"Mummy--"
"Please go away," said Joy, lifting her head slightly, so that Kate could just make out the red-rimmed eyes, the flattened, matted gray hair. "I just want to be left alone."
Outside, in the corridor, Kate heard the sound of Sabine's door closing. She lowered her voice.
"You know what? It would be really nice if you listened to me. Just once."
Joy looked away, through the window.
"Look, whatever you think of me, Mummy, I'm still Daddy's daughter. And I'm here. Christopher's not. And it's not fair for Sabine to have to cope with all this on her own. Someone has to decide whether Daddy is going to go into hospital, and, if not, what we are going to do." She paused, rubbed at a mark on her trouser leg.
"Right. If you're not downstairs in five minutes, then I shall decide with the doctor what's the best thing to do with Daddy." With a deep sigh, Kate turned and walked out of the little room, closing the door firmly behind her.
Joy arrived in the drawing room just as the doctor was finishing his cup of tea, her hair smoothed back, and her eyes almost obscured by puffy folds of skin.
"So sorry to have kept you waiting," she told him.
Kate, seated opposite in one of the easy chairs beside the fire, didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
It's like she would do almost anything rather than talk to me," she said afterward, absently fingering an unidentified leather strap, as she sat with Thom in the tack room.
She was sunk into an old armchair, her legs stretched out near the three-bar electric heater that, while glowing brightly, seemed to do little to dispel the cold. The air, stark and clear outside, condensed into little clouds of steam as she spoke. "I mean, at a time like this a family is meant to pull together. Even a family like ours. And yet she just marches around, making herself busier and busier, staying away from Dad, and yet refusing to talk to me about what we should do about him. Christopher's stuck in Geneva at some conference, and Sabine is too young to have to make those sorts of decisions, so it's not like she's got anyone else to talk to, is it?"
Thom sat, rubbing the dirt from a bridle with a piece of wet sponge, deftly unpicking buckles and stripping it apart with his right hand.
"Am I really that useless? Is it so inconceivable that I might be able to help her?"
He shook his head.
"It's not about you. It's about her."
"What do you mean?"
"It's easier for her to grieve for her horse than for her husband. She's so knotted up, your mother, so used to keeping it all inside. I don't suppose she knows how to deal with what's going on."
Kate thought for a minute.
"I don't agree. She's always found it easy enough to get cross. I think it's about me. She just doesn't want to let me feel that anything I do could possibly be of any use to her." She stood, facing the door. "She's never been proud of anything I did. I've always gotten it wrong in her eyes. She just doesn't want to let that change."
"You're awful hard on her."
"She's been awfully hard on me. Look, Thom, who was it who said I couldn't live at home when I got pregnant with Sabine? Huh? How much do you think that hurt me? I was eighteen years old, for God's sake." Kate was now pacing the little room, running her hand along the saddle racks that lined one side.
"I thought you didn't want to stay."
"I didn't. But that was partly because they were so bloody awful to me."
Thom paused, lifted the bridle to the light, searching for patches of inbuilt grime, and then lowered it onto his knee.
"That was a long time ago. You should move on. We've moved on."
Kate turned to him, her mouth set in an obstinate scowl that, had she seen it, her late grandmother Alice would doubtless have remarked was exactly like her mother's.
"I can't move on, Thom. Not till she stops judging me for everything I do. Not till she can start accepting me for who I am."
She had folded her arms, and stood there, glaring at him, her hair falling over her face. He put the bridle down, and stood upright, placing his arms tightly around her, so that her body, inevitably, became fluid, and relaxed within them.
"Let it go."
"I can't."
"For now. We'll do something to take your mind off it." His voice was soft, tender. Kate lifted her finger and traced his lips. The bottom one was very faintly blistered, from the cold.
"So, what did you have in mind?" she murmured. "You know the house is full of people."
He grinned, his eyes lifting mischievously.
"I think it's about time you came riding."
Kate stared, and then pulled back, away from him.
"Ohhh, no," she said. "You might have gotten Sabine. You are not getting me. I've spent the last twenty years thanking God that I didn't have to get on another bloody horse. No way."
Thom walked slowly toward her. He was still smiling.
"We could go for miles. It's a beautiful day."
"No. No way."
"We could just walk, slowly, and head down to the forest." He paused. "Where no one can see us."
Kate shook her head, her mouth firmly closed, in the manner of someone trying to stave off an unwelcome kiss.
"I don't ride, Thom. Horses scare me. I'll be quite happy if I never ride another one in my whole life."
His good hand crept behind her neck, pulling her gently toward him. He smelled of soap, and of the sweet, musty scent of meadow hay.
"You don't have to ride one. You can get on with me. I'll have my arm around you the whole time."
Kate felt dizzy, intoxicated by the nearness of him. She placed her arms around his collar, wanting to sink into him, wanting to feel him sink into her. Her eyes closed, and she let her head fall to one side, feeling his warm breath on her exposed neck.
"I want to be on my own with you," he whispered, and the vibrations of his voice made the hairs on the back of her neck stiffen exquisitely.
Then she jumped back, as she heard the sound of a stable door slamming shut.
There was the sound of approaching footfall, and then Liam appeared at the door, his thin, weathered face dark against the bright light outside. He stood, a blanket under his arm, his gaze flickering from Thom, who was seated, cleaning tack, to Kate, who stood, casually resting against one of the saddles.
"Gorgeous day," he said. It was directed at Thom, but his eyes rested on Kate. "I thought I'd probably leave the blankets off the bay colt, for now. He's not as thin-skinned as we thought."
Thom nodded. "Good move. I was thinking we should probably turn him out, now that the weather's improving," he said. Then looked up, inquiringly, only the briefest of glances directed at Kate.
"So, you going to be around all day, Liam?"
Sabine walked down to the stable yard, her hands thrust deep in the pockets of her jeans, her chin buried in the polo neck of her jumper, so that only her eyes and nose, both of which were pink and slightly raw-looking, emerged. Her grandfather was dying, that was basically what the doctor had said, even if he had dressed it up in all sorts of "problematics" and "prognoses." Her grandfather was going to die, her grandmother had gone all strange because her horse had died, Annie hadn't answered her calls for ages, and the whole thing was falling apart. The only proper family she had ever had was falling apart.
Bertie at her feet, Sabine sat down on the wooden bench by the paddock, and wiped at her nose with her sleeve. She was increasingly having to fight a suspicion, stupid as it sounded, that it had something to do with her. The two families she'd had at home, Jim and Geoff, they had fallen apart. Now her Irish family, whose numbers had all been perfectly well and normal when she arrived--well, maybe not normal, exactly, she conceded--that was all disintegrating, fracturing, and fading around her. Nothing was as it had been when she came. Nothing. And if it didn't have anything to do with her, then what was it?
Sabine let out a long, shuddering sigh, so that Bertie looked up questioningly, before resettling his nose between his paws. B
obby had told her she was being ridiculous when she told him her theory on the telephone. "Old people die. Old horses die," he had said. "That's what happens. You just haven't been up close to it before." He had been nice. Not made any jokes about it all, as if understanding that she really needed to talk to someone. She would have talked to Thom, she thought bitterly, but even he was never around these days. He hadn't offered to take her out riding for ages, and when it was just the two of them in the yard, he was just pleasant and jokey with her, like he was talking to John John, or even some stranger.
Sabine stood, suddenly conscious of the cold, rubbed at her elbows, and walked over to the stables, poking her head over the top of each door to see who was in and who wasn't. She had toyed with speaking to her mother. They had gotten on okay for a couple of days, since the Geoff letter. But sympathetic as Kate might have been, any conversation with her about Kilcarrion was going to be too difficult, clouded by Kate's inability to get on with Joy, and muddied by the fact that both knew that she wanted to leave Ireland as soon as possible, and Sabine didn't.
Because that was the crux of it: Even if her grandfather died, she didn't want to go. She had gotten used to it here: its rhythms and structures, the way you knew what was going to happen. Most of the time. She liked the horses. The big house. The people. She couldn't imagine spending hours aimlessly hanging around the housing project, where all that mattered was who was wearing what and whether people fancied one another. If she tried to talk to them about riding, or hunting, they would take the mickey out of her, make out she had turned posh. They would make her feel different, more different than she already felt. Somehow, home didn't feel like home anymore. And hearing that, Sabine thought guiltily, was going to break her mother's heart again.
She pushed open the stable door, trod softly inside, and put her arms around the gray, who, engrossed in a hay net, ignored her. After some minutes, she walked out, closed the door carefully, and made for the tack room. A ride would blow the black clouds away. That was what her grandmother always said.
Liam was alone in there, swiping at a horse blanket with a brush that seemed more clogged with hairs than the fabric it was trying to clean.
"Thought I'd take the gray out," she said, reaching for his bridle.
"Nice day for it," said Liam, grinning. "Mind you, it's always a nice day for it."
"Har-har," said Sabine, trying not to smile. She didn't feel Liam should be encouraged.
"You going out by yourself?"
"Yes? So?"
"Nothing."
"Go on."
Liam shrugged. "Thought you'd rather have company. Thought you liked to ride out with Thom."
Sabine struggled to lift the saddle off the rack, determined not to blush.
"Well, I don't know where he is. And there's no one about today. Not really."
"Well, now, you might just be surprised."
Sabine looked at him.
"I think Thom's headed over to the forest. On the big horse." He dropped the brush in a box on the floor and gave the blanket a shake. "I can't remember whether he had anyone with him or not."
He turned to the next blanket on his pile, a peculiar smile playing about his lips. "Have a good one," he said.
Sabine frowned at Liam, and then walked out of the yard, her reins dragging on the floor behind her. Liam could be really odd, sometimes.
Deep Boar Forest, as it was known locally, neither was particularly deep, nor, to anyone's knowledge, did it contain any boars. It ran, about a quarter of a mile wide, along the course of a small river, which backed two local country estates and provided trout fishing in season, and opportunities for local teenagers to lose themselves, unspied upon by their elders, in summer. It was, however, long; pursuing the winding river for almost a mile and a half, so that those who wanted to convince themselves that they were far from civilization could do so, protected by the shelter and the near silence of the trees and shrubbery around them.
It was halfway down this river path that Thom pulled the big bay hunter gently to a halt, and, swinging his right leg over the back of the saddle, sprang lightly onto the soft, peat-cushioned earth. Looping the reins over his left arm, he reached up to help Kate down. Rather less gracefully, she slithered down the horse's shoulder, then made her way slowly to the recumbent tree trunk, and seated herself gingerly on its mossy surface.
"I'm not going to be able to move tomorrow," she said, rubbing at her backside and wincing.
"It's the day after that will really get you."
"You don't have to sound so pleased about it."
Thom stroked the horse's nose, and then led him over to another tree. He untied the lead rope around the horse's neck and clipped it onto his bit, securing him to a branch with a loose knot. Then he walked slowly over to the trunk and sat down beside her, pushing back her hair and kissing her nose.
"Was it really so bad?"
She grinned ruefully. Looked down as if she could see the emerging bruises through her clothes.
"I wouldn't have done that for anyone else."
"I hope not. If we'd have sat any closer we'd have been flouting public decency laws."
"Oh, I didn't get the feeling that you minded too much."
They leaned together and kissed for a long time, Kate breathing in the damp, mysterious scents of woodland, the musty smells of rotting leaves and sharp tang of new growth mingling with the subtler ones of the man beside her. She was, she realized, unequivocally happy.
"I love you, you know," he said, when they pulled apart.
"I know. I love you, too."
It hadn't required any effort at all. No soul-searching. No trauma.
Above them, the bright sunlight cast spindly rays through the green canopy, illuminating the earth around them in winking, moving spotlights. The breeze gently rustled the undergrowth beneath them, an invisible hand running lightly across its surface. They kissed again, his hands now entwined in her hair, forcing her gently back onto the wide bed of the tree trunk, so that she could feel his weight upon her. It made her weak with longing, and she clutched at him in return, trying to bring him closer, closer.
Time stilled, dissolved in the feeling of him against her, of their mingled breathing, of the feel of his lips against her skin.
"Oh, Thom," she murmured into his ear. "I want you."
She felt his cheek, rough against her, and his stillness as he paused. Then he pushed himself up on his good hand, his eyes fixed on hers. "I want you," he said, and stooped to bestow a kiss, like a blessing, on her face.
She reached up, feeling there was too great a distance between them, pulling him down toward her. But halfway down, he stopped, his strength holding the gap between their bodies.
"No," he said.
"What?" She squinted, as a shaft of sunlight broke the shady cover above them, briefly unable to see his face. Oh, God, she thought suddenly, it's the glasses. I shouldn't have worn the glasses.
"I don't want to do it here. Like this." He pushed himself fully upright, his breathing still irregular. "I don't want it to be . . . sleazy."
"How could this be sleazy?" Kate, also struggling upright, fought to keep the impatience from her voice.
"Not sleazy, then. The wrong word." He rubbed at the back of his head, reached for her hand, turned it over.
"I just want it to be perfect. It . . . I don't know . . . I waited so long . . . it's you, you mean too much."
Kate stared at her palm, aware of the slow dissipation of the heat within her body. Replaced by a different kind of tenderness. A different power.
"It won't be perfect, Thom."
He glanced up at her, two perfect blue irises in black borders.
"You can't expect it to be perfect. If you build this up too much, we'll disappoint each other. Believe me." I know, she added silently.
He looked down, still studying her hand.
"Just because it's been such a long time coming, doesn't mean we should make it more significant than it is.
It'll probably be a bit awkward, at first. I mean, we've got to get used to each other."
Unconsciously, he glanced at his arm. Kate shook her head.
"We've both changed, Thom. We both have to start from scratch. I think it will be perfect, but eventually. And I think it's more important that we just start from somewhere." She smiled, looked around her. "Even if it's not here. Or for the next couple of days. Because frankly, I don't think I'm going to be able to move my legs."
The mood eased, expanded. He looked back at her, breathed out, a short, half-laughing breath. And then he lifted her hand and, his eyes still fixed intently on hers, took hold of the inside of her wrist lightly with his teeth. At the touch of his mouth on her skin, Kate's spine became molten, her vision, even from behind her glasses, blurred. She swallowed hard.
"You're right," he said into her wrist, his eyes still burning into hers. "We shouldn't make it the be-all and end-all."
He let go, and placed her hand gently back on her lap. Smiled.
"But you're wrong, too, you know. It will be perfect."
Sabine turned toward home, lifting her left leg forward with a newly practiced ease, and loosening the buckles on the horse's girth, so that he could relax a bit, too. She had ridden him hard this afternoon, determined to focus only on the physical sensations of his sinewy frame pounding rhythmically across the turf beneath her, the glorious, all-absorbing feeling of him lifting and stretching over the jumps, keen to blank out the complications that lay ahead.
She wasn't going to go home. She was just going to have to tell her mother. She would visit her, she would explain, and she would ring her every week, but she was going to live here. Where Grandmother needed her. Where she felt happiest. Maybe she wouldn't say that last bit, she thought, lengthening her reins, so that the gray's head drooped gratefully. It sounded a bit cruel. Even for Mum.
The lowering sun glowed red, casting a silent, Scandinavian glow over the empty fields, and tinting the top fields, still tipped with frost, with pink hues. Behind her, exhausted, Bertie trotted listlessly at a safe distance from the rear hooves, his paws clicking lightly on the tarmac. She could always go back every other weekend, if her mother was really desperate. She knew she didn't like being on her own. But she would have to understand that it was partly her own fault; that it was she who had sent Sabine here after all. And it wasn't her fault if she got on with Grandmother and Grandfather so much better than she did.