“Well, you may be hurting now, pet, but you’re only the one person. It could be his wife hurting, through no fault of her own, and their children too. He wasn’t yours to have, no matter how bad you feel. And there’ll be others.”
“There wasn’t for you.”
Brona narrowed her eyes and gave her an impish look. “You’re very sure of that, are you?”
“Brona!”
Her aunt stood up. “That’s enough of that. What you have to do, young lady, is get yourself over this man.” She tucked in the sheet. “It’ll be a lot harder than getting over the illness, granted, but there’s nothing else to be done. Sure isn’t he taken, and far away, and that’s all there is to it.”
“But where could you have met someone?”
Brona pushed a stray strand of gray hair back over her ear and glanced at the sunlight that was like another person, having leaped in from outdoors and landed on the timber floorboards. And then she came back again, from wherever, whomever, she had gone to. “You have to break the habit of thinking about him. Any habit can be broken.”
“And how’s that to be done, when I have zilch energy to do anything other than lie around thinking all day?”
“Think about something else. Daydream.”
“What?”
Brona nodded. “Fantasize.”
“That’s what I am doing!”
“Yes, but, darling, it’s the wrong man you’re dreaming about.”
“Is there another?”
“That’s up to you. Sure, doesn’t every one of us have an inner life that’s all our own?” Brona’s voice was softer than usual. With a glance at the bare crucifix on the wall (Thea steeled herself for a religious rant), she went on, “I couldn’t have survived out here on the edge of nowhere without another existence—an imagined one.”
Thea disentangled herself from the cat, fixed her pillow to support her lower back and reached for her mug. “You daydream?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“No. You know what the nuns always said about daydreamers! ‘Time-wasters.’ ‘Good-for-nothing layabouts.’ So tell me! Tell me who you fantasize about.”
Brona looked out of her tiny window with her tiny eyes, as if she was about to reveal her hidden life, then did not. Her daydreams were not for the telling.
One fresh, sunny day, as Thea improved, Brona wrapped her up in a great coat, took a cushion and her arm, and led her along the road to a low wall in front of a line of cottages. There they sat, looking down at Brona’s leveed field, an exact rectangle delineated by a stone wall.
“You’d never see green like that in Iraq,” said Thea. “It’s dusty there, juicy here.”
“I remember trying to call you and the others up for your tea, during the summers.”
“We went up and down this slope like we were going from one room to another.” Thea smiled. “Now it looks miles away. I don’t think I’ll ever get down there again.”
“When you’ve got your strength back.”
“I’ll go out to the lighthouse. That’s my objective.”
“That’s a long way too.”
Thea looked back at the house, sitting on its U-bend, with a view up the road and down it, standing over a lake and an ocean, and hard-hewn fields. A bit grubby, it was like an oversized cottage. She turned to the sea—its rippled surface like crushed silk—and back to the house. “Is it haunted, Brona?”
Brona wrinkled her nose, her eyes still on the awkward fields. “You asked that a lot when you were little.”
“Did I? Well, children are very intuitive.” It was easier, somehow, to talk about the house outside it. “I’ve been wondering if that’s why you’ve never left.” Thea looked at her. “Is Christie still here?”
“Christie is where God wants him to be: by His side. He didn’t call him back so very young just for the sake of leaving him behind with me.”
“But there is something, isn’t there? I feel it. Sometimes I can hear it. And you—you see it, don’t you?”
“Get away with that.” Brona hunched her shoulders, moved her scarf away from her mouth.
“I lie there all day and . . . I don’t know. It has a sense of somewhere else. It feels warm when it’s cold, light when it’s dark. . . .”
“Time to go on back in, now. Time to go in.”
“Why won’t you tell me? Don’t you want to pass it on to the next generation?”
Brona was on her feet, offering her arm. “It’s the quiet, darling. The . . .” she inhaled a great breath of ocean air “. . . enormity of all this. It puts us very deep into our thoughts.”
Deep in her thoughts, Thea continued to brood about having lost her job (she had exceeded her twenty days’ sick leave in one go), her lover, and her health, but Brona continued to put her back together, like a jigsaw, piece by piece, giving her potions brewed from her own herbs. She was a shaman, Thea decided, some kind of healer, and she was certainly playing mind games with her niece, or something was: the cliffs, the hills, the edge of the ocean—who knew? Because sometimes, when she sat outside wrapped in blankets and looked across Dunmanus Bay, Thea felt a heat, an intense, glaring heat, sliding around her bones which was neither Irish nor spring-like. It made no sense, but she could feel herself heal in its light, and she enjoyed also the comfort of company, even when Brona was gone for hours to shop in Bantry. In this barren place, she never felt alone.
With her energy returning and the flesh coming back to her bones, she was able to take short strolls by the cottages, and always went back indoors to find tea and scones waiting by the stove. Ireland was getting between the ridges, smoothing out the humps and pits that had been so uncomfortable these last weeks. She still missed Kim and Reggie, the women in the office, but
