From the frequency of these comments she judged that he wished her to be quiet, but really they were produced by his feeling of inadequacy in the face of such a strange story. He was like a peasant faced with a foreigner who speaks with a strange accent, too overcome to recognize the language as his own.
What he did absorb was that Anna had been treated badly by the world and was, in some way, wounded because of it.
“You’ll get better here,” he said. “You’ve come to the right place.”
He smiled at her, a little shyly, she thought. For a brief instant she felt as safe and comfortable as she had ever been in her life and then fear and suspicion, her old friends, claimed her once more. Her skin prickled and the wind in the trees outside sounded forlorn and lonely.
She sat beside the kerosene lamp surrounded by shadows. That the light shone through her curling fair hair, that Dermott was almost unbearably happy, she was completely unaware.
6.
Weeks passed and the first chill of autumn lay along the river. Dermott slowly realized that Anna’s recovery would not be as fast as he had imagined, for her lips remained sad and the sleepy eyes remained lustreless and defeated.
He brought things for her to marvel at — a stone, a dried-out frog, a beetle with a jewel-like shell — but she did not welcome the interruptions and did not try to hide her lack of interest, so he stood there with the jewel in his hand feeling rather stupid.
He tried to interest her in the river, to give to her the pleasure the old inspector had given him, but she stood timidly on the bank wearing a dress she had made from an old sheet, staring anxiously at the ground around her small flat feet.
He stood in the water wearing only baggy khaki shorts and a battered pair of tennis shoes. She thought he looked like an old war photo.
“Nothing’s going to bite you,” he said. “You can stand in the water.”
“No.” She shook her head.
“I’ll teach you how to catch crays.”
“No.”
“That’s a silky oak.”
She didn’t even look where he pointed. “You go. I’ll stay here.”
He looked up at the sky with his hands on his hips. “If I go now I’ll be away for two hours.”
“You go,” she insisted. The sheet dress made her look as sad as a little girl at bedtime.
“You’ll be lonely. I’ll be thinking that you’re lonely,” he explained, “so it won’t be no fun. Won’t you be lonely?”
She didn’t say no. She said, “You go.”
And he went, finally, taking that unsaid no with him, aware that his absence was causing her pain. He was distracted and cast badly. When a swarm of caddis flies hatched over a still dark pool he did not stay to cast there but pushed on home with the catch he had: two small rainbows. He had killed them without speaking to them.
He found her trying to split firewood, frowning and breathing hard.
“You’re holding the axe wrong,” he said, not unkindly.
“Well, how should I hold it then?”
She stood back with her hands on her hips. He showed her how to do it, trying to ignore the anger that buzzed around her.
“That’s what I was doing,” she said.
He retired to tend the garden and she thought he was angry with her for intruding into his territory. She did not know that his mother had been what they called “a woman stockman” who was famous for her toughness and self-reliance. When she saw him watching her she thought it was with disapproval. He was keeping an anxious eye on her, worried that she was about to chop a toe off.
7.
“Come with me.”
“No, you go.”
That is how it went, how it continued to go. A little litany.
“Come, I’ll teach you.”
“I’m happy here.”
“When I get back you’ll be unhappy.”
Over and over, a pebble being washed to and fro in a rocky hole.
“I can’t enjoy myself when you’re unhappy.”
“I’m fine.”
And so on, until when he waded off downstream he carried her unhappiness with him and a foggy film lay between him and the river.
The pattern of his days altered and he in no way regretted the change. Like water taking the easiest course down a hillside, he moved towards those things which seemed most likely to minimize her pain. He helped her on projects which she deemed to be important, the most pressing of which seemed to be the long grass which grew around the back of the house. They denuded the wild vegetable garden of its dominant weed. He had never cared before and had let it grow beside the tomatoes, between the broad leaves of the pumpkin, and left it where it would shade the late lettuce.
As he worked beside her it did not occur to him that he was, in fact, less happy than he had been, that his worry about her happiness had become the dominant factor of his life, clouding his days and nagging at him in the night like a sore tooth. Yet even if it had occurred to him, the way she extended her hand to him one evening and brought him silently to her bed with a soft smile on her lips would have seemed to him a joy more complex and delightful than any of those he had so easily abandoned.
He worked now solely to bring her happiness. And if he spent many days in shared melancholy with her there were also rewards of no small magnitude: a smile, like a silver spirit breaking the water, the warmth of her warm white body beside him each morning.
He gave himself totally to her restoration and in so doing became enslaved by her. Had he been less of an optimist he would have abandoned the project as hopeless.
And the treatment was difficult, for she was naked and vulnerable, not only to him, to the world, but to all manner of diseases which arrived, each in their turn, to lay her low. In moments of new-found bitterness he reflected that these diseases were invited in and made welcome, evidence of the world’s cruelty to her, but these thoughts, alien to his nature and shocking for even being thought, were banished and put away where he could not see them.
She lay in his bed pale with fever. He picked lad’s love, thyme, garlic and comfrey and ministered to her with anxious concern.
“There,” he said, “that should make you better.”
“Do you love me, Dermott?” she asked, holding his dry dusty hand in her damp one. They made a little mud between them.
He was surprised to hear the word. It had not been in his mind, and he had to think for a while about love and the different things he understood by it.
“Yes,” he said at last, “I do.”
He felt then that he could carry her wounded soul from one end of the earth to the other. He was bursting with love.
8.
As he spent more and more time dwelling with her unhappiness he came to convince himself that he was the source of much of her pain. It was by far the most optimistic explanation, for he could do nothing to alter her past even if he had been able to understand it. So he came to develop a self-critical cast of mind, finding fault with himself for being stubborn, silent, set in his ways, preferring to do a thing the way he always had rather than the way she wished.
Eager to provide her with companionship he spent less and less time on the river, collecting the crays just once, early in the morning while she slept. In this way he lost many but this no longer seemed so important.
When she picked up a book to read in the afternoons he did likewise, hoping to learn things that he might share with her. He felt himself unlettered and ignorant. When he read he followed the lines of words with his broken-nailed finger and sometimes he caught her watching his lips moving and he felt ashamed. He discovered things to wonder at in every line and he often put his book down to consider the things he had found out. He would have liked to ask Anna many things about what he read but he imagined that she found his questions naive and irritating and did not like to be interrupted. So he passed over words he did not understand and marvelled in confused isolation at the mysteries he found within each page.