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By Root 528 0

leave for summer vacation. The Reading Room might as well have white sheets thrown over the furniture. Henry will be relieved to know he didn’t miss anything important. Work is tolerable because the library is air-conditioned. If it wasn’t, I’d fall asleep at my desk reading reports about information system design. There’s no time for reading reports on weekends at Cliffhead. We finish painting the rowboat after we plant her garden and before we tackle the job of widening the trail beyond the meadow. The garden fence needs to be repaired to keep out the lettuce-loving animals. The soil needs more lime. We build a sifter out of leftover chicken wire and some boards to remove the large stones. I shovel. Norah sifts through the soil. I promise to help with her catalogue on rainy days but there are none.

I borrow a library book on astronomy to guide our sky gazing. We don’t use it much because we’re too exhausted for anything but sleep by the time we’re in the peak of the house. We take advantage of the long days to be outside until nine or ten o’clock. The dogs wake us in the morning not long after the sun comes up. We spend the day at the cove, meadow, pond, around the garden, in the woods or by the barn. The first thing we do when we come inside is take a shower together to wash away the sweat, smoke and salt from our skin. It’s the best part of the day – worth getting dirty for.

Norah doesn’t invite me to Cliffhead on weekdays. The routine is Friday to Sunday night then back to work Monday morning. I don’t usually visit without letting her know I’m coming. This time is different because it’s her birthday. She kept it a secret but the database didn’t.

The morning drags on. Not long after lunch, I stop by the flower shop to pick up the roses. The florist piles them into my arms. “Sixteen red, sixteen yellow, sixteen pink. Lucky woman,” she says.

“Lucky man, you mean.”

She stares at me. “Sorry. I assumed–”

“No, you’re right. I mean I’m a lucky man.”

She smiles.

I visit the delicatessen for picnic food, the liquor store for champagne, the ice cream shop for a cake engineered to stay frozen up to two hours out of the freezer. I roll down the car windows, turn the stereo on high and head to Cliffhead with the warm wind blowing in through the open windows.

I pull up to my usual spot by the barn. That fact that his vintage Jaguar is parked there makes it less usual. I leave the birthday celebration in the back seat. The dogs are nowhere in sight, the house is locked, the barn empty, the cove deserted. I run up the trail towards the meadow in my office clothes during one of the hottest days on record, dodging the roots and rocks under my feet, almost falling, almost suffocating. Two or three times, I stop to bend over. I rest my hands on my knees and wait till my heartbeat slows down.

I take a shortcut through bushes and trees that scratch at my face and neck. I scramble through the thickets, push branches out of my path and hop over muddy puddles. The pond is calm, rowing conditions ideal. The three dogs are swimming after the boat. He’s wearing a hat over his bald head. She’s wearing her hair down. He rows smoothly and quickly. The dogs will soon pick up my scent if they don’t drown before they reach the shore. I take the same route back, not as fast, not with the same lightness. I drive directly to my basement flat. It’s cool enough in there to keep a cake frozen and roses fresh. That might be useful if I hadn’t thrown the lot in the garbage when I stopped for petrol.

“How was your week?” I ask her two days later.

“The usual. Pass me an extra garbage bag, please.”

I’m helping her gather fly-ridden, part-rotted, salt-baked strips of seaweed to use as garden fertilizer. The dogs poke their noses in the slime left on the beach rock when I peel off a layer of seaweed.

“I meant to ask you about the photos in your study. Who’s the boy with the light hair, the one your father has his arm around?”

“The photo on the shelf with my father and the boy?” Norah says. “Francis Hickey. He was one of my father’s pupils.”

“Like