After dinner, Bill disappeared into the room off the kitchen that they used as a TV room. She had abandoned the idea of interesting Finn in the beehives: He’d eaten his potatoes and peas, then taken the feathered cadaver outside to the garden, where he sat examining it, so engrossed that she hadn’t the heart to take it from him. She did the dishes before joining Bill in the TV room. It was a small space that might once have been a maid’s room and was easier to heat than the larger rooms in the front. Bill was sitting in an armchair, toasting his socked feet on the bars of an electric fire.
The husband of one of her colleagues had taken a job in Dubai last year. It was difficult, of course, her colleague had said, but every second month she left the kids with her mother and flew out for a week. In three years’ time they would be back on their feet; it would be worth it. Looking at Bill now, sitting there reading one of his art journals, she wished that he would go to Dubai, too; it shocked her, the force with which she wished this, as did the composure with which she found herself contemplating it. She went to a cupboard and took out the bottle of brandy left over from Christmas, poured a measure for herself, another for him. He took the glass from her, but said nothing.
“Maybe you could take Finn with you tomorrow?” she said.
He looked up from his journal. “Turn up with a kid in tow? I might as well not bother.”
And she saw now how this would unfold, how any time in the future she hinted he should get a job, it would come back to this: He’d wanted to, he’d tried, she’d thwarted it. She took a mouthful of brandy. “I think you should go,” she said.
“What about your appointments?”
“I can’t get out of the first one, but I’ll ask someone to cover the later ones. Put on one of Finn’s DVDs for him. I’ll be home by three-thirty P.M.”
“You mean leave him on his own?”
She was tempted to say it wouldn’t be much different from any other day. As best she could tell, Bill mostly seemed to leave the boy to his own devices.
“It’s only for half an hour,” she said. “He’ll be fine. Give him his lunch before you go.”
“I give him his lunch every day,” he said. He was silent for a moment, and then he said: “You really think I should go?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
“Okay, then,” he said. “I will.”
—
THE PONY TRAP HAD most likely belonged to a woman called Eliza Harriet Smithwick, who, according to the title deeds, had been granted a life interest in the house and a hundred acres as part of a marriage settlement in 1886. An ancestor of hers had acquired the land from the Earl of Mountrath for the princely sum of eighty pounds, ten shillings. Oh, how she and Bill had laughed with the solicitor about that—eighty pounds, ten shillings!—because it was possible for anything to be funny in those days, anything at all. They’d bought in those last few weeks before the crash, when the market, like a ball in flight, had quietly, imperceptibly, stopped rising, had hung for a millisecond at the peak of its trajectory before it began to drop.
She was thinking about this as she drove too fast up the avenue the following evening, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. It was just after five-fifteen P.M. Nobody had been able to cover her appointments, or, more accurately, nobody had been willing to. It was like that at work lately: everybody pretending busyness, everybody watching, the way children in a parlor game watch the chairs, knowing that the music could stop at any moment. Bill had telephoned at two, inquiring as to the whereabouts of a particular blue shirt. “Be sure to lock the doors,” she’d said, to which he’d replied that he always locked them, this being a downright lie. She didn’t tell him that she’d be late.
As it turned out, the front door was locked. Stepping into the hall, she heard canned laughter and the soundtrack of a cartoon. “Hey, Finn,” she called, putting down her briefcase. She hung up her coat and looked into the TV room. A plate of peas was abandoned on the floor beside the armchair. A DVD was playing, but the room was empty. “Finn?” she called again. “Finn, sweetheart, Mom’s home.” He wasn’t in his bedroom, either. She went from room to room upstairs, then downstairs again, where, in the dining room, she noticed the curtains moving and saw that the window was open.
She continued to call his name as she circled the house and garden. She climbed through the post-and-rail fence into the wasteland next door. From where she stood, she could see as far as the rough track that ran along the river, and, in the next field, the rows of unfinished houses. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Finn!” she shouted.
A man was walking at speed along the track, breaking now and again into a run. He veered off and came toward her, his head bent, his hands in the pockets of his anorak. He was in his thirties, she guessed, with straggly brown hair and a reddish-brown beard, a colony of pimples on one cheek. “I heard you calling him,” he said. “I know where he is.”
“Where?” she said.
“Over there.” He pointed to the houses. “I seen him earlier.” His anorak was torn, and he was wearing dirty gray trainers and no socks.
“Thank you,” she said curtly. She took a step forward, but he remained positioned in front of her.
“I seen you going off in your car sometimes,” he said. “In the mornings.”
She wondered if this was an attempt to intimidate her, but he was grinning, the grin open and a little vacuous, and she decided he was probably harmless. “Yes,” she said, “that’s right. I work in the city.” She stepped around him and walked quickly in an effort to put some distance between them, picking her way over a coil of discarded wire that wound snakelike through the grass. He caught up and walked alongside, so close that his arm brushed against hers. She would run to one of the occupied houses if he got awkward, she decided; she was nearer to them now than she was to her own house.
“Through here,” the man said. He had scurried ahead and was pulling wide an opening in the chain-link fence. He was as eager as a child, smiling as he held the mesh open, and she noticed how his wrists were frail and thin and scarred. She stooped to fit through the gap, and as she did she felt his hand, briefly, on the small of her back. In the next field, dozens of houses stretched out in front of her. Most of the windows had been smashed, and they stood blind in the late-afternoon light, surrounded by weeds and litter. There, still, were the refuse sacks she remembered from before, but there was no van, nothing to suggest that anyone was living here. The man led her across ground strewn with cans and broken glass to a house in the middle of a row. “In here,” he said, climbing over a window ledge, but she shook her head. The earth beneath the ledge was churned up, indented with footprints of various sizes. “Where’s my son?” she said.
The man was standing in what had likely been intended as a sitting room. The floor was rough concrete, and seeds blown into crevices had taken root, weeds pushing up through cracks. She saw in one corner a mug that belonged to Finn and next to it the jacket her sister had given him for his birthday. How long had he been coming to this place? she wondered. How long had he been hanging out with this man? Because the man’s belongings were here, too—clothes, cardboard boxes, a sleeping bag—all piled in the center of the room. She took a deep breath. “You told me you saw him,” she said. “Now can you please tell me where he is?”
He picked up a metal rod from a pile of rubbish and struck it on the floor a couple of times. Swinging it back and forth, he crossed the room to the fireplace. She saw then that a thing she had taken for a bundle of rags was a dog stretched out, dead, its head at an odd angle to its body. There was a large bald circle on its back and, in the center of the circle, a wine-colored spot, like a birthmark, fading into softer reds and pinks as it radiated outward. Gripping the rod in both hands, the man raised it high, then brought it down again, piercing the dog through the stomach.
“Where is he?” she screamed, banging the window ledge with her fist. “What have you done with him?”
He stared at her blankly
and rubbed the back of one hand across his eyes, as if he’d just woken. “He was here this morning,” he said.
She turned and ran, back to the gap in the fence, tripping on the way, falling and tearing her tights. Her hands were shaking as she struggled to part the wire mesh and squeeze through. When she’d gone a little distance, she stopped to catch her breath. She looked behind to see if the man was following, but there was no sign of him. She stood for a moment and tried to think what to do. It was possible that while she’d been here, Finn had returned home, had climbed back in through the window and was there now, waiting for her, or for his father, who would be home shortly. It was also possible that he was down by the river, searching for dead things, so absorbed in his activities that he hadn’t heard her. Other possibilities crowded in on the heels of these, but she pushed them aside. She looked toward their house and saw it as a stranger might: an abandoned outpost, stately but diminished, plundered. The sun had moved lower in the sky, and now it caught the glass of the windows, causing them to blaze as if they’d been set alight. For a moment she imagined she saw the face of a woman pressed against a pane. What became of Eliza Harriet Smithwick? she wondered, and what would she think if she saw what had been done to her house and her gardens? She became aware of a stinging pain in her leg and, looking down, noticed that her knee was bleeding. “Finn!” she shouted.
And then she heard it: a yell, a small, joyous bellow of trumpeting delight that was her son’s voice, coming from the direction of the river. She turned and saw him cresting the grassy embankment above the water, sun reflecting off the near-white blond of his hair. She began to run toward him. He had a stick in his hand, and he was waving it in the air like a sword and making whooping noises. She was within a dozen yards of him before she realized he was not alone. Lying on the grass, reading, was a slim, tanned woman of about thirty. Sunlight filtered through the trees, parting the shadows along the bank, streaking her long hair. The woman raised her eyes from a book. It was a Bible bound in brown leather, and, before she closed it and sat up, she marked her page with a yellow ribbon. “Hello,” she said, shading her eyes with her hand. “Isn’t it a glorious day? We thought it a shame to stay indoors.” Finn waved to his mother but didn’t go to her. He seated himself next to the woman and picked up a magazine from a pile on the ground.
Was it possible they could have been here all this time and not heard her calling? She was conscious of her torn tights, her bleeding leg, the incongruity of her tailored jacket and pencil skirt, here where everything was peaceful, where sunlight dappled her child’s blond head and weeds in flurries of blue and white bloomed along the riverbank. She crouched beside her son and hugged him. “Finn,” she said, “I was so worried about you.” He smiled but, shrugging away her arms, continued to read. Not knowing what to do, she settled herself next to him, tucking her legs underneath her to hide the bloodied knee. The preacher woman’s legs were bare, she noticed, bare and brown. She wondered if Finn had simply climbed out the window to the woman or if she, before luring him Pied Piper style across the fields, had climbed in. She pictured her going from room to room, sitting at the mahogany table under the ravaged chandelier, her green catlike eyes that, yes, were ridiculously like Angelina Jolie’s, taking in all the brokenness.
“We come down here sometimes when the weather is good,” the woman said. “Finn knows the names of everything—insects, birds, plants. He’s a walking encyclopedia.”
Stay away from my son, she wanted to say. Stay away from him with your beasts and your lakes of fire and your pestilence. Instead, she said: “Yes, he’s an exceptionally bright child.” And because in the silence that followed it seemed that something more was expected of her, she gestured to a cluster of purple flowers with yellow hearts that grew a few feet away. Possibly, they were violets; she had never been good with plants. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” she said.
The woman smiled. She picked up her Bible, opening it not to the place she had marked but to a different page, and began to read. “Consider the lilies of the field,” she said, “how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” There was a soft swishing sound, the sound of someone moving through long grass. Bill was making his way toward them across the wasteland, his jacket thrown over one shoulder, his gait relaxed, unhurried. “Dad!” Finn shouted, and he jumped up and ran to his father.
She kept her eyes on her husband until she knew he was near enough to have seen her, and when he didn’t wave or call out, she turned away. She lay back on the grass and looked up. A flock of small birds, starlings perhaps, were flying in an arrow formation above the trees. As she watched, they drew close together to form a dark, quivering orb. For a moment, they appeared freeze-framed as if someone had pressed Pause, and, just as she thought that they would surely fall, they scattered like gunshot across the evening sky.
From the fence behind the house, Kate could see her husband up at the old forestry hut where mottled scrubland gave way to dense lines of trees. “Colman!” she called, but he didn’t hear. She watched him swing the ax in a clean arc and thought, from this distance, he could be any age. Lately, she’d found herself wondering what he’d been like as a very young man, a man of twenty. She hadn’t known him then. He had already turned forty when they met.
It was early April, the fields and ditches coming green again after winter. Grass verges crept outward, thickening the arteries of narrow lanes. “There’s nothing wrong,” she shouted when she was still some yards off. He was in his shirtsleeves, his coat discarded on the grass beside him. “Emer rang from London. She’s coming home.”
He put down the ax. “Home for a visit, or home for good?” He had dismantled the front of the hut and one of the side walls. The frame of the old awning lay on the grass, remnants of green canvas still wound around a metal pole. On the floor inside, if “floor” was the word, she saw empty beer cans, blankets, a ball of blackened tinfoil.
“Just for a few days. A friend from college has an exhibition. I wasn’t given much detail. You know Emer.”
“Yes,” he said, and frowned. “When is she arriving?”
“Tomorrow evening, and she’s bringing Oisín.”
“Tomorrow? And she’s only after ringing now?”
“It’ll be good to have them stay. Oisín has started school since we last saw him.” She waited to see if he might mention the room, but he picked up the ax, as if impatient to get back to work.
“What will we do if the Forestry Service come round?” she said.
“They haven’t come round this past year. They don’t come round when we ring about the drinking or the fires.” He swung the ax at a timber beam supporting what was left of the roof. There was a loud splintering but the beam stood firm, and he drew back the ax, prepared to strike again.
She turned and walked back toward the house. The Dennehys, their nearest neighbors, had earlier that week sown maize, and a crow hung from a pole, strung up by a piece of twine. It lifted in the wind as she walked past, coming to rest again a few feet from the ground, above the height of foxes. When they first moved here, she hadn’t understood that the crows were real, shot specially for the purpose, and had asked Mrs. Dennehy what cloth she sewed them from, while the Dennehys’ two sons, then just young boys, sniggered behind their mother’s back.
After supper, she took the duvet cover with the blue teddy bears from the airing cupboard and spread it out on the kitchen table. The cat roused itself from the rug by the stove and went over to investigate. It bounded in one quick movement onto a chair and watched, its head to one side, as she smoothed out creases. There were matching pillowcases, and a yellow pajama holder in the shape of a rabbit. Colman was at the other side of the kitchen, making a mug of Bovril. “What do you think?” she said.
“Lovely.”
“You couldn’t possibly see from that distance,” she said.
“It’s the same one
as before, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes,” she said. “But it’s a while since they visited. I’m wondering, is it a bit babyish?”
“You’re not going to find another between now and tomorrow,” he said, and she felt the flutter in her eyelid start up, the one that usually preceded a headache. She had hoped the sight of the duvet cover might have prompted an offer to move his stuff, or at least an offer to vacate the room so that she could move it. “It’ll be an improvement on that brown eiderdown, anyway,” she said. “John was still at school when we bought that,” but he just drank his Bovril and rinsed the mug, setting it upside down on the draining board. “Good night,” he said, and went upstairs. The cat jumped down from the chair and padded back across the kitchen to resume its position on the rug.
—
NEXT MORNING, SHE STARTED with his suits. She waited until he’d gone outside, then carried them from John’s old room to their bedroom across the landing. The wardrobe there had once held everything, but now when she pushed her coats and dresses along the rail they resisted, swung back at her, jostling and shouldering, as if they’d been breeding and fattening this past year. For an hour she went back and forth between the rooms with clothes, shoes, books. The winter before last, Colman had brought the lathe—a retirement gift from the staff at the co-op—in from the shed and had set it up in their son’s room. He would turn wood late into the night and often, when she put her head around the door in the morning, she would find him, still in his clothes, asleep on John’s old single bed. There began then the gradual migration of his belongings. He appeared to have lost interest in the lathe—he no longer presented her with lamps or bowls—but for the best part of a year, he had not slept in their bedroom at all.
Colman had allowed junk to accumulate—magazines, spent batteries, a cracked mug on the windowsill—and she got a sack and went around the room, picking things up. The lathe and wood turning tools—chisels, gouges, knives—were on a desk in the corner, and she packed them away in a box. She put aside Colman’s pajamas, and dressed the bed with fresh linen, the blue teddy bears jolly on the duvet, the rabbit propped on a chair alongside. Standing back to admire it, she noticed Colman in the doorway. He had his hands on his hips and was staring at the sack.
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