‘We can be civilised about it,’ she says, ‘can’t we? We can manage that. You can see them whenever you want. It’s just that I’m so tired. I’m so tired of trying to keep you. I’m tired of trying to guess what kind of person it is that you want. I’m tired of always feeling in the wrong, that I should be constantly apologising for you having to give up your PhD, for you having to become a teacher. We live in the house with you but you’re not really there. You’re off living your imaginary life as an American professor. Don’t tell me you aren’t because I know you are. So I want you to know that you can go. Wherever you want. You can leave. Vita’s at school now. I’m going to get this degree. Then I’ll get a job. You don’t have to stay.’ She opens her hands as if releasing a small animal.
‘Do you want me to go?’
Claire doesn’t say anything, she doesn’t nod or even acknowledge that he has spoken. Instead, she turns her face to the sea, to the wind, letting the breeze whip back her shorn hair.
Further up the beach, Monica stands. She consults her watch, she looks out at the sea.
‘We should get going,’ she says.
‘Why?’
Aoife lies on the sand, curled up, her eyes shut.
‘Mum said to pick her up in two hours. It’s almost two hours now.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘And the tide is starting to come in.’
‘So?’
‘So we want to get over to the island before the tide comes up again.’
Aoife sits up and eyes the sea. It looks just as it always has: green, foaming, restlessly rising up and falling down. ‘How can you tell it’s coming in?’
Michael Francis stands. He feels, all of a sudden, completely awake, as if he is rising up out of his sleepless night on the ferry, kicking that fatigue aside. Claire’s words seem to circle him, cloud the air around him, like flies.
‘Claire,’ he says, ‘look—’
At that moment, Vita comes hurtling up to them. She flings herself at both of her parents at once, crushing them into a sandy embrace. In the knot of limbs and hair and joints and skin, he feels Claire’s fingers slipping from his own. He is about to reach out for them, to snatch them back, but he hears his name being called. He turns and sees his sisters waving at him, then pointing back towards the car.
At the crossroads where they dropped Gretta, they have an argument. Aoife is all for driving up to the convent; Monica says they should wait, as arranged. Michael Francis appears to favour both opinions, depending on who is speaking. Claire keeps quiet.
They are still arguing, Aoife opening the car door, saying she’ll walk up, then, when Gretta appears round the bend.
They fall silent, watching as she approaches, with her signature gait, lurching and uneven ever since that knee operation, her handbag gripped in one hand.
‘Is Dad with her?’ Aoife whispers.
‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Michael Francis says.
Gretta yanks open the passenger door and climbs in, with a great heave and exhalation and a rustling rearrangement of clothing.
‘I’m dead,’ she announces.
There is a pause.
‘You don’t look dead,’ Aoife says.
‘Don’t be so bold, Aoife,’ Gretta snaps. ‘You’ve no idea what I’ve just been through. Not the faintest idea. I’m dead on my feet. The heat! Unbearable. Never seen the like. The sister said she’d get me a glass of water but she didn’t come back. I swear if I don’t get a cup of tea in the next half-hour I will simply expire.’
From the back seat, Claire proffers a flask. ‘There’s still some squash in here, I think, Gretta.’
‘Ah, no.’ She waves it away, eyes shut. ‘I wouldn’t take it from the children.’
‘They’re fine. You have it.’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘Go on. It’s OK.’
‘I couldn’t take it from them.’
Michael Francis takes the flask, opens it, pours out a cup of squash and hands it to his mother. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘drink it.’
‘I couldn’t,’ Gretta says, gulping it down. ‘I really couldn’t.’ She hands back the cup, rests her head back and shuts her eyes again.
Aoife leans through the gap in the seats. ‘So what happened?’
Gretta doesn’t answer.
‘Did you see Dad? Where is he?’ Aoife touches her mother on the shoulder. ‘Mum? What did you find out?’
‘Can a body get no rest at all?’ Gretta snaps. ‘The day I’ve had.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. We just want to know a few things, like did you see Dad, where is he, what’s happening with Frankie, and—’
‘The thing is,’ Monica says, in a mild voice, as if drawing their attention to something interesting seen from the window, a water tower, perhaps, or a particularly memorable tree, ‘that we have to get our skates on if we’re to get over the causeway before the tide comes in.’
It is exactly the right thing to say. Aoife marvels at the effect. Gretta’s eyes jerk open and she sits up. How does Monica do it? She’s like a sort of external heart valve for Gretta, responding immediately and precisely to every mood, every demand Gretta could ever make.
‘The tide’s coming in?’ Gretta is suddenly wide awake, looking round at them all.
‘Well,’ Monica says, still casual, still detached, ‘it’s on the turn.’
‘Then we have to go!’ She taps the dashboard with a flat hand, in the manner of a driving instructor with a particularly sluggish pupil. ‘Come on!’
Michael Francis puts his hand on the ignition key. ‘Is Dad . . . coming . . . or . . .?’ He stops carefully, not looking at his mother.
She busies herself with readjusting her shoes. ‘Not here,’ she says crisply. ‘The sister said he comes and goes. They never know where he is.’
As the car rounds the last bend at Claddaghduff, they see it – a low-lying, sea-fringed stretch of land.
‘Oh!’ Gretta exclaims, her hands leaping to her chest. ‘Look at it now.’
The strand out is a gleaming white path through the waves, which foam and turn on either side.
Hughie had said on the boat that he didn’t remember the island, not one bit. His father said, but you must, you must remember; his mother said, well, you were only five when we last went. But as the car slides down the concrete ramp and the tyres begin to hiss over the sand, he realises he does remember. He remembers this, exactly: the shock of driving on a beach, the soft expressive feel of wheels over sand, the rows of waves sliding past. He pictures suddenly an overgrown garden lined with a stone wall, a cracked path, an outhouse filled with grey-backed beetles, a bed next to a white-painted wall, a window looking out over grass and sea. He wants to say, I remember, I remember now, but he doesn’t. He keeps the words in his head, shut inside. He crouches nearer to the suitcases, he watches as the island approaches them, its green shape the back of a sleeping sea monster, his father steering the wheel.
There is a flurry of activity when they get to the cottage. Gretta treads from room to room, extolling its merits, lamenting the appearance of certain cracks/marks/carpet stains/squashed insects. She embarks with zeal on a clean of the kitchen, removing all the plates and pans from the cupboards, but loses focus halfway through and goes into the garden, where she starts pulling up weeds, in the sudden grip of a low mood, saying to anyone who passes that she doesn’t think Robert will come, that he doesn’t want her any more. Monica fiddles with the boiler switches, then pushes the carpet sweeper round, a handkerchief over her face. Michael Francis carries in boxes and suitcases from the car. Hughie and Vita careen through the front door and out of the back, round and round. Aoife builds a fire in the grate. Claire puts sheets on the beds.
Gretta gives up on the weeding and the lamenting and takes the children down to the beach, telling them they need to find a mermaid’s purse before the day is out. Monica sits on the front step, looking out to sea. Michael Francis chops firewood, finding calm in the regular fall
of the axe. Aoife, seized by a sudden hunger, starts frying eggs and bacon and Claire, smelling the food, comes in to lay the table. She says nothing when Aoife starts eating standing at the stove, cramming eggs and bread into her mouth, as if possessed. She says nothing at all, just passes her a fork and a plate.
When dinner is finished and the oblongs of light in the cottage windows are indigo-blue, the children are put to bed, their hair stiff with seawater, and Michael Francis comes into the room where his mother, his sisters and his wife are sitting, a fire whispering from the grate.
‘Come on,’ he says, taking Claire by the hand, ‘let’s go for a walk.’
She rises, without a word, putting down her book, and follows him out of the cottage.
After a moment, Monica and Aoife exchange a look, Monica with her eyebrows raised.
‘I don’t know what you two are smirking at,’ says Gretta, without looking up from her knitting, ‘but at least he knows how to fix a problem, that boy. Always has done, always will.’
Aoife pulls a face, exasperated as ever by her mother’s roving favouritism. She gets up, goes to one window, then another. She pokes the fire, picks up Claire’s book, turns over a page, then puts it down. She has the strange sensation that her body has too much blood in it: she can feel it pumping and pumping around her body, uncomfortably persistent. She needs to decide what to do and when; she needs to get out; she needs to call Gabe or maybe she doesn’t, maybe that’s the last thing she should do; she needs to think, for God’s sake, but how can she do that in this tiny cottage, with her family there, all ready to suck her thoughts out of the air?
‘What time is it?’ Aoife says and, without waiting for an answer, ‘Where’s the nearest telephone?’
‘Claddaghduff,’ Gretta says, ‘but you can’t go now.’
‘Why not?’
‘The tide’s up.’
‘Shite,’ says Aoife, which makes Gretta drop a stitch.
‘Aoife Magdalena,’ she says, ‘will you mind your mouth?’
Aoife goes to the door, looks out, confirms that her mother is right, then slams it shut and comes back, flinging herself down into a chair. In a moment, she is out of it again, rifling about in the log basket.
‘For the love of God, will you stop it, Aoife?’ Gretta says, counting off stitches.
‘Stop what?’
‘Crashing about like a bull in a china shop.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You are. Find something to do and—’
‘—do it.’ Monica finishes the mantra for her.
Aoife sits back on her heels and regards her mother and sister with naked hostility. She doesn’t know what it is about evenings with her family that make her like this – unbearably restless, that cooped-up, pent-up feeling, the sensation that she must escape, no matter what.
‘OK,’ she says, getting up from the floor. ‘I’m going out.’
She marches across the room, out of the door and bangs it after her.
Gretta sighs, switching her empty knitting needle from one hand to the other. ‘That girl,’ she says, to the air.
Monica turns a page of her magazine but doesn’t answer. Gretta eyes her middle child over the top of her glasses. Back straight as a schoolmarm’s, face set into a holier-than-thou expression, ankles crossed. Good legs her daughters have; she’s always thought so. They got that from her, although neither of them has ever acknowledged it.
‘The children have gone off easily, at least,’ Gretta says, needles clicking against each other, wool looping around, almost independently of her hands. ‘Must have been tired, poor mites.’
Still no answer. Monica lifts her chin slightly.
‘Should be another lovely day tomorrow. The sky was pink over the sea tonight. Did you see it?’
Gretta knits on, wool slipping into stitches, stitches becoming rows, rows forming the sleeve of what will be, soon, a cardigan. A lovely lilac wool blend, it is; fully washable. She’d intended it for Monica’s Christmas present but she might change her mind if Madam doesn’t start being a bit pleasanter.
‘We’ll go back to the convent tomorrow, I think,’ she says, and is aware of a prickle of interest from the person across the room. ‘You might think of coming too.’
Still nothing.
‘I’ll take you with me tomorrow. Just you. The others would be too much.’
With a flourish of her index finger, Monica turns another page.
‘That Frankie is in a bad way, poor soul. Had a stroke, by the looks of things. He doesn’t have long. A matter of days, I’d say. He has that smell off him, you know, that smell of death. Same as my father when he was failing.’
She looks up. Monica is staring at her but drops her eyes as soon as Gretta’s meet hers.
‘And my father? How about him?’
The sound of Monica’s voice makes Gretta’s heart leap – in relief and also triumph. She knew she could get her to talk to her again! She knew it!
To mask her glee, Gretta puts her head on one side, she drops her eyes, she lowers her tone. ‘Not there, pet. The sister said he comes in, visits Frankie, then goes off again. I . . . I just don’t know what to think. What to do.’
Monica is silent again. Gretta can’t risk looking up at her now, so she continues in the same aggrieved voice: ‘The sister I spoke to seemed to think he’d be there again tomorrow, in the morning or the afternoon.’ Gretta frowns, trying to remember which it was or what exactly the nun had said. ‘One of the two, anyway. We could—’
Monica puts down her magazine with a slap. ‘You needn’t think I’ve forgiven you!’
Gretta, hopeful and encouraged by this outburst, lets her knitting fall. ‘I don’t think that,’ she says, keeping her head low, her hands meekly in her lap. She reminds herself of a painting she’s seen – can’t remember which one, though. Is it that grim-faced woman in profile by that Scottish painter? Perhaps. She could look it up when she gets home; the thought gives her a small thrill. How she loves those encyclopedias she got on a discount from that shop. Only a little water damage at some of the corners. Volumes A to M got the worst of it; N to Z, you’d hardly know at all, really, unless you were looking closely and who—
‘I can’t ever forgive you.’ Monica clasps and unclasps her hands, just as she did when she was a small girl and she’d realised she’d forgotten to do some chore Gretta had asked of her.
Had she been too hard on her as a girl? Was that why she’d grown up so fearful, somehow, so reluctant to make her way in the world? Was it Gretta’s fault? She couldn’t have done anything differently with Monica: they were so close, close as close, as she often put it to Bridie, who was, Gretta was sure, more than a little jealous, herself having only boys.
‘I know, pet. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let you down. It was . . . I don’t know . . . all so long ago and after the war and all . . . they were strange times and—’
‘I don’t care how strange they were, you shouldn’t have lied. You shouldn’t have pretended.’
‘I know that.’ Gretta bows her head even deeper. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What would the priest say?’
Fear jags deep into Gretta’s heart, banishing all thoughts of encyclopedias, all reflections on upbringing. ‘Oh, now, don’t say that, don’t—’
‘What would he say if I were to go in there and tell him you and Dad aren’t married, that he is in fact still married to someone else, that you had all of us out of wedlock, that—’
‘You won’t do that, will you, please don’t now, promise me you won’t or I’ll—’
‘Of course I won’t.’ Monica sighs, as if irritated by the very idea that she might. She sits back in her chair, arms folded, looking away. ‘What are we going to do about Daddy?’
Gretta is heartened by the ‘we’ in that sentence. She raises her head. ‘We’re here now,’ she says, ‘and he’s here, we know that. I left a message at the convent, saying where we were. So we’ll wait. See if he comes. We’ll have t
o go and see Frankie anyway, a desperate state he’s in, you wouldn’t believe it, and he’s family, after all, so—’
‘That’s it?’ Monica demands. ‘We just wait?’
‘There’s nothing else to do,’ Gretta says.
Monica crosses her legs. She swings a foot up and down. As restless as Aoife, sometimes, Gretta thinks. Then Monica gets out of the chair and goes over to the window.
‘We could at least give these curtains a wash,’ she says, reaching up, ‘don’t you think?’
Gretta is on her feet in seconds. ‘We could. I wouldn’t like to say when those old things last saw a bit of soap.’
Aoife treads up and over the spine of the island, along the track, over a wall and up the sandy slope of the bluff. To the right of her, she’s aware of some shapes – vaguely human – flitting about, at the edge of the island. She keeps her head averted. Whatever Michael Francis and Claire are getting up to out there in the dark, she doesn’t want to know.
The air is still about her, soft, the night gilded by a white glow from a near-spherical moon, puncturing the prickling sky over the mainland. It delineates the contours of the island for her, picks out the turf beneath her feet, the grey shapes of the dry-stone walls. At the highest point of the hill, she turns 360 degrees. She can hear the sea all around her. They are cut off from land, encircled by sea, for the moment a true island.
Ahead of her, she knows, is an overhang, then a drop and then a steep slope of sand. She has held the topography of this place in her head, she realises, learnt from her many summers wandering about here. It has been tucked somewhere into her consciousness since she was last here – ten years ago now, or thereabouts. But just walking on this terrain, just standing here at the highest point, with the island flowing away from her in all directions, brings it out, unfolds it like a paper map.
The lough is just below her; she sees its black mass, pooled in a hollow, as an absence of light, the only one under this bright moon. She feels her way over the edge of the drop, allowing herself the observation that she is being careful, she is not jumping or hurling herself off on to the sandy slope, as she might have done otherwise. She steps down the slope, aware of sand invading her shoes, again witnessing herself taking care.