The Comet Seekers

by Helen Sedgwick

  I can’t leave, he says. I’ve thought about it. I know you think I should, but I can’t. The farm would—

  OK.

  You don’t understand. This farm. I have to save it. It’s all that’s left.

  I said it’s OK.

  It is not OK, he says, thinking of tomorrow when she will leave again, thinking of a lifetime spent trying to resurrect something.

  She touches his chin, draws his eyes back to hers.

  I have an idea.

  She leads him outside.

  They lie on the grass, despite the cold, and look for a comet flying so fast they can see it move against the stars.

  It’s the brightest in two hundred years, she says.

  There are a lot of clouds tonight.

  He thinks that this was what she meant by an idea – searching for a comet again, as if all the answers can be found in the sky.

  I’m coming home, she says.

  Liam’s not sure if he heard her right, if it can be true. He closes his eyes, holds his breath. Doesn’t say anything. It’s . . . what does it mean? What does she mean, really?

  I promise, she says, leaning up, holding his face between her hands, planting a soft, swift kiss on his lips. I’m going to come home.

  He opens his eyes. Smiles at her, puts his arm around her shoulders, feels the warmth of her head on his chest. Sees the comet. It is bright, she was right; it is moving so fast it can change the sky.

  Róisín doesn’t know how it’s going to work but she thinks that just being here might, for a while, be enough.

  When? he asks, his voice muffled in her hair.

  She sits up, and he does the same. They look at each other and forget about the comet.

  As soon as I can. There’re a few things I need to finish, some of my work . . . But then I’ll come home.

  And you’ll live here? With me?

  With you.

  All of a sudden something that seemed impossible has become possible.

  Róisín thinks his expression is one of gratitude but Liam doesn’t realise she’s doing something he should be grateful for; his expression is one of hope, for a home rebuilt, for family.

  There is no university here, Róisín thinks, she’ll have to find some other job. Some other life.

  Overhead, unobserved, the comet has gone again, slipped behind the violent chemical reactions of the sun; something so dangerous can appear so beautiful, when seen from a distance.

  Róisín tells herself it will be good to come home.

  She looks back up at the sky.

  1079

  The Embroidered Comet

  Ælfgifu watches her daughter work; lips pursed, eyes focused. The linen is stretched flat and taut across the frame. The parchment on top is covered in pinpricks – every line, every arrow – to create a colourless scene of holes. The cleric is watching. She dips a wad of fleece into the crushed charcoal and begins to dab it through the holes in the parchment.

  They work side by side, Ælfgifu and her daughter, together in a room full of nuns and widows; everyone lost someone, some lost everyone, and now they will create the story. Footsteps approach. She feels her daughter’s back straighten, looks up to see the cleric’s hand brush against her daughter’s cheek, her daughter’s eyes downturned; you cannot disobey the cleric.

  Come, he says.

  Her daughter stands, follows him to the far table. Looks back.

  Ælfgifu feels a panic that she hasn’t felt for a long time. She’s barely aware that she’s embroidering the scene until it’s finished, but then it is: a panel that will stand through time, be stared at by a child’s eyes, an old woman, a man searching for answers he cannot reach. She adds lettering, includes her own name. She works through the dusk as the linen is cast in guttering shadows. The nuns are returning for compline but she has something she must do, and she doesn’t know where else to get help.

  She embroiders it larger than she ever saw it: a wild ten-pointed star with a core of glowing red and streams of yellow flying out behind. Below, five soldiers stand in amazement, pointing up at the sky; one has black hair and eyes she still remembers. Her daughter comes to help her finish, and when they step outside they see a star of thread and gold soaring through the sky.

  There is a package by the door of their room. It is for her daughter. Opening it, the silk of red and gold sends shivers down Ælfgifu’s skin. It’s the most beautiful dress her daughter has ever seen, but she understands what it means; this is not the dress of a child, and gifts come with a price.

  Come tonight, says the note.

  Mother?

  No, she says. No. You don’t have to go.

  Then he will take me anyway.

  Ælfgifu didn’t know her daughter knew about such things, but she is right. The nunnaminster is not safe any more and Beatrice, well, their abbess will not protect them from this. There’s a limit to a woman’s power, even an abbess with the confidence of Bishop Odo.

  I will wear the dress, says Ælfgifu. He’s expecting you, so I’ll make him think you’re coming. We don’t have long.

  But, Mother—

  This time I will save my family, she says. I’ll face him, and you must run.

  Will I see you again? her daughter asks.

  I promise, she says. Just follow the shooting star.

  Neither of them understands that they are the only ones who can see the star, that there is no shooting star in the sky tonight.

  Go quickly now, she says, gather your things.

  I can’t leave you.

  But you must. Keep to the shadows, my love. And don’t look back.

  Ælfgifu slips off her habit in a gesture that makes her remember slipping off her dress, in another life, and lets the red silk fall over her shoulders.

  You look beautiful, he says from behind her, but you do know where this will end?

  She turns at the voice, so familiar, and she knows who she’ll see.

  I thought you were dead, she says to the soldier boy whose name she never knew, who helped her when she was ready to die. Who vanished.

  I’m not here to interfere, he says, I just thought you could use the company. And of course I’m dead.

  So be it, she replies with a smile.

  As her daughter climbs the stone walls, Ælfgifu stands with her back to the door in a room she’s never entered before, facing out over the cloisters. She can see the shooting star, though she knows now it is not there, just like the soldier boy standing beside her.

  Do you like your panel, in the tapestry?

  He shrugs, smiles. I think you got my eyes wrong.

  Then your face with different eyes will last forever.

  You have created a ghost, he says.

  The comet that is not there speeds through clouds and does not dim. It races in front of the Horsehead Nebula, through the purples and greens and blues that make a whirl of dust alive with magic.

  And what of you? he asks.

  I have my own panel.

  She holds out her hand for the first time and her fingers slip through his palm. There are footsteps. It has begun.

  My child, the cleric says – he has a voice smooth as marble and just as hard. Turn now, I want to see your face.

  It is working, so far: he believes she is her daughter; that he will get what he wants. She can hear his breath as his hand touches red silk. A man who believes he can have everything. When she turns, her eyes are defiant.

  His voice rings out as he recoils and the shadows around the cloisters make the floor ripple like snakes. Where is she? he demands – but her daughter is free now, as the last rays catch the corners of the window and spark like flames from dragon heads. His hand rises, like she knew it would, and she laughs because she has saved the last of her family, and when the sun sinks below the hills the comet that isn’t there glows brighter than gold.

  When her daughter stops running she looks up to see that the shooting star has vanished. She does not keep running, unlike her family for mil
lennia before her. Instead she does what her heart tells her to do; she begins to walk back to her home.

  The next morning, she wakes to see her mother’s ghost dancing in the stream with a soldier boy. Halley’s comet glows on the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry, where an immortal soldier points in wonder at the sky and a woman with wild black hair is refusing to kneel.

  The tapestry moves from England to France, and eventually to Bayeux, and her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, and daughters beyond that follow the shooting star in thread and gold. They refuse to leave it and they refuse to run from it and they wait for the shooting star to shine again in the sky – and as long as Ælfgifu’s tapestry is close they know that, when it does, the ghosts of their family will appear.

  1996

  Comet Hale—Bopp

  THE SUMMER PASSES SLOWLY FOR Liam, as he waits for Róisín to keep her promise. It seems too good to be true; something you say when you want to make someone feel better, but when it comes to it, when the months have passed and time is pressing up against you, a thing she will regret.

  They talk on the phone, and he has to force himself not to ask her: is she coming home yet? He can’t put this on her, she has to choose on her own. So instead they talk about their respective worlds – the earth and the sky, the ground under his feet and the planets over her head.

  She has changed field, she tells him. She’s not looking so far away any more.

  He knows that she is trying to be kind.

  Now she’s studying how planets form, she says. How they live, how they change.

  That word, change; he’s never been very good at that.

  What hurts is that he understands. If he could be other than what he is, if he could go out into the world and be happy there he would. Just because he’s never left doesn’t mean he doesn’t understand the pull of all that distance. And yet he cannot bring himself to leave.

  He stands at the grave. He doesn’t kneel, or place flowers, he just likes the peace. And he talks to his dad, sometimes. It is strange how he can hear his voice, as if he were standing right there beside him. It’s not profound or miraculous, nothing like that. Their conversations are remarkably mundane.

  The fence has blown down, he says, this winter; like that winter a few years ago, when we mended it together.

  At least I taught you how, his dad says – ever the farmer. It’s your land, your fence. You can take care of it, sure.

  And so he does.

  The paperwork he despises, but it is necessary. He files papers for government subsidies, for European funding, for tax rebates; he signs cheques and letters and remortgage applications; he opens bills and demands. He uses his credit card to buy some new furniture; spends his Saturdays painting the living room, the hall, the bedroom, replacing the cracked glass in the kitchen-door window. But still he doesn’t quite believe it.

  When you have wanted something for so long, it is strange to think that you are about to get it. It does not feel how he thought it was going to feel. He is nervous. He doesn’t know how things are going to work.

  It is his father’s birthday and he spends the day alone, although he has received cards; the family has made an effort. But he wants a day of being on the farm and not working the farm, of remembering the farm as it was. He plays Creedence Clearwater Revival, refusing to put on U2; it is a day like any other – he still has taste. He laughs when the record jumps, then comes to an abrupt end halfway through a track, the needle scratching as the arm clicks out of place. That turntable’s always been broken. Some things don’t change. Right, Dad?

  Things don’t change, not here, his dad says.

  They’re changing everywhere else, Dad.

  Maybe so, maybe so.

  I’m not ignoring it, not like you did. The farm has to change to survive.

  He expects his dad to fight back, as he had when he was alive, but he doesn’t. The house is quiet again, except for the grandfather clock in the hall. Its time is wrong.

  He winds it up. Resets the hands. Turns towards the kitchen.

  He is used to being on his own, but Róisín is going to change that.

  He imagines her there. When she would arrive, for dinner, waving at him through the window with her hair pulled back into a ponytail, half of it flying loose.

  And when they would pass in the corridor at school, each of them pretending to be too cool to talk to their cousin, pretending like it wasn’t happening but all the time he would know, wait, count down the hours, the minutes until he could creep out of the school gate and run for the island, knowing she would do the same. And the way they were together, then; can it be like that when time has separated them and one has left, taken so long to return?

  Even these thoughts leave him with a longing deep in him that is a part of him, now. It is who he is – if it were gone he would feel the loss of it just like he felt the loss of her.

  But she is not lost.

  She said she was coming home.

  Two days. She has phoned to tell him when she will arrive, has given him the details of her flight, told him not to come to the airport.

  I’ll come to the farm, she said, and he didn’t know why but didn’t question her.

  In the barn, he had needed her in a way that terrified him. It had been so different, so urgent, his arms, hands, even now, thinking of it, cannot remain still.

  And he cleans the house – oh, he is surprised to find himself doing it; didn’t expect to feel so anxious, so like he needs to impress – and he can’t sleep, he gets up in the night to pace the fields, to remember how he was. Has he changed, after all?

  Another day goes by, the last day, and he doesn’t hear from her and forces himself not to call. He works, he spends all day and all evening working until he is exhausted, feels like he could sleep for two nights in a row, until he lies down and thinks of Róisín, arriving, tomorrow, Róisín coming home, and he cannot sleep. There is too much, too many things; things he can’t name and doesn’t even understand.

  He turns on the radio.

  They are talking about the latest comet.

  The bar is busy. Such a French place, and she is glad of that – to have now something different from what she will have next. And they are kind, with their bottle after bottle of wine, their leaving cake dusted with chocolate, their understated goodbyes. But she knows that none of them can understand what she’s doing, she saw the look of blank confusion on their faces when she told them. She’d had a fellowship opportunity; could have had three years’ funding without the need to teach and then this – to turn down every job offer and move to a village in Ireland no one has ever heard of. Not even a village – beyond a village, to a farm miles past the nearest village. They would have understood her moving to the city – even in Bayeux she used to talk about going to a bigger city. But this?

  You will come back, someone says in deep lilting French. It is her boss, a quiet, committed man.

  She smiles her No.

  You’ll stay in touch, say the people she has worked with, searching for undiscovered planets beyond the known reaches of the solar system. We’ll see you again.

  She fields questions about what she will do, what postdoc she will find, what university she can travel to. She understands how they must feel. If someone else was doing this, she would feel as they do. Like it was a mistake.

  The skies will be clear, she says, not wanting to admit that after being surrounded by all these people she’s nervous about the isolation of the farm. She excuses herself from her farewell party at midnight, leaving the others to drink more Pinot Noir and wake up the next morning in one another’s beds.

  Her boss tells her she can always return; he will find a position for her, when she needs it. I’ll let you know, she says, even though she knows that she won’t, and as she steps outside she feels like she is running away, but that is OK.

  Because how can she explain, to these people that don’t really know her, that she is tied to a man so closely that she�
�s realised she can’t keep travelling the world without him. That she has fought the need to be with him, and she has lost, and now it is time to give in.

  But the next day, arriving at the airport, she imagines seeing his face. She knows that he will be anxious, now, not quite believing she will be there. She remembers the way he used to see her and the way his expression changed into everything that mattered; the way he will see her again.

  Is it real? he says.

  She is standing by the back door, the one that opens into the kitchen. She has a suitcase with her, a bag thrown over her shoulder, another carried by its straps.

  She steps inside.

  Are you really here?

  I told you I was coming, she says with a smile, but he cannot return it; he cannot laugh at this scene that he has wanted for so long.

  He can’t walk towards her either. He can’t make that approach. It is as if he’s rooted to the spot, unable to move, to speak until she steps closer and makes this true.

  Perhaps he is afraid of something, he thinks, as he looks at her, as his eyes try to take in the woman standing before him. Perhaps he is afraid that it’s a joke, that it is like someone who offers you a drink that tastes foul; when someone says they love you then leaves.

  Are you not pleased to see me? she asks.

  His face is burning. How can she be unsure, when he has been waiting for her all these years? It is like he’s swimming in chlorine, can’t see his way to the surface for breath.

  And now she drops her bags to the floor, shuts the door carefully behind her and returns her gaze to him.

  It’s me, she says.

  And she thinks that a hug is how it should start, even that has been so long. There was once one Christmas when they shook hands – so awkward, so far from what they had been.