‘Eefie,’ Hughie repeats obediently. He pushes his cheeks up, so that his eyes are obscured, then down, so that his lids are stretched wide. It makes Monica feel quite peculiar. ‘I’m surprised she’s got anything left inside her,’ he says.
‘Maybe she’ll sick up her own stomach,’ Vita, whom they’d assumed to be asleep, pipes up.
Hughie laughs, delighted by this notion. ‘Maybe she will. And it will spill out all over the road and Daddy will have to pick it up and push it back inside and—’
Gretta releases the catch from the door and steps on to the grass verge. A swallow arrows above her, its wing flashing blue-black as it turns back on itself. She goes up to her daughter, who is still bent over, hands on knees, gulping mouthfuls of air. Gretta gathers the hair hanging in her daughter’s face and holds it back.
‘Thanks,’ Aoife gets out, and retches again.
Gretta pats her back, which feels clammy through the thin stuff of her blouse. Aoife straightens, eyes closed; Gretta hands her a tissue. She surveys her younger daughter; she sees the greyish pallor of her cheeks; she sees the tremble of her fingers. She hands her another tissue. ‘Is there something you need to tell me, Aoife?’
Aoife’s eyes snap open; mother and daughter look at each other for a moment. Gretta feels, just for a moment, the presence of those babies, those people who never breathed air, five of them there were, her not-quite-children. They stretch between her and Aoife, now and for ever, like a row of paper dolls. The swallow dives near them again, throat red, like a warning.
‘No,’ Aoife says.
Gretta takes a step closer. ‘Please tell me you haven’t got yourself in trouble.’
Aoife, despite herself, despite everything, starts to laugh.
‘What’s so funny? I don’t see anything funny about this.’
Aoife balls up the tissue and shoves it into her pocket. ‘It’s 1976, Mum.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘You don’t say “in trouble” any more.’
‘I’ll say whatever I like. So you are? You admit it?’
‘I admit nothing. It’s none of your business.’
‘Oh, God.’ Gretta holds a hand to her forehead. ‘You’re a young girl, unmarried—’
‘You’re one to talk,’ Aoife says, and Gretta draws back, as if Aoife has struck her.
In the car, Monica leans over Claire to get a better view. ‘What are they talking about?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Claire, who has caught some of the conversation and who had, anyway, come to her own conclusions about Aoife’s peaky appearance and odd appetite.
‘Yes, what are they talking about?’ Michael Francis says from the front seat. He leans on the horn, briefly, irritably, shouting, come on, but he hasn’t reckoned for the effect this will have on his children. It is instant: they hurl themselves in one movement into the front of the car and into his lap, shouting, can I do that, can I, can I, it’s my turn, no, it’s my turn, no it’s mine.
‘Stop it,’ he shouts, in between flailing limbs and the sounding of the horn. ‘Get back to your seats, I mean it, both of you, stop this minute.’ Hughie’s hand catches him on the temple, an elbow – Vita’s, he thinks – is driven into his throat and then a knee is ground, with sickening accuracy, into his groin. The horn drowns his screamed expletive; petals of pain open and blossom in his lower body, fireworks spray across his brain. He is immobilised by agony, by a seatbelt, by the weight of his offspring.
‘Move over.’ Claire is there, opening the door beside him, removing the children from his lap, one by one. ‘I’ll drive.’
By lunchtime, they have reached the Twelve Bens, great grey mountains that rear up from the line of trees, their elephant-hide sides replicated in the lough water. Even Vita is awed into silence by their shadowed presence. Before they reach the village of Roundstone, Gretta directs Claire to the right, then down a track.
‘Drop me here,’ she says, as the car rumbles to a place where two tracks cross, under a cluster of oak trees.
‘What?’ Monica says, jerking forward. ‘Here? Why here? We can’t leave you here.’
‘The convent’s just up there.’ Gretta gestures with a hankie. She is rummaging in her bag. She extracts one bottle, seemingly at random, knocks back a pill, then finds another and tosses two into her mouth. She crunches them between her teeth and pulls a face. ‘I’m going alone.’
Monica remonstrates, objects, argues; Michael Francis tries to say that he thinks they should all stick together; Claire gives Hughie and Vita a biscuit; Aoife steps out of the car.
‘Where are you going?’ Michael Francis says, just as Hughie asks hopefully, ‘Is she going to be sick again?’
‘Just a wee,’ she says, over her shoulder, and disappears into the undergrowth.
Gretta stands firm. She gathers her bag, her headscarf, her pills, her hankie; she steps from the car and she sets off down the track. ‘Come back in two hours,’ she says. She pauses briefly to watch Aoife emerge from behind a tree, zipping up her trousers. They look at each other, then Gretta walks on, without speaking, disappearing up the track.
Aoife gets back into the car.
Vita leans forward from her perch on Claire’s knee and looks closely at her aunt, this fascinating, vomiting person, who has appeared from nowhere, in a top printed with flamingos. Vita is overcome by an urge to lick Aoife’s bare arm. She wants to taste that tanned skin, feel those tiny hairs under her tongue; she has an idea it would be smooth as honey and that the freckles might have a peppery tang. She stretches out quickly, before anyone can stop her, and runs her tongue up her aunt’s arm, near the elbow.
Aoife swivels her gaze to meet her eye. ‘Did you just lick me?’
‘No,’ Vita says, still with the tip of her tongue out. ‘Are you feeling better?’
‘I am.’ She looks at the child for a moment longer, then whispers, ‘You know what I think we should do while Granny’s away?’
Vita, quick to catch the confidential tone, whispers back, ‘What?’
‘Go for a swim.’
They park the car at Mannin Bay. As soon as they open the doors, the children are off, greyhounds from traps, haring about in circles and zigzags. Hughie whirls a plume of seaweed above his head and Vita heads in a straight line for the sea, tiny wavelets that turn and criss-cross each other on the silver sand.
Monica sits down on a rock, dress tucked beneath her. She sifts handfuls of the beach – broken pieces of whitened coral, smoothed and jointed like the bones of tiny creatures. Touching it gives her a sensation akin to a bell sounding in a belfry, so deep is the familiarity of it. All her childhood summers seem to be distilled into this particular moment, into this particular act, with her fingers digging deeper into the sand, all those days of running on the beach in a swimming costume and an Aran jumper, Michael Francis always ahead of her, his pink feet sugared with sand, all those rides on the back of her grandmother’s donkey, all those trudges through the rain that was only gentle water falling from the sky, warmish and clean, not like the rain in London. The digging for peat with her uncle and her mother, the slicing heft of the spade’s drop, the twisting out the water from washed sheets, hens peck-pecking around their legs.
She looks up and sees silhouettes of people, her people, glowing black against the bright sea, her brother and his wife near the shore and Aoife, like a sprite, pulling off her clothes, the children screaming at the sight.
She looks down. Minuscule fibulas and tibias of coral caught in the creases at her fingers’ base. It is at this scale Monica remembers Ireland best: the minutiae of this bay, the feel of this strange coral sand, the layers of colour in the sea, the green, the turquoise, the deep blue, the great swags of bladderwrack that lie on rocks like fat seals.
Aoife is in the water now; Monica can hear her shout. Vita is going in after her, single-mindedly crashing through the waves. Two of a kind, Monica thinks. Does Claire realise there’ll be trouble ahead with t
hat one? Michael Francis is dashing after his daughter before a wave knocks her over. He is lifting her kicking, shrieking form high in the air, swinging her up, and when she comes down on to the sand, she is laughing again, her anger left up in the sky somewhere. Monica thinks she can see it dissipate into the blue beyond.
Hughie sets to work excavating a hole, working his hands like a dog, sand spraying up behind him in an arch. Vita watches for a second, maybe two, then copies him. Michael Francis turns and is surprised to find his wife standing by him. He puts his arms around her, closing the gap between them. It is an act of pure instinct, done without thought, and as he feels her body come into line with his – so familiar is that feeling, so exactly right – he wonders if she will pull away, whether she will accept it, and he wonders, too, why they haven’t stood like this for so long, too long. When was the last time and how can they not have stood like this? Why they don’t do it all the time?
She doesn’t pull away. She goes so far as to put her arms around him. He feels them fasten and lock at his waist and he closes his eyes with the perfection of it all. He feels, he realises, jealous of himself, as if he is looking back at the scene from a distance.
‘Thank you for coming,’ he says to her.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says, her head tucked under his chin. ‘Of course I’d come.’
When he’d got back from taking his mother and Monica home yesterday, he’d had Aoife with him. Monica and Gretta had returned to Gillerton Road in a bad state, the two of them screeching and weeping at each other, Monica beside herself with fury. Monica, their mother’s favourite, their mother’s pet, their mother’s confidante. How could you, she kept sobbing, how could you lie to me like that, how could you pretend to be married when all the time . . . And Gretta weeping noisily, I’m sorry, darling, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t lying, I just, I didn’t mean to, I just.
When he’d moved into the hall, ready to leave and go back to his own house to pack, Monica was ranting about the time Gretta had made her go to confession because she’d slept with Joe before their wedding and Gretta had said that she’d paved her way to Hell. He’d turned to call goodbye and found Aoife next to him, arms folded.
‘Where are you going?’ he’d said.
‘Wherever you’re going,’ she said. ‘There’s no way I’m staying here with them.’
So it was him and Aoife who had walked back through his front door, to find Hughie and Vita sitting side by side on the stairs, both with a kind of wide-eyed look on their faces. There was a noise of chatting from the sitting room, and cackling and a kind of sliding zither music that he’d never heard before in his house.
‘What’s going on?’ he’d said to his children.
Hughie looked from him to Aoife to the shut sitting-room door. ‘A past-papers study group,’ he’d said, pronouncing the words with a care that broke Michael Francis’s heart. He could feel it breaking right there and then as he stood in his hallway, with his children before him on the stairs, breaking and falling in pieces down through his body.
Claire appeared in the doorway, quickly shutting the door behind her.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s you. I didn’t know if you’d be back or—’
‘Of course I’d be back,’ he said. ‘Why wouldn’t I be? Why are you talking to me as if I don’t live here any more?’
Claire held the door shut behind her, the handle between her palms. She looked flushed, dishevelled, her hair standing on end, the way she often did after drinking red wine. ‘I’m not. It’s just that—’
At that moment, a woman Michael Francis didn’t recognise burst through the door. She had her greying hair in bunches, like Vita sometimes did, and she was wearing a long, loose, wraparound skirt.
‘Welcome!’ she said, throwing her arms into the air.
‘Welcome?’ Michael Francis said, but the irony was lost on the woman, who was seizing Aoife by the arm.
‘Have you come to join us?’ she said to Aoife, her eyes alight with evangelical zeal, and Michael Francis didn’t have much to be glad about at that moment – nothing at all, in fact – but he was glad that, of all his family, it was Aoife who was with him. Not Monica, not Gretta. Aoife was the only one who could have coped with this.
‘You’ll find us a very friendly crowd,’ the woman is saying to Aoife. ‘I’m Angela and this is Claire. It’s her house and—’
Unperturbed, Aoife stepped away from the woman with bunches and on to the bottom step. ‘Why don’t you,’ she said, taking Vita and Hughie by the hand, ‘show me your bedroom? I haven’t seen it yet. Come on, let’s go upstairs.’
The woman returned to the sitting room and he was left in the hallway with his wife. He sat down on the bottom step. He leant his head against the newel post and was surprised to find a modicum of comfort in the smooth, varnished wood pressing into his temple. He looked, not into his wife’s face, but at her feet, her bare feet. She’d always had particularly beautiful feet: slender, high-arched, with curving, pale nails. Not like his – hairy, wide as plates, the toes all broken and crooked from his days playing rugby. He would, he decided, keep things brief. He outlined in three sentences what he was going to do, keeping his eyes only on her feet, on the pearly curves of her nails, on the web of blue veins at the instep: he told her the whole family was going to Ireland, tonight, on the night ferry and they were leaving in half an hour.
‘And,’ he said, ‘I’m taking the children. You can do whatever you want. I don’t—’
‘I’ll get ready,’ the owner of the feet said. ‘I’m coming too.’
On Mannin Bay, Hughie is jumping in and out of his hole; Vita is kicking at the shallow water, sending it up into the air where rainbows flash in and out of the spray.
‘Listen,’ he says to Claire, who is still pressed to his side.
‘Mike,’ she says, ‘I need to say something to you.’
He pulls away. ‘Oh, God, no.’
‘What?’
‘Please no.’ He puts his hands over his ears. He cannot bear this, he cannot, he doesn’t want to hear it. He is filled with an urge to run, run up the beach, leap into his car and drive away, anything to avoid hearing his wife say what she is about to say.
‘What do you mean? What do you think I’m going to say?’
‘I . . . I don’t . . .’ he slumps down on to the sand ‘. . . just don’t say it.’
‘Say what?’
‘It.’
‘What’s “it”?’
‘That you’ve,’ he circles his hand in the air, ‘slept with someone else. Don’t say it. Not now. I can’t take it.’
Aoife, buoyed to a horizontal position in the sea, the sky above her, the seabed below her, feels her kicking feet hit solid sand. She stands up to the disconcerting discovery that she’s in shallow water: she’s up to her knees, the sea pouring off her, not far out, as she’d thought. She hoicks up her wet pants and starts to wade out of the waves, her breath coming in sharp jags, her hair plastered to her back and shoulders. She passes Michael Francis, who is sitting on the sand, his head bowed, Claire standing over him, and the children, who are bailing water out of a rapidly refilling hole.
‘You’ve got your work cut out there,’ she says, as she passes, and they look up at her, their faces distant, transposed, and she realises she is calling to them across an invisible galaxy, that they are currently inhabiting not Mannin Bay but the realm of their game.
She collects her clothes from the ground, shakes the grit out of them, picks off a few strands of seaweed. Monica is sitting not far off, her knees together, skirt spread about her, as if, Aoife thinks, she is readying herself for a portrait. Aoife rolls her eyes to herself, strips off her sodden bra and pulls her blouse over her head.
‘How was the water?’ Monica’s voice reaches her through the air between them. The beach and sea shimmer and refract in the heat; seaweed dries to rocks; sand cracks and powders in the sun.
Aoife looks up. Her sister has her hands clasped tight
on her lap, her sunglasses obscuring most of her face. ‘Fine,’ Aoife says.
Monica waits for a moment, then nods. She clearly cannot think of anything else to say.
‘Are you going in?’ Aoife asks.
‘Me?’ Monica sits straight with the shock of this idea. ‘Oh, no. I can’t swim.’
Aoife, caught in the act of pulling on her trousers, stops. ‘You can’t swim? Really?’
Monica shakes her head. ‘No.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really true?’
Monica bristles at this questioning. ‘Yes,’ she repeats with emphasis. ‘Ask Michael Francis, if you don’t believe me.’
Aoife comes closer. She sits down on a patch of sand, near but not too near her sister. ‘How come?’
‘I don’t know,’ Monica’s voice is just at her shoulder, coming at her from behind. ‘I just never learnt. I never . . . I could never get in the water. It terrified me. The depth of it.’
‘Weren’t you made to go to those swimming lessons at the pool? Those sadistic teachers who stood on the sides and jabbed you with rods if you did it wrong?’
‘I went once. But I hated it.’
‘Now, why would that be?’
Monica doesn’t reply so Aoife turns to look at her. Her sister’s face is uncertain, perplexed, as if unsure whether Aoife is making fun of her.
‘Mon, I’m joking. Sadistic teachers? Rods? It’s called sarcasm. Of course you hated it. Everyone hated it.’
‘Oh, I see.’ Monica nods, smooths her dress, a tailored checked number that looks – to Aoife – unbearably hot and restrictive. ‘Well, swimming isn’t really very me.’
‘Right.’
They sit on the beach, together but not quite. Aoife stretches out her legs, runs her toes through the sand in geometric arcs. She is looking at them one way, then the other, squinting to plot their imaginary remaining curves, when Monica speaks again.
‘What do you reckon?’ She indicates the figures of Michael Francis and Claire, who are down by the shoreline, Claire gesturing with expansive pushes of her hands, Michael Francis still slumped on the sand. ‘Do you think they’ll stay together?’