Sheridan takes a walk in the lichen-gnarled oak wood by the shore, in the company of a ten-year-old girl. Not the daughter of the B&B, another little girl. He shows her things that she has never known, and tells her the names of flowers and trees which have merely been flowers, trees , to the barren little mind of the modern peasant. Here's a wood ants' nest, a treacle-brown heap of sifted soil that looks like a small grave: but when you take a second glance the grave is heaving. "Did you know," says Sheridan, "that ants are farmers?" They lie down together, the tall man and the little girl, in the leaf-litter and watch an ant-shepherd teasing a drop of nectar from the pointed belly of one of its aphid charges.
"Holy Jesus God," says the little girl. "It's like a science-fiction film."
"The weak are here to justify the strong," says Sheridan, stroking a drop from another insect with a pointed grassblade, to show how easy it is to milk this crop.
"Jesus," says the little girl, peering intently. "If they were bigger, it would be like a horror movie." She sighed. "Yez knows a lot. It's like talking to the Internet."
"Shall I take your picture now?"
The little girl thinks maybe she ought to run. But she doesn't.
Camilla and Noreen walk by the shore, Noreen pushing a stoutly built tartan upholstered buggy ahead of her. It's what passes for a fine summer day on the west coast of Ireland. There are cars ranked in the car park, battalions of windbreaks; very few foreign tourists. Camilla's thinking of her glimpses of native life before this providential halt. Shovel-faced young women marching along lanes where only tractors and tourists ply, with the baby in the buggy: and you wonder, where is she going? You wonder what kind of life is it she leads. You want to touch her. Now Camilla is in the picture . She has penetrated to the heart of the alien world, It's always a thrill, however often repeated.
She has seen Noreen's husband briefly. A kitchen monster, sitting at the table, knife and fork in either fist, red impassive slab of a face. My God, to lie under that , while it silently prods children into you ! But she keeps such thoughts to herself, tucks her arm in Noreen's arm and recounts her adventures as a world traveller, long-haul traveller. The pyramids at Giza, the restaurants of New York. Wise insights. "In West Africa, in the market in Foumban, beside the earth-walled palace of the sultans, did you know you will only find Dutch printed cotton?"
"Is that a fact? Would there not be any native handicrafts there?"
"Noreen, it's a big lie that the colonial powers went to Africa and Asia to plunder the natural resources. That was an afterthought. They went to force new markets for their goods. To sell, not to buy. It's the same with tourists, did you ever think of that? They don't come to see , they come to be looked at. Did you ever think of that?"
"I did not!" said Noreen, blinking in bewilderment. "Oh, but I could never call you a tourist , Cam. Ye're much more than that to me." Shyly, she clasped Camilla's arm to her well-nourished flank. (The pleasure lies in knowing that it will go no further . There will be no consequences, because Camilla isn't staying. Tastes and smells, moments of intensity, never a bill presented.)
They walked on, Noreen silenced for a little by her own outburst. "You know," she said, after a moment or two, "I'm worried about this bug that's going round. Some folk are keeping the children in. D'ye think I should keep them indoors?"
"Them?"
"The kids?"
"Ah." Camilla frowned, and looked away. "Don't worry. Your kids are safe."
She didn't explain the emphasis.
The steel-blue waves rushed in and out, the mothers sat behind the windbreaks, a somewhat depleted cohort of local boys and girls jumped and splashed in the water. "I suppose all your children are grown up and gone," sighed Noreen, shoving the buggy over recalcitrant tidewrack and compounded this faux-pas by adding hurriedly, "Och, I mean, you must have been married very young!"
"Married?" Camilla dispelled the idea with a laugh, slightly put out that her dark hint has been ignored. "Sheridan and I have been together so long we're almost like brother and sister, but we've never been, ah, officially married ."
"Not married?" gulped Noreen.
"I've never been married. I like my independence."
"But yez said, you was like, a a kept woman?"
"That was my joke."
Never married! The buggy gave a jolt that made Roisin wail. Among the family portraits so readily on display in the Guests' Lounge and TV Room, there are several women who have never married, holding ugly babies against their bolster chests. Noreen's astonished gaze is comparing Camilla with those crewel-working great-aunts, finding a place for her among the failed huntresses, old maids
"You look so young!" she gasped, as if unmarried bliss was in her mind inextricably linked with spinster middle age. "You look like a fashion model!"
Camilla squeezed the housewife's arm more tightly, and leaned close to rub her cool pale cheek against Noreen's warm, rosy one. "I've been young for so long," she murmured, "I can't remember being anything else."
"Ah!" sighed Noreen. "For two pins I'd"
What would she do? Take Camilla away from all this? The blushing ploughboy, the sophisticated older woman, the configurations are endless; and pity may play a part. It's all grist to Camilla's mill. It's like a transfusion of fresh blood, without any of those ugly, depressing emergency-room details.
Love is the hunger on which we feed.
Sheridan prowled the woods and the shore. Camilla, no longer poorly, haunted the kitchen of the B&B, where Noreen was penned for most of her life, incessantly cooking, stowing the washing machine, ironing dank sheets. Noreen relayed tales of the disastrous epidemic. The boy with the nightmares, and no one in that house gets a wink of sleep. The girl that they rushed to hospitaclass="underline" but then the doctors couldn't find anything wrong. So that was a whole day gone for nothing, with the driving her there and the waiting in the waiting room, and the driving her back. In August, too. Jesus God. Schadenfreude . Noreen is miraculously preserved.
Camilla changes the subject. We are all kept women , she says. (Noreen has confided that romance is long out of the window with her Jonas.) We can't do without them, can we? We may look like the perfect couple, but the truth is there are things I — She breaks off, and will say no more.
One day Sheridan came home from his adventures in a thoughtful mood, laid out digital prints on the tired candlewick bedspread, and pondered them with a happy smile. "Time to get the hell out of here," he said. "I'm done."
"The hell is right," said Camilla, glancing and averting her eyes.
"Why so squeamish? I have to live, don't I?"
"I can see why you want to leave!"
He put on his sunglasses, and grinned at her. "No one ever knows. I'm careful."
"Good, because I'm not done. I haven't finished. Not yet."
The dark lenses gave back a double image of her face, so richly shadowed, it's a shame she needs another partner. But two predators can't feed on each other. This is their eroticism, these tastes and smells, this contact at a remove: and it still thrills her. Sheridan always comes first, true. But Camilla likes it that way.
"Go, sister," says Sheridan, the big teenager. "You look like you need a fix."
The car had been repaired. It arrived back at the B&B that evening. They announced their departure the next morning, and settled the bill. Noreen was very sorry to see them go, but she made no fond farewells in front of Camilla's ersatz husband. Camilla conveyed, by a sad glance or two, that the sudden decision was not her own; and that she wished they could say goodbye more warmly. She got up about an hour after midnight, Sheridan peacefully unconscious. The sheets, although freshly changed, still had that bad-laundry smell. How does she do it? wondered Camilla, wrapping herself in an elegant blue and white kimono. Poor Noreen is a genius of poor housekeeping, of meagre portions She went into the ensuite and checked her face. Good God, even the electricity in the mean fluorescent tube seems to come straight from the North Pole. Tiny crow's feet around her eyes, lines between her brows, is that a broken vein ? Can't be! Never mind. Soon, soon this washed-out hag will disappear. The mirrors of civilization will restore Camilla's beauty, infused with fresh magic. For a last thrill, she walked the immeasurably ugly, pine-varnished passageways of the big lumpen house, possessing it like a ghost. American couples snore peacefully behind their brass number-plates, dreaming of Blarney Castle and the Rock of Cashel. Noreen shares a room and a bed with Jonas, with baby Roisin in her cot. The baby, for a wonder, is not grizzling. But the house is unquiet.