by Penny Feeny
19
The Rock
Bel insisted that Kieran stop at the end of the track to avoid the potholes, as Tom had done. ‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘I’d rather see you right to the door.’ He had none of Tom’s agitation, but a sort of measured calm that she supposed would be useful for a priest.
‘I’ll be okay. Honestly. You’ve got enough on your plate back home.’
He grinned. ‘Not my plate, thank God.’
She smiled too and waved him off jauntily, although the cack-handed way Clemmie had been introduced to her grandmother had been hard to witness: the awkwardness and confusion that came from keeping a secret too long. Bel didn’t really believe in secrets. She didn’t see why people couldn’t be upfront more often, but she was going to have to break one of her own rules because she was worried about her mother’s state of mind. She didn’t think she’d react well to hearing her daughter had fallen off a ladder. She breezed into the cottage, full of apologies.
‘Hey, I’m sorry. Was I out for ages? Only Tom took me for a tour of the farm. The colours are fabulous when the sun’s out. You should have lent me the camera.’
Julia was sitting in the window recess, chin propped on her palm, gazing absently into the distance, but she said: ‘Are you all right?’
‘Sure. Why?’
‘You seem to be wincing.’
Bel longed to tell the truth. She’d had some challenging scrapes in her youth and had never been able to predict whether Julia would react briskly – You’ll be well enough for school tomorrow – or melt into solicitude – My poor darling, let me see how bad it is. In any case, recent events had changed everything. ‘I’m fine,’ she said with the same conviction she’d offered to Ronnie and Kieran. ‘Got a headache though. Have you any paracetamol?’
She knew the answer: Julia would rather travel with medicines than cosmetics. She took the capsules and gave an appreciative smile. ‘Thanks. I feel bad that you’ve been stuck in all day, waiting for me to get back.’
‘I’ve been reading mostly. It’s a luxury for me.’
‘Well do you want to come out now? We said we’d go for a walk, didn’t we, and it’s lovely and mild.’
‘I suppose we should make the most of any good weather. You’ve given up on the dolphins?
‘We might take a boat out tomorrow. In fact, I was wondering…’ She hesitated.
‘What?’
‘Where’s that beach?’
‘Which beach?’
‘The one you took the pictures of.’
‘Oh…’ Julia tugged at a clump of her hair until it stood up in a spike. ‘You saw them.’
‘Shouldn’t I have looked? Is this what you’ve been doing every day? Going out and taking photos.’
‘For the past three weeks actually. I took loads in France too.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? To keep a record. Isn’t that why people take pictures?’
‘A record of what?’
When Julia didn’t answer, she said, ‘Can we go there anyway? Is it far?’
‘About ten minutes’ drive.’
‘Well then.’
‘Fine, I’ll put my boots on.’
Julia turned on the car radio so they wouldn’t be driving in silence. Adverts blasted for carpets, fertiliser and home insurance; a caller to a quiz show was trying to identify the voice of a character in a television soap. She took a sharp corner and drove along a narrow lane, then pulled over and parked on the verge. They got out and Julia led the way down a steep cobbled path. On either side the cliffs towered, as majestic as castle walls. The strand was bracketed by jutting rock formations; it was beautiful, bleak and deserted.
Bel couldn’t confine her curiosity any longer. ‘Is this it?’
‘The beach in the photos? Yes. We used to call it the secret beach because you could only access it when the tide was low. Bracing, isn’t it?’ The wind lifted Julia’s hair and rouged her complexion as she took swift strides along the sand.
‘And you keep coming here?’ She found her mother’s behaviour ghoulish as well as obsessive, but she attempted to phrase her question tactfully: ‘Are you… trying to recapture something?’
Julia stopped short. Under the great expanse of sky Bel could see the creases around her eyes and mouth, but the quality of the light was such that it softened them, erased years. ‘Like what? My youth, do you mean?’
‘It’s okay,’ said Bel. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘This is where it happened,’ said Julia in a terse, matter-of-fact way. ‘William’s accident.’
‘Oh, Mum, do you really think you should be doing this?’
‘We had happy times here too. Only the day before, Matt had spent hours building a sandcastle by a rock pool. I thought I’d never forget, that I’d recognise it instantly but I can’t seem to locate it… My memory’s a blank.’ She raised her camera and pointed it at the horizon, then replaced it in her pocket without depressing the button. ‘In the old days, pre-digital, if you didn’t change your film in the dark, if you exposed it too soon, you lost all your images…’ Her voice began to crack.
‘Mum, please don’t!’
At Julia’s feet lay a glutinous heap of seaweed. She turned it with her toe and bent to extricate a long stick. Then she started to draw letters in the sand. Because her bruised arm was throbbing painfully, it took Bel some time to work out what she was writing. At first she’d thought the marks were just nonsense hieroglyphics; eventually she understood them to represent chemical symbols and compounds. Julia muttered as she wrote, as if reciting an incantation; when she’d finished her list she ravaged it with the point of her stick.
‘At medical school,’ she said, ‘you have to learn the names of so many things. Bones, body parts, diseases, pharmaceuticals. One damned inventory after another. You could memorise the lot, be the best student in your year and still cock up in practice. Basic human error. Will and I used to help each other revise, test ourselves until our ears were bleeding. Then we’d throw the books on the floor and go out and slaughter each other on the tennis court.’
Bel had no idea her mother played tennis. She’d never seen her with a racquet and it wasn’t Leo’s game. She tried to picture Julia hopping on the balls of her feet, the collar of her polo shirt turned up, and William (who she’d only ever seen flat and two dimensional in photo albums) poised to serve: a leaner version of Matt, in those tight shorts people wore in the seventies to play sport.
‘Shouldn’t you be telling Matt?’ she said cautiously. ‘This stuff about his dad…’
‘Matt isn’t here,’ said Julia, throwing away the stick.
‘I just meant in general… but of course I want to help too.’ Bel wondered if she sounded like a complete prat. After all, Julia had been the stalwart of the family: the breadwinner, letter-writer, homework supervisor, problem solver, diviner of lost objects – she did everything except cook. ‘Give moral support, I mean,’ she said weakly.
Julia threw her arm around her and she had to bite her lip to stifle a yelp of pain.
‘But you are a source of support! It’s why I asked you. Truly. I’d had enough of being on my own.’
‘Really? Only it seemed like you didn’t need me. You were on some major one-woman mission.’
‘A mission?’
‘I don’t know how else to put it.’
‘In a way,’ sighed Julia as two gulls began fighting overhead with angry cries, ‘you’re right. I have been looking for something. Stupid isn’t it?’
Bel was intrigued. ‘What?’
Julia set off again, as if it were easier to make a confession in motion. ‘A rock,’ she said.
‘A what?’
‘Not any old rock. There was one…’ Julia still wouldn’t look at her ‘…somewhere on the beach, where couples used to chisel their names. Hearts and arrows, that sort of thing. We laughed when we came across it, but it was impressive too. Like a memorial to long-lost love – not necessarily lost
, I suppose. They’re everywhere, aren’t they – usually bus shelters and toilet walls – till they get scrubbed off. But I thought, well, a rock, you can’t do away with that, can you, unless you’re quarrying or something.
‘Will teased me that he was going to add our names to the roll call. That was the night before, and we were full of Guinness and Paddy at the time. I’d forgotten all about it, like everything else I’d wiped out. But now I wonder if he ever did, if that was why he came down here, before the accident… I’ve been searching and searching, only I can’t find it. I can’t seem to remember where it was.’
‘Someone must know,’ said Bel. ‘You only have to ask around.’
‘I don’t think I could,’ said Julia. ‘I’d feel too silly. It isn’t important.’
‘But if it’s important to you—’
‘Let it go, darling. I should never have mentioned it.’
It was just as Bel had feared: her mother was clawing her way back through the decades, seeking a love cut off in its prime. It couldn’t be healthy. It shouldn’t be encouraged. Was it really her father’s fault, or was it that Julia had never had the leisure for self-reflection until now? What Bel needed to do was steer her mother away from past regrets and keep her positive.
The tide was encroaching and a sea mist began to wreathe up from the shoreline in billows and coils. At first, in Bel’s fancy, the elegant dancing shapes could have been sea nymphs but they grew and thickened into a dense white blanket obliterating the squat boulders, the carpet of slippery seaweed, the furrows in the sand. The further end of the strand, the danger spot, could no longer be seen.
‘Why don’t we go into Dingle?’ she suggested. ‘It’s getting damp out here.’
‘Okay,’ said Julia as the mist continued to roll towards them. ‘If that’s what you’d like.’
It was easier to behave normally, like any other tourists, if they idled around the little town, inspecting craft shops and picture galleries. Indeed the craft shops helped to lighten the atmosphere. They made them giggle with their eccentric assortment of novelties (although Bel found a sumptuous woven mohair shawl in shades of heather and persuaded Julia to buy it for her). The paintings appealed less: anodyne illustrations that captured nothing of the grandeur of the landscape. It was impossible not to hear the roar of Leo’s scorn.
‘God, wouldn’t Dad hate this!’ Bel burst out, in front of a slick acrylic: the sea a gaudy turquoise, the mountains purple and pink, not a single tint quite right.
‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ agreed Julia. As they turned away, she added, ‘You know he had the cheek to ask me where I was?’
‘Dad? When?’
‘The other day, while I was waiting for you. I didn’t tell him.’
‘He must have been on his way home,’ said Bel cautiously.
‘Home?’
‘He’s staying with Matt and Rachael.’
‘What! When did this happen?’
‘Only yesterday. He has stuff to do apparently.’
‘Stirring up trouble is more like it.’
‘He has a meeting with someone at the Tate. And maybe…’ oh Christ, she should have kept her mouth shut ‘…he wants to make amends.’
Julia was silent a moment. ‘That’s what he wants?’
‘I’m only guessing.’
‘It hardly matters. I don’t plan on seeing him.’
She stalked off and Bel hastened after her. ‘Where are you going?’
‘To buy some supper. Come on.’
Bel followed, hopping on and off the narrow pavement until they arrived at a fishmonger’s. Julia was lured inside by the dressed crab in the window.
‘The freshest sweetest crab this side of the peninsula,’ the fishmonger assured them. ‘A treat for two.’
‘I’m sorry but I don’t eat crab,’ said Bel.
Julia took out her purse and said with a glint of mischief, ‘That’s tough. A treat for one then.’
20
The Tulips
On Wednesday there was no chance of going out to take more photographs; the weather was against her. Julia knew it could change rapidly, that if you stood in the right location you could see not only the blustery squall heading towards you across the Atlantic, but also the promise of blue sky beyond. Today, however, the rain skittered against the windowpanes as if someone were tossing fistfuls of shingle. Bel would not get her trip to see the dolphins.
Earlier she’d taken her a cup of coffee, which must now be cooling beside her bed. She’d said something about sleeping badly – the storm had got up in the early hours – so Julia had left her to rest. When she’d last peeked in, Bel had a book in her hand, but her head lolled on the pillow and her eyes were closed. She’d waited a few moments, watching the rise and fall of the feather duvet, her daughter’s lips parted, her face in repose as smooth and creamy as in childhood.
Back in the living room she stoked up the fire. Then she returned to the computer, scrutinising the slide show as if a story were unfolding and a pattern might emerge. She knew perfectly well how much of life was random. She had seen it first hand: children with leukaemia or heart conditions or missing chromosomes; a volcano erupting as the wind changed, sending the world into a spin. It was crazy to think her efforts to capture the moods of the ocean, the formation of the clouds on the horizon, would tell her anything. What was striking about the photographs – even for a hopeless amateur – was the enormous breadth and power of the seascapes. How could a person not feel diminished?
She was startled from her reverie by a rap – which she thought at first was a sound from within the cottage – Bel’s book slipping onto the floor perhaps, as she turned in her sleep. The second, sharper, she recognised as a knock on the door. She opened it to a large bunch of yellow tulips. The face behind the tulips belonged to a young man; his dark hair, sparkling with raindrops, was slicked behind slightly prominent ears.
‘Goodness!’ she exclaimed, trying to recall the last time she’d been presented with a bunch of flowers on her doorstep. And then realised it wasn’t so long ago after all: Matt, eager and grateful, on the day they’d swapped houses and she’d moved into Canning Street, had produced a lavish bouquet. (Although she also knew, with ninety-nine per cent certainty, that the bouquet in question had been conceived and chosen by Rachael. Rachael had thoughtful, impeccable taste.)
‘They’re for Bel,’ said the visitor in a mild Irish accent. ‘This is where she’s staying, I’m right in thinking?’
‘Well yes, but she’s not up, I’m afraid.’
She wondered whether to invite him inside. She could see that he’d left his car at the top of the lane and the wind and rain were still squabbling overhead. The bonnet of thatch above the door didn’t offer much shelter. He could dry himself by the fire and hand the flowers to Bel in person. Except she might not want to be caught unawares. If she was keen on him she might need some time to make herself presentable. And if not…
‘I can’t stop,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to check she was okay after yesterday. No bad effects, is what I mean.’
‘No bad effects?’ echoed Julia.
‘Her arm? It’s not troubling her?’
Julia frowned. She recalled Bel wincing, her denial that anything was the matter. Walking along she’d held herself stiffly, it was true, but her movements had been jerky throughout her convalescence. It was bound to take her a while to get back to the elastic-jointed acrobat she’d been before illness struck. ‘She didn’t mention it,’ she said. ‘So I imagine it isn’t. Troubling her, I mean.’
‘Oh that’s good!’ His smile was lopsided but engaging. He thrust the tulips at her, in their soggy tissue-paper wrapping. As she took them their fingertips tangled.
‘Do you want me to give her a message?’
‘A message? Right, yes, if you will. You can tell her Kieran was asking after her.’ He turned up the collar of his jacket against a rivulet of water shooting suddenly from the downspout. ‘I’m afraid I
have to make a run for it now. Got to get back to fixing the fences. If the cattle escape it’s a hell of a trial herding them home again.’
Julia could believe this. She’d seen some errant cows lumbering along the road the day before. They were plundering new green shoots in the hedgerows and being chased by two teenagers in wellies waving sticks, like a scene from a child’s picture book. ‘I’ll be sure to do that,’ she said and watched him sprint up the lane, avoiding the puddles.
She carried the tulips over to the sink. Bel’s posy on the windowsill was wilting and forlorn. Wild flowers never lasted indoors. She threw them into the bin and filled the vase with fresh water. The yellow blooms brought a bright splash of sunshine into the room. She was about to start arranging them when her phone rang.
‘Dr Wentworth?’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Teresa Hogan here.’
‘Oh… Teresa… Hello. Everything’s fine actually. We’ve had no problems…’
‘You’ve been sleeping well?’
Julia was perplexed. Surely she wasn’t phoning merely to enquire after her sleeping habits? ‘Almost twelve hours a night! I must have years of catching up to do.’
‘I always say we have the best air in the world. It’s a tonic in itself. I wanted to check that your daughter had arrived safely?’
‘Oh yes, she got here in the end, thank goodness. All in one piece too.’
‘That’s grand.’ Teresa cleared her throat and said in a casual tone, ‘You remember, when we met the other day, you were discussing the old graveyard?’
‘Yes?’
‘Did you happen to notice a plaque for a man called William Langley?’
Julia didn’t answer. She sat down on a hard wooden chair, welcoming its rigidity. She needed firm, unyielding support.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Yes.’
‘It must have been a shock,’ said the other woman gently.
‘Yes.’
‘You know I was certain I’d seen you before, only until you mentioned St Silas it quite eluded me – we have so many visitors. But then, when we saw the pictures of your grandson who is so like his daddy…’