Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - August 1969
Chapter 2 - August 1949
Chapter 3 - August 1969
Chapter 4 - September 1949
Chapter 5 - August 1969
Chapter 6 - September 1949
Chapter 7 - August 1969
Chapter 8 - October 1949
Chapter 9 - August 1969
Chapter 10 - November 1969
Chapter 11 - December 1969
Chapter 12 - March 1970
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page
To my father, Ernest, with love
1
August 1969
THE SEAL APPEARS FROM NOWHERE, an instant immutable presence in the sea—although he must have been swimming silently beneath the surface for some time without her knowing. Katherine shudders in the water; her thoughts are moving like fast cold spikes inside her head. Where has he come from? Is he lost? Has he come to feed? The seal’s heavy muzzle thrusts toward Katherine; his nostrils—two dark inlets—flare: He is taking in her smell, her fear. His stiff eyebrow hairs, beaded with sea drops, crisscross the thick shadowy skin of his dark, wide head. Battle-scarred, his snout slopes to an ugly dull point where his long wiry whiskers afford him the seductive familiarity of a family dog. But it’s his eyes—the eyes of this wild animal—that terrify Katherine the most; huge, opaque, and overbold, they hold on her like the lustrous black-egged eyes of a ruined man.
Briefly the seal’s lips roll to display his sharp conical teeth, strong enough to dismember a large bird, she thinks, strong enough to rip her flesh. Her panic rises. If she turns her head away from him to look for help, even for a second, God knows what he’ll do. He may strike. Seals startle easily, someone once told her, their behavior as unpredictable as human love. Yet if she remains where she is . . .
They tread the cold sea together, Katherine and the seal. Above them, sandpipers drop their miserable cries as they fly. Splinters of high voices peak on the blue wind. In the distance, there is the low mechanical churr of a train. Around them, the sea continues its cool lamenting slap.
A sudden thought. Is he alone? Are there more seals? Are there cows or pups to aggressively protect?
The bobbing sea confuses the distance between them. It feels as though he is moving closer to her with every swell. She is keenly aware of her quivering limbs, of her too-quick breathing, of the saltwater in her mouth: a jagged dark fear filling her up. Her mind shrinks to the size of one thought: He may kill me.
Out of this fear there is the sudden impulse to reach out and touch him. Like the only way to stop the white panic of vertigo is to jump. To finish it. To decide to finish it. Or by reaching out, by touching, she might just connect with him, soothe him, soothe herself, make it mean something. Madness, she knows. But his heavy beauty is suggesting just this.
She doesn’t do it.
She hears her husband, George, calling out for her from the shore, his voice traveling like a lone seagull’s cry, searching for her. But she doesn’t respond. Transfixed by the seal’s gaze upon her, by this odd and uncomfortable gift of him, by the fear of the ever-opening sea, she remains.
The seal is the first to move. He shifts his head a little, as though he is beginning to lose interest in her, and he snorts abruptly, spraying her face with seawater, the spiky claws on his fore flipper breaking the surface of the water as he moves. He turns his head, creating thick dark wrinkles around his neck. But after his black eyes casually scan the horizon, they return to her. His eyes, those eyes, brimming black liquid pools, stare into her. They are asking something of her; they are waiting for her to answer him.
The sea blasts an icy wash over her body.
She hears George calling her again. This time, the sound of his voice is pitched with relief that he has spotted her in the water. His voice pulls at her. “Katherine! Katherine!” he calls. Does he see the seal beside her? Does he see him? “Katherine! Over here!”
A new spiral of fear kicks in at the sound of her husband’s voice. What if George cannot reach her? What if he frightens the seal and provokes it? She feels her stomach lurch, as though she might get sick. Reflux burns her throat. Her chest tightens. The eyes of the seal still hold on her. The heft of his body is now remarkably still, his bulk buoyed by the obedient sea. That big gray head.
Against her common sense, she turns her body to look for George and sees him wave to her from the rocks, beckoning her to come to him. She opens her mouth, but she cannot find her voice. Instead, her mouth fills with seawater, a thick glide of salt blue into pink. She swallows some, spits out the rest.
When she turns back, the seal is gone. She hangs in a quiver of cold sea.
That morning, George had casually announced that he had taken a day’s leave due to him from his job at the Water Commissioner’s Office. Katherine, surprised by George’s uncharacteristic spontaneity, had nonetheless decided it opportune to pack a picnic and take their girls—Maureen, Elizabeth, and Elsa—and baby Stephen out for the day to Groomsport beach. After all, the girls are already on their summer holidays and the weather is holding up so beautifully, she had thought.
By early afternoon, the Bedford family were well on the road from their home in east Belfast, their bottle green Morris Traveller winding its way through the fourteen miles of unremarkable countryside away from the city toward Groomsport town. Apart from Bangor and the small village of Ballyholme, there was only the occasional farmhouse to be seen, some scattered clusters of whitewashed buildings here and there, and one or two forsaken churches whose crumbling stone walls had long since exposed their sacred interiors to a disinterested sky.
Katherine let her head rest back on the warm leather of the car seat, her body heavy, as though the hot August sun were inside the car with her. She looked out of the window and saw the world passing her by. She watched as the mottled hedges of hawthorn and gorse, the trees, and telegraph poles moved briskly into and then out of her view. Glancing beyond the low hills to the east, she caught a glimpse of sea. The blue sky offered a singular white cloud, as though it knew how to be summer.
Stephen was fast asleep on her lap, his plump, hot body rounded like a basking pigeon. Elizabeth and Elsa were jostling with each other beside her in the back of the car, whacking each other with a flat palm when they spotted a blue car on the road and sticking out their tongues at each other when they saw a brown car. Katherine’s eldest daughter, Maureen, sitting in the front, was talking to her father as he drove, finding points of interest along the way. To Katherine, Maureen sounded older than her fourteen years, so amiable and agreeable was her tone, so ladylike and pleasantly curious. As her father drove, he occasionally lifted a hand off the steering wheel to point to a particular building or a stretch of land, and Maureen nodded her head and smiled politely and said that they had learned that at school, and her father said really, had they? Only when Elsa or Elizabeth stretched through the gap between the car seats to punch Maureen had she lost her composure to bark at her younger sisters and roll her eyes at them.
Katherine pressed her body against the car seat with some difficulty to adjust her position. Her skirt had crumpled up underneath her thighs and her nylons felt damp. She arched her lower back to ease Stephen’s weight forward a little, being careful not to wake him, then, raising herself slightly, pulled her skirt back down to her knees.
“Everybody all right?” Her voice squeaked, as though she had forgotten how to use it. George responded with a “Fine, thanks,” while Maureen did another little bobbing motion with her head. Elizabeth remained firmly scouring the road for blue cars, but Elsa turned to look at her mother.
“Are we nearly at Groomsport, Mummy?” Elsa smiled.
Katherine looked at her nine-year-old daughter, Elsa. Elsa was the only one of her children who looked like her. Maureen, Elizabeth, and Stephen all carried their father’s swarthier complexion and his hair’s blue-black sheen. To Katherine, in the squat, shadowy light of the car’s interior, Elsa looked translucent, a child starved of sunlight, her creamy skin melting into the gold of her hair, and all of her features—eyes, nose, and mouth—as gently placed as butter into warm milk.
“George!” Katherine called to her husband in the front of the car, “We’re nearly there, aren’t we?”
“Yes, love, another few minutes,” George addressed the clear rectangular slice of his wife in the rearview mirror, then shifted his gaze back to the road.
Katherine and Elsa gave each other a wide smile, as though they had secretly known the answer all along, and then Elsa turned quickly to stick her tongue out at Elizabeth.
“No, that wasn’t a brown car.” Elizabeth shook her head.
“It was so!” Elsa replied.
“It was dark gray, or maybe purple, but it wasn’t brown.”
“Mummy, wasn’t that car brown?” Elsa looked to her mother, but Katherine was careful not to take sides.
“I didn’t see what color it was, pet.”
“It was brown,” Elsa insisted.
“It-wasn’t-brown,” Elizabeth pronounced her words very precisely to indicate to Elsa that she was putting an end to the argument. Then with a regal glide, she turned to look out of the window again. Elsa stuck her tongue out at the back of Elizabeth’s head.
As they approached the town, the car passed a long iron railing fronting a factory. Fast, fat slices of sun fell across Katherine’s face, making her feel nauseous. She breathed deeply and squinted in the glare of the sunlight. “Oh look,” she said quietly, turning her head away from the sun, “there’s a brown car!”
But no one paid any attention to her remark. Maureen and George were still chatting in the front of the car and Elsa and Elizabeth were now both engrossed in reading Nurse Nancy and the Forgotten Parcel from a Twinkle comic.
As though, all along, he had simply been pretending to be asleep, Stephen stirred, already pointing at something. His eyes were barely open, but he had caught sight of trees and rooftops and people, all of them worthy of his regard. He yawned and rubbed his eyes, then, pointing into the air again, he said to his mother “Mama, mooon.”
“Where’s the moon, darling? There’s no moon!”
“Mooon dere,” he said emphatically, and, standing shakily on his mother’s lap, pointed out of the car window.
“Does Stephen think that the moon is out, Mummy?” Elsa smiled, amused at her little brother.
“It’s been all the talk of the moon landing in the house over the past few weeks.” Katherine kissed him. “Can you see the man on the moon, my pet?” she teased Stephen affectionately. “Is he still there?” Stephen clapped his hands gleefully against Katherine’s forehead. Katherine hugged her darling boy and, rubbing her lips against his cheek, she spoke into his skin. “And are you going to be an astronaut when you grow up and fly in a rocket to the moon?”
Stephen squealed with delight.
“No, he’ll get a proper job like his father!” George remarked quickly, lifting his head to smile at Katherine in the rearview mirror.
Katherine laughed and turned back to Stephen, settling him once more on her lap.
“And will you take me to the moon with you when you go?” she whispered.
“Mooon dere!” Stephen said with a deeply earnest expression on his face. He pointed to the air again.
Elsa bent her body over toward Stephen and, moving her face close to his, said in a high, baby voice, “There’s no moon in the daytime, silly billy.” She shook her head at Stephen. “No moon in the daytime.”
The way she pulled a face at Stephen made him laugh; his eyes became wide with delight and his laughter rippled like a warbling bird inside the car. He loved Elsa. He loved her. He wanted her to pull that face again. Elsa pulled that face. He threw his head back this time as he laughed, and Elsa laughed, too.
Maureen turned her head around from the front seat of the car to see what was going on. She couldn’t help but smile.
George parked the car under a large ancient sycamore in a small concrete enclave just off the main Groomsport Road. The shade was welcome relief to Katherine.
She swung her legs out of the car and lowered Stephen onto the tarmac of the car park, where he immediately staggered into a little circular jig of excited anticipation. The three girls barreled out of the car behind them and grabbed the bags and towels from the boot.
Groomsport—a small town of tidy streets, neat gardens, and well-scrubbed telegraph poles—was full of Union Jacks that day, for it was still the Protestant marching season in Northern Ireland. The flags hung languidly outside the shops and houses, however, as the breeze was too light to lift them. On the corner of the concrete enclave were a cluster of modest souvenir shops, the doorways of which were decorated with buckets and spades and plastic windmills tied with colored string.
George, Katherine, and the four children followed the dusty brown path from the car park down to the beach. Banked high on either side of the path were mounds of dry marram grass, which brushed gently against their shoulders and arms as they walked.
Other digressions wound off the main path, like snail trails in a morning garden, created by eager day-trippers in their search for a private spot. A young man with untidy fairish hair moved briskly toward them along one of these smaller paths, looking down at his watch as though he were timing himself on his journey. He gently bumped against Katherine as he passed.
“Someone’s in a hurry,” muttered George behind Katherine. But Katherine just smiled—it was too nice a day to complain about anything or anyone—and turned to watch the young man until he reached the car park and was gone.
From where they stood at the top of the sandbanks, the sea stretched before them like a cloth of blue jewels. Below them, a dirty spray of stones and shells echoed the gentle curve of the beach. Bunches of dank seaweed were caught between the rocks that jutted out into the sea from the flat yellow sand. The blue sky was dotted with a trail of pearly clouds that moved across it like floats in a slow parade.
Katherine had packed a flask of tea, some ham sandwiches for herself and George, and raspberry jam pieces for the children. There were also some chocolate biscuits, a small bunch of bananas, and four packets of Perri crisps. There was a bottle of diluted orange squash and some plastic cups.
George carried a bundle of blankets and towels to a spot on the beach sheltered by a modest sand dune. There were already several families farther down on the western side of the shore. A young girl in a red polka-dot swimsuit could be heard screaming “Tom! Tom!” as she ran after a boy who was flying a blue kite. Katherine stopped to look at the two children for a moment, taking in the full sweep of the bay.
“We’ll sit here, shall we? We’ll get a lovely view of the bay if we sit here.”
George responded by spreading the blankets out. Katherine sat down with Stephen, who began to squirm, unsettled by the feel of the sinking soft, dry sand giving way beneath his feet.
“Get changed and go for a swim,” she said to the girls; “then you can eat.”
Maureen, Elizabeth, and Elsa looked at the other children on the beach, who were skipping excitedly at the edge of the waves, but seemed reluctant to make a move themselves.
“Go on!” Katherine urged them.
Maureen was the first to organize herself and change into her swimsuit beneath one of the towels, slipping off her slacks and blouse, making sure no one could catch a glimpse of her underwear. Elizabeth and Elsa stood watching Maureen, as though they might glean some secret meaning or girlish code by the manner in which she undressed beneath the towel.
When Maureen was ready, Elizabeth and Elsa swiftly moved to catch up with her, until all three of them were in their black swims
uits and gingerly making their way toward the sea. Katherine watched her daughters move like three wading birds pecking at the sand with their spindly legs. A moment later, she turned to her husband.
“George, would you like some tea?”
“Yes, love.”
“Can you take Stephen for me?”
Katherine began to unpack the picnic bag, laying the sandwiches and cups on the blanket.
She poured them both a small cup of black tea, pushing George’s cup into the sand beside him and then taking a quick sup from her own. They both sat silently for a moment. A light breeze shifted a thin whisper of sand around them.
Suddenly, throwing the remains of the tea from her cup into a nearby clump of beard grass, Katherine got up and, lifting her skirt, began to take off her nylons. George released Stephen gently from his hold to see if the child would stand unsupported on the soft sand. He turned and frowned a little at Katherine.
“What are you doing?”
“Going in for a swim.”
“You may want to use one of the blankets to cover yourself,” George said, turning to see if anyone was watching his wife undress.
“There’s nobody looking.”
“Just for your own comfort . . .” George’s voice trailed off as he reached out to catch the teetering Stephen, “I’ve got you, buster,” he said, then turned to Katherine again. “Katherine, I think you should—”
But Katherine ignored George. She pulled her white swimsuit quickly up over her body, fixing the straps over her shoulders, and left her clothes on the blanket as though they were the flimsy traces of a delicate skin.
Just a few steps short of the sea, Katherine stopped to look around her. The headland to the east of Groomsport bay narrowed into a slender spindle of rock, which curved in toward the shore like an arm enfolding the belly of sand. Rocky outcrops jutted here and there at its tip, reachable only when the tide was out. To the west, children could be seen searching for stickleback fish or velvet fiddler crabs in the salty pools near the small pier. The children’s backs were bent, their flanks to the sun, their little plastic buckets swinging in the thin breeze.
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