Sheltering Rain

  This was all without the rules one should simply not have to be reminded of. Like not letting the dogs upstairs. Or keeping one's boots on in the drawing room. Or turning over the television so that it wasn't on Grandfather's favorite news channel. Or beginning to eat before everyone had been served. Or using the phone without asking first. Or sitting on the Aga to keep warm. Or having a bath in the evening (or of a depth any greater than six inches).

  A week into her stay, Sabine found there were so many rules to remember it was as if the house were a person itself, as seemingly persnickety, and set in its ways as her grandparents. At home, she had grown up with almost no rules; her mother had taken a perverse satisfaction in letting her structure her own life, a kind of Montessori existence, so that, faced with these never-ending and seemingly incomprehensible strictures, Sabine found herself increasingly resentful and depressed.

  That was until Thom taught her the most important rule, one that did return some small measure of freedom back into her life--never, ever attempt to traverse any distance within the house or grounds at a pace slower than the Kilcarrion walk. This was a brisk, purposeful gait, to be conducted with chin lifted and eyes focused on the middle distance, which, if carried out at correct speed, served to deflect any of the questions such as, "Where are you going?" or, more commonly, "What are you doing? Come on, you can help me muck out this stable," or ". . . fetch the horses in," or ". . . unhook the trailer," or ". . . hose out the dogs' shed."

  "It's not just you," said Thom. "She doesn't like to see anyone idle. Gets her anxious. That's why we all do it."

  Now that Sabine thought about it, she realized it was true. She had never seen anyone in the house, with the exception of her grandfather, moving at anything less than a rate of knots. And as she had seen the old man only sitting, she couldn't be sure about him.

  But it wasn't just the house, and its labyrinthine rules. Sabine, cut off from her friends, with only one brief, unsatisfactory telephone call to her mother, felt isolated and removed from everything she had known. She was an alien in these surroundings, as nonplussed by her elderly relatives as they apparently were by her. She had left the house and its grounds just once so far, to accompany her grandmother to a kind of hypermarket in the nearest town, where, had she been inclined, she could have purchased anything from processed cheese to white plastic garden furniture. There was that, and a post office, and a tack shop for horse stuff. No McDonald's, no cinema, no arcade. No magazines. Seemingly no people under the age of thirty. With the Daily Telegraph and Irish Times her only contact with the outside world, she didn't even know what was number one in the charts.

  Her grandmother, if she noticed Sabine's steady descent into depression, had evidently decided to ignore it, or treat it as some kind of teenage foible. She "organized" Sabine at the beginning of each day, giving her a succession of tasks, such as dropping off papers at the office, or fetching vegetables from the kitchen garden for Mrs. H, and treated her with the same brisk detachment with which she seemed to treat everyone around her. Except the dogs, that is. And, more significant, the Duke.

  That had been their worst falling-out so far, worse than her grandmother's insistence that vegetarianism couldn't possibly embrace chicken. It had come two days later, when, swinging on the door as the Duke was led stiffly back into his stable, Sabine had forgotten, as requested, to kick the bottom bolt across, and had subsequently had to watch, aghast, as with a skittishness worthy of a much younger and less lame animal, the old bay horse had worked the top bolt with his teeth, and made his elegant bid for freedom across the yard to the open fields beyond.

  It had taken her grandmother and both lads, with the aid of six apples, and a bucket of bran mash, almost two hours to catch him, tramping grimly around the top fields as he came tantalizingly close and veered away again, tail held high like a banner of defiance. When, as it began to get dark, he eventually strolled over, head low with exhaustion and sporting an air of something like embarrassment, he was limping badly. Her grandmother had been furious, had first shouted at her that she was a "stupid, stupid girl" and then, almost tearfully, had focused all her attention on her "boy," alternately rubbing at his neck and scolding him in soft tones as they walked stiffly back toward the stables. What about me? Sabine, now tearful herself, had wanted to yell at her departing back. I'm your bloody granddaughter and you've never said so much as a kind word to me!

  That had been the point at which Sabine had begun plotting her escape. And avoiding her grandmother, who managed, while never referring to the incident again, to somehow make Sabine feel the weight of her disapproval. She had not tried to hug Sabine again after that. In fact she had apparently found it hard to say anything much to her for a day or two; her mood only lifted when the vet announced that the inflammation in the Duke's leg was on its way down.

  So Sabine spent most of her time with Thom and the two lads, Liam and John John, both of whom, like Mrs. H, seemed to be some kind of distant relatives. Liam was a libidinous former jump jockey, almost incapable of saying anything that didn't swell into some kind of double entendre, while John John, his eighteen-year-old protege, was almost silent, his desperation to graduate into the nearby racing yard etched into his prematurely weather-beaten skin. Thom, although too quiet, seemed to understand Sabine's frustration and resentment, and would occasionally puncture it with gentle mockery. She had already stopped noticing his arm, which was covered to the wrist by jackets and jumpers. He was someone to talk to.

  "So I waited till bloody half past ten until I was sure the old man had finished with the bathroom, and then there was no hot water left at all. Nothing. I was so cold by the time I got out of the bath that my feet were blue. Really. And my teeth were chattering."

  Hanging over the stable door, she kicked at a bucket, sending a small wave over its battered edge. Thom, raking down the clean straw that had been piled up along one wall, stopped and raised an eyebrow, and she climbed down, glancing unconsciously over at the Duke as she did so.

  "There's no hair dryer, so my hair's gone all flat. And my sheets are damp. Really damp. Like when I get in the bed, you have to peel the top sheet and the bottom sheet apart. And they smell of mold."

  "How can you tell?"

  "How can I tell what?"

  "That they smell of mold. Yesterday you told me that the whole house smelled of mold. The sheets might actually smell quite nice."

  "You can see it. Green spots."

  Thom guffawed, still raking his straw.

  "It's probably the pattern on the sheets. I'll bet you've got eyesight like your mother."

  Sabine stared at him, letting go of the door.

  "How do you know about my mother's eyesight?"

  Thom paused, and then rested his rake against the wall. He bent and removed the bucket from under Sabine's foot, waiting for her to move out of the way before he sluiced the water across the yard.

  "You're all blind. Your whole family. Everyone knows. I'm surprised you don't wear glasses."

  Thom was like that; she'd think she had the measure of him, talk to him like he was a mate. And then every now and then he'd throw in some piece of information, about her mother, or his own past, and she'd find herself silenced, trying to make this new piece of information fit into the recognizable whole.

  The things she knew about him (some gleaned from him, some from Mrs. H, who was a veritable broadcasting network when not in her grandmother's presence) were that he was thirty-five, that he had spent some years in England working for a racing yard, that he had returned under some kind of a cloud, and that he had lost his arm through riding. That had not come from him--easygoing as he was, she didn't yet feel brave enough to quiz him about his amputation--but Mrs. H had told her, "I always thought the horses would be the death of him. He has no fear, you see. No fear. His father was the same." She didn't know the full story, as she didn't like to burden her sister--his poor mother--but it was something to do with when he used to ride over the sticks.

/>   "Sticks?" Sabine had said, picturing some kind of picket fence. Had he impaled himself?

  "Fences. He was a jump jockey. It's a damned sight more dangerous than on the flat, I'll tell you that for nothing."

  Everything here revolved around horses, thought Sabine grimly. They were all bloody obsessed, to the point where they thought nothing of losing bits of their own bodies. She had so far managed to put off riding the gray horse in the back field, telling her grandmother that she had a backache. But she knew from her grandmother's impatient expression, the way she had already fished out an old pair of riding boots and a hat and left them pointedly outside her bedroom door, that she was living on borrowed time.

  Sabine didn't want to ride. The thought of it made her feel sick. She had managed to persuade her mother that she should give it up years ago, after the weekly drive to the stables had gradually found her becoming nauseous with nerves, morbidly--and usually correctly--convinced that this was the week that she would have to ride one of the "evil" riding school horses, the ones that bolted, and bucked, and chased the others with slicked-back ears and bared teeth, and that this was the week where she would be carried off, out of control, her legs flapping unbalanced against the saddle, her arms hauling back in vain against the reins. It wasn't a challenge, like the other girls seemed to find it. It wasn't even fun. And Kate hadn't even seemed to fight her, when Sabine said she didn't want to do it anymore, as if she had made her daughter do it only out of some uncertain sense of family tradition.

  "I don't want to ride," she confided to Thom, as he led one of the tethered horses back into its stable.

  "You'll be fine. That little lad's a real gent."

  Sabine glanced over at the distant gray.

  "I don't care what he is. I don't want to ride. Do you think she'll make me?"

  "He's grand. Get on him a couple of times and you'll be fine."

  "You're not bloody taking me seriously," she half shouted, so that John John in the next stable stuck his head around the door. "I don't want to ride the horse. I don't want to ride any horse. I don't like it."

  Thom calmly unhooked the lead rein from the horse, and gave it an appreciative slap on its rump with his good hand. He walked over to her, closing and bolting the door behind him.

  "You're frightened, huh?"

  "I just don't like it."

  "There's nothing wrong with losing your nerve. Most of us have done it at some point."

  "Can't you hear me? God, you people. I just don't like riding."

  Thom placed his fake hand on her shoulder. It rested there, stiff and unyielding, curiously at odds with the sentiment it was trying to convey.

  "You know, she won't be satisfied until you've at least had a go. It'll make things heaps better. Why don't you come out with me tomorrow morning? I'll make sure you're okay."

  Sabine felt like weeping.

  "I really don't want to. Oh, God, I can't believe I'm stuck here. My life is just a bloody mess."

  "Tomorrow morning. Just you and me. Look, it's better you ride out with me for the first time than with her, isn't it?"

  She looked up at him. He grinned.

  "You know she'll eat you for breakfast. Most fearless seat in the whole of southern Ireland, that woman. Still rode to hounds until the Duke went lame."

  "I'll break my neck. And then you'll all be sorry."

  "I certainly will. I can't carry a body all the way back with only one arm."

  But the following morning she managed to put Thom off again. This time, however, she had a valid excuse.

  "Now. I've got to go out for most of the day, and Mrs. H is going to be very busy, so I'd like you to take care of your grandfather."

  Her grandmother had gotten dressed in her "town" clothes. At least Sabine assumed they were her town clothes; it was the first time she had seen her in anything but old tweedy trousers and Wellington boots. She was wearing a dark-blue woolen skirt of uncertain but certainly aged origin, a dark-green cardigan over a round-necked jumper, and her ever-present quilted green jacket over the top. She had placed a string of pearls around her neck, and had brushed her hair back so that it sat, still, in the way old people's hair always seemed to, in waves, rather than its usual electric frizz.

  Sabine fought back an urge to ask her if she was going out on the town. Somehow she knew her grandmother wouldn't find it funny.

  "Where are you going?" she said, incuriously.

  "Enniscorthy. To see a trainer about selling him one of our yearlings."

  Sabine sighed in ill-disguised boredom, the information already filtering past her unrecorded.

  "Now, your grandfather will want his lunch at one o'clock on the dot. He's asleep in his chair upstairs, so make sure you wake him a good hour beforehand because he will probably want to smarten himself up. Mrs. H will prepare his lunch and leave it in the little kitchen next to the dining room, and one for you so that he doesn't eat by himself. But you'll have to lay the table because she'll be busy this morning, taking the windfalls around to the neighbors. Don't bother Thom in the stables--they've got a lot going on. And don't let the dogs upstairs. Bertie got into your grandfather's room again yesterday and ate his hair brush."

  Can't see how it can be of any great loss, thought Sabine. He's got only about two hairs left to brush.

  "I'll be back after lunch. Have you gotten everything?"

  "Lunch at one. Don't be late. Don't bother Mrs. H. Don't bother Thom. Don't let the dogs upstairs."

  Her grandmother stared at her for a moment, with her curiously blank gaze, so that Sabine couldn't tell if she was noting her tone of insurrection or whether it simply filtered past. Then she pulled her head scarf over her head, tied it firmly under her chin, and with a brief, adoring word of farewell to Bella, who had been standing anxiously at her feet, turned and walked briskly out of the front door.

  Sabine stood in the hallway for a few minutes until the slam of the door had reverberated into silence, and then gazed around her, wondering what to do. She seemed to spend vast swathes of her day here wondering what to do. All the elements that had effortlessly filled her days at home--MTV, the Internet, hanging on the telephone with her mates, just mooching around the Keir Hardie estate, seeing who was around, what was happening--had been withdrawn, leaving her with this vast, vacuous space to fill. There was only so much time she could spend organizing her room (besides, the blue shag pile made her feel physically sick), and if you didn't like horses, what the hell was there?

  She didn't want to go out to the yard, because she knew Thom would just start going on at her about riding that stupid horse. She couldn't watch television because there was nothing on Irish television in the day. And last time she had tried to surreptitiously turn it on in the afternoon, her eardrums had been virtually blasted. "It's so your grandfather can hear the news," shouted Mrs. H, who hurried upstairs to see what the noise was. "You'd best leave it alone." Every night at ten, wherever she was in the house, Sabine could hear the thunderous roar of the news theme tune. Her grandfather would sit, peering at the screen as if he still had trouble hearing, while those around him read their newspapers, politely pretending they weren't being deafened.

  Still, she thought, walking slowly upstairs, followed by Bella, her grandmother's absence did confer something of a sense of release. She hadn't realized how anxious the older woman's presence made her until its absence revealed this hitherto unknown sense of calm. A half day of freedom. A half day of boredom. She didn't know which was worse.

  Sabine spent the best part of an hour lying on her bed, earphones on loud, reading a 1970s potboiler that Mrs. H had brought her. Mrs. H had evidently decided she understood what young girls needed--romance and more cake--and the way Sabine felt, Mrs. H had gotten it just about right.

  It wasn't exactly literature. There was, however, lots of panting in it. The women were divided into sluts who panted with ill-concealed lust over distracted male heroes, who were just trying to get on with saving the world, or virgi
ns, who panted with restrained longing as the same heroes skillfully seduced them. Only the men actually did anything. The women either got killed off (the sluts) or hitched to the men (the virgins). And despite all the panting, there was relatively little real sex (Sabine flicked first through to see). Perhaps this was what being in a Catholic country was all about. Lots of panting and not much of anything really going on. "Like you, Bella," she said, stroking the dog on her bed.

  Panting made her think of Dean Baxter. She had almost kissed him once. It was not like he would have been her first kiss; she had snogged loads of boys, and had done more than snog with some, although less than most of the girls she knew. She had known he was flirting with her, and they had been sitting on the wall of the estate after dark, and he had been sitting really close and joking with her so that she pushed him and he pushed her back, all just an excuse to touch each other really. And she had known that they probably would kiss and felt okay about it because she had liked him for ages and although he was a laugh, he wasn't too pushy, and he wasn't the type to go bragging to his mates afterward. Plus, he didn't think she was weird because her house was full of books and her mum wore second-hand clothes. He had even told some of the girls to back off when they called her "Brainache" and "Spod" for not smoking and taking her exams early. But then he had gotten carried away, and instead of pushing her back, he had picked her up in a fireman's lift, as if he was going to take her somewhere, and she had panicked and shouted at him to put her down, and when he had laughed, she had hit him repeatedly, too hard, across the head. He had dropped her after that, stood back and looked at her, holding his reddened ear, and asked her what was the matter with her. But she couldn't really explain, so she had just laughed, even though she felt like crying, and tried to make a joke of it. But he hadn't laughed, and things had never been quite the same between them, and then a week later she had heard he was hanging around with Amanda Gallagher. Amanda Bloody Gallagher with her long, girlie-girl hair, fabric-conditioned clothes, and cheap perfume. Probably Amanda Bloody Baxter by the time she got home. Perhaps it was time to forget about Dean Baxter. He had bad skin on his back, anyway. His sister had told her.