The Girl on the Cliff (2 page)

‘She has no mother.’ Kathleen’s wooden spoon stirred the stew rhythmically.

‘She’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see … so who looks after the poor child?’

‘Don’t be asking me about their domestic arrangements,’ Kathleen shrugged, ‘I couldn’t care and I don’t want to know.’

Grania frowned. Her mother’s attitude was totally contrary to the way she would normally respond. Kathleen’s
big, maternal heart beat hard and loud for any poor thing in trouble. She was the first round to a member of the family, or friends, if there was a problem and support was needed. Especially when it came to children.

‘How did her mother die?’

The wooden spoon ceased its circling of the pot and there was silence. Finally, Kathleen gave a heavy sigh and turned to face her daughter. ‘Well now, I suppose if I’m not telling you, you’ll be hearing it soon enough from someone else. She took her own life, so she did.’

‘You’re saying she committed suicide?’

‘’Tis one and the same thing, Grania.’

‘How long ago?’

‘She threw herself off the cliff four years ago. Her body was found two days later, washed up on Inchydoney beach.’

It was Grania’s turn to stay silent. Finally, she ventured, ‘Where did she jump from?’

‘From the sound of things, probably where you set eyes on her daughter today. I’d say Aurora was looking for her mammy.’

‘You know her name?’

‘Of course. ’Tis hardly a secret. The Lisle family used to own the whole of Dunworley, including this very house. They were the lords and masters round here a long time ago. They sold off their land in the sixties, but kept the house up on the cliff.’

‘I’ve seen the name somewhere –
Lisle
 …’

‘The local churchyard is filled with their graves. Including hers.’

‘And you’ve seen the little girl – Aurora – out on the cliffs before?’

‘That’s why her daddy took her away. After
she
died, that little mite would walk along the cliffs calling for her. Half mad with grief, I’d say she was.’

Grania could see her mother’s face had softened slightly. ‘Poor little thing,’ she breathed.

‘Yes, ’twas a pitiful sight and she didn’t deserve any of it, but there’s a badness that runs through that family. You listen to what I say, Grania, and don’t be getting yourself mixed up with them.’

‘I wonder why they’re back?’ Grania murmured, almost to herself.

‘Those Lisles are a law unto themselves. I don’t know and I don’t care. Now, will you be making yourself useful and helping me set the table for tea?’

Grania went upstairs to her bedroom at just past ten o’clock, as she’d done every night since she’d arrived home. Downstairs, her mother was busy in the kitchen laying out the table for breakfast, her father was dozing in the chair in front of the TV and her brother, Shane, was at the village pub. Between the two men, they ran the 500-acre farm, the land mostly given over to dairy herd and sheep. At twenty-nine, the ‘boy’, as Shane was still affectionately called, seemed to have no intention of moving into his own home. Women came and went, but rarely across the threshold of his parents’ farmhouse. Kathleen raised her eyebrows over her son’s still-unmarried status, but Grania knew her mother would be lost without him.

She climbed between the sheets, listening to the rain battering the window panes, and hoped poor Aurora
Lisle was tucked up inside, safe and warm. She turned the pages of a book, but found herself yawning and unable to concentrate. Perhaps it was the fresh air here that was making her sleepy; in New York she was rarely in bed before midnight.

In contrast, Grania could scarcely remember a night as a child when her mother had not been at home in the evenings. And if she had to go away overnight on a mission of mercy to care for a sick relative, the preparation to make sure the family did not go hungry or the clothes unwashed was a military operation. As for her father, Grania doubted he had
ever
spent a night away from his bed in the past thirty-four years of his marriage. He was up at five thirty every morning of his life and off to the milking shed, coming home from the farm whenever dusk fell. Husband and wife knew exactly where the other was at all times. Their lives were as one; joint and inseparable.

And the glue that bound them together was their children.

When she and Matt had moved in together eight years ago, they’d taken it for granted that one day there would be babies. Like any modern couple, until that suitable moment presented itself, they had taken their lives and careers by the throat and lived fast and hard while they could.

And then, one morning, Grania had woken up and, as she did every morning, had thrown on her track-pants and hoodie and jogged along the Hudson to Battery Park, stopping at the Winter Gardens to enjoy a latte and bagel. And it was there that it had happened; she’d been sipping
her coffee and had glanced down into the pram parked by the next table. Inside was a tiny new-born baby, fast asleep. Grania was beset by a sudden, overwhelming urge to pick the baby up out of its pram, to cradle its soft, downy head protectively against her breast. When the mother had smiled nervously at her, then stood up and pushed the pram away from her unwanted attention, Grania had jogged back home, feeling breathless at the emotion that had been stirred in her.

Expecting it to pass, she’d spent the day in her studio, immersing herself in moulding the malleable brown clay into her latest commission, but the feeling hadn’t alleviated.

At six, she’d left her studio, showered and changed into something suitable for the opening of an art gallery she was attending that evening. She’d poured herself a glass of wine and walked to the window that looked across to the twinkling lights of New Jersey on the other side of the Hudson River.

‘I want to have a baby.’

Grania had taken a hefty gulp of wine. And giggled at the absurdity of the words she’d just spoken. So she’d said them again, just to make sure.

And they’d still felt right. Not only right, but completely natural, as if the thought and the need had been with her all her life and all the reasons ‘not to’ had simply evaporated and now seemed ridiculous.

Grania had gone out to the gallery-opening, made small talk with the usual milieu of artists, collectors and envelope-openers that made up such events. Yet, in her mind, she was running through the practicalities of the
life-changing decision she had taken earlier. Would they have to move? No, probably not in the short term – their TriBeCa loft was spacious and Matt’s study could easily be turned into a nursery. He rarely used it anyway, preferring to take his laptop into the sitting room and work there. They were up on the fourth floor, but the freight lift was quite big enough to take a pram. Battery Park, with its well-equipped playground and fresh river air, was easily walkable. Grania worked from home in her studio, so even if a nanny had to be employed, she’d only be a few seconds away from the baby if she was needed.

Grania had climbed into the big, empty bed later and sighed with irritation that she’d have to keep her plans and her excitement to herself for a while longer. Matt had been away for the past week, and wasn’t due home for another couple of days. It was not the kind of thing one could just announce over the phone. She’d finally fallen asleep in the early hours, imagining Matt’s proud gaze as she handed him his new-born child.

When he’d arrived home, Matt had been just as excited about the idea as she was. They’d made an immediate and very pleasurable start on putting their plan into action, both of them loving the fact they had their own secret joint project, which would bond and cement them, just as it had for her own parents. It was the missing piece that would unite them once and for all into a homogenised, co-dependent unit. In essence, a
family
.

Grania lay in her narrow childhood bed, listening to the wind howling angrily around the solid stone walls of the
farmhouse. She reached for a tissue and blew her nose, hard.

That had been a year ago. And the terrible truth was, their ‘joint project’ had not united them. It had destroyed them.

When Grania woke up the next morning, the storm of the night before had blown away like a memory, taking the grey clouds with it. The sun was making a rare winter appearance, lighting the rolling landscape beyond her window, giving definition to the endless green of the fields that surrounded the farm, interspersed with the white, woolly dots of the sheep that grazed on it.

Grania knew from experience that this state of affairs was not likely to last long; the West Cork sun was akin to a temperamental diva, gracing the stage for a cameo appearance, bathing all in her glory and then disappearing as quickly as she had arrived.

Having been unable to complete her normal routine of a morning jog because of the incessant rain of the past ten days, Grania jumped out of bed and rifled through her still unpacked suitcase to find her hoodie, leggings and trainers.

‘Well now, you’re up bright and early this morning,’ commented her mother as Grania arrived downstairs in the kitchen. ‘Porridge?’

‘I’ll have some when I come back. I’m going for a run.’

‘Well, don’t you be tiring yourself out. I’d say the colour on you isn’t healthy – no flush in those cheeks of yours.’

‘That’s what I hope to achieve, Mam.’ Grania suppressed a smile. ‘I’ll see you later.’

‘Don’t you be getting a chill now, will you?’ Kathleen called to the disappearing back of her daughter. She watched from the kitchen window as Grania ran down the narrow lane cut into the fields by an ancient drystone wall, which led eventually to the road and the path up to the cliffs.

She’d been shocked at the sight of her child when Grania had arrived home; in the three years since Kathleen had last seen her, her beautiful, bonny daughter – always a head-turner, with her peaches and cream complexion, curly blonde hair and lively turquoise eyes – seemed to have diminished in vitality. As she’d commented to her husband, John, Grania currently resembled a bright pink shirt that had been put by mistake in a dark wash. And emerged a dulled, greying relic of its former self.

Kathleen knew the reason. Grania had told her when she’d called from New York to ask if she could come home for a while. She had agreed, of course, delighted at the unexpected opportunity to spend time with her daughter. However, Kathleen could not understand Grania’s motive – to be sure, this was a time when she and her man needed to be together, to support each other in their grief, not have half the world separating them.

And that lovely Matt telephoned every night to speak to her, but Grania stubbornly refused to take his calls. Kathleen had always harboured a soft spot for him; with his clean-cut good looks, soft Connecticut accent and impeccable manners, Matt reminded Kathleen of the movie stars she’d mooned over as a girl. A young Robert Redford – that’s what Matt looked like to her. Why Grania hadn’t married him years ago was beyond her. And now
her daughter, always stubborn when she had one on her, was surely on the verge of losing him altogether.

Kathleen did not know much about the ways of the world, but she understood men and their egos. They were not built as women – did not have the same capacity for rejection – and if there was one thing she was certain of, it was that his phone calls would soon stop coming nightly and Matt would give up.

Unless there was something that Kathleen didn’t know …

She sighed as she cleared away the breakfast dishes and dumped them in the sink. Grania was her golden girl – the one Ryan of the clan who’d fled the nest and done everything possible to make her family, especially her mother, proud of her. She was the child the relatives wanted to hear about, poring over the cuttings Grania sent from various newspapers detailing her latest exhibition in New York, fascinated by the well-heeled clients who commissioned Grania to immortalise their children’s faces or animals in bronze …

Making it in America – it was still the ultimate Irish dream.

Kathleen dried the bowls and cutlery and stowed them away in the wooden dresser. Of course, no one had the perfect life, Kathleen knew that. She’d always presumed that the patter of tiny feet was something Grania had never hankered after, and had accepted it. Did she not have a fine, strong son to give her grandchildren one day? Yet it seemed she’d been wrong. For all Grania’s sophisticated lifestyle, living at what Kathleen saw as the centre of the universe in New York, the babies were missing.
And until they came along, her daughter would not be happy.

Kathleen could not help thinking Grania had brought it on herself. For all those new-fangled drugs, used to help and abet the miracle of nature, there was no substitute for youth. She herself had been but nineteen when she’d had Grania. And brimming with the energy to cope with another babe in the space of two years. Grania was thirty-one. And whatever any of these modern career women believed, it was impossible to have everything.

So, although she felt for her daughter’s loss, it was her way to accept what she had and not pine after what she didn’t. And on that thought, Kathleen climbed up the stairs to make the beds.

Grania sank down on to a damp, moss-covered rock to catch her breath. She was puffing and panting like an OAP; obviously the miscarriage and a recent lack of exercise had taken its toll. Grania put her head between her legs as she caught her breath and kicked with her trainers at the coarse clods of rough grass beneath them. They stubbornly refused to be dislodged from the strong roots which held them fast beneath the ground. If only the little life inside her had done the same …

Four months … when she and Matt had finally thought they were home and dry – everyone knew you’d usually reached a safe place by then. And Grania, paranoid up until that point, had begun to relax and give in to the imminent and longed-for fantasy of becoming a
mother
.

She and Matt had announced the news to both sets of grandparents; Elaine and Bob, Matt’s parents, had taken
them out to L’Escale, near their enormous house in the gated community of Belle Haven, Greenwich. Bob had asked bluntly when the two of them would get on with their long-awaited marriage now Grania was expecting. After all, this was their first grandchild and Bob had made it blatantly clear it must take the family name. Grania had stone-walled – when pushed into a corner her hackles rose, especially with Matt’s father – and she’d replied that she and Matt were yet to discuss it.