The Island of Longing

About the Author Anne Griffin’s first novel, When All is Said, was a number one bestseller in Ireland in 2019 and chosen as the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year in the An Post Irish Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the John McGahern Annual Book and the RSL Christopher Bland prizes. Her second novel, Listening Still, was also a bestseller in Ireland. Her work has been published in 25 territories. The Island of Longing is her third novel. She lives in Co. Westmeath, Ireland. Also by Anne Griffin When All is Said Listening Still The Island of Longing Anne Griffin www.sceptrebooks.co.uk First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Hodder & Stoughton An Hachette UK company Copyright © Anne Griffin 2023 The right of Anne Griffin to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Cover photograph © plainpicture/Lubitz + Dorner All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library eBook ISBN 978 1 529 37206 9 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd Carmelite House 50 Victoria Embankment London EC4Y 0DZ www.sceptrebooks.co.uk For Adam, may you never be lost to me. Contents About the Author Also by Anne Griffin Title Page Copyright Dedication PART 1 PART 2 PART 3 Epilogue Acknowledgements PART 1 She recognised the girl. She definitely recognised her. My father’s back pocket is always full of rubber bands and safety pins. You never know when you might need them, he says, ignoring the listener’s curious smile that sometimes borders on the brazen. A smile that Dad graciously forgives by looking off to the kitchen windowsill, finding something of great interest there – the teapot when not in use, or perhaps, if we’re on the ferry, Cairn Rock, that he has seen a thousand times as we pass the north end of the island. It’s a look that holds the weight of wisdom that is wholly and undeniably him: Danny Driscoll. Seventy-seven. Ferryman. Father of three. Grandfather to ten. Crooked of leg and bent of back. My father has always known how to forgive a man’s belief that he knows better than the next, possessing, as he does, an understanding that the need to survive in life often leads to the crossing of a line or two. And, well, what harm? he’d say. Have we not all tripped over our own cockiness at one stage or another? Once there is no theft or murder or cruelty, then what of it? But this last year has changed him, and those enviable sentiments, exactly as it has changed me. I have loved my father and his assured belief in the strength of his own flaws since I first set eyes on him, forty-nine years ago. Not that I remember my birth or the original moment of my seeing him. But it is as real to me as if I could. As certain as the fact that I had arrived in our small island home in West Cork, with Patsy Regan by my mother’s side telling her she had a daughter, just as she’d predicted, with ten marvellous fingers and toes, and a mop of black hair that refused to lie down, no matter how hard my mother and my two curious brothers tried in the coming days. They christened me Rosie Driscoll. Twenty years later I would become the ferry skipper just like my father. Twenty-nine after that, I would return from Dublin to the island totally broken but willing to stand at the boat’s helm once again. Still a wife – although my husband back in the city might have had his own opinion on that – and mother. Mother. The rounded wholesomeness of the word made me shiver on the occasion of my momentous return to this place, unconvinced as I was that I deserved that moniker. I have two children: Colmán, Cullie for short, twenty-three, still in Dublin, and Saoirse. Saoirse, the elder by two years, who would, when small and on our annual holidays back here on Roaring Bay, follow her grandfather around as if he had a rope attached to her, and who would trip in her wellies as she tried to climb the steps to the ferry’s wheelhouse and would laugh joyfully when he sounded its departure. Both mine, and both wholly bereft of me. Eight months ago, I took refuge on this strip of land, two miles long and one mile wide, alongside all the other lost souls gathered into her arms. I suppose the island has always been that way – a haven for those blown off course, like the Siberian and American birds that take cover from the ravages of the Atlantic Ocean on our cliffs and in our scrub, needing to step out of the world for a while, to mend wounds that might never heal fully but somehow in this place are soothed. While I have loved the island my entire life, I had never before felt that I would simply crumble if I could not breathe the purity of its air or listen to the water nestling against its shore, but that has become the way of things. Very little has changed here since I first left aged twenty-two. A community of natives and newcomers, our speech is still loaded with rich guttural sounds left over from our long-ago Irish-speaking days but that sometimes make visitors wonder if we are using English at all. We have a