The hide man gently deposited Cormac beside his father, who did not look up. Brian could not be certain but he thought he detected a note of censure behind the hide man’s jocose tone. ‘Saf now, aher his thravels.’
Jeremiah darted a sideways glance at his wife to prevent her from moving to comfort her by now hysterical son. She stepped back obediently.
‘He can travel away,’ he said, indicating Cormac, ‘we’ve plenty more where he came from, at home.’
Brian turned and went down the fields again to the cows. Later, he got his penny from the hide man.
‘You were twitching in your sleep again,’ Julia said drowsily.
‘Was I?’ Brian stretched and yawned. ‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly eight.’ Julia looked from her watch to the window. She groaned. It was a sharp clear morning. Touring time.
Edward was already in the kitchen preparing breakfast. He cast her a shy smile and waited for her to greet him first. ‘What sort of cereal does Sam like?’ he asked.
‘Oh, he eats anything. Anything at all. What have you got?’
Edward checked the cupboards; rows of unopened, newly purchased cereal boxes filled the shelves. A solitary rusted tin of tuna competed for space. ‘Everything,’ Edward said. ‘I like cereal.’
Julia stood and pretended to study the cereals. She lifted them out and frowned. ‘This one, I think,’ she said, putting the Rice Krispies on the table.
‘I like those too,’ Edward said, pleased. She had chosen the only opened box.
She studied him from the corner of her eye as he made toast, buttering the slices with the seriousness he seemed to accord to everything. He had the same colouring as Brian, dark with blue eyes, but there the resemblance ended. Edward was tall and concave. His shoulder blades stood out, his stomach and back appeared almost as one, as if a ladle had scooped out the centre of him. His hands were white and very long; the flat-topped fingers flexed constantly, moving in and out like the delicate tentacles of a sea anemone. He wore black-rimmed, round spectacles, behind which his eyes sustained long-lashed nervous blinks for seconds at a time. Sometimes, he reminded her of a slender shaving of Brian.
Sam was about to say he hated Rice Krispies when she silenced him with a look. He finished his bowl obligingly and leaped up for the dreaded tour. Brian was doing his older brother hearty act – she pinched her nose and forced an enthusiastic smile on to her lips.
They headed off in Edward’s small hatchback so that Brian could check the engine out. He knew as much about engines as Julia knew about the sexual proclivities of greenfly, but that was not the point. She had often observed how Brian’s family used material goods like trophies, so that they might praise one another indirectly. It was not the done thing to say ‘you look good’ or ‘you must be doing well to afford such a big house’, instead engines or brickwork or employment contracts were studied with great seriousness and sagacious noddings so that the nodder might take an active part in the acquisition, in the success. Thus, Edward’s car was pronounced a ‘right little runner’, the perfect vehicle for the single man. Julia could see Edward visibly swell. He was seated in front with Brian driving. She had elected to sit in the back with Sam for reasons of her own.
Sam was in one of his dreams. His brown eyes stared out of the window in glazed fascination. She wished that she could tap his head open like an egg and crawl inside for a look around. When he inhabited his own little world like that she felt excluded. And she had to hold her breath sometimes to stop herself from clumsily treading with heavy footfalls into his own private space. It was difficult standing back observing. She was aware that she allowed him a leeway, a licence she could never countenance with her husband. But even at that, she still had to hold herself mentally back at times so that Sam might breathe, so that he might blossom into himself. The temptation to nip and tuck, to prune, was overwhelming.
Brian, or so it seemed to Julia, required nothing of or from Sam save that he be there; she, on the other hand, felt a profound sadness that she seemed to require not less than everything for the same reason.
There would not be another. Her womb had been in trouble even before Sam. She lived under a constant threat that the men in white coats would one day, and one day soon, whip it out to fling the empty redundant sac on to a waiting platter. She hated the idea of that barren space they would leave inside her.
Julia allowed her eyes to stray from Sam. Outside, a fretwork of colours drifted by. The fields to the right were irregular in shape and hue. They were not only green, she observed, but russet and brown and occasionally black. They stretched out over a gentle incline. Dark copses of trees clustered around gleaming homesteads: this was anglicized country. Neat, symmetrical, an undulating version of Surrey or Sussex. To the left, the land flattened and stretched, the unhurried waters of the Blackwater river carved a python conduit through the unusually prostrate landscape. The car followed the curves of the river, passing through rich, fertile farm country. They drove past mature escarpments of trees on the right bank, where large grey-flagged houses with unmistakably English bay windows looked out across the valley below. Houses accessed by long avenues of rhododendrons interspersed with gaunt Scots pines, their lower branches amputated or simply worn away by time. It was a solid landscape. Aged and sure of itself like an old Italian painting. Julia sighed with contentment. She was reminded of her home in Hampshire.
‘Da-ad, tell me about the school again …’ Sam was pleading.
‘Sam, you don’t want to know, believe me,’ Edward laughed over his shoulder.
‘Go on,’ Sam urged.
Brian laughed. Julia could envisage his stretch. She clamped her lips together.
‘Well, what do you want to know?’ Brian was saying. ‘That it was a two-mile walk with one room and one teacher who was a sadist?’
Edward threw his head back and guffawed.
‘What’s a sadist?’ Sam asked.
‘A person who enjoys inflicting pain on others.’
‘Oh, that was old C-C-Cotter, for sure,’ Edward said.
‘Tell me about the day he beat you so bad, Dad – you know, the day you had to go to the hospital for the stitches.’
Julia’s ears pricked; she had not heard that story before. She saw Edward’s shoulders stiffen. ‘T-t-that wasn’t –’ he began but Brian cut across him.
‘You’re turning into a right ghoul, Sam,’ he said.
‘What’s a –’
‘Sliced my ear open and half the side of my head that day he did,’ Brian continued, ‘with that bloody strap of his. I think the buckle caught me. It could have been my eye, mind you.’
‘He hit you with …’ Julia tried to access the conversation but Edward was guffawing again.
‘Remember the rasher rinds?’ He nudged Brian’s arm and pulled an imaginary length of rind from his mouth. ‘Hoy, you lad, put that in the trash …’
The way they were nestling their backsides into their seats augured a long trip down memory lane. Julia had no desire to accompany them. Then her gaze softened. Sam’s eyes shone, he wanted to take it all in, the child laying claim to the adult’s past. Quite understandable really.