Jessie Keane - Ruthless

He thought of her, as beautiful as any Dante Rossetti painting, with her lustrously tumbling auburn hair and her fine white skin. Her eyes, green as emeralds, always with that sad shuttered look about them.

Keep out, those eyes told the world around her. Don’t come near.

He remembered her so well. Wished he could have seen her again, got to know her better. They had shared one illicit kiss, one juvenile embrace. He remembered how madly excited he’d been, he’d loved her with a kind of desperation. She, on the other hand, had kissed him close-mouthed, her jaw tense. Her neck under his hand had trembled and strained, and she had broken free as soon as she could.

He’d been hurt by her reticence. He’d thought his affection was returned. But no, obviously not. She’d looked at him as if he was a monster, and run off.

He’d never kissed her again.

He would have liked to show her Paris, the City of Light, the Eiffel Tower all a-sparkle. Forget Don and all that shit. But now… now it was too late. He would never get the chance.

It was a bright sunny day, the river gleaming, the morning mist burned away by the sun. The farmhouse loomed ahead of him. He noticed that the grounds were no longer manicured, the way they’d been in the glory days when the Delaneys ruled the London underworld and the coffers overflowed. Some of the stonework was crumbling away, the paintwork was peeling. And no scaffolding up, no sign of repairs underway.

He went to the door. That was the same, though the oak had been stained to grey by the passing years. Rufus yanked the chain, and heard the bell ring in the bowels of the place. He waited. Finally, he rang again. There was no movement from within; no dogs barked; no hurrying footsteps approached.

He stepped back, peered up at the bedroom windows. He could see nothing, no movement. He walked around the side of the building. The sun beat down on him, he was sweating lightly. High summer, just like that day long ago.

And… oh God… she was there.

He stopped, dropped his bag and jacket to the ground in shock.

He was hallucinating. He’d wanted so much to see her again that here he was conjuring up a vision of her from his imagination. She was wearing a faded flower-sprigged tea dress, a rough windcheater over the top of it, and Wellington boots. Her hair was blowing straight out in the stiff breeze, a blood-red banner. She was hanging washing out to dry on a rotary clothes-line.

He felt his heart banging hard in his chest, felt his mouth go dry. He stood there and stared.

She was older. There was a frown line between her brows, a cobweb of crow’s feet around those heartbreaking eyes of hers.

He closed his own eyes, opened them again.

She was still there. This was no illusion.

‘Orla?’ he said aloud.

The wind whipped the word away. She didn’t turn, didn’t hear. She pegged out another garment, an old woman’s underwear.

‘Orla? ’ he said, louder this time. It wasn’t her, it couldn’t be. This was an illusion. He’d wished it so much that he was seeing it.

She stopped what she was doing, turned her head, stared at him. For a moment her eyes widened in alarm. She looked as if she was going to run indoors.

‘It’s me,’ he said. He let out a bewildered half-laugh. After the hell he’d been through, was this a sign of heaven at last? ‘For the love of Christ, is it you? Is it really?’

‘Rufus? ’ she asked.

‘You’re supposed to be dead,’ he said in wonder. He walked towards her in a daze.

Orla was starting to smile. She was so beautiful. It was her, it was his Orla.

Suddenly Rufus was running, and Orla stumbled forward and they fell together in an embrace, Rufus laughing and lifting her off her feet with the joy of it.

He spun her around, roaring with laughter. ‘You’re alive! God be praised, you’re alive!’

There were tears in his eyes as he set her back upon the ground, cupped her dear face in his big hands. He planted a kiss on her lips. As she had once long ago in these very grounds, she stiffened – but still, she smiled.

‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said, and a tear of genuine emotion trickled down his cheek.

Orla gave a tight little smile. It was her smile, the same one she’d had as a teenager; restrained, secretive, closed-off.

‘I’ve been here all the time,’ she said.

‘For how long?’ To think of that! That she had been here, and he had been running around the world not knowing.

‘Oh – years. Years and years,’ she said, and there was that sadness again, as if she had been stuck here like a fly in amber, trapped against her will. ‘Where have you been?’ she asked.

‘Long story,’ he said.

‘Well, fetch your bag and come inside, then you can tell me all about it.’

‘Who’s this?’ Davey Delaney asked when he saw Rufus sitting in the kitchen with Orla and her mother.

‘This is Rufus. You remember him, don’t you? Sorcha’s boy, Rufus,’ said Ma.

The old man looked as though he didn’t even remember Sorcha, his own sister, much less her son.

‘That Sorcha! What a tongue she had on her,’ said Ma.

Rufus had to smile at that. His mother did have a tongue on her, it lashed like a Fury’s. More miserable in her poverty as the years passed, her husband dead so no longer the whipping boy for her dissatisfaction, she had taken to homing in on Rufus as a fair substitute. He found her depressing to be around, and his visits had become less and less frequent. In fact he hadn’t visited her in years, and he didn’t intend to remedy that.

The place was looking tired, for all the efforts that had clearly been made to spruce it up – much like the elderly pair who inhabited it, shuffling around in carpet slippers, eating crackers and cheese at the kitchen table, the old man gazing around him with an air of gentle bewilderment, the old woman living out her days in obdurate, long-suffering tedium.

‘Pa’s not always this mild,’ Orla warned him. ‘He gets a bit aggressive sometimes, a bit frustrated. You know we have guns on the farm, to see off vermin. All the farmers around here do. We have to be careful to keep the cabinet locked though.’

Rufus wondered if she was joking, but soon found she wasn’t when the old man sprang to his feet one night and threw a coffee table at the TV in irritation at something the newscaster was saying. Rufus had to restrain him until Ma and Orla could calm him down, but it was startling to see and a warning that Orla’s words were correct.

That first night, when the old ones went off to bed, Rufus sat there into the late evening with Orla. She got out a bottle of whisky, poured them both a measure, and sat there in her tea dress studying him.

‘You look well,’ she pronounced at last.

‘And you.’ In fact he thought she looked better than well: fabulous. ‘Tell me what happened. I heard talk about a plane crash when I was in London. How could you have survived that?’

Orla’s eyes dropped to the tumbler of whisky. She raised it to her lips, sipped a little.

‘Redmond helped me get out,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Fergal the pilot was done for when we hit the sea, but we were still alive and the plane was filling with water and starting to sink.’

‘It must have been terrifying.’

‘It was. But Redmond saved me.’

‘He got you out of the plane, got you to shore?’

Orla shook her head. ‘He got me out of the plane, but I lost him after that. I swam to shore alone. I’ll never forget how cold that water was. I was sure I would die before I got to dry land. Somehow, I managed it though.’ Her voice broke. ‘But Redmond was nowhere to be found.’