The Wonder(17)

Anna stood where Reilly had put her, beside a spindly table, with her right hand resting next to a vase of silk roses.

He tilted a mirror on a stand so a square of light hit her face, then ducked under the black drape that covered his camera. “Eyes up now, girlie. To me, to me.”

Anna’s gaze wandered around the room.

“Look to your public.”

That meant even less to the child. Her eyes found Lib instead, and she almost smiled, although Lib wasn’t smiling.

Reilly emerged and slotted a wooden rectangle into the machine. “Hold that, now. Still as stone.” He rolled the brass circle off the lens. “One, two, three…” Then he flicked it shut and shook the greasy hair out of his eyes. “Out you go, ladies.” He pushed the door open and jumped down from the van, then climbed back in with his reeking bucket of chemicals.

“Why do you keep that outside?” Lib asked, taking Anna by the hand.

Reilly was tugging at cords to let blinds fall over one window after another and darken the interior of the van. “Risk of explosion.”

Lib yanked Anna to the door.

Outside the wagon, the child took a long breath, looking towards the green fields. In sunlight Anna O’Donnell had an almost transparent quality; a blue vein stood out at the temple.

It was a long afternoon back in the bedroom. The girl whispered her prayers and read her books. Lib applied herself to a not-uninteresting article on fungus in All the Year Round. At one point Anna accepted another two spoonfuls of water. They sat just a few feet apart, Lib occasionally glancing at the girl over the top of her page. Strange to feel so yoked to another person.

Lib wasn’t even free to go out to the privy; she had to make do with the chamber pot. “Do you need this, Anna?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

Lib left the pot by the door with a cloth over it. She repressed a yawn. “Would you care for a walk?”

Anna brightened. “May we, really?”

“So long as I’m with you.” She wanted to test the girl’s stamina; did the swelling in Anna’s limbs impede her movement? Besides, Lib couldn’t bear to stay cooped up in this room any longer.

In the kitchen, side by side, Rosaleen O’Donnell and Kitty were skimming cream off pans with saucer-shaped strainers. The maid looked half the size of the mistress. “Anything you need, pet?” asked Rosaleen.

“No, thank you, Mammy.”

Dinner, Lib said silently, that’s what every child needs. Wasn’t feeding what defined a mother from the first day on? A woman’s worst pain was to have nothing to give her baby. Or to see the tiny mouth turn away from what she offered.

“We’re just stepping out for a walk,” Lib told her.

Rosaleen O’Donnell swatted away a fat bluebottle and went back to her work.

There were only two possible explanations for the Irishwoman’s serenity, Lib decided: either Rosaleen was so convinced of divine intervention that she had no anxiety for her daughter, or, more likely, she had reason to believe the girl was getting plenty to eat on the sly.

Anna shuffled and clumped along in those boy’s boots with an almost undetectable lurch as she shifted her weight from one leg to another. “Perfect thou my goings in thy paths,” she murmured, “that my footsteps be not moved.”

“Do your knees hurt you?” Lib asked as they followed the track past fretful brown hens.

“Not particularly,” said Anna, tilting her face up to catch the sun.

“Are these all your father’s fields?”

“Well, he rents them,” said the girl. “We’ve none of our own.”

Lib hadn’t seen any hired men. “Does he do all the work himself?”

“Pat helped, when he was still with us. This one’s for oats,” said Anna, pointing.

A bedraggled scarecrow in brown trousers leaned sideways. Were these Malachy O’Donnell’s old clothes? Lib wondered.

“And over there is hay. The rain usually spoils it, but not this year, it’s been so fine,” said Anna.

Lib thought she recognized a wide square of low green: the longed-for potatoes.

When they reached the lane, she turned in the direction she hadn’t yet been, away from the village. A sun-browned man was mending a stone wall in a desultory way.

“God bless the work,” called Anna.

“And you too,” he answered.

“That’s our neighbour Mr. Corcoran,” she whispered to Lib. She bent down and tugged up a brownish stalk topped with starry yellow. Then a tall grass, dull purple at the top.

“You like flowers, Anna?”

“Oh, ever so much. Especially the lilies, of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Because they’re Our Lady’s favourite.”

Anna spoke about the Holy Family as if they were her relations. “Where would you have seen a lily?” asked Lib.

“In pictures, lots of times. Or water lilies on the lough, though they’re not the same.” Anna crouched and stroked a minute white flower.

“What’s this one?”

“Sundew,” Anna told her. “Look.”

Lib peered at the round leaves on stalks. They were covered with what looked like sticky fuzz, with the odd black speck.

“It catches insects and sucks them in,” said Anna under her breath, as if she feared to disturb the plant.