I n her dream, the bare, sun-warmed rock felt smooth on her back, like the touch of another person’s skin. She lay there, looking at the sky, filled with loneliness and longing and love. He had risen from beside her, put on his shirt and stepped down from the outcrop without a word. If she sat up, she would see him making his way across the glen. She would watch him enter the shadow of the wood, the sun alighting for the last time upon his golden hair.
But she did not sit up. She could not bear to prolong the parting, to cling feebly to a final view of him. She was stronger than that; she would lie here until she was calm, and her cheeks were pale again, and then she would return to the house. She would take her place at one end of the table, her husband at the other, and they would speak briefly of their visitor’s departure. Her husband might express his hope that the train was punctual and his cousin’s journey pleasant. She would push her food around her plate, and think of his bright hair, the sensation of his fingers upon her flesh, and the wound his departure had left in her heart.
And then she was screaming. On and on she screamed, pouring her despair into the empty valley and the bare rock under the sky.
“Mama! Mama!”
The child’s cry entered her hearing, but she did not understand where it had come from. Then she felt his small hand touch hers, and his knees dig into her thigh as he climbed onto the sofa beside her. “Mama, you are crying!”
She sat up, coughing, and caught him in her arms. She stroked the white-gold hair she could not bear to cut, even though the boy had passed his fourth birthday. “Mama is well, darling,” she reassured him. “I was dreaming, that is all.”
He gazed up at her, his cheeks streaked with tears. “Not-nice dream,” he said gravely.
“You are quite right,” she said, embracing him once more. “It was one of Mama’s not-nice dreams. Now, will you let me rest a little longer? Bridie will take care of you.”