‘Are you joking?’ Niall eyed her from behind a giant wedge of apple pie. ‘No, Mum, I’m good here. I’ll keep an eye on Gran for you,’ he said before swallowing a large mouthful of pie.
‘You’ll get your death of cold out there,’ Jo said gently.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll just go to the wall opposite, breathe in the fresh air. We don’t get much of that in A&E. I’m not going to waste it now we’re here…’ Lucy knew she needed to feel Ballycove wrap itself around her and feel as if she really was home at last. ‘Wuss,’ she murmured at Dora who only dug deeper into the shaggy pile rug before the fireplace. ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes,’ she said then, putting Jo off coming with her. They both knew her asthma didn’t need a shower of rain to start it up again.
Outside, she pulled the door firmly shut behind her. The wind was biting cold and the rain, easing slightly, still felt like prickling stab wounds when it managed to infiltrate any area not covered by the oilskins. She made her way across the empty road, stood at the thick wall for a moment, looking down at the angry water beneath. She picked her way past the boats docked in preparation for the storm. The noise down here was orchestral, the wind and rain fighting against the harsh sea with a backdrop of clanging chains – they combined in an eerie endless symphony. This was what she needed. Why on earth hadn’t she realised it sooner?
She turned reluctantly back towards the cottage as the rain whipped about her, as if scurrying from all sides to toss her off balance. Making her way back across the road once more, she was struck again by her mother’s appearance at the sitting room window. When had she grown so fragile? Her mother had always been a robust woman, but here, with the light on her outline, there was no mistaking that her mother’s presence owed as much to legacy and more to bulky clothing than it did to any real weighty flesh upon her bones.
A strange, terrible recognition occurred to Lucy, only heightening as she passed by the photograph taken of them both a year earlier on the hall table. Her mother was not well. Lucy had seen that look too many times for it to dupe her now. Above all the shock waves that flooded her body, she wondered, a little absently, if her mother realised that she had silently taken a step on a journey that would entail months of treatment – if they were lucky enough to catch it in time.
3
Jo
Jo had never liked Jack Nolan. Not from the very first day Lucy had brought him home to the cottage. Maybe even before that, she had a feeling that he would not be good for her daughter. From the start she knew he couldn’t be trusted. He was far too good-looking for his own good or anyone else’s and he knew it; a womaniser, it was in his bones.
In the beginning, she’d hoped this thing – whatever it was between them – would fizzle out once they had each immersed themselves in the heavy schedules of being house doctors in a busy hospital. Then, Lucy told her that she was pregnant with Niall and that was that. It was too late to say a word against him and Jo simply had to bite her tongue. Of course Lucy knew it was an unspoken shadow in the corner of their relationship for years. Neither of them wanted to open it up and when the marriage broke down, they both knew that Jo had been heartbroken for her daughter. Regardless of what she thought of Jack, she’d never wanted to see Lucy or Niall hurt that badly.
And yet, Jo still felt it lingered between them. It wasn’t an argument or even regret – more a narrow apprehension that might detonate at some point and it meant that for years she’d guarded her words carefully. So, although Lucy only lived three hours away, sometimes it felt as if she’d moved to a different world. They’d drifted apart in some indefinable way; not that they didn’t speak every other day, rather, they didn’t talk to each other as they had before and Jo missed this dearly.
Three curlews circling stridently above her head brought her thoughts back from things she wished she could change. God, she loved this place. She loved everything about coming down here to swim when darkness closed in on her and freed her from the cumbersome truth of her age and aches and the gnawing certainty that time was running out. She loved the godliness of it all, which was strange, because she’d never been a religious person. Perhaps it was the sense of how completely irrelevant all her fears were in the face of the utter vastness of the sea and sky around her. She loved the silence and the roar of the ocean, the velvet sky and the inky water. Mostly she loved the fact that it made her feel alive in a way that nothing else could. She even loved the biting cold that ate through her skin and into the very marrow of her bones – in some absurd way, it warmed her from the inside out, as if it lit some fire that would never be extinguished.