by Penny Feeny
The clientele was different in a B&B, hence the role reversal. The hardest thing to adjust to was the change in the hours. They’d had to leave the Farrelly party well before it ended last night, because they were putting up a German couple who wanted to make an early start on the drive around the Ring. The morning was stormy when they set off but Vince reckoned they’d see a blade of sunshine coming in. And it was worth taking the optimistic view because nowhere was more beautiful than the lush south-westerly coast of Ireland on a sunny day.
When the beds had been stripped and the dishwasher stacked and the pans scrubbed and the perishables put back in the fridge, he drove to the post office with his wife’s mail order returns. And when he came out again after a chat, there it was: a glimmer of gold fringing a cloud. You could see it moving towards you like a gift. If only the Germans hadn’t been so impatient to get moving, he could have had a longer sleep and they’d have had a better view of the Skelligs.
On impulse he hopped back into the car and drove to the beach at Doonshean. You never knew what you might find, what the tide might leave behind. The chief skill required was a good eye, sharp enough to spot a glint of something unusual. He’d found a gun once. Not the shotgun you’d expect a farmer to keep, but a revolver, black and heavy. A hard man’s weapon: a gangster or a terrorist. Unloaded though. He’d had a field day, joking around with it for a few hours, imagining how it had been lost. (Thrown away after a crime, was his guess, so the fingerprints were well washed off.) He’d handed it in to the garda but nothing had come of it and ever afterwards he wondered could he have made a wad of cash selling it privately.
On another occasion he uncovered a stash of Seiko watches, a whole box full, tarnished by the tide, but his hopes had risen high. Turned out they were worthless fakes. They looked the business but not one of them had been able to tell the time.
Today, he decided, he’d be happy with a fine scallop shell or a large conch. He parked in his usual spot above the bay and noticed another car nearby, with a Cork number plate. It looked familiar but he couldn’t place it. He could see a moving shape on the cliff top in the distance: impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman, only that the person wasn’t riding a horse or walking a dog, but solitary.
Vince made his way down the steep channel that led to the beach and gulped lungfuls of salt air – he’d found this a tonic for a hangover. His arthritis never seemed to give him trouble either once he was strolling on the sand. His eyes roamed over the drift of seaweed, on the lookout for anything that might twinkle or a shell superior enough to add to his collection. Then he looked up and saw a figure perched on the jutting bluff above him. The solitary walker, he supposed. He waved his arms and called out. ‘Stay away from the ledge! It’s dangerous.’
‘I know.’
He recognised the lady doctor’s voice and felt compelled to greet her – especially since there were only the two of them in the world, at this of all beaches. ‘Good morning to you!’
‘Wait there and I’ll be with you in a minute.’ She vanished from sight and then re-emerged, treading carefully past strewn boulders. She was trussed up in a waterproof, but even so her hair was wet and sticking to her skull; her lashes were beaded with drops.
‘That was a terrible downpour we had,’ said Vince. ‘You must have been caught in the heart of it.’
‘I quite like the rain.’
‘I do myself. Though we have an interlude at present, I’m glad to say. I hope there were no leaks in the cottage? Teresa’s always on at me to check the guttering.’
‘Thank you. It’s watertight. Sometimes the ceiling feels a little low. Not that I bang my head or anything… I just need… I need…’ She tailed off, raised her face to the wide bowl of the sky, magically clearing. ‘There’s so much space out here. I appreciate that.’
‘It’s not what you call crowded,’ he agreed. ‘Not like last night. Ah, but that was a grand party, wasn’t it?’ Her head jerked on her neck and she gave him a startled look. He pressed on. ‘I’m doing a bit of idle beach-combing. It’s a good time when the tide is low and the storm is over.’
‘You know this beach well?’
He nodded. Was she going to bring up the husband now?
‘Can you tell me then,’ said Julia. ‘It’s been driving me to distraction. Is there a rock along here, where people try to chisel their names? Declare undying love and so on.’
‘No,’ said Vince.
‘Really?’ She looked disbelieving, as if she wanted to say: But we’re surrounded by rocks! Surely one of them could have been written on? Instead she tailed off. ‘Oh dear, I could have sworn I’d seen it…’
‘Well now.’ He didn’t want to disappoint her. ‘This strand isn’t well known enough to attract that kind of lettering. You’re likely to be thinking of Slea Head, at the tip of the peninsula.’
‘Am I? Oh my God!’ Her expression was so dismayed you’d have thought he’d told her they were going to erect another bloody wind farm right on the very spot where their feet were sinking into the sand.
‘It’s very popular, Slea Head. Grand for surfing. Good for the youngsters too.’
‘Oh yes… I remember going there. My son, Matt, loved it. He was only four and the waves kept knocking him down. He’d stand up to them like a little King Canute and they’d knock him down again and he’d roar with laughter. And then, another couple of times, we came here for fishing in the rock pools and… whatever you’re doing, collecting shells and so on. I must have got the two places muddled. How dreadful!’
‘Well,’ said Vince cautiously. ‘It wouldn’t be unusual, after so long.’
‘Oh but you don’t understand!’ cried Julia. ‘I know it was daft of me to be pacing up and down in search of a wretched rock – especially when I haven’t even got the location right – but that’s not the worst of it. The reason I was looking for it in the first place was because William, my husband, had talked about adding our names. But he was fooling, wasn’t he? He couldn’t have done – it was too far away.’
‘Maybe he intended to. And maybe the conversation in your memory is on the hazy side itself.’
‘He was coming up with all kinds of nonsense that day,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if the whole story was a fabrication. But because of what happened I so wanted it to be true. I thought if I could find our names I’d feel forgiven…’
She appeared to be talking to herself, but Vince hadn’t stood behind the bar for thirty years, listening to the outpourings of strangers, for nothing. He waited.
‘My last words to him were angry ones,’ said Julia. ‘That’s not an easy admission to make. Or to live with.’
‘Your man wasn’t angry though. Rueful, I’d say.’
She looked at him sharply. It wasn’t rain glittering on her lashes, but tears; the whites of her eyes were bloodshot. The scars might be buried deep, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still distressing her. ‘I’m sorry, but how on earth would you know?’
‘I was there,’ said Vince.
‘Where?’
‘In the bar. When you came in and sat in the snug with the little fellow. I was serving.’
‘Oh my God! You were the publican at the inquest? The last person Will spoke to?’
He nodded.
‘Gosh, I didn’t recognise you.’
‘I had hair in those days,’ he said sadly, pulling at the peak of his cap. ‘And in truth it wasn’t myself, but Teresa who identified you. Though you haven’t changed, hardly at all.’
‘I have to get my head round this,’ said Julia, shaking her wet hair like a dog. ‘It was you who… I mean, if you were there you must have noticed we were having a row… But you didn’t tell the Coroner.’
Vince’s cramp was going to set in again. ‘Will we walk to the other side of the strand?’ he suggested. ‘I seize up if I stand about too long. That’s why I had to give up the pub, but I’m fine if I keep moving.’
‘Cod liver oil,’ she said
automatically. He could picture her whipping out a prescription pad.
‘I take gallons of the stuff,’ he assured her. ‘I’m breathing fish most days.’
She smiled then and he held out his arm like a proper gentleman so she could take it as they wandered the water’s edge. Seaweed squelched beneath their feet. ‘I didn’t mention the argument,’ he said, ‘because it was trifling, as you said yourself. And because his state of mind struck me as the same as any man who’s had a tiff with his wife. Not one of us wants to be browbeaten.’
Julia said in a voice so low it creaked. ‘Actually I’d threatened to leave him.’ There was a tension in her – he could feel it in the grip on his arm – that reminded him of a horse before a race. ‘I’ve never been able to tell anyone before. It makes it so much worse, doesn’t it?’
‘Why?’
‘Why does it make it worse?’
‘Why would you leave him?’ Vince’s ideas on marriage were traditional, old-fashioned. And the man had been a good sort; a sad loss, as events had proved.
She said, ‘Because he’d been offered a research fellowship in the States. My qualifications wouldn’t have been accepted, which meant that I wouldn’t have been able to work. Plus, Matt was about to start school and I didn’t want us to be uprooted. We were living in Bristol at the time. Have you ever been?’
‘The airport only.’ He’d touched down on his way to the racing at Cheltenham, which was the only English town he’d ever stayed in (not that he remembered much about the accommodation).
‘It’s a nice city and I was enjoying living there. That was the problem basically: I wanted to stay and he wanted to go. The thing was, he sprang it on me. I’d no inkling. I think he waited on purpose till we were halfway through our holiday and I was relaxed.’
Vince was reviving the scene: the woman and child on one side of the table, the man on the other, reaching out. She had snatched back her hand. The child had sucked his lemonade noisily through a straw. There had been a sense of impasse.
‘The irony,’ said Julia, ‘was that I’d complained of us being in a rut. In our relationship, I mean. I was very happy at work, which was why I didn’t want to travel three thousand miles away. And this crazy project was Will’s solution to our marriage feeling stale. I was so cross. What was he thinking of? He claimed it was a fantastic career opportunity for him, but that was the sum total of it. How could it possibly have improved anything else?’
He marvelled at her loquaciousness. This was the woman who, when asked if she’d slept well – a perfectly reasonable query from a host to a guest – had said primly, ‘Yes, thank you,’ as if any more information was uncalled for. Yet now he couldn’t stop her: regrets gushing forth as if she were talking to a father confessor – perhaps because there were only the two of them in this expanse of sand and sea and sky. He was flattered, truth be told, to be back in his old role, as if he were still pulling the pints and wiping away flecks of foam (though he was known for never spilling a drop; his jars of Guinness had the finest, creamiest, deepest crowns in the whole locality).
‘At first, when I refused to go with him, he thought I didn’t mean it. That I was just being perverse. Matt hadn’t actually started school, for instance, though I was very pleased with the one we’d picked… But then Will realised I wasn’t going to give way. I was entrenched. I said the choice was up to him but Matt and I weren’t shifting. He knew me and he knew I wasn’t going to change my mind. Of course in the end we had to move anyway, because our lives went haywire.’
‘He wasn’t obliged to go to America,’ said Vince, who’d never been keen on foreign travel. ‘And I’m sure, when he stayed on in the bar after you left, he would have been reconsidering.’
‘Is that the impression you got?’
He screwed up his eyes and peered at the horizon. The banner of blue was being chased by another ominous bank of cloud. ‘My impression,’ he said slowly, ‘was of a man who knew he’d lost the first round and was reviewing his strategy.’
Julia said, ‘William could put up a good front. That’s part of being a medic in a way: you tamp down your emotions, balance your duty as a professional against the fears of the patient. We were both too damn controlled. I couldn’t tell how much I hurt him but it must have been shattering. Oh my God, I have such a capacity for damage!’ She wrapped her arms around her body as if no one else would ever do so. She certainly wasn’t Vince’s type, not enough to get hold of. She still looked like an adolescent boy though she couldn’t have been much younger than himself and Teresa. ‘I shall always feel guilty. Responsible…’
‘Ah no, that’s ridiculous.’
She regarded him directly. ‘I was partly to blame. That’s a fact. The pain isn’t as raw as it was back then – so many years have passed – but it’s been eating me up lately, this need to make sense of things. I used to deliberately keep myself busy, but I have plenty of time now to try and work out how and why. You get to a point in your life when old questions keep rising to the surface. Why did he come down here at all? I wanted to believe he was planning to carve our names on the rock as a romantic gesture to soften me up. But now you’ve told me that couldn’t have been possible.’
There weren’t many facts to go on, but this one was incontrovertible; he couldn’t pretend otherwise. ‘Maybe he’d have done that another day,’ he offered. ‘But he drove here first, because it was nearer, to think things over. It can have a soothing effect, can it not, the rhythm of the sea.’ The repetitive suck and swill of the tide a few yards to their left bore this out, sweeping the sand smooth.
‘I don’t know why he didn’t chase after me at once. Why he let me storm off…’
That wasn’t exactly an option in Vince’s recollection. ‘He probably thought you needed breathing space.’
‘You’re positive he didn’t tell you anything? When he left the bar, he didn’t say where he was going?’
‘No.’ He’d been asked this at the inquest and the answer was the same. ‘But, at a guess, I’d say he was off looking for you.’
‘So, what made him come down here?’
‘Because he hadn’t been able to find you anywhere else?’
She nodded. ‘It’s a possibility. Perhaps he remembered how much fun we’d had the day before, how much Matt had enjoyed the rock pools. But he can’t have been thinking straight or he’d have realised it was a heck of a way for us to get to on foot.’
She glanced up at the two parked cars, their noses pointing towards the encroaching swathe of cloud. ‘I imagine him screeching down here, leaping out of the car and looking over the edge as I just did. I’d put the wind up him, hadn’t I? I bet he was obsessing about losing Matt. When he saw the boy on the rocks he wouldn’t have had time to check his identity. He wouldn’t even have considered it. A child in danger becomes your child. Adrenalin takes over and forces the body into action.’
Vince said, ‘And he was a good swimmer?’ He may not have known about the riptide, but only a fool would enter the ocean if he couldn’t swim.
‘He was an all-round sportsman. Terribly fit. He would have raced over to that kid at the speed of light to stop him being swept away. What I don’t know, what I can never know, is whether he believed he was saving his own son. And whether, when he rescued the Farrelly boy and saw that it was another child completely, it confused him. Did he turn back again because he was still searching for Matt?’
Vince had to agree the sequence of events was perplexing. Tom Farrelly had been fished from the water by his sisters. They’d been too preoccupied, fretting over him, to be able to tell whether his rescuer had been dragged under or whether he’d gone back into the waves of his own accord. The inquest had determined that William Langley must have lost his footing and struck his head. That the brief blur of unconsciousness and the force of the current overwhelmed his swimming ability, his chances of survival. The Farrelly girls had sought help, but it arrived too late. Nothing was going to change the verdict of accidenta
l death. Why did the widow have to mortify herself all over again?
‘When I first lost Will,’ she said, ‘I wanted to talk about him constantly, as if talking could bring him back to life. Though I wouldn’t dwell on his bravery because it was his bravery that had destroyed us. Talking failed of course and, in the end, the urge atrophied. But I never told anyone what I’ve told you… about our difficulties. Who knows, if this hadn’t happened, whether we’d have stayed together or whether we’d have separated anyway. William might have gone to America by himself and had a new family. Oh sweet Jesus – imagine that!
‘It’s a terrible thing to confess but it has its disadvantages, being married to a hero. It makes it hard for anyone else who comes into your life to cope with the comparison. Leo, my second husband, was completely different from Will – which was the point, of course – but I know he felt it acutely, especially when things went wrong.’ She took his arm again. ‘Thank you for listening.’
‘We have five minutes by my reckoning,’ he said, ‘before the deluge.’
‘Oh… right.’ She didn’t say any more but lengthened her stride as they approached the path leading up from the beach. He wished he could find something in the back end of his brain, some morsel or recollection that might give her comfort. She hadn’t mentioned meeting Tom Farrelly at the do. Could the lad have been a disappointment to her? Is that why she had to believe her husband was after rescuing his own son?
The first drops landed. Vince was wearing his favourite flat cap but he felt the cold smack on the back of his neck. At the same moment a mobile phone began to ring. He wasn’t keen on mobiles – pernicious objects of surveillance in his view – and he contrived to leave the one Teresa had bought for him at home. If he wanted to speak to his friends, he knew pretty much where to find them.
Julia pulled the instrument from her coat pocket and answered it. The expression of shock on her face deepened as she asked When, Where and How? She ended the call as they reached the cars and the rain began to patter more insistently.