They didn’t stop till they were at Letterkenny, the first town in the Republic, and there they went into a small tea shop and had two teas and a lemonade and a Coke, and he had a chocolate bar and shared it round, looking at the wrapping critically and saying, ‘There’s not much to that. Bloody English, Cadbury’s. I bet they’re mean with it when it goes overseas. I bet they say, don’t put so much in there, that lot’ll not know the difference.’
Then they were back in the car, bumping over the topsy-turvy land on a narrow roadway, until they came across a two-pump petrol station and Kathleen got out and asked which way was Bunbeg. There was a stand inside the small room with a few loaves of bread on it and some buns, so she brought six iced buns back with her. It was a brittle winter day, but the car was warm with the four of them and they were happy going between grassy hills, following a single road that was inexorable, stupid, lovely. To the sides, set at disinterested angles, heedless of the road, there were single-room dwellings, some disused, some with smoke coming out of the chimney.
An elderly woman out walking stopped in her tracks as she saw them coming, looked at the car as if it were romance itself and waved hard at them.
When they came to a small village – a few homes and a lone pub – they were obliged to come to a standstill. There was an old man standing in the middle of the road, using his stick to indicate that they should slow down.
‘Would you be going in that direction?’ he asked at the driver’s window, pointing forwards. ‘I’m a wee bit out of sorts and I could use the lift.’
Liam got out to let him in and once inside, the man sat bolt upright in the middle, between the seats, two hands about his walking stick, holding it proud, flagless.
‘And this is your car!’ he said, impressed by the Ford Escort. His tweed jacket was tied together with a piece of string. Liam got back in and slammed the door. The man winced.
‘We were lent it by our priest,’ said Kathleen.
‘You must be very holy,’ he said, smiling, steadying himself as they took off. He craned his neck to watch Sean at the gear stick and leant forward to watch his foot on the clutch. ‘Lovely gear change,’ he said happily, and nearly fell forward between the front seats.
‘You have a beautiful countryside out here.’
‘Aye we do that.’ He was squinting, one eye closed, his tongue drying on to his lip. ‘Just pull over some time on the right, down there, in your own time, Sir.’
Sean pulled the stick into second, slowed to a stop.
‘’Tis a fine driver you are, Sir, may the Lord give you all you need in life.’
He put a hand on either of the front seats both to congratulate them again and to lever himself up and out. Liam was standing outside, waiting. In a minute, he was back inside and the door was closed. The man was on the road behind them. On their knees, looking out the back window, the children watched him wave his stick, then head towards a little house on a ridge.
‘He was full,’ said Liam, fingers squeezing his nose. Kathleen cracked her window and Sean followed suit.
There were small, white bungalows with thatched roofs dotted here and there on the peaty hillsides towards Bunbeg. Skirting the ocean for a while, they went up and down hill and came to the village itself with its couple of pubs, some guest houses, a post office, a general store and a single, rather maudlin, hotel, no lights on.
‘I feel comfortable here. In Ireland proper,’ he said to his wife.
‘It’s all Ireland proper. No one can say it’s not, the land is the land.’ When they got to the sandy beach, Sean stopped the car, and they sighed at the glistening flat sand and the sea that lapped and spread circles of glitter drops. Then he started up the car and drove it forwards on to the sand, with Kathleen exclaiming and the children drawing in great happy breaths of excitement.
‘Now it’s our beach,’ he said, stopping the car just at the water’s edge.
‘’Tis a fine driver y’are, Sir,’ said Kathleen, in their passenger’s voice. She opened the bag she had and handed round baps and then, steadying a bottle between her thighs and getting Sean to hold two mugs at a time, she poured lemonade. The children leant forwards to see what their parents had inside their sandwiches, looked at each other’s, put their own mugs between their feet and then they ate, the four of them, looking at the view up ahead and all around them, and at the marooned sailing-boat that had been abandoned in the harbour. The wind shook the car.
‘It’s like we’re in the boat ourselves. It makes me feel cosy.’ Aine shivered.
‘Didn’t we always say it was the bad weather outside made it good to be inside? I can’t imagine living in a warm climate. I wouldn’t need a family if I did. I’d be off down the road.’
‘And we’d all be right after you,’ said Sean, giving her his heavy romantic look, the one she used to dread, full of misplaced admiration, booze-heavy. But he was sober. It was New Year’s Day. It was nice that he bothered.
The kids got out and went running, they took their shoes off and paddled.
‘Only Irish kids could find fun in that, socks off in the freezing cold,’ said Sean, watching them, proud. They had the doors open and smoked together.
‘I was thinking of Genoa on the way here,’ he went on. ‘No, I’m not going to tell the story again. But I’d forgotten the bit about how I missed you when I was away. Jesus Christ, Kathleen, you’d have loved it there in Italy, just dripping with pure beauty, so it was. We got a lift round the coast to this wee town called Portofino. A gem of a place. I thought of you all the time, walking about with a plastic bag, thinking how I’d like to get you this and that from the shops they had there. And I brought you back a wee tea-towel with a ship on it, didn’t I, along with that stupid damned ashtray. Ach Jesus. Sorry about that. You know, every foot of the place was flowers, and it was all old and fine and these wee lizards went racing about the hill pathways and there was this big mandarin-coloured church on the hill, sitting in the sun like it owned the place. I’d have liked to have been with you there, to have taken you back to a hotel, to be with you in nobody’s bed and to say, she’s mine and I’m the luckiest man in the world. And here we are in Bunbeg and it’s fifteen years gone by since then, and I’m glad to have you here with me. I’m grateful, Kathleen.’
Aine was peering into the water, sat on a rock, and Liam was alongside of her looking into the same place. He said something and he splashed her.
‘Sean, I was thinking that maybe I should love our Sean less or others more. Other people I mean. But I can’t love Sean less. So I’ve got to love the others more.’
‘You think too much.’
‘You talk too much. It’s with you talking, I get to thinking.’
On the way there he’d been telling her a story about his time in Australia. She’d been bored and not heard him and then tried to listen and felt guilty that her thoughts were elsewhere and that her inclination was to look for the lie, to put him down.
‘I’m not a good person, Sean, I don’t know why you think I am.’
‘Because I believe you are.’
‘That just makes me feel worse, so it does. I was thinking about you on the way here. About how baby Sean came along and I loved him so much it took me over. Well, I want to say that I’m proud of you for giving up the drink the way you have. Honest to God it’s a miracle.’
‘It’s only been a few days.’
‘A wee miracle then.’
He took her hand in his.
‘They’re getting soaked,’ he said, nodding at the children in the pale light as they ran into the brisk waves, grabbing what they could for themselves. She bristled with the cold and closed her door. He did the same.
‘Sean’s away,’ he said, and his voice sounded different without the noise of the sea and the wind taking from it. ‘He’s away, love. We don’t know when he’s coming back or even if he is.’ He squeezed her hand.
‘He’s my son too.’
The children had been writing in the wet sand. Liam was putting down ‘IRA’ and Aine had written with her big toe, ‘The Police’. Her brother was standing, hands on hips, abusing her.
‘Death comes unasked. That’s what they say. Any time, any place, anywhere – like with your Martini drink. Well so does life, Kathleen, and so does love. The best thing of all is when we don’t do the thinking for ourselves, we just get on with what we’re given.’ He tucked his chin into his coat.
‘Do we have to go back to the Murph? Can’t we just take off? On a boat, like you used to, with some handsome strangers?’
‘And there’s me on my hammock while you’re off with the captain in first class.’
And she saw the old Sean and she saw the new Sean and she saw the humour in the both of them.
‘Are you ever going to take me on a honeymoon or is this it? Is this all I’ve got to look forward to?’
‘This is it, Kathleen.’
‘All right then. So long as I know.’
His eyes were pale and loose with a tiny core of granite, and she felt that she loved him and doubted him, and she was glad she knew both things even though they were hard to take together, and she decided to try not to hurt him any more, even though she would. She couldn’t trust him, he couldn’t trust her, but it was warm there with him and it didn’t matter. She lay her head on his chest. This was just one moment, not the best one, not the last one, nor the beginning of something else; in the next minute they might be quarrelling again. He put an arm about her and kissed her head, his lips moving in her hair. With his hand he stroked her, kept her close.
The kids’ faces came up at their father’s side window; they were squashing their noses and pressing their tongues into their chins to make monsters of themselves.
‘That’s our lot then,’ said Sean, pulling away. ‘Time to break open them iced buns, missus.’