Rainsongs Read online

  4

  There’s a stash of Sophie’s letters in a box file on the top of the bookcase. The paper has yellowed. How times have changed, Martha thinks, as she unfolds the brittle sheets, many written with a fountain pen in thick black ink. Nowadays there’d be no such physical evidence. Any affair would be digital, all texts and furtive emails. She’s surprised that Brendan kept the letters, carefully arranged in date order, all these years. The first ones are typed and mostly about the book. Ideas for chapter sequences and discussions about permissions sought from museums and collections for the necessary reproductions. There are suggestions for, and confirmations of, lunch dates to discuss the layout and cover. But slowly the language becomes more intimate and the notes handwritten in Sophie’s cursive italic script. The letters are all on Thames & Hudson headed paper and the envelopes addressed to the gallery in Cork Street where Brendan had his office. In one she describes a day out in Whitstable: Darling, oysters, champagne and a glorious sunset. What could have been more perfect except a long, long night together?

  How had they managed it? What had Martha been doing that she hadn’t noticed? Presumably she’d been at school trying to instil a love of theatre into children who only ever watched TV and thought that Andrew Lloyd Webber was a great dramatist. Sophie and Brendan had, apparently, strolled along the front by the coloured beach huts, watching the wading birds scavenging in the mud and the working boats hauling their blue nylon nets onto the quay. They had lunch in a whitewashed pub on the beach. It was early November and they walked out onto the spit of shingle that appears at low tide to watch the display of fireworks over the little Kent town. She imagines Brendan standing behind Sophie, his arms wrapped round her, his chin resting on her thick red hair caught up in its tortoiseshell clip, as rockets exploded across the darkening sky. Other letters describe lunchtime assignations or snatched drinks in Soho after work when, presumably, they didn’t manage to have sex because Brendan had promised Martha he’d be back for her sixth form production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or dinner with the Evans.

  She was surprised when Sophie turned up at the crematorium. She should have been angry. But she wasn’t. It must have taken a degree of courage. They didn’t speak but Martha noticed her standing on the edge of the proceedings in a black wool coat, her thick curls loosely held at the nape of her neck with a big copper slide. She looked genuinely upset but was discreet, hanging back until everyone left for the hotel, and then quietly slipping away without joining the reception. As she reads through the letters she can only guess whether the impetus for the affair came from Sophie or Brendan. She’d lived with him for more than thirty years, borne his child and yet still there was so much she didn’t know about him. Perhaps everything we do is simply an imperfect version of what we think we’re actually doing. What had he and Sophie talked about? On one level they had more in common than she and he had done. Both of them were involved in the art world and Sophie must have seemed fresh, untrammelled and free.

  But what had Sophie seen in Brendan, a middle-aged man with a bit of a paunch? He didn’t look particularly young, dressed fairly conservatively: corduroy trousers, checked shirts from Marks & Spencer. In the winter, a lamb’s wool sweater with a Harris Tweed jacket. Sophie must have had plenty of admirers her own age. No doubt she was attracted by the same thing that Martha, herself almost a decade younger, had been. His natural Celtic-tinged charm. She’d always convinced herself that Brendan’s time with Sophie was a sort of interregnum in the real business of their marriage, a hiatus, an aberration. Yet a part of her can understand his need for a port in a storm. The storm that had descended, nearly wrecking them on the rocks. She wanted to believe that his behaviour had simply been that of a middle-aged man trying to hold onto his youth. That what happened hadn’t really been important. But now she can’t be so certain. Maybe it was a sacrifice to give Sophie up and come back to her. Was it love or simply guilt for cheating on her, for leaving her alone to cope? Or maybe he just decided, in a way that would seem old-fashioned to many, to do the right thing. For hadn’t that been what he’d promised? For better for worse, till death…

  She finds some photos taken at a private view at the Tate. Sophie is holding a glass of wine and talking to Antony Gormley, raising a glass and smiling directly into the camera. Brendan must have been on the other side of the lens. Another, taken on a glowing autumn afternoon in the middle of Hampton Court Maze shows her looking windswept in a navy anorak and a big, knotted tartan scarf. She’s not only young but very pretty. It would have been surprising if Brendan hadn’t fallen in love with her. This is a part of his life he lived without any reference to her. Had she, in her turn, ever been tempted to have an affair? Not really. There was a lukewarm flirtation with Stuart, who taught history at her school before moving on to become head of a large comprehensive in Peckham. But that never amounted to more than the odd drink after work and a bunch of rather tacky garage carnations on her birthday.

  She remembers her wedding. She wasn’t really that young but had felt, for the first time, as if she was on the threshold of adulthood. A marquee was erected on the back lawn of Maresfield Gardens and a champagne buffet served beneath the blue and white striped awning. She wore an Empire line dress, carried a spray of forget-me-nots and blue hyacinths. On the whole it was a happy day and she tried to forget that her mother didn’t think Brendan was really good enough.

  Their honeymoon in Florence was the first of many trips to Italy. When they returned, London was in bloom. For a time they lived in a small flat, two rooms really, in Notting Hill Gate, before moving to the house in Islington. There they lay naked on a blanket in the empty drawing room with the high ceiling—they didn’t yet own anything other than a mattress, two stools and a kitchen table—the windows thrown open onto the dusty summer heat, the curtains billowing in the warm air as they listened to Leonard Cohen. In those days Islington was run-down, full of Irish navvies in rooming houses. In the basement flat opposite was an elderly German Jewish refugee with a sweet smile and wiry grey hair. Whatever the weather she wore the same overcoat as if perpetually prepared for a quick getaway.

  Brendan divided his time between the gallery, the Courtauld and the British Library where he was researching his first book. There were dinners, and parties at the Chelsea Arts Club. She knew enough about art not to put her foot in it. People tended to be impressed, which she hated, when they found out that her father had been the original director of the gallery. Maybe they thought that’s why Brendan had married her. Once, after too much to drink, she suggested as much. But he just laughed and told her not to be so ridiculous.

  Thursday

  1

  An El Greco sky. Shafts of sunlight pierce the clouds. When artists painted skies like this, Martha had always thought they were an exaggeration. Not something that occurred in nature but a symbol in praise of the glory of God. All those angels in Italian churches sitting on cottonwool clouds surrounded by rays of celestial light. Looking out of her little window at the sun-washed islands, she can understand how people believed in heaven. How could anything this beautiful be mere accident? It would be a comfort to have faith, wouldn’t it? How many times in the last twenty years had she pleaded with God, promising that if he gave her back the one thing she most wanted that she’d believe in him unconditionally? She knew it was nonsense, of course. A measure of her desperation. And when it hadn’t worked she understood that no God would get involved in anything as tawdry as a plea bargain. God was, if he was anything at all, not some venture capitalist who struck deals. Yesterday she walked down to the ruined abbey on Ballinskelligs beach with its windswept graveyard and worn Celtic crosses, its glass bubbles like upturned goldfish bowls containing faded plaster Virgins and cheap plastic roses. Was faith, then, simply a matter of habit and custom or something you decided upon, like the decision to dive off the high board into the swimming pool in front of you? Perhaps all you needed to do was shut your eyes, jump and believe y
ou wouldn’t hit concrete or drown. Wispy clouds hang over the far mountains. The sky is clear blue. She imagines swimming through it, floating up and up into its saturated blue depths.

  She goes to the bookcase in Brendan’s study to look for a Bible. As a Catholic, even a very dilute one, he must have one somewhere. She finds a battered copy among the dictionaries on the top shelf. The flyleaf says that it was awarded for the best Latin translation in the Lower VIth. She’s touched by the thought of the young boy, who one day would become her husband, diligently translating Horace. A silk ribbon marks the passage: The meek shall inherit the earth.

  Will they? There doesn’t seem to be much evidence. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine that these are the direct words of God. But can’t. She’s taken to reading her horoscope and started to meditate, sitting cross-legged on the Turkish rug in her Islington bedroom, eyes closed, concentrating on her breathing and listening to whatever sounds occur. The postman pushing letters through the flap. The rev of a motorbike in the street outside. Birdsong. All that would normally blur into the white noise of morning. She knows that she’s being pulled further and further into a world of chance and superstition and that death, whether she likes it or not, is irrevocable and eternal and nothing, nothing, she can do will ever change that. Everything seems to be dissolving and slipping away. Her life, her memories and all that they contain. And, with it, any sense of who she is. A gap is opening between her and the world and she’s not sure how she’s going to bridge it.

  When Brendan turned his back on Catholicism at school he closed the door on anything to do with formal religion. The only religion for him after that was art. He argued that there was more spirituality in a Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock than in any church. Their paintings were proof of the life force. The struggle to articulate the divine within a secular world. No, he insisted, you didn’t need God to be spiritual. Artists managed to achieve spirituality and none of them had ever killed anyone in the name of religion. No genocides had been committed for the sake of art. For a painting to be spiritual it didn’t have to invoke God. Feeling was meaning. A painting could suggest a new way of being in the world. All the viewer had to do was be open to the experience of looking. To give a work their undivided attention in order for the self to shrink and boundaries to dissolve.

  She misses her husband. His bulky presence, his solidity, his sense of balance and the fact that he was the only other person in the world who could understand the gaping hole in her life.

  She gets out of bed, washes her face and brushes her teeth but doesn’t bother to shower. She wants to get out for her walk before she changes her mind, while the weather is still good. She knows if she thinks about it for too long she won’t go. She ties back her hair and slips on a fleece. It’s not going to rain.

  The last time she’d walked along this track it had been high summer. Butterflies flitted in and out of the brambles and the lanes were aflame with wild fuchsia. There were foxgloves in the ditches and the cliffs were fringed with yellow gorse. In the small fields the hay had already been cut and gathered into beehive ricks. It was hot. The sort of heat more associated with the Mediterranean than with the west coast of Ireland. The sea a deep ultramarine. She always thought how like Greece Ireland looked, or at least like Greece would have looked, or like Greece would have looked if it had a rope slung round it and was pulled further west and north, where it rained a good deal more.

  She turns down the track and a village dog follows snapping at her heels. In the middle of the path, she spots a hare. She freezes, but it’s caught sight of her and sits stock still, its ears twitching. They stay like that for a long time, she and the hare. Watchful and alert. Then, as she moves slowly forwards, it springs away over the wall and disappears into a tussock of reeds. She’s read that in Kerry there used to be a superstition that hares were bewitched old women. Locals were warned to walk at night with a stick to protect them against the pooka and other malevolent spirits.

  Eventually the track opens out onto a small bay surrounded by a windbreak of pines. On the far shore there’s a lone fisherman’s cottage and a concrete slipway where a wooden boat has been pulled out of the water. Since she was last here someone has built a bungalow on the previously empty headland. Beside it, in the next field, is a notice tied to the fence with blue twine. She clambers over to read it. It’s a planning application for another bungalow ‘with sea views’. With another bungalow will come bungalow taste: concrete lions and box hedging. No doubt they’ll also put in an asphalt drive and wrought iron gates to mark the boundary between what they’ve tamed and the wilderness beyond. It seems, that at all costs, the anarchy of the wild Irish landscape must be disciplined and kept at bay, suburbanised by plastic tubs and garden gnomes.

  Behind the beach is a boggy area of reeds that grows down as far as the shingle. It is littered with debris. A broken flip-flop, an asthma inhaler, some shredded blue nylon netting, along with fragments of a smashed packing case from a wreck, all lie washed up by the storms. The strand is empty except for an old fellow in a baseball cap, his trousers held up with string and stuck into his Wellingtons. He is trying to unscramble a knot of buoys, driftwood and plastic fishing net. She calls hello and he nods, looking at her strangely, as if he doesn’t understand her. He has hardly any teeth.

  That long-ago summer when they came to this beach they’d set up their striped windbreak at the far end of the bay. She’d brought sandwiches in a wicker basket; cheddar and chutney for her and Brendan, peanut butter for Bruno. As she stands on the shore in the wind she can see him waving to her from the edge of the surf, his new adult teeth slightly too big for his mouth, his brown skin encrusted with salt.

  They’d searched for shells in the rock pools, collecting them in a red plastic bucket so they could identify them later in his Collins Shell Guide. And he’d swum. For hours until his skin was wrinkled and blue. She had to call him out of the sea and wrap his shivering little body in a big towel. They’d stayed on the beach as long as possible, playing cricket into the early evening. She can still see him running across the sands, silhouetted against the low white sun—her golden boy.

  Making their way back up to the cottage in the fading evening light, their skin tingling with salt, they’d climbed up on a rock to look at the stone shelters where the monks had waited for good weather before setting out for the Skelligs. Brendan had gone on ahead with the deckchairs, while she and Bruno sat on the cliff edge looking out to sea.

  But why should anyone want to live on a rock in the middle of the ocean, Mum? Weren’t the monks lonely?

  She thought, she said, that was the point. That all those centuries ago people believed that if they lived in extreme places they’d, somehow, be closer to God. It was their souls that mattered, she explained, not their bodies. They thought that if they denied their physical needs they’d become more holy. God was a real presence in their lives in a way that it was hard for modern people to understand. They believed they were born sinful and spent their days in prayer and meditation trying to achieve redemption. Life on the rock was dictated by the weather and, in the winter months, by the short dark days. They’d had to be self-sufficient, growing cabbages and a few potatoes on their little stony plot, making tallow candles with the fat and feathers of sea birds. Nothing was wasted. There was virtually no fuel so they’d have been wet and freezing most of the time. It’s almost impossible for us with our warm beds and full fridges, she said, to imagine what that must have been like. And talking of warm beds and fridges, it’s supper time.

  As they’d made their way back up to the cottage he’d asked, again, if they could take a boat out to the mysterious rocks. And she’d promised that before they left they would try. In those days the cottage still had no electricity or mains drainage. Meals had been simple affairs. Yet there was something magical about the three of them eating in the glow of the Tilley lamps. Even in summer they’d had to light the peat stove against t
he damp evening chill. Then, when they woke the following morning after nearly three weeks of sun, the weather had broken. A mist had come down and a gale was blowing. It had been impossible to go out to the Skelligs.

  2

  She turns up the beach, empty except for two gannets mewing and wheeling overhead. Apart from the new bungalow, everything is the same as it had been that summer. How cavalier nature is as it carries on regardless. For some reason she’s always had an inner sense of foreboding that she couldn’t explain. Some would say her fears were morbid. Her worries that those she loved would be involved in a car crash or suddenly taken ill, irrational. Life simply wasn’t tenable if you considered the myriad possibilities of things that might go wrong. Everything is random. Yet we generally assume that tomorrow will be the same as today; that our children will lose their milk teeth, sit their exams, fall in love, grow up and flourish.