by Gemma Whelan
Frank jumped up. “I don’t have to stay here and listen to . . . ”
Fiona also sprang to her feet as Frank wound his way unsteadily towards the door. With amazing alacrity she found herself in his path, blocking his escape route. She looked him directly in the eye.
“No, you don’t—have to stay. And what’s more, you will leave this house and never return, or walk on our land ever again.”
He averted his eyes.
“And Frank . . . ”
With a huge effort he raised his eyes to hers, the eyes of a haunted, frightened, man. Fiona could see that he was shaking.
“If you ever so much as look at Una, or any little girl, or child, anywhere, anytime, I will go directly to the police and have you arrested.”
Frank blanched. Fiona thought he was about to have an apoplectic fit on the spot. Then he gathered himself together, turned and slouched in shame from the room.
Fiona stood rooted to her spot. Then she looked at Declan. He now looked like he’d seen a ghost.
“Fiona?” He struggled to speak. “You mentioned Una. Were you just . . . ?”
“Yes.” Fiona slumped back into the chair now. Exhausted. “I was just warning him. Nothing happened. And I think we’ve seen the last of him.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
EYE OF THE STORM
“When the soul . . . is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight . . . I shall try to fly by those nets . . . to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”
JAMES JOYCE—Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
One week after their eventful meeting with Frank, Fiona and Declan sat at the same long table and signed the final papers. They were now co-owners of the house and land.
“I suppose I should get therapy, shouldn’t I?” Fiona remarked, after Mr. Stanley had left. “While I’m working through all this. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?” she asked half seriously.
“Only if you need to. You seem like you’re doing great. Never seen you better.”
“Maybe the film is my therapy—or the whole visit. I’m still working on my hostile feelings for you, Declan!” Fiona was joking—partly. She understood so much more now about her brother and his behavior, but while working on certain scenes in the script she still smarted at some of his childish cruelties.
“I know you’re saying that lightly, but I don’t blame you.” Declan’s tone was serious. “I know I felt lonely and excluded after Orla was born, and then hugely powerless during and after the Uncle Frank episode, and all of it resulted in me becoming a bit of a bully. Trying to be a tough guy. Ultimately it all led me to psychology—to try and help myself and hopefully others work their way through these conundrums.”
“And I think that’s why I would never look for professional psychiatric help,” Fiona admitted. “Wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole—because it was your bailiwick. Funny, or maybe not so funny, how we shoot ourselves in the foot.”
“Yeah,” Declan agreed. “And look at me. It took me this long to deal with my own family, too. I mean, I understood it intellectually before, but still couldn’t bring myself to deal with you, my own sister.”
Fiona laughed. “So, Declan,” she teased. “Are all my awful memories of you entirely figments of my own imagination, or what’s the percentage—maybe half is truth, half imaginings?”
Declan laughed, too. “Well, there might be a modicum of truth to some of them. But, but . . . I bet you don’t remember all the great things I did—like the time I saved your life, for example?”
Julie walked in at this point and joined them. “Oh, I remember that story,” she said as she sat down at the table. “You told me that one, Declan.”
Fiona stared at both of them. “What? You’re joking me. What are you talking about?”
“The time you fell off the kitchen table,” Declan said.
“Fell off? When? Tell me?” Fiona was fascinated.
“Okay.” Declan began. “You were just a few months old and I was about three. Crazy about you, I have to say, though you wouldn’t remember that! Anyway, I don’t know where Mam was; she must have gone out of the room for a minute to get something. You were lying on a blanket on the kitchen table, maybe Mam had been changing you or something. I was sitting on the floor playing with my toy car when I saw a movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked up and there you were rolling over head first off the table, like you were diving. I saw it all in slow motion as you rolled right off and were heading for the cement floor. And in that split second I catapulted up and caught you in what seemed like midair, and you dropped into my arms. And the weight of you, though you weren’t very big but neither was I, plopped me down on the floor. My bum hit hard, but you were held out in my arms so you were safe though you were screaming at the top of your lungs with the shock.”
Fiona stared at her brother as if he had just imparted some earth shattering piece of information to her, like that they really were from Mars. When she found her tongue again she burst out. “But, but, I do know that story. I’ve known that story all my life but not in that version.”
“Did you hear it from someone else or do you actually remember it?” Julie asked.
“No idea.” Fiona admitted, except I believe I remember it. Here goes. The first part is the same, Declan. I was lying on the table looking up at the kitchen ceiling. I remember Mam being there and you on the floor and then Mam leaving. Then I remember you jumping up and pulling me off, sort of rolling me along and off the table and me doing a sky-dive for the floor and smashing my head. I remember hearing this terrible screaming and then realizing it was coming from my own throat.”
“But you’d have had major brain damage from a fall like that.” Julie surmised.
“Maybe that explains everything.” Fiona laughed, and then she laughed even more. She liked the sound of her own laughter—it was a new register that she was re-discovering. It was as if she had lived most of her life in a tragic vein, but had now flipped it around to reveal the complimentary mask of comedy.
“Well, I was always proud that I saved your little life,” Declan joked. “Always thought you were a tad ungrateful!”
“And I had you pegged as a murderer! I always thought you were out to get me!”
They both found this hilarious and started laughing all over again. They were still in high merriment when Sean arrived. He had been making phone calls, working on details of the filming. It was late Friday afternoon and Declan, Julie and Una were heading off on a short trip for the weekend. Sean and Fiona were going to try out the new Italian restaurant in the nearby town that evening and put the finishing touches to the shooting script.
“Maybe you should join Fiona as a consultant on the film, Declan.” Sean joked, when they filled him in on the disparate versions of the same event.
“Can I be a consultant, too? Can I?” Una also walked in the door that minute—she had been amusing herself outside for several hours.
“Una—is your backpack ready for the weekend? We’re leaving in five minutes.” And Una bounded up the stairs to gather her belongings.
Fiona picked up on Sean’s comment. “If you add your perspective, Declan, then the truth—whatever that is—may lie somewhere in between.”
“You could change the title to ‘The Crazy Clarkes’!” Declan offered.
“Then you can both continue competing with each other in your respective fields.” Julie threw in to the mix.
“Who makes the greatest contribution to the betterment of humanity?” Sean asked in a mock lofty tone.
“Art or Psychology?” Fiona added in the same vein, and they all laughed happily.
Sean and Fiona stood side by side and looked out over the land which stretched as far as the eye could see. The fields smelled of fresh cut barley, and the purple hills rose up to meet the horizon.
“You know,” Fiona said to Sean, “I’ve been thinking I might actually want to live here.
Even for part of the year. It’s so beautiful and peaceful. I never noticed it in that way before.”
Sean nodded, breathing in the fresh country air. “It would be a lovely place to write, wouldn’t it?” And she knew he was echoing Peter’s sentiment to Sheila, which echoed Simon’s to her. Fiona’s mind turned back to Simon, as she stood side by side with him at the age of seventeen, half a lifetime ago, surveying his family’s land. She looked at Sean mischievously. “An idyllic country setting, down on the farm?” She laughed. “You’re right. It could be a lovely place to write.”
Over a candlelight dinner in the new trattoria, Fiona and Sean discussed the final re-writes on the script.
“Are you happy with it, Sean? All the inconsistencies you mentioned at the beginning, and the blending of reality and fantasy—do you think it’s clear?”
Sean popped a ravioli into his mouth and munched.
“I think it’s almost there. You’ve done great work. I had a feeling the tangles could be sorted out.”
Fiona laughed and took a sip of Chardonnay. “How did you know that? How could you be sure? I didn’t know I’d be able to sift through the inconsistencies—I’m not sure I’d have even admitted there were any when we started out. So how could you have known before you even met me?”
“I suppose it’s the director’s job to draw out what’s there and to sense it even if it’s hidden.” He took a bite of salad. The waiter sailed by and topped up their wine glasses. “There’s still something missing, Fiona.” Sean took a sip. “I don’t know what it is. I’m not sure if it’s structural, in the screenplay.”
“Do you think it’s a story element?” Such nice clean words. Such simple terms for such shattering consequences. Time Past and Time Present were converging. She sipped some courage and then looked at Sean across the glinting candlelit table.
“There is something I want to tell you. For you. Not for the script.”
Sean caught the look in her eye, the fear and sorrow and hurt and haunting. He reached over and took her hand in his.
“It’s something that happened to me, very soon after Orla died.” Fiona forged ahead. Her voice was heavy but clear. Sean tightened his grasp as she struggled to find words. “It was in our house, our home, when I was nine . . . ”
Sean gathered her other hand across the table and held both of them firmly in his own. “Fiona, I think I know.”
She stared at him.
“I think I know what, but not who. Not who it was.”
Fiona was flabbergasted. “How could you possibly know, Sean? You just guessed?”
He nodded. “From your novel. I guessed it though it wasn’t written. I knew you had been violated in some deep way—I felt there was something else besides the death and loss. But I was confused. I thought it was, that it might be Declan.”
“What? How? Why? You saw that in my novel? My brother? I wrote that in there somehow? Hidden? God, no wonder he was scared!”
“As soon as we got to Ireland, I wondered if it wasn’t someone else—that maybe you had shifted the blame from someone else and for something you couldn’t name, couldn’t write about. But the animosity for the brother was so strong in the book that I felt the prototype, Declan, had to have done something dreadful. It wasn’t him though, was it?”
“No. It wasn’t. Though you’re right. I blamed him, unconsciously, and held him responsible.”
Sean cradled her hand.
Fiona continued. “It was . . . my uncle, Uncle Frank.”
Sean nodded. Paused. “I figured it might be him. After we got here, I began to put two and two together.” He was quiet then. He continued to hold her hand. The food was forgotten.
Fiona looked at him. “Did you really know that there was something that dark . . . is that what you meant, just now, when you said . . . ? Sean, you don’t mean that this is what’s missing?”
His eyes rested on hers. “I didn’t know exactly what it was. Just that it was something crucial and unspoken. And when I met you, I knew it was some deep strain in you, something locked away.”
The candlelight cast a halo around Sean’s blond curls. He looked to Fiona for an instant like a cherub, and she smiled. “Have you ever considered psychiatry? You’re good at it you know? Maybe you have to be for directing.”
He laughed. “You have to be able to analyze characters and find the inner motivations, the secret lives.” He stopped, and a cloud passed over his face. “But I’m not trying to pry open your life, Fiona. I know I have, in so far as the novel is concerned. I had to treat the characters as characters, to get to the bottom of their psyches as much as I could. But this is something else. Painful and private. I really didn’t mean to get it out of you, as information. I hope you know that.”
“I didn’t offer it as information, Sean. Nor to you as a scriptwriter. But as my . . . love, I felt you had a right to know. I know it’s my own private life.”
Sean raised her hands to his lips and gently kissed them. Fiona had the sweeping sensation again that she had always known him. It was a comforting and exciting feeling. It did not preclude the knowledge that they had a future lifetime to grow together. She dared now to hope they might have a chance.
“What about the script?” She asked. “Can we work it out?”
“Hey, that’s my job, and yours. We’re writers, we’ll figure it out!”
“Okay!” They shook hands as if clinching the deal and returned to the neglected ravioli.
Fiona took a long deep luxurious shower and felt she was washing away the debris of centuries. She was still a young woman, only thirty-five, but the grief she carried around for so many years had made her feel ancient. She massaged her scalp and scrubbed her back and slid the soap in all the curves and planes of her body as she worked up a lather and then let the water spray it off. She thought of Sean. He had kissed her goodbye at the door. She had said she might take a bath and soak, but instead, she opted for a vigorous shower. She knew Sean would come. And she wanted him to. Up until now, she had not felt whole and had no desire to enter into another relationship where she needed someone to be her mirror, to give her validation. She saw that her newly developed confidence with Simon all those years ago had been dependent on staying with him; it had not come from her but from his appreciation of her. It had all crumbled away when she couldn’t deal with him leaving, abandoning her. In reality, she had abandoned herself.
She was barely out of the shower and vigorously drying her hair in the plush white towel when Sean knocked on the door and called out her name. She wrapped her robe around her tingling body and went to let him in.
No sooner was he in the room than they were in each other’s arms. He hugged her tight, and she clung to him. They eased apart and she searched for his lips and he met hers and they hungrily blended their kisses. Then they stood in the center of the room and held each other. Fiona had so much to tell him, a life to relay. At the same time, she felt that he knew. That she had had a catharsis. And that the many strands of her past were now gathering in, and the meaning and hope in them was illuminated. She and Sean looked at each other and smiled. They had not yet spoken. After all of their time spent together, the meetings, the phone messages, back and forth, the separation, the waiting, the return to her homeland, he had found the right time to come to her. The exact right moment.
They slowly moved towards the bed, her bed, and sat down side by side. There was no need to speak. They already knew, maybe had known from the beginning, that they would arrive at this moment. There was an urgency in their eagerness, an excitement to be in each other’s arms, yet there was also a sense of timelessness, as if the moment stood still for them. Without hurry, they could ease into their dance of love. Sean reached out and lightly brushed her cheek with his fingertip. She felt the touch of a lover. It fanned out and coursed through her whole body. She reached over and stroked his face, ever so gently, barely making contact. She felt his response in a quivering wave. She knew that her touch, like his, had
spread like a mantle and enveloped his entire body. Sean slipped out of his sandals and drew his legs up onto the bed. Fiona curled her legs under her. They now sat facing each other, their legs crossed beneath them. Sean caressed her hair, still moist from the shower. He ran his fingers through the copper threads and slid them down to the nape of her neck. She felt the most delicious tingle and laughed aloud with pleasure. She ran her fingers through Sean’s wavy dark blond locks and traced a pattern down the back of his neck and underneath his cotton shirt to his shoulders. Then her fingers traveled back and one by one she slowly unbuttoned his shirt. Sean moved his fingers unhurriedly to the front of Fiona’s robe, spread it open and eased it gently off her shoulders so that it fell down to her waist.
“How beautiful you are, Fiona,” he spoke, almost a whisper.
The purity and directness of his compliment swept over her like the cool waters of a mountain stream. She placed her hand on his heart.
“You’re so lovely, too, Sean.” He laughed and laid his palm over hers and then lifted her hand and pressed her fingers to his lips. Fiona felt that this man knew her and accepted her as is. Sean had first fallen in love with her work, which had come from an even deeper place inside her than she knew, and as she trusted her writing and her past to him, she now entrusted her present self. Their lips searched each other out in the sweetness of new exploration as the summer breezes wafted gently against the windowpanes, and the gossamer curtains swayed back and forth to the music of the night.
A week and a half later, the crew had been organized, the equipment rented and the filming was ready to go. Sean had assembled a crew, part Irish, part American, and Declan was extremely helpful guiding them around and rallying the neighbors as extras in some scenes. And Nellie headed up the local catering. The American crew loved the fresh Irish food—streets ahead of any Hollywood grub, they claimed! The locals were thrilled no end to be having a film shot in their own backyard, and even more so that they were going to be film stars. The musicians who had played at James Clarke’s wake earlier in the summer were happy to provide music. When they heard Declan had taken up the violin again, they tried to talk him into playing with them, but he declined.