There were months of me moving about the house like a nervous horse ready to bolt and you being too nice—falsely bright, like a stable hand with a bridle and bit held ready behind your back. Our conversations were inconsequential, about what to have for dinner and when you could drive me into Hadleigh to buy food if I missed the bus. We didn’t touch each other, we didn’t kiss—I wouldn’t let you. I thought about leaving, often. Once or twice I got as far as dialling Louise’s number but replaced the receiver before she answered. Another time, I packed that blue suitcase but couldn’t work out how to carry it together with all the things Nan needed as well as push the Silver Cross. So I unpacked it and put the clothes away.
And I thought about leaving without her.
Several times that summer, people turned up uninvited (even by Jonathan) for the sunshine and the beach, to camp in the grass like the year before. You avoided them but I was grateful for their company, and if I’m honest, I was grateful because those girls in long skirts and bare feet loved Nan. One day, I came across a girl—a woman (she must have been ten years older than me)—breastfeeding her. The woman was topless, sitting on a mat with her friends, smiling down as our daughter fastened to her nipple. At the time I couldn’t work out how she was able to do it, how she had the milk, but later I understood. When she saw me, the woman’s face and chest flushed, she slipped a finger into the side of Nan’s mouth, unlatched her, and held the bawling baby out to me, but I shook my head and sat beside her. She smiled again and guided Nan’s gummy mouth back to her nipple.
And then Jonathan came to stay.
He’d been down for a day or two after Nan was born, but now he arrived with a toy bear that growled when it was upturned, two bottles of Kilbeggan, and a round of Gubbeen for me.
We were both so thankful for his arrival that we moved from our defensive positions, and on his first evening the three of us stayed up late, passing the baby in the opposite direction to the whiskey and the cheese.
“Smells like the bog,” you said when I unwrapped it.
“I camped on the farm where they make it and helped with the milking,” Jonathan said.
“Jonathan—the world’s best lie-abed—got up to milk the cows?” I said, my mouth full of soft yellow cheese and cracker.
“Needs must when you’re a travel writer.” He laughed and then stopped. “A terrible thing happened while I was there.” We watched his face. His eyes shifted away from ours and momentarily he pressed his hand against his mouth. “A child fell in the bog and was lost.”
“Oh God,” I said.
“Lost?” you said, holding Nan tighter. “How the hell do you lose a child in a bog?”
“Her brother dared her to cross it. She sank and he couldn’t pull her out.”
“Oh God,” you said. “How old was she?”
“Six. Her brother ran to the dairy and a group of us ran back with him, but he couldn’t remember the exact place where she went in, and we found nothing. Nothing. The whole village came out to search.”
“And you didn’t find her?” I said.
“She was gone,” Jonathan said.
“Not even a body to bury? I can’t imagine anything worse.”
We were silent until you said, “Of course that isn’t the worst thing. Finding the body is surely more terrible, more absolute. With a body there is no possibility of hope.”
“I’m telling you,” Jonathan said, “the child was gone.”
“Maybe she was,” you said, “or perhaps one day she’ll come walking back into Bally-whatever saying she bumped her head, forgot who she was, and wandered off. Without the body her parents are free to imagine, to hope for anything.”
“But maybe they’ll be hoping forever,” Jonathan said. “What kind of life would that be? You can’t exist like that, with not knowing.”
“It’s about believing two opposing ideas in your head at the same time: hope and grief. Human beings do it all the time with religion—the flesh and the spirit—you know that. Imagination and reality.”
“That old Catholic upbringing rears its head again,” Jonathan said. “Pass the whiskey, I need cheering up.”
The two of you carried on drinking and talking until Nan fell asleep, and I lay on the sofa with my head resting in Jonathan’s lap and shut my eyes to listen as I drifted in and out.
“I bumped into Louise when I was in London,” Jonathan said.
“Ingrid’s Louise?” you said. “I haven’t seen her since the wedding.”
I heard more whiskey glugging, the chink of glass on glass.
“I took her out to dinner.”
“Really?”
“Well, OK, she took me out to dinner.”
“She’s still into women’s lib?” Your voice was less distinct; you must have got up, turned away from us.
“I suppose. She did pay.”
“And you paid her back in kind, did you?”