Perching.

Yes.

Where exactly was I heading with this?

The photographs … the suspicion … the explosion … the binoculars … Miss Hahn’s arrival on the porch, her cheeks flaming. Some discussion about the gypsy woman. Then that confounded child – Orla. Miss Hahn gets a special look on her face whenever she talks about the child. Sort of stricken. What’s behind that look? Confusion? Guilt? Helplessness? Terror?

And then suddenly I recollect a photo of Miss Hahn crawling through some blackthorn wearing exactly that look. In this little beret. Adorable in this little beret – red, I presume. In the foreground is Father Hugh (né Pietr) Tierney being crowned by the child, Orla, with a small daisy chain. The child’s expression is radiant. Then I recall another, later, photograph in the same set, where all three of them are sitting on the grass, but now they are four. Bran Cleary has joined them. He’s wearing a smock covered in paint. I suppose I should say five. Five of them, because Kim is there too, behind the camera. And in this picture another daisy chain is being made. Miss Hahn is making it. I try to remember whether Father Hugh …?

Miss Hahn is telling me about … meanwhile … Miss Hahn is talking about the sculptor, Jacob Epstein, who once lived for a period of time in the local area.

I’ve already mentioned the tunnelling to her, obviously. Then I refer, elliptically, to the photo. I stand up to go and fetch it, and as I do so, it dawns on me that the photos must have been numbered – collated – in the wrong order. Because in the second photograph, Father Hugh isn’t wearing his daisy-chain crown …

Unless, of course, he’s removed it and the child is stringing yet another …

Or …

I stand up to go and fetch the photo. I need to see whether … Is it possible that Miss Hahn wasn’t alone in that tunnel? Is it possible that following up close behind her was … who else? Bran Cleary?! That they had been … been … somewhere – beyond the blackthorn – alone, together? Kimberly was always very strict about keeping the photographs in a particular order.

Very strict. Each one numbered on the back: 01, 02, 03 … 30 … 134 …

I suddenly sit down again. I pick up my knitting. Miss Hahn starts to interrogate me about the tunnelling photo. She demands to see it. From an earlier position of apparent indifference, now she’s very keen, almost hectoring.

And me? Oh, I am overwhelmed by the desire to give her what she wants because, well, I love Miss Hahn. I am in love with her! Yes! Yes! The same way a sentence can be in-coherent or a person in-fected. With a virus. It’s so obvious, isn’t it? But how awful, eh?! How maddening! Ever since I first laid … from the very … even …

But I am equally overwhelmed by the need to stop her/it – to stop this in love – at all costs. This pointless, inappropriate, unreciprocated ‘in love’. I must deny her/it. But to deny Miss Hahn always seems to spark something within her. A special fire starts to burn deep, deep within the glacier. So I deny her. And I suppose, at some level, I have always denied her. Because … Why is that, exactly? I wonder.