Maker of Footprints

by Sheila Turner Johnston

  She had asked Paul a question and he still hadn’t answered it. She glanced at him but he was looking out to sea, quiet. She looked back to the surfers.

  “You remind me of a king’s palace,” she said.

  “How come?”

  “Because you’re behind so many closed and guarded doors.”

  He looked round at that. “So who’s this then, sitting on this boulder beside you? Winnie the Pooh?”

  “Peter Pan, maybe.”

  He scoffed. “You’re talking in riddles.”

  “Then think in riddles!” she flashed, “they’re the way to the answers. Isn’t that what you said?”

  He shifted on the rock to face her slightly. “So solve the riddle then.”

  She hesitated and then put her hand up to touch his shoulder and left it there as she spoke slowly. “I think Paul Shepherd lives in the farthest room, at the farthest end of the longest corridor in the palace. I think he controls every room, every key, every door in that corridor. He lives in the inner chamber and no one gets in there. Because he won’t let them. Not even his wife.” He was holding her gaze, still and intense. She smoothed her palm gently across his shoulder, lifting it only when her fingers felt the merest touch of his neck. “I wonder why.”

  He took a deep breath, opened his mouth as if to speak, stopped, looked at the sea. Short locks of black hair blew back and forth across his brow. Her own head was still circled by his woollen hat, close and warm. She waited.

  Finally he said, “Once, when I was a child, I was helping my father clear out our roof space. I found an old suitcase. It was really old, brown and stitched, with those silver coloured clasps that opened with a snap when you pulled a slider back. You know the type I mean?” She nodded. “It was quite small, just an overnight case.” His eyes became bright as he remembered. “But the really magical thing about it was that there was a key inside it. It could really lock.”

  She smiled, imagining the delight of a child at this discovery. Why was he telling her this?

  “I loved that little suitcase. It became my secret place, the place where I hid things just for the sake of knowing they were hidden. A book, a pebble, a notebook. There was even a shell from here. Only I knew they were there. You know?” She nodded. “One night Adam said I must have stolen one of his toy cars. We used to race them round the living room floor and play ‘garages’.” He stopped for a moment. Then, “Anyway, I said I hadn’t taken it. I’d enough of my own. But Adam said I had.

  He even said…” he gave a short, bitter laugh “… he’d seen me. My father didn’t believe me. Adam told him about my hiding place, the suitcase. I kept it under my bed. My father marched me upstairs and…” she sensed him tremble a little “… he made me open the case and let him and Adam look inside. Of course there was no car in it. I was too young to put a word to what I felt. But now I know I felt violated. Someone had power over me to make me show my secrets, to expose me, to show things that I’d hidden.”

  Jenna looked down at her lap. Paul’s fingers were entwined with her own, gripping, moving, meshing. He had reached out for her hand at the moment he said “You know?” as if to check she really understood what he was saying. She was sure he didn’t know what he had done.

  “That feeling’s been with you ever since, hasn’t it?” she said simply. You’ve vowed that no-one will ever do that to you again.”

  There was still a slight tremble in his fingers. Well, there would be. He had allowed her through a door and let her place a foot upon that long corridor. She left his hand where it was, quieter now within her own, his wedding ring somewhere in the tangle of fingers.

  “I suppose,” she said, “your father was just trying to solve a quarrel. He loved you both.”

  “No, he didn’t,” he said. “He loved Adam. I was a nuisance, a cuckoo.”

  Jenna frowned. “What do you mean?”

  He stood up suddenly. In doing so his hand left hers and he felt it go. For a second he paused, looked at her, startled. Then he straightened.

  “I was building sand castles over there when he told me I wasn’t his son.”

  Shock froze her. Then she got to her feet slowly and stood beside him, looking across to where he pointed, as if she could go back through the years and see the scene he spoke of. Neither of them spoke until Jenna took his arm and asked, “So you and Adam…?”

  “Half-brothers,” he said and his mouth twitched a little.

  “Mother’s my mother all right.”

  Another silence. “That’s another thing Adam didn’t tell me,” she said.

  “Don’t blame him for that one. We don’t talk about it. For Mum’s sake.”

  “Does Dianne know this?”

  “No.”

  She stood in front of him, hands in her pockets. How long until the door slammed shut again?

  “Do you know who your father is?”

  “I know who he was.”

  “Was?”

  “He was killed just before I was born. His Land Rover was blown up on a routine patrol.”

  Her head came up, her eyes wide. “Was he in the police?”

  “He was an English soldier.”

  The gulls were gone now, the short day fading. The sea was close, but not yet close enough to make them move. Loose sand coloured the edges of the water as it rippled into turning arcs, swirled in retreat, ducked beneath the white fringe of the next wave.

  There were so many questions in her head she couldn’t catch hold of them in any order.

  “Adam,” she said. “When did he find out? Who told him?” Paul sat on the rock again. “Adam was beside me, knocking down the castles I built. He ran up to my mother and asked her what a bastard was.”

  Jenna dropped to her heels and dug a mussel shell out of the sand. She brushed it clean and turned it over in her palm. I know what happened. I know why he’s here. That tug of connection, that gossamer strand was blowing in this salty wind as surely as it spun between them that day before Christmas. She looked up. His face above her was pale again, despite the cold.

  “You haven’t been here since that day,” she said. “Have you?”

  “No.”

  She balanced the shell on her open palm and raised her hand towards him. “The shell in the suitcase. It was from that day, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  His expression was calm, steady, as if for now, he was content to watch her unpick his mind.

  “And when you were made to open the case and they saw the shell, I think you threw it away. Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve come back today to face it again. To deal with it.” This time he just nodded. She pushed herself to her feet. The sea lapped closer, reeling across the nearer sand. Far out to sea, a tissue of cloud had ripped and sunlight made a butter yellow tent upon the water.

  “Jenna, do you miss Adam?”

  She blinked at the unexpectedness of it. She took a few steps away from him. What was the truthful answer to that? She turned back, thoughtful.

  “Not at the moment,” she said.

  His mouth curved into that wonderful smile, a smile that slipped into every part of his face, changing it the way sunshine changes the sea. He raised his hand and reached for hers. His fingers wrapped around her own, deliberately this time.

  She pulled her hand away sharply, bantering. “No need to shake my hand! All I did was read your mind.”

  He looked down at his feet then, solemn again, as if somehow she had made him sad.

  After that, he went for a walk alone and she let him go. Her head was full of questions, but none of this was any of her business. She pulled her coat around her, hunched into it and watched a mist descending on the Donegal hills. Still she couldn’t understand why he wanted her here. Indeed it seemed as if he was unsure himself.

  When she turned again to look, Jenna saw his footprints in the dryer sand, firm and even, the line of them leaving her as he strode off. Now, he was a far away figure, stopped, as
if abandoned on the beach like a lost toy.

  Slightly anxious, she could see that the waves were getting closer. He would have to return soon, for the sea came up to meet the shore at high tide. She sighed. The door that he had opened reluctantly had not slammed, but it had shut nevertheless, firmly and ever so gently. Her brow creased a little as she tried to decide which of them had closed it.

  17

  FEELING DANGEROUSLY HAPPY while having dinner with someone else’s husband wasn’t the way Jenna had imagined she would finish New Year’s Day. It was only twenty-four hours ago that she had cleared away every vestige of Christmas from her house and crawled into a lump of misery in her bed.

  When Paul returned from his solitary walk, she was sitting on the bonnet of the car. She grumbled that he might have left her the car key. He told her to stop complaining – she was the one wearing his woollen hat. She said he was an unfeeling prat. He said it was great to find a woman who knew that without having to be told.

  A contentment had rested between them as they left Rossnowlagh on the long journey home. They said very little and Jenna’s thoughts whirled in the silent car, reluctant to let go of a day that must end in a few hours. The cold air of the sea had sapped her energy, and eventually she began to feel sleepy. When Paul turned into the car park of a hotel just outside Omagh and said he was starving, Jenna had stretched her arms in front of her, yawned and lazily agreed.

  It wasn’t until she got out of the car and the late evening air sharpened her senses that misgivings leapt from the corners of her mind. She stopped by an island flowerbed where spears of yellow mahonia were floodlit from the path to the hotel steps.

  “Paul, this mightn’t be a good idea.”

  He locked the car and came to her side. “Since when was eating a bad idea?”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she said, “and you know it.”

  He held up the car key, dangled it from his finger and thumb. “Here’s the key. Stay here if you like. I’m going to eat.” He grasped her hand and dropped the key into it. As he walked up the steps he called back, “Steak, I think. Medium rare. See you later.”

  She had to laugh.

  So here they were. Paul was chasing a prawn round his plate, and she was trying to eat her melon without dropping any raspberry coulis on her pink jumper.

  She discovered that when he was relaxed he could be very funny. Between mouthfuls of steak, onions and potatoes, he told her stories of the people he had met during his years in London. With wicked impersonations and mobile expressions, he conjured up for her the self-important stockbroker, the paranoid mother, the grumpy granny. There was even a baby who had crawled to his camera bag and been sick in it. He could laugh about it now. At the time, he said, he nearly committed murder. He held up his knife and fork, close together. “It was this close to being an ex-baby!”

  He wanted a dessert and, reckless, she took one too. When it came, he admired the artistry of it: the square plate, the dusting of sugar, the cream swirled just so, the cape gooseberry splayed in the centre.

  Yet again he had changed, shapeshifted before her. Jenna put her chin on her hand and watched him, just watched and didn’t mind that he knew it. He caught her eye as a forkful of cream passed his lips. He smiled. A trace of cream tipped the point of his upper lip. His tongue flicked it away.

  Once again, the thought overwhelmed Jenna. He is perfect, absolutely perfect.

  Today had explained something. Since the day she had met Paul, she had known with her head that he was Adam’s brother. But at a deeper level, she had felt them to be different. They did not have that unconscious shared identity, that common way of walking, that angle of the head, that use of the same phrases, all those little common things by which brothers betray a shared parentage. It explained the hair colour. And that matchless mouth.

  “I wonder,” she said suddenly, “if you look like your father, your real father.”

  He didn’t reply and the silence changed the mood.

  Jenna crumpled her napkin. “We should go. This has been quite a self-indulgence. I’m not used to it.”

  “I don’t want to go yet.”

  “It’s late.”

  “I want coffee.”

  “You don’t need my permission.”

  “OK then.”

  They took their coffee at an open fire in the hotel lounge. Only one other group of diners remained. Two deep soft chairs sat side by side and Jenna sank into the one next the fire, acquiescent again, warm and lazy, chin tucked into her pink polo, somnolent with the meal and the day’s end. After some minutes, Paul’s voice came from her right.

  “You like pink, don’t you? You’ve a pink dress and your slippers are pink.”

  Propped against the back of the chair, she turned her head towards him, aware that sleepiness must show in her eyelids.

  “I suppose I can’t deny it then. But I don’t have the pink dress any more.”

  “Oh? Where is it?”

  “In the bin. I tore it, remember.”

  “Was it that bad?”

  She shrugged. “I wouldn’t have worn it again.”

  “No, you probably wouldn’t. Bad memories.”

  “You understand?”

  “Of course. Smells, places, tastes, sounds. They all gain baggage depending on what was happening when we met them.”

  “Like Rossnowlagh?”

  He nodded. “And rhubarb.”

  “Rhubarb?”

  It was some moments before he said, “The day I discovered I wasn’t who I thought I was, we had rhubarb for tea. I haven’t been able to stand the stuff since. So I know how you feel about the dress.” He studied her. “So do you feel better?”

  “Better than what?”

  “Than this morning. This morning you were a sad case.”

  She pulled a face, embarrassed to remember how she looked when he had called. “Much better. But today was about you, not me. Has it been worth it?”

  He spread his hands wide. “It beats a day of being polite in London. And…” he leaned towards her a little, across the arm of his own chair “… today was about you as well.”

  Light was dancing on him again, firelight this time. He attracted light, she thought, her lashes heavy. But it doesn’t illuminate him. It makes shadows.

  “I want to talk about you now,” he said.

  She gave a short laugh and turned her head away. “Ha! That’ll be a short conversation. I’ve a better idea. Tell me about your Christmas. I suppose Dianne’s family has a big house?”

  He picked at the arm of the chair. “Huge.”

  “I suppose you met some old friends.”

  “A few.”

  “Will you go back there to live some day?”

  “Never.” He had replied almost before she had finished the question.

  “When Dianne talks about it she seems homesick. I think she wants to go back.”

  He sat back and stared at the ornate sideboard on the other side of the lounge. “It’ll be without me.”

  “What a weird thing to say.”

  “That’s the unfeeling prat talking.”

  It was becoming important to Jenna that they talk about Dianne. Dianne wasn’t here and she was his wife. Her presence should be invoked. “When’s she coming back?”

  “After the weekend some time.”

  “It must have been nice for her father to see her again. Her mother’s dead, isn’t she?”

  He was still staring ahead. “She is.”

  Jenna studied his profile, the fine nose, the little darkness beneath the jut of his lower lip, a spiral of hair curling neat behind his ear. Dianne ran her fingers through that hair. When was the last time she had done so? When was the last time he had made love to her?

  She spoke again, quickly. “So did she get to all those parties she talked about?”

  He said nothing, a frown beginning to nudge between his brows. Then he looked round, petulant. “I said I want to talk about you.”

 
“So how is she? Have you wished her a happy New Year yet?” She laughed. “That’s funny, wishing your wife a Happy New Year by phone.”

  His left hand reached across and fell on her own where it lay along the arm of her chair. She blinked in surprise. “Jenna,” he said, “shut up. I said I want to talk about you.”

  She looked down at his hand. “And I said you don’t always get what you want.”

  “Not always. Just most of the time.”

  She pulled her hand away. “I think we should make for home as soon as we can,” she said.

  His head tilted in question. “Jenna, what’s wrong?”

  “This is a mistake. I shouldn’t have come with you.” She wanted to be home, away from here, away from him.

  He asked again, “What’s wrong?”

  She looked at the light shade on the wall; she looked at the leaves of a fern on a table in the window embrasure; she looked at the people in a group across the room. Then she looked back at his face, at the line of his jaw where it smoothed down beneath his chin, down the pale cream of his neck to the swell of his throat. Truth burrowed its way through all the lies she could have told. She lifted her hand and, one finger extended, brought it down slowly to touch the ring on his finger where it still lay beside her.

  “That’s what’s wrong,” she said.

  He held up his fingers and studied the ring. It was broad, with fine bevels on each side. He didn’t ask her what she meant and she didn’t expect him to. He gripped the ring with the fingers of his other hand and held them there. Then she saw him come to a decision. He slid the ring from his finger and held it up between his finger and thumb.

  “Will you talk to me if I take it off?”

  The fire was crackling, chatter rose in the other corner of the room, a clock ticked. Yet to Jenna it seemed as if they were stopped in a cavern of silence as the ring hung aloft between them, halo-shaped.

  Then she whispered, “Put that back.” A shiver of anger trembled across her words. “How could you?”

  He tossed it in the air and caught it in his fist. He sat forward on the edge of his chair. Elbows on his knees, he cupped his hands and dropped the ring from one palm to the other and back again, back and forth, over and over, watching the gold spilling through the firelight.