But Sabine always made it impossible for her to say anything, was seemingly covered in an ever-growing coat of spikes, like a glamorous, sulky little porcupine. If she told her she loved her she was told off for being so Little House on the Prairie. If she reached out to hug her, she felt her child visibly flinch in her arms. How did this come about? she repeatedly asked herself. I was so determined that our relationship would be different, that you would have all the freedoms I was denied. That we would be friends. How did you come to despise me?
Kate had become an expert at hiding her apparently odious feelings from her daughter. Sabine hated it even more if she got needy and emotional; it just made her even more prickly. So instead she reached into her overflowing basket-bag and handed over her tickets, as well as what she considered a generous amount of spending money. Sabine didn't even acknowledge it.
"Now, the crossing will take around three hours. It looks like it might be a bit rough, but I'm afraid I didn't bring anything for seasickness. You'll get into Rosslare at around four-thirty, and your granny will meet you at the information desk. Do you want me to write any of that down?"
"I think I can just about remember 'information desk,'" said Sabine, dryly.
"Well, if anything does go wrong, I've put the phone numbers for the house on the back of the ticket holder. And ring me when you get there. Just so I know you've arrived."
Making sure the coast is clear, thought Sabine, bitterly. Her mother must really think she was stupid. She must really think she didn't know what was going on. There had been so many times in the past few weeks where she had wanted to scream at her, I know, you know. I know about why you and Geoff are splitting up. I know about you and Justin bloody Stewartson. And that's why you're shipping me out of the way for a few weeks, so you can carry on your disgusting little affair with both me and Geoff gone.
But, somehow, despite all her anger, she had never quite had the appetite for it. Because her mother had just seemed too sad, too droopily miserable about it all. Still, if she thought she was going to go quietly, she had another thought coming.
They sat in the car for a few minutes. Periodically, the rain would ease, and they would get a glimpse of the unlovely terminal in front of them, but then it would beat down again, turning the picture into a watercolor bleed.
"So, will Geoff be gone when I get back?" Sabine lifted her chin as she said this, so that it sounded more defiant than inquiring.
Kate gazed at her.
"Probably," she said, slowly. "But you can still see him anytime you want."
"Like I could see Jim anytime I wanted."
"You were a lot younger then, darling. And it got complicated because Jim got a new family."
"No, it got complicated because I got one bloody stepfather after another."
Kate's hand stretched out to her daughter's arm. Why did no one tell you that childbirth was the easiest pain?
"I'd better go," muttered Sabine, opening the car door. "I wouldn't want to miss my ferry."
"Let me walk you over to the terminal," said Kate, tears stinging at her eyes.
"Don't bother," said Sabine, and with the hollow slam of the door, Kate was alone.
It was a rough crossing, rough enough for the screaming children to whiz up and down the carpeted walkway on stolen dinner trays, while their parents slid comfortably backward and forward along plastic-covered benches, drinking from cans of Red Stripe and occasionally breaking into noisy explosions of laughter. Others queued, staggering, for overpriced chips at the cafeteria, ignoring the salads wilting under cling film, or played the slot machines that broadcast jangles and sirens alongside the stairs. Judging by the number of families, and the resolute postponing of hangovers, the Sunday afternoon crossing was popular among weekend trippers.
Sabine sat in a window seat, her personal stereo closeting her from all the irritating people around her. They seemed to be grown from the same stock as the people she saw in motorway services, or supermarkets. People who didn't care that much what they wore; whether their haircuts were so last year; whether the way they sat or spoke was likely to be embarrassing. This is what Ireland is going to be like, she told herself grimly, above the bass-heavy sound of her CD. Backward. Culture-free. An anticool zone.
For the millionth time, she cursed her mother for this exile, this removal from her friends, her manor, her normal life. It was going to be a nightmare. She had nothing in common with these people, her grandparents were virtual strangers, she was leaving Dean Baxter to the evil clutches of Amanda Gallagher just at the point where she thought she was getting somewhere with him, and, worst of all, she wouldn't even have her mobile phone or computer to keep in touch. (Even she had to admit that her computer was too large to transport, while her mother had told her that if she thought she was going to pay to have an "international call" facility on her already overspent mobile, then "she had another thing coming." Why did they say that? If she had told her mother she should thing again, her mother would have started on about how she should have sent her to private school.)
So she was not only to be exiled, but without even the comforts of phone or e-mail. But even as she sat staring grimly at the churning Irish Sea, Sabine allowed herself the smallest sense of relief that she wasn't going to have to be party to the endless tensions of her mother and Geoff slowly and painfully unthreading their domestic web.
She had known it was going to happen before even Geoff had. She had known from the afternoon she came down from her room and heard her mother whispering into the phone. "I know. I want to see you, too. But you know he's impossible at the moment. And I don't want to make things worse."
She had stood, frozen on the stairs, and then coughed loudly, so that her mother put the phone down suddenly and guiltily, and then said, too brightly, when she walked into the living room: "Oh, it's you sweetheart! I didn't hear you out there! I was just thinking, What shall we have for supper?"
Her mother didn't cook supper. She was a useless cook. It was Geoff's job.
And then she had met him. Justin Stewartson. Photographer on a left-leaning national newspaper. A man so full of his own sense of self-importance that he had caught the tube rather than travel in her mother's battered car. A man who thought he was it because he wore a leather jacket that might have been cool about five years ago, and khaki-colored trousers with desert boots. He had tried too hard to talk to Sabine, throwing in comments about underground bands that he thought she would know, trying to sound both cynical and knowledgeable about the music business. She had given him what she hoped was a withering look. She knew why he was trying to be friendly, and it wouldn't wash. And men over thirty-five could never be cool, not even if they thought they knew about music.
Poor old Geoff. Poor fusty old Geoff. He had sat at home, brow furrowed as he worried night after night about patients whom he couldn't get sectioned, ringing around all the psychiatric units in central London in an effort to stop some other nutter ending up on the streets. He hadn't had a bloody clue. And her mother had merely drifted in and out distantly, pretending to sound as if she cared, until the day that Sabine came downstairs and it was obvious that he knew, because he gave her one of those long searching glances, like, "Did you know? Et tu, Brute?" It was difficult to fool Geoff, because of his psychiatric training. So when she stared back at him, she tried to convey some sense of sympathy, some sense of disapproval at her mother's pathetic actions.
She didn't let either of them know how hard she had cried. Geoff had been irritating, and a bit earnest, and she had never let him think he was a dad of sorts. But he had been kind, and he had cooked, and kept Mum sane, and he had been around since she was a kid. Longer than any of the others, in fact. Besides, the thought of Mum and Justin Stewartson doing it made her want to vomit.
The announcement that Rosslare was now a few minutes away came at just after four-thirty. Sabine slid out of her seat and made her way to the foot passengers' disembarkment point, trying to ignore the little flutter of
nervousness in her stomach. She had traveled alone only once before, and that had been a disastrous "holiday" flight out to join Jim, her mother's previous live-in partner, in Spain. He had wanted to reassure her that she was still family. Her mother had wanted to reassure her that she still had a father of sorts. The British Airways stewardess had wanted to reassure her that she was obviously a "very big girl" to be traveling alone. But even from the moment Jim had met her at the airport, with his heavily pregnant, wary-eyed new girlfriend trailing in his wake, she had known it was going to be a disaster. She had seen him only once after that, when he had "tried to get her involved" with the new baby. The girlfriend had looked at her like she wanted her to get as uninvolved as possible. She didn't blame her, really. The baby wasn't a blood relative, after all. And she wouldn't have wanted some kid from a previous relationship hanging around like a lost soul.
The doors opened, and Sabine found herself transported along the walkway, hemmed in on all sides by chattering people. She wondered about putting her earphones back on, but she was secretly afraid of missing some vital announcement. The last thing she wanted was to have to ring her mother and tell her she had gotten it wrong.
She glanced around her, wondering what her grandmother was going to look like. The most recent picture she had of her was taken more than ten years earlier, when she had last been to the Irish house. She had only the most distant memories of it, but the picture showed a dark-haired woman, high-boned and handsome, smiling reservedly down at her as she patted a small gray pony.
What if I don't recognize her? she thought, anxiously. Was she likely to be offended? Her birthday and Christmas cards were always short and formal, not the kind of writing to suggest a sense of humor. From the little her mother said it was all too easy to do the wrong thing.
Then she spotted him. Standing, leaning against a desk that may or may not have been the information point, holding up a piece of card with the word "Sabine" on it. He was medium height, wiry-looking, with thick, dark hair cut close against his head. Probably the same age as her mother. He also, she noted as she walked slowly over, had only one arm. The other extended into a semiclawed plastic hand, in the kind of unrelaxed pose more commonly seen on shop display dummies.
She put her hand unconsciously to her hair, checking that it hadn't flattened too much on the journey, and then walked over, trying to muster as much insouciance as she could.
"You've changed, Granny."
He had looked at her quizzically as she approached, as if assessing whether he had the right girl. Now he smiled, and held out his good hand. This involved putting the card on the desk first.
"Sabine. I'm Thom. You're older than I thought. Your grandma said you would be . . ." He shook his head. "Well. She couldn't come because the Duke's got the vet in. So I'm your chauffeur."
"The Duke?" she said.
He had the kind of lilting Irish accent she thought only existed in television series. Her grandmother didn't have an Irish accent at all. She tried not to look at the plastic hand. It had the waxy complexion of something dead.
"The old horse. Her boy. He's got a problem with his leg. And she doesn't like anyone else looking after him. But she said she'll see you at the house."
So her grandmother, whom she hadn't seen for nearly ten years, had chosen not to come and meet her but to look after some mangy horse. Sabine felt her eyes prick unexpectedly with tears. Well, that told her all she needed to know about how her visit was viewed.
"She's a bit odd over him," said Thom, carefully, as he took her bag from her. "I wouldn't read anything into it. I know she's looking forward to seeing you."
"Some way of showing it," muttered Sabine. Then glanced quickly up at Thom to see if he thought her sulky.
She cheered up briefly when they walked outside. Not so much because of the car--a huge, battered Land Rover (although it was obviously cooler than Mum's)--but its cargo, two huge, chocolate-brown Labradors, as silky and sinuous as seals, squirming around each other in their passionate attempts to greet the returning.
"Bella. And Bertie. Mother and son. Go on, get over, you daft animal."
"Bertie?" she couldn't help grimacing, even as she rubbed the two adoring heads, trying to steer the wet noses from her face.
"They're all Bs. Down the line. Like hounds. Except the hounds are all Hs."
Sabine didn't like to ask what he was talking about. She hoisted herself into the front of the car, and strapped herself in. She wondered, with a little concern, how Thom was going to drive without his arm.
Erratically, as it turned out. But as they careered around the gray streets of Rosslare, and then onto the main road toward Kennedy Park, she realized she couldn't be entirely sure whether that was down to his insecure grip on the gear stick. His hand clasped it like an ill-fitting hard hat, rattling quietly against the plastic cover as the car bumped along the rough roads.
As a route home, she decided, it was less than promising. The drizzly, cramped streets of the port town contained no shops she could imagine wanting to hang out in, being stuffed with, as far as she could see, old ladies' stiffly upholstered underwear or car parts, while outside it seemed to be all hedgerow, dotted by modern bungalows bearing a sprinkling of satellite dishes, like some strange fungi sprouting from the brick. It didn't even feel like proper countryside. There was a park dedicated to a dead president, but she couldn't see herself becoming desperate enough for greenery that she needed to use it.
"Is there anything to actually do in Wexford?" she had asked Thom, and he had turned briefly toward her and laughed, his mouth curled reluctantly around it, as if it didn't happen too often.
"Our big city girl is bored already, is she?" he said, but it was in a friendly way, so she didn't mind. "Don't worry. By the time you leave here, you'll be wondering what there is to do in the city."
She somehow doubted it.
To take her mind off her nerves, Sabine thought about Thom's arm, which was resting on the hand brake next to her. She had never met anyone with a false limb. Would it actually be attached to him, with some kind of glue? Or would he pull it off at night? Would he put it in a glass of water like her neighbor Margaret put her false teeth? And then there were the practical things--how would he put on his trousers? She had once broken her arm, and found it impossible to do up her fly one-handed. She had had to ask her mother to do it for her. She found herself stealing a look at his fly to see whether there was some sort of Velcro fastening and then glanced away quickly. He might think she was perving at him, and, nice as he was, she had no intention of a bit of one-armed banditry while she was here.
During the rest of the drive, Thom spoke to her only once more, to ask her how her mother was.
Sabine looked at him in surprise.
"How do you know her? You must have been here forever."
"Not quite. But I was around as a lad. And then I left to work in England a couple of years after she did."
"She never mentioned you." She realized as soon as it came out how rude it sounded. But he didn't seem offended. When he spoke, she had noticed, he did so with a kind of permanent time delay, as if measuring the words before he allowed them out.
"I don't know how much she'd remember me. I worked in the yard, and she was never a great one for the horses."
Sabine gazed at him, desperate to ask more questions. It seemed somehow strange to picture her mother here, friends, perhaps, with this one-armed horseman. She could picture her mother only ever in an urban environment: in their house in Hackney, its stripped floors, spider plants, and art-show posters broadcasting their liberal, lower-middle-class credentials. Or eating in one of the ethnic cafes in Kingsland Road, chatting earnestly to her long-earringed, angry female friends, trying to put off the ugly moment when she had to go back to writing her piece. Or arriving home in raptures from some arty film she had seen at the cinema, while Geoff, ever the realist, complained about its diversion from the German school's traditional imagery. Or whatever.
Thinking of Geoff made her stomach clench, and, annoyingly, provoked a renewed fluttering of nerves. She wondered, briefly, if he would try to write to her. Somehow knowing that he and Mum weren't going to be together anymore made it all awkward. She didn't know how to be with him anymore. He would probably find some new girlfriend within months, as Jim did, and then Mum would get dumped by Justin Stewartson and end up all bitter and upset and ask why men were "such aliens." Well she wasn't going to give her any sympathy. And she was never going to agree to go on holiday with Geoff if he got a new family. That was for sure.
"Here we are," said Thom.
She had no memory of the house at all, apart from its size. From her childhood, she remembered the inside: all dark-wood stairs and corridors that doubled back on themselves, the smells of wood smoke and wax. And she remembered the foxes' faces, mounted and dated according to their demise, jutting from their little shields and snarling impotently from the walls. At the age of six she had found them terrifying, and spent minutes at a time crouched on the stairs, waiting for someone to come past and give her the courage to race past them. From outside she remembered only a mournful donkey, who would bray incessantly when she walked away from its field, so that she felt blackmailed into staying. Her Mum and Jim had thought she was in love with it, and told everyone how sweet it was. She couldn't explain that she felt bullied by it, and was relieved when someone made her go back inside the house.
Now she noticed the exhausted-looking frontage of the house: the tall Georgian windows peeling their paint, the windowsills chipped and sagging like the mouth of an aging aunt. It had obviously been a grand house once, grander than anybody she knew. But it looked tired, steeped in decay, like someone who had stopped caring and was waiting simply for an excuse to go. It looks like I feel, Sabine thought, and felt an unexpected empathy.
"Hope you've brought your woollies," said Thom, out of the corner of his mouth, as he hauled her bag up the front steps. "It's awful damp in there."
They waited some moments after he rang the bell, and then the door opened, and a tall woman stood before her, dressed in Wellingtons and tweedy trousers, and rubbing bits of hay from her cardigan. She was old, her brow, nose, and chin pushing past dignified pronouncement to the exaggeration of old age. But she stood tall, and lean. When she held out her hand, her fingers were unexpectedly broad and close, like rough sausages.