The crowd erupt with joy and as he leaves the stage, Cormac, his eldest brother, gets up to say a piece from Dancing at Lughnasa by Brian Friel.
As Solomon makes his way through the crowd, stopping to chat to people he hasn’t seen in months, he reaches his place to find Laura gone. He searches around and catches Donal’s eye. He points at the door towards the kitchen. Solomon can’t get into the kitchen quick enough.
The kitchen holds party stragglers picking at the food during Cormac’s performance. Cormac possesses that ability to clear the room, not because he’s not good – he’s great, no one delivers it better – but because he lacks timing. When everybody is about to lift the ceiling off, he does his piece, dark and quiet and sad, which is in direct contradiction to what everybody wants. He kills the atmosphere, lets the energy dip. He does the same in conversation, brings up something sombre when they’re all laughing.
His sister Cara has also escaped their brother’s moment. She notices Solomon looking around, senses his mood.
‘Out there’ – she points out the window – ‘gone to show her the cuckoos, our cuckoo-fucking-expert.’ She does Solomon the decency of not even laughing at that. Solomon controls himself, his pace, tries to control his heart rate as he makes his way through the growing crowd to the door that leads to the garden. Once at the door, he stalls, his hand on the handle.
And what is so wrong with Laura being outside with Rory? Apart from it driving Solomon insane, she’s a twenty-six-year-old woman who can do what she likes. What’s he going to do, break them up? Declare that they can’t be together? He knows his brother well, knows exactly what he wants from Laura, what any man would want from any young beautiful woman they have a private moment with, but his brother is not a sexual predator. He won’t be on top of Laura, pinning her down to the ground; she doesn’t need rescuing.
Or maybe Laura knows exactly what Rory wants, maybe she wants it too. Ten years alone in a cottage without intimacy, would she want sex? Wouldn’t that be natural? Solomon knows that he would. But does he owe it to Laura to protect her? It’s not his job to mind her, or is it? Perhaps that’s a job that he’s given himself, placing himself in a position of importance for his own ego. An argument that is reminiscent of childish brotherly fights: I found her first. She’s mine! But Laura did choose him, he is the one she wanted to stay with, though not necessarily be wrapped in cotton wool by him. He’s not exactly her knight in shining armour either, thinking some of the things he’s been thinking. With a girlfriend. A girlfriend he just accused of trying to hook up with her ex. He was projecting. Bo would see right through him, if she hadn’t already. Most girlfriends would never allow their boyfriends to go away on a trip with another woman, especially to a family occasion, especially a young beautiful single woman. Was she testing him, or did she have ridiculously high reserves of trust and loyalty? Or did she want him to do what he so wanted to do? Was she egging him on, daring him to end it? Do the thing that she can’t do. Because if he didn’t, would they ever break up? Were they going to be together for ever because neither of them had the balls to break up, because there wasn’t a good enough reason to break up?
Things were never bad between him and Bo, but he didn’t exactly know where they were headed. They were working together, tied together through that, living together more as a result of an accident than from anything deliberate or romantic. And who does he think he is, imagining he is even entitled to a chance with Laura, as if that’s something that is there for his taking. Frustrated with himself for sitting on his high horse, he knows he’s entirely to blame and has been trying to justify whatever occurred to him in the forest the day he met Laura.
‘Jesus,’ Cara interrupts his thoughts. ‘If you don’t go, I will.’ Cara hands him her bottle of beer, moves him aside and goes outside to the garden. The chill hits Solomon, which goes straight to his brain, a wake-up call. He downs the remainder of her bottle, follows Cara into the dark night and the security beam comes to life, illuminating the garden. There’s no sign of Rory and Laura.
There are three places to go. Through an archway into the labyrinth; manicured hedging that they used to get up to mischief in, the beach.