Sipping the last of his tea, he looked at the poem again, puzzled by the sharp contrast between its transparent exuberance and Jessica’s present subdued mood.
After breakfast, Julian pulled on a tweed hacking-jacket and rode up the meadow to Skyhead. He tethered the chestnut mare young O’Dell had tacked up for him to a stunted tree near a patch of grass where Windkin was grazing free, held in place as he’d been trained by the weight of his hanging reins.
The day was brilliant. The sun climbed up bright, white skies. Breezes off the sea smelled warmly of kelp. And new spring gorse grew over the Connemara cliffs.
Walking along the bluff, Julian saw Jessica sitting below him on a ledge of rock that gave her a lee from the wind, her yellow scarf and black hair stirred by occasional, erratic breezes. He walked down the narrow trail, finding a perch of rock to sit on. Dr. Homewood took out his pipe and looked appraisingly at her. She was squinting slightly, her long, dark eyelashes lowered to screen out the blinding track of the sun on the water.
“All right, Jess. What’s the matter?”
“What makes you think anything’s wrong?”
“Well, because I’m extremely clever about things like that. I see a cheerful young girl, happy as a sandboy, writing poems that sound like a flock of larks at play...” He filled and tamped his pipe with a mixture of rough-grain tobacco. “...and the next minute she’s frowning like a thundercloud.”
“Julian, I am not frowning.”
“Technically, you may have a point. But you’ve hardly spoken a word since last night at dinner.”
With a little shrug, she said, “What’s wrong with that? Does everybody have to chatter away all the time like Miss Charity’s cousins? I should think they gave you enough talk yesterday to last a week, Dr. Julian, especially the red-headed one.”
“Aha!” Julian said.
“Oh, please don’t use that silly tone!”
“I can’t believe this, Jessica. I think you’re jealous.”
“I am not jealous,” she said, a mutinous flash of anger in her eyes. “But you promised to go riding with me after lunch at Miss Charity’s. Instead, you took her cousins to the Hannibal Arms where I’m too young to go. So I had the great fun of playing checkers for three hours with Father Malachy.”
Dr. Julian puffed on his pipe, hands cupped around the spurting match-flame. When the pipe was going well, he said casually, “Supposing you tell me what’s really bothering you, Jessica.”
“I know you’re going away for a long time, Julian.” She looked away and fingered a loose thread on the cuff of her twill trousers. “That’s why I wanted to spend as much time with you as I could this weekend.”
“I’m sorry. Did Andrew tell you?”
“No, I just knew, Julian.”
“I planned to tell you myself today. I’m going to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, for a year of special seminars and studies. How did that information come to you this time?”
“That you were going? I’m not sure, Julian. I woke up Friday morning knowing it was true.” She turned and looked at him directly. “Why are you going away?”
“It’s too important an opportunity to turn down, Jessica. It’s a chance to work with the top people in the field, a chance to learn more about the work I’ve been doing — the areas that you and I have been looking into together for quite a few years.”
“But we still don’t understand all of my feelings.”
“Perhaps there aren’t any hard and fast answers.”
His pipe was drawing well and the strong smoke, streaking blue in the air, eddied about the natural enclosure of the rock. He looked at her and said, “But we do know at least that psychic functioning is much more common than we’d been led to believe. We’ve learned it’s a difficult aptitude to use, or even understand, because it’s been allowed to atrophy for centuries. All through history, clairvoyance, precognitive manifestations, were people’s perceptual tools, but these tools have been suppressed too often since then, often out of sheer ignorance and superstition. These psychic implements — psychokinesis, remote viewings, out-of-body experiences — have been known to us for ages, of course, but the field of parapsychology is still in its infancy.”
Caught up in the subject, Dr. Julian almost forgot where he was. The cliffs of Skyhead and the seas beyond them were suddenly less real than his own thoughts. It was a factor in his personality that made him such an excellent teacher — this mesmerized, and hence mesmerizing, response to the heady reaches of philosophy and science.
“If we imagine our Creator, Jessica — whether we call him (or her) God or Jehovah, the Supreme Force or the Universe itself — if we imagine that ultimate source of power as the ground of all being, the support of all matter and life, it follows that our conscious and unconscious minds, our finite capacities, are inevitably linked to that infinite base.”
Jessica had always liked the way he talked to her. It was as if they were both the same age. He never bothered to explain difficult words to her, simply assuming she would understand what he meant to say.
“When a person plumbs the depths of unconscious mind, which you can do so effortlessly, Jessica — the word ‘depth’ being only a spatial allusion, since I could as easily have said ‘height’ or ‘breadth’ — those limits are the approach to the ultimate ground of being. And at that point we can see and know with infinitely more perception than we can with our senses.”
His beard wasn’t really brown, she decided, watching his animated face and eyes. It was more like dully burnished copper and nearly red where the sunlight touched it.
Jessica picked a small white flower from a crack in the rocks and said, “But, Julian, Charity Bostwick isn’t all that impressed with people who can see things. She told me that half the people in Ireland have some kind of second sight.”
“That’s just a touch of pardonable chauvinism in the old girl,” Julian said.
Jessica studied the small white flower that rested in the palm of her hand, the wind stirring its fragile petals. She sighed and said, “Julian, can I ask you about something else?”
“Of course, Jess. What is it?”
“I’ve been almost seeing something I don’t quite understand. I was wondering — should I try harder to see it? Should I force myself?”
“Is it something you’re afraid of?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not that clear...”
“Then — no. If you force yourself, you’ll distort Whatever images are coming to you. Because what is seeing? Our eyes are only cameras. The brain interprets the picture. And that interpretation is a reflexive, instinctive process, the sum of what we are, what we’ve been told, the incidence of amino acids in our brains, our response to the external stimuli beating on our nerve endings, waking or sleeping.”