She moved inside the characters’ bodies. She spoke with their voices. When they died or were hurt in love it might as well have happened to her. By reading her father’s books she mourned for him. These were the pages he had turned and relished. The print and smell were his. A conjecture in the corner was written in his hand. A small pressed flower that had accompanied him through the pages, now followed her through Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, nestled at night amid Hardy’s poems, or peeped out from Crime and Punishment. It sat in the dark of Huckleberry Finn. When she lifted any new book in her life ahead it would fall open at that flower. It was the place where her father had lain down to die. Where the voice he had been listening to had stopped. It marked the place where the story was suspended. It marked the place where it would be taken up again.

18. The Greatest Man in Ballyconeely

18

The Greatest Man in Ballyconeely

“I hear it never grows back,” said Lizzie Summers. “The doctor told my mother that if it does you’ll always have a bald patch.”

“Is that so?” asked Catherine curtly. “Do you think, by any chance, that I might grow a new head?”

“That’s a dreadful thought,” laughed Sara.

She said to Sara that she did not want Lizzie Summers in the house. She barred her from her room.

“Well, of course, you have Mother, haven’t you, Cathy?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’m envious of how close you and Mother have grown,” Sara said thoughtfully.

“You can’t be serious.”

“Ye are in cahoots.”

“You’re only imagining things.”

Maisie Adams was now completely bedridden. She developed a flu that later in summer led to pneumonia. “Of all things, in summer to be like this,” was her cry. Bald-headed, Catherine spent most of her day in her mother’s room reading to her. It became hard for her to spend much time away from her mother’s side. Maisie Adams was often thrown into fits to get her breath. Her nose shone purple. Her cheeks were clustered with broken veins.

The firm face had cracked down the side.

“I am only a young woman,” she complained to her daughter.

In the end, to soothe her mother’s sleep, Catherine lay in the bed beside her, with the windows, even on the windiest nights, thrown open.