Chapter 1
Pin Hill Island
Constance Macken
Pin Hill Island had always been a haven, not just for sea birds and undisrupted native species of everything from Irish hare to native Irish goat, but also for people.
Visitors to the island often remarked on the prettiness of the place.
In summer, the locals pushed the boat out with hanging baskets, a strident tidy village committee and a touching-up of the pastel-coloured houses that were a tourist’s first impression as they disembarked the ferry.
The overall effect was welcoming and comforting.
Nothing bad could possibly happen here, could it?
Maggie Macken, Constance’s mother, must have recognised it the first moment she’d stepped on the, then, busy dock.
Oh, that was a long time ago now – Constance and Dotty had been girls, glad to leave their old lives behind.
Pin Hill Island couldn’t have been more different from Galway and the narrow terraced streets they’d known.
The island seemed vast by comparison, but it was only ten miles by eight miles.
Sometimes Constance found it hard to believe it had been her home for almost seventy years.
Ocean’s End, the art deco folly house her mother had purchased all those years ago, stood on the westernmost tip, between the only two villages on the island – well, you could hardly call Muffeen Beag a village, but no-one would ever say that to anyone who lived there.
Muffeen M?r, on the other hand, boasted the vital conveniences any modern village needed.
Snuggled beneath Pin Hill and at the top of a narrow slipway the locals grandly called the pier .
There was a post office, a church (albeit without a resident priest these days), a supermarket, two pubs, a hotel, the cemetery, a ramshackle community hall, and a small school, which was fought hard for when Constance was just a girl.
Later, she’d taught there for many years.
Two of those years were more precious than the rest when her darling husband had taken up the principal’s job.
Oisin had fallen in love with the island soon after he fell in love with Constance.
Sometimes, she found herself smiling wistfully when she caught a flicker of those hopes and dreams. A lifetime ago, now.
Ocean’s End was as different from the terraced house they’d lived in in Galway as it was possible to be.
A striking, two-storey white edifice, peering over a rocky cliff to the ocean below, it wasn’t a huge house, not by today’s standards to be sure.
Over the last few years, there had been some monstrosities erected on the south side of the island, holiday homes for people who didn’t really know the island at all.
Still, Ocean’s End felt far too big for one person, even if she did live here all year round.
For a start, there were five bedrooms too many and a generous library Constance hardly ever poked her nose into these days.
The windows, in their thin pencil-like frames, now seemed insubstantial, the flat roof a nod to a very different era and the once white paint had turned to a flaking red-grey, thanks to the constant onslaught of the sea below.
Still, when the sun shone here, it was glorious, like no other place in the world, though, for most of the year, the skies filled over with layers of incessant clouds that appeared to have no start or finish to them.
The fields wore mists like cloaks wafting above the land as if suspended by some great puppeteer intent on hiding the best until he was quite ready to unveil the stupendous beauty of the place.
It would be weeks yet until the sun broke through the blanketing grey with convincing brightness that indeed, summer was on its way in.
Constance knew many of the islanders preferred the winter.
The place was left alone. It was an excuse to pull across the curtains early, drink hot toddies and pretend the mad world on the mainland no longer existed.
Still, summer was the lifeblood of Pin Hill.
Tourism was the only form of external income to be relied upon for many families.
Constance loved each season as it came, but if she was pushed, she knew her preference was the summer.
Her favourite day of the year was the one when she saw the first swallow shoot through the air outside the kitchen window and she noted it down each year in her weather journal, oh joy!
It was too early in the year to think of that today; the swallows would not even have thought of packing their bags for Ireland yet.
For now, Constance would make do with robins and doves, huge grey crows and occasionally, on blustery days when the fishing boats could not leave the dock, a flock of seagulls landing on the rough grass outside her window in the hope of finding something to tide them over until the storms passed.
Constance shivered. She plugged in the little two-bar heater she kept beneath the kitchen table for those days when draughts found a way of catching you out in spite of the ancient Aga going at full steam.
If she sat here long enough, it felt as if she was stepping into the hot sands of the Sahara and being warmed from the ankles up.
If she could bend to take a proper look, she was certain there must be a blackened circle scorched beneath the table top, but what did it matter at this stage? It was only a table.
Really, she should be used to the cold. They’d left Galway when she was just a girl to live here at Ocean’s End.
And it wasn’t as if the Atlantic was any more biting today than any other spring day.
This was a different sort of chill. It felt as if a shadow had streaked across at her back, sending an icy frisson along her spine.
She knew what it was; of course she knew what it was.
Another of her dreams. It seemed that as age dulled her reflexes and slowed down her movements, it had a canny knack of switching up the velocity of her night terrors.
She’d woken at five o’clock, just as the rooks shook their feathers in the tall pines in the distance.
Her nightdress soaked. Heather . That darling child she’d doted on so many years ago.
And in that way that dreams can mash up all reality, the girl was reaching down into a well at the gate to Ocean’s End.
She was reaching down, down, and then scurrying at her back a badger flashed out of sight.
Dreaming of badgers was never a good sign. Constance had cast the dream off when she woke earlier. She’d long believed that anything she dreamed of in black and white would eventually turn into a magpie and she’d just been thankful to waken before that final and familiar denouement.
Constance wiped the tears from her eyes.
The last time she’d laid eyes on Heather was right here, in Ocean’s End.
They’d had an awful row, Constance and Heather’s mother, Dotty, the sort there was no coming back from, it turned out.
Heather had been tugged along in the slipstream of her mother’s rage, tripping out the door and back to England once and for all.
When Constance thought about that time, it still twisted sharply in her heart.
In spite of the passage of so many years, that fissure in a friendship that should have been forever would always be a huge regret.
So long ago. Certainly, life had trundled on.
Over the years, Constance’s mind had wandered down roads wondering if she should reach out to Dotty just one last time.
Perhaps it still wasn’t too late? Silly old woman , she told herself crossly, of course it’s too late.
As time trundled on, she’d imagined Heather, growing into a young woman, forgetting all about Ocean’s End, or perhaps resenting it as much as her mother seemed to that day, or maybe, just maybe, at odd moments missing it and remembering Constance, still here, thinking of them both.
At some point, Heather would have been packed off to university, her father would have seen to that, maybe she got married, had a family, made a good life for herself.
Dotty was bloody lucky and she took it all for granted and maybe that was at the root of why Constance had lashed out so fiercely.
All of this was surely what her mother, Maggie, called the mixed blessing of hindsight.
Constance, older than her mother had ever been, could see it quite clearly now.
There had been no daughter for Constance.
Her chance to have a family with Oisin was cut short before they had celebrated their cotton wedding anniversary.
Her own fault, of course, hadn’t she been the one to bring him to the island.
A man from County Laois, the most landlocked county in Ireland, and she’d dragged him to Pin Hill, to start their lives together.
What had she been thinking? He knew nothing of island life.
The sea he’d loved snatched him from her on a day that gave no suggestion of what it had in mind that bright and balmy morning he set off to catch some trout for their supper.
The fact was, Dotty Wren, or Dotty Banks as she was by then, had everything Constance could have dreamed of, a good man who adored her, a darling daughter and the hope of future grandchildren, family to pass things along to, to grow old with, one day.
Constance had never remarried. Island living meant there was a scarcity of men at the best of times; certainly, there was no-one who could take Oisin’s place in her heart.
It was as simple as that. It was strange, but to Constance, time had shaped Heather into another of those ghosts who drifted in and out of her thoughts while always at a distance.