THE PUB THAT Adam has chosen is half an hour’s drive from St. Vincent’s.
The other side of the village, we take a road that passes through Coldharbour Bog. It’s a desolate place, the land all bleached or tawny, with gilded grasses flattened by the wind and no trees but an occasional stunted thorn tree, its branches furred with lichen. You can see the black lines where peat has been dug, and there are many pools of water that hold the shine of the sky. This brown, wet wilderness seems to stretch forever.
I lower my window a little, breathe in the scent of roots and rot. The wind has an animal sound.
“It feels so bleak,” I say. “If anything happened here . . . I mean, you’d be miles from anyone.”
Beyond the bog, the road begins to rise. We pass narrow fields full of rocks, and quiet villages of sparse, hunched cottages. A rumpled pony stares at us across a broken wall.
I glance back at Sylvie. She smiles at me. She still has that flushed, happy look.
“Is there anything here that you’ve seen before?” I ask her.
“Yes, of course,” she says, and turns away, watching out the window.
I feel how she eludes me.
The pub is called Joe Moloney’s. We go to order at the bar, where a hollow-faced man in an old, worn coat gets up and kisses my hand. The landlord has quick, knowing eyes. He gives me an appraising look.
“Well, aren’t you the lucky one?” he says to Adam. “You’ve got a lovely lady there. Just you take good care of her.”
“I’ll do my best,” says Adam lightly.
I feel my face go hot.
We choose a table near the fire. White ash sifts down around the grate, and the burning logs have a sappy smell. Adam and I drink Guinness, and we eat steak pie, which comes with three varieties of potato. Sylvie amazes me by clearing her plate.
“It’s nice here, isn’t it, Grace?” she says.
I love it when she’s happy like this.
When we go out to the car again, the wind has dropped and there’s a flamboyant pink-and-orange sunset. We set out for Coldharbour. Behind us, there are mountains heaped up, deeply purple as damsons. There’s nobody about except an occasional quiet animal—a slow horse the color of rust moving through a field of reeds, a clumsy sheep that lumbers over the road.
I look back at Sylvie. She’s scarcely blinking. Soon she’ll be asleep. Minute by minute the countryside smudges and darkens around us.
We come to a rambling farmhouse with a noisy dog chained up. Adam is frowning.
“Does this look familiar?” he says.
“Not really,” I tell him.
“Oh. That’s not what I hoped you’d say.”
He stops and peers out at a signpost. “Ballykilleen? Why the hell are we heading for Ballykilleen? Isn’t that where we’re meant to be coming from?”
“I guess we could just drive on till we reach the next intersection,” I say.
Adam grunts. “A fat lot of good that’ll do us. I swear that that last signpost had been turned the wrong way round.”
But he does drive on and turns down a side road that doesn’t have a signpost, that seems to be going in roughly the right direction. The road climbs. We come to the top of the mountain that rises behind Coldharbour. The view opens out in front of us like a gift unwrapped. Way down below us, the sea is shimmering in the sunset, a track of pink light across it like a bale of bright silk flung out. To the left of the road, there’s a hedge of sheltering firs, a birch tree. A couple of small pale cottages are set back from the road.
“Grace! Grace! Look!”
There’s a shrill excitement in Sylvie’s voice.
“Look, Grace, look, it’s my house!”
Adam glances quickly over his shoulder at her. He slows, pulls into the shoulder of the road.
Sylvie points to the first of the cottages. “There it is, Grace!”
Her face is radiant.
Adam is leaning across me to look, but I can’t see his expression. He’s quiet, attentive, his irritation forgotten. Between us the Saint Christopher is gently turning and glittering; it goes on moving long after the car is still.
I stare at the house. It has a run-down look, with no lights on and boards across most of the windows. Its whitewashed walls glimmer faintly in the evening, and one solitary unboarded window catches the sun in a dazzle of saffron and pink. In the dim light, you can’t see what color the door is painted. There’s a little lawn in front of it, and the shadow of the mountain falls across the lawn. It’s clear that nobody lives here. It has the bleak look of all abandoned houses.
I stare, can’t move my eyes away, take in the rough white walls, the squat, symmetrical shape of it, the slate gray tiles that are streaked with moss and lichen. There’s a feeling in the back of my neck, as though a small cold hand is fingering my spine.
“It’s a good house, isn’t it, Grace?”
When she turns to me, all the brightness of the sky is in her eyes.
“Yes, it’s a very good house. It’s just like the house we got from Tiger Tiger.”
“I told you,” she says.
Adam is tense, alert. I can hear his light, quick breath.
I wind my window down. I can smell mint and a green, fresh scent of pollen. The garden is raggedy and neglected, but some flowers and herbs must still grow here. The grass is mostly rough. Someone has mown a strip across the width of the house, but the rest is very long, and there are daffodils in it, their paleness floating in a sea of black. The gate is open and hanging on one hinge. A nameplate says FLAG COTTAGE. A little breeze shivers the leaves of the birch tree.
I try desperately to remember the sequence of what just happened. When did Sylvie call out? Before or after she saw the house? Is she excited because it reminds her of the dollhouse? Or did she start to get excited before she saw the house? I try to untangle it all in my mind, but I can’t—I can’t be certain. I’m angry with myself for not paying more attention.
“D’you like it, Grace?” she says.
“Yes. I really like it.”
Her face is luminous, but I sense such fragility in her. I feel I have to move with the greatest care.
“Aren’t we going to see it?” she says.
I don’t know what to say.
“Please, Grace. I really want to.”
She undoes her seat belt and leans across the back of my seat toward me. I feel her moth breath on my face. Her eyes are full of the colored lights from the sky.
I don’t know how to handle this. I glance at Adam for guidance.
“Sylvie, it’s nearly dark,” he says. “What we’ll do is, we’ll come back tomorrow, first thing in the morning. So we can see everything properly.”
She’s anxious. “But what if we can’t find it?”
“We’ll find it, sweetheart,” I tell her. “Adam will mark it on the map. Look, we’ll mark it now. It isn’t going anywhere. We’ll come and find it tomorrow.”
“I promise,” I say.
This seems to satisfy her.
She sits back, buckles up her belt. As we drive away, she twists in her seat, staring out the window, holding the house with her eyes until it’s swallowed up by the night.
Sylvie settles quickly. But it takes me ages to get to sleep, even though I’m exhausted. I lie in bed and stare into the dark.
I hear Adam in the next room, talking on his cell phone. I can hear the tone of his voice through the wall, but I can’t make out the words. I wonder if he’s ringing Tessa. There are lots of silences his end—she seems to do most of the talking—and he’s on the phone for what seems like a very long time. Then I hear his shower running, hear him unpacking, opening cupboards, shifting things around in the room. It’s a very old building, everything creaks. It’s unnerving, living so close to him, this man I scarcely know at all, and it feels too intimate—hearing all his movements. Eventually the creaking stops.
I lie awake and listen to the silence. There’s no noise at all but the sea, just the faintest pulse as the waves break, a sound that’s more felt than heard, as though it’s part of your body. I think of why we’ve come here, remembering what Adam said: A violent, sudden death, with all the wreckage that leaves. I realize I’m shivering, pull my duvet close against me. I try to reassure myself with thoughts of London things—our street, our flat, the mulberry in our garden—but already our life there seems remote, the images so small and distant. Like pictures on a page, not something real.