She stood grim-faced as black smoke worked its way through the dampers of the Blue Cormorant. The boat seemed to brace itself. The fishermen stood with averted eyes. Water pouring from its sides, the trawler pushed off, the tractor tyres were hauled in. The last thing she heard was Daley screaming something obscene.

30. Corrloch

30

Corrloch

When they arrived back from the sea, a taxi took Jack and all his belongings from Thady’s. The Adams’ house in Corrloch was empty. The door was unlocked. The remains of a breakfast were on the kitchen table. He lit fires in all the rooms, set out his work in Jonathan Adams’ old study, hung his clothes in a wardrobe in her room, then sat by the kitchen table running the possibilities of certain phrases through his mind. It was here that he looked into a chaos that he had glimpsed before only during the worst hangovers.

He got up immediately and hoovered the rooms. He made her bed. Washed the dishes.

He relit the fire in her room and in the kitchen. The anticipation of her arrival made him giddy, as if he were standing on a great height feeling lightheaded from vertigo. He began to pack scattered turf into a stack at the gable of the house.

He took out the clippers and trimmed the hedge of oleria. Went indoors and stoked the fires. He sat down to dream. Later he took down two pairs of her black shoes from the low ledge in the kitchen and began polishing them. He lifted her clothes that were strewn in a corner of her room. He collected her intimate garments that lay under the bed, and carried them to the kitchen sink and washed them. He hung them out to dry in the Atlantic wind.

He listened, as evening fell, for the sound of her car. He stood outside and searched the peninsula for the sight of the headlights coming.

A furious wind was blowing. Streams, dancing over stones, had turned into torrents. Blue blackness was raging in the heavy, ominous sky. He walked between the low ditches on the white sandy road. Cattle appeared and looked at him as they stood seeking shelter behind the gable of a ruin. The bark of a dog flew by. He turned down an old lane that took him eventually within the spray from the ocean. A smell of burning turf blew past, and then a smell of dung, a handful of bitter salt; a call from a bird he couldn’t place; and once a sort of overwhelming non-human presence raced across the dunes.

“I’m tipsy,” she said as she came through the door. She kissed him and sat down.

Jack placed her dinner in front of her and she pushed it away.

“I had an audition for a film,” she said.

She went out to the car and returned with a few bottles of Rioja. She poured out two glasses of wine.