He could either be a snow day, an escape from the routines and rituals that now comprised her life, or the cold shock that would wake her up. She was prepared to suffer either eventuality. And whenever she walked to the window and saw Donal emerging from the house, she counted one, two, three – and every time, he looked up at the cottage.
In the afternoons she walked the beach, and did her best to tamp down her fears over her dwindling finances, staving off the day when she would have to go to Shaun, cap in hand, and ask for more money. There were so few hours of daylight that it was dark by half four and however early darkness fell that always seemed like an acceptable time for a drink. She prepared herself a meagre supper and listened to the radio. She could just about manage to read a few pages of a novel. She could only read poetry that was new and unfamiliar to her. The collections that had offered her solace in the past could now undo her with a single line. She no longer needed Elizabeth Bishop to remind her that the art of losing is a skill so easily acquired. And then she meted out the medication she’d stolen from her mother, bit off half of one of the bitter blue tablets. She drank until her thoughts could no longer rise up against the tide of her exhaustion, and she was dragged down into sleep.
She closed the notebook and pushed it across the table. It knocked into the envelopes she’d leant against the vase. They fell forward, one sliding across the oilcloth, delivered to her. She turned her eyes away from it. The weak light above the cooker barely made it to the corners of the room, crept far enough only to give an impression of things, and for a moment she felt as though her entire known world was held within the scope of that light. She’d had so much, had been offered everything. Shaun had said, keep that apartment in Dublin, go there as much as you want. He hadn’t even suggested she get rid of John. Keep your marriage, keep your family, keep your home. Everything. You’re not listening to me, you’re not listening to me – that was what she had said over and over, that night she had driven back to Donegal to tell Shaun she was leaving him and he had carefully responded with a diluted version of the future she proposed. It was like he had anticipated the conversation, had been preparing for her withdrawal from his life for some time. And she realised now how thoroughly she had been understood.
More than that – she had married a man who had offered her the financial means and freedom to conduct her life, her career, exactly as she wished, and who had looked on with humble adoration. How many women could say the same – they had been adored by their husband? For her part, when it came to leaving him, she’d told him she wanted nothing. She had been magnanimous – and wasn’t that a cheap trick? No wonder he’d hardened against her so fully when the time came, no wonder he had turned to wholesome, simple Ann. And how like every other man he’d behaved, as soon as he believed something belonging to him was threatened – that was a great disappointment to her. She didn’t know if she could forgive him for that.
When she’d phoned from Dublin and told him she wanted Carl to stay with her for the summer, he saw that it was her intention to have him come and live there. He’d stopped paying the rent on the apartment, and two days later a van driven by one of the men from the factory arrived from Donegal with forty-seven cardboard boxes containing everything she owned. Standing in that cramped apartment, towers of boxes surrounding her, she’d picked up the phone and called Shaun at his office.
‘You never forgave me,’ she’d said.
‘You never forgave yourself,’ he’d said.
Seventeen years since she’d gone to give her son Patrick his morning feed and found him cold and stiff in his cot. She had collapsed entirely, had needed her mother to move up from Dublin to help with Ronan, who was still only a toddler at the time. Shaun had returned to work a week after the funeral. She had wanted to die and was lit by rage that he seemed capable of living. She drank herself to sleep every night. And then she found out she was pregnant with Barry and she began to see a way to survive. It baffled her that at a time when she had no interest in living, she wanted to bring a child into the world, and yet it was the only thing that made sense to her. And over the years she had watched Shaun kiss and cuddle each of their sons, read them bedtime stories, had taken great pleasure in seeing whichever of the boys needed most help at the time, sitting at the dining room table, with Shaun offering instruction on their homework. Shaun did not frequent pubs, did not play golf like so many other men in the town. He enjoyed the company of his children. He was a busy man but what little time he had, he spent with them. Yet she’d continued to underestimate his love for their sons, and having lost one already, she’d thought he was just going to give Carl up because she’d asked him to.
She’d calculated everything so carefully. In many respects remaining in Dublin had made a great deal of sense. She’d spent her entire adult life in a cultural backwater where opportunities to advance her career were limited. She could get more teaching work if she stayed in Dublin. If she returned to Donegal, very soon she’d find herself alone in that house with Shaun, and with little practical purpose as a mother. Ronan was already at Trinity, Barry already at boarding school in Dublin, and in a year’s time Carl would be joining him. But when she’d told John that Shaun had stopped paying the rent, that they’d need to find a bigger place so that Carl could come and stay with them, he was all talk then of his responsibilities to his wife and his daughter and his unpaid mortgage.
‘Fucking fool,’ she said again, to test her voice, to hear its sound. The cottage was the place where she had started to converse with herself aloud. She had said things before of course, sung songs and cursed when she stubbed her toe. But in this house she had begun to say fully formed sentences out loud. It felt like tempting fate. That is the kind of thing a mad person would do was one of the things she said sometimes. Once she had spoken this, she felt like she had breached some boundary, and she began to say things when she was out walking on the beach, testing how close she could get to another body before she would make herself stop. And what would be the end of that?
She poured another glass of wine and wandered into the bedroom and stood before the full-length mirror. However thin her life had felt wandering around that flat in Dublin and during those cruel months she’d spent living with her mother, now it felt like it had no substance to it at all. She raised the wineglass and clinked it against the mirror. ‘Cheers,’ she said.
There was the noise of an engine and she walked to the window and looked down just as Donal’s van pulled up and the sensor light went on above his front door. He stepped out of the van and she counted aloud – one, two, three. He looked up at her and at once lowered his eyes, just like the other day when he’d dropped off a letter, making a point of telling her that Dolores and the kids were going away for the weekend. They were down in Roscommon seeing her sister, he’d said, all the while staring down at the doormat and trying to straighten it with his foot.
Colette ran out the front door and over to the wall. The wind whipped her hair across her face, the rain spat at her.
‘Donal!’ she shouted down to him just as he was stepping through the front door. Her words were carried away on the wind, reduced to nothing. She shouted again and he turned and looked up at her, crowned in a halo of light from the porch. ‘Would you mind coming up to me for a second?’ she asked.
‘What?’ he shouted back at her.
‘There’s a problem,’ she shouted.
He shuffled in the doorway a bit, wiped his feet on the mat. ‘Aye – just give me one minute and I’ll be up to you then,’ he shouted.
She ran back inside and shut the door behind her. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she said. She sat down at the table and downed the glass of wine. She got up, took off her shoes. She crossed the cold stone floor and went into the bedroom and turned the lamp on beside the bed, turned off the main light. Standing before the mirror she smoothed her hand over the ends of her hair a few times so it fell evenly around her shoulders.
There was a knock on the door and she felt the noise of it sift down through her. She answered it and looked at him but she did not move and for a moment he just stared at her.
‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said and moved aside to let him pass. ‘Everything’s fine, Donal, but the heaters, I’m having terrible problems with the heaters.’
‘Are they still not coming up to temperature?’ he asked, walking to the window.
‘That’s right,’ she said, and sat back down at the table.
He was wearing a big black padded jacket not dissimilar to the one Carl wore. It rose up on his back as he crouched down to check the pipe so she saw a crescent of white flesh exposed. Dark hairs sprouted at the base of his spine.
‘Well, there’s good heat coming out of that one now?’ he said. He looked up at her with curiosity and she nodded. He rose and moved closer to her at the table. ‘You should put a few decorations up in here, make the place look a bit more festive.’
She looked up at his face to see if this was meant as some kind of joke, but it was impossible to read anything from the expression he wore.
‘What do you be listening to?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘When you’re dancing. What do you be listening to?’
‘You’ve seen me dancing?’ She gave a little laugh.
‘You know I have.’
‘Do you really care what music I play?’
She watched him narrow his eyes at her then – it was a change so slight and sudden but there was frustration in it, and it gave her pleasure to unsettle him just a little.
‘I don’t think that’s what you came up here for, Donal – to talk about my record collection.’
‘I came up here because you asked me.’
‘I did, yes.’
She looked down at the table. ‘Will you have a drink?’ she said and rose suddenly just as he took a half step towards her.
His face was inches from hers but she would not look at him. She stared down at her bare feet, toe-to-toe with his black work
boots, blotted with mud. And she could smell the night upon him, the cold air that clung to him. There was a smell of cigarettes
on his breath, which was strange because she had never seen him smoke, and just beneath that was the low hum of alcohol. She
looked him dead in the eye and before she turned away an agreement was made. She walked into the bedroom and stopped beside
the bed. His footsteps behind her were so soft and she began to count their slow progress across the floor – one, two, three – until he was close enough to her again to feel the chill that rose off his body. His fingertips grazed her skin as he pushed
aside her hair. The cold air kissed the back of her neck.
Chapter 12
Izzy heard the front door open and turned down the heat under the pots and pans that crowded the cooker. The little television on the worktop was showing the news, and it was all about the newly formed government. Ministers who’d lost their jobs kept their head down as they exited government buildings, and the new ministers waved and smiled to the cameras as they walked through the gates. But the change in power hadn’t led to a ministerial position for James. He had seemed the natural choice for Minister of the Marine. He’d phoned from Dublin the day before to deliver the news and he’d tried to disguise his disappointment with weak dismissals. The man he’d been passed over for – his family had been involved in Irish politics for generations. ‘He was handed that job by his father,’ James said, the only hint he gave of his bitterness. But she was disappointed for him, knew how much he had wanted this, and how it would only serve his belief that the country was run by better men – better educated, better connected – than himself.
Izzy turned down the volume on the television.
