Even on the long journey home he remained undecided. As they entered Leitrim and left the West behind, he began to try out the image of the house in his mind. Is it a house I would like to die in? he asked himself. They arrived back at their fortress in the North feeling disorientated, but still he would not say yes or no. That night the house in Belmullet visited him. In one dream he entered the porch and passed by a group of light-keepers playing cards in the tall kitchen. “Where’s the joker?” a clear-eyed man called out. Jonathan Adams climbed the stairs that instead of going up were going down. He found he was at a window on the second floor of the house and Matti Bonner was about to fall out, but luckily Jonathan caught him. “Keep smiling,” said Jonathan. “Don’t let on you were falling. Think what the neighbours might say.”

“You can go now, Sergeant,” said Matti. “It’s safe.”

He woke distressed, as if he had been visited by his own death. But Maisie Adams had already begun to decorate the light-keepers’ house.

“I’d carpet that living room in green. The girls could have the attic.” She would clear it of Catholic bad taste, the seamen’s Madonnas would go. She’d open up the earth – she had begun to hang curtains.

“It will be our summer home,” she said. “You’ll be able to relax there.”

The girls pleaded. That his family should seek to go South to the Republic was a situation the Sergeant was not prepared for. The house grew on him. One day he agreed. Just like that. “I want no Catholics calling – agreed?” he told Maisie. She nodded. Yet it would be him that would later invite them in. They drove down to Belmullet and handed over a deposit of five hundred pounds to the auctioneer. They signed the contract. When they reached The Dwellings that night a wind had turned the peninsula into a tornado of stinging sand and hail. They fought to open the huge door. Once inside, Jonathan Adams was surprised to find that the table in the tall kitchen was exactly as it had been in his dream, and that in its drawer was a deck of old playing cards.

13. The Outsiders

13

The Outsiders