After Annie had walked out of his studio without a word on Saturday, Daniel had traded the thin, pointed metals, harsh chemicals, and sharp tools for pliable canvas, tubes of paint, and soft-bristled brushes. He’d told Annie the watercolors displayed here and there around the studio were studies for his metalwork. True, yes. But the deeper truth was the solace and pleasure he found in painting. These pieces, not intended for sale, allowed him to retain a deeper connection to his art, like a poet scribbling a poem on a bar napkin and leaving it behind, or a dancer twirling with abandon in an empty dance studio to the music in her head. The pure satisfaction of the process, when it wasn’t for any purpose other than the joy of creation. Rarely did he share his watercolors with anyone, not even Margitte. And this painting would surely be his alone. The one indulgence of longing he would allow himself before it turned into regret.
It began, as all his work did, from a sense of place, grounded in the land where he’d been restored and sustained. But this painting was not a landscape; it was a portrait. After the shades and contours of sky, sea, mountains, and the gorse and grass of fields came the cream of skin and hair and delicate dress. The sharp edge of rock and the soft curve of cheek and thigh. A gaze into the distance that was meant to capture the longing Annie had expressed to stay and his longing that she never leave.
As Daniel gave shape to his desire in the form of a woman he barely knew perched on a slip of land that formed his very soul, he drifted to other memories, an earlier time of abandonment and regret.
He’d never painted his mother, although he could still see the thick wave of her dark hair, the shade she’d given to Fiana, and her cool and distant blue eyes, eyes that looked back from the mirror at Daniel every morning as he shaved. But his lasting image of her was not one he wanted to commit to canvas. There he’d been, a ten-year-old boy standing still as stone between his mother’s hands as she clutched his shoulders and kissed his cheek. A mother who laughed as she jumped into the back of a Volkswagen van, waving good-bye to her young son and daughter. She was on her way to England for just a fortnight to see some old friends and take in a few concerts at the festival in Glastonbury.
Decades later she resurfaced as a letter addressed to Fiana at the Ballycaróg Bayview Hotel, married, with another family, raising sheep in New Zealand’s Waipara Valley. She’d been searching for her first children on the Internet, she wrote. It wasn’t until Daniel’s manslaughter conviction that she’d finally tracked down her son, then a resident of Cork Prison, and his sister, a social worker living in Ballycaróg. Neither Fiana nor Daniel had ever responded to that letter.
Daniel had yet to form a long-term attachment to a woman. He and Fiana had worked through the psychobabble a long time ago; they both had issues with trust. Of course he hadn’t lived a monastic existence. He was away enough—overnight hikes, guide trips, scouting scrap metal—wandering from Beara to sketch or hike. There were the return visits to the Durrell Wildlife Park, where he’d first become enchanted with the Red-billed Chough; he’d sought out women who didn’t know or care about his past. Even Fiana had been pestered for years by acquaintances who looked beyond Daniel’s crime and conviction and saw only a somber, handsome man in need of saving.
But if his head had ever been turned, if he’d let go of his self-hatred long enough to care for anyone, he’d never admitted it to himself. Until this one. This troubled, flawed, vulnerable American who’d burst into their lives just a week ago. Whose presence would be extinguished as soon as she flew away from Ireland. He painted to capture and preserve what he accepted would never be his. Another layer of regret as thick as the scar on Annie’s leg.