Too close. Too close for comfort, he thought, as he looked up at the cottage and a light rain speckled the windscreen. These things began in a rush of excitement and ended with phone calls to the house, with Dolores staring at him as she listened to the silence on the end of the line. They became administrative, something to be managed, and elicited the same stress he felt when on a Sunday night he thought of all the work he had to fit in that week. Distance was crucial, he’d decided, and there would be no more women from Donegal Town or Ballybofey, or even Letterkenny. From now on he’d be in the next county before he’d even think about starting anything.
You kept trouble away from your own doorstep at least, and that was why he didn’t allow himself to think too much about Colette; this strange woman who behaved like a teenager – who rolled her own cigarettes and left her bedroom in disarray. She was not so much his type anyway, too tall for a start, and she was growing stout with age. She was attractive all the same; there was no denying that. But he was not stupid enough to get involved with his tenant, even though he could see how a woman like Colette, the pure conundrum of her, could make a man behave in stupid ways. She’d fooled a shrewd customer like Shaun Crowley.
He found the envelope with the oldest postmark. He turned it over, dug his thumb in at one corner, and ripped it open. He withdrew a handwritten letter on numbered pages that went all the way up to twelve, the final one signed ‘John’. He could barely make out the writing but certain sentences and phrases were clear to him, and they detailed this man’s heartbreak over the loss of Colette and used words like ‘bereft’ and ‘crestfallen’. One line read, ‘The curve of your breast is like a planet in orbit.’ There were verses, some of them with lines crossed out. There were single lines hanging in the middle of the page. They were clearly written by someone who was losing his mind. He had never read anything like it. She’d made a mockery of this poor John fellow as well. And these were only the letters that had accidentally come to his house. He put the letter in the glove compartment. He’d throw it in the bin later. She’d never even know it had existed, and besides, it could have been lost in the post. At least this way he wouldn’t have to explain to her why he’d kept it for so long.
He turned up the drive to the cottage. Colette’s car was there but the curtains on the bedroom window were drawn. He peered into the kitchen. A thick wedge of envelopes in the same grey stationery sat on the table, held between the vase and a candlestick. Perhaps she’d gone out for a walk on the beach, as he knew she was in the habit of doing, or perhaps she was still in bed. He thought of her coming to the door in some old dressing gown, drawing aside the mussed-up strands of hair, sleep still heavy upon her, the warmth of it rising from her body. He lifted his fist to knock on the door and at once thought better of it. He pushed the letters through the slot and heard the soft pat as they landed. And when he stepped back from the door, he saw that she’d fixed a little wooden sign to the front of the house that read ‘Innisfree’ in white lettering.
He looked in again as he passed the window, trying to absorb as much detail as he could, aware that inside somewhere she might be watching him, waiting for him to leave. There were a couple of birthday cards beside the microwave, a few empty wine and vodka bottles by the bin. On the counter was a cassette player with a stack of tapes beside it. Sometimes when he looked up at the cottage he could see her dancing, throwing herself about the place, tossing her head from side to side so that her black hair twisted around her face. Whatever she was listening to, she was giving herself over to it entirely. And it made him embarrassed for her; disgusted him a little that she could forget herself like that, leave herself exposed in this way.
He got into his van and drove. Things were getting busier coming up to Christmas and it felt good to be on the road, not stuck in the house with Dolores going on about whichever one of the kids needed new shoes. When he’d told her that morning he had a job to get to in Letterkenny, she’d furnished him with a list of presents to buy at the shopping centre. They had to make a start, get the toys hidden away in the attic before the kids got too curious, she’d said. Like he’d needed reminding that this was what his life was, an endless round of Christmases and christenings, confirmations and communions.
Married at twenty-one – in the wedding photo that hung in his hallway he looked like someone had put a gun to his back and told him to smile. But there was solace too in knowing that once he’d married Dolores, he’d never see a poor day. Mick and Eileen McNally had come down from Howth when the EU was handing out fishing trawlers to whoever wanted one. They were millionaires within a decade. But where the McNallys were vulgar and brash, his own parents were pious and discreet. They were among the most religious people in the town, and it was to be an embarrassment for them when he got Dolores pregnant after they’d only been going out a couple of months. He’d thought about running away to England but instead he got drunk for three days, and on the third day he was at the disco in the Harbour View Hotel when Mick barrelled in and hauled him out by the collar of his shirt. He marched Donal down the alley by the hotel and in near darkness, amid the smell of putrefying rubbish, threw him up against a damp wall, and told him that if he didn’t marry Dolores, he’d see to it that his body was dredged up off the harbour floor.
As if to sweeten the deal, Mick paid for the construction of their house. But married life in that house was to be a shock to him. This was it, this was all his life had amounted to, and he felt short-changed and cheated and angry all the time. Often in that first year he’d leave his wife and baby daughter at home and retreat to his mother’s kitchen table, where he spent a great deal of time complaining. His mother had always indulged him and his three brothers, overcompensated for their father’s coldness with love and care and affection, but even she grew tired of Donal’s complaints. She knew Dolores was a good wife, that she cooked and cleaned and took care of their child in a manner that was beyond reproach. Dolores was fulfilling her side of the bargain. And he even resented her for that. Dolores was also a regular attendee of confession and the Stations of the Cross, while Donal only fulfilled the minimum requirement of showing up for mass on Sunday. No matter how much he complained, his parents would never countenance the idea that an alternative life existed for Donal on the other side of his marriage. They actively campaigned against all evils, and chief among them was divorce. Donal could remember, before the last referendum, when they’d boarded a bus to Dublin to hold either end of a banner and parade it up and down in front of Leinster House – ‘DIVORCE?’ it read, ‘JESUS SAYS NO’.
Donal’s brothers had all gone on to university and now worked good jobs, and continued to be good Catholics. They’d had the decency at least to wait until after they were married to get their wives pregnant. His father had believed in discipline and education, and if his sons were not going to go on to the priesthood, then they were at least going to be upstanding citizens. Bad school results and bad behaviour were met with a few lashes of the belt, doled out with calm, considered control. All four Mullen boys were handsome and clean and intelligent, and in a town where most grubby-faced teens were just trying to get their hand up a girl’s blouse so they could boast to their friends, the idea that their religiosity might make them respectful was to their advantage. Donal recognised the way girls looked at him from an early age, but of all the women he drew to him Dolores was the first who he knew would do whatever he asked of her. But when she told him she was pregnant, he began to think he was the one who’d been had, tricked into marriage by a woman who knew he’d have no other choice.
Donal had completed his electrical apprenticeship and worked hard to grow his business. Buying the cottage had been his first act of financial independence from his father-in-law. But there wasn’t much demand for holiday homes in Donegal outside of the summer months, so when Dolores had told him she was pregnant again, it seemed like a good idea to rent to Colette. But she was starting to cause him bother, coming down to the house and asking stupid questions about the fuse box and rousing little fights between him and Dolores. And now she’d screwed that sign to the front of the house, and he’d never hear the end of it.
Donal turned off the radio. He couldn’t get his thoughts in any order. He was tired of the chatter of the presenters and the
afternoon quizzes and the same songs being played no matter what station he turned to. But it had been like this all day,
his mind flitting from one thing to the next, and he was driving through Barnesmore Gap before he knew what was happening
to him. The broad valley rose up around him as he drove a clean line through it, and he was thinking about Colette. He had
her on the table in the cottage, her legs wrapped around him, the dirty soles of her otherwise snow-white feet placed upon
his back. He was so distracted it was all he could do to keep his mind on his driving and he pulled over onto the hard shoulder
and drove into one of the car parks that had been made for tourists to take photos of the Gap. But on this day at the end
of November his van was the only vehicle parked there. He looked up at the valley, the grey sky, the pine forests wrapped
around the slopes. And he placed his head against the steering wheel and came into a tissue and shuddered so hard that he
felt the van shake. He rolled down the window and tossed the tissue out. It’s been a while since that happened, he thought.
Chapter 10
Izzy expected Carl to come bounding out of the house as soon as she and Niall pulled up. She’d never had to knock on the door, had never even been inside the house. The noise of the car coming up the long gravel driveway was always enough to announce her arrival when she’d come to collect Niall. But she had asked Niall many questions about it – she couldn’t help herself. He’d told her that there were five bedrooms and every one of them was en suite. There was a utility room upstairs and a utility room downstairs connected by a laundry chute. Izzy had thought that a very clever idea. Sheila Sullivan came every weekday to have food ready for Carl and Barry when they got home from school, which Izzy thought an even better idea. And Sheila cleaned the house as well. Izzy had a cleaner herself but she came only once a week and Izzy could have been doing with her more often.
‘But what is Colette doing when Sheila’s cooking Carl’s tea?’ Izzy had asked.
‘Writing,’ Niall had said, as though that was self-evident.
Colette Crowley had had full-time help so that she could sit about all day writing poems, and this Izzy could not get her head around at all. ‘Writing?’ she’d repeated.
She beeped the horn and they waited in silence. Niall had barely spoken a word to her since the night before when she’d announced in her most enthusiastic voice that she had a surprise for him – she’d be taking him and Carl to Waterworld the next day. She’d watched the colour drain from his face. He’d been full of questions then about whether she had actually spoken to Carl or just his father. He’d said that Carl wouldn’t really want to go and his father would make him. He was furious with her. She should have asked him first, he’d said.
When she’d phoned Shaun at his office to arrange the meeting, she told him she’d been meaning to call for some time. The weeks had gotten away from her. She said that Niall was very sorry about the fight and that it was a shame how the boys had grown apart. She suggested they might broker some kind of peace between them. Shaun made little noises of assent that barely amounted to a handful of coherent words. It was as she’d expected – that she could count on Shaun to be unfailingly amenable.
And just as she was about to beep the horn again, the front door opened and Shaun ushered Carl forth with his hand on his back. Shaun was a very tall man and he had to stoop in the doorway to smile and wave at Izzy. She waved back but he was already withdrawing into the house, and that was his way whenever you met him – he was never quite looking at you. And she remembered then Shaun and Colette as a young couple – or at least Colette had seemed young, whereas stolid, serious Shaun had always seemed middle-aged – and him shepherding his fiancée around the town just a half step behind her, his hand ever on the small of her back. Such a handsome couple, and Colette, tall as she was, still had to tilt her head back to look up at him. But Shaun always had his eyes averted and his smile turned inward, like he was trying to conceal the extent of his happiness, like if anyone knew the fullness of his pride in her she might be taken away. And whatever misgivings Izzy had had about this glamorous blow-in arriving in a town where she knew no one, to marry a man ten years her senior, were banished when she saw the protectiveness Shaun showed her. And any problems Colette might encounter, she’d have enough money to do something about them. And money, Izzy had always believed, was a great comfort.
Carl hopped into the back of the car all bundled up in a black puffer jacket.
‘Yes,’ he said, burying his chin and mouth in the collar of his jacket.
‘Yes,’ Niall said.
The boys did not talk to each other much during the journey. Izzy tried to bridge the conversation between them. She asked Carl questions about school and he gave brief, polite answers.
‘Are you going anywhere nice on holidays this year?’ she asked. The Crowleys went on lots of holidays and usually had deep tans in the middle of winter when everyone else was bright red with the cold. But it was Colette who usually went away with the boys and Izzy was sorry she’d asked.
‘No, not this year,’ Carl said.
She tried to cover this up. ‘You’re a good swimmer, aren’t you, Carl? I’m trying to get Niall to go for swimming lessons in Ballyshannon.’
‘I can swim,’ Niall moaned.
‘I know you can, it’s only to improve your technique.’
‘I’m going to go,’ Carl said.
‘What day of the week is it?’ Niall asked.
‘Saturday,’ Carl said. ‘There’s a bus going from the Diamond.’
When they got to the water park Carl took a £20 note from his pocket and offered it to her. It was typical, she thought, of someone as well-mannered as Shaun Crowley to have told Carl to do this even though he knew Izzy would never take money from him.
‘Don’t be silly, pet. You give that back to your father.’
She paid the entry for the boys at the front desk and pointed them in the direction of the changing rooms and then went up to the viewing deck with her book. The glass-fronted seating area looked over the swimming pools and slides that filled the enormous metal-framed building. The place was packed with wet little bodies sloshing about and ruddy teens climbing one on top of the other and dunking each other’s heads under the water. She waited until she saw Carl and Niall emerge from the changing room in their red swimming caps and take a few tentative steps into the shallow end of the pool before she opened her book.
She pulled out the bookmark – it read, ‘My other book is War & Peace’. Brian had left it inside the book when he’d lent it to her. She knew this was supposed to be funny but she found the books he pressed upon her challenging enough and hoped he didn’t have plans to progress to Russian novels. This most recent one, The Remains of the Day, was very serious. Nobody in it seemed to have a sense of humour at all. In fact, the only funny thing about it was how the main character, a butler in a big old stately pile, was always going on about loyalty and dignity and duty when it was clear that all he really wanted was to marry the housekeeper. Or at least that’s what was becoming apparent to Izzy, because at first he had seemed so passionless – and she tried to turn this thought over in her mind a few times so that she might remember it when Brian asked her what she thought of the book. Brian always asked her what she thought of the books he gave her. And often her feelings were the same – that she enjoyed the writing but if she had been asked to describe a single significant or dramatic event she would have struggled. And yet she couldn’t put this one down and she had to keep reminding herself to look up every few pages to check on her son. On the hour a horn sounded and she watched everyone rushing to the same pool where the wave machine was starting to churn the water, and after a minute or two the boys were jounced together in the swell.
She closed the book. She tried to imagine explaining to Brian what she was about to engage in, and the silence she’d be met with, the blankness in his expression, carefully reserving judgement, waiting until she’d said what she needed to say before he’d make any comment whatsoever. Just speaking things in the light of his gaze had become her way of knowing how she truly felt. Even when she’d spouted that rubbish to him about Colette’s brazenness, painting her as some kind of scarlet woman, she’d known then in her heart that this was not really what she thought of her. And she knew now there couldn’t be anything wrong with a mother as kind and loving as Colette spending time with her child, and the righteousness Izzy felt about this unsettled her sometimes. Colette, for her part, would be in her car now, on her way, anticipating this meeting with every breath in her body. There was no question of that, no chance on earth that she would back out of this arrangement. And Izzy wanted to be equal to that determination.
At 3 p.m. she saw Niall look up at the clock and watched the two boys dutifully making their way to the changing rooms. By three thirty they were in the foyer of the Great Northern Hotel. She instructed the boys to order quickly from the children’s menu and she ordered a sandwich and a pot of tea for herself. She stared around her at the busy foyer, at the disgruntled-looking golfers in rain gear crowding the reception desk, and she was thinking this venue a very poor choice now because people from her own club often played on the hotel course. But perhaps that was a good thing; this made it precisely the kind of place you would accidentally run into someone you knew.
She sank down in her seat, hoping the wingback armchair might provide some cover for her. She turned her attention to the boys, who were in good humour, a little listless from swimming but giddy in that tired way children could be, and she thought that if the only outcome for the day was that their friendship was renewed then that was enough. And as she thought this, her resolve vanished. She began to pray for Colette not to appear.
‘Come on, Niall, eat that up,’ she said, ‘we need to get on the road.’
Izzy noticed that Carl had left some food on his plate and she thought about telling him to finish it, and then all of a sudden she was beside them, so tall, she felt her presence before she saw her. They all looked up at her at once. But Colette’s focus was on Carl, who was turning the last of his food over in his mouth, this process slowing to a halt as his eyes widened to take in the full shape of his mother. His face froze, his lips parted slightly, flecks of burger flew out with his breath.
