If the children weren’t with them Alison might have told Peadar now on that secluded bench in the gardens overlooking the Ventry river where they had made love late one rainy afternoon sixteen years before. Alison, with the tear that Peadar had found in her skirt, sitting astride him with his flies undone. Thankfully not even the gardeners were moving about that day, but by the end they wouldn’t have stopped or cared. Their excitement had been addictive, the feel of him thrusting through the material, the creak of an old beech tree overhead, the dark river gushing over rocks and a solitary heron taking flight before their eyes. The gardens were closing by the time they had left, with just their bicycles in the car park. Her dress was stained but she hadn’t cared. She had cared about nothing that summer, except that she was twenty–two and free, on a dirty weekend with her first love who had come back after three years to find her.
Peadar was already ordering food in the tea rooms. The old lady in the hunting jacket was in her usual place beside the antiques, guarding the door into the gardens. Three local women ran the tea room. They remembered Peadar because of his fondness for rhubarb streusel. Danny was eyeing the rich cakes, but once they had a good walk it was unlikely he would get sick later on in the car. Alison scanned the menu, wondering was there anything she could persuade Shane to taste. Maybe she could invent a game to coax him into trying chicken. She envied women whose sons ate like horses. Yet Shane was tall and healthy, existing mainly on milk and cheese.
None of this was important, she reminded herself, or at least not at this moment. Let Shane drink what he likes. Let Danny have two cakes or three. Childhood was short and her own seemed to have been spent forever gazing in through invisible windows, being denied the things she saw inside and made to feel guilty for even wanting them. Not that her parents were mean, but the Waterford she grew up in had felt like it was ruled by some headscarfed matriarch with pursed, disapproving lips. It was a different world for children now. They were a family together on the sort of holiday she had only ever known once as a child. She had survived her scare, even if for days after getting the all–clear she had burst into sudden inexplicable tears, alone in the kitchen.
Peadar glanced at her now as the lady filled his tray.
‘You look flushed,’ he said. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘Just fine.’
The woman mashed up potatoes, carrots and gravy for Sheila and heated them in the microwave. Even with coaxing, the child would only eat half of it but there was enough goodness in that. Alison had plain biscuits wrapped in tissue for afterwards. She knew that both Sheila and Shane would enjoy them far more than any dessert.
The children stormed out into the gardens after they’d finished, while Peadar was still paying the admission fee. The azaleas were in bloom, stretching out before her eyes in pinks, yellows and whites as Alison walked through maple trees towards the river. Parts of the grass were deliberately cut long to give the woodlands a feel of half wilderness, half exotic Eden. Peadar appeared behind her, taking her hand but urging her on, anxious not to lose sight of Shane as the boy climbed up rough steps to a suspension bridge leading to the owner’s house located on a man–made island in the river. Alison called for Shane to run after Danny and Sheila who had disappeared among the trees. She wanted to stroll in peace with Peadar along the wide avenue of hanging rhododendrons.
There was an octagonal wooden house at the end where she remembered changing Danny, the first year they went to Fitzgerald’s, when everything was new and she was frantic about being a mother. The fear she might drop him, the incessant worry that caused her to wake several times a night to check his breathing in the cot.
Danny now gripped Sheila’s hand as he pushed ahead towards the shallow stretch of river, hoping to see the solitary heron there again this year. Another talisman of their journey. Even at eight the boy was caught up in this ritual. The riverbed was empty. Danny cupped his hand over his eyes, straining to glimpse the bird. She called out that the heron was probably hunting along the far rapids and Danny disappeared across the bridge into a tunnel of old overhanging trees.
Shane followed, running along the maze of woodland paths, while Peadar called for them not to get lost. She let go of Peadar’s hand, tired of being hurried, wanting to enjoy the cool shade of those gnarled trunks. Her family moved ahead, with Sheila demanding that Peadar carry her. From Danny’s cries she knew he had found the entrance to the secret path built along girders down a tiny tributary of the river. The steps descended to the water, with ferns and moss crowding the steep banks on either side. Sheila was frightened of falling in and wriggled away to run back to Alison.
She sat on the grass with her daughter, watching Peadar hold each boy’s hand as they negotiated their way slowly along the girders that were almost submerged in the green water. They disappeared in and out of shade, with patches of sunlight igniting the ripples that sparkled around them. This was a moment she knew she would remember when they were all gone from her. The three men in her life, calling excitedly to each other as they stooped beneath archways and rocks. Then their voices went silent, as if the riot of trailing plants along the riverbank had somehow ensnared them up inside a magical green world.
Peadar’s car–phone rang as they descended the twisty mountain road beyond Rathnew, stuck behind a horsebox being pulled by a jeep in a tailback of Sunday afternoon vehicles. Alison thought he had remembered to turn it off. He glanced across, with a sheepish grin. She knew he couldn’t resist picking it up.
‘Just once,’ she warned him. ‘If it rings again it’s going out the window.’
It was McCann, of course, fretful and over–conscientious as usual. Alison had grown to dread his voice calling at ridiculous hours about trivial matters. At first she had thought this was his method of retribution against Peadar for taking the principal’s job that outsiders felt he had patiently waited in line for, during his decade as vice–principal, before Peadar was headhunted for the post. But gradually she’d realised that his obsequiousness was without irony or malice. McCann was a natural lieutenant, not a leader. He lived alone, with classical music always in the background when he phoned, seemingly oblivious to the disruption caused by a midnight call.
‘I know,’ she heard Peadar say. ‘I passed the site. There were seven then … maybe another two have bunked off. But the deadline is in place with penalty clauses, so they’ll just have to work longer in the evenings.’
There was a silence as Peadar let McCann fret on. The secret was to wait until McCann paused for breath and then get your goodbyes in fast. Peadar braked as the horsebox slowed even more.
‘If he’s got three sites going at once then that’s Nolan’s problem,’ Peadar interjected. ‘He can switch workmen around all he likes once he meets his commitments to us, because he knows he’s not getting another red cent until I can see my face shining in the floor tiles.’
Peadar replaced the receiver, making a deliberate show of switching the phone off.
‘Sorry about that,’ he apologised.
‘No, it’s reassuring,’ Alison replied. ‘Once I’m sure McCann is still in Dublin I know he can’t pop his head out of the petrol tank if we stop to fill it up somewhere along the way.’
Peadar smiled, knowing her views on the vice–principal. She used to tease him in bed by inventing blind dates for McCann, her favourite being to pair him off with Mother Teresa.
The Enid Blyton tape had run out. Alison turned it over. Pip, Fatty and Daisy continued outwitting the fat policeman, Mr Goon, on side two. Danny was fascinated though he had heard it a dozen times before. Shane was happy beside him, playing some game with Paddington Bear. And Sheila … Sheila was simply happy, like it was a gift she’d been born with. Sheila, with the same jet–black hair as herself, whom they very nearly didn’t have. They had even seen a doctor about Peadar having the operation before finally deciding to go once again. Three boys would have been too much, but Alison had been certain from the moment Sheila was conceived that there was a girl inside her. Never mind that