The Gravity of Love

by Noelle Harrison

  Lewis lifted his head and gave her a long look. She had no idea what he was thinking. She didn’t want to consider the consequences of their actions. Instead she slid her body, slippery with the glow of their passion, beneath his, so they were almost on the floor of the car. She put her hands on his rear and brought her pelvis to meet his, drawing him to her. She wanted him to rock her, deep down to the core of her being.

  Twelve

  Gravity

  Ballycastle, County Mayo, Easter Sunday,26 March 1989

  What had he done? The guilt sank in as he navigated the car round the bends of the narrow lane running alongside the shore. He focused on the road. He couldn’t bear to look at Joy. He didn’t know what to say. He was grateful for Tracy Chapman singing about what she would do for her lover. Was that what he and Joy now were? Lovers? What had just occurred was, for him, completely spontaneous. He couldn’t fool himself that it was comfort sex. He’d wanted Joy with that raw, keen, clear-headed need – and more than that, he’d wanted to give her so much, make her thrill with pleasure. What was the source of this passion?

  They began to climb a small hill and the car struggled. He shifted gear. They seemed to be rising higher and higher so that if he looked in the rear-view mirror, the land slid away to their beach, a fragile crescent of gold against the blue. He couldn’t resist and looked across at Joy. She was staring straight ahead, her eyes glazed, deep in thought, her curls still wet, her cheeks glowing and he felt that pull towards her again.

  Was it all a fabrication, his mind playing tricks on him? Just like he’d felt pulled towards Sammy all those years ago in London. That hadn’t been real love. It had been sexual chemistry, and then a sort of companionship – two souls thrown into the same life together by circumstance. He’d married the wrong woman. He should have been with Marnie all these years, in London, running their own design agency. Was he going to let his attraction to Joy stop him from following his heart’s desire again?

  Before him the landscape appeared as a green shelf poised above the frothing Atlantic. He could see its ragged outline, hear the distant beat of the waves. Fragments of land had broken away, and one in particular stood apart: a tall, multilayered slice of rock valiantly defying all gravity.

  This was Marnie’s land. Its wildness, its rough, unapologetic edges and lush fields, its deep dark insides buried in the bog like a secret essence. All elements of the girl he had once known. The girl he thought he could never have. To whom he was now returning. And yet Ireland was Joy too, if he thought about it. It was where she had been born.

  When he’d first met Joy she’d appeared to embody Arizona. An American girl in her denim and blue cowboy boots. She was as delicate and shy as those rare desert wildflowers that she so loved. And then Joy had taken him to the desert at night. She had made him look up. She had made him wonder, and he would never forget how that sky had looked. He had seen all the activity of space, understood that a star lived as much as a human, and that his dream was not so unreachable.

  Lewis drove down the Main Street in Ballycastle, eventually pulling in beside a whitewashed building with fifties-style signage that said ‘Polkes’ in blue above the door. He took a breath and turned to Joy. ‘Shall we ask in here?’

  She nodded, still not looking at him.

  ‘Remind me, what’s your mother’s name?’

  ‘Her second name is Martell,’ Joy said, finally turning to him, her face pale and serious. ‘And her first name must be Irish. A-O-I-F-E. I have no idea how it’s pronounced.’

  ‘Nor do I. We’ll write it down and show them.’ He glanced at Joy again. She looked crushed in her seat. Small and afraid.

  ‘It’s going to be okay,’ he said, taking her hand in his.

  ‘Will you ask for me, Lewis?’ she whispered.

  They walked through a deserted shop and into a small, dark pub at the back. A few stray men sat at a single counter on the right, one of them with a collie dog sprawled by his muddy boots. All eyes were upon them as Joy sat on an upholstered bench to the left. Lewis approached the bar. The dog looked up at him with mournful eyes, and he noticed that its fur was knotted with burs. He leaned down and gave it a pat on the head. It rewarded him with a rough lick on the back of his hand.

  ‘Good afternoon to you,’ the barman said as he approached. Close up Lewis could see he was a young man, at least half the age of all the old fellows arranged around the counter. His face looked rubbed clean and was shiny in the gloom.

  ‘What can I get you?’ he asked, a welcoming smile on his face.

  ‘Two glasses of Guinness please,’ Lewis said.

  ‘Right so.’

  He watched the barman follow the lengthy ritual of drawing a Guinness, but he could feel Joy’s eyes upon his back, her tension. He had to ask about her mother now. He coughed, and the barman looked up at him.

  ‘Would you happen to know of a family by the name of Martell who live in Ballycastle?’

  The barman frowned and shook his head. ‘I haven’t heard of any Martells, but then I’m not here that long. Married a local girl and moved from County Meath about a year ago. You’d be best to ask one of the lads here.’

  Before Lewis had a chance to do it himself the barman put his hands on the counter, leaned over and addressed the group of drinkers. ‘Do any of ye know of the Martells of Ballycastle?’

  ‘Course we’ve heard of the Martells,’ a voice from the end of the bar piped up as the owner of the collie turned to them. ‘Why do you want to find them?’

  He was a red-faced man with a head of wiry grey hair and sharp blue eyes.

  ‘Actually we’re looking for someone in particular,’ Lewis said, taking out the slip of paper that Joy had given him and handing it to the collie man. ‘I don’t know how to pronounce her first name,’ he explained.

  ‘Eee-fa,’ the older man read. ‘That’s how you say it.’ He lifted his pint and took a slow sip. No one said anything. Lewis sensed Joy behind him, holding her breath.

  ‘Do you know her?’ he prodded.

  ‘The Martells weren’t like the rest of us,’ the man said. ‘I knew of Aoife Martell, but I didn’t know her so to speak.’

  Joy rose from her seat and joined Lewis at the bar. ‘Is she still here, in Ballycastle?’ she asked the man breathlessly.

  The man said nothing for a moment. Looked at Joy long and hard. Lewis could tell in that look that the man knew exactly why Joy was here. Yet he didn’t let on.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said, his voice a quiet lilt. ‘She’s long gone. All the Martells are gone.’

  ‘They had land,’ said the voice from the end of the bar. Its owner had slid off his stool and approached them. He was younger than the collie man, with thinning fair hair and a craggy face. ‘My ma used to work for them, cooking and whatnot. But like Paddy says, they’re gone now.’ He cocked his head to one side and gave Joy an appraising look. ‘Aoife Martell left for London years ago and no one has heard of her since. She had no brothers or sisters. Her parents, Walter and Kathleen Martell, are dead, and the house went to some cousin in America. It’s all fallen apart. Abandoned. Terrible shame – it’s a beautiful spot.’

  ‘There’s a house?’ Joy asked.

  ‘Oh yes, a big old house and land. It’s just down the road,’ the craggy man said.

  ‘I can show you the way if you want to follow me in the tractor,’ Paddy, the collie owner, offered. ‘Once you’ve finished your drinks of course.’

  Lewis felt Joy’s hand clasping his, squeezing tight. She didn’t need to say anything at all. He could hear her thoughts.

  Home at last.

  He wanted to take her in his arms and tell her it would be all right. That they would find out where her mother was, one day. But he held back. All eyes in the little pub were upon them, but more than that, he had no right to make Joy such a promise. They were passing through each other’s lives. Helping each other, like two shipwreck survivors. They were a jilted husband and a jilted wife. Soon they m
ust part again. For surely his destiny was Marnie and hers was Eddie.

  *

  Joy stood in front of the old house. It sent a shiver down her spine. The rain had stopped, and the sun had broken through the clouds, lifting the lead out of the sky, but still this did nothing to improve how the building looked to her.

  ‘I’d say its mock Gothic,’ Lewis told her. He pointed at the latticed windows with their pointed arches. ‘Probably early nineteenth century.’

  ‘It looks haunted,’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s just been empty for a long time.’ He paused. ‘Shall we go inside?’

  He took the lead, and she followed. They walked up the steps and stood for a moment in front of an arched doorway, with mouldings of vines along its lintel and around its edges. This house must have once been so grand. Her family must have been wealthy. It wasn’t what she’d expected. She had imagined that she’d come from a poor home, a peasant’s cottage, on a cliff edge, her mother barely a child herself and forced by poverty to give her up. This house told her a different story. Aoife Martell had come from a family of privilege. Maybe she wasn’t the victim Joy had thought.

  Lewis pushed the door open. There was a flurry of noise, and she screamed as a bird flapped past her. Her heart pounded with dread at the prospect of stepping through the doorway. So far she hadn’t recognised anything. Not the roll of green fields surrounding the house that dropped down to the blazing blue sea, nor the spectacle of the old house itself, the granite of its grey walls showing through the whitewash, laden with ivy, the slate roof sagging, its chimneys stuffed with birds’ nests.

  Inside they walked through a barren hall, the air thick with the penetrating odour of ancient damp, into a large room to the left. It was covered in a crimson flock wallpaper that was peeling off the walls. The house was deathly cold. Joy shivered again.

  Before he had driven off in his tractor, his dog at his side, the farmer Paddy had told them that old Walter Martell had died about eight years ago, and the house had been empty ever since. Kathleen’s death had preceded his by about twenty years, and his daughter, Aoife, had disappeared well over thirty-five years ago.

  ‘Can you tell me anything about her?’ Joy had asked him, hungry for information. Here she was with someone who had seen her mother, maybe even spoken to her.

  ‘Well, like I told you, I didn’t really know her,’ he’d said to her. ‘I saw her at Mass on Sundays, but her family were rich compared to us. She went to school in England. She would never have mixed with the likes of me.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘A little like you, darling,’ he’d replied, giving her a crooked smile. She had felt her blush rising. Was it so obvious who she was? What kind of shame was she bringing on her mother by looking for her? She had been embarrassed, grateful for the distraction of the dog barking at his master from the tractor cab as if to tell him to mind his own business and move on.

  Now she stood inside a house she must have lived in for nearly two years of her life, and yet as she walked from one dark abandoned room to the next it raised no memories for her. She climbed the stairs, avoiding broken steps, careful not to put too much weight on the wobbling banister. In each room she entered, through every cracked, mildewed window she could see the sea. From all sides of the house there seemed to be a view, as if her family had lived on its own personal peninsula.

  But in the last room she entered something was different. She sensed it immediately. It was the smallest room upstairs, and she could see that the walls were once covered in a vibrant floral wallpaper. Now the blooms were faded, but her mind began to colour them in. She remembered these flowers. The twisting stems of red roses, purple violets, the posies of forever-blue forget-me-nots. In this room she heard a voice. It was her own, and yet it sounded different to her. No longer the cry of the child within her, wanting to find her mother’s love, but a voice of assurance. Her adult self.

  This is your room.

  She could feel it, imagine the embrace of her mother’s arms around her, the scent of her, the sound of a soft lullaby. It was not a fantasy. She knew she had been loved, held, cared for. So why had Aoife Martell given baby Joyce up and run away to London?

  Joy felt Lewis’s hand slip into hers. The warmth of his fingers spread into her palm, through her wrists and up her arms to her heart. It made it ache. If only she could pull her hand out of his, but she would take the tiniest drops of affection from him now. His contact kept her from falling apart.

  ‘Why don’t we go for a little ramble?’ he suggested gently.

  They walked back down the stairs and out the front door into the light. She gulped down the fresh sea air.

  ‘I lived here for the first two years of my life and yet I recognise so little,’ she told him. ‘Apart from that one little room upstairs – there I felt something – but I can’t remember my mother.’

  ‘Of course you don’t remember, Joy. You were a baby. Who would?’

  ‘There’s something missing in me.’ Her voice came out hoarse, broken. ‘I’ve always felt that way.’

  ‘Everyone has secrets from their childhoods,’ Lewis said. ‘Some we know, and some lie buried so deep inside our subconscious that only our instincts reveal them to us.’

  ‘Like the way I feel that my mother loved me,’ Joy said.

  ‘You look like her, Joy – that’s what the farmer said,’ Lewis reminded her. ‘You’ve changed since we got here . . .’

  ‘I have?’ She couldn’t stop herself from looking at him. She traced the line of his nose, his chin in profile, and tried to commit it to memory. After tomorrow she would never see him again.

  ‘Yes, it’s like . . . I can’t imagine you back in Arizona now.’

  She smiled at him. ‘Not even with my cowboy boots on?’

  ‘Well, maybe those fabulous boots are the only part of you that’s American,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t deny my mom and dad. They raised me.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Lewis said. ‘But why do you think your dad told you that you were adopted? He wanted you to find your roots.’

  ‘It was his dying wish,’ she said.

  Lewis squeezed her hand. She wanted him to take her in his arms so much. Her need was burning through her.

  They walked through an overgrown garden at the front of the house. The grass was almost as high as her waist. It swished against her, silken and coarse at the same time. Lewis led her round clusters of nettles, past huge rhododendron bushes that blocked their view of the sea. She could feel the ground sloping beneath her feet as they entered a copse of trees. It was then she heard a loud, cooing call, a relentless rhythm that almost sounded like a human voice seeking her attention.

  ‘What’s that noise?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s a wood pigeon,’ Lewis told her. ‘Have you never heard one before?’

  ‘I don’t think we get them in Arizona, do we? But I have heard it . . . that noise . . . I know it.’

  ‘It must be from when you were here, Joy,’ Lewis told her. ‘When you were a baby.’

  He was giving her that unsure smile again. His eyes were sweet maple, laughter lines creased at their corners.

  ‘So I do remember something else?’ The idea of it thrilled her. She felt already a lightening in her heart.

  ‘Do you think my birth mother loved me?’

  ‘I have no doubt, Joy,’ Lewis said without hesitation.

  She wanted to reach up to him. Stroke that long lean face with her hands, stand on her tiptoes and kiss him. Every part of her wanted to be with him.

  The silence hung between them, tantalisingly. She watched his face, tried to read it. Was he looking at her with kindness or was it something more? It had to be after what she’d seen in his eyes in the car down on the shore.

  The wood pigeon cooed again and then she heard pattering all around her. For a moment she wasn’t sure what it was, until she felt a raindrop on her cheek. It was raining again, the leaves catching the drop
s. The sun was still shining and the water looked like lines of crystal falling from the sky.

  ‘There must be a rainbow,’ he said, leading her by the hand through the trees. They walked back out onto the lawn and looked down across the green valley to the sea beyond. A field of heavenly gold spread before them; she knew them to be daffodils, a sight that thrilled her. A perfect rainbow arched above the field, each colour immaculately delineated.

  ‘Oh, it’s beautiful,’ she gushed.

  ‘Looks like we found our first rainbow,’ he told her, turning and kissing her on the forehead. It was an intimate kiss but fatherly, as if he was blessing her. Despite its tenderness she felt disappointed, confused.

  They sat in the tiny Fiat, facing the house of her ancestors. It was hard to imagine that this was where she had started her life. Who would she be if her parents had never adopted her and brought her to America? Would she still be living in Ballycastle, in this very house?

  ‘What do you want to do now?’ Lewis asked her, turning on the engine.

  She thought of the mess she had left back home in Scottsdale. Was the wedding still going ahead between Heather and Darrell? Was her mom okay? Had Eddie shacked up with Erin? It felt like being stabbed – the thought of Erin Winters sitting in her chair, drinking coffee out of her favourite mug and lying in her bed with her husband. She couldn’t face any of it.