False Mermaid

She’d been very specific on the phone: His father had suffered a stroke, and needed looking after—more looking after than a mere concerned neighbor such as herself could offer, was the implication. But from the sound of things, his father wasn’t at all unwell. There must have been some mistake. Cormac walked to the open doorway feeling confused, relieved, guilty. Just what did Geraldine Foyle think she was playing at here?

“Hang on now,” his father was saying. “Hang on. We’ve gone past it now. This is the part I especially wanted you to hear.” Joseph stood to lift the needle from a spinning 78 rpm disc on the gramophone, and carefully placed it back to an earlier point in the groove. “Would you listen to that—” He paused to let the instruments speak, raising a hand to indicate a particular passage. “Pure genius, don’t you think?”

The woman in the easy chair opposite swirled and sipped from her glass of red wine as she listened to the music. Cormac was startled to discover that his father’s guest was someone he knew—Roz Byrne, one of his university colleagues from Dublin. They’d been hired on at the same time, and sat together on a few faculty committees. They’d always got on very well. Roz was a folklorist, a good-natured woman with a great hearty laugh, lively green eyes, and an unruly tumble of gingery hair. As neither of the room’s occupants seemed to mark his presence, he raised a hand and rapped lightly on the door frame. Roz put a hand to her throat. “Jaysus Christ, Cormac Maguire—you nearly put the heart across me. What in God’s name are you doing here?”

“Hello, Roz. I was about to ask you the same thing.”

Joseph Maguire looked from one to the other, slightly befuddled. “Don’t tell me you know each other?”

“We’ve only worked together these last twenty years,” Roz said. “What’s your connection?”

Cormac felt his color rising. He’d let the world believe his father was dead. Perhaps it was petty, but the first thought that leapt to mind was now that Roz knew his father was alive, everyone else at the university would soon know it as well.

“Ah,” she said, evidently experiencing a sudden flash of comprehension. “Maguire—you’re related.”

“Father and son,” Joseph said.

“I always had you down as a Clareman,” Roz said to Cormac.

“I am,” he said. “It’s—complicated.”

Joseph rubbed his hands together. “Now we’ve got all that rubbish out of the way, Roz, shall we offer my poor starving issue some of your marvelous fish stew?”

At that point it hadn’t seemed politic to bring up Geraldine Foyle. Cormac had to admit he was ravenous, and saw no other option than to sit down to a bit of supper and listen to the tale of how his father and Roz had met.

“I’ve been here a few weeks, digging into research for a book—” Roz began. “It started out as a collection of selkie stories from Donegal, but it’s morphed into something quite different. Anyway, I tried to find a little house to let for the summer, but you wouldn’t believe how tight things are at the moment. I had a research grant, but the money was literally being hoovered out of my pockets by an unscrupulous landlady all the way up in Portnoo. Bloody atrocious place, but all I could find. I happened to be walking the beach just over the headland here one evening—it must have been about three weeks ago—trying to work out whether to stay or to go. For some reason, I picked up a stone and pegged it into the sea—letting off steam, I suppose—”

“And I happened to be out for my constitutional. What can I say? I praised the ferocity of her stone-throwing, and we struck up a conversation—”

Roz said: “Of course I started whinging about the grant that was supposed to last all summer, when Joe had a sudden brainwave and offered to let me stay here. I’m making great headway now. And I have to say, it’s wonderful to have someone to bore with all my new discoveries at the end of a long day.”

She turned to cast a warm smile at “Joe.” Cormac added the cozy scene into which he’d just stumbled to Mrs. Foyle’s taut urgency on the phone. It was all beginning to make sense.

The old man said, “Well, scholarship is important, and sure, it’s not like I haven’t the room. Tell Cormac a bit about your project, Roz—it’s fascinating stuff.”

Roz said: “Shape-shifting and fairy-bride archetypes have always been my bread and butter as a folklorist. There’s a famous Donegal song, ‘An Mhaighdean Mhara’—maybe you’ve heard it—about a sea maid tricked into marriage with a human, who eventually leaves her family and returns to the sea. I’ve been fascinated by that song for as long as I can remember. What’s left of it is only a fragment, only four short verses, so that’s automatically intriguing. There were loads of stories about mermaids and selkies collected in this part of the world, but there’s one detail that makes ‘An Mhaighdean Mhara’ stand out. The sea maid has a Christian name and a surname—”