Best Love, Rosie. Nuala O'Faolain

I couldn’t retire, and I didn’t want to. But I’d have enough with the lump sum to keep going for a year or two – maybe even three, if I went back to Dublin.

      And – I sent my tongue on a delicate walk around behind my teeth – the dentists in Dublin spoke English. W. H. Auden said that thousands have lived without love, not one without water, but he might well have mentioned teeth. I had no future of any kind if I didn’t look after the ones I had left.

      It was completely dark now outside the single slender window, high up in a peeling, ochre wall. A navy-blue sky, with one winking star. There’d been a cheerful-looking trattoria on the way to the recital and we could go there as soon as we’d collected a heavier sweater and more socks from the pensione. Then, bed…

      And what about all that? What about cafés and sex and sixteenth-century windows? One of the great things about Brussels was that I could very easily take a train to meet Leo. And I couldn’t bear to be long away from him, even now. I kept my hair a tactful ashy-blonde colour, and bought my clothes in boutiques in the Flemish-speaking part of Belgium where even chic women loved bread and butter as much as I did and had the same build, and when I walked along beside him with my tummy held in and an interested smile on my face I felt like a woman alive in the world. In Italy, where we met more often than anywhere else, quite a few men had a good look at me before they turned away.

      But in Kilbride in Dublin… My birthday wasn’t till September but I’d be fifty-five then – barely tipping towards the second half of the decade, but heading that way. There’d never been unmarried women my age in Kilbride who considered themselves to be still in the game. Or maybe there had been, but they were too smart to let anybody know it.

      The audience were applauding with tremendous vigour. They must be trying to warm up. Leo gave me one of the smiles he didn’t know were lovely as he got to his feet. Music made him happy – well, music up to about the time women stopped wearing long skirts, no later.

      Oh. An encore.

      We all sat down again.

      Home’s most powerful lure, all the same, was an image, not an argument.

      If I went home to look after her, there was a certain way Min might be. I was charmed by her face anyway – so small and white, the black eyes so round and childlike. But I’d seen long ago what it could look like when it opened like a leaf in the sun.

      When I was a child, before my father died, the three of us used to go every summer to a wooden shack called Bailey’s Hut, out on the shelly grass beyond the last wharf of Milbay Harbour. My father’s mother, Granny Barry, could borrow us The Hut for our holiday because she worked for Bailey’s Hardware and Builders’ Providers.

      There was no running water, so we brought a jerrycan of tap water for making tea and otherwise we used the rainwater in the barrel at the door. My father would also use the rainwater to wash Min’s hair.

      ‘Right you are, Ma’am!’ he’d say, when she said this would be a good day to give her hair a good wash. He’d bring a basin of warm water out onto the grass, and then a bucket of rainwater. She’d kneel in her old skirt and her pink under-bodice that had a stitched cone on each side for her breasts. He’d sit on a box and with her head in his lap, he would shampoo her, using the tips of his fingers. ‘Mind that stuff in my eyes!’ she’d say. Then he’d leave her kneeling, her head bent, and he’d delicately pour the first trickle of rainwater onto her head and she’d jump and say ‘Ouch! That water’s freezing!’ But as he went on, the water flowed more evenly. She used her hands to distribute the water around her hair and he followed her with his stream of water and poured it where her hands went, exactly. Then he put down the bucket, and wrapped the towel firmly around her head. She lifted her blinded face, and he dabbed it very gently with a smaller towel.

      Her hair would dry then in the sun, combed forward to fall over her face, her thin shoulders peeking out at each side. Or she’d brush it in the hot air currents from the Aladdin heater they kept in the corner of the room behind chicken-wire, where I couldn’t touch it, and it would take on volume and gloss and vibrate as if energy ran through it.

      He’d say: ‘See your auntie’s hair? Your auntie Min has beautiful hair.’ He’d sound wistful. He’d sound as if he were talking about something long in the past, though she was right there in front of him and was not going to leave.

      I never forgot the way she lifted her unguarded face to his. He held it between his two hands for a few moments when she was waiting for him to dab the wet off, and she, who was always so wary and brisk, allowed herself to be held. Her eyes were closed but she rested in his care like a seabird coming down onto the water.

      That was the face she might turn on me. She might be like that with me.

      I’d take the lump sum.

      I went back at the end of the summer, and for the first two or three months I didn’t do much more than sit at the old kitchen table. It was as if I’d entered one of those forests in fairytales which surround the castle where the princess sleeps, where no leaves move and no birds sing. I was slowly thinking – you wanted this and you got it, but what do you do now? It was as if I’d been fractured from my own experience – as if most of what I’d learnt in thirty years of living and loving and working around the globe wasn’t relevant to where I’d now arrived.

      Nothing happened. It was an event when Bell the cat walked across the table an inch from my nose on her way from the window to the stairs to go up to Min. She walked past again on her way back out. Sometimes she condescended to mew to show she wanted her dinner served up. There was nothing to stop me spending a long time wondering whether she really disdained me, or whether the situation was more complex than that. She could have chosen to walk around the edge of the room, after all.

      ‘I always know where to find you, Rosie,’ Andy Sutton said, and being Andy he said it every time he came to the house. Andy was in his early sixties, but he seemed even older because he looked after us all, including my friend Peg, and my friend Tessa, whose cousin in fact he was. Andy worked for a charity called No-Need and in summer he collected goats and hens and rabbits and pigs around Ireland and drove truck-loads of them across to Gatwick Airport in England, to be flown out to places that were so poor that the people could cope with only the smallest livestock. The rest of the year there were regular meetings at No-Need headquarters and he came up from the country for them and stayed with his mother Pearl, a few streets away in Kilbride.

      He’d open the front door and stick his head into the kitchen.

      ‘Is Min asleep?’ he’d whisper.

      And I’d whisper back, ‘She either is or she’s pretending to be.’

      ‘Do you never move from that table?’ he’d say, and go out the back to check the thermostat on the boiler or to fetch the ladder to change a high light-bulb. Or he’d stagger back into the room under a sack of logs from the trees on his farm.

      My aunt, upstairs, would detect a presence and soon the madly animated voices on her transistor radio, or the sweet swoops of singers – she turned up the volume for singing – would filter down through the ceiling. Then whoever was in the kitchen could talk normally.

      Other times, the quiet would be broken by dance music from next door and I’d know that Reeny was back from Spain and that she’d be in any minute to see us, tanned and jovial and carrying ham, or peaches, or chocolates – some gift that wasn’t alcoholic. And once in a while the fellow who did old-age pensioners’ hair in the home brought his gear in and I’d hand the kitchen table over to him. And every two weeks I’d tactfully go to the library when a psychologist and some sort of nurse assistant came to see Min as part of a service for elderly people with depression that Reeny – a virtuoso manipulator of the welfare system – had discovered. Reeny filled in the questionnaire too, but when the team came to assess her she had to admit that she’d only signed up because she liked getting something for nothing.

      ‘Your aunt is very low in herself,’ the psychologist would say reverently, when I was seeing her out.

      ‘She goes