A Keeper(15)

The jolt of a pothole woke her. How long had she been asleep? The bright winter light of earlier had gone and now the hedges blurring past were being swallowed by a grey gloom. She sat up and discovered a long string of saliva connecting her mouth to a dark stain on the front of her coat. She quickly wiped it away. Edward glanced at her and smiled. It was nothing, but to the starving, crumbs can feel like a feast. Patricia smiled back. ‘Sorry. I had an early start. Was I asleep for long?’

‘A while all right. You missed Bandon and Timoleague. It’s not far now.’

‘Oh, right.’ Patricia wondered how she could surreptitiously reapply her lipstick before she met his mother.

‘That was my primary school there.’ He indicated a slate-roofed box with long windows. Patricia peered out as if her guide had announced the Arc de Triomphe or the Spanish Steps. She struggled to come up with an appropriate response, even a ‘nice’ seemed disingenuous, so instead asked where he had gone to secondary school.

‘Clonteer, but I only did a few years before my brother James died and I went onto the farm full time.’

Death. How had her small talk taken her to death so fast?

‘Oh. That’s a shame.’ It was unclear even to herself if she meant the untimely passing of his brother or his truncated education.

‘Ah, it was all right. I wasn’t much of a one for school.’

The car came down a hill through some trees and then rounded a corner onto a narrow causeway. On either side of the road misshapen mounds of grass and reeds sat like giant mushrooms in a network of muddy channels.

‘It’s low tide,’ Edward observed.

Having got used to the smell inside the car, Patricia was now accosted by a salty sulphuric fog from outside.

‘You might want to close your window,’ he said as she quickly rolled it all the way up. ‘It’s not always this bad,’ he added apologetically.

The road rose up slightly over a small bridge where the channel through the marsh was wider.

‘This is where old Pat Whelan went in. Drunk as a lord, riding his bike back from the pub.’ Edward gave a low chuckle and Patricia was very happy to join in.

‘Was he all right?’

‘No. Never found. They did find the bike at low tide but no sign of Pat. The mud just swallows things up. We’ve lost a couple of cows over the years.’

‘I see.’ Patricia wasn’t sure how to respond so just stared out the window at the wide flatness of the marsh, imagining the horrors that lay beneath the smooth dark sheen of the mud.

Ahead of them was the reassuring solidity of hedges and trees. As they reached them Edward spoke again.

‘This is where the good land starts. That’s all grazing in there.’ He pointed to his right and Patricia’s eyes followed dutifully though in fact she had no idea what she was looking at. The car slowed down.

‘Here we are.’

They went through a pair of unpainted stone pillars and up a lane with a long thick Mohawk of green down the centre. At the top of the hill, Patricia gasped. It was the sea! Just a field away was a long sandy beach. At either end the land reared up into tall dark cliffs. Backing onto the rocks furthest away from them was a large white and blue farmhouse and behind that the jagged silhouette of a ruined castle.

‘It’s beautiful,’ she said and she meant it. The whole landscape that stretched before her looked like something she might have seen in a gallery in Dublin on a school trip.

‘It’s home,’ Edward replied matter-of-factly.

As the lane came down to the shore and towards the house Patricia could hear the waves and the rushing of the wind. She felt strangely invigorated, as if maybe she had made the right decision. The whole trip wasn’t the worst idea she had ever had.

Edward brought the car to a stop just before the house. Patricia could see that the lane continued on to a farmyard where a line of outbuildings joined up with the old castle and the back of the house to form a U shape. A sheepdog roused himself by the door to one of the outbuildings. His tail wagged but he didn’t approach them. When Patricia tried to open her door, it was yanked from her hand by the wind. Edward hurried around the car to help her out.

‘Are you OK?’ His voice was raised against the gritty din of the surf and storm.

‘Yes,’ she called back and stood up, the wind catching her hair and coat, tossing them without mercy. Edward was holding her case. ‘Let’s get you in.’ He led her through a small gate painted the same shade of Virgin Mary blue as the windows of the house. A narrow gravel path led them up the side and around to the front, where a neat grey-haired woman was waiting at the door for them. Her dark eyes quickly surveyed the new arrival and for a moment Patricia felt like a rabbit that had just been spotted by a fox. Her hostess bared her teeth into a smile and then waved Edward forward with one bony hand while the other held her lemon cardigan closed against the weather.

The door shut behind them, and it was as if heavy machinery had stopped. The silence was abrupt. Patricia tried to smooth down her hair and readjust her coat simultaneously.

‘You are very, very welcome. You must be Patricia. I’m Edward’s mother. Please call me Catherine.’

Patricia noticed a look flicker across Edward’s face. She guessed that not many people got to call Mrs Foley by her Christian name. The women shook hands and the lady of the house led them down the dark hall and to the left into a living room that seemed too small for the house.