Where Old Ghosts Meet - Kate Evans [83]
There was no light on in the house when she came around the bend in the path. When she came through the door, he was at the kitchen table, sitting in the pitch dark, his head in his hands and not a stir out of him. Peg went straight for the lamp and lit it, paying no attention to him. Then she threw a few sticks in the stove and put on the kettle.
“Matt,” she said, “I’ve made up my mind. I want to stay here on the island with you. This is where we belong.”
“No, Peg,” he said. “The reality is that you belong here. I don’t. I realize that now. I suppose I always knew but didn’t want to think about it.” He continued, “You’ve been good to me, Peg, and I’ve been happy here. For that, I will be eternally grateful. I wanted to tell you that before I leave, but it’s time I was off.”
She couldn’t believe her ears. She was willing to change her whole plans so they could spend their old age in peace and quiet in the place they both loved and all he could say was, “Thanks, I’ve been happy, but goodbye.”
Peg turned on him then. “You don’t care about me, Matt Molloy. You don’t care about me or yourself or anybody else in the whole world. You’d be quite happy now after all these years to walk out that door and just leave me to find my own way. Well, you’d best go on then. Yes, go on out of it. My father told me years ago this would happen, told me to my face: ‘He’ll leave you on your own, Peg, out on the bawn.’Them’s his very words. And you know somethin’? He was right. I should have listened to him.”
Matt spun round in his chair, mad as a hornet, and shouted at her, “I do care for you, Peg.”
She was shocked and so was he. She didn’t think that was what he had in mind to say, but there it was: popped, like a cork from a bottle.
“There was an awkward minute between us then. He had never before raised his voice to me, but saying he ‘cared for me’ made me, well …”
Her lower lip began to tremble but she covered it quickly, pausing before continuing. “But I knew what he said was true. I knew in my gut but hearing him say so was, well, it was what I needed to hear. When we finally got over the shock, he spoke first. ‘It’s not what I want to do or even what I’d like to do, but rather what I think is best for you. You want to go, I know that, and I’m in your way. I’m driving a wedge between you and the people around you and I don’t want to do that. That’s what I really believe but I never seem to be able to do or say the right thing.’ I wanted to wrap him in my arms then, to hold him close to me ’til he understood how much I wanted to be with him always but … he was sitting down and …”
She started to giggle like a girl. “Anyway, I didn’t. I just cupped his cheek in my hand and looked him straight in the eyes and said, ‘I’m happy to hear you say that, Matt. That’s all I need to hear. We must do what is best for us now. We’ll stay, you and me together, and care for each other.’ From then on, that was how it was between us. It’s just how it was.”
22
A shadowy figure was beginning to emerge from the dark boundaries that surrounded her grandfather and his arcane life. He was all around her now. Nora knew the look of him, could hear the deep resonance of his voice, could sense his detachment, feel his fear and uncertainty, knew of his passion. She could sense too a certain generosity of spirit but it was finely layered and fragile. But the heart and soul of the man remained elusive, shifting like a fog, at times thin and veiled, but mostly dense and impermeable.
She was unsure how she felt about this stranger who was her blood relative, her grandfather. She still had difficulty saying the word grandfather in relation to him, difficulty with the whole idea. It made demands on her that she was reluctant