Edward drove hunched over the wheel, emitting grunts and sighs as he made his way through the city traffic, peering over the dashboard to see if he was in the right lane. Patricia felt it was unwise, unsafe even, to distract him with any of her prepared small talk. Once past Bishopstown, however, as the houses gave way to fields he seemed to relax and sat back in his seat. Patricia tried out some of her questions.
‘Are you busy on the farm at the moment?’
‘So-so.’
‘Are you near a village?’
‘Not really. Muirinish, but there’s nothing there.’
Patricia closed her eyes and breathed as deeply as she dared. She ran through the rest of her questions in her head and accepted that every answer would be a variation on ‘no’。
‘Are you not cold?’
Edward had spoken. The shock of it meant that she hadn’t actually heard what he had said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Your window. Are you not a bit cold?’
‘Oh. Well, I might close it a little. I like the fresh air.’ She wound the window up two thirds, almost excited that he had actually engaged in some sort of conversation. ‘Are you cold?’ she asked.
‘No.’
They drove on with nothing but the steady growl of the engine filling the emptiness.
The jolt of a pothole woke her. How long had she been asleep? The bright winter light of earlier had gone and now the hedges blurring past were being swallowed by a grey gloom. She sat up and discovered a long string of saliva connecting her mouth to a dark stain on the front of her coat. She quickly wiped it away. Edward glanced at her and smiled. It was nothing, but to the starving, crumbs can feel like a feast. Patricia smiled back. ‘Sorry. I had an early start. Was I asleep for long?’
‘A while all right. You missed Bandon and Timoleague. It’s not far now.’
‘Oh, right.’ Patricia wondered how she could surreptitiously reapply her lipstick before she met his mother.
‘That was my primary school there.’ He indicated a slate-roofed box with long windows. Patricia peered out as if her guide had announced the Arc de Triomphe or the Spanish Steps. She struggled to come up with an appropriate response, even a ‘nice’ seemed disingenuous, so instead asked where he had gone to secondary school.
‘Clonteer, but I only did a few years before my brother James died and I went onto the farm full time.’
Death. How had her small talk taken her to death so fast?
‘Oh. That’s a shame.’ It was unclear even to herself if she meant the untimely passing of his brother or his truncated education.
‘Ah, it was all right. I wasn’t much of a one for school.’
The car came down a hill through some trees and then rounded a corner onto a narrow causeway. On either side of the road misshapen mounds of grass and reeds sat like giant mushrooms in a network of muddy channels.
‘It’s low tide,’ Edward observed.
Having got used to the smell inside the car, Patricia was now accosted by a salty sulphuric fog from outside.
‘You might want to close your window,’ he said as she quickly rolled it all the way up. ‘It’s not always this bad,’ he added apologetically.
The road rose up slightly over a small bridge where the channel through the marsh was wider.
‘This is where old Pat Whelan went in. Drunk as a lord, riding his bike back from the pub.’ Edward gave a low chuckle and Patricia was very happy to join in.
‘Was he all right?’
‘No. Never found. They did find the bike at low tide but no sign of Pat. The mud just swallows things up. We’ve lost a couple of cows over the years.’
‘I see.’ Patricia wasn’t sure how to respond so just stared out the window at the wide flatness of the marsh, imagining the horrors that lay beneath the smooth dark sheen of the mud.
Ahead of them was the reassuring solidity of hedges and trees. As they reached them Edward spoke again.
‘This is where the good land starts. That’s all grazing in there.’ He pointed to his right and Patricia’s eyes followed dutifully though in fact she had no idea what she was looking at. The car slowed down.
‘Here we are.’
They went through a pair of unpainted stone pillars and up a lane with a long thick Mohawk of green down the centre. At the top of the hill, Patricia gasped. It was the sea! Just a field away was a long sandy beach. At either end the land reared up into tall dark cliffs. Backing onto the rocks furthest away from them was a large white and blue farmhouse and behind that the jagged silhouette of a ruined castle.