‘But, Birdie, there wasn’t a word out of him. Not a word.’

Not till they were back in the camp and starting on the whiskey and the tea sweetening their tongues.

‘I wish I could tell you more,’ says Hughie, ‘but I can’t. Not a word.’

2

THE GUARDS FILLED IN a few more details for her. The morning Gussie left the hospital, they said, he hitched a lift across the city to Salthill where he picked up the keys of an Opel Vectra. The property of Enda O’Driscoll, a beardy, blunt countryman who taught woodwork in a Galway vocational school, and who was happy to help an old schoolmate who was going through a bit of a rough patch. He had told Gussie on the phone the previous Monday that he could have the car for the two weeks, since he was going on holidays to the south of France on the following Saturday. He could pick up the keys that morning. Gussie reassured him that he would only need the car for a week. He intended finding another teaching job. And this time he believed that the loyalty of certain political friends of his father would pull strings.

Well, that was a consolation. To know he was back to himself. And they said that he was also intent on visiting Birdie. He was coming to her and he was going to bring her flowers or something. They said that. The O’Driscoll fellow claimed he spoke to him about it. About where to get flowers. But Birdie doesn’t know what to believe sometimes. It can’t all be true.

It was the stillness of the chestnut trees that morning which seemed to be holding up the sky. And it was a strange sky. Hughie said something like that.

A windless, grey stillness above the lake that was so potent, even the cry of the curlew conveyed the agony of Christ on His cross. The low ceiling of cloud, the colour of a mackerel’s belly. The weather was so personal, Hughie said, that he felt its presence almost unbearable. As if the sky was looking at him.

He bid Gussie farewell, and then blessed himself and walked back up the lane to his house. He kept the dog at the range all day, for fear anything bad would happen him out in the world. The full canopy of chestnut leaf had fallen to the cobbles of the laneway. He even played a few slow tunes on the flute to placate the possible wrath of a divinity whose mercurial powers were beyond Hughie’s intelligence, though not his instinct.

Poor Gussie. He was buoyant as he walked down the lane to the car. As if he had seen the light. As if it was a special day for him, to begin life again. Maybe it was the feeling of the steering wheel. The soft, rubbery leather. Or the smell of the car. That new car smell. Or maybe it was the airtight music of the CD player. But Gussie was in a bubble. A little bubble of his own happiness. That’s what she’d like to believe. That’s what Birdie would hope: that he was happy for once.