps of the porch had been scrubbed of their habitual coating of creeping yellow lichen by the elderly sexton, and the ivy cut back in the places where it had begun to send curling tendrils inching over the low limestone wall. Wooden buckets planted with white hellebores and early yellow primroses had been placed on each side of the steps, and the papery petals, so bright against the dark soil and the grey stones, fluttered and shivered in the breeze coming in off the lough.

  They had not intended to get married in February. Ruth had wanted an autumn wedding, some warm and lazy afternoon when the air would be filled with the scent of cut grasses and of hay drying golden in the fields; when the sun, golden too, would pour down like a benediction from a deep blue sky; when apples would be ripening on the gnarled old trees in the orchard and the first blackberries swollen in the hedgerows; the thrushes that nested in the rowan coppice down by the ancient rath burbling their liquid songs and the waters of the lough calm and shining silver. That was to be their wedding day. A day perfectly balanced between summer and winter, plump and sun-warmed, like an ink-skinned damson ready for the plucking. Euan laughed when she described their wedding day to him, and asked: what if it rained? But even if it rained, she would not mind the rain. She knew all the moods and nuances of the seasons in these parts. The sudden, spattered sprays of rain in early spring, and the fresh bright light that followed; the sullen shiver of raindrops on the lurid yellow whin bushes after a summer shower; the fogs that rolled in from a grey and seething autumnal sea; the tattered sky and sudden piercing shards of light on a bright winter’s day that sent the wavelets glittering like quicksilver. And September was her favourite time, rain or no rain: the heifers weaned and grazing the last of the sea-meadows, the black-wrapped bales of silage fermenting in the barnyard; the sugar-frosts in the mornings and the nights drawing in; the last weeks, then days, before her father declared it was time to turn in for winter.

  Everything, still, even on a modernised farm – which had computerised milking and identification systems to track precisely the yield of each cow, the number of days since heat and service and until a probable calving date – was done according to the seasons. The time to bring the herd in for the winter was after the second ground-frost; the time to plant barley after the first crocuses showed. You did not impregnate a cow before the summer, or else she would calve too early for the calf to grow strong on spring grazing. Everything, too, had its place in the order of things. Turnips were planted after harrowing, which was done three times after harvesting the barley; a field used for crops one year must be fallow the next, untilled, and used for pasture after that. A time to plant and a time to uproot, her father had framed in his office, a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them.

  They planned the wedding for the last day of September, a Saturday: after the flurry of harvest was done, and before the winter wheat was sown. But when she discovered she was pregnant, they brought the date forward: settling for a plainer version of the dress, a reception at the local golf club rather than the hotel on the marina up the coast, which only opened for six months of the year; a weekend in a country manor house in Sligo rather than a two-week honeymoon in Italy. But it was the marriage, they insisted to each other, the marriage, and not the wedding, that counted. What did one day matter when you would have all the days of your life with someone, and the days beyond that? They were to be blessed with a child, too: and unplanned, unexpected as that child was, a child was always a blessing. They told each other this, eagerly, relieved to hear it said and affirmed by the other. Saying it made it true; made you realise that it was true. It allayed, too, the quiet guilt each felt at not having waited until their wedding night, as they had planned to, as they had ought to; at taking the engagement to be married as the marriage itself, the intention for the action. A time to embrace and a time to refrain. But this was 1999, not ’59, they reminded themselves: a generation ago, things might have been different, but the worst that happened to them was a ribbing from Euan’s colleagues at Braemore Park.

  And the weather was with them for their February wedding. January had been uncommonly nasty, even for these parts, which were exposed to the Irish Sea and used to fierce winters, with storms blowing up almost daily and thick, greasy fogs roiling in across the land. But a few days into February, a fortnight before the wedding, a cold snap set in. The days turned crisp and bright, the low skies lifting to show the heavens wide and cloudless above; blooms of frost appeared on the dark bare fields like icing; cracklings of ice covered the puddles in the lane. As a result of the torrential rain, the waters of the lough were up, heaving black and oily against the shingle shore. But the danger that the sea-meadows would flood had passed, and at sunset the rippling currents blazed and danced like scattered handfuls of rubies. Every day, they prayed it would hold, and it did hold, the morning of the wedding dawning crisp and bright and brittle.

  That was two years ago now; more than two years. Anna will be two this May, and the word husband, once so slow and soft in the mouth, has become easy, familiar.

  *

  Ruth shivers suddenly. She has been standing still too long, watching the sky grow ragged to the east where the night is thinning, dissolving into grey. This morning is the last morning: today the very last day. Finally, suddenly, it has come, and she is trying to see everything with new eyes, as if she can imprint it on her mind’s eye and take it with her, as if she might never see it again. She can see the little old church from here, across the bay, the shape of it squat and mute, dark against the lightening sky. Services are rarely held there any more; weddings, because it is picturesque, or occasional funerals, candlelit carols during Advent, but that is all. She and Euan worship at the bigger church in Kircubbin, or the cathedral at Downpatrick to hear the Bishop of Down and Dromore, and she has not set foot in the little church for months. The thoughts, the memories it has brought back! She had not known she remembered so much of the day; it was all such a blur; everything had passed so fast. But n
ow her mind conjures up the groomsmen, stiff and upright and self-conscious in their morning suits, in a semicircle at the base of the steps; the bridesmaids huddled together, their bare white arms mottling in the cold as puffs of wind snatched at their flimsy shrugs and sateen fichus. Her mother and father and Euan’s mother and father and sister, standing not quite close together enough; the waves of cheers and applause; the handfuls of pastel-coloured horseshoes and shamrocks and hearts, flung straight at them by the breeze; ducking and laughing and clutching at Euan’s hand, married. No longer Miss Ruth Bell but Mrs Armstrong; Ruth Armstrong; the strangeness, solidity of it; the certainty.

  At last the sun is rising now, slowly, large and red, creeping over the waters. A sharp crescent moon and one or two stars are still visible, and the waters of the lough glitter quietly, slapping and sucking at the pebbles on the shore. She nudges at a couple with the toe of her wellington, then picks up a particularly smooth one and puts it in the pocket of her bally old fleece jacket. It is icy cold. Her fingers curve perfectly around it. She will take it with her, she decides. A living stone, like Isaiah’s stone, to lay in Zion; the one who trusts will never be dismayed.

  She turns, walks quickly back across the fields, stamping her feet to warm them. When she reaches the lane, her footsteps ring out across the frozen ground as if her wellingtons are iron-soled.

  In the farmyard, her father and the farmhand are already letting the first lot of cows into the milking parlour. Each cow knows where to go; she ambles into her slot and nuzzles at her feeding tube. The cows are slow and heavy-bellied; thick with calf. In a few days her father will start separating from the herd those due to calve in the next four weeks, and cease to milk them so their milk can thicken, swell with the fats and antibodies needed by their newborns. She will not be here for calving, she realises. It will be the first year, the first time, ever, that she has not been here. Even last year, she had been able to leave Anna with Euan or with her mother and go down to the barn for an hour or so to help with the newborns, give bottles of defrosted colostrum to the two or three whose mothers couldn’t or wouldn’t suckle them, keep watch over the first-timers for the signs of impending labour. And even the year before that, big with child herself, she had kept vigil with her father, wrapped up in rugs and fleeces and oilskins, ready to help a cow in fear or distress. It will be strange not to be here.

  By faith he made his home, she reminds herself, in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country. She and Euan have been studying the passage from Hebrews all that week, to strengthen their faith in preparation for the task ahead of them. Last night, they concentrated on the final verses, the tribulations, the warnings. Those ancients who faced jeers and flogging, those chained and put in prison. Those stoned, or sawed in two; those put to death by the sword. Those left to wander in deserts and mountains, to hide in caves and holes in the ground. They were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect. What they are about to do, Euan assures her, will be the most important thing they have ever done. They must shore up their faith; they must pray for serenity; for courage. The bags are packed, the arrangements checked and finalised; all that is left to do is pray, and keep on praying.

  The solid warmth of the cattle is comforting; the smell of them; the steam from their flanks and the scrape and clatter of their hoofs on the concrete floor. She slaps her way through them to find her father and he smiles to see her, surprised. She has not helped with the first milking since before Anna was born; since she was pregnant, and married.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she says. ‘This time tomorrow, you know?’

  ‘Aye,’ he says, the word puffing slow like smoke from his mouth. ‘Aye.’

  Rosie, the arthritic old Border collie, whines by his feet, and Ruth bends down to scratch her forehead and tug her ears. It suddenly strikes her that Rosie does not have much time left.

  ‘Oh, Rosie,’ she says, letting the dog lick at her hand.

  ‘Come on,’ her father says, as if he understands, ‘no time for petting,’ and he sets to slamming the gates and setting the pumps going. She falls in behind him, her limbs moving automatically in the remembered ways. Once, she had thought she might take on the farm one day, take it over. But God, it seems, has other plans. Sometimes she can barely credit it, that she, a farmer’s daughter, should be chosen for such things. But that is the way, Euan says. The son of God Himself was born in a stable, and to a humble carpenter. And so she has been studying guidebooks, studying maps, learning new phrases and customs, hardly able to believe that they are going, what they are doing.

  Bahrain. She says the word to herself, the weightless aspiration of it like the billowing of silk in the air. Bahrain. She shivers again, this time with excitement. It is not just a new place, Bahrain. It is a whole new life: a whole new world. Go into all the world, and preach the good news to all creation. She feels laughter bubbling up inside her, the joy of the Holy Spirit.

  Tomorrow.

  II

  1

  Bahrain.

  As the plane circled Muharraq Island, waiting for clearance to land, fear budded in her stomach. This was the furthest from anywhere that she had ever been. A school trip to Germany, and another to France; a weekend in Paris, once, for her parents’ wedding anniversary; a two-week holiday to Disney World, Florida when she was thirteen. Day trips into Belfast, or down to Dublin, to go Christmas shopping with her mother; a week or so each summer with her cousins in Donegal. Until now, these have been the limits of her world.

  When she was younger – nine, ten, eleven – she used to beg her parents to go skiing at Easter, or spend summers in the south of France or Spain. She cut out pictures from Sunday supplements and travel brochures and glued them into a series of scrapbooks; glossy photographs of honey-skinned models in straw hats and sundresses, dangling strappy sandals from their fingertips as they walked laughing through azure waters. They had reminded her of it at the departures gate this morning, her mother laughing and dabbing at her eyes, her father squeezing her arm and repeating each anecdote, each detail, until she feared they’d never make it past security in time. They had to jump the queue, in the end, with Euan praying audibly that they wouldn’t be chosen for a random bag search.

  Now, as the plane wheeled and tilted into another circle, she tried to ignore the raw-penny taste of fear and concentrate instead on the fact that God, truly, worked in mysterious ways. Her parents were right: her scrapbooks had been more than a hobby, almost an obsession. She had been desperate to get away, convinced that elsewhere, away from the dull, incessantly drizzly countryside, life was happening. Marbella, her calligraphic caption would read, or Albufeira. She would whisper the words like magic charms, sitting in the draughty front room with the heavy Reader’s Digest atlas dragged from the shelf and propped open on the floor, imagining the starfish and sea horses such words conjured up, the palm trees and hammocks. Once, after reading an advert about safari holidays to Kenya (Kenya, the loop of the word round on itself at the back of your mouth), her scrapbook became a jumble of rhinos and elephants at waterholes, lions and zebras and all things exotic. She saved her pocket money to join the WWF, stuck the sad-eyed panda stickers in the cab of her father’s tractor and begged her parents for a holiday in Africa. But it was too far to go; always it was too far to go. The one occasion they left the farm for any length of time – the Disney World trip – her father grumbled and fretted, spent most of the day finding phone booths to telephone the locum and farmhands who were left in charge of things. When they got back he vowed never to do it again. And if Ruth talked about the plight of the great apes or the evils of the ivory trade he told her to volunteer with the Ulster Wildlife Trust on the boglands at nearby Inishargy, and help conserve the marsh fritillary butterfly or the mistle thrush. Oh, how that had infuriated her! As a teenager, though, she grew more involved with the workings of the f
arm and ceased to mind so much that there were countries she might never see; stopped dreaming of other places.

  But God had not forgotten. When the phone call came from Richard Caffrey, Euan’s theological college room-mate, saying he had given Euan’s name as a possible replacement for him in Bahrain (there had been some accident; Ruth never fully understood the details, and he was coming home before his stint was up), she leapt at the idea: she knew it was meant to be. She had been more enthusiastic than Euan, at first: had persuaded him into it. Of course he had to go, she insisted, and of course she would go with him. And of course it would not be a problem having Anna with them. People had babies in the Middle East, didn’t they? And the Church would arrange everything; it was not as if they were setting off with backpacks into the middle of nowhere. It was a Calling, she was convinced of it, straight from God, sending them in the footsteps of the first Christian apostles. It took longer for Euan to be convinced – this she did not understand – but after several days’ prayer he decided that yes: they would go, they would do it.

  People had asked her time and again if she was worried, or scared. Anna so young, the politicians nightly preaching war in the region. And Islam: was she not nervous of sharia law, of women stoned to death for adultery, of hands chopped off and public beheadings, of hostages? She laughed when her mother suggested the latter. It was Bahrain they were going to, she replied, not Iran or Iraq or Saudi Arabia; not Beirut in the eighties. There were cathedrals in Bahrain, Anglican and Catholic; there were malls that sold Marks & Spencer’s clothing; you could buy alcohol in off-licences, just like home. She looked it all up on the internet and in the guidebooks. She read blogs written by expats, online editions of weekly English-language newspapers. She was disappointed, in fact – that became her joke, her punchline – that Bahrain seemed so normal, so ordinary.