The Sugar Loaf

Then the woman on the weather forecast says: ‘Try to get out and enjoy the good weather tomorrow.’ She gives a big, motherly smile and points at the little suns that are dotted all over the map. Tonight she is wearing a velvet jacket: a deep mellow plum colour. And earrings. She must be going on to something after the news – Audrey imagines her at a party, holding a crystal glass of champagne, chatting to elegant people near a roaring log fire. Or maybe eating dinner in some cosy restaurant, the candlelight flickering, the forgiving light making everyone look beautiful.

This woman has been doing the weather for ages. She has always smiled brightly, even when telling the nation to expect more unsettled weather, issuing gale and flood warnings. But she has never before said, get out and enjoy it. Not that Audrey, who has hardly ever in her life missed the nine o’clock news followed by the weather, can recall.

It seems right to take her advice.

It’s October. The summer was dreadful. In two weeks the clocks will go back, at the same time as the leaves fall thick and heavy from the trees, which are now in their autumn beauty.

Sunday morning. Honey-coloured sunlight pours into the front room. Get out and enjoy it, the advice rings in her ears, like a command from a kindly tyrant. But Audrey can’t, not yet. There is far too much to do. She has to prepare her classes for tomorrow. Audrey has been teaching English in Mulberry Manor for thirty-three years but she still always has to prepare every day. She can never find her notes. Her mother used to raise her eyebrows at her.

‘If you spent a few days tidying up, you’d save yourself a lot of time in the long run,’ she’d say.

‘Ah, will you stop annoying me!’ Audrey would respond. ‘If I had time to tidy up, I’d tidy up, but when would I get the time?’

Her mother had no answer to that. But she set her mouth in a straight line like a one-inch zip. That was how she expressed disapproval, or dismay, or despair.

The truth was, Audrey really was very, very busy. Preparing, correcting copybooks. Exams. And she had her busy social life. She did salsa dancing. Drama. Belonged to a choir, although she wasn’t much of a singer. She had her piano lessons, too, at least until the teacher said she was moving to another country and could no longer take private pupils. Audrey had asked if she could recommend another teacher, but no, she could not.

She drinks her coffee – she can’t face the day without a few strong mugs, although the doctor has told her she’d be less anxious if she cut it out altogether, but that’s easy for him to say, and she’s sceptical about that coffee taboo. Fashions change so often, in health, as in everything else. It’s not so long ago that doctors were sticking disgusting leeches to sick people and bleeding them to death. Doctors differ and patients die, she says to herself, as she drinks her third mug. She’s sitting on the only chair in the kitchen that is not piled with newspapers, letters, schoolbooks, essays or exams by pupils, some still in Mulberry Manor and some long gone. Long graduated from university. Two are dead, but their compositions still survive in the archive of Audrey’s kitchen. Audrey never likes to throw anything out. When she was alive, her mother occasionally insisted on doing a blitz, clearing at least one room in the house so they’d have somewhere to sit in comfort, or to place a guest. Not that they often had a guest, apart from Ben, Audrey’s brother, who lives in England and used to come home to Dunroon Crescent about once a year. (You’d think England was the far side of the moon.) As Audrey’s mother got older, she wasn’t able to do much herself, and no amount of her sulks could get Audrey to tidy up. She just never had the time. That was the long and short of it.

She goes to her desk, still wearing her dressing gown. It’s fluffy turquoise with a big brown stain on the side. It doesn’t look very attractive but nobody sees her, so what matter? She knows the brown stain is just hair dye. Iced Chocolate. It’s a good dye, her hair is always shiny and natural-looking – if young, shiny hair is the definition of natural – for at least a week. After that, it turns the dead black of ink. Or black clay. Her hair was always her crowning glory, the one beautiful thing she had, so she doesn’t want to let it go grey before she has to. Iced Chocolate is the answer. It’s close to her real colour, that is, the colour she had until she was about forty-two or -three, which is when it started to fade. (She doesn’t know what its real colour is now, because it’s always covered with Iced Chocolate.) The hairdresser might give a more lasting shine but it would cost ten times as much as the home stuff. A hundred euro for highlights and blow dry. You can buy six fluffy dressing gowns for a hundred euro. In Penney’s. Which begs the question, how much do the women who make the dressing gowns get? Audrey asks this question sometimes, usually of some class in school. But it doesn’t stop her buying all her dressing gowns, and most of her other clothes, too, in Penney’s. She can’t really be expected to solve all the problems of the world on her own. She’s busy enough solving all the problems of Mulberry Manor.

Tomorrow they’ll be doing John McGahern, Amongst Women. It’s a hard enough novel even for sixth years but they’ll have to make the most of it. She’ll ask them which characters they find most interesting. And they’ll say Rose or Maggie, Sheila or Michael. They’ll all pick a different one. That’s what she likes about the novel, that everyone has their own favourite character. Hers is Luke, the son who runs away and stays away. He’s intriguing because he is never in the book. And she admires his guts. Anyone can run away, but it takes real courage to stay there.

The sun is around at the back of the house by the time she’s even got herself dressed. Hot enough to sit out. The garden looks great in this forgiving light. Nasturtiums climb over everything – the fence, the hedge, the trees, the lawn. They’re even creeping over the yard and into the drain, they’re incorrigible, they’d grow anywhere, even in a sewer! The yellow dahlias, too, are exuberant. They are a special tough kind of dahlia, those, which would survive anywhere. Some of them are pushing up the slabs on the patio, so strong are they, and growing through them – the nasturtiums are doing their best to strangle them, but good for the yellow dahlias, they’re holding out. So are the nerines, which her mother planted the spring before she died. Their bubble-gum pink is a pleasant shock in the autumn palate of dark reds and yellows. Bulbs, they are, which are great in a garden, they just look after themselves. Like weeds, which is what most of the garden is covered with – but weeds is just another name for wildflowers. Audrey’s garden, once her mother’s pride and joy, has been transformed to a nature reserve. Not appreciated by the neighbours, but beloved of hedgehogs, urban foxes, insects of all kinds. And mice and rats (they have a nice nest in the old compost heap, lovely and warm).

She could easily spend the day here. Enjoying the weather and maybe going so far as to do a bit of gardening. Even for a nature reserve, it’s getting overgrown. The nettles at the back of the garden make it difficult to get to the big bin tucked away behind the shed, where she throws the empty bottles. Her mother had plenty of time to look after the garden and she went on doing that till she had her heart attack. Audrey could get someone in, but why would she? They rip you off and what do you get for it?

The Sugar Loaf she can see from the front garden. It rises from a nest of green hills, the Dublin Mountains and the Wicklow Mountains, a dramatic peak that looks like a volcano, although it has never been a volcano, she knows, from listening to Mooney Goes Wild on One on the radio. (She used to listen a lot to the radio, before she mislaid it. It must have got thrown out by mistake. Or else it is buried under papers somewhere in the kitchen.) Audrey has seen the mountain almost every day for fifty years, ever since they came from a house in the inner city to live in Dunroon, on the outskirts, when she was four and Ben was two. They moved out of town because their father had got a promotion and that’s what people who were doing well did in those days. They said goodbye to the old Victorian terraces and colonised the new white estates built on the fields and farms all around the edge of the city. Audrey can remember the excitement of all that, how pleased she and Ben and her mother were with the big windows, the bright rooms filled with light. The enormous, bare garden.

During that fifty years – her life – she has driven close to the Sugar Loaf dozens of times and seen people walking up the road that winds to its summit. But she has never climbed it. Not even when she was a child. When she and Ben were kids, their parents brought them out on a drive almost every Sunday. They’d drive to some field or beach. Then they’d eat tomato sandwiches and sweet biscuits, drink sugary orange juice, in the back of the car or sitting on a rug spread on the ground at the side of it. There was a flask of hot tea for Mammy and Daddy. They called that a picnic. When it was over, they’d turn around and drive back home. They never climbed a mountain or went for a hike or anything like that. They never even went for a swim in the summer because Daddy had a thing about water. (His grandfather, a policeman in the country, had drowned – he had been pushed into the sea by a smuggler he was apprehending. This happened when Daddy was four years old, in 1918. Daddy’s earliest memory was of seeing somebody empty the water out of his grandfather’s rubber boots. He’d never forgotten it.)

Audrey had revived the Sunday drives when Daddy died ten years ago. She did it to give her mother a change of scene, at the weekends, and to ease the tension that could arise when they were both cooped up together in the house for too long. Of course, they’d never climbed the Sugar Loaf. Her mother couldn’t have, at that stage. She was old, she had a weak heart, and arthritis, and various other complaints (as she called them, although she never actually complained but bore her pains in silence).

It is almost three o’clock by the time Audrey gets away. She doesn’t know where the day has gone to. She has managed to get dressed but she has not managed to finish her preparations for tomorrow’s classes. She’s slower than usual today. When she opened the McGahern novel, her heart sank and her head swam. She couldn’t engage with Maggie and Moran and Rose and all of them. All she could see was 6C sitting in their desks, like flowers in a bed of weeds, eager to get space and light, eager to escape from school and get started on life. Their big, kohled eyes full of contempt for people like Audrey, locked in the school forever.

She drives out to the main road and stops at the little garage on the Bray Road, where she has filled her tank for the past thirty-odd years. He’s the only garage left around here now, anyway; the other three sold up, as sites for apartments, over the past year or two. If she doesn’t fill here, she has to drive to Bray. Here’s usually a cent cheaper than the Bray garage, she’s noticed. One hundred and fifteen cents here, that means it’s one hundred and sixteen in Bray – she’ll try to look when she’s passing.

As soon as she passes the Dunroon shopping centre, the Sugar Loaf disappears from view. After about ten minutes’ driving, it occurs to her that she doesn’t actually know where it is. Not in the way you need to know where a mountain is in order to climb it. Audrey often does this – sets off in her car, sure she knows the way to some place, only to realise en route that she has no more than a general clue as to its whereabouts. She has to ask at the filling station outside Bray (where the petrol is actually one hundred and seventeen cents a litre!). The young fellow is Chinese and has never heard of the Sugar Loaf. Or so he says. Can’t be bothered telling her the way, probably, is more like it.

Of course, she knows the mountain can’t be far away; otherwise she wouldn’t see it from her front garden. She drives along, glancing to the right all the time, to see if she can spot it over the cars and trucks that roar along the motorway. Eyes off the road, she swerves out of her lane twice. A driver honks at her, and another gives her that sign with his fingers that means ‘Fuck Off!’ Obviously, someone with road rage syndrome. The Sugar Loaf remains elusive.

At Kilmacanogue, on a hunch, she turns right towards Glendalough. Then she does a sensible thing, the sensible thing she should have done at home before she set out. She decides to consult a map.

Parking outside a bungalow, in a little lay-by, she searches for the map of Ireland. There are ten of them at least in the car, on the front seat and in the glove compartment and on the back seat, mixed up with some other things made of paper, and some not (there’s an apple butt on the seat, and a packet of chicken liver pâté she bought two years ago). She picks up the cleanest map and looks at it. Yes, she seems to be headed in the right direction. In fact, if she is reading the map correctly (she’s not all that good at reading maps), she could be halfway up the Sugar Loaf already. According to the map, this road she’s on is on the side of the mountain. She looks out. The bungalow is an ordinary one, with a tiled roof and a little tarred patch of yard in front, two green wheelie bins and an old fridge at the side. Behind it is a slope covered with heather and furze. That could be a mountainside all right.

There is a tiny little thin blue line off this road, and the spot called Sugar Loaf on the map seems to be somewhere between this road that she is actually on, and that little thin one. The L1031.

To her surprise she finds the L1031 without difficulty.

It’s nearly as narrow as the line on the map. Just a track, really. There is nothing to indicate that the Sugar Loaf is on it. You’d think there would be a sign at least, but no. They expect you to be divinely inspired as usual. Sugar Loaf. She goes along, anyway. She has no choice once she starts – turning back wouldn’t be easy on this narrow track. It runs through flat fields, with sheep in some of them and cows in others, and a bog. That must be Calary Bog. She always liked that name. She doesn’t know why.

She hasn’t gone far along the narrow track when she sees cars. Something is happening – some country event. There are lots of cars, parked along the side of the road, which is wide enough for two only. Families stand around their boots, eating sandwiches and drinking tea. It must be a point-to-point, Audrey thinks. She’s not quite sure what a point-to-point is. But all these people look as if they’re waiting to see horses, or dogs, hunting some animal across the bog. They don’t look as if they came to the side of this narrow road just to eat their sandwiches and then go home. To Audrey, other families have always seemed purposeful, in control of their lives, their Sunday afternoons.

She drives carefully along the free side of the road. After half a mile or so, there’s a gap in the line of cars. And suddenly, out of the blue, the mountain appears. That familiar sandy peak. The Sugar Loaf – unless there is some other mountain around here. The Little Sugar Loaf? Or that one with the name that sounds like ‘Juice’? Funny name for a mountain. Though it sort of goes with Sugar Loaf.

Whatever it is, the peak is close to the road, and not high. I’ll be up that and down again in less than half an hour, Audrey thinks, as she starts to plod across the springy turf. The sun shines in a clear sky, but she’s wrapped up in her warm green cardigan, and she put on her green parka, too. Just in case the temperature is lower at the top. (On Mount Etna, where she was in the summer, there was snow.) The landscape is exhilarating – the hill, fields with cattle and sheep, spread behind. Hundreds of people are walking up and down the hill. Half of Dublin is here. On its crest there’s a line of things that looks like burned spruce trees. Or crucifixes.

She overtakes a family: a mother and father, with two small children in tow.

‘Are we there yet?’ the little boy says, whining.

They have hardly left the carpark. He looks to be about three, so he may not know it’s a cliché. Though children are so precocious now, it’s possible that he does and is being ironic.

‘Not yet,’ his mother says patiently.

His father looks at the boy in exasperation. ‘We’re going up there,’ he says, and points to the peak. ‘See where those people are? Up there.’ He points at the crucifixes and utters the words with slow, exaggerated patience.

‘All the way up there?’ the boys whines. ‘Will you give me a carry?’

‘That’ll be fun for you!’ says Audrey, smiling at the father. ‘He’s no light bundle!’

The father nods, but doesn’t say anything. The little boy looks alarmed. He runs back to his mother and takes her hand. The mother gives Audrey a sharp, questioning glance.

She hurries on.

A big group of girls, long-haired, mostly blond, clad in light summery clothes, blocks the path. They stand right across it, so Audrey can’t pass. One of them, dressed all in white, comes tentatively towards her, holding out a camera.

‘Yes, yes, of course!’ says Audrey, without waiting to be asked. Relieved, although she knew nobody could attack her, here, with half of Dublin to witness it.

The white girl goes back and stands with her crowd.

‘Smelly Sausages!’ says Audrey, and the girls smile, but they don’t laugh. So she says it again and takes another one. They don’t laugh this time, either.

‘I should take one more,’ Audrey says to the white girl. ‘I didn’t hear a click.’

‘I did,’ says the girl, with the trace of a German accent.

‘Sure I’m half-deaf,’ says Audrey, and waits for them to laugh. But they don’t. They give a little smile and look away.

It takes her an hour to reach the foot of the final peak. It’s further away than it looks. She’s sweating by the time she gets there – it’s much too hot for the cardigan and the parka. The parka she takes off – she doesn’t feel like removing the cardigan; then she’d just have to carry it. Most people are in their T-shirts. She looks up at the peak – a mound of rocks. Scree. Grey stones tumbling down the slope – that’s what the sugar is. The peak, which looks like the point of a needle from her garden, is about twenty square metres in circumference, at least. It’s a little platform at the top of the stony scree.

Audrey feels just a tiny bit light-headed, and also a bit queasy. Altitude sickness? The mountain is five hundred metres high – she noticed this when she was looking at the map – but maybe some people can get altitude sickness at that height? She wonders if the Twin Towers were five hundred metres high. Probably about that. You wouldn’t get altitude sickness at the top of a building that you worked in every day, even one that a plane could crash into and destroy. It must be her heart.

She sits down to takes a rest.

Maybe she shouldn’t go up any further.

The view from here is good, anyway. The cars are a necklace of black diamonds strung gently around the foot of the mountain. There is Powerscourt, nestling in its dark woods. The big hotel at Kilternan in a patchwork of fields. Her landscape, where she has lived for most of her life. It’s lovely, she thinks, gratefully. Of course, she’s always known that.

Someone sits beside her. An older woman – older than Audrey.

‘Stay here and we’ll be down soon,’ says someone. She is a comfortable-looking person, in a tracksuit. She settles the woman, who is clearly her mother, into a fold-up chair.

‘I’ll be grand,’ says the older woman. ‘It’s lovely here. Take your time, enjoy the view from the top.’

The younger woman kisses the older woman and starts to climb the mountain. She has two children, a boy and a girl, who also kiss the older woman and shout: ‘Bye-bye, Granny, bye-bye, see you in a while!’

Last year, Audrey and her mother had been down there at Powerscourt one Sunday afternoon. An overcast day, it was not looking its best. But her mother had loved it.

‘You go and walk for as long as you like,’ she said to Audrey. ‘I’ll sit here and wait, I’m grand.’

She sat on an iron seat in the garden, looking down at the steps, the statues, the fountain. The flowers. The Sugar Loaf, soaring over the garden, as if built for it as a suitable backdrop.

Audrey had walked dutifully through the gardens, looked at a few unusual trees with labels on them, tripped across the tiny bridge in the Japanese gardens. The things everyone does at Powerscourt. But the grey day depressed her. In the pets’ graveyard she was overwhelmed with loneliness. A sense of being totally lost, abandoned, although there were people all around. Within ten minutes she was back with her mother.

‘I’d love a cup of coffee,’ her mother had said.

She seldom asked Audrey for anything. She loved having cups of coffee in cafés but knew Audrey didn’t share her taste for this form of amusement and usually refrained from asking. This day was different, for some reason. She hadn’t been out of the house for weeks, and she was overjoyed to see something different from the four walls of the messy sitting room. She was overjoyed to see the gardens and the fountain and the great house. To see the Sugar Loaf soaring over all that.

‘ok,’ said Audrey gruffly.

They went into the café. Of course it was packed, as Audrey knew it would be. Everyone in stuffing themselves, escaping from the nasty weather. She put her mother at a table in the corner – lucky to find one – and queued for coffee and cakes.

For about twenty minutes. That’s how long it took to get two coffees and one slice of chocolate meringue gateau and cream.

By the time she got back to her mother, Audrey was as cross as a bear. She snapped and snapped. But her mother didn’t mind. She was used to Audrey’s snapping. She no longer heard it – like someone who lives beside a railway track and doesn’t hear the trains roaring by every five minutes. She sipped her coffee and ate her chocolate meringue gateau slowly, with great enjoyment. She was happy. Anyone could see it. She glowed. In love with the fields and the flowers and sky. In love, yes, with the chocolate cake.

Audrey didn’t hear her own snapping, either. While she was doing it, snapping away and drinking her coffee, she was thinking, it’s great to see her having such a good time. I must bring her on a holiday somewhere before the end of the summer. Wales, say. Somewhere that would be easy to get to, but a different country. They could go over on the ferry, bring the car. Go up to the top of Mount Snowdon on the Mountain Railway and drink coffee up there, look down over Wales. And Ireland. They say you can see Ireland on a clear day from the top of Snowdon.

Her mother had been finding the summer long and gloomy. The garden was out of bounds most of the time, because of the rain. She had to sit in the house, listening to Audrey snapping at her, eating sandwiches for dinner more often than not – Audrey didn’t bother cooking much since Daddy died. The sandwiches weren’t bad. Ham and cheese, smoked salmon. Crisps on the side and often a bit of salad from a bag. Audrey had her wine to wash it all down, which seemed to make a difference. But her mother didn’t like wine. So she had nothing but tea to flavour the sandwiches. It got monotonous.

Audrey didn’t bring her on a holiday. Because a very strange thing happened last summer. A man in the choir, Brendan, asked Audrey out, and then he asked her to go on a holiday with him, to Sicily. Brendan was fat and had big, sticking-out ears. Still, he was nice enough. Audrey didn’t want to go – she couldn’t leave her mother for so long. But it was her mother who insisted. She phoned Ben and persuaded him to come over to stay for the week Audrey would be away. Audrey was sure everything would go pear-shaped, in Ben’s incompetent hands. But when she came home, the two of them, Ben and Mammy, were sitting in front of a blazing log fire in the front room, which he had cleaned up, listening to nice music, and looking as happy as larks.

The hotel in Sicily was great. Five star, with a lovely pool surrounded by mature palms, and a view of Mount Etna, conveniently erupting. The food was good, although the wine was a bit expensive, and of course they drank a lot of it. On the second day, after settling in, they went up to the volcano in a bus. Audrey loved that, even though Brendan shivered when he got out of the bus, and instead of climbing upwards with the other tourists, they had to head for the café to have a cappuccino, then get the bus back down again. But it was great even halfway up – you could see for miles around, the gorgeous coastline, the deep green interior.

After that day, things started to go downhill. Brendan became far too fond of getting massages from the Chinese girls who worked the beaches. They were pests, you couldn’t get a minute’s peace from them. As soon as you settled into your lounger one of them was over, with her straw hat and little simpering smile, whispering, ‘Massage, massage?’

‘Go away, go away!’ Audrey had said to them, swatting at them with her towel, as if they were flies.

Brendan had laughed at her. At first. Then Audrey started refusing to go to the beach, saying she preferred the pool, anyway. She told him the story about her grandfather and the boots. So he had to put up with it – he couldn’t force her and he wouldn’t go to the beach alone. But it annoyed him. When they came home, he never contacted her. He stopped attending choir practice.

That was at the end of August. Her mother had a heart attack on the first of September, the first day of school, and a month later, she died. The Sunday in Powerscourt, it turned out, was her last day out. Ever.

She used to come here as a girl. Audrey’s mother. She had often talked about that. With her best friend, Myrtle, who worked with her in a grocer’s shop, she would cycle out to Enniskerry on Sundays. They would go to the Powerscourt Waterfall, and stand under it, getting splashed all over with the water that cascaded down the side of the cliff. Then they’d have tea in a café in the village, if they had a shilling to spare. Myrtle and Audrey’s mother, in their gabardine coats and headscarves, laughed a great deal. There was a black-and-white snapshot of them on the mantelpiece, them and their bicycles with the waterfall behind, laughing their heads off. This was in the 1940s because by 1950 they were both married and no longer worked in the shop or cycled out to the country on their bikes. This place had been on her mother’s map, all her life. Just as it is on Audrey’s. The place you could go to on a Sunday for a drive or a walk or a climb or a cycle.

Audrey looks up at the top of the mountain. The things that looked like trees or crosses from below are just people, standing on the crest. Happy to have got up there. Now she knows that is where she has to go.

She says goodbye to the granny, who doesn’t answer because she has fallen asleep.

You have to clamber up the rocky slope. It’s steep. But Audrey finds this bit easy. She used to love climbing frames when she was small. There was a good one in the park in Dunroon, beside the graveyard. ‘You’re my little monkey, you’re my little monkey,’ Daddy used to say. He used to bring her there to get her out of her mother’s hair sometimes. ‘My monkey,’ he would say, catching her from the top of the frame and swinging her, swinging her, in the crisp bright air, so her skirt flew out in the wind and she screamed with delight.

There’s a constant stream of people going up and coming down the rock face. They all use the same track. You have to move out of the way all the time to let someone coming down pass.

She is about a third of the way up, her eyes fixed on the rock face in front of her, when someone bumps into her and nearly knocks her down.

A man.

He apologises, then stares at her. He is long-legged, dressed all in black, like a spider. Dark grey hair. The kind of face that is called distinguished in a man. There is something familiar about him. He must be somebody’s father, someone she has met at a Parent–Teacher meeting. They usually recognise her, although she can’t possibly be expected to remember all their names and faces.

‘It’s you,’ he says abruptly. This is not a thing the students’ fathers say to her.

As soon as he speaks she recognises the voice. She takes a good look at him, as he stands there on the uneven rocks, with the sky all blue behind him. His grey hair turns black before her eyes. His young face emerges from his old face, where it is buried, to be discovered by those who know how to find it.

Pádraig. She was ‘going with him’ (that’s what you did then, you went with a person) from the 10th March 1972, which is when she met him at a dance in college, till the 15th June 1974, when he went elsewhere. To America, just for the summer. She was to go, too, and if she had, she might still be with him. Going with him, to wherever people who stay together go in the end. But at the last minute she got cold feet. Her mother was encouraging, but her father had reservations. The us. Anything could happen there. What if Pádraig abandoned her? What would she do then? ‘Ara, couldn’t she just catch the plane and come home?’ said her mother. ‘And he won’t abandon her, what would he do that for?’

The religion thing was never mentioned. But it was there, nevertheless, unvoiced, like a huge mountain hidden in fog. (They didn’t know – how would you? – that when the fog cleared, the mountain would have disappeared, melted away like sugar in water.)

In the end she didn’t go to America. She just couldn’t face being away from home, from her mother and father and the house she had lived in for such a long time. She wasn’t ready to leave.

During the first weeks, Pádraig wrote letters and postcards. There was no question of telephone calls from America in those days. After a month, the letters stopped coming. And she never heard from him again.

‘Yes,’ she says now. So she is still recognisable. She wishes, how she wishes, that she looked smarter. She hasn’t even bothered to comb her hair. The green cardigan is about twenty years old. The sleeves are black with coal dust, from emptying the ashes, something she noticed yesterday but she wore it, anyway. And the trousers are work trousers, not sporty-looking, not feminine. (She remembers that Pádraig had preferred skirts on girls.) Her hair is a rat’s nest. If she’d even stuck a scarf on to cover it up. But how could she have known that half of Dublin would have the same idea as herself? Would heed the weather woman’s advice to get out and enjoy the good day? She hadn’t thought she’d meet anyone at all on the mountain. Still less this man whom she hasn’t bumped into since June 1974.

‘How are you?’ he asks, in a calmer, kinder tone.

His voice had always calmed her down, made her feel all right. He was the only person who could do that for her. Ever. She had loved him much more than her father or her mother or her brother or anyone she met in later life (two other men, including Brendan). The realisation, which should have come to her that summer all those long years ago, is like a light going on in her brain. A light that makes her feel very sick and very well at exactly the same time.

‘I’m grand’, is what she says.

‘We should meet sometime in more comfortable circumstances,’ he says, smiling. ‘Can I give you a call?’

‘That would be nice,’ she says. ‘I’m in the phone book.’

‘Under your own name?’

She admits it.

‘Yes, my own name. Bailey, Audrey.’

‘I can remember that!’ he says, grinning. He looks up at the top of the mountain. ‘Well, don’t let me keep you from your climb. This last bit is hard but it’s worth it.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ she says.

After forty years, he doesn’t want to keep her from her climb.

She wants to scream, stay, stay. She wants to grab him by the black anorak and keep him here on the side of the scree.

Already he has started to go down the slope, facing away from her this time. Even though there are several people trying to get past her, she stands for a full minute watching him retreat. The back of his head. His trim body in its black jeans and anorak. A woman is coming towards her now, down the sugary slope. Something tells her this is Padráig’s wife. Younger than him. And good-looking. Lots of women who are not good-looking have husbands. But not husbands like him, successful and presentable and talkative. They always get pretty wives and if you’re not pretty, you just won’t do.

Audrey never said this to herself before. It’s simple when you realise it.

Someone should tell the girls at school.

Or maybe they know that. They know so much. And so much has changed. Nobody cares whether you’re Catholic or Protestant. Nobody cares whether you’re married or single, either. (The girls paint their eyes, though, and diet, and care dreadfully about clothes. So they do care about something, although it’s not quite clear what, or why.)

Audrey reaches the top. And there are the twelve German girls, in their light, white blouses, their long hair blowing in the wind. They are standing on the crest of the Sugar Loaf in a circle. They must have passed her by when she was taking her rest on the ridge beneath.

Last Friday she had 4C for English, last class of the week. It’s never easy. They get so giggly and so damned silly. But she knows how to deal with them. Mountains of work if they dare to step out of line, she threatens them with. Not that they bother doing it, that’s the trouble. She has to send them to the Principal then. And the Principal is getting fed up with her, but what can she do? it’s not her fault. She was late for class on Friday, she’d stayed too long with 1B. They’ve been in the school for less than two months, so they haven’t learnt to be brats. She was nearly ten minutes late. The door was closed and there was the usual cacophony of noise inside the room. Bracing herself, she opened it.

Jessica Black was sitting on the teacher’s desk. She was draped in a big red coat, which looked just like Audrey’s coat, however she’d managed to get her hands on it. Her hair was pulled back into a bun and she had painted a big black moustache on her face.

‘Girls, girls, girls! Quiet please, girls. You’re so bold,’ she said.

‘Please, Miss Bailey, where does your big black moustache come from?’ Rebecca Murphy said. ‘Can we shave it off for you?’

‘No,’ said Jessica Black. ‘If you did that, I wouldn’t be the ugliest woman in the school, would I? Now, open your novel, girls. I hope everyone has read Chapter Five?’

There are clouds in the distance, over Enniskerry and Powerscourt. A few swathes of rain, like cobwebs hanging in the valley. But they won’t make it here. The woman on the weather promised. All sun and no rain. Those veils of rain will evaporate before they reach this mountain.

She takes off her green cardigan.

The German girls are dancing now on the crest of the mountain, in a ring, their white blouses fluttering, their hair floating on the wind. She knows she should go and offer to take a photo of them now that they are at the top of the mountain. Before and after. If she were a different sort of person, she would do that. It would be easy. It would be a kind and friendly act.

But she doesn’t.

She sits down on the heather.

In the clean air the laughter of the German girls sounds like a nice nocturne by Chopin or John Field. It is the very sound of human delight. On her bare arms, on her bare face, the sun is warm and sweet, like the breath of someone you love dearly.

Below, the cars glide noiselessly along the N11 like toys. Then the sea. Bobbing sailboats, and the big white ferry slowly making its way eastwards. Pale blue, dark blue, azure. On the horizon a bumpy grey line, and a triangular peak rising out of the bumps.

It could be some sort of cloud formation. But she knows it’s not. It’s Wales, and the triangle is Mount Snowdon. They say you can see it, on a really clear day, from the top of the Sugar Loaf. She had always heard that, but she had never really believed it. Who would credit that you can actually see another country from the island of Ireland, which always seems so far away from the rest of the world?