Jarlath shook his head. He had moved almost imperceptibly away from her in the bed and had started to pull up his trousers.
“You should see it,” Alice said. “It’s beautiful.” She watched Jarlath struggling into his jeans, fumbling with the zipper. Earlier, during sex, she had surprised him with her vigor. Marian would have been impressed. “When he tried to end it,” Alice said, “I panicked. I told him I would tell his wife.”
It was getting late, the room edging closer to darkness. Jarlath sat on the bed, lacing up his boots. Every word that bubbled up onto Alice’s tongue seemed to swallow a little more of what light remained, but she could not help herself.
“Of course I would never have told his wife.” Her eyes followed Jarlath as he bent to pick his shirt up from the floor. “But he believed I would. He gave me ten grand to keep quiet.”
Jarlath stopped buttoning his shirt. “Ten grand?”
Alice nodded. “I took my mother to London to visit her brother, I changed the car, and I bought new linoleum for the kitchen. Then I asked him for more.”
“Did he pay?”
“He kept paying for two years, and then he went to the police.”
Jarlath was standing by the foot of the bed. Behind him on the wall was a ragged-edged poster of Radiohead, defaced with graffiti. Alice noticed how here in his bedroom, with his face flushed and his hair damp with sweat, he seemed much younger than he had at the barbecue.
“So what happened?”
“I went to jail,” Alice said. “It was all over the newspapers. Poor Mammy took it very badly; Poor Mammy thought I was still a virgin.”
Jarlath shuffled his feet on the carpet and looked away. Alice felt sorry for him.
“He left his wife anyway,” she said. “That first summer I was away, he disappeared with a Portuguese woman who came to work in the hotel.”
“Where did they go?”
Alice shrugged. “Someplace far away.”
Jarlath came round to the side of the bed and stooped to give her a hug. It was a safe, compassionate hug, the kind of hug her cousin, Olive, might give Alice’s father when she put him on the bus home Sunday morning. He touched her bare shoulder. “Take care of yourself,” he said.
Alice watched Jarlath putting on his jacket, getting ready to leave his own house. She knew that she had said too much, knew that Marian would roll her eyes and be furious, but there was no stopping now. She sat up in bed, clutching the sheets to her breasts. “I’m forty-five,” she said.
—
HER FATHER’S SUITCASE IS back in the hall, waiting to be unpacked and stored beneath the stairs for another year, or maybe another couple of years. Alice has taken down all the flypaper. “Tea, Daddy?” She pours a cup of tea for her father, sets it down in his saucer with a fistful of colored pills. But her father is on his feet, prowling the kitchen with a rolled-up newspaper. “Hoors,” he shouts. “Feckers.” There is a stirring in the folds of the curtains, a murmur in the clammy air of the kitchen. And all along the windowpanes, the bluebottles, dark and velvety, rise up in a last frantic salute to life and summer. And they buzz and ping and beat their gauzy wings against the glass.
Along the Heron-Studded River
He gripped the ice scraper in his gloved hands, pulled it back and forth across the windscreen. A mist of ice particles rose up, settled upon the car bonnet. It was dark yet, but the sun was beginning to rise, tingeing the white fields pink. All around him the land was hard and still, the ditch that separated their property from the farm next door brittle grassed and silver. In the distance he could see the line of trees that flanked the river, their branches dusted with a light powdering of snow. A heron stood beside the small ornamental pond, stabbing the frozen surface with its beak. The previous Saturday, Cathy had driven to the city and had returned with half a dozen koi, some of them bronze and tea colored, others gray. He had watched her release them, dazed and startled, into the pond. Dropping the ice scraper, he clapped his hands and the heron rose up and flew away.
The house was a dormer bungalow, facing south toward the river, set into a hollow in the field. From where he stood in the driveway, it looked like a Christmas ornament, frost clinging to the roof, condensation rounding the squares of light in the windows. He could see Cathy moving about the kitchen in her dressing gown, Gracie on her hip, preparing breakfast.
“Did you get any sleep?” he had asked earlier.
“Yes,” she said, “plenty,” but he had felt her slip from their bed during the night, had heard her feet on the floorboards as she went downstairs. He knew she would be on the phone to Martha, her sister, who lived in Castleisland. What Martha made of these late-night phone calls, he didn’t know. Martha spoke to him only when matters concerning Cathy or Gracie required it, grudgingly even then, and once a month she posted a check for the daycare fees.
He finished the windscreen, leaving the engine running so the car might heat up, and went back into the house. In the hall he removed his wet gloves and put them to dry on the radiator. He could hear his wife and daughter in the kitchen singing “Incy Wincy Spider.” He watched them through the door, their forms distorted by the patterned glass. Cathy was making porridge. She balanced the wooden spoon on the edge of the pot and shimmied low to the floor, her dressing gown enfolding Gracie like a tent. Gracie screamed and wriggled out, then immediately crawled back in again, pulling the dressing gown tight about her. She poked her face through a gap between buttons and giggled. And as he entered the room, he felt something seep away, like the slow hiss of air from a puncture.
Cathy stepped over her daughter and crossed the kitchen to kiss him on the cheek. There were dark circles under her eyes. She took both his hands in hers and rubbed them gently, frowning at their coldness.
“Is it bad?” she said, inclining her head toward the window.
“Bad enough. You’ll need to be careful going to daycare later.”
“It’ll have thawed by then. Do you want coffee?”
He shook his head. “I’ll get some at the office.”
Gracie toddled across the kitchen to reclaim her mother. Cathy scooped her up and she clung, limpet-like, to her neck. Over on the burner, the porridge spluttered in its pot. “I’ll do that,” he said, as he saw Cathy turn. “You sit down.”
He poured porridge into two bowls and carried them to the table. Cathy lowered Gracie, kicking and protesting, into her high chair and fastened the straps. “Martha’s asked us to go stay with her for a few days,” she said.
He pulled out a chair beside her. “When?”
“She thought next week might be good. There’s a festival on, and a few of the cousins will be around.” She stirred some milk into the porridge, and blew gently on a spoonful before putting it to Gracie’s lips. He watched the child clamp her mouth shut, contort her small body so she was facing the other direction.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I worry about you being there on your own.”
“We won’t be on our own. We’ll be with Martha.” She took Gracie’s chin in her hand and gently turned it back toward the spoon. “You could come down on the weekend, stay for a few days.”
“Did Martha say that?” He knew how Martha felt about him. It was the same way he felt about Martha.
“You know she’s always asking us to visit.”
You, he thought. She’s always asking you to visit, but just then Gracie released a mouthful of porridge she had quarantined in her cheek. He watched Cathy’s hand dart out and catch it on the spoon. Her own porridge was untouched, solidifying into a cold gray disc.
“Here,” he said, reaching for the spoon. “Let me feed her. You eat your breakfast.” But she shook her head.