“Who knows?” she answers in reply to his unasked question, toeing her Singer, which was moved out of harm’s way, under the table, for lunch. “It doesn’t mean anything.” Ted steps forward to lift the sewing machine for her. The conversation closes, irredeemable, abruptly sheeted as her face.

30. “A Birthday Present”

CHAPTER THIRTY

“A Birthday Present”

DECEMBER 22, 1962

LONDON

Like another lifetime: she turns the packages, the cold mysteries, in her hands, like an amnesiac. Thick papered, irregular, tied with string. Purchased yesterday, and yet the butcher’s wrap, the twine and waxed twists present themselves as unidentifiable, as if conjured from another lifetime. No great riddle, really—bones, buttons: her marketing, notions, baubles for Christmas. Several of the housewares she’d already opened and used: the yardage, the black floor paint. The rest languished a day on the kitchen table while she painted and sewed and took breaks only to make pancakes for Frieda and Nick, clearing goods then from the table to the drain board, leaving them heaped on the windowsill overnight. Utterly unlike her. She’s exhausted, tired to her marrow; black eyed with another night beyond sleep, visionary with the glaze of insomnia, and the children would be waking soon. A can of coffee, a jar of molasses, cinnamon and cloves, a vial of anise oil. A packet of sugar shifting like sand. Eggs and butter—

—Irish brown bread, fresh butter and eggs. The previous night’s milking skimmed that September morning, and the butter just churned. Breakfast waited on the table, a solid, handsome thing carpentered by a boatwright, like all the furniture in the cottage. Their host had stoked the hearth on his way out to check his boats at the pier, the blue smoke of the turf fire blowing inland over the cottage on its drumlin, away from the village and its few houses huddled about the harbor on Cleggan Bay. They were staying on the coast of Connemara, west of Galway, with a poet acquaintance from the London awards circuit, a fisherman who had invited them to sail in return for their good company. She had gone with Ted for a week without the children to part the dolorous veils of their recent life, for the transparent Atlantic air to sweep away the impurities that had poisoned their marriage. To renew it, if they could—or that was her hope.

Her string of flattening illnesses since July and the racking movement toward a trial separation had prompted the hastily organized trip; after their recuperative week in Ireland, Ted was of a mind to remand to Spain for six months. She had been too apprehensive to ask outright if he was going alone, and Ted had not offered details. Caught between resistance and crediting any kind of progress, she has imagined him in the landscape where they honeymooned, hoping, somehow, that the potency of those memories would reach him, even if Assia were there.