Her lungs still acclimatized to the sootier, city atmosphere, she breathed in the salty air, carried on sharp winds from the seafront below them, like a connoisseur savoring a fine wine, listening to the newborns' cries of the gulls and guillemots suspended on invisible channels above. She was wearing her glasses, and even at this distance they were periodically hit by tiny flecks of spray, glinting like diamond chips in the bare light.
"You don't ask much, do you?" she said, not looking at Thom, beside her.
"I mean, about what happened to me. About Justin--my last partner. Or Geoff."
Thom turned to face her.
"Why, do you want me to?"
The clouds skidded across the distant horizon, buffeted by unseen winds.
"I just thought you'd want to know. Most men do. Want to know about your history."
"I know all the history I need to know." He turned his head back to face the sea, taking a sip from a plastic cup of coffee. "You can ask too many questions, sometimes."
"But you don't question any of it. You don't even want to know what I think about all of this. Whether it's a good thing."
"As I said, you can ask too many questions sometimes." He raised an eyebrow. "Especially with someone like you."
They had sat there for almost half an hour, peacefully relishing the brief escape from Kilcarrion, and its attendant complications. For almost half of that, they had lain in each other's arms, exchanging lazy kisses, gazing at each other intoxicated and brimful of unspoken anticipation. It wouldn't be today; that was understood. But it didn't matter. It was good enough just to be with each other, to be held, to be alone.
It had been several days since they had been together in the summerhouse, and Kate's feelings of panic and guilt had stealthily been overridden by a desperate need to be near Thom, to see him smile, to have him to herself. She had woken the day after in a raw panic, any warm feelings from the night before subsumed by her terror at having "gotten involved" again, and had sought him out in the yard, cornering him and telling him firmly (although with a slightly hysterical edge to her voice) that it had all been a terrific mistake, and that she was sorry if she had led him on, but she should really just be on her own right now. Thom had nodded, said he understood, and remained just as impassive when on three other occasions that day she had located him, and in hushed and urgent tones, explained again why it was impossible, how she had thought it over and realized that they were totally unsuited, and that she liked him much too much to wreck his life.
Kate had then gone upstairs to her room and wept, furious with herself, and suddenly bereft, so when Thom, unusually, had come into the breakfast room the following morning in order to inform Joy that he was going into town to pick up some bits from the tack shop, Kate had wondered, seemingly casually, whether he could give her a lift while doing so. There were a few things she needed in town. Christopher--with his bloodhound ability to scent any indiscretion on her part--had left on Sunday evening, Sabine was out, and Joy had not noticed anything odd; she noticed little at the moment, apart from the fading health of her old horse, and the seemingly endless tasks that had suddenly acquired an urgency around the house and yard, and so they had snuck off, careering away in the Land Rover, as secretly gleeful as truanting children. Kate, by now unable to suppress her frantic need to touch him, had reached for his hand, and then had to stop herself from shrinking away when she came into contact with hard plastic instead of yielding flesh.
"You get used to it," he said, apparently amused. "I used to make myself jump, rubbing my nose in my sleep. Or worse."
He had glanced sideways at her as he spoke, a sly smile playing about his lips.
Kate had glowed with something that could have been embarrassment, but undoubtedly contained something more pleasurable. Neither had spoken for some minutes after that, both silenced by the vision Thom's words had provoked.
"So what about you, then?"
Thom finished his coffee, and placed the cup on the dashboard, next to the old woolen gloves, baling twine, and a yellowing copy of the Racing Post.
"What about me?"
"Well, there must have been someone. It was more than sixteen years, after all."
Thom looked down, and shrugged.
"I wasn't a saint. But there was no one special."
Kate was incredulous.
"In sixteen years?" Her voice held the faintest tinge of fear, hijacked by the less enticing specter of unhealthy obsession on his part. "There must have been someone. Did you never want to get married? Never live with someone?"
"There were a couple of girls I was fond of." He turned to face her again, reaching for her hand with his own. "But we're different. I don't find it that easy to get involved. I'd rather be on my own than with someone who isn't . . ." His voice tailed off.
Kate silently filled in the gaps. Suitable? Perfect? The one? The prospect of the latter made her break out in a sweat--it was too soon for him to be talking like this; she wasn't entirely sure she had made the right decision getting involved as far as she had. But there was also another unwelcome prospect: that of an implied criticism in what he'd said. We're different. I'd rather be on my own than . . . than be like her? Was he suggesting she was indiscriminate?
She took a sip of her own coffee, formulating and rejecting various responses. But she didn't ask him what he'd meant. As he said, you could ask too many questions sometimes.
Two men, tiny figures, like insects, busied themselves around a small boat, one pointing and gesticulating. A third trudged backward and forward along the seafront, collecting objects unknown.
"Were you angry with me?" she said, eventually.
"At first."
His blue eyes reflected the unusually clear skies. They stayed fixed on some distant point, perhaps lost in history. "It's hard to stay angry with someone for long. Someone you care about, anyway."
Kate bit her lip.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. We were young. We were bound to screw things up one way or another."
"But I screwed it up."
"You just got there before me."
"You're terribly Zen these days."
He smiled. "Zen? Is that what they call it? Nah . . ." He grinned, a long, slow smile that spread across his face. "I've just learned not to get wound up about things I can't change."
Kate hesitated. Couldn't help herself.
"Like your arm?"
"Yeah." He looked down at his left hand, resting lightly on his thigh. "I guess that was a pretty good introduction. You can't argue with a missing limb. . . . You can't argue with anything missing."
They sat in silence, watching the gulls wheel and hover over the bay. The little boat was pushed out to sea, one little figure waving off the two who had climbed within it. It leaped the first few waves like a salmon fighting its way upstream.
Kate pondered the possible interpretations of things missing. There were things she wanted to hear from him that she knew she would shy away from, things that were both necessary and impossible to hear. Still contradictory, said Virtual Maggie. Still obsessed by romance and its possibilities. Still not standing on your own two feet. Oh, bog off, Kate told her.
"There was one thing that troubled me," he said, his gaze still fixed away from her.
Kate had been tracing the palm of his hand with her finger. She looked up.
"It's going to sound a bit strange. But it bothered me for a long time. . . . I wanted to ask you . . . why him?"
She hadn't expected that. She blinked, hard.
"I mean, you hardly knew him. I know we weren't together that long, or anything, but I didn't understand why you would give him something that special. I didn't understand why . . . well, why not me?"
For the first time, he looked troubled, unsure of himself. He closed and opened his mouth a few times, as if struggling with unfamiliar emotions. "I keep looking at Sabine," he said, eventually. "And I'm so conscious . . . that she could have been mine."
Ka
te thought of Alexander Fowler, of the birthday portrait, of the furious and perverse determination behind her unsolicited unzipping of her old-fashioned velvet dress, and of the twin emotions of amazement and opportunism that had run riot across that man's face, confronted with her newly naked teenage body. It had been hot in there, she remembered; suffused with the smells of turpentine and oil paint, flanked all around by half-finished images of people she didn't know. She remembered dressing, afterward, as he disappeared into his house on a hunt for cigarettes, and feeling like they now knew her rather better.
"If it had been you, it would have meant something," she said slowly. "And I suppose I didn't want it to mean that much." A gift horse, that had been the expression that he used. It had made her cringe at the time.
Thom stared at her, his own expression blank, still uncomprehending. Behind him a solitary gull wheeled and cried.
"If it had been you, Thom," she said, tightening her hold on his hand, "you would have made me stay."
Sabine, sitting by the upstairs window, watched as the Land Rover turned into the drive and discharged her mother onto the gravel outside the house. She was holding a newspaper and something unidentified in a brown paper bag; nothing she couldn't have gotten in town with her grandmother later, Sabine observed. She was also running her hand repeatedly through her hair--a dead giveaway that you fancied someone; Sabine had read it in a magazine. No doubt if she looked closely enough, her mother's pupils would be dilated, too.
She turned away from the window, toward the bed where her grandfather was sleeping, letting the heavy curtain fall. Too busy fancying men to spend time with her own father, she thought bitterly. You could count the number of times she'd been up to see him on one hand. Grandfather didn't even seem to realize his own daughter was staying here, that was how involved she had gotten. Then again, apart from the nurse, Sabine seemed to be the only one to get involved these days. Her grandmother was always too busy. Or fussing over the Duke, who, John John told her with apparent relish, was headed for the great cat-food factory in the sky.
Sabine sat lightly on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb him. He seemed more comfortable sleeping, these days. When he was awake, he often got agitated, and his breathing came in hoarse, labored gasps that made Sabine's own chest feel tight and anxious. She would hold his hand then, trying not to feel panicked when his grip sporadically tightened, like it was practicing for rigor mortis.
"He off again?" said Lynda, the nurse, walking briskly into the room with a jug of fresh water. "Oh, well. Best thing for him."
Lynda (she had inserted the "y" herself, she told Sabine) was going to leave full-time nursing for a career in aromatherapy once this job was over. She never said at what point she would consider it over, but they both knew when that was.
"Just gone," said Sabine.
"Why don't you go off? Go and enjoy yourself? I know, I would. You spend too much time up here." Sabine waited for her to add that it "wasn't healthy," another Lynda favorite, but it didn't come.
"Go on. I'm going to sit and watch my soaps for half an hour, so you might as well go. And, yes, you don't have to say it, I'll have the volume down."
Sabine went, disappearing into the study in order to reexamine the piece of paper that had become a long-term resident in her pocket. It was now two days since she had received the letter from Geoff informing her that he was going to get married to that Indian woman, and she still didn't know quite what to do about it. She had initially assumed that her mother had been sent the same news, but nothing in her demeanor since appeared to justify that belief. If anything, she had been more cheerful.
It wasn't just the news that Geoff, like Jim, had found a new family that bothered her. It was what it said about her own family. Why hadn't Geoff ever asked her mother? They had been together six years, and he had seemed a committed kind of bloke. He had even tentatively mentioned being a "surrogate father." Kate, Sabine had been forced to conclude, was evidently not the kind of girl men married. Not like her grandmother, who had managed to get herself asked after just one day. She was the kind of girl who allowed herself to be used and dumped again and again and again. It was hopeless, her lack of self-respect. That permanently eager expression she wore around men, like she would be grateful for whatever emotional scraps they threw out. Sabine stared at the now-familiar phrases of the letter, with its slightly earnest desire "to keep her in the picture," its promises that he would "always be there for her." It was not that she had wanted her mother to marry Geoff; just that the fact that he had never asked her somehow made her even more irritated with her mother than she had been already. It felt like another failure.
She looked down at the photographs that she and her grandmother had not yet gotten around to sorting: the baby pictures of Christopher and Kate (he looked pompous even then, she decided) in burgundy, gilt-embossed borders, and the photographs of Kate and the little Chinese boy. Sabine would have really liked to know more about the Chinese boy, but Joy had been too busy to finish them off, she had said the last time they had sat there, reverting to her brusque, matter-of-fact voice. There were too many other things that needed doing right now. Sabine should just do with them what she wanted.
He seems to have been the only bloke who ever stuck around by you, thought Sabine, fingering the photograph of the two of them grinning toothily from under their hats. Whatever you had, Mum, you definitely lost it somewhere.
"Sabine?"
Sabine jumped. Kate stood in the doorway.
"I wondered if you wanted some lunch. Your granny said she's not hungry, and your grandfather's asleep, so I was wondering if you wanted to grab a bite with me."
"I hope you didn't wake him up," said Sabine, shoving the letter back into her back pocket.
"No, darling, he's asleep. The nurse told me."
"And I suppose you didn't think to check."
Kate forced herself to maintain her smile. Nothing was going to spoil today--neither her mother's blunt dismissal of Kate's offer to cook (Mrs. H was off visiting a doctor in Wexford Town to see if he had any advice about Annie), nor her daughter's apparent irritation at any attempt to help. She shifted her weight slightly, so that she moved farther into the room.
"I thought I'd just do some soup. And bread and butter. Mrs. H was kind enough to leave us a loaf."
"Fine. Whatever."
Sabine turned away from her, back to the photographs.
But Kate didn't go away.
"What are you doing?"
What do you think? thought Sabine. "Just sorting through some old photographs," she said, noncommittally. "Grandmother said I could."
Kate's gaze had landed on the top of the box.
"Is that me?" She walked over and bent down, picking up the photograph of herself and the Chinese boy. "My God," she said, adjusting her glasses. "I haven't seen these for years."
Sabine said nothing.
"It's Tung-Li," she said. "My amah's son. We used to play together . . . until--" She broke off. "He was a sweetheart. Terribly shy. He was probably my first childhood friend. There were only a few months between us."
Sabine, despite herself, looked over.
"There was a pool at the back of the apartments where we lived. In Hong Kong. And when none of the other families were around, he and I used to play water dragons in there. Or ride my red bicycle around the edge. We fell in a couple of times, if I remember. My amah was furious." She laughed. "She had a hell of a job drying off anything in the wet season, so having one's best shoes in the swimming pool was really a no-no."
"How old are you there?"
Kate frowned. "I think we moved to the swimming pool place when I was about four, so . . . probably about five? Or six?"
"What happened to him?"
Kate's expression changed. She looked suddenly less animated.
"Well, I sort of had to stop playing with him."
"Why?"
Kate paused.
"It's just the way things were the
n. Your--your granny had very firm ideas about what was proper. And apparently playing with Tung-Li wasn't proper. Not for a girl like me."
"What, even though you'd been friends for all that time?"
"Yes." Kate thought back, her face now closing off with remembered injustice.
Sabine stared at the photograph.
"It doesn't sound like Grandmother," she said.
Kate's head shot up. She couldn't help herself.
"You don't think so, do you?"
"She's always been all right with me."
"Well, darling, one day you'll find out that Granny is not always the sweet old lady that you now think. She can be as hard as nails, too."
Sabine looked at her mother, simultaneously shocked by her unusually hard tone, and perversely feeling the need to contradict it.
"You think it's fair to separate two children, just because of the color of their skin?"
"No," said Sabine, conscious of the feeling of being backed into a corner. "But things were different then, weren't they? People didn't see things the same way. It was the way they were brought up."
"So you'd have thought it was fine if I'd made you eat meat back home--because that was the way I was brought up? Because it was, you know. If I'd refused to eat meat here I would have been told to live off potatoes or nothing."
"No, of course not."
"So, Sabine, how come everything Granny does is somehow okay, somehow excusable? And yet how come everything I do, no matter how well intended, is thrown back in my face?"
Kate didn't know where this had come from, yet somehow the sight of that picture had brought the ancient sense of injustice back to the surface, and made her infuriated again. She was tired of taking the rap for all the wrongs of the world, tired of taking Sabine's sharp cracks with equanimity, of being burdened both by the guilty acknowledgment that she had ruined everyone's lives and by having to keep moving on, nodding and smiling, from underneath it.
"Sometimes, Sabine, believe it or not, your mum is the wronged party. Occasionally, just occasionally, she is in the right."