Golden white under its gray slate roof, Marlfield cottage leans back against the protecting arm of the hill and gazes quietly across the lough at the brown and green hills of the County Down. The low white wall about the cottage yard is broken by a single gate painted green to match the shutters and doors.  The chimney is smokeless. The crisp yellow curtains are still. The narrow gray road curves between the pastures and the cobbled beach, brushes the white wall lightly, follows the coastline leftward and disappears behind a mass of golden gorse at the foot of the hill. There is no sound but the wash of wavelets on the stones and the faint, elfish tinkle of distant cowbells. The cottage, alone but not lonely, settles back to enjoy the unaccustomed May sunshine. Across the lough, just to the right of the sun-tracks on the water, the finger of the Scrabo Tower points heavenward, a silhouetted memorial to a son who never came back.  

The cottage was never intended to be a monument. More than a century ago it was built, stone on stone, by a retired schoolmaster. The pattern was traditional: one room deep, four rooms long, and a room-and-a-loft high with broad stone chimneys on each end. Two sturdy plank doors faced the road; two faced the hillside garden and the spring.  

The old man built well, for he intended to live there many years. In that part of the world, when people pass a certain age they seem to go on forever.  Perhaps it's part of the timelessness of the land. Anyway, he built to last, and roofed the house with slate that could defy storm, fire and time. He had his bed and wardrobe made to special order in Strangford, whose ruined castle still stands guard over the mouth of the lough where the wind and chop of the Irish Sea are focused by the funnel of the land.  

When all was ready he sailed down to the village, carefully loaded his furniture at the ancient stone quay, and started homeward. About the half-way point he was overtaken and hidden by a rain squall which left only empty sea when it passed. The remains of the boat washed ashore a few hundred yards down the beach from the cottage. The old man's body was never found; perhaps his sea boots weighed him down.  

Since this was Ireland, the cottage soon acquired a reputation for being haunted. The farm people drove their carts and cows along the road by day, but nothing could persuade them to pass the cottage at night. In bright moonlight it stood like a white sentinel surveying the road. On misty nights it was worse, for then it loomed up suddenly with empty, staring windows in its gray face.  

Local lore had it that the builder was in residence, weedy sea boots and all, and no one wished to offend him by renting it. No one, that is, until some twenty years later my grandfather and his brother leased the cottage for five pounds a year and set about refurbishing it as a summer place. Neither was superstitious in the least; had the Devil himself seen fit to challenge either of them, he would have been well advised to bring his friends with him. The cottage stayed in the family for nearly thirty years until the children were all grown and gone and my grandfather had retired.  

Marlfield entered my world when I was about two years old, snuggled down in my father's bed as he began to spin his web of boyhood adventures. I don't know how many years I listened to the stories, but they never grew old. It had been a marvelous place for a boy to grow up. The hills behind the house were one huge rabbit warren, and the lough teemed with fish. There was a boat, and a little to the north was McCausland's Island with old ships beached for salvage and no one to keep small boys from exploring.  

A six-foot conger eel was captured under an old hatch cover one Sunday morning and brought home just in time to disrupt the family's trip to meeting in the pony cart. All sorts of interesting things hid under the rocks of the beach at low tide.  

Old Mrs. Savage, at the big house up the road, owned the cottage. She sold the family milk and cream and always had a slice of hot buttered soda-bread for the child who brought the pail in the morning.  

My father was the oldest, but eventually there were four boys and two girls sitting by the glowing, smoldering turf fire in the kitchen fireplace on stormy evenings when the surf crashed against the sea-wall and pattered down on the slate roof of the cottage. My grandfather's business kept him in Belfast during the week, so the children and their mother had the place pretty much to themselves.  

"Pretty much," I say, because there sometimes were noises not of the house, such as heavy, booted footsteps in the loft above. After repeated checks with gun and lantern revealed nothing, the sounds became as accepted as the ticking of the clock on the wall.      

Then one night Daisy and Nellie, the two girls who by this time had grown up and were in nurses' training, were alone at the cottage with Queenie, the family Great Dane. Everything was calm, when suddenly there came a loud rapping at the heavy iron knocker of the front door. Queenie growled. Thinking it might be a neighbor, Daisy called, "Come in!" The only answer was an even more urgent rapping.  

Daisy slipped a couple of shells into the old double-barreled shotgun that stood in the corner. Queenie was nearly going crazy. As Daisy threw the door wide open the dog dashed out and started running in circles, whining. The girls stepped out. The road, the beach and the hillside lay bright in the moonlight, but no one was there. The neighbors nodded wisely when they heard the story in the morning, but that was the last time it happened.  Whoever or whatever the visitor had been, he never came back.  

The cottage had been the center of the universe to the children, but one by one they went away. Daisy and Nellie became nurses and eventually married. Bertie and my father worked as electricians at the "Queen's Island," the big Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and when the White Star Line commissioned its newest liner in l912, there was an opening for just one of them in its crew. Bertie won the flip of the coin and sailed, junior electrician on the Titanic.  

Clement and Basil emigrated to Canada after the war. My father knocked around the world for several years before jumping ship in Baltimore to marry the girl he once courted in Ireland. He worked hard, but all his life the hub of his world remained the little stone cottage by Strangford Lough. It became the same to me, for it provided a fixed point of reference in the kaleidoscope of our many moves.  

I was forty-four and he was retired and a widower when I took him back to Ireland. Going back is always risky, but as we stood together on the gray road and looked at the cottage, it was just as he had described it. My father may have been a romantic, but he never romanticized, and it seemed to us both that we had never really been away.  

He wanted to buy the cottage, and he could have afforded it, but I knew that at seventy-nine the climate would have killed him out of hand. He never went back, and now he's gone just like all the others.              

A few years later my wife and I stood together beside the little white wall and I also felt the call to seek out the owner and persuade him to sell. I didn't. Now it seems unlikely that I, the last who really cares, will ever return.  

It's strange, though, how homesick one can be for a house he never lived in and for a country that was never his own.  Maybe I suspect, down in my heart, that I'm missing out on some wonderful conversations in the cottage, sitting by the blue turf fire on a stormy night as the spray patters on the roof.

Author's Biography

Albert Ervine is a long-retired engineer who lives in a forested family compound in Arkansas. He writes short stories when he has a break from taking care of his wife of over fifty years. 

A first-generation American, he last visited Ireland over thirty years ago. The current owners have since remodeled, enlarged and modernized the cottage until no self-respecting ghost would go near it. So died another dream, done in by "progress."

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