Cushla Lavery and Gerry Devlin

Cushla Lavery and Gerry Devlin’s friendship grows out of a hesitant invitation to share company, survives an awkward attempt at courtship, and eventually becomes a lasting bond that both can name without romance. Gerry offers Cushla a way back into social life, but their connection is not a conventional love story: their affection rests on companionship, shared work for peace, and the trust that remains after Gerry’s expectations of marriage have passed.

Identity and First Invitation

Gerry teaches the other P3 class at Cushla’s school. He has only been on the staff since September when he takes over training the school choir, writes lyrical poems for peace, and sets them to music. His enthusiasm is conspicuous enough to make Cushla feel shown up, but it also establishes the quality that will shape their friendship: he is willing to put his ideas into public, collective form, even when their reception is uncertain.

When Gerry asks Cushla to come to a party, the invitation meets a life narrowed by routine. She has not been out since the staff drinks at Christmas; her social life consists largely of driving her mother to Mass and working the occasional shift for her brother, Eamonn Lavery. She wants to go out, even if the prospect is simply an evening with Gerry, and accepts. The decision matters less as a declaration of attraction than as a small willingness to leave the house and re-enter company.

Gerry arrives at her mother’s home in a tan leather coat, taking in the heavy furniture and flock wallpaper. Cushla laughs at how clearly the house belongs to an older person and explains that it is her mother’s. This domestic setting makes the limits of her routine visible: she is not meeting him in a life she has independently built, but stepping out from a household closely tied to her mother and her obligations.

An Awkward Courtship

The party does not immediately make Cushla feel at ease. When the company sings a song about how the Troubles have changed Derry, everyone joins in except her. The moment sharpens her sense that she has become an outsider: she once shared books and secrets with Catholic schoolmates, but has lost touch as events in Belfast worsened. Even when she sees those former friends, they treat her like a tourist; at Gerry’s gathering, she feels the same distance as she watches how comfortably the others are together. Their social worlds overlap, but Cushla cannot simply step back into belonging because Gerry has brought her along.

Gerry’s company also takes the form of tentative dates. On a later outing he asks whether she goes to the theatre, a question that feels to Cushla like a weak attempt to keep conversation moving. She considers telling him that she has barely been out for more than two years, since her father died, and has attached herself to her mother and the house; instead, she gives a brief answer. The withheld explanation marks the difference between being accompanied and being fully known. Gerry can invite her out, but he cannot by that gesture undo the grief and withdrawal that have shaped her days.

Cushla has, in fact, avoided him after the party. When he drove her home, he made an awkward attempt to kiss her, and she remembers the encounter as uncomfortable rather than romantic. The episode gives their early relationship an imbalance: Gerry seems to approach dating through familiar expectations, while Cushla is uncertain whether she wants or can return that kind of attention. Her later acceptance of another outing does not erase that hesitation; it shows that she is still willing to see him and find out what companionship between them might be.

Friendship Through School and Public Life

At school, Gerry’s interest in peace is more than a private enthusiasm. During an assembly in which Slattery speaks about loyalist gangs’ torture rooms, Gerry walks onto the stage with his guitar despite Bradley’s attempt to stop him. He begins one of his peace songs. Cushla finds its rhymes and lyrics awkward, but judges that singing is preferable to listening to Slattery. She joins in, and by the end the pupils have joined as well; only the two men behind Gerry remain apart. The scene gives their connection a shared public dimension: Cushla does not merely watch Gerry’s intervention but adds her voice to the act of collective refusal.

Gerry’s support is not limited to the school. Later, when Michael Agnew is in the bar where Cushla works, Gerry arrives looking anxious, and Cushla identifies him as the person who has come to see her. On another outing, after they have seen a film, Gerry says he will have to take her out more often and makes clear that he does not fancy her, describing her instead as good company. Cushla calls the admission hurtful, but the exchange lets them acknowledge the distinction between dating and friendship directly. The playful discomfort does not end their companionship; it helps define its terms.

Loyalty and the Relationship’s Later Shape

Gerry remains part of Cushla’s life as it becomes more difficult. Before he leaves on a trip with friends, she asks him to find out where Davy McGeown is. Gerry does not know where to look without going door to door in Short Strand, and Cushla herself once drives east but turns back when the surroundings and her fear overwhelm her. The search is unresolved in the evidence of their friendship: her request shows that she trusts him with a matter of deep concern, while his inability to locate Davy is a practical limit, not proof of indifference. Gerry’s postcard from Girona, with a note about the bridge designed by Gustave Eiffel, also preserves a simple thread of contact while he is away.

Cushla’s mother later explains that Gerry is a nice man but that Cushla never fell for him. The distinction accords with the friendship they have maintained: Gerry may once have seemed a possible husband, but the bond that lasts is not a marriage deferred. Decades later, Cushla tells him that she has been Mrs McTiernan for a long time and asks him to call her Cushla. Gerry admits that he had thought she would marry him; she replies that he is in a civil partnership with Mr Mulgrew and remains her best friend. The exchange brings their different lives together without treating either as a betrayal. Gerry’s earlier expectation is part of their shared history, while the present-tense friendship is the relationship Cushla chooses to name.

Significance

Their friendship gives Cushla companionship without resolving the losses or isolation that surround her. Gerry invites her outward, makes room for her at gatherings and on outings, and shares with her a commitment to peace that becomes publicly consequential at school. Yet the text also preserves her separateness: at the party she feels like a tourist, and private grief remains difficult to explain even to someone trying to draw her into conversation.

The relationship’s eventual clarity depends on allowing affection and disappointed expectation to coexist. Gerry once imagined marriage; Cushla did not return his romantic interest; neither fact cancels their later closeness. By ending with Cushla calling him her best friend, the story presents enduring friendship not as a lesser version of romance but as the form their mutual regard actually takes.