Yes, My Darling Daughter

by Margaret Leroy

  We pick up a rental car from a wet gray car park and load our luggage in.

  “I’m happy to drive. But it’s up to you,” says Adam.

  I’m grateful that he asked me, that he didn’t just assume.

  Sylvie scrambles into the car. There’s a silver-plated Saint Christopher hanging from the rearview mirror. She leans across the front seats and touches it, making it shiver and glitter. Then she settles into her seat with Big Ted and a Jaffa Cake.

  We drive through a gentle countryside of gray church spires and little farms. It’s subtly different from England—the Gaelic words on the signposts, with their baffling clusters of consonants, the palms in people’s gardens, even the electrical towers seem different—but it’s dreary under the rain.

  Sometimes I glance back at Sylvie. She watches out the window, her gaze acute, alert. Her sleep on the plane has revived her. Sometimes she points out what she sees—a donkey shambling through a field, two black birds on a wire—like any child who’s traveling through an unfamiliar land.

  After Galway the sun comes out for a while. There are small white houses in fields of stones with hills heaped up behind them, and a washed silver light over everything. Then, beyond Oughterard, we come to a different, harsher land—empty, silent, with mountains all around us and still black lakes choked up with grass and reeds. A sudden squall lashes the car. Where it moves across the mountains, you can see the edges of the rain, though far ahead of us, at the coast, the sky is clear and luminous. I’m getting used to this weather now, the way it shifts and changes even as you look at it, and between the squalls of rain, this light that is everywhere like the light over water. For miles we see no other car or house or sign of people—just a shepherd with his tatty flock, and a church in the middle of all the desolation, with a blue benign Virgin who reaches out her arms toward the road.

  “Why aren’t we there yet?” says Sylvie.

  “We soon will be, sweetheart. It isn’t much farther,” I say.

  “I want to be there now,” she says. “Now, Grace.”

  At last the road begins to descend, above us that vivid arch of sky we saw before. We pass the crest of a hill. I hear my quick inbreath. The sea is suddenly spread out before us, unimaginably wide and shimmering with silver light. We drive down the hill into Coldharbour. Tall thin houses line a street that winds toward the shore; the houses are painted many colors, like the colors of fruit—apple, lemon, berry red. There’s a scream of seagulls.

  33

  ADAM PULLS UP by a red-painted building that looks out over the sea. A sign says ST. VINCENT’S HOTEL.

  “This is it,” he tells me.

  I get out onto the pavement. I stretch out my arms, and the wind lifts my hair from my neck. I have a sense of so much space, so much air, of all the vastness of the place—the sky, the sea. After the confinement of London it seems extraordinary.

  Sylvie scrambles out beside me.

  “D’you like it here, Grace? D’you like it?” she says.

  “Yes, it’s beautiful,” I say.

  The wind blows color into her face. Her eyes are shining.

  Adam leads us up the steps of St. Vincent’s.

  But Sylvie stops on the bottom step, a little frown etched in her forehead.

  “Why are we going in here?” she says.

  “It’s where we’re staying, sweetheart.”

  “But aren’t we going to my house?” she says.

  I crouch down beside her, take her face in my hands.

  “Sylvie, where is your house, sweetheart?”

  She gives me a small, blank look, as though she can’t explain, as though she doesn’t really understand the question.

  “This isn’t my house,” she tells me.

  Her frown deepens. I’m worried she will cry and protest, but she lets me take her hand.

  A woman is sitting at the reception desk. She’s about the same age as Lavinia. She has an exact blond bob, a sunbed tan, a ready, practiced smile.

  She tells us she is Brigid. Adam introduces us.

  “And aren’t you a petal?” she says to Sylvie. She has a throaty, resonant voice. “She’s gorgeous,” she tells me. “Look, let me show you round.”

  To one side of the hall there’s a lounge, with a grandfather clock with a juddery tick and sofas that have a fading print of peonies; to the other side there’s a breakfast room and a bar with an open fire.

  “I have music here on Friday nights,” says Brigid. “You mustn’t miss that, now.”

  She takes us up to our bedrooms. The room that Sylvie and I will share has embossed wallpaper and rather battered furniture, and through glass doors a balcony, with a parasol and two plastic chairs, looking over the road to the sea.

  I go out onto the balcony. The sound of the sea is loud up here, and the clarity of the wide blue air is dazzling; you feel you could see forever. I gaze down at the shoreline—off to my right, the solid stone jetty with fishing boats tied up, then the line of black, encrusted rocks that reach out into the sea, then, down in front of me, a stretch of smooth white sand. I’m staring into Sylvie’s picture. I have an unreal, dislocated feeling.

  “It’s a beautiful beach,” I tell Brigid.

  She nods. “So it is. But I have to warn you, it’s not so good for bathing. There’s a riptide. You have to be careful. But I don’t imagine you’ll be fancying a swim this time of year.”

  She takes Adam to his room.

  I start to unpack. Sylvie chooses her bed and arranges all her things on the bedside table—her books and LEGO and animals. She makes meticulous little movements, quiet as a cat.

  When I’m sure she’s quite involved in what she’s doing, I take my phone and go back onto the balcony, closing the doors behind me.

  “Karen. It’s me.”

  I’m working out how to tell her. But she knows at once from my voice.

  “Where are you ringing from?” she says warily.

  “From Connemara.”

  “Oh no, Grace. Please don’t tell me you’ve gone off with that weirdo.”

  “I can’t talk properly. Sylvie and I are unpacking. I just wanted to tell you we’re here.”

  “You can’t be doing this, Grace. You can’t.”

  “But we couldn’t just go on the way we were.”

  “Grace, you could get into serious trouble with this. You know nothing about that creep you’re with. For God’s sake, please come home.”

  “I felt I had to do it—I had to try,” I tell her.

  “Grace. She’s just a little kid with a big imagination. I mean, for Chrissake, Grace. You believe she had a dragon?”

  “No. But I had to do something . . .”

  My voice fades. I hear the doubt in it.

  I say goodbye and go back into our bedroom. I have a jittery feeling, as though Karen’s wariness has infected me.

  Adam comes to our door. He has his leather jacket on.

  “Okay, this is the plan,” he says. “We’ll have a walk around the village—see what Sylvie makes of it. And then I thought we could drive around the countryside a bit, see if she recognizes anything. There’s a pub in Ballykilleen where we could eat.”

  I’m glad he’s got it all worked out.

  We walk out into the cold, blowing street and the scolding cries of the gulls. The shadows are lengthening now. There’s a pavement along the seafront, with steps at either end going down to the beach, and a handful of shops that sell crafts and ices and postcards. Some of the shops are shut up, and they have a bleak, out-of-season sadness, their rolled-up awnings banging in the wind, but there’s also a bigger store called Barry’s that looks like it’s open all year.

  Sylvie runs on ahead of us, runs out along the jetty, past the little fishing boats. She seems entirely confident there, so high up above the water, with the solid stone wall to one side of her. We follow.

  Sylvie turns toward me. Her face is pink, and she has a wide-open smile.

  “This is my jetty, see, Grace.”r />
  I’ve never heard her say “jetty” before. I wonder where she’s learned the word.

  She’s flushed and happy and quite unafraid for the moment. She stretches her arms out wide, reaching out in a big embrace, as though to take everything in. The wind blows her hair straight back from her head. You can see all the joy in her face.

  I go to look at the boats. They’re painted blue or scarlet, and the water makes a nervous slapping sound around their hulls. I read their names—the Ave Maria, the Endurance.

  “You’d better be careful,” calls Sylvie. “Don’t go too close to the edge.”

  I can’t help smiling when she says this. She has the exact intonation of a parent warning a child.

  There are piles of lobster pots and coils of sodden rope and orange buoys that are strung up together like a bunch of balloons. Two men in oilskin dungarees are sorting out their nets, which lie in a nylon cloud between them, frail-looking, and green and glistening like the sea. There’s a plastic box full of rotten fish—a chaos of gray and silver, their heads cut off, their eyes blank. The pungent, briny smell of the harbor wraps itself around us.

  We pass a sign that says CURRAN CRUISES, where you can buy a boat trip.

  “Sylvie, look—if you like the boats, one day we could go on a boat trip,” I tell her, blithe, unthinking. “There might be dolphins . . .”

  Her face closes up. I realize what I’ve done.

  “No, Grace.”

  “No, of course not.” I’m cross with myself for being so clumsy. I think how frightened she’d be—to be that close to the water, to feel the spray on her face. “Not if you don’t want to.”

  We turn back, follow the road that runs along the seafront. At the farther end of the beach it veers to the left and climbs. There are houses here between the road and the sea; they must have fabulous views from their back windows. We pass a long wall of crumbling gray stone, with plaited creepers and ivies draped across it, and come to a formal gateway. There are pillars with falcons on them to either side of the gate. A plaque on one of the pillars says KINVARA HOUSE. Between the pillars a tarmac drive sweeps around and out of sight. There’s a garden of lawns and flowering shrubs—rhododendron, azalea—and a casual litter of snowdrops under an old, twisted tree. A little farther along the wall we come to a small, shabby door, its paint corroding from all the salt. When I press my eye to a gap in the door where the wood has rotted away, I glimpse a house through the trees. It’s imposing, double-fronted, colonnaded.

  Sylvie pulls at my sleeve.

  “Where’s Lennie, Grace?”

  Whenever she asks for Lennie, I feel that little tug of hurt about what happened with Karen.

  “Lennie’s in London, sweetheart.”

  She doesn’t say anything for a moment. A shadow crosses her face.

  “I want Lennie,” she tells me.

  I swallow down the urge to say, Well, you should have been nicer to her, shouldn’t you? I glance down at her. She has a lost, confused look. I think of something I read in a newspaper article: how little children experience any separation as absolute, how they can’t believe that people still exist if they can’t be seen.

  “Hey, don’t be sad, sweetheart,” I say.

  I bend down, hug her. Her hair blows into my mouth. It’s salty and lank already from the sea wind. I can taste the salt on my tongue.

  She clutches my shoulders tightly; her fingers dig into my skin.

  “Find Lennie for me. You’ve got to, Grace.”

  “Sylvie, who’s Lennie?” says Adam.

  She turns to him. She has a candid, open, slightly condescending smile, a smile that says, I can’t believe you don’t get it.

  “She’s my Lennie, of course. I told you, Adam,” she says.

  34

  THE PUB THAT Adam has chosen is half an hour’s drive from St. Vincent’s.

  The other side of the village, we take a road that passes through Coldharbour Bog. It’s a desolate place, the land all bleached or tawny, with gilded grasses flattened by the wind and no trees but an occasional stunted thorn tree, its branches furred with lichen. You can see the black lines where peat has been dug, and there are many pools of water that hold the shine of the sky. This brown, wet wilderness seems to stretch forever.

  I lower my window a little, breathe in the scent of roots and rot. The wind has an animal sound.

  “It feels so bleak,” I say. “If anything happened here . . . I mean, you’d be miles from anyone.”

  Beyond the bog, the road begins to rise. We pass narrow fields full of rocks, and quiet villages of sparse, hunched cottages. A rumpled pony stares at us across a broken wall.

  I glance back at Sylvie. She smiles at me. She still has that flushed, happy look.

  “Is there anything here that you’ve seen before?” I ask her.

  “Yes, of course,” she says, and turns away, watching out the window.

  I feel how she eludes me.

  The pub is called Joe Moloney’s. We go to order at the bar, where a hollow-faced man in an old, worn coat gets up and kisses my hand. The landlord has quick, knowing eyes. He gives me an appraising look.

  “Well, aren’t you the lucky one?” he says to Adam. “You’ve got a lovely lady there. Just you take good care of her.”

  “I’ll do my best,” says Adam lightly.

  I feel my face go hot.

  We choose a table near the fire. White ash sifts down around the grate, and the burning logs have a sappy smell. Adam and I drink Guinness, and we eat steak pie, which comes with three varieties of potato. Sylvie amazes me by clearing her plate.

  “It’s nice here, isn’t it, Grace?” she says.

  I love it when she’s happy like this.

  When we go out to the car again, the wind has dropped and there’s a flamboyant pink-and-orange sunset. We set out for Coldharbour. Behind us, there are mountains heaped up, deeply purple as damsons. There’s nobody about except an occasional quiet animal—a slow horse the color of rust moving through a field of reeds, a clumsy sheep that lumbers over the road.

  I look back at Sylvie. She’s scarcely blinking. Soon she’ll be asleep. Minute by minute the countryside smudges and darkens around us.

  We come to a rambling farmhouse with a noisy dog chained up. Adam is frowning.

  “Does this look familiar?” he says.

  “Not really,” I tell him.

  “Oh. That’s not what I hoped you’d say.”

  He stops and peers out at a signpost. “Ballykilleen? Why the hell are we heading for Ballykilleen? Isn’t that where we’re meant to be coming from?”

  “I guess we could just drive on till we reach the next intersection,” I say.

  Adam grunts. “A fat lot of good that’ll do us. I swear that that last signpost had been turned the wrong way round.”

  But he does drive on and turns down a side road that doesn’t have a signpost, that seems to be going in roughly the right direction. The road climbs. We come to the top of the mountain that rises behind Coldharbour. The view opens out in front of us like a gift unwrapped. Way down below us, the sea is shimmering in the sunset, a track of pink light across it like a bale of bright silk flung out. To the left of the road, there’s a hedge of sheltering firs, a birch tree. A couple of small pale cottages are set back from the road.

  “Grace! Grace! Look!”

  There’s a shrill excitement in Sylvie’s voice.

  “Look, Grace, look, it’s my house!”

  Adam glances quickly over his shoulder at her. He slows, pulls into the shoulder of the road.

  Sylvie points to the first of the cottages. “There it is, Grace!”

  Her face is radiant.

  Adam is leaning across me to look, but I can’t see his expression. He’s quiet, attentive, his irritation forgotten. Between us the Saint Christopher is gently turning and glittering; it goes on moving long after the car is still.

  I stare at the house. It has a run-down look, with no lights on and boards acro
ss most of the windows. Its whitewashed walls glimmer faintly in the evening, and one solitary unboarded window catches the sun in a dazzle of saffron and pink. In the dim light, you can’t see what color the door is painted. There’s a little lawn in front of it, and the shadow of the mountain falls across the lawn. It’s clear that nobody lives here. It has the bleak look of all abandoned houses.

  I stare, can’t move my eyes away, take in the rough white walls, the squat, symmetrical shape of it, the slate gray tiles that are streaked with moss and lichen. There’s a feeling in the back of my neck, as though a small cold hand is fingering my spine.

  “It’s a good house, isn’t it, Grace?”

  When she turns to me, all the brightness of the sky is in her eyes.

  “Yes, it’s a very good house. It’s just like the house we got from Tiger Tiger.”

  “I told you,” she says.

  Adam is tense, alert. I can hear his light, quick breath.

  I wind my window down. I can smell mint and a green, fresh scent of pollen. The garden is raggedy and neglected, but some flowers and herbs must still grow here. The grass is mostly rough. Someone has mown a strip across the width of the house, but the rest is very long, and there are daffodils in it, their paleness floating in a sea of black. The gate is open and hanging on one hinge. A nameplate says FLAG COTTAGE. A little breeze shivers the leaves of the birch tree.

  I try desperately to remember the sequence of what just happened. When did Sylvie call out? Before or after she saw the house? Is she excited because it reminds her of the dollhouse? Or did she start to get excited before she saw the house? I try to untangle it all in my mind, but I can’t—I can’t be certain. I’m angry with myself for not paying more attention.

  “D’you like it, Grace?” she says.

  “Yes. I really like it.”

  Her face is luminous, but I sense such fragility in her. I feel I have to move with the greatest care.

  “Aren’t we going to see it?” she says.

  I don’t know what to say.

  “Please, Grace. I really want to.”