Sheltering Rain

  "You'd better go," he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. "Poor you. D'you want me to book you a flight?"

  It was about an hour after he'd gone, as she phoned around the various airlines, and discovered with equal amounts of frustration and relief that thanks to a combination of arts festivals and medical conferences, and her own finally deceased car, that unless she wanted to pay a small ransom it was likely to be at least two days before she would be airborne to Waterford Airport, that Kate realized: Not once, despite his sympathetic demeanor, had Justin offered to come with her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Christopher Ballantyne and his wife, Julia, looked so alike that according to Mrs. H, had they married thirty years earlier there would have been "serious talk" in the village. He had dark, wavy hair, matched exactly in shade by his wife's own, and set springily atop a broad head, like the ill-fitting top of a sponge cake. Both had the same slightly beaky noses, the same lean physiques, similar strong views on most topics, especially hygiene and politics, and both talked in the same, explosive, braying tones, as if every sentence had been pumped out of them by bellows.

  And both, Sabine noted, somewhat resentfully, treated her with that same air of indulgent detachment that they would any houseguest. Except in her case, she felt it was a deliberate attempt to let her know that she was not, despite her blood ties, a true part of the family. Not like they were. And that would be Kate's fault, of course.

  Christopher had marched into the place like he owned it on the night that her grandfather had fallen into the casserole, telling Joy, somewhat pointlessly, as far as Sabine could see, that "she would be fine now." He and Julia had been at a hunt ball in Kilkenny, which had been "a stroke of luck" as he rather tactlessly put it, and they had immediately driven down and moved their things into the good guest room next to her grandmother. It had never occurred to Sabine up until then to question why she had not been given the good guest room, which had a far nicer carpet, and a big glowing chest of drawers of walnut veneer, but when she mentioned this to Mrs. H, Mrs. H had said that Christopher "liked to have a room of his own" to come home to. And that he and Julia "did come and visit a lot." Not like me and my mum, in other words, thought Sabine. But she said nothing.

  If Joy had noticed any of the resentment Sabine felt, she didn't comment. But then she seemed awfully distracted, not having Edward in the house to look after. Wexford General Hospital had decided to keep him in for observation and while Sabine had not liked to ask her what exactly was the matter with him (there didn't seem much left of him to observe), it was obvious that it was serious, not just because her grandmother looked pale and strained and seemed unnaturally quiet, but because Sabine had noticed that whenever she wasn't in the room, Christopher would check the backs of furniture, and underneath the rugs for little handwritten stickers, to see if there had been any changes in the spoils that Joy had some months ago already begun to divide between her two children for after her and Edward's deaths.

  "Very sensible idea, Mother," he had said to her. "Saves any confusion in the long run." But Sabine had heard him mutter to Julia that he didn't think it was right that the grandfather clock in the hall, or the gilt-framed oil painting in the breakfast room had "Katherine" stickers on them. "Since when has she shown any interest in this place, anyway?" he had said, and Sabine had slunk silently back into the shadows and resolved to monitor every sticky label in the place, to make sure Christopher didn't start swapping them around.

  Julia, meanwhile, had insisted on "helping" around the house. So determinedly had she helped that Mrs. H's normally amenable expression steadily became more and more fixed, as if it had been set in aspic. Julia had already "organized" the kitchen, so that she could help prepare everybody's food, and been through the fridge, questioning whether it was really necessary to keep some of these old leftovers, and whether it wouldn't be easier for Julia to buy some "nice shop-bought" bread instead of Mrs. H making that dense old soda bread every day. When she left the room, Sabine told Mrs. H more than once that she thought Julia was an interfering old cow, but Mrs. H would only respond, "She means well," and observe, like someone repeating a mantra, that it wouldn't be long before they would return to Dublin.

  Considering they were the only aunt and uncle she had, Sabine should perhaps have been more surprised that she had met Christopher and Julia only a handful of times before. Once had been at their wedding, in Parsons-Green, when Sabine had been very small. All she remembered about that occasion was that she had been invited to be a flower girl, but her mother had somehow got her dress slightly different from the other girls', possibly as a result of a miscut pattern, and that she had spent the day in a quiet frenzy of humiliation at her puff sleeves, while the little blonde flower goddesses around her, sensing a misfit, froze her out. The most recent occasion had been several years earlier, before they moved from London to Dublin, when they had held a "little do" and, in a spirit of reconciliation, invited Sabine, Geoff, and her mother to come along. It had been full of city people and lawyers, and Sabine had soon snuck off to watch television in their bedroom with Julia's cats, trying to ignore the pubescent boy in the corner who had snogged his thirteen-year-old girlfriend for almost the whole of The Railway Children, and wondering when they could go home. As if heard by some deity, she had been rescued by Geoff and her mother little more than an hour after they had arrived, and Geoff had spent the whole journey home ranting about capitalists, while Kate sat silently, interjecting the odd "Yes, well, they are my family, you know," but not sounding like she was really offering any kind of defense.

  It was partly because of the sheer awfulness of being around Christopher and Julia that Sabine quietly took over some of the duties of looking after her grandfather when, two days later, frail, blanket-bound, and seemingly welded to a wheelchair, he came home. Out of respect for Joy's feelings, her son and daughter-in-law tended to leave him to her sole care (that was their excuse, anyway, Sabine told Mrs. H, but she knew it was because they wanted to go out riding), but Joy seemed to quite like it when Sabine came and sat with him, or read to him from the letters page of the Horse and Hound. Much of the time, he didn't seem to notice her, but Sabine was privately convinced that he bore an expression of deep irritation whenever the brisk young nurse, whom Christopher had paid to come for most of the day, helped him cheerfully upright and announced that it was time for him to go "to the little boys' room." And occasionally, when Sabine chatted to him about what she had done with the gray, or passed on some snippet that Thom had said in the yard, she was sure she could see his eyes flicker and a shadow of interest pass, like a distant cloud, across his face.

  Joy, meanwhile, simply responded to her husband's return by becoming busier than ever. There was apparently more to do in the yard, the house was a disaster, and if Liam and John John didn't clean some of that tack, then it was, of course, going to fall to bits. She never mentioned what the doctors had said, or discussed why her grandfather no longer seemed to eat anything at all, or why there was now a frightening array of bleeping medical equipment stationed around his bed, as if placed on high alert for some forthcoming disaster. She just told Sabine in a rather vague manner that she was doing "a grand job," popped her head around the door occasionally as if to reassure herself that he was still alive, and then spent even more hours, if it were possible, ministering to her tired old horse in the yard.

  "It's all right," said Sabine after the nurse had disappeared, as she sat down in the chair beside her grandfather's bed, once again grateful to escape the maelstrom of activity downstairs. "You can relax. We've gotten rid of them all again."

  She pulled his covers up higher around his concave chest, noting that his frailty no longer made her want to squirm. She was just grateful that he looked peaceful, and alive, and not covered in tomato juice.

  "Now don't you worry about me being bored or anything," she said, whispering close to his ear, as she prepared to read to him from this old Rudyard Kipling book she had found in th
e library, about horses playing polo in India. She knew he could hear her, even if the nurse raised her eyebrows, like she was doing something stupid. "I meant to tell you the other day," she said, softly, as she began. "Sometimes I just like to sit and be, too."

  For her eighteenth birthday, Kate Ballantyne had received three gifts of significance. One, from her parents, was a top-of-the-range, general-purpose, dark-brown pigskin saddle, which was opened by her with despair, as she had specifically asked for a brassiere and a new pair of trousers. Another, also from her parents, was an invitation to a sitting with a local portrait artist, in order that she could mark the occasion of her adulthood. This also prompted a less than grateful response; they had chosen the very artist who had just completed a large oil painting of her mother's new gelding, Lancelot. The third gift . . . well, the third gift had come about as an indirect result of the second. And that had come much later.

  Sixteen and a half years later, Kate thought of these as she sat in the back of the taxi, breathing in the pungent smell of in-car air freshener as she headed from Waterford Airport to Kilcarrion. She had been to her family home precisely three times since she had left home shortly after that eighteenth birthday; once to show them the newborn Sabine, twice with Jim, when she had thought that her being part of a "family" might soften their attitudes toward her, and now, some ten years on. Why does it always rain here? she thought, distractedly, wiping at the steam on the window. I can hardly remember a time when it didn't rain.

  It had taken her almost two days to get a flight to Waterford, and Kate knew already that her delayed return would be used, like a riding whip, against her, even though her mother had been at pains to ring and tell her when he "stabilized." She didn't care enough to come straightaway, that would be the muttered refrain. Even though her own father was at death's door. Too busy gallivanting with the latest fancy man, probably. She sighed to herself, thinking of the irony of her last conversation with Justin. He had seemed less shocked and disturbed by her abrupt ending of their relationship than by her insistence that he remove his bags from her house before she left for Ireland.

  She wasn't even really sure why she was coming; apart from her desperate need to see her daughter again, she had no real emotional ties to the place. Her father hadn't spoken to her with any warmth or civility since she was eighteen, her brother and his wife would simply patronize her and drop loaded comments that staked their greater claim to the family house, and her mother had long been more comfortable talking to her dogs. I came because my father is dying, she said to herself, trying out the words, to see if, even after all this time, they could elicit some awful sense of occasion, of potential loss. But all she really felt was dread at the prospect of being in that household again, tempered with relief at the thought of seeing her daughter.

  I'll stay a couple of days, she told herself, as the cab paused on the edges of Ballymalnaugh. I'm an adult. I can leave whenever I like. It's always possible to cope with a couple of days. And then perhaps I can persuade Sabine to come home with me.

  "Have you come far?" The driver evidently felt a need, now that he had neared his destination, to secure his tip.

  "London."

  His eyes, two beetles under bushes, met hers in the rearview mirror.

  "London. I've got family in Willesden." He paused. "It's all right, love, I won't ask you if you know them."

  Kate smiled thinly, gazing out of the window at the familiar landmarks: There was Mrs. H's house, the Church of Blessed Peter, the forty-acre field that her parents had sold to a farmer the first time they had run out of money.

  "You been here before, then? Not an area that usually gets many tourists. Usually I take them up north. Or to the west. You wouldn't believe the numbers that go to the west, now."

  Kate paused, gazing at the stone wall that fenced Kilcarrion House.

  "No. Never," she said.

  "Just visiting friends, then?"

  "Something like that."

  Just think of it as picking up Sabine, she told herself. That will make it all bearable.

  Except it wasn't Sabine who met her at the door. It was Julia, dressed in jodhpurs, a huge, scarlet fleecy body-warmer, and matching socks, who, after a great flurry of kisses and exclamation, said rather pointedly that she had "absolutely no idea" where Sabine was. "She seems to spend most of her time either hiding in the yard, or closeted away with Edward," she said. Julia always spoke in a way that expressed bemusement at other people's actions.

  Kate, trying to hide her irritation at the too-intimate way in which Julia referred to her father, decided she must have gotten it wrong. Sabine would not want to hang around the horses. And she was even less likely to be "closeted away" with her father.

  "But what am I doing?" Julia exclaimed, taking one of Kate's bags. "Do come in! Where are my manners?"

  They've been bulldozed by your acquisitive instincts, Kate thought bitterly. And then told herself she had no right, as it was not as if, for the past sixteen years, she had cared whether the house was hers, or indeed razed to make way for a McDonald's drive thru. She adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose (she had, of course, forgotten her contact lenses), trying to take in the home that was no longer hers.

  "We've put you in the Italian room," Julia trilled, as she "showed" Kate upstairs. "I don't think it's leaking at the moment."

  In the decade since her last visit, it was as if the house had aged in dog years, Kate thought, looking around. It had always been cold, and damp, but she couldn't remember these brown water stains spreading down the walls, like sepia-tinted maps of far-off continents; nor could she remember everything looking this shabby and threadbare: the Persian rugs worn down to a patchy network of grayed cotton threads, the furnishings scuffed and chipped, evidently long past their deadline for repainting. She didn't recall the smell; the ever-present distant hum of dog and horse now mingling with those of mildew and neglect. And she hadn't remembered this chill; not a dry cold, like her house had seen when her boiler had broken, but a damp, seeping, long-standing cold that had permeated her bones within minutes of her arrival. Kate stared at the back of Julia's dense fleece with new eyes. It certainly looked warmer than anything she had brought.

  "We've actually managed to warm up the place a bit," said Julia, throwing open the door of Kate's room. "You wouldn't believe how cold they had let it get. I told Christopher, it's no wonder Edward got ill."

  "I thought it was a stroke," said Kate, coolly.

  "Yes, it was a stroke, but he is old, and terribly frail. And the elderly do need their comforts, don't they? I've told Christopher we should take him back to Dublin with us, back to a bit of proper central heating. We've got a room all ready. But your mother won't have it. She wants to keep him here."

  The tone of her last words left Kate in little doubt as to Julia's opinion of this course of action. By keeping her husband in Kilcarrion, she was effectively resigning him to an early grave, it said. But Kate felt a sudden communion with her mother. Her father would always rather be here, cold and damp, rather than smothered to death in Julia's pastel-colored, centrally heated embrace.

  "Between you and me, Katie, I can't wait to get back to our house," Julia said, pulling out one of the drawers, to check that it was empty. She was prone to offering such fake "confidences," words that meant nothing but suggested some intimacy on the speaker's behalf. "I do find this place depressing, even if Christopher loves it so. And our neighbor is looking after the cats and I know they'll be simply miserable by now, poor things. They hate it when we go away."

  "Oh. Your cats," said Kate politely, suddenly remembering Julia's passion for the two insolent-looking felines. "Are they still the same ones?"

  Julia placed a hand on her arm. "You know, Katie, it's very sweet of you to ask, but they're not. Well, Armand is still with us, but Mam'selle sadly passed away last spring." Kate noted, with some fear, that Julia's eyes had suddenly filled with tears.

  "Still, she had a good life . . . ,
" she mused, distantly. "And you know we've got the sweetest little girl to keep Armand company. Poubelle, we call her," she laughed delightedly, her good humor suddenly restored. "Because she's never out of our kitchen bin, the little madam."

  Kate tried to smile, wondering how quickly she could escape Julia's freesia-scented hold, and try to locate her daughter.

  "You must be desperate to unpack. I'll leave you to it," Julia said. "But don't forget, tea is at four-thirty prompt. We've persuaded Joy to have it in the breakfast room now, because it's that little bit easier to heat. I'll see you down there."

  With a parting flutter of her fingers, she was gone.

  Kate sat heavily on her bed, and gazed around her at the room she had not seen for ten years. This had not been her own room; Julia had told her that Sabine was occupying that, while Julia and Christopher occupied the room that had always been his. The other "dry" guest room was apparently occupied by her mother. It didn't surprise Kate; she had suspected they often kept separate rooms even when she lived at home--her father's snoring, her mother had explained, unconvincingly. But she found it hard to reconcile anything in this room with her childhood or teenage self; it was as if the house had aged faster than anyone else, ironing out any badges or markings of familiarity as it went, and it felt, genuinely, like it had nothing to do with her.

  Why should I care? thought Kate, briskly. My life hasn't been here since Sabine was born. My life is back in London.

  But still she found herself gazing around at the pictures on the walls, peering into the cupboards, as if waiting for some jolt of recognition, even some pang of melancholy, for an earlier, less complicated life.

  She was making her way down the stairs when she first caught sight of Sabine. She had her back to her, and was crouching by the dogs, pulling her riding boots off, and exclaiming to Bella and Bertie fondly as they pushed their noses at her face that they were both "dopey, dopey animals." Bertie, becoming overexcited, jumped up on her, sending her collapsing gently backward onto the hall carpet, and Sabine laughed, pushing him away, trying to wipe her face as he slobbered over her.