The City of Strangers. Michael Russell

was away so much was an excuse not to face them, as it was an excuse not to face other things. Like the cracks in the crumbling house they lived in, and the bigger cracks in the management of the estate that surrounded it, draining money out year after year and bringing nothing back. Lack of attention wasn’t a solution to those problems either.

      Neither Valerie nor Stefan had looked for what had happened quite suddenly between them. They had come together for the simple reason that their children played together; their children were more the entire focus of their lives than they cared to admit. And so it happened.

      Valerie walked up the slope ahead of him. She had a head of yellow hair to her shoulders. She was thin and tall, and strong enough to stand beside the men who worked on the estate and do the same job when she needed to. The clothes she was wearing, as they often were, had come out of the back of her husband’s wardrobe.

      Stefan watched her, climbing gracefully and quietly up the slope. He was aware how much he liked her. She had the carelessness that somehow went with her class, even about their relationship, but she had a well of kindness that often didn’t. Whenever he thought about her, she was laughing. She laughed with everyone, but he sometimes felt that her laughter only really came from her heart with the children, and the children had come to include Tom Gillespie, more often than not.

      The track across the fields from Kilranelagh to Whitehall Grove had become well-trodden by the children over the last two years, and the woods that filled the valley between the farm and the estate seemed to have become their world. At the moment, after the arrival of the film The Adventures of Tom Sawyer at the small cinema in Baltinglass three weeks ago, it served as the countryside around St Petersburg, Missouri; the tiny stream at the bottom of the valley, on the other side of the motte, was the Mississippi River. The voices Stefan and Valerie could hear, floating down from the top of the mound, were now those of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Becky Sharp, Joe Harper and, intermittently, of Injun Joe, Muff Potter and Aunt Polly too.

      ‘I was at Garda Headquarters today,’ said Stefan.

      ‘Be quiet, Stefan,’ she hissed again.

      ‘It sounds mad, but I’ve got to go to America.’

      She turned round, glaring, holding a finger to her lips.

      ‘You can tell me later, darling!’ The last word meant nothing very much; it was simply the word Valerie called everyone she cared about.

      She continued up the slope. He followed, amused. It was a very different reaction from the ones he had got both at the Garda barracks in Baltinglass and at home. The idea of flying to America was, immediately at least, a prospect of such extraordinary wonder that reasons paled into insignificance, especially where Helena Gillespie was concerned. Stefan’s father smiled and joined in, but he still thought it all sounded very odd.

      David Gillespie, like his son, had a policeman’s nose; he could smell the politics too, perhaps as acutely as his son. He had worked in Dublin Castle under the British once, when he was an inspector in the Dublin Metropolitan Police. He picked up the excitement in his son’s voice too. It was something he hadn’t heard in a very long time. He felt that the wind was changing; he could see it in Stefan’s eyes; perhaps it was changing for all of them. He wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, but then the wind and the weather were nobody’s to control.

      By now Valerie Lessingham had reached the top of the hill. She crouched down behind a fallen tree, and as Stefan arrived behind her she grabbed his hand and pulled him down. There were no voices now, just the sounds of the rooks overhead, a great crowd of them heading home to roost. Then Tom Sawyer appeared among the bushes across the flat top of the motte, in the form of Tom Gillespie; he was holding Becky Sharp, in the shape of Jane Lessingham, by the hand; things were getting very serious.

      ‘Becky, I was such a fool!’ lamented Tom. ‘I never thought we might want to come back! I can’t find the way. It’s all mixed up. Don’t cry.’

      Becky didn’t look much like crying. Jane was older than Tom Gillespie and she was quite a bit taller – she felt Becky needed to buck her ideas up; crying wouldn’t get them out of the cave they were lost in.

      ‘Tom, if you can’t find your way out of here, I will!’

      ‘That’s not right, Jane. It’s Tom who gets them out!’

      ‘I don’t see why it always has to be that way.’

      ‘It’s in the film. It’s in the book too.’

      Suddenly there was a loud whooping noise, then crashing through the undergrowth came Harry Lawlor, as Injun Joe, his belt tied round his head and a pigeon’s feather sticking out of his headband, and screaming loudly.

      ‘I’m a-going to get you, Tom Sawyer! I’m a-going to get you!’

      ‘Becky, run, it’s Injun Joe!’

      Tom put his fist up to defend Becky, who scowled and looked like she was perfectly capable of protecting herself, but before Harry reached his prey a small figure wearing a wide-brimmed, very torn straw hat, flung himself at Injun Joe. Alex Lessingham, more accurately Huckleberry Finn, was coming to the rescue. Tom Gillespie clenched his fists and shouted.

      ‘That’s not what happens!’

      ‘Who cares?’ said Jane.

      She ran. Injun Joe followed.

      ‘Come on, Tom, let’s go!’ said Huck, racing off. And Tom ran after them, laughing, finally abandoning accuracy for fun.

      Valerie got up, laughing too, pulling Stefan up on to the mound by the hand. The voices of the children echoed through the darkening trees for a moment longer, and then there was silence again.

      ‘Come on, you lot!’ shouted Valerie.

      ‘Tom, we’ve to get back! Tea’ll be ready! Harry needs to go too!’

      ‘Jane, Alex, it’s almost dark!’

      ‘Tom! I mean it!’

      Valerie sniggered.

      ‘What’s that for?’

      ‘I mean it, indeed! Sure, don’t you put the fear of God into them?’

      ‘They’ll have us standing here all night, Valerie.’

      ‘Really?’ She took his hand.

      He pulled it back.

      ‘Don’t be so daft.’

      She giggled. They walked on a few steps.

      ‘Did you say you had to go to America?’

      ‘New York.’

      ‘What on earth for?’

      Out of the twilight four forms launched themselves at Stefan and Valerie, leaping up and pulling them down to the ground, laughing and whooping, in whatever characters they still carried in their heads. Tom and Harry Lawlor pinned Stefan to the ground; Jane and Alex held their mother down, demanding immediate surrender and a considerable ransom. But after a few moments the hostages were released. As they all got up, Valerie grabbed at the severely battered and torn straw hat that had fallen off her son’s head. She frowned a frown of considerable severity.

      ‘And who did this?’

      The children looked at one another and said nothing.

      ‘This came out of my bedroom. It was new last year. Look at it!’

      ‘It’s like Huckleberry Finn’s hat,’ muttered Alex.

      ‘It certainly is now,’ replied his mother. ‘Who did it, please?’

      Tom stepped forward, his head hanging down.

      ‘We were going to put it back, Mrs Lessingham.’

      ‘Oh, well, that’s all right then.’ Her voice was still very stern.

      ‘I only cut it a bit, so it looked