Chapter 12
Julian
It’s a long time since Sílbhe last visited Cian’s studio.
As she walks around the side of the house, it is exactly as she remembers, but she is suddenly self-conscious, aware of the intervening years and how visibly aged she has been by the loss of Cora.
Even though she feels younger in many ways, cast back to a different stage of life by second parenthood.
He opens the door. Sílbhe had forgotten he would be older too. She finds his kindness and warmth etched more deeply on his face, bracketing either side of his mouth.
“I’m sorry to have left it so long,” she tells him.
“No, no. Don’t be daft,” he says. “You’ve been busy. I understand. Come in, come in,” and then he pauses, an edge of nerves showing through. “Or would you rather go over to the house? Where would you prefer?”
“No, here’s grand,” she says.
He makes them tea and they sit around his workbench, her raincoat still on, the tungsten glow of a desk lamp dazzling her.
He switches it off, leaving just the overhead lights.
“Sorry, it’s a bit much. The eyesight’s not what it was.
” He smiles sheepishly. “What brings you here, anyway—or is it just social?” He tilts his head, smiles; an open door letting her know that would be welcome. She feels guilty it’s not.
“Well, social. But I wasn’t sure if you might be able to help me with something.”
“Oh, sure, go on,” Cian says.
“It’s my grandson, Julian.”
“He’s doing all right?”
“Yes, yes, he’s good. He’s like you—likes to use his hands.
Art, woodwork, metalwork. That kind of thing.
” He waits for her to say more. “But he’s—I don’t know, he’s not like the other boys.
He gets along. He’s not bullied especially.
But he’s different.” She pauses, because it feels too much to explain how his past has affected him; to admit that her impression is that he experiences life in grayscale, rather than allowing himself to become immersed in all its colors.
That there’s a flatness about him. Instead, she says, “Maybe it’s spending so much time around his gran, but he’s better with adults. ”
“Understandable,” Cian says.
“I tried to enroll him on a course. At the Adult Ed. He wants to do silversmithing. But he’s fourteen; they say the insurance won’t cover him.”
“So, you want me to teach him here?”
“I wouldn’t have asked, but when I saw that you were the course tutor, I thought—”
Cian can see she’s embarrassed, knows she’s uncomfortable to be asking something of him after all this time. It can’t have been easy, turning her life upside down like that. For two children she’d barely had any contact with.
He nods. That’s all she needs to know he’ll do it. And he doesn’t want her to have to say thank you, to feel indebted, so he changes the subject. “And Maia? That’s her name, isn’t it? How old is she now? She must be twenty-one, maybe?”
“Twenty-three,” Sílbhe says. “I used to worry she’d leave, go back to England, but not so much now.
She’s a homebody, not really interested in socializing or boys.
She helps out with the little ones at her old ballet class once a week.
Just pin money, really,” she admits. “Her real job’s at Doyle’s down in the town. ”
“The sandwich bar?”
“That’s it. She’s a bright girl—all As in school—she could have done more. But it changes your perspective. I just want them to be happy. Or content, at least.”
“Are you?”
“Am I?”
“Content?” he says.
“Me?” She laughs, surprised by the frankness of his question.
“I don’t know that I’ve stopped to think about it.
” They sit in silence as the water spills down the guttering outside.
“I feel,” she says finally, “as though I have a purpose. And I guess there’s a contentment in that.
Of knowing who I am, what I’m meant to be doing on this earth. What about you, Cian Brennan?”
“Oh, I’m right enough,” he says, looking around his workshop. And he is. When he’s working. When the hours are absorbed in shaping metal. But he’s also lonely. He feels like time is passing him by. Like he’s missed something. He thinks maybe they both sense this, but she doesn’t press him further.
“Will I bring him here then?”
“An evening, or on the weekend. Whatever works best.”
“A Tuesday?” she asks.
He nods. “I’ll look forward to it.”
“And about payment—”
He raises his hand. “It’ll be good craic. No need for that.”
She’d known he would say this and is already thinking through how she might compensate him. Wine, whiskey, a book voucher. She knew these things about him once, the things he might like, and hopes he still does.
From the first time his grandmother drops him off at the studio and he crunches across the gravel and sees the workshop through the window, Julian has a sense of being set alight. His mind whirs with possibility that lies well beyond his current skills.
When Cian teaches at the Adult Ed, he starts with a set project.
Something that introduces the basics and brings an easily won feeling of achievement.
But a few weeks in, he recognizes Julian’s frustration and says, “Okay, draw whatever it is you want to make. List out the details, and we’ll have you learning on the job instead. ”
All week at school, Julian fills the margins of his exercise book with sketches.
He finds it hard to narrow things down. He wants to make everything.
But, eventually, he settles on two free-hanging sweet chestnut leaves.
The larger in silver, the smaller nested above it in gold.
At first, he draws in all the detail—the veins and venules on display like a diagram in his biology textbook.
But later, he imagines this piece sitting against someone’s skin, and strips it back, retaining only the long, thin outline of the leaf and its central vein.
He knows instinctively this is closer to the jewelry he wants to make.
Lying in bed, he realizes he doesn’t want the precious metals to be highly polished like the brooches and necklaces his grandmother’s friends wear.
Instead, he wants them matte, with a slight texture to them, like the surface of watercolor paper.
He turns on the bedside light and adds this to his notes and sketches, and when he lies down again, his whole body seems to thrum, as though he is too alive, too charged, too vibrant, for sleep.
That old wavery feeling inside given a new form; instead of worry and loneliness, sometimes—now—it’s also excitement.
When he describes the piece, Cian listens and then studies Julian’s plans and says, “It’s contemporary, for sure, mixing metals how you have.
I like it.” The boy has a clear vision for what he wants, and Cian remembers having that same certainty when he started out.
He feels a flicker of the old anticipation as he goes over to the shelf and pulls down some materials.
Over the next few weeks, they heat and cool, bend and turn, solder and hammer, weld and sand.
In an English lesson, Julian’s teacher shares a Sylvia Plath poem—“Morning Song”—and the opening line circles his head like the catchy lyric of a pop song.
He can almost feel his insides ticking along like the fat gold watch when he thinks of being in the studio, with the tools in his hands, making something out of nothing; Cian suggesting he change the angle or switch to a file with a finer cut, seeing the difference it makes; a task that moments earlier had felt full of friction, suddenly tameable.
He feels dizzy with it. This—silversmithing—this is love, he thinks. It has set him going.
Julian’s sessions with Cian start to overrun. He goes over to the main house and rings his grandmother to ask if he can stay later.
“Back in time for dinner, though,” she says.
“Okay. Cian offered to drop me home. You won’t have to come out.”
“Have you said thank you?”
He doesn’t answer and instead says, “Will I ask him to stay for supper?”
“Oh…okay then,” she says, embarrassed she hadn’t thought of it, already mentally sorting through the vegetable drawer in the fridge, reworking what she’d planned to make when it was just the three of them.
That was how it was, that first time. A casual invitation that paved the way toward merging their lives, for there being one extra person around the table on Tuesdays, and then the odd Saturday.
Later Sunday lunch and Christmas dinner, because why not?
There was enough to spare, and he’d only be sitting at home alone.
For Cian, Sílbhe and her grandchildren are like a slug of whiskey making his insides burn with the sharp pleasure of human contact.
Of being invited in from the cold. And for Sílbhe, she feels the regret of not having done this earlier, of having wasted time, because she can see how good his presence is for the children.
Having another adult to rely on. Initially, Maia was wary, but she’s warmed to him.
And both begin to ask things of him—a lift into town, help putting the chain back onto a bicycle—sensing they can, and that he’ll say yes.
One evening, Cian picks Maia up from work in a snowfall.
It’s years since he’s seen the white so heavy.
“I wasn’t sure if the buses would still be running,” he says as he pops the passenger door for her, “and I was in town anyway.” She doesn’t need to know he set his work to one side, shutting up the studio early once he’d heard the forecast on the radio.
The heater blows warm air around the car and fat flakes dance above the windscreen, before flattening themselves against the glass. Maia feels warmth, right to the core of her. “Thanks,” she says. “This is great.”