Title: Fiona's Song
Notes: I hope you'll kindly ignore every blaring indication that this wasn't written by a talented author living in Ireland in the 1940's. (Basically I apologize for the un-authentic language.) This takes place about seven years after the events of the movie. The book in particular indicates that some of the extended family will begin moving back to the island, but for the purposes of this story that hasn't really begun to happen yet and it's still just the core 4 and Jamie.
-o-o-o-o-o-
You couldn't bring just any bride to Roan Inish.
Plenty of girls were tough enough – the farms and the streets were full of girls with sinewy arms and callused hands and no expectations of anything different in their future. Hardy girls. But how many of those girls could tolerate the solitude of the island? Early mornings and laborious days were one thing, but weeks of seeing no you else but your family? Gulls and seals and a couple of goats the only company? (And though their discourse on the weather could be quite interesting, gulls and seals and goats had very little to say about fashion or the economy or the moving pictures.) And there were no parties and no guests and no one to care what outfit you wore or whether you had even combed your hair - just an indifferent sun – or – more than likely – a blanket of clouds, with no mind to tell you whether they were full of rain or not, let alone what they thought about how you were dressed for the day.
Not many girls would willingly enter that life.
And of them, how many loved the sea?
Because you couldn't bring a girl to Roan Inish who didn't love the sea. She had to have the right kind of strength, and the right kind of social disposition, and she had to feel the ocean inside her.
And then you had to love her, of course. And be loved in return. Meeting those other guidelines didn't amount to a pile of sand on a sandy beach if there wasn't love. She had to be the right girl, in the end. A checklist of traits - even highly specific traits - like long, curly blonde hair and bright blue eyes and a heart that was open to magic - even a long list of them didn't guarantee she was the right girl.
And if you could devise a long list of highly specific traits, it was highly likely you already knew the right girl. The girl with the long, curly blonde hair who loved the sea and had a heart open to magic. The girl with all of the other qualities that couldn't be quantified or described or put down on a checklist for a young man who was ready to marry and start a family and was looking for the right girl. Like the way she smiled at you. Or the sound of her voice. Or the bounce in her step as she clambered over the rocky hillside. Or the way that all three at once made for a perfect moment, as she bounded ahead of you, looked back at you to smile, and called out that she was quite certain she was going to beat you to the other side. Which she did, of course. You were tall and fast but you'd rather chase her for a hundred years than reach the destination by yourself and then have to look back to make sure she was still there.
She made you chase her all over Roan Inish (and really you found yourself helplessly following her whenever you were on the mainland as well, and looking for her even when she wasn't there, like the day you looked for her in Siobhan), but the day you always remember was the day when she tripped and fell and hurt her ankle, because that was the day when you carried her all the way back. The day when you smelled her hair, like a gentle breeze off the ocean on a summer's day, and the day when you realized your unarticulated inner checklist for the wife you would have when you were a man was just a song about Fiona that you had not yet learned how to sing.
-o-o-o-o-o-
"She's smiling at ya."
"She's not." Eamon didn't even look up from his plate of chips.
"She is."
His friend Colin insistently grabbed Eamon's hair and yanked, forcing Eamon's eyes up and in the direction of a pretty brunette about their age. She had glanced away, but when her head turned back her gaze landed on Eamon and she smiled shyly.
Beside him, Colin grumbled resentfully, something about Eamon being "lucky" and "an idiot" and not deserving the attention. Eamon couldn't argue with that. He wouldn't turn way the attentions of a pretty girl but he hadn't been searching the market place for one the way Colin had.
"Smile back at her!" Colin ordered, slapping him on the same spot on the back of Eamon's head that he had terrorized moments earlier.
Eamon did smile back, and the girl came over to join their table. Her name was Siobhan and her father was a banker. She was having a soda while she waited for him, and she lived in south part of town. He noticed that her hands were soft, quite unlike Fiona's had become from eking a living out on the island, and her dress was fine and store-bought, nicer than anything the Coneelly's could afford to buy for their respective young lady.
"You're fishermen," she guessed.
"It's the smell, isn't it?" Colin asked apologetically.
Eamon didn't see the point in apologizing for that – he smelled like fish everyday and besides it wasn't a bad smell. The smell of fish meant there was something to take home.
But if the smell bothered Siobhan then she hid it politely.
The three of them conversed easily enough. Colin shared his dream of opening a furniture shop, and Siobhan told them about the exciting trip she had recently taken to Dublin.
"Eamon was just in Dublin as well," Colin facilitated. "For several months, in fact."
Siobhan turned to him with interest.
But Eamon had nothing he wanted to say about Dublin. His mother had insisted that he come visit her there, and her dutiful son had obeyed, but then, in as loving a way as possible, she had manipulated circumstances so that he was forced to stay for an extended period of time, during which she made every attempt to push him into local and moderately well-paid city jobs, and into the arms of local eligible bachelorettes. He enjoyed the pleasures of the city and seeing his siblings and parents for a fortnight but it soon became quite a miserable situation for him, in exactly the same way as it had when they had first moved there after the Evacuation, only worse, and growing more severe with each day that passed. His brothers did not believe him when he said that he didn't have a sweetheart waiting for him back on the islands. It was the only explanation they could understand. While several of Eamon's siblings were enthusiastically considering a return to Roan Inish themselves at some point, they did not feel quite the same pull as he did. It wasn't the same for them.
His mother, with a grand sigh, had finally given him her blessing to return to the island.
It had been such a tonic to him to breathe that fine sea air when he hopped off the bus. The entire family – his grandparents, Jamie, and Fiona – had all come to greet him at the bus station, and they took the ferry and then the curragh back the rest of the way together. Fiona had been very cross with him for not writing at all, and hadn't hugged him until he was properly lectured on this violent act of neglect, and then she ordered him, very quietly, to never leave again, before taking his hand.
Eamon didn't tell Siobhan any of this, but he brought up a very nice restaurant he had dined at one evening, and a very impressive building he had seen being built, which launched Siobhan happily into recollections of the delicacies she had eaten and the dazzling edifices she had seen.
Her hair was shorter than Fiona's, and streaked with red. Her eyes were dark green, more like the inland pine groves than the mid-morning blue sky.
Siobhan spied her father headed over, and stood up to leave. "I don't suppose you'd like to go dancing this weekend?" she asked Eamon. Eamon looked over her silky hands, emerald eyes, and cleaved chestnut hair. "Can't. I've got to help out my grandfather. But Colin's free. Aren't you, Colin?"
Siobhan, polite as ever, showed no disappointment as she turned to face Colin, and they agreed on the details.
Colin smiled happily as they both watched Siobhan meet up with her father and disappear into town.
"You're even more an idiot than I already thought you were, and I already had a very low opinion," Colin criticized.
"She wasn't for me," Eamon explained.
"Maybe not her. But what about Kate? The daughter of a fishmonger? Kate, who has a pet seal and wants nothing more than to live out on one of the smaller islands? I'll never understand why you broke off with her. She was everything I've always understood you to be looking for."
"No. Not quite."
"If my mother were here, God bless the woman, she would tell you that sea gulls don't starve to death waiting to find a loaf of fresh-baked rye on the beach, and she'd be quite correct."
Eamon laughed at that. "I'm not sure what the hurry is. Most men haven't married yet at 23 years."
"No hurry. No hurry. But I counter, sir: what are you waiting for? That's the real question."
Eamon frowned. His friend had alighted on something. Eamon saw it, blurry, in the distance. A future epiphany. A key.
"You were so determined to have your home on Roan Inish, with your own boat and net, and your wife, and a brood of what I can only assume would have been very ugly children."
Eamon tried to glare but laughed instead. But he turned the thought over in his mind and realized that somewhere along the way he had indeed lost his sense of urgency. He still wanted those things, of course. As much as ever. More so, even. But…
"Kate was perfect. She was the best possible girl," Colin continued.
But not with Kate. "Maybe she was the best girl. But she wasn't the right girl."
Colin reached over and ruffled his hair affectionately. "I'd think you were a strange one, Eamon, but you're a Coneelly, so I guess it's alright."
Eamon shook him off good-naturedly.
"Maybe you wouldn't have settled down with Siobhan, but I think a date might have cheered you up."
"Cheered me up?"
"You can't fool your best friend, Eamon. You've been down. A right mope, in fact. Because I'm your friend I won't say it's been irritating, but to be perfectly honest, yes, it's been irritating."
Eamon rolled his eyes at Colin, but didn't speak.
"Well? Are you going to tell me what the matter is?"
"Nothing. No matter. I'm just missing my little cousins, I suppose."
"I thought you said they were coming back next month."
"She is. I just miss her."
Colin gave Eamon a moment to correct himself but he never realized he had misspoken.
Fiona had accompanied Jamie to go visit their father in Glasgow. It had taken a few years for Jamie to adjust, and another few years on top of that for their father to accept what had happened, but there was no denying that it was one-and-the-same boy, and circumstances and arrangements had finally been deemed adequate for the family to reunite. Their father could not miss work, and so the children had traveled out to see him and their other siblings over Christmas. Coming on top of Eamon's own trip east it felt like quite an upheaval. It hardly seemed decent that they should be separated for so long.
"You're worried they won't come back, aren't you?" Colin finally said.
"No." Eamon didn't turn to look at him. "They'll come back. They couldn't stand to be away for the sea much longer than this." Remembering his own yearning to return to the shore, Eamon felt a pang of empathy for his cousins what they must have been enduring at that moment. "Fiona hates the city. She'd come back here on foot if she had to."
Colin regarded his friend critically.
Eamon continued, absent prompt. "Though I think she took the sea with her."
-o-o-o-o-o-
The tide had fought him the entire way, and the howling wind was its ally, so Eamon had already been longing for a warm meal - but the aroma of seaweed soup, which he swore he could smell even before he had eyes on the island, called him back to the cottage as surely as a sweet voice singing his name.
It might have been both the song and the scent pulling on him so hard, tugging him back to Roan Inish like a master on his dog's lead, for Fiona was humming a beguiling tune when he flew in the door, slamming it behind him on the chilling wind and encroaching darkness, and he began to wonder if he hadn't heard her humming it the whole time he had been boating back. The unknown song was somehow familiar on her lips.
She smiled when she saw him, her cascading long, curly blond hair swept to one side while she stirred the large cooking pot. It was magnificent hair, really – the same color as all the Coneelly's, of course. The family hair. The same color as his sisters' and aunts'. But he imagined Fiona's hair smelled like a gentle breeze off the ocean on a summer's day like he saw the mid morning sky in her eyes. It was wavy and full, keeping motion with her body like it was liquid gold, like forming foam, and long enough that she could wrap herself up in it like some modest Aphrodite – that is, if she ever had a mind to do something silly like that.
Perhaps it was the amount of time that had passed, or simply the fact that that time had passed while they were mostly away from each other, or perhaps it was the influence of the big city, but Fiona had grown. She wasn't taller, or fuller, or tauter – she must have already been those things before she left - but she was older. It seemed inappropriate now to think of her as his little cousin. Little Fiona with her little voice but her big ideas. Everything about her seemed overwhelming now.
"You're late," she said, though it was more of an observation than an accusation, and genial in either case.
"The tide and the wind were against me, though I would have been later if I had not smelled your cooking all the way from the point."
"You could not!"
"I could," he assured her in his confident way, removing his boots and coat and setting them by the fire to dry.
Fiona reached up and touched his cheek, then pulled her hand away exaggeratedly. "Ach! You're ice!"
Teasing, he took her hands and held them both against his face. "I do need to warm up."
She laughed, and then kicked him lightly in the shin. "The soup will burn! It's boiled down on account of the hours I've spent waiting for you."
He released her hands with a smile and picked up the spoon, beginning to stir it gently.
With their grandparents gone to Belfast to see one of their grandsons married, and Jamie gone with them to meet the rest of that branch of the extended family, Eamon had wondered if the cottage might seem a little empty without them, the way it had seemed vacant and lifeless while Jamie and Fiona were at their father's, but it felt as cozy as ever. (Though they were still missed, of course. Their absence a weight on Eamon's chest.) Eamon knew he would have to stay behind to tend the livestock and the crops, but he was surprised when Fiona had volunteered to remain with him.
"I don't need to be taken care of," he had argued.
"Of course you do," Fiona replied matter-of-factly. "You wouldn't want to be alone, would you?" she asked softly.
He stared at her. "No."
"So it's settled. I'll stay."
And she had. And he was glad, not only for her company, but for her cooking, which could not have smelled better if they had been dining at the Savoy in London.
"They made it off alright?" Fiona asked, moving over to the counter to slice the cheese.
"Oh yes," Eamon answered. "Saw the bus leave myself."
"And Jaime? He was excited? He wasn't scared, was he?"
"He was in fine spirits. It's only a few days, after all. Much shorter than before. He knows that."
"Yes," Fiona replied doubtfully.
"You're worried he'll be troubled with out you by his side," Eamon guessed sympathetically, coming over to stand beside her and placing his hand on her shoulder.
She nodded.
"He'd be crazy not to miss you," Eamon said quietly.
Fiona felt a fluttering in her stomach.
"But he'll be just fine," Eamon finished assuredly, going back to stir the soup again.
Fiona swallowed and exhaled heavily.
They sat down for a supper a few minutes later.
"What a feast," Eamon complimented, gazing appreciatively at all the dishes on the table. "Seems odd to have twice the amount of food less than half as many people to eat it but I'm not complaining."
He noticed how prettily she glowed in the firelight but not the blush that crept up her neck. Perhaps she had overdone it, Fiona thought. Both bread and cakes did seem excessive in retrospect, now that she saw them side by side on the table along with the soup and a casserole, when the fish alone with maybe a vegetable would have been enough on a typical night. She had wanted it to be a special meal but now she feared she had made herself look foolish.
He praised her cooking with the bite of each new dish even though this wasn't the first time she had made supper entirely on her own nor cooked any of the individual items. Eamon was polite in the extreme, always, but Fiona could always hear true enthusiasm in his voice when it was there, and on this occasion he meant every word.
It was a small, square table, and though they took their usual places, they felt quite like the master and mistresses at the head and foot of it without their grandfather and grandmother there. Eamon could not stop thinking about how it was as if this was their home, only theirs, and how there might have been children asleep in the next room, just like life was on the island before the Evacuation. A family living on the island, a foot in the past and a foot in the future.
"You're quiet," Fiona remarked.
"Am I?"
"Should I have gone with Jamie?"
"I'm sorry. I'm poor company. I was late and now I'm in my head."
"No! You're never poor company, Eamon. No, I only meant that you probably had plans. Granny said you were in town often. I was away for so long. I thought, I don't know, I thought perhaps you might have a new girl. Or maybe you were back with Kate. I did like her so," Fiona said stiffly.
"Kate? Oh no. That wouldn't have been fair to Kate. No matter how long we were together, I never would have married her. You can't bring just any girl to Roan Inish. You have to find one that was always meant to be here. I've as much left to figure out as any man my age but I do know that."
Fiona's immense mid morning-sky blue eyes studied him uncertainly.
She thought, with great pain, of the cottage next door that had once belonged to Eamon's parents. She and Eamon had restored it along with her own family's house, and then of course the big house that had been their grandparents', and which they had all lived in together for the past 7 years. Fixing up their grandparents house and her house had merely been a matter of righting what had gone wrong with time, what nature had taken back. But in the other cottage they had built new furniture, painted new colors, rearranged and redone as it fancied them, until, unintentionally, they had made it theirs. It was their cottage, hers and his. And now she grew sick at the thought of him living there with this mystical perfect bride he had always been seeking, ruining completely what was so perfect in this perfect moment.
The storm raged outside, rattling the entire house. It was fierce for a winter storm.
"It reminds me of the night we first came back here," Eamon commented as he built up the fire.
Fiona smiled. "The night they gave Jamie back to us." She pulled their mattresses into the front room and laid them down before the fire. They wrapped themselves in blankets and lied down side by side.
"I'm glad you stayed, Fiona," Eamon whispered as he closed his eyes. "This is no weather for being alone."
He might have said more, but didn't. He might have told her he was glad she stayed because she had been way for so long before, and he had missed her so. He might have told her he wasn't much for being without her, regardless of the weather. He might have told her she had sky eyes and sea foam hair, and that they sky lacked it's color and the sea its vim when she wasn't here.
It occurred to both Eamon and Fiona that it would have been much warmer to be sharing blankets rather than blocked from each other by them, but it was rather too delicate of a thing to suggest, so they had to make do with the comforting knowledge that the other was very close, if not quite as close as they might have been.
The next day was beautiful, the way the day after a storm often is, awash in robust rays and bright blues. Once the morning chores were completed the two of them set out into the open terrain, and Fiona challenged Eamon to a race to the western tip of the island. She had a sleek speed despite her cumbersome clothing, but Eamon ran only fast enough to keep up, occupied as he was with laughing at her confidence that she could outrun him. Until he heard her scream as she leapt down a small hill. It took him only a second to arrive at her side.
"I've twisted it," Fiona moaned angrily, rubbing her hand over her ankle.
"How's the pain?" Eamon asked.
"Well there's rather more of it than I prefer," she said, with a wincing smile.
He helped her up to her feet, but her attempt to hobble forward was so pathetic that he scooped her up into his arms. She threw her arms around his neck and shifted into a comfortable position against his chest.
Eamon admired her hair draped over his arm, and surreptitiously sniffed it, and found, to no surprise at all, that it smelled like fresh summer sea air. It was exactly how he had always imagined that her hair would smell, and in the pretense of brushing it out of the way he stole a touch, and found, to no surprise at all, that it was soft and smooth.
It was a heady sensation to have her so close. Not only close, but in his arms. Pressed up against him like one always fantasizes. Not a fantasy of sex but a fantasy of expressing love unrestrainedly. That impulse to hold one as tightly as possible. A love that's expressed not through movement but through stillness.
She wasn't light in his arms, but she was light enough, and he walked at a leisurely pace, with carefully balanced ginger steps. He was concentrating so much on the ground that he did not notice that Fiona was staring at him. He had avoided her gaze at first because he was afraid of what his own might betray, but taken unawares, he was not able to guard himself, and whatever Fiona saw there, it gave her the élan to lift her lips to his and kiss him with great purpose.
Although it was painful to her, she laughed when he accidentally dropped her bottom half to the ground. Fiona stabilized herself against his chest and tilted her head up towards his, smiling widely and squinting against the sun.
"You too?" is all he said.
"Me too," she replied.
And that was that.
-o-o-o-o-o-
No ordinary husband would do on Roan Inish.
A girl with the ocean inside her and a heart open to magic couldn't settle with just any man. Even if you could find one strong enough to work beside you, one who didn't crave the bustle of the city or the conveniences of city living, one who didn't mind the long quiet days or the cold, windy nights, could you find one who loved the sea? Could you find a man who would listen? Could you find one with the courage and the heart to believe?
And if you could find a solitary, hardworking man, who could sense where the fish were swimming and knew the tides and the currents and heard your words about magic and felt they were true, would he hear you singing from beyond the distance? Would he mistake the mid-morning sky for your eyes? Would he miss you when she smelled a gentle breeze off the ocean on a summer's day? Would he forget the ocean was there when you weren't?
Or was there no best man, only the right man? The one you loved and who loved you back? The one who spent seven years waiting for you without knowing it was you, the one who had been looking for you his entire life? The one who knew what it meant to destined for someone?
You made a house with him, and then a home.