Bríd had been telling me to go to Westport for two years. I’d been resisting on no very good grounds.
The grounds, if I’m honest, were something like: I didn’t want to go somewhere that other people had already decided was worth going to. Which is a form of snobbery so mild it barely deserves the word, and yet there it was. Westport is the kind of place that ends up on lists. I have a resistance to lists. I mention this not to defend myself but because it’s the honest reason, and because Bríd, who knows me well after thirty years, was entirely unsympathetic.
‘You’re being ridiculous,’ she said, the last time it came up. ‘It’s a nice town. Go in February when there’s no one there.’
She was right, as she tends to be about these things, which I find more useful than irritating on most days. I booked two nights at a small guesthouse off the quay and drove up on a Friday in early February, leaving Stradbally in the dark at half seven because it’s a long way. The better part of five hours, with a stop outside Westport for the last of the coffee. The Yaris made the noise under the dashboard somewhere around Limerick, the one I’ve been ignoring since last spring. Louder in the cold, I’ve noticed. I turned the radio up.
The town itself
I arrived just after one in the afternoon. The sky was low and white, the kind of February sky that looks like it’s been ironed flat, and the streets were quiet in a way I hadn’t expected. I’d been braced for the place to feel like a theme park of itself – the kind of town that’s so used to being admired that it starts to perform. It didn’t, or not that I noticed. The Octagon in the centre has the tree at the middle of it, and the tree in February is entirely bare, which is the right condition for a tree in a town square in February. There was a woman walking a small dog in slow circles around it. Two men talking outside a hardware shop. A delivery van double-parked on one of the side streets. Ordinary things, happening ordinarily.
I walked down to the quays before I’d even checked in, because I couldn’t not. The Carrowbeg comes into the harbour there – or alongside it, I’m not certain enough of the geography to be precise – and the water was the colour of pewter. The boats, such as there were, sat very still. There was a cold coming off the river that had nothing polite about it. I stood there for a few minutes and felt it, and then I went to find my guesthouse.
Westport House, from outside
I walked out to Westport House on the Saturday morning. It takes about fifteen minutes from the town centre, past the gate lodge and along the estate wall, and I want to be clear that I went only to see it from the outside – the grounds are closed in February, and the house itself is the kind of demesne that charges admission in summer, which I respect as a practical matter but couldn’t have faced in any season. From the road you can see enough: the Georgian front, the long pale line of it against the winter trees, the way the land falls away behind it toward the bay. Clew Bay was doing what Clew Bay does in February, which is exist in a state of enormous grey calm, the islands sitting in it like punctuation in a sentence that hasn’t finished yet.
I stood at the gate for a while. A crow was doing something in the grass just inside the wall. The cold was fierce and steady and I was glad of it in a way I couldn’t have explained to anyone who doesn’t understand what February is for.
Being mildly won over
I went to Doolin last week – I’d written about that already, the fog and the three people and the absence of apology from the weather – and Westport had a different quality to it. Doolin I liked because it was stripped back to almost nothing. Westport, even in February, had a sense of itself. The pubs on the quay were open and warm, and I sat in one on the Friday evening with a pot of Barry’s and a sandwich and read for an hour and a half without once feeling conspicuous for being alone. The barman didn’t hover. The two women at the next table were talking about a planning application for something in Castlebar. I didn’t catch all of it but the tone suggested significant objections.
Bríd rang on Saturday evening to ask how I was getting on.
‘Grand,’ I said.
‘I told you,’ she said.
I told her she’d told me, yes, and that I was allowing she’d been right, and she said that was very generous of me and laughed, and we talked for twenty minutes about nothing in particular the way you do with someone you’ve known long enough that most things can be said sideways.
The drive home on Sunday was long and grey and the Yaris rattled past Limerick again and I got back to Stradbally just before four, in the last grey light of a February afternoon. The cottage was cold in the specific way it goes cold when you’ve been away two nights – not the deep cold of a house long-abandoned, just the settled cold of a house that’s been minding itself. I got the range going and put the kettle on and sat down, and thought about Westport more warmly than I’d expected to.
Bríd will be insufferable about it. I’ll probably let her.