The Searcher, стр. 27
“How’re you getting on with the house?” she asks.
“Not too bad,” Cal says. “I’ve started painting. My neighbor Mart keeps giving me flak because I’m sticking to plain old white, but Mart doesn’t seem like the best place to get advice on interior decoration.”
Part of him is expecting Lena to come out with suggestions for color schemes—Mart’s talk must have got into his head. Instead she says, “Mart Lavin,” with a wry twist of her mouth. “You wouldn’t want to listen to that fella. Nellie,” she says sharply to the dog, which is dragging something dark and sodden out of the ditch. “Leave it.”
The dog reluctantly drops the object and trots off to find something else. “And the land?” Lena says. “What have you planned for it?”
Ironically, Mart regularly asks Cal that same question, not bothering to hide the fact that he’s trying to pry out Cal’s long-term intentions. Cal is a little hazy on those himself. Right now he can’t imagine a time when he’ll want to do anything more than fix up his house, fish for perch and listen to Noreen explain Clodagh Moynihan’s dental history. He recognizes that that time might come around someday. If it does, he figures he can do a little bit of traipsing around Europe, before he gets too old, and then come back here when he’s scratched the itch out of his feet. There’s nowhere else he needs to be.
“Well,” he says, “I haven’t rightly decided. I’ve got that piece of woodland, I’m gonna leave that the way it is; it’s about half hazel trees, and I’d eat hazelnuts all day long. I might add in a couple of apple trees, give me something sweet to go with the nuts in a few years’ time. And I was thinking of planting out another piece with vegetables.”
“Oh, God,” Lena says. “You’re not one of them off-the-grid types, are you?”
Cal grins. “Nah. Just been sitting at a desk for too long, feel like spending some time outdoors.”
“Thank God.”
“You get a lot of off-the-grid types round here?”
“Now and again. Notions about getting back to the land, and they think this is the place to do it. It looks the part, I suppose.” She nods to the mountains ahead, hunch-shouldered and tawny, shawled here and there with rags of mist. “Most of them don’t know one end of a spade from the other. They last about six months.”
“I’m OK with doing my hunting and gathering mainly out of your sister’s store,” Cal says. “I gotta admit Noreen scares me a little bit, but not enough to make me want to grow my own bacon.”
“Noreen’s all right,” Lena says. “I would say ignore her and in the end she’ll leave you alone, but she won’t. Noreen can’t see anything without wanting to put it to use. You just have to let it roll off you.”
“She’s backing the wrong horse here,” Cal says. “I’m not that useful to anyone, right now.”
“Nothing wrong with that. And don’t let Noreen convince you different.”
They walk in silence, but an easy silence. There are blackberry brambles mixed in with the gorse; a couple of thickset, tufty ponies in a field are nibbling at them, and every now and then Lena pulls a blackberry off a hedge and eats it. Cal follows her lead. The berries are dark and full, still with a tart edge to them. “I’ll get a rake of them, one of these days, and make jam,” Lena says. “If there’s a day when I can be arsed.”
She turns off the road, down a long dirt lane. The fields on either side are pasture, thick with long grass and the smells of cows. A man examining a cow’s leg lifts his head at Lena’s call and waves, shouting back something Cal doesn’t catch. “Ciaran Maloney,” Lena says. “Bought the land off me.” Cal can picture her out in those fields, in rubber boots and muddy pants, neatly outmaneuvering a frisky colt.
Her house is a long white bungalow, freshly painted, with boxes of geraniums on the windowsills. She doesn’t invite Cal in; instead she leads him round the side of the house, towards a low, rugged stone building. “I tried to get the dog to whelp inside,” she says, “but she was having none of it. It was the cattle byre she wanted. In the end I thought, what harm. The walls on it are thick enough to keep out the cold, and if she does get chilly, she knows where to come.”
“That what you and your husband farmed? Cattle?”
“We did, yeah. Dairy. They weren’t kept here, but. This is the old byre, from a century or two back. We used it mostly for storing feed.”
The byre is dim, lit only through small high windows, and Lena was right about the walls: it’s warmer in there than Cal expected. The dog is in the end stall. They squat on their haunches, while Nellie keeps a respectful distance, and peer in.
The mama dog is tan and white, curled up in a big wooden box around a squeaking mass of pups wriggling over each other to get in close. “That’s a fine-looking litter,” Cal says.
“This here’s the runt I was telling you about,” Lena says, reaching in and scooping up a fat pup mottled in black, tan and white. “Look at the size of him now.”
Cal reaches to take the pup, but the mama dog half-rises, a low growl starting in her chest. The other pups, disturbed, squeak furiously. “Give her a minute,” Lena says. “She’s not as well trained as Nellie. I’ve only had her a few weeks, haven’t had a chance to put manners on her. Once she sees her sister doesn’t mind you, she’ll be grand.”
Cal turns his shoulder to the litter and makes a big fuss of Nellie, who soaks it up joyfully, licking and wriggling. Sure enough, the mama dog