Foster

’

Everything about the night feels strange: to walk to a sea that’s always been there, to see it and feel it and fear it in the half dark, and to listen to this man saying things about horses out at sea, about his wife trusting others so she’ll learn who not to trust, things I don’t fully understand, things which may not even be intended for me.

We keep on walking until we come to a place where the cliffs and rocks come out to meet the water. Now that we can go no farther, we must turn back. Maybe the way back will somehow make sense of the coming.

Here and there, flat white shells lie shining and washed up on the sand. I stoop to gather them. They feel smooth and clean and brittle in my hands. We turn back along the beach and walk on, seeming to walk a greater distance than the one we crossed in reaching the place where we could not pass, and then the moon disappears behind a darkish cloud and we cannot see where we are going. At this point, Kinsella lets out a sigh, stops, and lights the lamp.

‘Ah, the women are nearly always right, all the same,’ he says. ‘Do you know what the women have a gift for?’

‘What?’

‘Eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.’

He shines the light along the strand to find our footprints, to follow them back, but the only prints he can find are mine.

‘You must have carried me there,’ he says.

I laugh at the thought of me carrying him, at the impossibility, then realise it was a joke, and that I got it.

"

"When the moon comes out again, he turns the lamp off and by the moon’s light we easily find and follow the path we took out of the dunes. When we reach the top, he won’t let me put my shoes on but does it for me. Then he does his own and knots the laces. We stand then, to pause and look back out at the water.

‘See, there’s three lights now where there was only two before.’

I look out across the sea.

There, the two lights are blinking as before, but with another, steady light, shining there also.

‘Can you see it?’ he says.

‘I can,’ I say. ‘It’s there.’

And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his.

6

After a week of rain, on a Thursday, the letter comes. It is not so much a surprise as a shock. Already I have seen the signs: the shampoo for head lice in the chemist’s shop, the fine-tooth combs.