How much did Kathleen mind? Hard to tell, because it wasn't something they ever talked about. The last time'Síle had tried to bring up the subject, they'd both kept their eyes on The Simpsons throughout, she remembered. Síle had wondered aloud whether there was anything they could do, and Kathleen had offered to ask around for a good counselor, but without much enthusiasm, and nothing had come of it. Since then, not a word, except that last year Kathleen had Silently forwarded her a link to some online journal article about the high incidence of "what is popularly known as bed death" in long-term lesbian relationships "as a side-effect of the merging process." The researcher—Síle couldn't get this sentence out of her head—reported that "many subjects stated a preference for, or at least acceptance of, nongenital intimacy within the dyad." On reading this in the crew lounge, she'd felt tempted to e-mail Kathleen right back—Sod that!—but she'd thought better of it.
The light blue eyes were open. "Whoops, caught me," said Síle.
Kathleen produced a benign yawn. "What time is it?"
"Ten past ten."
Kathleen stretched her tennis player's arms above her head and headed for the shower, pink-skinned and limber. It wasn't about looks, Síle noted; she'd always thought Kathleen was lovely on the eye. The planets still turned, so what had become of the gravitational pull? Stop brooding, she told herself. I still want to be with this woman and vice versa. It was a fact, but it didn't make her feel any better.
"Coffee?" Kathleen called.
"It's on," Síle replied from the kitchen, flicking open her gizmo and glancing at her messages. It was so easy. They knew how to do this; they were as practiced as figure skaters, linking and lifting, keeping their joint balance.
"We must pick up some daffs on the way to Monkstown."
"Da's garden is Wordsworth territory at the moment," Síle objected.
"So? It's about manners; family feeling."
Síle rolled her eyes, but didn't say another word. Five years was also long enough to have all your arguments over and over again, till the edges were French-polished.
An e-mail from Jude.
Today I'm going with Gwen and her parents to a sugar bush (here's the translation so you don't have to Google it: grove of tapped maples) for pancakes and sausages. The trees are all webbed together with little hoses, you ride round in a horse-drawn wagon, and there's pre-contact equipment like a huge boiling tub hollowed out of a trunk. (Sorry, more history jargon: pre-contact means before the palefaces turned up.) You've got to go in the early weeks of March because the first sap is the sweetest.
There, there was nothing in that for Kathleen to object to, if she happened to come in and look over Síle's shoulder. It was just everyday trivia. Síle read it again. The first sap is the sweetest.
On a tall stool in Shay O'Shaughnessy's kitchen, Síle stared at a framed photo on the wall: Sunita Pillay on her farewell visits before the wedding in 1959, black-rimmed eyes, bindi on her forehead, the traditional three-piece of pindara, rouka, and half-sari. "God, didn't our Amma look like a film star!"
"Everyone does in black and white," muttered her sister Orla, giving the roast potatoes a shake and slamming the oven door.
Was Síle being scrupulous enough? That was the question. In conversation with Kathleen over the past weeks she'd twice referred to having heard from "that Canadian girl," but in what might be termed a misleadingly casual tone. She hadn't mentioned Jude to anyone else, which was a bad sign in itself, it struck her now.
Hands on hips, still wearing the dinosaur-shaped oven gloves, Orla remarked, "Kieran was called into the principal's office for kicking."
"I didn't think that was legal anymore," said Síle, deadpan.
Kathleen smiled, as she stood arranging the carnations in a square vase.
Orla, not getting the joke, said, "It was Kieran doing the kicking." She lowered her voice so it wouldn't carry into the living room, where their father was playing sudoku. "Apparently the other boy had called him a nigger."
"At least he could have got the insult right and called him a wog or a coolie," remarked Síle. Which earned her a raised eyebrow from Kathleen. (White people were so touchy about words!) What Síle had really thought was, At least the boy didn't call him a mongol. Considering the Down's syndrome, Kieran was doing well at school—with intensive tutoring from his parents—but kids could be so mean.
"I swear, the Irish get more racist every year," said her sister; "those letters in the paper about the need to save our culture from being swamped!" Since the flow of immigrants and asylum seekers had begun in the early nineties, Orla had been running a drop-in centre with the unfortunately soupy name, Síle thought, of Ireland of the Welcomes.
"Mm, it's disgusting," Síle agreed. "I don't remember very much of that when you and I were at Sacred Heart."
"That's because you were Little Miss Loveable with the hair down to your bum and played Mary in the Nativity play," said Orla sharply.
Síle decided not to take offense. "It was more outside of school that people said stupid things like 'Where are yiz from?'"
"Besides," said Orla, "boys' schools are rougher."
"So what'll you do about Kieran?" Kathleen asked.
"I took his teacher out to lunch—that new Vietnamese in Dundrum—and gave him a course pack on cultural diversity called Hand In Hand, but I doubt he'll use it. Anyway."
"Anyway."
Again Síle's mind slid away sideways. Were she and Jude Turner friends, was that the idea? Síle didn't urgently need any more friends. Once, after a bottle of white wine, Kathleen had let slip her view that Síle had a few too many already. And besides, three thousand miles lay between her and Jude, for starters. Good if occasionally frustrating, wasn't that how Jude had described a long-distance friendship?) Síle would never get the chance to ring up from a pub and shout over the clamour, There's a great session on tonight, Jude, are you coming?
She nibbled the side of one nail where the purple polish was coming off; she'd have to fix that tonight. She told herself she was making too big a deal of this. They each had their hobbies; Kathleen's tennis matches took precedence over any other weekend activities, for instance. But Síle and Jude were now e-mailing several times a day; you could call that a hobby or—the word struck her with a wave of mortification—you could call it a big fat crush.
She stole a leaf from the salad. "This needs a drop more vinegar."
"Does it?" asked Orla.
Kathleen tasted a leaf. "It does not."
Síle was all in favour of honesty, but not of causing unnecessary pain. Relationships would never last a week without a bit of tact. Besides, why risk some dramatic confession to Kathleen, when this connection with Jude, whatever it meant, would inevitably peter out? (Like with that handsome woman Síle had met at a Security Training workshop last June, for instance: a flurry of pert texts and then nothing.)
Síle hadn't had a pen pal since she was nine; the very word was juvenile. Probably only nine-year-olds were generous or hopeful enough to spend long hours writing to someone they knew they'd never meet in the flesh. Her pen pal's name had been Martine, she dug that up out of her memory now: Martine van der Haven, who lived in a suburb outside Antwerp. Síle had sent off her very favorite picture of herself—big-eyed, in Orla's discarded Victorian nightie—and written in ink on the back, PLEASE RETURN AFTER VIEWING, but the photo wasn't returned, and she never heard from Martine again. Only now, staring at her mother's photograph, did it strike Síle that instead of merely getting tired of constructing letters in English to some little Irish girl, Martine might have been disconcerted by the little Irish girl's brown face.
Kathleen was going in and out to the dining room, setting the table. "Oh, and William finished his night course," remarked Orla, picking a bit of encrusted food off a fork, "so he's now a lay minister of the Eucharist."
"Wow," said Síle, trying to adjust her face.
There was a pause, while her sister turned down the oven. "I know you don'
t really get it."
Kathleen gave Síle a glare: Be nice.
"No no, I'm happy for him." She hoped they could leave it at that.
"It's not that he thinks the Church is right about everything—"
"Well, no. You'd have to be a complete moron to think that," said Síle, unable to curb her tongue.
"Who's a moron?" asked Shay O'Shaughnessy, wandering in with an empty glass.
Síle leapt up to get his sherry bottle. "We should never talk religion on Sundays."
He sniffed the air. "Orla, that smells like very heaven. Bring back heated discussions of politics, that's what I say. D'you remember that splendid fight over Parnell in Portrait of the Artist?"
Since her father had left Guinness's—where he'd been something high up to do with production standards—he'd read more than ever, wading through vast biographies of Gandhi and Shaw.
"We were just saying how beautiful Sunita was," Kathleen mentioned tactfully, nodding at the photo on the wall.
"She and I met on a plane, you know."
"Did you really?" Of course Kathleen knew the story; she was just humouring him like a good daughter-in-law.
"The Flying Ranee service, on a Super Constellation, London-Cairo-Bombay, all first class!"
"Her first words to you were 'More champagne, Mr. O'Shaughnessy?,' weren't they?" said Orla.
Síle always found it exasperating the way her sister—only five when their Amma died—acted as keeper of the flame.
"Whenever Sunita had a break, that night," Shay told Kathleen, "she perched on the arm of my seat for a chat. In those days the stews called us guests, not passengers; they were hostesses in the true sense. There was no film or personal stereos of course—so the in-flight entertainment was to watch the stews walk up and down the aisles. Luckily they were all young and pretty, back then," he said, deadpan.
Síle put on a stern face and swatted at him.
"She wouldn't give me her address till just before landing..."
She caught herself wondering whether, if her mother had lived, Sunita and Shay would still be happily married. What combination of passion and stamina—not to mention luck—did it take to last a lifetime? Especially now that lifetimes were so much longer than they used to be.
She looked at Kathleen's smooth blond head, bent over the cutlery drawer, and thought of five years, and of fifty.
The front door crashed open; the boys' voices went up like dogs'. Orla opened the oven and lifted out the sizzling, black-edged salmon.
Síle picked up the pot of honeyed carrots and said, "I'll bring this in, will I? Kieran," she called out, walking into the dining room, "Dermot, Paul, John, c'mon lads, dinner!"
Human Habitation
If ye will still abide in this land,
then will I build you,
and not pull you down,
and I will plant you,
and not pluck you up.
—JEREMIAH 42:10
Síle was parked illegally, helping Marcus pack all his worldly goods into a borrowed van. She picked up a box of glass fisherman's floats and slid it under an antique sewing-machine table. "I thought you said Eoghan and Paul and Tom were coming too?"
"Mm," said Marcus, "then I realized there wouldn't be enough room in the van for all of us. But I trust your muscles. Since I left the airline, my arms have turned to goo."
Síle deposited an armchair upside down on a small sofa. "It'll be worse now you're moving hundreds of miles from civilization. Country bumpkins drive everywhere and get fat."
Marcus laughed. "I'll risk it: It's time to put my roots down. That awful Basingstoke boarding school never felt like home, and my dad had so many postings I never knew whether I'd be spending the summer in Prague or Mexico City or Jo'burg."
"Pity about you. It's not like you stopped moving the minute you grew up."
"Oh, travel's a bad habit, an itch. An unnatural lifestyle," he pronounced with priestly relish.
"Didn't you see Winged Migration?" She was crawling to the back of the van with a nodding asparagus fern.
"The birdie thing? I prefer my film stars human."
"They spend most of their lives on the wing, back and forth; it's like this secret pulse throbbing through the planet."
"They have brains the size of peanuts," Marcus pointed out.
"It's even written into our language. Uplifted—" She searched for more examples. "Moved, transported, carried away ... Doesn't ecstasy mean something like 'out of place'?" she wondered.
"Dunno, but Eoghan and Tom are bringing some down tomorrow to celebrate my move."
She laughed.
There was barely room for the two of them in the front of the van, with their seat backs very upright. "Just as well we're used to confined spaces," said Marcus, pulling out into traffic. "Remember that time in the forty-seater, stuck on the tarmac at Shannon, waiting for them to change a bulb?"
Síle groaned. "Two hours of apologizing, creeping up and down that aisle like Quasimodo. I thought my neck would never straighten again."
"See? You're not going to lose me as a friend, not after times like that."
They edged through the capital's westward sprawl, and it began to drizzle. They discussed Marcus's work doing exquisite drawings of improbable inventions people wanted to patent, his dying sister in Bath—"liver disease, and the poor girl never had more than the odd sherry"—and Síle's nephews. "The irony is, Orla had two boys and was desperate for a girl, so she and William tried again and had twins, John and Paul—named for the Pope."
"That'll be Our Lord's famous sense of humour."
"Here's Kieran making his first Holy Communion, in a cummerbund," said Síle, holding up the photo. "Isn't that the cutest pair of trousers you've ever seen?"
"And I've seen some cute trousers in my time."
"Speaking of which, isn't it going to reduce your social prospects, holing up in the wilds?"
"Well, the thing is," said Marcus, rubbing his shaved head, "I've already slept with all the Dublin guys I'd ever have any interest in."
"What, all of them, you slag?"
"It's not that big a city." He turned off the wipers as the sun struggled through the clouds.
Síle stared at some unkempt horses grazing along the verge of the motorway. On the green horizon, a ruined tower kept appearing in glimpses. "You sound so world-weary."
"Do you remember your first love?" Marcus asked suddenly.
"Of course: Trish the unemployed activist."
"No, not who. Do you really remember what it was like?"
Puzzled, Síle weighed her memories. "Only some of it," she admitted. "The surprise. The glee."
Marcus nodded. "You're such a goggle-eyed baby the first time, aren't you? Having your big adventure, making landfall on a mysterious island. But then the fruit turns out to be sour or a storm blows up, and you paddle off again on your raft. Only now you're getting to be a seasoned island-hopper, and no matter how beautiful the next is, you can't forget that it's just one of many, the sea's littered with islands."
"Jaysus wept," said Síle under her breath.
"Sorry, I'll shut up and put on the radio, will I?"
A Mozart concert took them through Meath, Westmeath, Longford ... The midlands of Ireland had once been a lake, and as far as Síle was concerned they should have stayed that way. After soup and scones in Carrick-on-Shannon, Marcus turned off the N4 onto a series of little winding roads, cutting north to the Iron Mountains.
"Last week, I flew to L.A. and back twice with that fluffhead Noreen Cassidy," Síle was telling him, "and by the time the shuttle dropped me home I was ready to stick a plastic fork in her Botoxed cheek."
"Is she the one with an obsession with Christmas?" asked Marcus.
"No, you're thinking of Tara Dempsey. Tara bakes her Christmas cakes in August, gets her shopping done in September," cooed Síle. "Noreen's the one—remember, we were all in a Persian restaurant in Chicago once, and I'd just had a manicure, and you insisted on exp
laining to the group why women of my persuasion don't tend to have long nails?"
He hooted. "When she finally got it—she was scarlet," he recalled in his best faux-Dublin accent. "Seriously, Síle, how do you stick it? They're not in your league."
"By what measure?" she asked.
"Brain-cell count, politics, sense of humour, ability to tell Almodóvar from Alessi..."
She shrugged. "Nuala's a decent sort, and Catherine, and Justin. And nobody gives me a hard time for being queer, not since that one pilot who moved to Qantas."
"That's the law, not a basis for gratitude," snapped Marcus. "My point is, with your talents, you should be..."
"What? If you know of the ideal job—"
He puffed out a breath. "Sparkling companion to technical artist?"
She laughed. "Buy a penthouse in Manhattan and we'll talk."
They'd been on the road more than four hours when the van rattled across two cattle grids and turned sharply right up a muddy lane. Marcus braked in the yard beside what looked like a derelict barn. "Ta-da!"
The barn had windows, Síle noticed as she walked up to it, which meant it was actually the house.
Marcus slung his arm over her shoulder. "I warned you I couldn't afford anything fit for human habitation. I'm going to turn into one of those grotesque, decaying bachelors out of a Molly Keane novel."
"It's big," she managed. "Lots of room for, for improvement."
Marcus laughed and sniffed the moist March air. "The soil's peaty but the drainage isn't bad at all, for Leitrim. See the corner where the slates have come off? That's going to be my office; it gets the morning light. All I have to do is persuade them to put in a land line, so I can get broadband Internet."
"It doesn't even have a phone?"
"C'mon, let's have a cuppa, that's the thing for shock. The kitchen's got glass in the windows," he assured her.
On her third cup of tea, Síle stared out the window at the lone sheep munching the grass. All she could hear was her heartbeat and the occasional squeak of a bird. "Well, if you don't die of pleurisy by the summer..."