“Wasn’t she up for a job?”
“Lots of jobs.”
Tooly could never have conversations like these. The only place in the world where she fit was beside Venn. She watched the window, sitting upright each time a man entered her field of vision. She smirked, looking at her laced-up shoes, realizing how much like those nervous daters she must have seemed, glancing up whenever the door opened. He never did come back.
2011
MAKEUP APPLICATION WAS NOT Tooly’s strength. Summoning her art-class skills, she underscored each eye “gesturally,” as her instructor might have said, then blinked at the blurred image of herself reflected in the rearview mirror, peering through two black smudges. “Oh, this is ridiculous,” she said, and dangled a bead of spittle into a tissue to dab both eyes clean. A certain muss of the hair seemed stylish, while another was vaguely like a teenage boy. Did she look “severe”? Who had said that about her?
She drove from Cork Airport in her rental car, across South Tipperary, east past Clonmel, following signs for Waterford, toward the destination, Beenblossom Lodge, which she’d pinpointed on an online map. In the middle of a two-lane country road, she stopped the Nissan Micra, left clicker blinking. She was jittery to think that “Xavier Karamage” could be minutes away. She’d made this trip to Ireland without invitation or announcement. Would he be there? She turned down a private driveway.
Expecting the house to appear, she drove at walking pace. But the driveway continued for more than half a mile through woodland, offering strobe views between tree trunks of an emerald field containing a pond with a small island. Finally, she arrived at a gravel clearing bordered by rhododendrons. Beenblossom Lodge was a Georgian manor, ivy over the sash windows, pert chimneys at each end of the slate roof, a four-columned portico flanked by Regency urns overflowing with pansies. She pulled in beside a black Range Rover and a pink Mini, and turned off the engine. She sat a moment, looking at the front door.
If she was wrong about what this house contained, her trip would have been a colossal waste, and nothing would be clearer. But if she was right? She remained in place, the back of her bare knees sticky on the vinyl seat.
She knocked at the front door. Waited.
Knocked again.
A flame-haired young woman in jeans and riding boots answered, blue dress shirt undone two buttons too far down her freckled chest, presumably the result of breastfeeding, given the shiny-lipped infant at her hip. “Hullo!” the woman said cheerfully, scratching her red mane with the aerial of a cordless phone.
“Sorry to bother you,” Tooly said. “I was looking for Xavier Karamage. Is this right?”
“Yes, of course,” she said cheerily, in the cut-glass accent of the English upper classes, then told the telephone, “Mummy? Visitor. Yes, yes. Love to all.” She hung up and addressed Tooly—“Please, do come in”—then led the way down a long entrance hall, pine floorboards mottled from dried mud, orphaned shoes among children’s toys, a radiator piled with mail, a pewter vase containing an unhinged shotgun, field-hockey stick, fencing épée, hedge clippers, a deflated football. “My appalling husband is out putting an end to innocent lives,” she said, toe-pecking a baby rattle, which skittered down the hall. She turned through a doorway, jiggling the baby on her hip, voice trailing off: “Can’t even say when the horrible man will be back.”
Tooly followed, passing a door to a somber library, then a burgundy dining room, down five steps into a rustic kitchen with wood-beam ceilings, a vast open hearth, and a cottage window overlooking parkland.
“You know, I don’t even know who you are,” the woman exclaimed, sitting on a long bench in the kitchen, placing the baby on the table before her. Popping a grape into her mouth, she offered the bowl to Tooly. “So busy with the christening, I’m not even thinking straight. Please, take one. Take a bunch. Take them all, if you like.”
They exchanged names, Tooly describing herself as an old friend of Xavier’s, saying she’d been passing through the area.
“Well, I’m relieved we didn’t know you were coming,” Harriet said. “Was going to have to get quite cross with the brute. He has a habit of keeping guests waiting. And so, Tooly, ought I to know who you are? Sorry, that sounded rude. Of course I should.” She scratched her hair, said, “Far too little sleep.”
“You expect him back soon?”
“Yes, yes. As soon as he’s finished his murders.” She gathered that this required explanation. “Ferrets,” she added. “I’m not fussed myself — leave them alone, don’t you think? But my ghastly husband unearthed a nest of them in an abandoned warren and has been on the verge of pumping car exhaust down there for days. Far as I’m concerned, ferrets are sweet. It’s like having foxes dashing about the garden. He’s of another mind. Probably right — they are considered pests. Still.”
The infant gaped at Tooly, who looked back, eyebrows raised. Harriet considered the two considering each other. “Babies stare like that. I am sorry.”
“I don’t mind. Don’t often get the chance to just stare at another person. Long as he doesn’t mind if—”
“She.”
“Long as she doesn’t mind me staring back.”
But the baby lost interest in grown-up noises, and her abrupt inattention stifled them.
Harriet said, “An angel passes.”
“What?”
“It’s that thing French people say when a conversation goes quiet. Speaking of angels, c’est le diable qui s’approche. Hello, darling.” She stood to greet her husband.
His four dogs scampered through the scullery, each different in size and color, from an ankle-nipping Scottie to a hip-high Old English sheepdog, with a Jack Russell and a bull terrier in between, each sniffing, leaping, barking, racing through the house. “Not on the furniture, boys!” she cried. “Nor you,” she told her husband as he kicked off his rubber boots by the washing machine.
He leaned over and kissed his wife. A gentleman farmer, he appeared, in waxed Barbour coat and tweed cap, which he tossed onto the table. Harriet placed the hat on the baby’s head, swallowing the infant up to her wobbly neck, prompting a terrified Waaaaaa! “Oh, you silly!” Harriet responded, removing the cap. Seeing its mother again, the child burbled, and Harriet swooped in to smooch her cheek. “Only one angel here! Isn’t there, darling!” The baby chortled.
Harriet insisted — and her husband seconded it, brushing aside Tooly’s objections — that she stay overnight in the guesthouse, just the other side of the stable yards. He fetched her shoulder bag from the Micra, led her past a dozen stalls, three horses harrumphing in there, toward her lodgings around back.
“I knew,” she said. “I knew this was going to be you.”
They walked for a minute, neither speaking, she closing her eyes for a few seconds, electrified and tranquillized at his proximity. “This place is amazing,” she said. “How much land do you have here?”
“If I told you in acres,” Venn asked, “would that mean something to you?”
“Probably not.”
“In that case, about a hundred and forty acres.”
“Is that half the size of Texas?”
“Not quite. But respectable for South Tipperary.” He opened the door to the guesthouse, slid her bag in.
“You don’t seem surprised that I just turned up.”
“I’m never surprised, duck, never surprised.”
“You don’t mind that I came, do you?”
“Tooly, Tooly, Tooly,” he said, putting his arm around her. “A bit late to ask that.”
They reentered the main house via the scullery and found Harriet tapping at her iPad, the baby mesmerized by the screen.