Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (40 page)

I could be forgiven my fancy, I believe, because she looked like no earthly child, carved out against the background of dark dreaming pine and old mossy stones, with the surf foaming around her ankles. Her hair was wet and streaked like seaweed down her back, the color of indigo in the moonlight. Of course I would find her dancing there on the edge of the earth, feet in the water—that place where two elements meet and are neither here nor there has long been considered a place of magic, and making of the impossible, possible.

How long I stood there, I do not know, but suddenly she turned as though she sensed human interference in her fairy revels, and her eyes cut across the gloaming so that I was certain she had spotted me. I couldn’t have moved though, not for all the tea in China, for I recognized her and the recognition rooted me there. There is no way to say this without sounding foolish—or mildly insane—but it was one of those moments that do not come in all lives, where I just knew someone—all of them. I  knew that if she could see me, she would know me too—without words, or explanations—as though we both belonged to another race, another time, and were the only two survivors left here stranded on a strange planet, where neither of us truly understands the rules.

A fool’s fancy, and sitting here now with the fire crackling away, and a very prosaic cup of tea at my left hand (unable as I was to find mead in these sensible cupboards), I feel a fool even writing the words. Perhaps she was merely a vision born of a wildly romantic night of moonlight and amber-scented pines and the great wild body of the sea, not to mention the lack of medication in my bloodstream.

Perhaps.

June____, 1962

I spoke briefly with Colleen today. Briefly, because it seems neither of us can find words to bridge this terrible span between us. I cannot comfort her and she cannot forgive me.

It was a dull day, with the sort of oppressive humidity that sits on this coast occasionally during the summer. I could feel the weight of it reflected in my mood. So I forced myself to take care of the business that has lagged in my absence, the thousand small decisions that never fail to be good for one, especially when I consider the people who make up the companies and how even the finest details affect their lives. It is good to know there will be plenty to keep me busy once I return home.

July____, 1962

My moonlight oceaniade is real.

I was fishing below the tiny bridge that spans the stream near my hut, when I heard the unmistakable thump of horse hooves approaching. I was in no mood for company so I only poked my head around the struts of the bridge, where I would have a view of the trespasser. She stopped just short of the bridge, apparently having some difficulty with the horse’s bridle. Now, I ask you, would a creature of sea foam need a bridle?

I was equal parts relieved and disappointed to know that she was an actual flesh-and-blood child. Mind you, even in the suffering light of day, she did not look fully human—except that she was exceptionally grubby and clad in a shirt printed with cabbage roses—surely an oceaniade would not be caught in such a thing. And she was cursing volubly at the horse she rode. Then again, who is to say even enchanted sea creatures aren’t given to fits of temper and astoundingly coarse epithets. Sailors would have blushed to hear the tongue on her. I myself was quite impressed, and stood with my mouth open as she passed, without noticing I was there.

She sorted out her troubles with the bridle, though it took several minutes, during which time she had plenty to say to both the horse and the universe in general. Surely it is only my imagination but she seemed to have a lilt in her voice, as though the green hills of my own country were somewhere in her background.

She wore no shoes—well, an oceaniade wouldn’t be aware of something so prosaic as footwear, now would she? The shirt she must have stolen from a drying line on a moonlit flit inland. Otherwise, surely she would be clad in Neptune’s robes.

As she ambled away, good relations restored with both bridle and world, I felt slighted—for no sensible reason—that she didn’t sense me there, even if I was standing in waist-high bracken in the shade of the bridge.

I really ought to take my nasty little pills before I find myself dancing on the seashore too.

July____, 1962

Well, my oceaniade most certainly is human if broken bones and vomit are anything by which to judge. The former is her ankle and the latter caused me to throw my shoes out. I saw her out early this morning on a big, black brute of a stallion that she had no business whatsoever riding. I would have trouble controlling him, never mind a slip of a girl, which to him probably felt like a minor irritation on his back, to be quickly disposed of.

As befits a sea creature, however, she was pounding down the beach, barely clinging to his mane. Whatever on earth possessed her to ride bareback on such a beast, I do not know—or rather I do—but that’s neither here nor there at this juncture. I could see disaster coming as clear as the crash of the Hindenburg. Like most disasters one sees rolling out before one’s eyes, I could not reach her in time to prevent it.

There was, literally, a snake in the grass, and the horse reacted as horses will in such situations. He reared up and flung his rider off as if she weighed no more than a bit of oat grass. She might have been fine, only jarred and bruised, but his hoof glanced off her ankle on the way down. I think I will hear her screams echoing down the next several weeks. I ran to her, but she was mercifully passed out by the time I reached her. I carried her to the nearest house and had them call the local doctor.

She woke briefly before the doctor shot her full of morphine and seemed to think I was an angel hovering over her. I would have found it funny, considering how
I
 mistook
her
for a mythical creature at first, but her eyes were so filled with pain and terror and confusion that I only sought to reassure her. She passed out again, and when she came to after the ankle had been set, tried to sit up. The result is splattered all over my discarded shoes.

When I asked about her origins, I was told she is Thomas O’Flaherty’s daughter, who is rather famed as a financial wizard here. With the sort of old, quiet money that resides on this Island, that is saying something. A flesh and blood child who spends her winters in New York, I am told, and becomes a wild solitary creature each summer on the Island, with the unlikely name of Pamela. I was right about the lilt of her tongue though. Her father is a born Irishman who emigrated some years back, but she has spent many of her summers on an estate in County Clare.

Her father is, at present, on business in China, and she is under the dubious care of a woman named Rose. When I went to inform her of the girl’s injuries, she reeked of drink. Being that it was just noon when I knocked on the door, the woman must be a rampant alcoholic.

I fear that bringing her home to that cottage and leaving her under the aegis of such a woman is tantamount to some sort of sacrilege. Can one leave such a creature in the hands of a rough-mouthed Irish scrubwoman? This isn’t elitism speaking, for this Rose has the soul of a scrubwoman as well as the demeanor. At least the mystery of Pamela’s merchant marine lexicon is solved.

Pamela—the name sits oddly on my tongue—for oceaniades surely are not meant to have names.

July____, 1962

After a few setbacks, Pamela is on the mend. The poor child has suffered horribly during these hot days, an allergy to morphine and the bones in her ankle having to be re-set being the worst of it. She is out of hospital now and able to hobble about, and so today we took ourselves out among the tall pointed firs and into the salt-sticky day, thick with sunshine and the scent of wild roses.

She hasn’t made friends with the local girls nor the summer visitors. I suspect this is because she is too singular and because the girls can see already that she will one day have a beauty that will, even on its simplest days, eclipse their brightest entirely. Girls see and know these things and act according to the dictates of their tribal pecking orders. Such a girl never fits within those confines and therefore never lives the charmed life that so many others envy her.

For now, it would appear, I am her only friend, and she mine.

July____, 1962

It’s interesting how summer seems to be the season in which one can retreat back to one’s childhood pleasures and savor them again as much as one did at ten. Today we went sailing, and it turns out that Pamela
is
a bit of an oceaniade in more than just appearance, for she sails like she was born to it, as though water is a more natural home to her than the earth. Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it?

Afterwards we had dinner at a ramshackle hut near the shore that serves the most ambrosial lobster stew imaginable. She has regained her appetite and so, oddly, have I. I feel as though I have been sleeping for a long time and now, in the presence of this pure spirit, I am waking up and finding life still holds a sweet, sharp joy.

She truly is a most arresting child. I barely understand my own emotions around her, only that in her I have found a friend such as I never hoped to find again in my life. Her mind is far beyond her years and she’s conversant in poetry, prose, cabbages and kings. Last night she quoted Patrick Kavanaugh to me as we came through the gate into the field—

And then I came to the haggard gate
And I knew as I entered that I had come
Through fields that were no part of earthly estate.

“Doesn’t that give you the most delicious shiver?” she asked me. “I feel it sometimes in this field, as if I’ve stepped out of time and place and I expect to see strange creatures in the brush that are nothing to do with this world.”

She was right. There is something about that particular field, a sort of magic that isn’t entirely wholesome and is therefore a tad more exciting. She often seems to anticipate my thoughts, and will finish sentences with an eagerness that tells me hers is a mind that has been starved of the sort of company it needs to flourish. And so I do what small things I can, bring her books of poetry and the ancient classics. She has picked up enough Latin and Greek already to make her way slowly through short passages of Ovid and Virgil. I am learning to love them again through her thoughts and interpretations. She halted no more than five lines into the first eclogue yesterday and, fixing me with that terribly honest and rather stern green gaze of hers, asked if I, like the narrator, was exiled from home. I found myself saying ‘yes’ before I could think to halt my tongue.

In truth, I am exiled at present—not through choice—but rather through circumstance. I could go home if I chose, but what waits for me there except further proof of my own shortcomings and failures? I know come autumn there will be no more avoiding ‘home’ and I will return, for good or ill, to resume my real life. For now though, I linger with this strange and lovely child, telling myself I do it for her good, yet knowing it is she that is so very necessary to me.

When our lesson was done, she seemed preoccupied and then looked at me very seriously, those green eyes like a rake on one’s soul and said—“A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials.”

Just that and no more, that light, slightly grubby hand resting on my own as if it had been formed there and was as natural as the sun setting in the evening. It is worrying that I need not express my thoughts or the streaks of melancholy that come across me from time to time. She understands, and has no compunction about calling me out on them.

And that, I suppose, is what I get for teaching the child about Roman philosophers.

July____, 1962

In the way that I always do, I’ve attracted a few strays. I swear there’s a siren call that goes out when I settle in anywhere for more than a day or two that only animals can hear. The most disreputable looking marmalade cat has taken up residence on the front porch and even the suffocating wisteria cannot muffle his howls. He is the veteran of a thousand battles, to judge from his scarred hide, like some old Roman soldier who hasn’t been home for decades and knows nothing but the fight. He is missing an ear, and his nose looks like it was split by a fairy axe.

His appearance is not one of beauty, but Pamela is smitten with him and talks to him as though he were Prince Valiant. Lord knows that beauty is no requirement for love, and a bloody good thing too.

For her sake, I am feeding and watering him, though come the autumn he will once again be cast upon the mercy of nature.

I did say a few strays, didn’t I? We also have in residence an ancient and rather moldy-looking raccoon who looks in the window of nights, giving me the fright of my life. I think he passed his sell-by date about a decade ago but isn’t aware he was supposed to lie down quietly and die beneath a leafy green tree, or at least have the good grace to eat a poisoned bit of meat.

I suggested perhaps the cat might be happier residing at her cottage.

“Louis won’t go,” she said. “He likes living with you.”

“Louis?” I echoed, feeling as I often do with her, slapped with tangents.

She gave me one of those lucid green looks that manages to say, ‘Keep up, you thick sod,’ without her ever moving her mouth. All the while hand-feeding the cat—oh, pardon me, Louis—tunafish.

“Besides, Rose is allergic to cats.” She sighed and leaned down to kiss the filthy cat on the top of his ratty head, managing to convey the idea that Rose is also allergic to herself. Certainly the damnable woman acts as though she is, for she has given this girl up into my care as though she has been waiting for someone to come along and lay claim to her. I know how society views such a relationship, but she is hardly Lolita and I am not in the market for a prison sentence.

But what if—just what if—you found the dearest friend of your life in the body of a twelve-year-old girl? Written out, it looks perverse, but it doesn’t feel so when she is sitting here discussing Plato or the Ulster Cycle with me, or making me laugh as I no longer thought it possible to laugh.