‘Five words,’ said Caroline. ‘No, no, no, no, no.’
Joe let out a sigh of resignation and turned away. But he was not given to brooding on life’s disappointments, and his enquiring mind was never at rest for long. As they headed down towards the estuary path, Caroline could hear him asking his father why it was that dock leaves always grew in proximity to stinging nettles, and she could hear his father replying – as always – with a concise, informed explanation. Her eyes followed them as their figures receded, and as Joe’s two sisters ran and caught up with them: the bodies of father and son, so alike already in shape and bearing despite the years between them, and the eager, thronging daughters – the three children clustered around their father, drawn together into an inseparable group by blood and mutual affection and above all their unflinching regard for him. And she watched Max and Lucy following them down the same path: hand in hand, yes, but somehow sundered – some force intervening, holding them apart – and sundered in a way that she herself recognized, from personal experience. For an instant, in the odd paradox of their closeness and separation, she saw an emblem of her own relationship with Max. A shaft of keen, indefinable regret pierced her.
Now she could hear the two of them talking as they walked away.
‘So why
‘Well,’ Max answered. ‘Nature is very clever …’
But whether he managed to tell her any more than that she couldn’t say, their voices being carried off by the sea breeze.
How did he do it, Max found himself wondering on that walk. Just how did Chris get to be so bloody knowledgeable?
He could have understood it if he was just talking about things which fell within his own area of academic expertise. But it wasn’t only that. The fact was that he knew everything. Not in an offensive, I’m-cleverer-than-you sort of way. It was merely that he had been alive for forty-three years and in that time he had taken notice of the world around him, absorbed a lot of information and retained it. But why couldn’t Max have done that? Why couldn’t he remember the simplest things about physics, biology or geography? How could he have lived for so long in the physical world and not learned anything about its laws and principles? It was embarrassing. It made him realize that he was drifting through life in a dream: a dream from which he would maybe awaken one day (probably in about thirty years’ time) only to realize that his time on this earth was almost over, before he had even got the slightest handle on it.
Max looked up from these gloomy reflections as he felt Lucy’s hand slip out from his grasp, and saw her run away to catch up with Chris and his three children. The genial, ramshackle, ivy-covered outline of Ballycarberry Castle rose up before them, and she was running towards the point where the river curved, where it was sometimes possible to cross at low tide. Chris was explaining to Joe and his daughters about the tides and the gravitational pull of the moon, a subject (like so many others) of which Max had never achieved anything approaching mastery. He began to half-listen, but then started to feel self-conscious and, by way of distraction, picked up a flat stone which he attempted to skim across the river’s surface. It sank after a couple of bounces. Turning to catch up with the others, he found that Chris had now gathered all four of the children around him beside an exposed cross-section of the river bank. Even Lucy seemed to be paying attention.
‘Now, when a great chunk of the earth is exposed like this,’ Chris was saying, ‘the brilliant thing is that it tells you all sorts of stuff about the history of the area. Can anyone remember what these different layers of soil are called?’
‘Horizons!’ said Joe, keenly.
‘That’s right. They’re called soil horizons. Now, normally the top layer – this thin, dark layer here – is known as the “O” horizon, but this one would be classified as a “P” horizon, because this part of the countryside is so watery. Do you know what “P” stands for – something that you find a lot in Ireland?’
‘Peat?’
‘Peat, exactly! Then we have the topsoil, and the subsoil. Notice how the different horizons get lighter and lighter as you get further down. Even here, though, the subsoil is still quite dark. That’s because Ireland has a very rainy climate and rain is very effective in breaking down rock to form soil, and also in distributing nutrients through the soil. But the soil here is also quite sandy, because we’re at the mouth of an estuary.’
‘What is an estuary, Dad?’
‘An estuary is any coastal area where freshwater from rivers and streams mixes with saltwater from the ocean. So, estuaries form the boundaries between terrestrial systems and marine systems. They tend to have very rich soil because it’s full of decaying plants and animals. Look here in the subsoil, for instance …’
Oh, it was impressive stuff, Max had to admit. But then, you would expect Chris to know about soil. He had been teaching geology at university level for twenty years, and now he was a senior lecturer. Max wondered if his daughter realized this. Probably not. She was starting to stare at him with the same starry-eyed adoration as his own children.
Soon Chris, his daughters and Joe moved on, chatting away happily, making for the three stone steps which had been cut roughly into the wall, allowing people to climb up onto the walkway and thence along the grassy path to the castle itself. Lucy, meanwhile, lingered uncertainly. She took her father’s hand again and looked up into his eyes. It wasn’t at all clear that she had understood the finer points of that little lecture, but she had definitely understood something: she had understood the bonds of faith and admiration that connected Chris’s children to their father; she had understood the cheerful reverence with which they had listened to him. She had understood all of this; and Max knew, now, that she was wondering why the same feelings did not bind her to her own father. Or rather, she was now groping for those feelings, with a kind of forlorn hope. She wanted to be talked to in that way. She wanted her father to explain the world to her, with the same confidence and authority that Chris beamed out to his children with every word. As they, too, began to walk on, she looked around her, and Max knew that she was taking in her surroundings with a new kind of curiosity; knew that she was going to have questions of her own to ask him, soon, and that he would be expected to have the answers.
It happened sooner than he had been anticipating.
‘Daddy,’ she began, innocently enough.
‘Mmm?’ said Max, stiffening himself for the impending curve ball.
‘Daddy, why is the grass green?’
Max laughed, as though this was the simplest and most innocuous question in the world; opened his mouth to allow the answer to fall almost carelessly from his lips; then stopped, as he realized that he didn’t have the faintest idea what to say.
