Sheltering Rain (29 page)

Kate took a deep breath, and ran her hand through her hair, mussing it up a little.

“So,” she said, placing a hand on his leg. “Did you enjoy supper?”

She had cooked tuna steaks, his favorite. She was actually getting quite good at cooking.

“It was great. I told you.”

“So . . .” She let her hand move slowly up his thigh, and murmured into his ear. “I wondered if you fancied a dessert. . . .”

Oh, God, she sounded like some substandard porn film. But she had to keep going. Self-consciousness would kill it.

“Great,” he said, turning from the television to face her. “What have we got?”

She paused, trying to maintain her seductive smile.

“Well, it's not exactly a conventional dessert I had in mind.”

He looked blank.

“But it could be sweet . . . I guess . . .”

Are you really that dense? she wanted to yell. But instead, determined to pursue her chosen path, she slowly let her hand suggest what she had in mind.

There was a lengthy silence.

Justin looked at her, then down at her hand, then back at her face. He smiled, and then raised his eyebrows.

“That . . . that's a really nice thought. But to be honest, Kate, you haven't half made me feel peckish for a bit of pudding. Is there anything sweet in the house?” He paused. “A bit of chocolate maybe? Or ice cream?”

Kate's hand stilled. She stared at him.

“Well, you put the thought in my mind,” he said, a little defensively. “I didn't want anything sweet until you started talking about desserts. Now I really want something.”

For a brief, insane moment, Kate fought the urge to go and check the freezer compartment. Then she thought she might hit him. Then she thought she should probably leave the room until she had decided which of the many seething emotions she was prepared to act on. But, perhaps luckily for Justin, she was interrupted by the shrill ring of the telephone.

He made as if to pick it up, and then, catching something in her expression, sank back against the sofa cushions.

“Hello?” she said, aware that he was staring at her, as if bemused by her response.

“Kate?”

“Yes?”

“It's your mother.”

It's Sabine, Kate thought wildly. She's had an accident.

“What's happened?” There was no reason her mother would ring her otherwise. It had been years since she had last done so.

“I thought I should let you know. Your father . . . has been taken rather unwell. He collapsed this evening. He—he's in the hospital.” She faltered, her voice strained, as if waiting for some response. When none came, she paused, then let out a deep breath. “As I said. I just thought I should let you know.” And she rang off.

Kate gently replaced the handset, aware that as well as shock, she was still consumed by an overriding sense of relief that it wasn't Sabine who had been hurt. She had been so relieved that her daughter was safe that she hadn't quite been able to take in the significance of what Joy had actually said.

“It's my dad,” she said eventually, to Justin's inquiring face. “I think he's dying. She wouldn't have rung me otherwise.” Her voice was surprisingly steady.

“You'd better go,” he said, placing his hand on her shoulder. “Poor you. D'you want me to book you a flight?”

It was about an hour after he'd gone, as she phoned around the various airlines, and discovered with equal amounts of frustration and relief that thanks to a combination of arts festivals and medical conferences, and her own finally deceased car, that unless she wanted to pay a small ransom it was likely to be at least two days before she would be airborne to Waterford Airport, that Kate realized: Not once, despite his sympathetic demeanor, had Justin offered to come with her.

C
hristopher Ballantyne and his wife, Julia, looked so alike that according to Mrs. H, had they married thirty years earlier there would have been “serious talk” in the village. He had dark, wavy hair, matched exactly in shade by his wife's own, and set springily atop a broad head, like the ill-fitting top of a sponge cake. Both had the same slightly beaky noses, the same lean physiques, similar strong views on most topics, especially hygiene and politics, and both talked in the same, explosive, braying tones, as if every sentence had been pumped out of them by bellows.

And both, Sabine noted, somewhat resentfully, treated her with that same air of indulgent detachment that they would any houseguest. Except in her case, she felt it was a deliberate attempt to let her know that she was not, despite her blood ties, a
true
part of the family. Not like they were. And that would be Kate's fault, of course.

Christopher had marched into the place like he owned it on the night that her grandfather had fallen into the casserole, telling Joy, somewhat pointlessly, as far as Sabine could see, that “she would be fine now.” He and Julia had been at a hunt ball in Kilkenny, which had been “a stroke of luck” as he rather tactlessly put it, and they had immediately driven down and moved their things into the good guest room next to her grandmother. It had never occurred to Sabine up until then to question why she had not been given the good guest room, which had a far nicer carpet, and a big glowing chest of drawers of walnut veneer, but when she mentioned this to Mrs. H, Mrs. H had said that Christopher “liked to have a room of his own” to come home to. And that he and Julia “did come and visit a lot.” Not like me and my mum, in other words, thought Sabine. But she said nothing.

If Joy had noticed any of the resentment Sabine felt, she didn't comment. But then she seemed awfully distracted, not having Edward in the house to look after. Wexford General Hospital had decided to keep him in for observation and while Sabine had not liked to ask her what exactly was the matter with him (there didn't seem much left of him to observe), it was obvious that it was serious, not just because her grandmother looked pale and strained and seemed unnaturally quiet, but because Sabine had noticed that whenever she wasn't in the room, Christopher would check the backs of furniture, and underneath the rugs for little handwritten stickers, to see if there had been any changes in the spoils that Joy had some months ago already begun to divide between her two children for after her and Edward's deaths.

“Very sensible idea, Mother,” he had said to her. “Saves any confusion in the long run.” But Sabine had heard him mutter to Julia that he didn't think it was right that the grandfather clock in the hall, or the gilt-framed oil painting in the breakfast room had “Katherine” stickers on them. “Since when has she shown any interest in this place, anyway?” he had said, and Sabine had slunk silently back into the shadows and resolved to monitor every sticky label in the place, to make sure Christopher didn't start swapping them around.

Julia, meanwhile, had insisted on “helping” around the house. So determinedly had she helped that Mrs. H's normally amenable expression steadily became more and more fixed, as if it had been set in aspic. Julia had already “organized” the kitchen, so that she could help prepare everybody's food, and been through the fridge, questioning whether it was really necessary to keep some of these old leftovers, and whether it wouldn't be easier for Julia to buy some “nice shop-bought” bread instead of Mrs. H making that dense old soda bread every day. When she left the room, Sabine told Mrs. H more than once that she thought Julia was an interfering old cow, but Mrs. H would only respond, “She means well,” and observe, like someone repeating a mantra, that it wouldn't be long before they would return to Dublin.

Considering they were the only aunt and uncle she had, Sabine should perhaps have been more surprised that she had met Christopher and Julia only a handful of times before. Once had been at their wedding, in Parsons-Green, when Sabine had been very small. All she remembered about that occasion was that she had been invited to be a flower girl, but her mother had somehow got her dress slightly different from the other girls', possibly as a result of a miscut pattern, and that she had spent the day in a quiet frenzy of humiliation at her puff sleeves, while the little blonde flower goddesses around her, sensing a misfit, froze her out. The most recent occasion had been several years earlier, before they moved from London to Dublin, when they had held a “little do” and, in a spirit of reconciliation, invited Sabine, Geoff, and her mother to come along. It had been full of city people and lawyers, and Sabine had soon snuck off to watch television in their bedroom with Julia's cats, trying to ignore the pubescent boy in the corner who had snogged his thirteen-year-old girlfriend for almost the whole of
The Railway Children
, and wondering when they could go home. As if heard by some deity, she had been rescued by Geoff and her mother little more than an hour after they had arrived, and Geoff had spent the whole journey home ranting about capitalists, while Kate sat silently, interjecting the odd “Yes, well, they are my family, you know,” but not sounding like she was really offering any kind of defense.

It was partly because of the sheer awfulness of being around Christopher and Julia that Sabine quietly took over some of the duties of looking after her grandfather when, two days later, frail, blanket-bound, and seemingly welded to a wheelchair, he came home. Out of respect for Joy's feelings, her son and daughter-in-law tended to leave him to her sole care (that was their excuse, anyway, Sabine told Mrs. H, but she knew it was because they wanted to go out riding), but Joy seemed to quite like it when Sabine came and sat with him, or read to him from the letters page of the
Horse and Hound
. Much of the time, he didn't seem to notice her, but Sabine was privately convinced that he bore an expression of deep irritation whenever the brisk young nurse, whom Christopher had paid to come for most of the day, helped him cheerfully upright and announced that it was time for him to go “to the little boys' room.” And occasionally, when Sabine chatted to him about what she had done with the gray, or passed on some snippet that Thom had said in the yard, she was sure she could see his eyes flicker and a shadow of interest pass, like a distant cloud, across his face.

Joy, meanwhile, simply responded to her husband's return by becoming busier than ever. There was apparently more to do in the yard, the house was a disaster, and if Liam and John John didn't clean some of that tack, then it was, of course, going to fall to bits. She never mentioned what the doctors had said, or discussed why her grandfather no longer seemed to eat anything at all, or why there was now a frightening array of bleeping medical equipment stationed around his bed, as if placed on high alert for some forthcoming disaster. She just told Sabine in a rather vague manner that she was doing “a grand job,” popped her head around the door occasionally as if to reassure herself that he was still alive, and then spent even more hours, if it were possible, ministering to her tired old horse in the yard.

“It's all right,” said Sabine after the nurse had disappeared, as she sat down in the chair beside her grandfather's bed, once again grateful to escape the maelstrom of activity downstairs. “You can relax. We've gotten rid of them all again.”

She pulled his covers up higher around his concave chest, noting that his frailty no longer made her want to squirm. She was just grateful that he looked peaceful, and alive, and not covered in tomato juice.

“Now don't you worry about me being bored or anything,” she said, whispering close to his ear, as she prepared to read to him from this old Rudyard Kipling book she had found in the library, about horses playing polo in India. She knew he could hear her, even if the nurse raised her eyebrows, like she was doing something stupid. “I meant to tell you the other day,” she said, softly, as she began. “Sometimes I just like to sit and be, too.”

F
or her eighteenth birthday, Kate Ballantyne had received three gifts of significance. One, from her parents, was a top-of-the-range, general-purpose, dark-brown pigskin saddle, which was opened by her with despair, as she had specifically asked for a brassiere and a new pair of trousers. Another, also from her parents, was an invitation to a sitting with a local portrait artist, in order that she could mark the occasion of her adulthood. This also prompted a less than grateful response; they had chosen the very artist who had just completed a large oil painting of her mother's new gelding, Lancelot. The third gift . . . well, the third gift had come about as an indirect result of the second. And that had come much later.

Sixteen and a half years later, Kate thought of these as she sat in the back of the taxi, breathing in the pungent smell of in-car air freshener as she headed from Waterford Airport to Kilcarrion. She had been to her family home precisely three times since she had left home shortly after that eighteenth birthday; once to show them the newborn Sabine, twice with Jim, when she had thought that her being part of a “family” might soften their attitudes toward her, and now, some ten years on. Why does it always rain here? she thought, distractedly, wiping at the steam on the window. I can hardly remember a time when it didn't rain.

It had taken her almost two days to get a flight to Waterford, and Kate knew already that her delayed return would be used, like a riding whip, against her, even though her mother had been at pains to ring and tell her when he “stabilized.” She didn't care enough to come straightaway, that would be the muttered refrain. Even though her own father was at death's door. Too busy gallivanting with the latest fancy man, probably. She sighed to herself, thinking of the irony of her last conversation with Justin. He had seemed less shocked and disturbed by her abrupt ending of their relationship than by her insistence that he remove his bags from her house before she left for Ireland.

She wasn't even really sure why she was coming; apart from her desperate need to see her daughter again, she had no real emotional ties to the place. Her father hadn't spoken to her with any warmth or civility since she was eighteen, her brother and his wife would simply patronize her and drop loaded comments that staked their greater claim to the family house, and her mother had long been more comfortable talking to her dogs. I came because my father is dying, she said to herself, trying out the words, to see if, even after all this time, they could elicit some awful sense of occasion, of potential loss. But all she really felt was dread at the prospect of being in that household again, tempered with relief at the thought of seeing her daughter.