I Couldn't Love You More by Esther Freud

Author:Esther Freud
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526629937
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Aoife

Aoife didn’t know how she came to be standing on the beach. Rain stung her face and the waves rolled in, high over the sand. She’d never seen the sea so wild and she looked at her small car and wondered how it was she had driven here to Ardmore. Humphrey cowered at her side as she set off along the strand. The wind was fierce, the whole bay shook, and as she trudged, head down, clinging to the curve of the bay, she was grateful for the roar of the sea drowning out her thoughts. A wave crashed ahead of her and a salt spray stung her legs. The tide was never in so high, and she looked up at the sand and grasses of the dune and wondered if she might be forced to climb, dragging the great weight of the dog behind. Humphrey shivered. His ears were back, his fur was dark with wet. ‘Good boy,’ she told him, ‘who’s my good boy,’ and she kept walking.

There was a letter from Rosaleen when she left Ilford. I’m off to share with a couple of girls. I’ll let you know when I’m settled in Chelsea. But a year, more than a year, had passed and there’d been nothing. There had been a storm that day too, she was surprised the post had got to them at all; the water came in so hard the sea wall at Youghal collapsed from the very force of it, the concrete broken up and thrown into the park. Windows were taken out all along the front, nothing left of them but the frames, and a ketch in the harbour was smashed away to nothing. Aoife stopped and looked back the way she’d come. She couldn’t see the car. There was nothing but rain and wind, the waves crashing and beating, retreating just enough to leave a ragged path below the cliff. What is it I’m doing here? She shouted to Humphrey and ran. She could feel him at her back, lumbering, as the spray of the waves crashed against them, so that by the time she reached the path the pair of them were shaking.

She put Humphrey in the back and wrapped him in a rug. ‘The state of us.’ She held his loyal body in her arms as she rubbed him dry, but as she moved round to the driving seat the door wrenched away in the wind and would have thrown her over the front if she hadn’t clung to the handle. I still have two daughters. She gave herself a scolding. Good girls who’ve done nothing to deserve me, and a husband, God bless his soul, who’s worked every day of his life to keep us safe. She thought of them arriving home to find the kitchen empty, no smell but the old cold mess of meat she’d boiled that morning for the dog. Our Father, who art in heaven, she said it slowly, pondering each word as she’d only ever done during the worst days of the war.

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