Chapter 16 #3
He talks to her as he works. Explains each stage, like she asked. “The blue tip is the hottest part of the flame,” he tells her, as he adjusts it, “but we just want to gently warm the metal, so I’m using a more bushy, yellow flame.”
“A fox-tail flame,” she says, and he nods.
He tries to make his tone normal, workaday, but he can’t help feeling as though his explanations are an odd form of seduction.
As though there is an intimacy in her asking him to share these things with her.
She is attentive, occasionally asking questions, but mostly she listens, and at some point, Orla and the blanket and the legs beneath leave the radiator and come to sit beside him on the wooden swivel chair that he’d brought over from Cian’s when he first moved in.
“Annealing softens the metal,” he tells her, his voice lower now she’s closer, leaning in over his work.
“Do you see the rainbow it makes?” He quenches the hot metal in cold water, drops it into the pickle solution to bring out its shine, files the edges smooth.
His actions are repetitive, reassuring, predictable.
Soften, bend, sculpt, hammer, smooth, rub, cool toward hardness again. Repeat.
It’s grown dark outside by the time he has polished the piece to a gleam, smoothed its edges, attached crimps to the back to hold the chain in place.
He hands the finished necklace to her, but rather than reaching for it, she moves her hair aside.
He goes to stand behind her and lowers the chain down in front of her face, onto her neck.
He sees the fine downy hair that continues beneath her hairline, the bony nodule at the nape of the neck exaggerated by her lowered head.
He tries to fasten the necklace without touching her skin, but he is sausage-fingered and nearly drops one side of the chain.
He hears the sound of his own breath as he focuses on catching the jump ring on the clasp’s open arm.
“There,” he says when he finally does, the word coming out like a sigh of relief.
She spins the chair a slow half-turn to face him, one foot down on the wooden floor, one leg exposed from the blanket.
She feels for the front of the necklace, runs her fingers across the hammered curve of it, then lets it fall gently back into place, just below the pit of her neck, exactly where he’d intended it to rest. “Thank you. It’s lovely,” she says, and the dimple appears.
He is not sure where the evening should go when she already has her trousers off and he’s made her this piece of jewelry. But either way, he senses an expectation. From her. From himself. From the situation.
He excuses himself and walks down the corridor to the loos.
He places a hand on either side of the basin and looks at his reflection in the mirror.
He is not unattractive, he knows that. But somehow, he lacks the confidence he feels should go with this face.
It’s as though it belongs to someone other than him and he feels sure another man would wear it better.
Holding their jaw strong where he carries it weakly.
Maintaining eye contact where he lets it drop.
He washes his hands, more for something to do than out of need.
He feels the soft warmth of the water on his skin, the foamy slick of soap between his palms. It’s easier to focus on these things than the girl who is sitting half dressed in his studio, waiting for him to return.
When he finally turns off the water and looks at himself again, his thoughts are clearer.
He likes working here. He likes the new easiness he feels within this community of artists.
He likes Orla. But to preserve it, he must shut down whatever it is that’s been unfolding between them.
There are things about himself—his family—that feel too hard to reveal.
When he enters his studio again, her back is to him. The blanket has been abandoned on the swivel chair and she is standing at the window. He lifts his eyes and sees her reflection watching him in the black of the windowpanes.
He goes to the radiator just to her left and takes her jeans from it. They are crispy and stiff, so he gently shakes them out, trying to encourage air and softness into them, and then he hands them to her. “They seem dry enough to put on now.”
He registers her surprise and his insides contract with the realization he’s hurt her.
They both look away, but not before he sees her cheeks flush from white to red, so quick, it is as though someone has slapped her.
He feels her embarrassment as she slides her feet into the cardboard legs of her jeans.
He hears it in the curt zip of the fly. In her quick, barefooted exit from the room.
In the friction of her saw down the hall, cutting through wood, and the long yawn of the night.
And he is sorry. Sorry as he sits at his desk, motionless except for the tips of his fingers, which aimlessly push the discarded chips of silver and gold around on the desktop.
But he feels sure it must be better this way.
When dawn comes, Sílbhe stands at the window.
The fields beyond the garden look lush, but she can see from the shallow pool on the flagstones that they will be waterlogged and she’s likely to twist an ankle, or worse, if she heads out for her run.
She lets the curtain fall closed and climbs back into bed.
Cian stretches out an arm. “I like it when you stay home with me,” he says, and she allows herself to be pulled into the warmth of his body, knowing Julian is not in the room next door to hear and that Maia is up in the loft they converted last year.
She never wishes them away, but still, she is grateful for these fleeting moments when she and Cian find themselves alone.
It has been six years, but their romance still feels new.
Later, Cian puts on his slippers and goes through to the kitchen. He brings back a pot of tea, a plate of toast and honey. Sílbhe rests back against his chest as they eat, and they laugh at the quiet decadence of covering the duvet in crumbs and the luxury of having found a home in one another.
Upstairs, in the attic, Maia sits in bed with her laptop on her knees.
She is seven years off her mother’s age when she died.
And it is only recently, after something Jules said, that she’s felt an urgency to fill her life with the things her mother could not.
She doesn’t mean traveling the world or bungee jumping from planes, but the small everyday things her mother never got to experience.
Maia is a favorite at Doyle’s, but lately she’s felt her life slipping away, realizing she’s watched children of twelve or thirteen age and become mothers themselves, pushing a pram through the door with their mothers, now grandmothers, beside them.
And while their lives have changed and evolved, shuffling roles between the generations, Maia’s has stayed the same.
In early spring, Maia began getting off the bus a few stops early.
Stepping down onto the gray tarmac and watching the retreating vehicle become a dot on the landscape before she started to walk.
Craving putting one foot in front of the other and the space to think that offered.
She found herself noticing the blackbird’s courting dance, the glossy yellow flowers carpeting the steep banks beside the bridge, the wash of tiny blooms appearing in the fields to either side of the road; things her grandmother had always pointed out, but somehow Maia had never really seen.
Yet their names came to her then. Cowslip.
Dog violet. Star of Bethlehem. She’d bent down, the weight of her bag unsteadying her as she studied its white-green petals nestled amongst the lush grass.
That evening, hunting through a cupboard for cotton buds, she’d caught sight of the small bottle of Rescue Remedy she’d once carried in her school blazer.
She unscrewed the lid, inhaled the rich scent of preserving alcohol.
Her grandmother had given it to her soon after they’d arrived from England.
“Just four drops whenever you’re having a bit of a wobble and it’ll calm your nerves,” she’d said.
And somehow, whenever she was away from Sílbhe’s side, the gentle burn of those droplets hitting her tongue offered all the comfort of a St. Christopher.
In the bathroom, she turned the bottle to read the short list of ingredients: Rock Rose, Clematis, Impatiens, Cherry Plum, Star of Bethlehem.
Star of Bethlehem. The name giving rise to the odd sensation that comes when something rarely thought of appears, and then reappears, in quick succession.
As though the universe is pulling at your sleeve, telling you it’s significant.
She’d searched the internet, following links like bread crumbs through a forest. From Bach Flower Remedies, to homeopathy; from headlines claiming placebo, to articles explaining its theory; from local practitioners, to four-year training courses…
The following day, when the driver set her down by the side of the road, she walked until she came alongside a patch of grass dotted with Star of Bethlehem.
She bent, brushed her palms across its petals, hoping for a sign.
From the universe. From her mum. But there was nothing, just her own self-consciousness.
She stood and gazed across the landscape.
Vast in its openness; small in its familiarity.
She didn’t crave a big life…but she wondered if, within the confines of what felt safe—her grandmother, this terrain, Ireland—she might crack open the door on something new.
Now, upstairs in the attic, she checks her email and watches as unread messages cascade onto the screen.
Most are sales emails she never signed up to, a few Facebook notifications, but in amongst them is the one she’s been waiting for.
The one she’d been told she could expect around the tenth.
She hovers the cursor over it, and then clicks it open.
Dear Maia,
We’re delighted to confirm that you’ve been successful in your late application to join this year’s cohort at the Irish School of Homeopathy, where you’ll begin your first year of study toward becoming a qualified homeopath…
When she’s read the email and scrolled through the pages of attachments, she puts the laptop aside, gets out of bed, and stands in the dormer window.
She scans the landscape, letting her eyes settle on the wavering line where blue-gray meets green.
And even though floodwater stands in the fields all around her, for the first time, she feels as though she’s ready to go somewhere.