I turned to say something to Miss Hahn at this point. I think I had been intending to ask her if she might help me search for a jotter in the bedroom; my suitcase was pushed under the bed and I couldn’t bend over to … and if Mrs Meadows could put on the kettle and cut into that delicious-seeming … this was all complete hokum. I just wanted to get Miss Hahn on her own so that I might apologize for my former – my previous – but Miss Hahn was gone. Miss Hahn had vanished. Miss Hahn had left the room – the cottage. Without my even …

And I … this feeling of complete devastation! This shattered feeling. As if I had been blown into a thousand, tiny pieces and those pieces were floating about the room and getting lost under heavy furniture and … and only Miss Hahn had the adhesive. Only Miss Hahn had the glue.

I simply couldn’t leave things as they were. I grabbed Mrs Meadows by the hand and said, ‘Miss Hahn has gone! But you must run after her with … with …’ I quickly improvised: ‘with some cake! Miss Hahn adores cake … Or … or …’ My eyes looked frantically around the room … some kind of … some kind of gesture … some kind of … of keepsake … just by way of an … to apologize. To apologize. As a small sign. Of my great … my esteem. My great, my enduring esteem. For her. For the woman who had single-handedly borne … For Miss Hahn. Who had … who had brought us all together and then had quietly slipped away again. Without so much as a … without seemingly even … without …

44

Miss Carla Hahn

I was standing on the roof of the old Look Out. I was standing there because it was completely exposed. You could see for miles around, and you could be seen from miles around. It was a place where you might simply become a part of the landscape. Like the flickering needle on a huge, earthly compass. I was offering myself up, for Orla, finding significance through insignificance. And I was determined not to cry again. If I stood here for long enough, then the urge to weep would eventually pass. The urge to mourn, too. And the urge to feel. I might even bundle them all together, somehow (these pointless emotions) – like a stack of firewood – and offer them up, en masse (where’s the lighter? Out of fuel? That’s just fine. A match’ll do).

So this is where I was (yielding to precisely these kinds of ludicrously self-pitying thoughts) when Mrs Meadows found me (well, I was quite hard to miss, I suppose). Mrs Meadows was somewhat out of breath. Her footwear (a cream court shoe) wasn’t entirely appropriate for the rough, rubble-strewn terrain, and utterly unsuitable for scrabbling across the temporary plank-and-corrugated-iron bridge which currently divided us. So she stopped at the other side, called out and waved.