Sheltering Rain (30 page)

I'll stay a couple of days, she told herself, as the cab paused on the edges of Ballymalnaugh. I'm an adult. I can leave whenever I like. It's always possible to cope with a couple of days. And then perhaps I can persuade Sabine to come home with me.

“Have you come far?” The driver evidently felt a need, now that he had neared his destination, to secure his tip.

“London.”

His eyes, two beetles under bushes, met hers in the rearview mirror.

“London. I've got family in Willesden.” He paused. “It's all right, love, I won't ask you if you know them.”

Kate smiled thinly, gazing out of the window at the familiar landmarks: There was Mrs. H's house, the Church of Blessed Peter, the forty-acre field that her parents had sold to a farmer the first time they had run out of money.

“You been here before, then? Not an area that usually gets many tourists. Usually I take them up north. Or to the west. You wouldn't believe the numbers that go to the west, now.”

Kate paused, gazing at the stone wall that fenced Kilcarrion House.

“No. Never,” she said.

“Just visiting friends, then?”

“Something like that.”

Just think of it as picking up Sabine, she told herself. That will make it all bearable.

E
xcept it wasn't Sabine who met her at the door. It was Julia, dressed in jodhpurs, a huge, scarlet fleecy body-warmer, and matching socks, who, after a great flurry of kisses and exclamation, said rather pointedly that she had “absolutely no idea” where Sabine was. “She seems to spend most of her time either hiding in the yard, or closeted away with Edward,” she said. Julia always spoke in a way that expressed bemusement at other people's actions.

Kate, trying to hide her irritation at the too-intimate way in which Julia referred to her father, decided she must have gotten it wrong. Sabine would not want to hang around the horses. And she was even less likely to be “closeted away” with her father.

“But what am I doing?” Julia exclaimed, taking one of Kate's bags. “Do come in! Where are my manners?”

They've been bulldozed by your acquisitive instincts, Kate thought bitterly. And then told herself she had no right, as it was not as if, for the past sixteen years, she had cared whether the house was hers, or indeed razed to make way for a McDonald's drive thru. She adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose (she had, of course, forgotten her contact lenses), trying to take in the home that was no longer hers.

“We've put you in the Italian room,” Julia trilled, as she “showed” Kate upstairs. “I don't think it's leaking at the moment.”

In the decade since her last visit, it was as if the house had aged in dog years, Kate thought, looking around. It had always been cold, and damp, but she couldn't remember these brown water stains spreading down the walls, like sepia-tinted maps of far-off continents; nor could she remember everything looking this shabby and threadbare: the Persian rugs worn down to a patchy network of grayed cotton threads, the furnishings scuffed and chipped, evidently long past their deadline for repainting. She didn't recall the smell; the ever-present distant hum of dog and horse now mingling with those of mildew and neglect. And she hadn't remembered this chill; not a dry cold, like her house had seen when her boiler had broken, but a damp, seeping, long-standing cold that had permeated her bones within minutes of her arrival. Kate stared at the back of Julia's dense fleece with new eyes. It certainly looked warmer than anything she had brought.

“We've actually managed to warm up the place a bit,” said Julia, throwing open the door of Kate's room. “You wouldn't believe how cold they had let it get. I told Christopher, it's no wonder Edward got ill.”

“I thought it was a stroke,” said Kate, coolly.

“Yes, it was a stroke, but he is old, and terribly frail. And the elderly do need their comforts, don't they? I've told Christopher we should take him back to Dublin with us, back to a bit of proper central heating. We've got a room all ready. But your mother won't have it. She wants to keep him here.”

The tone of her last words left Kate in little doubt as to Julia's opinion of this course of action. By keeping her husband in Kilcarrion, she was effectively resigning him to an early grave, it said. But Kate felt a sudden communion with her mother. Her father would always rather be here, cold and damp, rather than smothered to death in Julia's pastel-colored, centrally heated embrace.

“Between you and me, Katie, I can't wait to get back to our house,” Julia said, pulling out one of the drawers, to check that it was empty. She was prone to offering such fake “confidences,” words that meant nothing but suggested some intimacy on the speaker's behalf. “I do find this place depressing, even if Christopher loves it so. And our neighbor is looking after the cats and I know they'll be simply miserable by now, poor things. They hate it when we go away.”

“Oh. Your cats,” said Kate politely, suddenly remembering Julia's passion for the two insolent-looking felines. “Are they still the same ones?”

Julia placed a hand on her arm. “You know, Katie, it's very sweet of you to ask, but they're not. Well, Armand is still with us, but Mam'selle sadly passed away last spring.” Kate noted, with some fear, that Julia's eyes had suddenly filled with tears.

“Still, she had a good life . . . ,” she mused, distantly. “And you know we've got the sweetest little girl to keep Armand company. Poubelle, we call her,” she laughed delightedly, her good humor suddenly restored. “Because she's never out of our kitchen bin, the little madam.”

Kate tried to smile, wondering how quickly she could escape Julia's freesia-scented hold, and try to locate her daughter.

“You must be desperate to unpack. I'll leave you to it,” Julia said. “But don't forget, tea is at four-thirty prompt. We've persuaded Joy to have it in the breakfast room now, because it's that little bit easier to heat. I'll see you down there.”

With a parting flutter of her fingers, she was gone.

Kate sat heavily on her bed, and gazed around her at the room she had not seen for ten years. This had not been her own room; Julia had told her that Sabine was occupying that, while Julia and Christopher occupied the room that had always been his. The other “dry” guest room was apparently occupied by her mother. It didn't surprise Kate; she had suspected they often kept separate rooms even when she lived at home—her father's snoring, her mother had explained, unconvincingly. But she found it hard to reconcile anything in this room with her childhood or teenage self; it was as if the house had aged faster than anyone else, ironing out any badges or markings of familiarity as it went, and it felt, genuinely, like it had nothing to do with her.

Why should I care? thought Kate, briskly. My life hasn't been here since Sabine was born. My life is back in London.

But still she found herself gazing around at the pictures on the walls, peering into the cupboards, as if waiting for some jolt of recognition, even some pang of melancholy, for an earlier, less complicated life.

She was making her way down the stairs when she first caught sight of Sabine. She had her back to her, and was crouching by the dogs, pulling her riding boots off, and exclaiming to Bella and Bertie fondly as they pushed their noses at her face that they were both “dopey, dopey animals.” Bertie, becoming overexcited, jumped up on her, sending her collapsing gently backward onto the hall carpet, and Sabine laughed, pushing him away, trying to wipe her face as he slobbered over her.

It didn't even look like her daughter. Kate stood and stared, feeling a simultaneous joy at this uninhibited display of affection, and a distant ache that somehow this place, this frozen wasteland of emotion, had succeeded where she had failed in eliciting it.

Sabine, sensing a presence, turned around, and jumped slightly as she saw her mother on the stairs.

“Sabine,” said Kate impulsively, and thrust out her arms. She had not been prepared for the sheer emotional pull her daughter's presence could have on her. It had been weeks.

Sabine stood, some kind of indecision flickering across her face.

“Oh . . . er, hi, Mum,” she said, and, with a small step forward, allowed herself to be hugged, and then pulled very gently backward when it felt like it was going on too long.

“Look at you!” exclaimed Kate, shaking her head. “You look . . . you look . . . well, you look great.” You look like you belong here, she wanted to say. But that phrase held so many dangerous implications that it had frozen on her lips.

“I look like shit,” said Sabine, staring down at her muddy jeans, and her oversized jumper, pincushioned with pieces of straw. Her head dipped, and her thin hand ran through her hair, and immediately she had returned to the old Sabine, self-conscious, hypercritical, and desperately wary of any kind of compliment.

“You've got your glasses on,” she said. She made it sound accusatory.

“I know. In all the commotion, I stupidly forgot my lenses.”

Sabine stared at her face.

“You should get some new frames,” she said, and turned back to the dogs.

There was a brief silence, as Sabine bent to pick up her boots.

“So . . . ,” said Kate, aware that her voice sounded too high, too eager. “Have you been out riding?”

Sabine nodded, placing them behind the door.

“I never thought your granny would have you riding. Do you like it? Has she gotten you a horse?”

“Yeah. She's borrowed one.”

“Great . . . great. It's nice to rediscover old interests, isn't it? And what else have you been doing?”

Sabine looked at her, irritably.

“Not much.”

“What, just riding?” The door of the breakfast room was open. Kate noted with some relief that no one was in there yet.

“No. Helping out. Doing stuff around here.” Sabine paused, to shoo the dogs into the breakfast room, and then with an action seemingly born of long habit, placed one of her socked feet up against one of the oil heaters.

“And . . . you're happy? Everything's been going okay? I—I've hardly heard from you lately. I was wondering if you were all right.”

“I'm fine.”

There was a prolonged silence, during which Sabine stared determinedly out of the window, eyeing the darkening sky.

“We don't normally have tea in here,” she said, eventually. “We normally have it in the living room. But
Julia
. . .”—she pronounced it lengthily, and with some scorn—“thinks that the log fire doesn't get the room warm enough. So now we're having it in here.”

Kate sat tentatively in one of the chairs, desperately trying not to show how wounded she felt by Sabine's apparent indifference. “We normally,” she had said. “We normally,” like she had lived here all her life. Like she felt proprietorial about the place.

“So,” she said, brightly. “Do you want to hear about O'Malley?”

Sabine, switching feet, looked at her.

“He's all right, isn't he?”

“Yes, he's fine. I just thought you might be interested in what he's been up to.”

“He's a
cat
,” said Sabine dismissively. “What is there to tell?”

My God, thought Kate. Whatever lessons it is they give to teenage girls in how to cut people down to size, Sabine evidently got her share.

“Don't you want to ask me anything about home? How my work's going? How the house is?”

Sabine frowned at her mother, trying to work out what exactly it was that she was asking her to say. She seemed desperate to try and provoke some response from her, as if she had expected her to be all over her, bombarding her with demands for news from home, jumping up and down like some television reunion. And perhaps, a week or two earlier, she might have done it. But she felt different about this place now, and seeing her mother so suddenly . . . well, it had put her on edge. That desperate need for her had evaporated with her arrival. It was like boys, when you spent all week thinking about them, desperate to see them, and then when you did you felt all complicated, like you didn't know whether you wanted to see them after all. Like they were somehow better in your imagination than in real life.

She eyed her mother surreptitiously as she gazed around the room, looking a bit lost and pathetic. For the last two months all she had thought about was the good stuff: Kate being supportive, and kind, and being able to tell her anything. And now—when she looked at her—her overriding emotion was—well, what? Irritation? The faintest feeling of being invaded? Looking at her reminded Sabine of the whole Justin and Geoff thing. Listening to her reminded her that her mother could never just relax and let her be; she was always pushing for more than Sabine felt comfortable giving. Why couldn't you have just been cool? she wanted to say to her. Why couldn't you have just said hi, and let me come to you? Why do you always have to push me so hard that I end up pushing you away? But she just stood, warming her frozen feet against the oil heater, swallowing her emotions.

“Ahh. Katherine,” said Christopher, striding into the room. “Julia said you were here.” He placed a hand on her shoulder, and inflicted a distant kiss. “Good journey over, was it? Did you come by ferry in the end?”

“No. I flew. Couldn't get an earlier flight,” said Kate, aware that she was already sounding defensive.

“Oh. Yes. Yes. I heard. Never mind, looks like the old man's improved a bit.”

No, he hasn't, thought Sabine. I've spent nearly every day with him, and he's not improved at all. But she said nothing.

“So, how long are you staying?”

He sat down on her father's chair, and glanced around, as if waiting for Julia or Mrs. H to enter bearing the tea tray. Kate didn't know how to answer. Until he dies, she wanted to say. I thought that's what we were all here for.