Thirty-one

October. The sun was getting low and shone with the deep mellowness of autumn on the milky sea. The visitors had all gone home. Half the houses in the valley were empty, but the place did not have the closed-up look more lively resorts get off-season. A new life began when the summer was over. The locals settled back into their own routines and repossessed their own place.

The blackberries were thick on the brambles that lined the lanes of the valley. Kate spent afternoons finding more and more, filling a small yellow bucket with the fat fruit.

In the mornings she packed most of them away in the new deep freeze she had bought and put in the new garden shed. She made bramble jelly, using Leo’s recipe book, Food for Free. He made wine. ‘Every year for ten years I planned to make wine,’ he said. ‘And now at last I’m getting around to it.’ He kissed her. The jars of rich purple juice fermented in the shed, bubbling like a river. ‘At Christmas we’ll be drinking the summer,’ he said. ‘When the mist wraps us up like a cloud, we’ll raise our sweet glasses and say “Summer is coming!”’

Kate was putting her mark on the house.

‘It is beautiful,’ she said. ‘And I like the way you have it.’ But it wouldn’t do for a child, she said, meaning it wouldn’t do for her. They had applied for planning permission for an extension – a new bedroom, and new bathroom, and new spare room, all to the side. She wanted to add a sunroom as well, but you didn’t need planning permission for that.

The shed was the first thing. You didn’t need planning permission for that either. And into the shed went the freezer, and a washing machine, and a new lawnmower.

‘I was slumming it – typical country bachelor,’ said Leo.

He was beginning to be slightly concerned about money now that the baby was on the way. But Kate’s parents had given her some and there would always be the proceeds of the sale of her flat. Anyway he was working hard and there were new books, new grants, new projects on his work plan. Kate was officially his assistant. In reality, she did very little on the publishing side of things. There was so much to be done with the house, and the garden. She was digging, she was drawing up plans for a patio and a pond and a shelter belt of trees.

The neighbours watched with interest.

They liked Kate well enough. She was a minor disappointment: not as talkative a person as they would have wished for. In the valley, there was a great need for people who had the gift of the gab, who could make jokes and puns, who always had a new story to tell. There was a need for good company. Leo was quiet, and now Kate was even quieter. But they were decent sorts, they were not muinteartha exactly – the best thing to be – but they were macánta – more important. It wasn’t their fault that they hadn’t a lot to say. They represented a new sort of person, people from the city who were restrained, not used to expressing themselves, who could not make jokes or tell stories and who spoke a thin, colourless language, peppered with slang they had learned from television. No proverbs, no wisecracks. Kate was polite and friendly. She answered questions as well as she could and did not withhold information. She did her best. God love her.

And they were a young couple. What the valley needed more than anything. Lifeblood.