One
The narrow trail disappears into the low grass, as though whoever or whatever walked there before us suddenly disappeared, or turned around, or rose up into the sky like an angel. Far below the path, the coastline curls and winds around the base of the cliffs, a brilliant blue scarf of water, edged with lacy white surf.
Ahead of us, my boyfriend Conor’s son, Adrien, and my daughter, Lilly, forge a path of their own, Conor and Adrien’s corgi dashing around their feet, barking and trying to herd them away from the edge. Conor’s hand is warm in mine. We can’t stop smiling, at the hot day—unusual for Ireland even in July—and at the summer unspooling ahead of us, a whole two months on this gorgeous, remote West Cork peninsula in a rented vacation cottage. Lilly and I flew to Dublin two weeks ago, right after school ended, and we all drove down to West Cork the next day. The stretch of glorious sunny weather has felt like a miracle, day after day of clear skies and blue water.
A bird passes overhead, its gray wings and body a cross against the paler sky, and Conor shields his eyes from the sun. “Peregrine falcon!” he calls out. “If Beanie were a mouse he’d be in fear of his life.” Mr. Bean barks and we both laugh.
I first saw Ross Head from the passenger-side window of Conor’s car as we turned off the narrow coast road in the nearby village and slowly crested the hill that leads to the peninsula. I felt my heart leap at the dramatic cliffs and the tall golden grass and the rocks dotted here and there with fuchsia and white wildflowers.
Ross Head is one of the smaller peninsulas along Ireland’s southwest coastline; only two miles around the peninsula road that traces its outlines along the steep cliffs. At the mouth of the peninsula is a big gray stone manor house called Rosscliffe House, once grand, now disheveled-looking, though Conor has told me that it’s in the process of being turned into a luxury hotel. The house was built on the ruins of a castle or stone fort and the overgrown gardens are dotted here and there with small stone structures and the remnants of rampart walls and towers with views of the sea in almost every direction.
The same developer who’s bought the house for a hotel has built five huge modern holiday houses along the cliffs and has started building more of them. At the construction sites, we can see steel girders shining in the sun; views of the ocean show through the skeletons of the huge structures.
Sheep dot the cropped green of the hills on another peninsula across the inlet, and where the peninsula meets what passes for a main road, there’s a village called Rosscliffe with a smattering of houses and buildings, a horseshoe-shaped beach in a protected cove, a little harbor and sailing club, a few shops and two pubs, and holiday cottages and farmhouses strung along the roads.
“Our” place, as I’ve already come to think of it, is a cozy whitewashed cottage perched at the edge of the cliffs across the peninsula from Rosscliffe House and the new houses, with a hearth for turf fires, a cozy kitchen and sitting room, and three bedrooms in an extension that opens on to a stone patio looking out over the inlet. We’ve been here less than a week and I already feel attached to it in a way that makes me want to call our landlady, Mrs. Crawford, and make an offer. Conor says to wait until the stretch of fine weather we’ve enjoyed comes to an end.
We stop for a kiss, the sun hitting my cheek as I lift my face to Conor’s, the wind swirling around us, rippling the grass. I’m full of that delicious feeling you get at the beginning of a vacation, everything still before you, the days not yet finite, the span of time not yet winding down. I formally resigned from my job as a detective on the homicide squad of the Suffolk County Police Department on Long Island in April, and for the first time in decades, I have no job to go back to, no calls or emails from my team building up, no one waiting for my return. The long-reaching implications of the case I worked in February, the one that led to me resigning from my job, have left me traumatized and anxious, though I can feel the sharp edges of the case’s aftermath softening, as though they’ve been worn away by the wind.
Our cat died of old age in May. Lilly, Conor, and Adrien are all here with me. Only my uncle Danny is back on Long Island, but he moved in with his girlfriend, Eileen, in March and though he keeps sending me and Lilly texts about how much he misses us, I know he’s just fine, better than fine actually, finally living again after twenty-three years of mourning his daughter without knowing that’s what he was doing.
The sun is strong and direct at noon and I can feel it soaking into my body, giving me energy, warming me from the inside. There’s a lone figure with long reddish hair on the path ahead of us, a birdwatcher, I realize when she lifts a pair of binoculars to her eyes and scans the sky over the ocean, and I wonder if she saw the falcon. I stretch my arm a little, testing my shoulder, which I sprained badly in March. I continue to have pain off and on, but it’s mostly healed now. Conor is watching me and smiling, his worn green shirt bringing out specks of gold and olive in his brown eyes. His pale Irish skin is a little burned from all the sun and he looks windblown and handsome.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s just nice to see you relaxed like this,” he says. “It’s very…”
“Unfamiliar?”
“Yes, but very nice. I worried, you know, that you wouldn’t know how to be on holiday.” His eyes crinkle a little at the edges, his mouth trying to hide the grin. His face still delights me, its novelty a legacy of the year we were long distance, I suppose, but also of the twenty-three years I didn’t see him at all, years when I imagined his face and lived off memory and the few pictures of him online I was able to find. I feel a surge of love for him, a surge of gratitude for the circumstances, tragic as they were, that brought us to each other twenty-three years after we first met, after I first began to love him.
I smile at him. “Being on holiday? What’s that? Is it a skill you can learn, like playing the recorder?”
“Oh, yes. I can give you pointers if you need them. I’m very, very skilled at being on holiday.” It’s true. Conor, a history professor, has a lot of work to do this summer on the book he’s writing on Irish political history of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, but he’s doing it on the patio behind the cottage, surrounded by piles of reference works and notebooks and cups of tea. More than once, I’ve found him on the chaise longue, wrapped in a blanket, walled in by books on all sides, looking perfectly contented and pleased with the world. And when he puts his research aside to go for walks or swims or to sit on our patio and look at the view, he seems able to disconnect from his work in a way I’ve never been able to manage.
We turn around at the end of the peninsula, stopping for a moment to look at the visual spectacle of the five huge modern houses perched close to the cliffs like elegant seabirds, and then start back, Lilly and Adrien and Mr. Bean dawdling behind us, checking for whales or dolphins. Rosscliffe House looms ahead of us, and as they watch the water, Conor and I walk over to the house for a closer look.
It stands proudly and defiantly at the crest of the rise, a gray stone fortress with three stories of empty windows, an imposing columned facade, and what feels like a half-hearted attempt at decorative detail above the entrance. It’s as though the architect took one look at the site and knew he’d have to trade beauty for stalwartness against winds political and meteorological. The house seems to be crouching there, bracing itself for the gusts sweeping across the peninsula.
When we walk closer we see a couple of NO TRESPASSING signs and one reading NEVIN PROPERTIES, FUTURE SITE OF ROSSCLIFFE HOUSE HOTEL, A LUXURY RESORT AND WEDDING VENUE. I think someone has tried to tame the overrun gardens all around it a bit, but otherwise it doesn’t look like they’ve started the renovation.
“How old is it?” I ask Conor.
“From the 1780s, I think I read. It’s a good example of Georgian architecture, built by some ancestor of the painter Felix Crawford next to the ruins of what had been a thirteen-century Norman castle. We’ll have to see what else we can learn about it.”
“It’s magnificent but ugly,” I say. “You know what I mean?”
“Mmmm. They were meant to be imposing, these Anglo-Irish Big Houses. They had to be. Their builders were uneasy here, trying to cement their claim over a place they had no claim to.”
We stand there for a minute, looking up at the house, then walk over to a floor-length window on the terrace and look inside the large, empty room on the other side of the glass. Suddenly I feel as though I’m being watched. The wind is snapping around us, doing funny things as it rounds the stone structure. The sound it makes is almost human, like a wailing baby, and I take Conor’s arm as we walk around to the back, finding a stone terrace and covered portico. One of the floor-length windows is open a little, a rock wedged in the gap.
Something rustles and we both jump. “Just the wind,” Conor says. The terrace is covered with dead grass and leaves and there’s some trash there, too, and graffiti on the back wall of the house. “Well, someone’s been here since the 1780s, anyway,” he says, pointing to a blanket in one corner and a pile of empty bottles opposite.
“Not a bad place for teenagers to meet for romantic assignations.”
“I don’t know. I think I’d find it a bit creepy.” We both take one final look up at the house and then he tucks my hand under his arm and says, “Let’s go find the kids.”
We catch up to Lilly and Adrien on the final stretch of the walking path and we all stand there for a few minutes looking back at the view. It’s stunning, the almost turquoise blue water against the white of the waves and the vibrant green of the grass. Across the peninsula, the three white cottages, ours in the center, are tucked cozily into the landscape rather than defying it.
“We saw you up in the window of the mansion,” Lilly says suddenly. “How’d you get up there? Is it open?” The wind whips her dark hair all around her face; she’s impossibly vibrant, her cheeks pink, her body strong and upright against the wind.
“What?” Conor turns to look at her. “What do you mean?”
“We saw you up in one of the windows,” Adrien says. “Just now. What’s it like up there?”
Conor and I look at each other, confused. “We were looking at the house,” I say finally. “We didn’t go inside, though.”
Lilly pushes her hair off her face. “Well, someone was up there,” she says casually. “Right, Adrien? We thought it was you.”
Adrien looks up and meets my eyes. “It looked like a woman, but maybe…” He turned seventeen in May and his face has thinned since the last time I saw him. Tall and gangly, he has his mother’s blond hair and heavily lashed blue eyes, shy and intelligent behind his glasses, but there’s something about the shape of his mouth and chin now that’s all Conor and his gestures are Conor’s, too. He’s been so conscious of Lilly’s feelings since we arrived, for which I’m eternally grateful. I can see him thinking, his eyes intent behind his glasses, trying to figure out if this is something we shouldn’t talk about around Lilly.
“Maybe there was someone hiding up there,” Lilly says. “You didn’t hear anything, did you?”
Conor smiles. “I don’t think so,” he says. But now I’m thinking of the sense I had of being watched.
“Probably just the light,” I say in what I hope is a reassuring way.
Conor nods. “Come on, Adrien, I’ll race you back. We’ll meet you two at the cottage,” he tells me and he calls to Mr. Bean, who barks and chases after them.
“You ready to head back?” I ask Lilly. Before we went on the walk, she told me that she was tired because she didn’t sleep well. “I’m going to stop at Mrs. Crawford’s cottage to get eggs and bread. You want to come with me?”
“Sure. I like that bread we got from her.”
Lilly and I walk in silence for a bit through the tall grass and then she says, “Mom, I was thinking I might want to run cross-country this fall.”
“That’s a good thought, Lill. We can talk about it. There’s still a lot of time before then.” I don’t look at her.
“What?”
“Nothing, just … that’s great. Maybe we can run together this summer. This is a gorgeous place to train. I saw there’s a 10K in August in Bantry. Maybe we could do that.” I try to make it sound breezy.
But she’s alert to my hesitation. “What’s wrong? We’re going back, aren’t we? We’re going back to Long Island at the end of the summer?”
“Of course we are, sweetheart. And then we can talk about it.”
“Talk about what?” She stops on the path, her hands on her hips, her legs long and lean in black leggings. Her thick brown hair is loose, rising all around her in the air.
“We can do this later, Lill. We’re on vacation.”
“What?”
The wind picks up again, whipping the tall grass back and forth. The ground beneath us is spongy, making me feel uncertain about my footing. “Well, part of us spending the summer here is to see if we might like to move here. You could go to school in Dublin and we could get some … some space from everything. You know, the past year has been—”
“What, and live with Conor?” Her face is incredulous.
“Well, yes, that’s the idea. Their house in Dublin is big enough for all four of us and you liked the city when we spent those two weeks there in April.”
She stops and stares at me for a long moment. Her eyes are dark, her face stony. “So what, you’re just going to, like, become an Irish cop?”
“Well, I’d have to figure all of that out. Honestly, sweetie, nothing’s been decided. It’s all just—”
Copyright © 2022 by Sarah Stewart Taylor