Instructions for a Heatwave (35 page)

“Should be another lovely day tomorrow. The sky was pink over the sea tonight. Did you see it?”

Gretta knits on, wool slipping into stitches, stitches becoming rows, rows forming the sleeve of what will be, soon, a cardigan. A lovely lilac wool blend, it is, fully washable. She’d intended it for Monica’s Christmas present but she might change her mind if Madam doesn’t start being a bit pleasanter.

“We’ll go back to the convent tomorrow, I think,” she says, and is aware of a prickle of interest from the person across the room. “You might think of coming, too.”

Still nothing.

“I’ll take you with me tomorrow. Just you. The others would be too much.”

With a flourish of her index finger, Monica turns another page.

“That Frankie is in a bad way, poor soul. Had a stroke, by the looks of things. He doesn’t have long. A matter of days, I’d say. He has that smell off him, you know, that smell of death. Same as my father when he was failing.”

She looks up. Monica is staring at her but drops her eyes as soon as Gretta’s meet hers.

“And my father? How about him?”

The sound of Monica’s voice makes Gretta’s heart leap—in relief and also triumph. She knew she could get her to talk to her again! She knew it!

To mask her glee, Gretta puts her head on one side, she drops her eyes, she lowers her tone. “Not there, pet. The sister said he comes in, visits Frankie, then goes off again. I … I just don’t know what to think. What to do.”

Monica is silent again. Gretta can’t risk looking up at her now, so she continues in the same aggrieved voice: “The sister I spoke to seemed to think he’d be there again tomorrow, in the morning or the afternoon.” Gretta frowns, trying to remember which it was or what exactly the nun had said. “One of the two, anyway. We could—”

Monica puts down her magazine with a slap. “You needn’t think I’ve forgiven you!”

Gretta, hopeful and encouraged by this outburst, lets her knitting fall. “I don’t think that,” she says, keeping her head low, her hands meekly in her lap. She reminds herself of a painting she’s seen—can’t remember which one, though. Is it that grim-faced woman in profile by that Scottish painter? Perhaps. She could look it up when she gets home; the thought gives her a small thrill. How she loves those encyclopedias she got on a discount from that shop. Only a little water damage at some of the corners. Volumes A to M got the worst of it; N to Z, you’d hardly know at all, really, unless you were looking closely and who—

“I can’t ever forgive you.” Monica clasps and unclasps her hands, just as she did when she was a small girl and she’d realized she’d forgotten to do some chore Gretta had asked of her.

Had she been too hard on her as a girl? Was that why she’d grown up so fearful, somehow, so reluctant to make her way in
the world? Was it Gretta’s fault? She couldn’t have done anything differently with Monica: they were so close, close as close, as she often put it to Bridie, who was, Gretta was sure, more than a little jealous, herself having only boys.

“I know, pet. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let you down. It was … I don’t know … all so long ago and after the war and all … they were strange times and—”

“I don’t care how strange they were, you shouldn’t have lied. You shouldn’t have pretended.”

“I know that.” Gretta bows her head even deeper. “I’m sorry.”

“What would the priest say?”

Fear jags deep into Gretta’s heart, banishing all thoughts of encyclopedias, all reflections on upbringing. “Oh, now, don’t say that, don’t—”

“What would he say if I were to go in there and tell him you and Dad aren’t married, that he is in fact still married to someone else, that you had all of us out of wedlock, that—”

“You won’t do that, will you, please don’t now, promise me you won’t or I’ll—”

“Of course I won’t.” Monica sighs, as if irritated by the very idea that she might. She sits back in her chair, arms folded, looking away. “What are we going to do about Daddy?”

Gretta is heartened by the “we” in that sentence. She raises her head. “We’re here now,” she says, “and he’s here, we know that. I left a message at the convent, saying where we were. So we’ll wait. See if he comes. We’ll have to go and see Frankie anyway, a desperate state he’s in, you wouldn’t believe it, and he’s family, after all, so—”

“That’s it?” Monica demands. “We just wait?”

“There’s nothing else to do,” Gretta says.

Monica crosses her legs. She swings a foot up and down. As restless as Aoife, sometimes, Gretta thinks. Then Monica gets out of the chair and goes over to the window.

“We could at least give these curtains a wash,” she says, reaching up. “Don’t you think?”

Gretta is on her feet in seconds. “We could. I wouldn’t like to say when those old things last saw a bit of soap.”

·  ·  ·

Aoife treads up and over the spine of the island, along the track, over a wall and up the sandy slope of the bluff. To the right of her, she’s aware of some shapes—vaguely human—flitting about, at the edge of the island. She keeps her head averted. Whatever Michael Francis and Claire are getting up to out there in the dark, she doesn’t want to know.

The air is still about her, soft, the night gilded by a white glow from a near-spherical moon, puncturing the prickling sky over the mainland. It delineates the contours of the island for her, picks out the turf beneath her feet, the gray shapes of the dry-stone walls. At the highest point of the hill, she turns 360 degrees. She can hear the sea all around her. They are cut off from land, encircled by sea, for the moment a true island.

Ahead of her, she knows, is an overhang, then a drop and then a steep slope of sand. She has held the topography of this place in her head, she realizes, learned from her many summers wandering about here. It has been tucked somewhere into her consciousness since she was last here—ten years ago now, or thereabouts. But just walking on this terrain, just standing here at the highest point, with the island flowing away from her in all directions, brings it out, unfolds it like a paper map.

The lough is just below her; she sees its black mass, pooled in a hollow, as an absence of light, the only one under this bright moon. She feels her way over the edge of the drop, allowing herself the observation that she is being careful, she is not jumping or hurling herself off onto the sandy slope, as she might have
done otherwise. She steps down the slope, aware of sand invading her shoes, again witnessing herself taking care.

She feels the lough before she sees it. A damp, spongy give under her feet, spiked marsh plants needling her trouser hems. At its edge, she discards her shoes, rolls up her trousers. The water is a shock, a delicious, skin-shrinking cold. Her feet find their way forward over the gritted, stony lake bed.

She stands up to her knees in the water. The sky above her is a blue-black, a purple-black, the hue of the ripest blackberries, backlit by silver, a color she has never seen anywhere else, not in the private gloom of Evelyn’s darkroom, not in all those thousands of photographic negatives she has pored over.

Aoife puts her hand to her middle. How strange it is to feel so alone and yet know that you are not. There is a second heart inside her, beating away. She applies a light pressure to her abdomen. Quickening: isn’t that the word? The best word of all to describe what is going on in there, in some hidden fold of her body, in some pressed corner of her being. She has given up, of late, trying to understand why things happen. There is no use in that line of thought, no use at all. What will happen will happen and there is often no reason at all. But this—this is something else. For it to arrive, to begin, to quicken now, when so many people in her life seem to be pulling away from her. How can it be?

As this thought threads its final syllables through her mind, there is, just to her right, a heave in the water of the lough. The surface parts, she sees the motion of a muscled back, a flash of sleek hide. She takes a step back, missing her footing as she stubs her toe on a sharp point of rock. She makes a small cry of pain. The lough seems to be waiting, flat again, its surface still as a mirror. Aoife looks left, then right, searching for a ripple, a line of bubbles, anything. What was that animal and where did it go?

A movement, a plash—where? She turns her head, alert for motion, and she is trying to push from her mind all her mother’s
tales of selkies, of watery spirits, of sailors lured to their deaths by apparitions on nights such as these. She wonders if she were to shout, to cry out, would anyone hear her? Would Michael Francis come running? He would. But would he be in time?

Then she sees it, not three feet in front of her. Its head rising from the water, looking straight at her. A blunt forehead, wetted fur, whiskers spread into the air, a pair of wide, dark eyes. A dog, she tells herself. It’s just a dog, from one of the farms, having a swim. But its ears are too small for a dog, the muzzle too short.

Aoife and the creature regard each other. It’s like an otter but big, like a seal but furred. Then it brings up a clawed paw and sweeps at its face, once, twice, the length of its nose and over its brow. There is a feeling behind Aoife’s eyes as if she is about to sneeze, a gathering, a buzzing, like the sensation she gets if she looks too long at a page of text and doesn’t work hard at keeping her mind in gear, a feeling that what she is looking at is slipping and sliding, might morph into anything if she isn’t careful.

“Gabe?” she says.

Even as she speaks the word, she is aware of the ridiculousness of what she is saying. She knows this creature, whatever it is, isn’t Gabe. She isn’t crazy. Gabe is over the sea, that sea to her right, all the way over, in New York. And yet, there is something in that creature’s gaze, something in that gesture of its forepaw.

She says it again, whispered this time: “Gabe?”

With a wheeling motion, the animal turns and disappears, diving down into the lough.

Aoife runs. She runs without thinking about where she is going and why, without picking up her shoes. She runs barefoot back up the dune, over the top, back down the grassed side. She vaults the wall, she passes two black cutout silhouettes on the track. Aoife, her brother’s voice calls after her, come back, but she doesn’t, she doesn’t come back, and when she gets to the other side of the island, she is unsurprised to find that the waters have
parted, that there is a narrow strip of gleaming sand, fretted by tides, leading to the mainland.

She takes this path, she runs along it. She sprints the length of the causeway, seawater reaching and reaching for her ankles. She runs all the way to Claddaghduff and, when she gets there, she sees the telephone box, lit up like a landing strip, and she goes inside.

She dials the number for her apartment; she isn’t expecting him to be there; she just wants to call, to hear the phone and know that it’s ringing there, on the wall next to her bed. It’s seven in the evening in New York. Gabe will be at the restaurant, stacking plates, skinning vegetables, sluicing down surfaces. But, amazingly, she hears a pickup on the line, she hears the intake of his breath, the minute parting of his lips.

“Gabe?” she says.

“Yes.”

“It’s me.”

“Aoife,” he says, elongating the sound of her name. “How are you?” Is that her imagination, her wishful thinking, or is his voice a little bit less brusque?

“I’m in Ireland.”

“Ireland?”

“Yeah. We came to Ireland, me and my family—all my family, even my niece and nephew.”

“What’s the news on your dad?”

“We’ve found him. Sort of. Well, we know where he is. We just haven’t seen him yet.”

“He’s in Ireland?”

“Yeah.”

“He just took off for Ireland?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you another time. How come you’re not at the restaurant?” There is a pause. She listens to him sigh. “Are you OK? Did something happen?”

“It’s nothing,” he says.

She grips the phone tighter. “Tell me.”

“There was just someone looking for me.”

“At the restaurant?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

“It was probably nothing but Arnault said I should stay away for a few days.”

“I’m so sorry, Gabe.”

“It’s OK. It just means I’ll have to find another job. Which is a shame because I kind of liked Arnault’s.”

“You’ll find something else.”

“I guess.”

Another pause. She hears him shift about, as if he’s walking across the room or perhaps sitting down on the bed.

“I’ve been keeping myself busy, though,” he says, after a moment.

“Oh?”

“I sorted out that file for you.”

She snaps upright. “You did?”

“Yeah. I didn’t have anything better to do and it kind of took my mind off things.”

“You’ve done it all? The whole thing?”

“I’ve put the contracts in envelopes and I clipped all the checks together. You can pay them in when you get back. Or”—she can hear him plotting his way carefully around the fact that he thinks she might not come back—“I can take them along, if you tell me where Evelyn banks, or give me the name of the accountant, or—”

“Thank you, Gabe,” she bursts out. “Thank you so much, I really, really—”

He cuts her off. “Don’t worry about it. I couldn’t just, you know, leave it like that. And, like I said, I had nothing better to do today.”

Aoife flattens her hands against the glass of the phone box
and leans her head into it. The file has been sorted. She cannot believe it. The problem that has weighed on her for a year is gone. Just like that.

“Aoife,” he says suddenly, “I know this isn’t really the time, but I just want you to know that I’m not going to be bothering you anymore. About the apartment and stuff. It’s OK. I get it.”

“You get what?”

“I get it. The whole thing. I realized at the airport.”

“You realized what?”

“That you don’t want to move in with me—you don’t really even want to be with me.”

“But—”

“It’s all right. Let’s not get into it now. I’ll be out of here by the time you get back.”

“Gabe.” She shakes her head in panic. “No, you’ve got it all wrong. Completely wrong. I do want to be with you, I want that very much, more than anything, and I would love to move in with you but the thing is …” She gets that old, familiar feeling of not being able to draw enough breath down into her lungs. “… at the airport … I couldn’t … see … what you’d written … I had difficulty …” She tries and fails to produce her usual, casual, self-deprecating laugh. “Maybe I need glasses or something …”