I wake in this new place to the old feeling of being hot and cold, all at once. Mrs Kinsella does not notice until later in the day, when she is stripping the bed.
‘Lord God Almighty,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘Would you look?’ she says.
‘What?’
I want to tell her right now, to admit to it and be sent home so it will be over.
‘These old mattresses,’ she says, ‘they weep. They’re always weeping. What was I thinking of, putting you on this?’
We drag it down the stairs, out into the sunlit yard. The hound comes up and sniffs it, ready to cock his leg.
‘Get off, you!’ she shouts in an iron voice.
‘What’s all this?’ Kinsella has come in from the fields.
‘It’s the mattress,’ she says. ‘The bloody thing is weeping. Didn’t I say it was damp in that room?’
‘In fairness,’ he says, ‘you did. But you shouldn’t have dragged that downstairs on your own.’
‘I wasn’t on my own,’ she says. ‘I had help.’
We scrub it with detergent and hot water and leave it there in the sun to dry.
‘That’s terrible,’ she says. ‘A terrible start, altogether. After all that, I think we need a rasher.’
She heats up the pan, and fries rashers and tomatoes cut in halves, with the cut side down. She likes to cut things up, to scrub and have things tidy, and to call things what they are. ‘Rashers,’ she says, putting the rashers on the spitting pan. ‘Run out there and pull a few scallions, good girl.’
I run out to the vegetable garden, pull scallions and run back in, fast as I can – as though the house is on fire and it is water I’ve been sent for. I’m wondering if there’s enough, but Mrs Kinsella laughs.
‘Well, we’ll not run short, anyhow.’
She puts me in charge of the toast, lighting the grill for me, showing how the bread must be turned when one side is brown, as though this is something I haven’t ever done but I don’t really mind; she wants me to get things right, to teach me.
‘Are we ready?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Yes.’
‘Good girl. Go out there and give himself a shout.’
I go out and call the call my mother taught me, down the fields.
Kinsella comes in a few minutes later, laughing. ‘Now there’s a call and a half,’ he says. ‘I doubt there’s a child in Wexford with a finer set of lungs.’ He washes his hands and dries them, sits in at the table and butters his bread. The butter is soft, slipping off the knife, spreading easily.
‘They said on the early news that another striker is dead.’
‘Not another?’
‘Aye. He passed during the night, poor man. Isn’t it a terrible state of affairs?’
‘God rest him,’ Mrs Kinsella says. ‘It’s no way to die.’
‘Wouldn’t it make you grateful, though?’ he says. ‘A man starved himself to death but here I am on a fine day with two women feeding me.’
‘Haven’t you earned it?’
‘I don’t know have I,’ he says. ‘But isn’t it happening anyhow.’
All through the day, I help the woman around the house. She shows me the big, white machine that plugs in, a freezer where what she calls ‘perishables’ can be stored for months without rotting. We make ice cubes, go over every inch of the floors with a hoovering machine, dig new potatoes, make coleslaw and two loaves – and then she takes the clothes in off the line while they are still damp and sets up a board and starts ironing. She is like the man, doing it all without rushing but neither one of them ever really stops. Kinsella comes in and makes tea for all of us and drinks it standing up with a handful of Kimberley biscuits, then goes back out again.
Later, he comes in looking for me.
‘Is the wee girl there?’ he calls.
I run out to the door.
‘Can you run?’
‘What?’
‘Are you fast on your feet?’ he says.
‘Sometimes,’ I say.
‘Well, run down there to the end of the lane as far as the box and run back.’
‘The box?’ I say.
‘The post box. You’ll see it there. Be as fast as you can.’
I take off in a gallop to the end of the lane and find the box and get the letters and race back. Kinsella is looking at his watch.
‘Not bad,’ he says, ‘for your first time.’
He takes the letters from me. There’s four in all, nothing in my mother’s hand.
‘Do you think there’s money in any of these?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Ah, you’d know if there was, surely. The women can smell the money.’ He lifts one, sniffs it. ‘Do you think there’s news?’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ I say.
‘Do you think there’s a wedding invitation?’
I want to laugh.
‘It wouldn’t be yours anyhow,’ he says. ‘You’re too young to be getting married. Do you think you’ll get married?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Mammy says I shouldn’t accept a present of a man.’
Kinsella laughs. ‘She could be right there. Still and all, there’s no two men the same. And it’d be a swift man that would catch you, long legs. We’ll try you again tomorrow and see if we can’t improve your time.’
‘I’ve to go faster?’
‘Oh aye,’ he says. ‘By the time this summer ends you’ll be like a reindeer. There’ll not be a man in the parish will catch you without a long-handled net and a racing bike.’
That night, after supper, when Kinsella is reading his newspaper in the parlour, the woman sits down at the cooker and tells me she is working on her complexion.
‘It’s a secret,’ she says. ‘Not many people know about this.’
She takes a packet of Weetabix out of the cupboard and eats one of them not with milk in a bowl but dry, out of her hand. ‘Look at me,’ she says. ‘I haven’t so much as a pimple.’
And sure enough, she doesn’t. Her skin is clear.
‘But you said there were no secrets here.’
‘This is different, more like a secret recipe.’
She hands me one, then another and watches as I eat them. They taste a bit like the dry bark of a tree must taste but I don’t really care, as some part of me is pleased to please her. I eat five in all during the nine o’clock news while they show the mother of the dead striker, a riot, then the Taoiseach and then foreign people out in Africa, starving to death and then the weather forecast, which says the days are to be fine for another week or so. The woman sits me on her lap through it all and idly strokes my bare feet.
‘You have nice long toes,’ she says. ‘Nice feet.’
Later, she makes me lie down on the bed before I go to sleep and cleans the wax out of my ears with a hair clip.
‘You could have planted a geranium in what was there,’ she says. ‘Does your mammy not clean out your ears?’
‘She hasn’t always time,’ I say, guarded.
‘I suppose the poor woman doesn’t,’ she says, ‘what with all of ye.’
She takes the hairbrush then and I can hear her counting under her breath to a hundred and then she stops and plaits it loosely. I fall asleep fast that night and when I wake, the old feeling is not there.
Later that afternoon, when Mrs Kinsella is making the bed, she looks at me, pleased.
‘Your complexion is better already, see?’ she says. ‘All you need is minding.’
And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end: to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something, but each day follows on much like the one before. We wake early with the sun coming in and have eggs of one kind or another with toast and marmalade for breakfast. Then Kinsella puts on his cap and goes out to the yard. Myself and Mrs Kinsella make a list out loud of jobs that need to be done, and just do them: we pull rhubarb, make tarts, paint the skirting boards, take all the bedclothes out of the hot press and hoover out the spider webs and put all the clean clothes back in again, make scones, scrub the bathtub, sweep the staircase, polish the furniture, boil onions for onion sauce and put it in containers in the freezer, pull the weeds out of the flower beds and then, when the sun goes down, water things. Then it’s a matter of supper and the walk across the fields and down to the well. Every evening the television is turned on for the nine o’clock news and then, after the forecast, I’m told it is time for bed.
Sometimes people come into the house at night. I can hear them playing cards and talking. They curse and accuse each other of reneging and dealing off the bottom, and coins are thrown into what sounds like a tin dish, and sometimes all the coins are emptied out into what sounds like a stash that’s already there. Once somebody came in and played the spoons. Once there was something that sounded just like a donkey, and Mrs Kinsella came up to fetch me, saying I may as well come down, as nobody could get a wink of sleep with the Ass Casey in the house. I went down and ate a dozen macaroons and then two men came to the door selling lines for a raffle whose proceeds, they said, would go towards putting a new roof on the school.
‘Of course,’ Kinsella said.
‘We didn’t really think—’
‘Come on in,’ Kinsella said. ‘Just cos I’ve none of my own doesn’t mean I’d see the rain falling in on anyone else’s.’
And so they came in and more tea was made and the woman emptied out the ashtray and dealt the cards and said she hoped the present generation of children in that school, if they were inclined towards cards, would learn the rules of forty-five properly, because it was clear that this particular generation was having difficulties, that some people weren’t at all clear on how to play, except for sometimes, when it suited them.
‘Oh, there’s shots over the bow!’
‘You have to listen to thunder.’
‘Aisy knowing whose purse is running low.’
‘It’s ahead, I am,’ Mrs Kinsella said. ‘And it’s ahead I’ll be when it’s over.’
And this, for some reason, made the Ass Casey bray, which made me laugh – and then they all started laughing until one of the men said, ‘Is it a tittering match we have here or are we going to play cards?’ which made the Ass Casey bray once more, and the laughter started over again.
One afternoon, while we are topping and tailing gooseberries for jam, when the job is more than half done and the sugar is already weighed and the pots warmed, Kinsella comes in from the yard and washes and dries his hands and looks at me in a way he has never done before.
‘I think it’s past time we got you togged out, girl.’
I am wearing a pair of navy-blue trousers and a blue shirt the woman took from the chest of drawers.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Mrs Kinsella says.
‘Tomorrow’s Sunday, and she needs something more than that for Mass,’ he says. ‘I’ll not have her going as she went last week.’
‘Sure isn’t she clean and tidy?’
‘You know what I’m talking about, Edna.’ He sighs. ‘Why don’t you go up there and change and I’ll run us all into Gorey.’
The woman keeps on picking the gooseberries from the colander, stretching her hand out, but a little more slowly each time, for the next. At one point I think she will stop but she keeps on until she is finished and then she gets up and places the colander on the sink and lets out a sound I’ve never heard anyone make, and slowly goes upstairs.
Kinsella looks at me and smiles a hard kind of a smile then looks over to the window ledge where a sparrow has come down to perch and readjust her wings. The little bird seems uneasy – as though she can scent the cat, who sometimes sits there. Kinsella’s eyes are not quite still in his head. It’s as though there’s a big piece of trouble stretching itself out in the back of his mind. He toes the leg of a chair and looks over at me.
‘You should wash your hands and face before you go to town,’ he says. ‘Didn’t your father even bother to teach you that much?’
I freeze in the chair, waiting for something much worse to happen, but Kinsella does nothing more; he just stands there, locked in the wash of his own speech. As soon as he turns, I race for the stairs but when I reach the bathroom, the door won’t open.
‘It’s alright,’ the woman says, after a while from inside and then, shortly afterwards, opens it. ‘Sorry for keeping you.’ She has been crying but she isn’t ashamed. ‘It’ll be nice for you to have some clothes of your own,’ she says then, wiping her eyes. ‘And Gorey is a nice town. I don’t know why I didn’t think of taking you there before now.’
Town is a crowded place with a wide main street. Outside the shops, so many different things are hanging in the sun. There are plastic nets full of beach balls, blow-up toys. A see-through dolphin looks as though he is shivering in a cold breeze. There are plastic spades and matching buckets, moulds for sand castles, grown men digging ice cream out of tubs with little plastic spoons, potted plants that feel hairy to the touch, a man in a van selling dead fish.
Kinsella reaches into his pocket and hands me something. ‘You’ll get a choc-ice out of that.’
I open my hand and stare at the pound note.
‘Couldn’t she buy half a dozen choc-ices out of that,’ the woman says.
‘Ah, what is she for, only for spoiling?’ Kinsella says.
‘What do you say?’ the woman asks me.
‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Thank you.’
‘Well, stretch it out and spend it well,’ Kinsella laughs.
The woman takes me to the draper’s where she buys a packet of darning needles at a counter and four yards of oilcloth printed with yellow pears. Then we go upstairs where the clothing is kept. She picks out cotton dresses and some pants and trousers and a few tops and we go in behind a curtain so I can try them on.
‘Isn’t she tall?’ says the assistant.
‘We’re all tall,’ says the woman.
‘She’s the spit and image of her mammy. I can see it now,’ the assistant says, and then says the lilac dress is the best fit and the most flattering, and Mrs Kinsella agrees. She buys me a printed blouse, too, with short sleeves much like the one she wore the day I came, dark blue trousers, and a pair of patent leather shoes with a little strap and a buckle on the front, some panties and white ankle socks. The girl hands her the docket, and Mrs Kinsella takes out her purse and pays for it all.
‘Well may you wear,’ the assistant says. ‘Isn’t your mammy good to you?’
Out in the street, the sun feels strong again, blinding. Some part of me wishes it would go away, that it would cloud over so I could see properly. We meet people the woman knows. Some of these people stare at me and ask who I am. One of them has a new baby in a pushchair. Mrs Kinsella bends down and coos, but the child just slobbers a little and starts to cry.
‘He’s making strange,’ the mother says. ‘Pay no heed.’
We meet another woman with eyes like picks, who asks whose child I am, who I am belonging to? When she is told, she says, ‘Ah, isn’t she company for you all the same, God help you.’
Mrs Kinsella stiffens. ‘You must excuse me,’ she says, ‘but this man of mine is waiting – and you know what these men are like.’
‘Like fecking bulls, they are,’ the woman says. ‘Haven’t an ounce of patience.’
‘God forgive me but if I ever run into that woman again it will be too soon,’ says Mrs Kinsella, when we have turned the corner.
We go to the butcher’s for rashers and sausages and a horseshoe of black pudding, to the chemist where she asks for Aunt Acid, and then on down to a little shop she calls the gift gallery where they sell cards and notepaper and pretty pieces of jewellery from a case of revolving shelves.
‘Isn’t your mammy’s birthday coming up shortly?’
‘Yes,’ I say, without being sure.
‘Well, pick out a card for her, so.’
She tells me to choose, and I pick a card with a frightened looking cat sitting in front of a bed of yellow dahlias.
‘Not long now till they’ll be back to school,’ says the woman behind the counter. ‘Isn’t it a great relief to have them off your back?’
‘This one is no trouble,’ Mrs Kinsella says, and pays for the card along with some sheets of notepaper and a packet of envelopes. ‘It’s only missing her I’ll be when she is gone.’
‘Humph,’ the woman grunts.
Before we go back to the car, Mrs Kinsella lets me loose in a sweet shop. I take my time choosing, hand over the pound note and take back the change.
‘Didn’t you stretch it well,’ she says, when I come out.
Kinsella is parked in the shade, with the windows open, reading the newspaper.
‘Well?’ he says. ‘Did ye get sorted?’
‘Aye,’ Mrs Kinsella says. ‘All’s done.’
‘Grand,’ he says.
I give him the choc-ice and her the Flake and lie on the back seat eating the hard gums, careful not to choke as we cross over bumps in the road. I listen to the change rattling in my pocket, the wind rushing through the car and their talk, scraps of news being shared between them in the front.
When we turn into the yard, another car is parked outside the door. A woman is on the front step, pacing, with her arms crossed.
‘Isn’t that Harry Redmond’s girl?’
‘I don’t like the look of this,’ says Kinsella.
‘Oh, John,’ the woman says, rushing over. ‘I’m sorry to trouble you but didn’t our Michael pass away and there’s not a soul at home. They’re all out on the combines and won’t be back till God knows what hour and I’ve no way of getting word to them. We’re rightly stuck. Would you ever come down and give us a hand digging the grave?’
‘I don’t know that this’ll be any place for you, but I can’t leave you here,’ the woman says, later that same day. ‘So, get ready and we’ll go, in the name of God.’
I go upstairs and change into the new dress, the ankle socks and shoes.
‘Don’t you look nice,’ she says, when I come down. ‘John’s not always easy, but he’s hardly ever wrong.’
Walking down the road, there’s a taste of something darker in the air, of something that might fall and blow and change things. We pass houses whose doors and windows are wide open, long, flapping clotheslines, gravelled entrances to other lanes. At the bend, a bay pony is leaning up against a gate, but when I reach out to stroke his nose, he whinnies and canters off. Outside a cottage, a black dog with curls all down his back comes out and barks at us, hotly, through the bars of a gate. At the first crossroads, we meet a heifer who panics and finally races past us, lost. All through the walk, the wind blows hard and soft and hard again through the tall, flowering hedges, the high trees. In the fields, the combines are out cutting the wheat, the barley and oats, saving the corn, leaving behind long rows of straw. We meet men on tractors, going in different directions, pulling balers to the fields, and trailers full of grain to the co-op. Birds swoop down, brazen, eating the fallen seed off the middle of the road. Farther along, we meet two bare-chested men, their eyes so white in faces so tanned and dusty.
The woman stops to greet them and tells them where we are going.
‘God rest him. Didn’t he go quick in the end?’ one man says.
‘Aye,’ says the other. ‘But didn’t he reach his three score and ten? What more can any of us hope for?’
We keep on walking, standing in tight to the hedges, the ditches, letting things pass.
‘Have you been to a wake before?’ Mrs Kinsella asks.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, I might as well tell you: there will be a dead man here in a coffin and lots of people and some of them might have a little too much taken.’
‘What will they be taking?’
‘Drink,’ she says.
When we come to the house, several men are leaning against a low wall, smoking. There’s a black ribbon on the door and hardly a light shining from the house but when we go in, the kitchen is bright, and packed with people who are talking. The woman who asked Kinsella to dig the grave is there, making sandwiches. There are big bottles of red and white lemonade, stout, and in the middle of all this, a big wooden box with an old dead man lying inside of it. His hands are joined as though he had died praying, a string of rosary beads around his fingers. Some of the men are sitting around the coffin, using the part that’s closed as a counter on which to rest their glasses. One of these is Kinsella.
‘There she is,’ he says. ‘Long Legs. Come over here.’
He pulls me onto his lap, and gives me a sip from his glass.
‘Do you like the taste of that?’
‘No.’
He laughs. ‘Good girl. Don’t ever get a taste for it. If you start, you might never stop and then you’d wind up like the rest of us.’
He pours red lemonade into a cup for me. I sit drinking it and eating the queen cakes out of the biscuit tin and looking at the dead man, hoping his eyes will open.
The people come and go, drifting in and out, shaking hands, drinking and eating and looking at the dead man, saying what a lovely corpse he is, and doesn’t he look happy now that his end has come, and who was it that laid him out? They talk of the forecast and the moisture content of corn, of milk quotas and the next general election. I feel myself getting heavy on Kinsella’s lap.
‘Am I getting heavy?’
‘Heavy?’ he says. ‘You’re like a feather, child. Stay where you are.’
I put my head against him but am bored and wish there were things to do, other children who would play.
‘The girl’s getting uneasy,’ I hear Mrs Kinsella say.
‘What’s ailing her?’ says another woman.
‘Ah, it’s no place for the child, really,’ she says. ‘It’s just I didn’t like not to come, and I couldn’t leave her behind.’
‘Sure, I’ll take her home with me, Edna. I’m going now. Can’t you call in and collect her on your way?’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I don’t know should I.’
‘Mine’d be a bit of company for her. Can’t they play away out the back? And that man there won’t budge as long as he has her on his knee.’
Mrs Kinsella laughs. I’ve never heard her laugh like this.
‘Sure maybe, if you don’t mind, you would, Mildred,’ she says. ‘What harm is in it? And you know we’ll not be long after you.’
‘Not a bother,’ the woman says.
When we are out on the road, and the good-byes are said, Mildred strides on into a pace I can just about keep, and as soon as she rounds the bend, the questions start. She is eaten alive with curiosity; hardly is one question answered before the next is fired: ‘Which room did they put you into? Did Kinsella give you money? How much? Does she drink at night? Does he? Are they playing cards up there much? Who was there? What were the men selling the lines for? Do ye say the rosary? Does she put butter or margarine in her pastry? Where does the old dog sleep? Is the freezer packed solid? Does she skimp on things or is she allowed to spend? Are the child’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?’
I answer them all easily, until the last.
‘The child’s clothes?’
‘Aye,’ she says. ‘Sure, if you’re sleeping in his room you must surely know. Did you not look?’
‘Well, she had clothes I wore for all the time I was here but we went to Gorey this morning and bought all new things.’
‘This rig-out you’re wearing now? God Almighty,’ she says. ‘Anybody would think you were going on for a hundred.’
‘I like it,’ I say. ‘They told me it was flattering.’
‘Flattering, is it? Well,’ she says. ‘I suppose it is, after living in the dead’s clothes all this time.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Kinsella’s young lad, you dope. Did you not know?’
I don’t know what to say.
‘That must have been some stone they rolled back to find you. Sure, didn’t he follow that auld hound of theirs into the slurry tank, and drown?’
I keep on walking and try not to think about what she has said even though I can think of little else. The time for the sun to go down is getting close but the day feels like it isn’t ending. I look at the sky and see the sun, still high, and clouds, and, far away, a whitish moon coming out.
‘They say John got the gun and took the hound down the field – but hadn’t the heart to shoot him, the soft-hearted fool.’
We walk on between the bristling hedges in which small things seem to rustle and move. Chamomile grows along these ditches, wood sage and wild mint, plants whose names my mother somehow found the time to teach me. Farther along, the same lost heifer is still lost, in a different part of the road.
‘And you know, the pair of them turned white overnight.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Their hair, what else?’
‘But Mrs Kinsella’s hair is black.’
‘Black? Aye, black out of the dye-pot, you mean.’ She laughs.
I wonder at her laughing like this. I wonder at the clothes and how I’d worn them and the boy in the wallpaper and how I never put it all together. Soon we come to the place where the black dog is barking through the bars of the gate.
‘Shut up and get in, you,’ she says to him.
It’s a cottage she lives in with uneven slabs of concrete outside the front door, overgrown shrubs, and tall red hot pokers growing out of the ground. Here I must watch my head, my step. When we go in, the place is cluttered and an older woman is smoking at the cooker. There’s a baby in a high chair. He lets out a cry when he sees Mildred and drops a handful of marrowfat peas over the ledge.
‘Look at you,’ she says. ‘The state of you.’
I’m not sure if it’s the older woman or the child she is talking to. She takes off her cardigan and sits down and starts talking about the wake: who was there, the type of sandwiches that were made, the queen cakes, the corpse who was lying up crooked in the coffin and hadn’t even been shaved properly, how they had plastic rosary beads for him, the poor fucker.
I don’t know whether to sit or stand, to listen or leave, but just as I’m deciding what to do, the dog barks and the gate opens and Kinsella comes in, stooping under the door frame.
‘Good evening all,’ he says.
‘Ah, John,’ Mildred says. ‘You weren’t long. We’re only in the door. Aren’t we only in the door, child?’
‘Yes.’
Kinsella hasn’t taken his eyes off me. ‘Thanks, Mildred. It was good of you, to take her home.’
‘It was nothing,’ the woman says. ‘She’s a quiet young one, this.’
‘She says what she has to say, and no more. May there be many like her,’ he says. ‘Are you ready to come home, petal?’
I get up and he says a few more things, to smooth things over, the way people do. I follow him out to the car, where Mrs Kinsella is waiting.
‘Were you alright in there?’ she says.
I say I was.
‘Did she ask you anything?’
‘A few things, nothing much.’
‘What did she ask you?’
‘She asked me if you used butter or margarine in your pastry.’
‘Did she ask you anything else?’
‘She asked me was the freezer packed tight.’
‘There you are,’ says Kinsella.
‘Did she tell you anything?’ the woman asks.
I don’t know what to say.
‘What did she tell you?’
‘She told me you had a little boy who followed the dog into the slurry tank and died, and that I wore his clothes to Mass last Sunday.’
When we get home, the hound gets up and comes out to the car to greet us. It’s only now I realise I’ve not heard either one of them call him by his name. Kinsella sighs and goes off to milk. When he comes inside, he says he’s not ready for bed and that there will be no visitors tonight anyhow, on account of the wake – not, he says, that he wants any. The woman goes upstairs and changes and comes back down in her nightdress. Kinsella has taken my shoes off and has put what I now know is the boy’s jacket on me.
‘What are you doing now?’ Mrs Kinsella says.
‘What does it look like? Couldn’t she break her neck in these?’
He goes out, stumbling a little, then comes back in with a sheet of sandpaper and scuffs up the soles of my new shoes so I will not slip.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’ll break them in.’
‘Didn’t she already break them in? Where are you taking her?’
‘Only as far as the strand,’ he says.
‘You’ll be careful with that girl, John Kinsella,’ she says. ‘And don’t you go without the lamp.’
‘What need is there for a lamp on a night like tonight?’ he says, but he takes it anyhow, as it’s handed to him.
There’s a big moon shining on the yard, chalking our way onto the lane and along the road. Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be. He takes shorter steps so we can walk in time. I think about the woman in the cottage, of how she walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people.
When we reach the crossroads we turn right, down a steep, sloping road. The wind is high and hoarse in the trees, tearing fretfully through the dry boughs, and their leaves rise and swing. It’s sweet to feel the open road falling away under us, knowing we will, at its end, come to the sea. The road goes on and the sky, everything, seems to get brighter. Kinsella says a few meaningless things along the way then falls into the quiet way he has about him, and time passes without seeming to pass and then we are in a sandy, open space where people must park cars. It is full of tyre marks and potholes, a rubbish bin which seems not to have been emptied in a long time.
‘We’re almost there now, petal.’
He leads me up a steep hill where, on either side, tall rushes bend and shake. My feet sink in the deep sand, and the climb takes my breath. Then we are standing on the crest of a dark place where the land ends and there is a long strand and water which I know is deep and stretches all the way to England. Far out, in the darkness, two bright lights are blinking.
Kinsella lets me loose and I race down the far side of the dune to the place where the black sea hisses up into loud, frothy waves. I run towards them as they back away and retreat, shrieking, when another crashes in. When Kinsella catches up, we take our shoes off. In places, we walk along with the edge of the sea clawing at the sand under our bare feet. In places, he leaves me to run. At one point, we go in until the water is up to his knees and he lifts me onto his shoulders.
‘Don’t be afraid!’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Don’t be afraid!’
The strand is all washed clean, without so much as a footprint. There’s a crooked line, close to the dunes, where things have washed up: plastic bottles, sticks, the handle of a mop whose head is lost and, farther on, a stable door, its bolt broken.
‘Some man’s horse is loose tonight,’ Kinsella says. He walks on for a while then. It is quieter up here, away from the noise of the sea. ‘You know the fishermen sometimes find horses out at sea. A man I know towed a colt in one time and the horse lay down for a long time before he got up. And he was perfect. Tiredness was all it was, after being out so long.
‘Strange things happen,’ he says. ‘A strange thing happened to you tonight, but Edna meant no harm. It’s too good, she is. She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed, but she sometimes is.’
He laughs then, a queer, sad laugh. I don’t know what to say.
‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’
Everything about the night feels strange: to walk to a sea that’s always been there, to see it and feel it and fear it in the half dark, and to listen to this man saying things about horses out at sea, about his wife trusting others so she’ll learn who not to trust, things I don’t fully understand, things which may not even be intended for me.
We keep on walking until we come to a place where the cliffs and rocks come out to meet the water. Now that we can go no farther, we must turn back. Maybe the way back will somehow make sense of the coming. Here and there, flat white shells lie shining and washed up on the sand. I stoop to gather them. They feel smooth and clean and brittle in my hands. We turn back along the beach and walk on, seeming to walk a greater distance than the one we crossed in reaching the place where we could not pass, and then the moon disappears behind a darkish cloud and we cannot see where we are going. At this point, Kinsella lets out a sigh, stops, and lights the lamp.
‘Ah, the women are nearly always right, all the same,’ he says. ‘Do you know what the women have a gift for?’
‘What?’
‘Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.’
He shines the light along the strand to find our footprints, to follow them back, but the only prints he can find are mine.
‘You must have carried me there,’ he says.
I laugh at the thought of me carrying him, at the impossibility, then realise it was a joke, and that I got it.
When the moon comes out again, he turns the lamp off and by the moon’s light we easily find and follow the path we took out of the dunes. When we reach the top, he won’t let me put my shoes on but does it for me. Then he does his own and knots the laces. We stand then, to pause and look back out at the water.
‘See, there’s three lights now where there was only two before.’
I look out across the sea. There, the two lights are blinking as before, but with another, steady light, shining in between.
‘Can you see it?’ he says.
‘I can,’ I say. ‘It’s there.’
And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.