Sheltering Rain (6 page)

“She's a bit odd over him,” said Thom, carefully, as he took her bag from her. “I wouldn't read anything into it. I know she's looking forward to seeing you.”

“Some way of showing it,” muttered Sabine. Then glanced quickly up at Thom to see if he thought her sulky.

She cheered up briefly when they walked outside. Not so much because of the car—a huge, battered Land Rover (although it was obviously cooler than Mum's)—but its cargo, two huge, chocolate-brown Labradors, as silky and sinuous as seals, squirming around each other in their passionate attempts to greet the returning.

“Bella. And Bertie. Mother and son. Go on, get over, you daft animal.”

“Bertie?” she couldn't help grimacing, even as she rubbed the two adoring heads, trying to steer the wet noses from her face.

“They're all Bs. Down the line. Like hounds. Except the hounds are all Hs.”

Sabine didn't like to ask what he was talking about. She hoisted herself into the front of the car, and strapped herself in. She wondered, with a little concern, how Thom was going to drive without his arm.

Erratically, as it turned out. But as they careered around the gray streets of Rosslare, and then onto the main road toward Kennedy Park, she realized she couldn't be entirely sure whether that was down to his insecure grip on the gear stick. His hand clasped it like an ill-fitting hard hat, rattling quietly against the plastic cover as the car bumped along the rough roads.

As a route home, she decided, it was less than promising. The drizzly, cramped streets of the port town contained no shops she could imagine wanting to hang out in, being stuffed with, as far as she could see, old ladies' stiffly upholstered underwear or car parts, while outside it seemed to be all hedgerow, dotted by modern bungalows bearing a sprinkling of satellite dishes, like some strange fungi sprouting from the brick. It didn't even feel like proper countryside. There was a park dedicated to a dead president, but she couldn't see herself becoming desperate enough for greenery that she needed to use it.

“Is there anything to actually
do
in Wexford?” she had asked Thom, and he had turned briefly toward her and laughed, his mouth curled reluctantly around it, as if it didn't happen too often.

“Our big city girl is bored already, is she?” he said, but it was in a friendly way, so she didn't mind. “Don't worry. By the time you leave here, you'll be wondering what there is to do in the city.”

She somehow doubted it.

To take her mind off her nerves, Sabine thought about Thom's arm, which was resting on the hand brake next to her. She had never met anyone with a false limb. Would it actually be attached to him, with some kind of glue? Or would he pull it off at night? Would he put it in a glass of water like her neighbor Margaret put her false teeth? And then there were the practical things—how would he put on his trousers? She had once broken her arm, and found it impossible to do up her fly one-handed. She had had to ask her mother to do it for her. She found herself stealing a look at his fly to see whether there was some sort of Velcro fastening and then glanced away quickly. He might think she was perving at him, and, nice as he was, she had no intention of a bit of one-armed banditry while she was here.

During the rest of the drive, Thom spoke to her only once more, to ask her how her mother was.

Sabine looked at him in surprise.

“How do you know her? You must have been here forever.”

“Not quite. But I was around as a lad. And then I left to work in England a couple of years after she did.”

“She never mentioned you.” She realized as soon as it came out how rude it sounded. But he didn't seem offended. When he spoke, she had noticed, he did so with a kind of permanent time delay, as if measuring the words before he allowed them out.

“I don't know how much she'd remember me. I worked in the yard, and she was never a great one for the horses.”

Sabine gazed at him, desperate to ask more questions. It seemed somehow strange to picture her mother here, friends, perhaps, with this one-armed horseman. She could picture her mother only ever in an urban environment: in their house in Hackney, its stripped floors, spider plants, and art-show posters broadcasting their liberal, lower-middle-class credentials. Or eating in one of the ethnic cafés in Kingsland Road, chatting earnestly to her long-earringed, angry female friends, trying to put off the ugly moment when she had to go back to writing her piece. Or arriving home in raptures from some arty film she had seen at the cinema, while Geoff, ever the realist, complained about its diversion from the German school's traditional imagery. Or whatever.

Thinking of Geoff made her stomach clench, and, annoyingly, provoked a renewed fluttering of nerves. She wondered, briefly, if he would try to write to her. Somehow knowing that he and Mum weren't going to be together anymore made it all awkward. She didn't know how to
be
with him anymore. He would probably find some new girlfriend within months, as Jim did, and then Mum would get dumped by Justin Stewartson and end up all bitter and upset and ask why men were “such
aliens
.” Well she wasn't going to give her any sympathy. And she was never going to agree to go on holiday with Geoff if he got a new family. That was for sure.

“Here we are,” said Thom.

She had no memory of the house at all, apart from its size. From her childhood, she remembered the inside: all dark-wood stairs and corridors that doubled back on themselves, the smells of wood smoke and wax. And she remembered the foxes' faces, mounted and dated according to their demise, jutting from their little shields and snarling impotently from the walls. At the age of six she had found them terrifying, and spent minutes at a time crouched on the stairs, waiting for someone to come past and give her the courage to race past them. From outside she remembered only a mournful donkey, who would bray incessantly when she walked away from its field, so that she felt blackmailed into staying. Her Mum and Jim had thought she was in love with it, and told everyone how sweet it was. She couldn't explain that she felt bullied by it, and was relieved when someone made her go back inside the house.

Now she noticed the exhausted-looking frontage of the house: the tall Georgian windows peeling their paint, the windowsills chipped and sagging like the mouth of an aging aunt. It had obviously been a grand house once, grander than anybody she knew. But it looked tired, steeped in decay, like someone who had stopped caring and was waiting simply for an excuse to go. It looks like I feel, Sabine thought, and felt an unexpected empathy.

“Hope you've brought your woollies,” said Thom, out of the corner of his mouth, as he hauled her bag up the front steps. “It's awful damp in there.”

They waited some moments after he rang the bell, and then the door opened, and a tall woman stood before her, dressed in Wellingtons and tweedy trousers, and rubbing bits of hay from her cardigan. She was old, her brow, nose, and chin pushing past dignified pronouncement to the exaggeration of old age. But she stood tall, and lean. When she held out her hand, her fingers were unexpectedly broad and close, like rough sausages.

“Sabine,” she said, smiling. As an afterthought, she held out her other hand, too, as if she was expecting a hug. “I'm sorry I didn't meet you at the boat. It's been all go this afternoon.”

Sabine didn't know whether to walk forward or not. “Hullo,” she replied, unable to say Granny. She rubbed at her hair awkwardly, unsure what to do with her hands. “Nice . . . nice to see you.”

Her grandmother withdrew her hands, and stood, her smile looking a little stiffer. “Yes. Yes . . . Did you have a good trip over? That ferry can be awful. Can't bear it myself.”

“It was fine.” Sabine heard her own voice disappear to a whisper. She felt Thom's presence behind her, waiting, listening to this ridiculous exchange.

“Bit rough. But not bad.”

There was a lengthy pause. “Is your horse okay?”

“No. He's not, really. Poor old boy. But we've given him some Bute, so he should have a better night. Hello, Bella, old girl, hello, hello. Yes, I know. Yes, Bella. You're a very good girl. Now, Bertie, don't you dare go upstairs.”

Stooping to rub the gleaming coats of her dogs, the old lady turned and walked stiffly into the hall. Sabine stood and stared at Thom. He gestured to her to follow, and then, having dropped her bag on the step, saluted and tripped lightly back down the stairs.

Filled suddenly with a childish urge to ask him not to go, Sabine paused momentarily. Her grandmother, she realized, with some indignation, hadn't even thanked Thom for coming to get her. She hadn't even acknowledged him. Sabine felt the first glimmerings of resentment, carried quietly since she had left London that morning, begin to blossom into something more potent. She walked slowly in, and closed the big door behind her

The scents and sounds of the hall hit her memory squarely with the strength of a demolition ball. Wax polish. Old fabrics. The sound of the dogs' claws clicking on the flagstone floor. Behind her grandmother moving briskly along the corridor, she could hear the weighty tick of the grandfather clock, marking time at the same distant pace that it had done on her last visit, a decade ago. Except her height now allowed her to see above the tables, where the bronze horses stood in rest, or paused in midflight across bronze hedges. On the walls were oil paintings of other horses, mostly referred to by their first names: Sailor, Witch's Fancy, Big Dipper, like half-remembered portraits of family members. Somehow she found them comforting. I wasn't nervous then, she told herself. And she's just my grandmother for God's sake. She's probably nervous about having me to stay, about guessing what will make me comfortable.

But she seemed to hide it pretty well. “We've put you in the blue room,” she said, upstairs, motioning into a room at the far end of the landing. “The heating's not terribly good, but I've got Mrs. H to lay you a fire. And you'll have to use the downstairs bathroom, because the hot water's given up in here. I couldn't give you the good room because your grandfather's in it. And the downstairs one has got mold on the walls.”

Sabine tried not to shiver in the thin cold of neglect and gazed around the room, a curious hybrid of the 1950s and 1970s. The blue chinoiserie wallpaper had at some point been optimistically matched to a more modern, turquoise shag-pile carpet. The curtains, threaded with gold brocade, dragged along its surface, as if they had come from a much larger window. An old sink stood on stiff, cast-iron legs in the corner, with a thin, pale-green towel hanging close to the fireplace. A watercolor of a horse and cart sat above the mantelpiece, while a larger, badly done portrait of a young woman who may have been her mother sat on the wall close to the bed. She kept glancing behind her at the door, strangely conscious of her grandfather's silent presence just a few doors away.

“There are a few bits in the wardrobe, but there should be plenty of room for your things. Is that all you brought?” Her grandmother looked down at her bag, and then around her, as if expecting something else.

Sabine paused.

“Do you have a computer?”

“A what?”

“Do you have a computer?” Sabine realized as she spoke that she knew the answer. She should have known it from this room.

“A computer? No, no computers here. What do you need a computer for?” Her voice was brusque, uncomprehending.

“For e-mail. Just to keep in touch with home.”

Her grandmother appeared not to hear.

“No,” she repeated. “We don't have any computers here. Now, if you unpack your things, we'll have some tea, and then you can go and see your grandfather.”

“Is there a television?”

Her grandmother gave her a searching look.

“Yes, there is a television. Your grandfather has it in his room at the moment, because he likes to watch the late news. I'm sure you can borrow it occasionally.”

By the time they walked into the drawing room, Sabine had begun to sink under a black cloud of depression. Even the arrival of “Mrs. H,” who, short and plump and sweet-smelling as her home-baked bread and scones, could not lift her mood, despite her friendly inquiries about Irish Sea crossings, her mother's state of health, and her own happiness with the bedroom arrangements. There was no escaping it, Thom appeared to be the youngest person there, and he was the same age as her mother. There was no television in her room, no computer, and she hadn't yet worked out where they kept the phone. And Amanda Gallagher was going to steal Dean Baxter before she could make it home. It was what hell must be like.

Her grandmother, when she reemerged into the drawing room, didn't seem to be much happier. She kept looking unseeing around the room as she ate, as if trying to work out some distant problem. Periodically she would stand stiffly up from the easy chair, walk briskly to the door, and shout some instruction at either Mrs. H or some other unidentified person, so that after the fourth time Sabine decided that her grandmother wasn't used to having tea, and felt it something of an imposition to have to sit there with her granddaughter for that long. She didn't ask about her mother. Not once.

“Do you need to see to your horse?” she said eventually, figuring that would give them both an easy exit.

Her grandmother eyed her with relief. “Yes. Yes, you're right. I should check on the old boy. Very good.” She stood, and brushed crumbs from her trousers, so that the dogs immediately leaped up to check the carpet. Striding to the door, she turned around.

“Do you want to have a look? Come and see the stables?”

Sabine paused. She was desperate to disappear, so that she could indulge her burgeoning misery in private. But she knew it would be considered rude. “All right, then,” she said grudgingly. Her Dean Baxter depression could wait another half an hour.