It was a quarter past four when she drove, a little too fast, down the narrow lane that linked the Lockes’ house to a minor road, a minor road that after some miles led to a road that was slightly less minor. She had wanted to do the weekly food shopping, discreetly, in an Aldi store in a country town on her way home, it would save her fifty euros, but now, thanks to Eleanor and her button, there wouldn’t be time. Still she had to pick up ingredients to cook dinner before going to the gallery—Jennifer had texted to request tacos. She stopped at a mini-mart attached to a petrol station in Skibbereen and went directly to the fruit and vegetable aisle. The ready-to-eat shredded lettuce was all sold out. An assistant directed her to a box of unwashed whole heads, and she grabbed one and put it in her basket. She was at the meat counter, about to ask for ground beef, when she spotted, too late, Katherine Ferriter.
“Hello, stranger,” Katherine said, placing a hand on her arm.
“Katherine! What a lovely surprise!” The last time they’d met was more than five years ago at a wedding in the Hudson Bay Hotel in Athlone. Years before that, as students in London, they’d shared a flat. Katherine’s makeup was subtle, apart from her lip pencil, which was too stark, too high above her upper lip. Her hair was darker and glossier than Nessa remembered, and she had on a very nice jacket. She took Nessa by the other arm, as if there were a chance that she might abscond. “You haven’t changed a bit.”
“You neither.”
Katherine took a step back. “I can’t believe it,” she said, “it’s been so long. What are you doing down here?”
“Just work. You?”
“We have a cabin out at Lough Hyne.”
Nessa had been there once, a secluded marine lake, popular with water sports enthusiasts because of the tidal flows that rushed in from the Atlantic. Cradled in a fold of hills, it had salt marshes, cliffs, beaches, and was a mecca for marine biologists. She recalled how, after the cabins were built, she had laughed with Philip and one of his architect buddies about how very un-cabin-like they were, and also, how expensive. “It’s very beautiful there,” she said.
“We think so,” Katherine said. “And Dublin’s got so crazy, you know? It’s not like it used to be. So I’m down here a lot. It’s harder for William to get away, but he comes down when he can.” All the time she was talking, Nessa could see that she was doing the social arithmetic—jacket, shoes, hair—taking in Nessa’s red Ecco flats, the coffee-colored skirt Nessa had borrowed from the floor of Jennifer’s room, the Dunnes Stores blouse, now with one very expensive button. “So what are you doing with yourself these days?” Katherine asked.
“I’m project managing an acquisition for the Elmes Gallery. We’re in the process of buying Robert Locke’s studio. You might have heard about it?”
Katherine stared blankly.
“The sculptor Robert Locke?” Nessa said. “The Chalk Sculpture?”
“Ah. Of course. The Examiner had an article about him recently. Did you see it?”
“I wrote the article.”
“Did you? Goodness. Well. That’s marvelous. Well done, you!”
“I’m really sorry but I have to rush,” Nessa said. “I’ve got to get home and cook dinner. It’s so nice bumping into you like this. Tell William I said hello. Tell him I send my love.”
“Do you know who contacted me recently?” Katherine said. “Luke.”
Now it was Nessa’s turn to look blank. “Luke?”
“Amy’s son.”
“Oh, of course. Gosh, yes. Luke. Sorry.”
“He’s twenty-one. Can you believe it? He friended me on Facebook. He’s living in Manchester, with his father, and studying digital media.”
“I’m glad,” Nessa said. “I mean, I’m glad that things worked out for him.” She’d felt herself flinch at the mention of the father, and wondered if Katherine had noticed.
“He’s over here for a few weeks,” Katherine said, “he’s staying with Amy’s Aunt Gretta in Tipperary. I’ve invited him to spend some time with us at the cabin.”
What would the word “cabin” conjure up for a twenty-one-year-old Manchester lad? “You know him?” Nessa said.
“No. And that’s what William asked too.” A flicker of doubt crossed Katherine’s face. “But Luke’s really keen to meet anyone who knew his mother. It’s understandable, I suppose.” She paused. “Maybe you’d like to come to supper some evening?”
“I don’t know that I’d be much help. I don’t think I’ve anything to say that you couldn’t tell him.”
“He asked about you,” Katherine said. “He had your name.”
There was a Frida Kahlo painting called Wounded Deer in which a stag with Kahlo’s face was depicted in a forest clearing, its hide pierced by nine arrows. The way Nessa saw it, standing there in the mini-mart, she had been hunted down and cornered.
“So you’ll come?” Katherine said. “Philip too, of course. And your little girl. Jennifer, isn’t it?”
“She’s not so little anymore. She was sixteen last birthday.”
Katherine shook her head. “Where does the time go?” she said. “It seems like only yesterday that we were all running around London like mad things.”
In fact, Nessa thought, Katherine had never been a mad thing. That year in London, when Nessa—and Amy Corrigan—had grudgingly taken Katherine in, she had set her alarm every morning for 6:30 A.M. to use the bathroom before anyone else got up. The Irish nurses in London had partied harder than the art school crowd, but Katherine had ironed her uniform every night while watching Coronation Street.
“He’s arriving in a couple of weeks,” Katherine said. “How about we say supper on a Friday evening? Are you still at the same email?”
Nessa looked down at the lettuce in her basket. She needed to get ground beef; she needed to get home in time to make dinner and give her lecture. “Yes,” she said, “okay. I mean, thank you.”
“Wonderful!” Katherine said. “It will be so much more special with you there. We’re the third cabin along, but…” She faltered. “It won’t be hard to find us. Things are quiet there. It’s just us most of the time.”
Nessa watched her leave, noted her neat, confident walk. Katherine had always been middle-aged. They used to mock her for it: the way she put out the garbage, the way she read the council notices that came in the mail. Now that her actual age had caught up with her, it suited her.
While the butcher fed the meat into the machine, Nessa stared at the steaks laid out on their fields of chipped ice. There was a day in London over twenty years ago when Amy had decided that she needed animal parts for the piece she was making for the end-of-year art college exhibition. She had persuaded Nessa to go with her to an abattoir on the edge of the city. From the outside it could have been a clothing factory, or a toy warehouse, or any number of innocuous things. Inside, there was a long cavernous room, carcasses strung up on hooks. Amy had handed money to a man whose white overalls were spattered with blood, and listed her requirements. The man had looked them both over with his butcher eyes and Nessa could almost see his mind going: ribs, brisket, shin. She had pictured herself sliced open, innards labeled, like a diagram of a cow in an old-fashioned cookbook, the kind that wasn’t shy about where meat came from. “I need some air,” she’d said, and she’d gone outside, vomited behind a stack of wooden pallets. Amy emerged carrying a blood-streaked plastic bag. “You’re going to have to toughen up,” she said scornfully. “That’s life, in there.”
When they lived in London, she and Amy used to joke that an honest epitaph for Katherine might read: “Here lies Katherine Ferriter, who never caused any trouble.” It could probably also add that she was a loving wife and daughter. She would have made a good mother, Nessa thought, given the chance, but there had been no child when they’d met that time at the Hudson Bay Hotel, and she’d have heard if one had arrived since. Katherine was harmless but she was a reminder of London, and of Amy, and now there was this boy to think about. Luke. And Stuart, his father.
Nessa paid for the groceries and hurried out to her car. As she drove back to the city, even the ordinary fields were beautiful, with yellow bursts of furze in the thick green ditches and everything overrunning its boundary, the grasses on the shoulder toppling long and heavy onto the roads. To the other side was the sea, gray and solidly forbidding, none of the shallow turquoise tomfoolery that passed for sea elsewhere.
Robert Locke had made a series of six thematically linked pieces titled Sea Urchins. In compendiums of his work, they were usually attributed to his first year in West Cork, and images of them were often included in coffee-table books, perhaps because the delicate sea-hedgehog spikes were so pretty. They weren’t his best work, in Nessa’s opinion. He’d discussed them at length in an interview he gave to Frieze in 1991. He talked about wave shoaling and refraction, and amphibious life-forms as a metaphor for human existence. It had impressed her the first time she read it, but now she thought it smacked of gobbledygook. She occasionally tutored undergrads—there was a time when it was the only work she could get and she didn’t like to relinquish it entirely—and it struck her now that Locke’s “amphibious life-forms” was the sort of thing the students came up with when they’d made something whose provenance eluded them.
There was nothing of this place in those dainty Sea Urchins. Her own view, one she never expressed publicly, was that Locke didn’t make those pieces during that first year in West Cork. There were indications from his personal life that he was not well at that time. He may have been suffering a nervous breakdown. His work was how he measured out his life, and it wouldn’t have been beyond him, she thought, to have decided to attribute something to that time, because he was a man who was uncomfortable with gaps.