Chapter 1
K I L T E E G A N B R I D G E , C O. C O R K , 1 9 4 8
Don’t leave me, Paudie. Don’t leave me. I’ll die. I swear, I’ll walk into the sea and I’ll die.’‘Maria, why are you saying this?’ Daddy’s voice was strange – it was broken and sad. He was normally stronger sounding or something. ‘Of course I’ll never leave you.’‘I’ve seen the way Hannah Berger looks at you, Paudie. Everyone sees the way she looks at you, right there in the church in front of the whole parish, in front of her own husband. She wants you for herself.She’s heart-set on having you.’
Lena kept very still in her special hiding place behind the carved and painted settle beside the fire. Her brother and sister were in bed,but she’d come down to fetch her doll. She was small for seven, and most days she liked it here behind this long wooden seat with the highback, which could fold down into a bed for visitors. You could hear things, and it was warm near the fire, and nobody gave you a job to do. But now she was listening to things she’d rather not hear, even if she didn’t understand any of it. Mrs Berger couldn’t have Daddy all to herself, even if she did find him useful around the estate. Daddy belonged to Mammy, and to her, and to Emily and Jack.
‘This is all in your mind. I love you, Maria...’‘Then stop going to see her!’‘If we could afford for me to stop working up there, you know I would.’A wild sob and a crash of crockery. Mammy had thrown some‐thing down from the dresser. Lena prayed it wasn’t her favourite bowl, the one with the bluebells painted on it that Daddy had brought her from the fair in Bandon. He’d brought Emily a green velvet ribbon at the same time, to tie up her long blond hair. Emily was beautiful,tall like Mammy, and though she was only nine, people always thought she was much older. She could be bossy sometimes, but usually she was nice. Jack was small like Lena. He was only five.Daddy had brought him a small wooden donkey, just like Ned, their donkey that pulled the cart on the farm.
‘Maria, Maria, stop now, love...’ Daddy’s voice was firmer. He was trying to calm Mammy, soothing her like he did with Mrs Berger’s stallion up at Kilteegan House when it went wild in the spring. ‘I can’t stop going to the Bergers’. That’s half our income, building stonewalls, pruning the orchard, caring for the horses. Hannah Berger’s not interested in me as a man. She just needs a strong pair of hands around the place. She’s had nobody to do the heavy jobs since her father died.’‘Let her own husband do the work, now he’s home from the war!’‘Ah, how can he do that, Maria, and him in a wheelchair?’‘There’s that man of his, the Frenchman...’‘He’s neither use nor ornament, that fella. All he does is wait on his master hand and foot, and he pays no attention whatsoever to anything that needs to be done around the grounds.’‘You’re a fool. You can’t see it – she’s trying to seduce you, Paudie,with her red hair and her green eyes. I’m scared, Paudie, and if she gets you, then her husband will kill you. He’s evil, Paudie. There’s something terrifying about him.’
Lena felt a pain in her tummy when Mammy spoke like that, like she believed that evil spirits were in people. She was very superstitious. Sometimes it was fun when she told Lena and Emily and Jack about fairies and things like that, but mostly it was scary because it was a sign that things could be bad for days if Daddy didn’t manage to coax her out of it. Lena wanted it not to be like that for Daddy, or for her and Jack and Emily, but when Mammy got into her imaginary world, she often stayed away a long time. It didn’t happen often. She hadn’t had a bad spell since last summer, when she’d screamed there was a demon on the stairs. Lena had wet her knickers, she got such a fright. Daddy had to tell Lena over and over that these things weren’t true, that it was only in Mammy’s mind, before she could get to sleep that night.
Daddy’s voice was even firmer now, more like his normal self, like a big strong tree in a storm. ‘Maria, my love, calm yourself. There’s nothing to worry about, honestly. I go up there and do some work,and they pay me well. That’s all. I love you.’
Mammy fell silent. She was still breathing harshly, but she let Daddy lead her over to the settle. Lena felt the wood creak as he sat beside her, and she heard the whisper of cloth on cloth as he put his arm around Mammy. He told her all about the wild flower meadow that would be growing between their farmhouse and the sea in the spring, in just a few weeks, and how they’d all take a picnic and go to the seaside. Lena could tell from the way his voice was gentle and low and rumbling that she was calming down.
Lena thought her tall, slim mother really was like a selkie, one of those magical tricky mermaids who look like seals in the water but who come to live with human men until they can’t stand to be on land any longer and go back to the ocean. There was a picture of a selkie in a book at school, and she had long white hair, same as Mammy’s, and it looked a bit like ropes coming down. Mammy tied her hair up most of the time, but sometimes it was loose and reached all the way down her back. She had eyes the same colour as the selkie too, pale as the sea on a summer’s day, and her eyelashes and eyebrows were so light that it looked like she didn’t have any.Emily and Jack both looked like Mammy, pale-skinned and fair haired, but everyone said Lena looked just like her father – dark silky hair, brown eyes and skin that only had to see the sun for a day before it went copper.
In the quiet, the fire crackled in the range and the night wind threw drops of rain against the window. The radio that had been on all this time in the background began playing the popular new song by Al Jolson, ‘When You Were Sweet Sixteen’.Lena’s father started singing it softly under his breath. ‘I loved you as I’ve never loved before, since first I saw you on the village green.Come to me, ere my dream of love is o’er. I love you as I loved you,when you were sweet...when you were sweet sixteen...’And slowly her mother’s breathing softened and the pain in Lena’s stomach went away.
Daddy swept up the bits of broken crockery in silence.‘Dance with me, Maria,’ murmured her father.Mammy still didn’t answer, but she let Daddy pull her to her feet.And when Lena peeped out from behind the settle, her parents were swaying together around the kitchen table, her father’s big strong farmer’s arms around her tall, slim mother, Maria’s head on Paudie’s shoulder and both of them with their eyes closed. The broken crockery was in a pile in the corner, and it wasn’t her favourite bowl –it was just that cracked yellow and green plate she’d never liked anyway.
Lena crept out of the kitchen, up the stairs of the two-story farm‐house and into the bedroom she shared with her sister. Emily was fast asleep, her long blond hair spread out across the pillow. Lena snug‐gled in beside her with her doll and lay on her back, gazing up at the sloped ceiling, the beams casting sharp black shadows in the moon‐light. She was glad the storm had passed this time.
She hoped Mammy wouldn’t spoil things between Daddy and the Bergers, because she liked going up to Kilteegan House with him. He let her bring up a basket of their farm eggs, and Mrs Berger always gave her an extra penny to keep for herself. Sometimes Daddy kep tLena busy, weeding the vegetable garden or picking up the branche she pruned from the trees in the orchard. But other times she played with Malachy, the little boy who was there when he wasn’t away at boarding school. He had dark-red hair like his mother, and the same grass-green eyes. They would play hide-and-seek around the garden if it was fine, and if it rained, they’d hide in the tack house, where the saddles and bridles lived, and lay out a clean horse blanket on the stone flags and sit and play cards or draughts.
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