The Way Back Home

‘But –’ Oriana wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear. She didn’t know whether Malachy would rather not talk about it. She was unsure whether it was impertinent for her, of all people, to ask. She hadn’t seen him for such a long time. And here he was, here was Malachy, changed and yet unchanged.

‘I lost it,’ he said in the same gentle tone. ‘My eye, my sight.’ He watched how she nodded but couldn’t look at him.

‘Sixty per cent of injured eyes become phthisical and require either evisceration or enucleation,’ he continued quickly, as if medical facts made it less personal, as if being in the majority made it somehow less severe.

‘I – I don’t know what those words mean,’ she struggled, staring hard at the floor.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

And Oriana thought how ridiculous it was that the word should come from Malachy. The constriction in her throat made it impossible for her to say so.

‘The terms, the minutiae,’ Malachy qualified, ‘they’re just part of my lexicon – I forget.’

Oriana glanced at him, then away, then to the door. Suddenly, Malachy really didn’t want her to go, not yet, not now she was back after such a very long time.

‘Beyond twenty feet, everyone sees the world as if they have only one eye,’ he said. He lifted her wrist and placed her hand over her eye. Pointing for her to look at the back of the gallery, he lifted her hand off, then on. He needed to change the subject, draw her back from the past to right here, in his gallery. An extraordinary thing that they should be marvelling about. ‘You’re back – from the States.’ It was a fact, not a question.

‘Yes.’

‘How long for?’

‘I’m back for good.’

Just then, to Oriana, the word seemed preposterous. Life on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly seemed ridiculously complicated. Where could she run to next? Australia?

‘Or for the time being,’ she added.

‘And are you in the area – for the time being?’

She nodded. ‘Hathersage.’

‘At your mother’s?’ He couldn’t contain his surprise and it made her giggle. He had her gaze once again.

She rolled her eyes at herself and shrugged. Pathetic really. Thirty-four years old and living with her mother.

‘And are you OK, Oriana? Are you all right?’

He always knew. He always knew when she wasn’t.

Malachy watched as she hauled herself to her tallest and pulled the widest smile possible across her face.

‘Oh, I’m good,’ she said, with drama and drawl to her inflection.

And then the gallery phone rang. And an elderly couple came in. Followed by a father and a teenage boy. And Malachy thought this is very, very bad timing. All of it. He knew that as soon as he turned away from her, returned to the demands of his day, Oriana would disappear. In the blink of an eye, she’d be gone. That’s what had happened all those years ago. Now you see her, now you don’t.

CHAPTER NINE (#ulink_aa0d15e7-fe27-5930-8d1c-2390111afa03)

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost!’ Jed laughed at Malachy when he arrived at the gallery just before closing. ‘Sorry – I know I said lunch-time. The day ran away with me.’

His brother was just staring at him.

‘I bought food though,’ Jed said. ‘Including ground coffee.’

‘I just saw Oriana.’

Malachy watched the colour drain from Jed’s face while redness crept up his throat.

‘Oriana?’ Jed looked quickly around him. ‘Here?’

‘Here.’

‘How did she know you work here?’

‘She didn’t.’ Malachy paused. Jed was visibly flummoxed. ‘She literally showed up out of the blue,’ he told him. ‘She said she’s back from the States and living with her mother.’ Jed was speechless, staring at her father’s paintings as if they held a clue, if not an actual answer. ‘She was surprised I’m not a best-selling author. I completely forgot to ask her what she does.’

‘Did she leave a number?’

‘No.’ Malachy thought about it. ‘I wonder if Robin knows.’ He looked at Robin’s paintings too. He turned to Jed. ‘Did you pop in on him today?’

Jed hit his forehead. ‘Sorry – sorry. I didn’t. No.’

‘I’ll call in when we get back,’ said Malachy.

‘Will you tell him? About Oriana?’

Malachy thought about it. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Does he talk about her?’

‘Not really – sometimes he says her name, but in a disembodied way, as if it isn’t connected to a person, let alone his daughter. As if he just likes the taste of the word on his tongue.’

‘Did she –’ Jed wondered about this conversation, how to cut it off yet know everything before he did so. ‘Did she seem happy? Pleased to see you?’

Malachy thought about it. ‘I’d say she seemed flabbergasted.’ Then he thought about it. Terrified would have been a better word. ‘But she hadn’t changed, not really.’

‘You have,’ said Jed. ‘She hasn’t seen you since—’

‘I know,’ said Malachy. ‘I’m aware of that.’

Jed and Malachy drove back to Windward in their separate cars, privately picking over all the tiny details. From the silt of the past, undisturbed for so long, the seed bank of memories and dormant feelings was awakened. They were both acutely aware that if they talked about her, about what had happened, they’d spend the rest of the weekend doing so but getting nowhere. They also knew there was even less point pondering her return and mulling the what-ifs of her being here. Her absence had brought them closer. Her reappearance, however, could drive them apart.

Malachy parked precisely, Jed at a hasty slant across his brother’s car. His boot was crammed with shopping and they took the bags into the house. As they put the items away, they read out what each was, just as their mother used to. It gave a rhythm, a ritualization to it; a pointless family tradition that, when it was needed, carried meaning and comfort.

‘Was forty quid enough?’

‘Was it hell.’

‘I have cash.’