Janice Macdonald - The Man On The Cliff

“Rufus.” He pulled the door open, and a large gray dog burst into the kitchen on a blast of cold air. “You’ve awful-smelling breath, d’you know that?” He scratched the dog’s wiry head. “And you’re a bit of a scruff bag, too. If you ever hope to interest that little Pekingese down the road, you’ll have to do something about yourself.”

“Oh, I see.” Sharon spoke at his shoulder. “You’re just going to ignore me, is that it? Sure, the bloody dog gets more attention than I do. Maybe I should get down on all fours and bark at you. Would that do it?”

Over the dog’s head, he met Sharon’s ice-blue stare.

“It’s a character flaw, you have,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? Your head’s always up in the bloody clouds. You’re not grounded in reality.”

He pushed the dog down. The charge wasn’t exactly new. Three years ago when they’d first become partners in the small art gallery, she’d teased him about mentally disappearing. For a while, it had been a joke between them. Sharon would knock on his head, inquire if anyone was home. Gradually, the teasing started to get a bit of an edge. It wasn’t until they’d started sleeping together that she’d taken to calling it a character flaw.

On the dresser, there was an unopened bottle of whiskey that he’d bought to take up to Sligo. The converted lighthouse he’d bought a few years back was his favorite place in the world, remote and beautiful—with a constant crash of the ocean all around. He could do with a little of that solitude right now, he thought, with a glance at Sharon. He poured a little whiskey into a couple of glasses and handed one to her. She downed it in one gulp, carried her empty glass to the sink, then returned to where he stood.

“She’s a bit young, isn’t she, Niall? Have you thought of what people will think?” She put one hand up as though to ward off an outburst. “All right, you say she’s just a student in your class and it’s all perfectly innocent. Maybe that’s true, but people talk.” She gave him a meaningful look. “As you well know. I didn’t say it to the bank manager, of course, but can you imagine if I’d told him you weren’t there because it was more important to be with this…this little tart?” A faint flush of pink stained her face. “Can you?”

“I can.”

“But you don’t care, do you? It really doesn’t matter to you what people think. You lock yourself away in your own little world, and nothing else exists.” She stopped, left the room and returned a few moments later with a large white envelope. “Maybe this will bring you back to earth. It came today.” She handed it to him. “From that boyfriend of Moruadh’s in Paris. It was addressed to you, so I opened it, but the letters inside were for her.”

He took them from her. Half a dozen gray envelopes.

He riffled through them. All had been opened. Letters from him sent during the year before Moruadh died, forwarded by one of the many men who had drifted through her life at that time. He looked up and met Sharon’s eyes.

“Did you open these?”

“They were already open.”

He looked up at her. “Did you read them?”

“One of them, I glanced at. It said something about her needing to get help and—”

“I know what it said, Sharon. I wrote it.” He got up and walked across the kitchen to the window and stared out at the dark night.

“I don’t make a habit of reading your personal mail,” Sharon said. “You know that. You had that exhibit in Paris last month, and I thought that this was something to do with that. A business matter. We’re supposed to be partners, aren’t we?”

He didn’t answer.

“Whatever you think you understand from what you read,” he said a moment later, “you understand nothing at all.”

“But Niall—”

“You understand nothing,” he repeated. “Moruadh was a talented young musician, greatly loved and admired by everyone who knew her.” He said the words as though by rote. “She was also a beautiful woman who had a lot of admirers. Her death was a tragic accident and an incredible loss to us all.”

Sharon stared at him as though transfixed.

“Is that clear?”

Various emotions played across her face. For a moment, she seemed about to speak, but then she shrugged and took his glass to the sink.

“There’s another matter I wanted to talk to you about.” He sat down at the table, watched as she pulled out a chair. “Look, I think we both know this isn’t working, Sharon. Us, I mean. We spend half our time together arguing over one thing or another. There’s just—” he shrugged “—nothing there anymore.”

“Oh, really?” She got up from the table, crossed the room. Regarded him, arms crossed, her back against the wall. “Nothing there, you say? And do you know why that is? Niall? Do you have the faintest bloody idea why there’s nothing there?”

He waited for her to tell him.

“No, of course you don’t, because you’re as oblivious to what’s happening with us as you are to everything else going on around you. Well, I’ll tell you. You’ve lost touch with yourself, Niall. You can’t connect.”

He bent to pick out a burr from the dog’s coat. “You’re right, Sharon. I can’t. Don’t. Won’t. I’ve never been much on giving guided tours of my psyche. Go and find someone who emotes. There’s a drama teacher at the college who’ll sob at the drop of a hat. I’ll find out if he’s available.”

“Sure, make a joke of it. It’s the easy way, isn’t it? Well, fine. It’s over, finished. I’ll survive. And you’ll meet someone new and it’ll be fine at first, just as it was with us. She’ll fall in love with your looks and the way you have about you, so bloody interested with all your questions and rapt attention, but you’re like a collector. You take what you need, but you give nothing back.”

“Well, that’s my problem, isn’t it?”

“Yes it is, Niall. And frankly, I’m glad to be done with it. You’ve got something locked away up there and you’ll sacrifice anything before you let it out.”

AN HOUR OR SO AFTER Sharon left, Niall sat at his desk in the study, going through the rest of the mail. Press notices from his show in Paris, an invitation to a gallery opening in Dublin. Another letter from the American writer who wanted to interview him about Moruadh. For a moment, he held the blue envelope in his hand, its color triggering a memory of a spring day five years ago. Wisps of clouds, a lark high in the sky. A windy hillside…

Moruadh had found a gentian, the first of the year. A bright blue flower that she’d held out for him to see. There was a bit of doggerel that went along with finding the first one. They’d both learned it as children, and he had recited it in Irish, one of the few scraps of Irish he knew.

“May we be here at this time next,” he’d said.

“I won’t be,” Moruadh replied. “I’m going to die.”

Her eyes as blue as the flower in her hand looked right into his and he felt a chill across his back.

“What is it? Are you ill? Is there something wrong?”

“There is not.” She smiled, one of the lightning-quick smiles that lit her face like sunshine. “Nothing at all.”

“Then why would you say something like that?”

“Because it just came to me.”

“You’re standing in a field on a sunny day and it just comes to you that you’re going to die?” He started to become angry with her. “Sure, it makes perfect sense.”

“No, it makes no sense. It just came to me.”

At a loss for words, he shook his head at her.

“Ah, Niall.” With a laugh, she tossed the flower aside. “Don’t try to understand. Some things aren’t meant to be understood.”