The spray bombards his eyelids. He shakes his head, inhaling steam, feeling his lungs expand. Maeve is a good person, he can’t find a bad word to say about her. She has agreed to him giving up a highly paid job with an international company to sell fruit and vegetables, honey, eggs and jam on a market stall in a little country town. He can only do that, balance an unpredictable income because she works as a secretary at Riordan’s, bringing in the steadier wage. He knows that she regrets the life they had in Manchester and still hasn’t come to terms with the disruption he has caused. In her gaze, he sometimes sees disappointment, an unguarded yearning for the man he used to be, the one she proudly boasted about when she phoned her mother; sharply suited, high earning, smelling of aftershave, glowing with a corporate sheen. She has made the best of it all, she never complains; sometimes, he wishes she would, then he could fight his corner. She is a reliable woman. Her heart is constant and lies dependably in their home. He should be counting his blessings.
He turns the shower to the pulse setting. His mind is flooding with memories, scenes and images he hasn’t thought of for years. Liv used to sing to him when they took baths together, songs her mother was keen on from her days in amateur theatricals: you are my heart’s delight and where you are, I long to be. Or she would treat him to songs from the shows, musicals that her parents had taken her to over the years: ‘The Street Where You Live,’ ‘I Could Have Danced All Night,’ she knew all the words, the composers and original singers. The bathroom in her flat was damp and always chilly, the steaming water the only way of keeping warm. The old gas heater popped and gasped when they topped up the hot water, the flare of the pilot light hissing. He would pretend to count her freckles, her sun dust as he called them.
He shivers and squeezes his eyes, switching the shower to maximum, hoping the drumming water will drown his thoughts. Inside the thundering spray he sings, tentatively at first, then louder;
I have often walked down this street before,
But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before,
All at once am I several storeys high
Knowing I’m on the street where you live.
As the cascade beats down on his head he laughs, eyes still tightly closed, seeing rushing stars and myriad lights, a pulsing galaxy of caramel freckles, that unforgettable tripping walk.
* * *
In the morning Liv wakes to bright sunlight and thinks of the well, smiling. She carries a mug of tea made with bottled water and the empty galvanized bucket along the little path made of stepping stones curving away to her right behind hawthorn bushes. The stones are worn and smooth with moss growing between the cracks. She follows them past the bushes and through a sea of swishing ferns, deep green and still licked with morning dew. She holds her hands out on either side and they tickle her palms, leaving traces like moist cobwebs on her skin.
The path leads her past oak and elder trees, via a dense tunnel of fuchsia and blackberries, then turns through a narrow gap and down worn steps into a grove encircled with more blackberries, fat-leaved rhododendrons and tall lilies. In the centre of the grove is a well, surrounded by more interleaved stones, built up in a couple of layers around it. A tall hazel tree throws dappled shade. The sun sparks on the stones, catching the surface of the water, illuminating tiny flies dandering above it. The blackberries are ripe and she picks and eats a handful, tipping them into her mouth. They taste of earthy red wines.
Kneeling on the ground, she lowers her face towards the water. It is deep and clear and fresh smelling, a natural spring. She plunges her hand in. It is earth cold, tingling. As a child she had imagined the fathomless source it came from and always it had filled her with a delicious fear. Kneeling by it, she would close her eyes and bend forward, thinking what it would be like to fall in and drift down through the chilled depths towards the earth’s raging core.
Her grandmother had treasured the well as an almost sacred place; provider of pure water but also of protection and healing. She would sprinkle the water over her aching shoulders and rub it against Liv’s throat to protect her from recurring tonsillitis. When Liv’s mother had shingles, Nanna had sent her a bottle of the water to dab on her abdomen but she had poured it into a plant pot, saying she preferred the doctor’s medicine to Juju. Always, Nanna carried a small bottle in her pocket, in case she felt unwell or sensed ill will or danger. It was an ancient well, she explained to Liv; it had been there long before the house. The hazel tree signified its special qualities because there was a hazel by the well at the centre of the world. This tree had dropped its berries into the water and to eat a hazel berry meant that you gained wisdom. All wells were linked to the central one and this meant that magic could occur at any of them. That was why the fairies often stopped by wells and had their meetings in the trees and bushes around them. ‘The people these days are full of science and brain work but there’s more wisdom in that water than in all the books in the world,’ she’d advised, as Liv’s mother threw her eyes up to the ceiling.
Liv scoops the well water into her mouth, shivering with the shock of its icy purity, then drinks and drinks with abandon until her mouth is numb, paralysed, and her face and hair drenched. She laughs, a loud, reckless note. A passer-by might mistake her for a fairy on the rampage, one of those her grandmother had often referred to. She’d had a wealth of verses and stories about them visiting wells and dairies; they were usually mischievous beings, out to hoodwink, irritate and tease, the delinquents of the spirit world. At night in the kitchen she would sing as she scraped leftovers into the pig bucket:
With tip-toe step and a beating heart quite softly I drew nigh,
There was mischief in his merry face
And a twinkle in his eye,
‘Twas Tic Toc Tic his hammer went upon a weenie shoe,
Oh I laughed to think of the purse of gold
But the fairy was laughing too.
Liv shakes her head back, sending a cloud of spray rattling into the bushes, then lies on her stomach, her arms propped on the stones, staring into the restless water. The sun and high clouds move across the surface, a constantly changing pattern of light and shade. She turns on to her back, shifting her shoulders to get comfortable and closes her eyes, the stones now acting as a pillow. The well sings quietly to itself, a constant, delicate melody. The ground is warming slowly under the sun. She can hear it breathing, stretching, stirring itself, releasing a loamy aroma. She dozes, the well murmuring behind her, little whispers of reassurance.
A cloud passing across the sun stirs her. She stretches, bones clicking, as if rediscovering their natural arrangement. Finishing her tea, she steps around the well to a hollow at the base of a furze bush and parts the grass to see if the stones are still there. They are small white chips of shingle specially collected by her father from the beach at Owenahincha on one of her parents’ wedding anniversaries. He’d used Liv’s plastic sandcastle bucket, a yellow one with moulded turrets to carry them back. That evening, she and her mother had watched as he’d levelled the ground by the furze and arranged the stones: MOLLIE AND FINTAN. Her mother had said it was the nicest gift she could have imagined. ‘Your daddy’s one of life’s real romantics,’ she’d said to Liv, holding her on her lap, making sure she blew her cigarette smoke away from her daughter’s eyes.
She traces her fingers along the stones, removing weeds. Once, she had asked her mother how much she loved her and her mother had said, ‘You know the well at Nanna’s? I love you deeper than the well and deeper than the deepest ocean.’ Standing by her mother’s coffin, she had understood suddenly, in a way that made her want to cry out, that a world was lost to her.
She rearranges the grass around the stones, restoring them to their hiding place. Then she fills the water bucket and makes her way back, her right arm dragging with the weight.
She crosses the paved area outside the kitchen and puts the bucket down by the door. There are terracotta tubs with flowers and herbs but they all look ragged and in nee
d of attention. An archway through a trellis leads to the main vegetable plots. A spade is stuck in a ridge of upturned earth, leaning at a perilous angle. The soil is a dark, cocoa brown, the colour of the milky paste she’d mixed the previous night from a packet she’d found in the kitchen cupboard. A wheelbarrow half full of stones and shards stands next to the path, mulched leaves piled around it. She kicks through the leaves, gripping the spade and standing it up straight, slicing it deeper into the soil. The wooden shaft is warm and rough like dry skin.
Another trellis and archway takes her to an area of overgrown fruit bushes and semi-jungle, where the juicy grass is brushing her calves. Turning and looking back through the archways, she sees order being stealthily overtaken by confusion. She is no gardener but she knows, from a time long ago when her father had appendicitis, how quickly nature wrenches back control; his small garden became unruly within a month.
The path vanishes and she walks on through thick grass and bracken, her shoes becoming soaked until she reaches a low bank and steps with a stile crossing into a field with cows. She climbs to the top of the stile and catches her breath; even now, the vista can surprise. There, at the end of the sloping field is the glistening sea, reflecting the blue of the sky. From where she stands, she can believe the illusion that she could run down the field, straight into the waves. She holds her arms across her chest and stands, entranced.
As she watches the swelling tide, she thinks of the first time she and Douglas went on holiday together. They took a package trip to Cyprus to celebrate their engagement and he confessed to her, as they walked down to the beach in blazing heat, that he couldn’t swim. She had been astonished because to her, he’d had a privileged childhood, rooted securely in ‘old’ money; father a surgeon in the army, mother an ex-debutante — one of that breed who had been ‘presented’ to the Queen — who bred Labradors and had her own London property, a vast and gloomy mansion flat off Eaton Square. Douglas had been educated at Harrow and Oxford. Summers were spent in Switzerland and Gibraltar. The family home was a huge house in Sussex with acres of land, gardeners and domestic staff. He could ski, ride, play cricket, polo and golf but was frightened of being out of his depth in water. He’d informed Liv, in that mechanical voice he always used when speaking of his mother, that when he was two years old she’d thrown him into the sea off Brighton, just as she’d done to his siblings, to encourage him to swim. Unlike his brother and two sisters, he’d panicked and gone under, felt the water pressing on his skull, drank his fill of salt as he screamed. Afterwards, he’d developed a stammer that came and went until he was a teenager. Even then, telling her the story, it returned as a hesitancy, a pause between words and it occurred to her that he spoke in this way when he was in his mother’s company.
Liv had spent a good deal of the holiday encouraging him into the sea, reassuring him that the shallow coast was perfectly safe. At the end of the fortnight, he was happy to doggy-paddle as long as the tips of his toes touched the bottom and she stayed near him. Watching him, she had enjoyed feeling nurturing, protective but later, when she reached the lowest ebbs in the marriage, she resented being trapped in the role of mother. I’m a mother with no children, she would reflect as she made excuses for him, forgave him, and waited up for him, cleared up the trail of debris he caused.
She had never been able to warm to his mother, a brisk, excruciatingly thin woman who regarded Liv as a downmarket addition to the family. ‘Haven’t heard from you for a while, since you blew in with that dreary bird,’ she’d written to her son after their first visit, which had been an endless, chilly spring weekend of croquet, mysterious horsy business and tasteless meals eaten in a freezing dining-room. The days and nights had been filled with the yapping and scrabbling of dogs that Liv feared. She had been glad that Douglas rarely visited his parents, preferring to keep his distance. They visited now once a year, at Easter and she thought of it as her duty, similar to the doctrinal laws she had obeyed in her childhood when communion and Mass had to be attended.
Bending, she picks up a handful of rough grass and soil, crumbling it in her fingers. This, she thinks, is what I want: simple days and nights. Today I’ll clean the house and poke about in the garden, see if there are any vegetables I can use, pick blackberries. I might see if they do an evening meal in Crowley’s. I’ll make cocoa and go early to bed and wake early. I’ll plan each day as it comes. No waiting for a key in the door and a smell on his breath, no half-truths and evasions and lies, no watching him push food round on his plate and missing his mouth, no having to look at the sheer heart-stopping stupidity of the smile on his lips.
She lifts her face to the breeze and lets her unhappiness lie quiet, like a calmed baby who will grow fractious again when it wakes to the difficult business of living.
Chapter 4
She’s itching and blinking from dust, in need of a bath. She has spent the day cleaning the cottage from top to bottom, dusting, sweeping with the heavy brush, scrubbing floors. She has washed all the kitchen crockery, cleaned the windows, cleared out the fire place and rinsed the curtains. She explored the shelves beside her grandmother’s bed/settee, sniffing the bottles and tubes of medications for rheumatism. They smelled of camphor, menthol and pungent eucalyptus. The eiderdown on the settee is impregnated with the same sharp scents and she imagines that Nanna must have rubbed them into her limbs before sleeping.
Carefully, she wipes off the books in the back bedroom and examines the yellowing pages. On each flyleaf are the initials O.F. The copy of Bleak House has a flattened Sweet Afton cigarette pack as a bookmark. Her grandmother had never liked cigarettes, or the devil’s weed, as she’d called them. That was why Liv’s mother had always smoked standing at the open door, or out in the glen.
It’s a long time since she’s done so much hard physical work; she and Douglas have a cleaner who visits once a week and sees to all the chores, including the ironing. She is grimy, aching, and happy. She lights a fire, cranks the big cast-iron pot from the back to the middle of the hearth and fills it with water, placing the tin bath ready in the centre of the kitchen. While she waits for the water to heat, she pours a glass of wine from the bottle she’s kept chilling in the well. It’s delicious, all the more so, she thinks, for being well earned. She relishes the taste, the relief of being able to open a bottle without having to worry that it will be an overwhelming lure, without having to hide it at the back of a cupboard or behind a bookcase.
Her father cleared most of Nanna’s personal papers after her funeral. In the dresser drawer Liv has found a small photo album. She sits by the fire with her wine and turns the pages, looking at black and white images of people she doesn’t know. There are various groups, the women in dark clothes, the men in suits. A nun is at the front of some of the groups, waving at the camera cheekily.
There is one photo of Liv and her grandmother holding hands, taken by the well; Liv aged about five in a ruched summer dress, Nanna garbed in her usual black, a tall woman with a full bosom, straight shoulders and capable hands. Around her grandmother’s head is one of the scarves she always wore, wrapped bandanastyle, framing her high forehead. Every Christmas, Liv’s father would buy one in Debenhams on the high street and post it in a padded envelope. It was always the same style, silk and in her preferred colours of blue or cream with a rose print. The bandana lent her an exotic air of a hippy or woman from the east who had wandered into the glen. Liv couldn’t recall ever seeing her without it, even at bedtime. She is sure that her grandmother slept in it. She holds the photo closer, scrutinising it. Both she and her grandmother look solemn, squinting in the sunlight. She has only distant, fleeting memories of the visits; hot potatoes bursting on a plate, milk cans wedged in the well, a sudden shudder of fear as a bull’s head loomed through a hedge, steam coiling from fresh cowpats, collecting eggs still warm from the hens for breakfast, her grandmother singing as she fed Susannah and chanting a rhyme as she helped Liv undress at night in front of the fire.
Dan,
Dan, the dirty old man, washed his face in a frying pan,
Combed his hair with the leg of a chair
And threw his britches up in the air!
Her grandmother’s hands were rough from work, but warm, and when Liv was washed and in her nightdress, Nanna would hold her face and plant a kiss in the middle of her forehead, saying, ‘Now, Alannah, it’s time to sleep the sleep of the just.’ She touches her grandmother’s face with her finger. I hardly knew you, she thinks, I was always too busy to come and see you and yet you left me your house, this refuge.
When the water is bubbling she transfers it by saucepan to the bath, a laborious process that takes a good ten minutes, topping it up with cold. No wonder she’d never seen her grandmother bathing. She lies in the tub with the pink radio on a chair beside her, listening to an Irish station. There is a discussion about the phenomenon of returning emigrants coming back to a country they’d left a long time ago. ‘It’s history revolving,’ a Professor Coughlan is saying. ‘Life is, if you like, a carousel and what goes around comes around; every nation has its time, when it takes a step forward on the world stage.’ She imagines an Irish dancer, one of those girls she used to see attending the Maura O’Dwyer academy on Saturday mornings, stepping forward from behind a curtain and commencing a jig. She supposes that’s what she is in a way, a second-generation returnee. She’d asked her father if he wanted Glenkeen and he’d shaken his head vigorously. ‘I’m too long away,’ he’d said, ‘there’s been too much water under the bridge, I wouldn’t want to be going back. And anyway, Barbara can’t be travelling these days, she gets too tired. Your grandmother wanted you to have it; it’s a gift of love. You could make something of it, you can do whatever you want, and it could just be an escape hatch.’
OUT OF THE BLUE a gripping novel of love lost and found Page 5