WE CROSS THE edge of the land. If I lean over Sylvie, who has the window seat, I can see the Irish Sea below us—the white fringe of surf that follows the line of the shore, that from up here seems to have no movement, to be as still as something drawn or painted. Sylvie, who has loved everything today—the glamour of the airport, the flight attendants’ bright green suits and hats, even her chicken-and-salad sandwich, once she’d carefully removed each shred of lettuce—has finally fallen asleep.
The newspaper I bought at the airport lies open, unread, on my lap. I rest back in my seat, very aware of Adam’s arm on the elbow rest between us. I have a sense of astonishment that this is actually happening.
Adam isn’t reading either.
“Does your girlfriend . . .” I say. “I mean, I don’t know her name—”
“Tessa. She’s called Tessa.”
“Does Tessa mind you going away like this?”
He’s puzzled.
“No. Why should she?”
Perhaps it was a stupid thing to say.
“It’s not that kind of relationship,” he says.
I want to ask what he means—what kind of relationship it is.
We’re over Ireland now. The land slides away beneath us, purple plowed fields, a tangle of woods so dark they have a burnt look, a twisting silver river. Cloud blows past us like smoke.
“Look,” I say.
He leans across me, so close I can sense the warmth that comes off his body. We watch for a while, till cloud obscures the ground.
Sylvie stirs, opens her eyes. She stares around, she has a confused look. She clutches Big Ted to her.
“Grace,” she says. The word is a question.
I smooth back her hair.
“We’re on the plane, sweetheart, remember? We’re going to visit the place in your picture,” I say.
Sylvie smiles.
The engine noise cuts out, so it feels that the plane is still, suspended. The pilot announces that we’re starting to descend. White cloud presses in at the window.
Adam finishes his coffee and folds his table away.
“I’ll read to Sylvie,” he tells me. “So you can get some rest.”
I find The Very Hungry Caterpillar in my bag. We change places, so Adam is sitting next to Sylvie. I lean back and stretch my legs out into the aisle.
He starts to read. His voice is expressive, and he’s utterly unself-conscious, and Sylvie is enchanted. When he gets to the end, she wants it all again. She looks across at the pictures, pressing her fingers into the holes where the caterpillar has eaten through. I close my eyes, drift in and out of consciousness. He’s reciting the lovely long list of food that the caterpillar has eaten, and the thread of his voice unspools through my dreams. “‘One slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie . . .’”
When we land at Shannon Airport, it’s raining heavily. We eat in a restaurant of unforgiving 1960s concrete, looking out across a slow brown river. Sylvie says her cheesy potatoes taste of sweat.
We pick up a rental car from a wet gray car park and load our luggage in.
“I’m happy to drive. But it’s up to you,” says Adam.
I’m grateful that he asked me, that he didn’t just assume.
Sylvie scrambles into the car. There’s a silver-plated Saint Christopher hanging from the rearview mirror. She leans across the front seats and touches it, making it shiver and glitter. Then she settles into her seat with Big Ted and a Jaffa Cake.
We drive through a gentle countryside of gray church spires and little farms. It’s subtly different from England—the Gaelic words on the signposts, with their baffling clusters of consonants, the palms in people’s gardens, even the electrical towers seem different—but it’s dreary under the rain.
Sometimes I glance back at Sylvie. She watches out the window, her gaze acute, alert. Her sleep on the plane has revived her. Sometimes she points out what she sees—a donkey shambling through a field, two black birds on a wire—like any child who’s traveling through an unfamiliar land.
After Galway the sun comes out for a while. There are small white houses in fields of stones with hills heaped up behind them, and a washed silver light over everything. Then, beyond Oughterard, we come to a different, harsher land—empty, silent, with mountains all around us and still black lakes choked up with grass and reeds. A sudden squall lashes the car. Where it moves across the mountains, you can see the edges of the rain, though far ahead of us, at the coast, the sky is clear and luminous. I’m getting used to this weather now, the way it shifts and changes even as you look at it, and between the squalls of rain, this light that is everywhere like the light over water. For miles we see no other car or house or sign of people—just a shepherd with his tatty flock, and a church in the middle of all the desolation, with a blue benign Virgin who reaches out her arms toward the road.
“Why aren’t we there yet?” says Sylvie.
“We soon will be, sweetheart. It isn’t much farther,” I say.
“I want to be there now,” she says. “Now, Grace.”
At last the road begins to descend, above us that vivid arch of sky we saw before. We pass the crest of a hill. I hear my quick inbreath. The sea is suddenly spread out before us, unimaginably wide and shimmering with silver light. We drive down the hill into Coldharbour. Tall thin houses line a street that winds toward the shore; the houses are painted many colors, like the colors of fruit—apple, lemon, berry red. There’s a scream of seagulls.