know about the children’s homes because the man hadn’t spoken of them, but she claimed to know instinctively that they had ridden away from poverty and unhappiness. ‘From the clatter and the quarrelling,’ Cynthia said. ‘Two children who later fell in love.’
‘Horrid old dream,’ Strafe said. ‘Horrid for you, dear.’
She shook her head, and then sat down. I poured another cup of tea. ‘I had the oddest dream myself,’ I said. ‘Thrive Major was running the post office in Ardbeag.’
Strafe smiled and Dekko gave his laugh, but Cynthia didn’t in any way acknowledge what I’d said.
‘A fragile thing the girl was, with depths of mystery in her wide brown eyes. Red-haired of course he was himself, thin as a rake in those days. Glencorn Lodge was derelict then.’
‘You’ve had a bit of a shock, old thing,’ Dekko said.
Strafe agreed, kindly adding, ‘Look, dear, if the chap actually interfered with you –’
‘Why on earth should he do that?’ Her voice was shrill in the tea-lounge, edged with a note of hysteria. I glanced at Strafe, who was frowning into his teacup. Dekko began to say something, but broke off before his meaning emerged. Rather more calmly Cynthia said:
‘It was summer when they came here. Honeysuckle he described. And mother of thyme. He didn’t know the name of either.’
No one attempted any kind of reply, not that it was necessary, for Cynthia just continued.
‘At school there were the facts of geography and arithmetic. And the legends of scholars and of heroes, of Queen Maeve and Finn MacCool. There was the coming of St Patrick to a heathen people. History was full of kings and high-kings, and Silken Thomas and Wolfe Tone, the Flight of the Earls, the Siege of Limerick.’
When Cynthia said that, it was impossible not to believe that the unfortunate events of the morning had touched her with some kind of madness. It seemed astonishing that she had walked into the tea-lounge without having combed her hair, and that she’d stood there swaying before sitting down, that out of the blue she had started on about two children. None of it made an iota of sense, and surely she could see that the nasty experience she’d suffered should not be dwelt upon? I offered her the plate of scones, hoping that if she began to eat she would stop talking, but she took no notice of my gesture.
‘Look, dear,’ Strafe said, ‘there’s not one of us who knows what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m talking about a children’s story, I’m talking about a girl and a boy who visited this place we visit also. He hadn’t been here for years, but he returned last night, making one final effort to understand. And then he walked out into the sea.’
She had taken a piece of her dress and was agitatedly crumpling it between the finger and thumb of her left hand. It was dreadful really, having her so grubby-looking. For some odd reason I suddenly thought of her cooking, how she wasn’t in the least interested in it or in anything about the house. She certainly hadn’t succeeded in making a home for Strafe.
‘They rode those worn-out bicycles through a hot afternoon. Can you feel all that? A newly surfaced road, the snap of chippings beneath their tyres, the smell of tar? Dust from a passing car, the city they left behind?’
‘Cynthia dear,’ I said, ‘drink your tea, and why not have a scone?’
‘They swam and sunbathed on the beach you walked along today. They went to a spring for water. There were no magnolias then. There was no garden, no neat little cliff paths to the beach. Surely you can see it clearly?’
‘No,’ Strafe said. ‘No, we really cannot, dear.’
‘This place that is an idyll for us was an idyll for them too: the trees, the ferns, the wild roses near the water spring, the very sea and sun they shared. There was a cottage lost in the middle of the woods: they sometimes looked for that. They played a game, a kind of hide-and-seek. People in a white farmhouse gave them milk.’
For the second time I offered Cynthia the plate of scones and for the second time she pointedly ignored me. Her cup of tea hadn’t been touched. Dekko took a scone and cheerfully said:
‘All’s well that’s over.’
But Cynthia appeared to have drifted back into a daze, and I wondered again if it could really be possible that the experience had unhinged her. Unable to help myself, I saw her being led away from the hotel, helped into the back of a blue van, something like an ambulance. She was talking about the children again, how they had planned to marry and keep a sweetshop.
‘Take it easy, dear,’ Strafe said, which I followed up by suggesting for the second time that she should make an effort to drink her tea.
‘Has it to do with the streets they came from? Or the history they learnt, he from his Christian Brothers, she from her nuns? History is unfinished in this island; long since it has come to a stop in Surrey.’
Dekko said, and I really had to hand it to him:
‘Cynth, we have to put it behind us.’
It didn’t do any good. Cynthia just went rambling on, speaking again of the girl being taught by nuns, and the boy by Christian Brothers. She began to recite the history they might have learnt, the way she sometimes did when we were driving through an area that had historical connections. ‘Can you imagine,’ she embarrassingly asked, Our very favourite places bitter with disaffection, with plotting and revenge? Can you imagine the treacherous murder of Shane O’Neill the Proud?’
Dekko made a little sideways gesture of his head, politely marvelling. Strafe seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. Confusion ran through Irish history, Cynthia said, like convolvulus in a hedgerow. On 24 May 1487, a boy of ten called Lambert Simnel, brought to Dublin by a priest from Oxford, was declared Edward VI of all England and Ireland, crowned with a golden circlet taken from a statue of the Virgin Mary. On 24 May 1798, here in Antrim, Presbyterian farmers fought for a common cause with their Catholic labourers. She paused and looked at Strafe. Chaos and contradiction, she informed him, were hidden everywhere beneath nice-sounding names. ‘The Battle of the Yellow Ford,’ she suddenly chanted in a singsong way that sounded thoroughly, peculiar, ‘the Statutes of Kilkenny. The Battle of Glenmama, the Convention of Drumceat. The Act of Settlement, the Renunciation Act. The Act of Union, the Toleration Act. Just so much history it sounds like now, yet people starved
